MaverickSawyer

Huh. Try a complete reinstall?

Glad to see some consensus on the 1.875 part seat count... Now I can start on an MRJ.

Field report time... The Size 1 APU attachment nodes is buried in the tail. You have to use the offset tool to get it to line up properly.

I have two different sets of "standard" AGs... Planes 1. Flaps 2. Toggle engine mode (reheat/reverse) 3. Toggle engines and parking brakes. 4. Ramps/doors, if present. Anything else is usually for mission-specific tasks. Rockets 1. Fairing jettison. 2. Cruise stage solar panels and antenna deployment. Beyond that, it's pretty much mission-specific. I recently ran a mission that used a total of 9 action groups and Smart Parts to heavily automate the whole mission.

I love that new cockpit...

Did a lot of stuff dirtside on Kerbin... Made a new supersonic single-seat airplane, and Jeb decided that a Panther engine just wasn't enough fun... Some of you already know where this is going, don't you. Yep, Jeb made a ZeLL package for the Aeris 3S. After all, those 8 Seperatrons were getting near the "Best if used by" date. What better way to dispose of them? The first second or so is kinda sketchy... despite my best efforts, there's still a nose-down tendency. (I blame the Panther engine.) But acceleration is such that the aero surfaces take control after that point and away you go. Flight then continued as normal, and Jeb proceeded to 15 km altitude and 900 m/s. He's quite happy with the results, and now wants to make a "road-mobile" version for... things. Airshows, I suppose. Couple other birds in the nest now worth mentioning... My new Supersonic Business Jet. Can tool along at 450 m/s and 10 km for quite some time. Might throw that into the Kerbal Express Airlines as a charter bird. Good o' Herky Bird. Can't fit an Akita rover into it, which is a shame... but it's still a great transport. Excellent handling, even at low air speeds. Took it to visit some old friends as a functional test.

Well... Why let real physics get in the way of having a good time, right?

I have rarely used it, tbh. I've always used autostrut to grandparent. That seems to kill pretty much and and all shaking.

1: ALL management MUST come up through the ranks and have at least five years experience in the field they will be overseeing. 2: Seniority and experience trump education. I don't care if you were valedictorian at MIT... You know just enough when you leave college to be EXTREMELY dangerous. The guy from the state school who has been in the industry for 10 years, and has been an engineer longer than you've been alive... He knows what he's talking about, usually from experience. Trust him, listen to him, learn from him. 3: If someone expresses concern over safety, especially if the concern is that safety is being set aside in the name of speed or profits, STOP. NOTHING is worth a failure that takes lives.

On as in "it's installed aboard the vessel", or on as in "I used action groups/context menu to activate the unit"? Because there is a difference, as the electrolysis process consumes significant amounts of power.

Yeah, NF is a fantastic suite of parts. It's been in all of my installs for several years now.

So that's where this thread went. Huh. *rubs paddles together* CLEAR!!!! Back on topic... "This is fine." - Jeb

Agreed. Love the concept.

Haven't used it much as of late, as I've been tossing a bunch of 1.875 or 2.5 meter payloads, and that's a bit big for the Delta. Perhaps after I unlock the Ion propulsion node, I'll he able to run higher performance missions with it, but for now... Atlas V has been getting quite the workout. And yeah, it is kinda hard to believe it's gone... But I did manage to see the last one fly, even if it was just for a few seconds before the fog swallowed it.

Great... Where's an Su-57 with pulse lasers when you need one? All kidding aside, excellent recreation of those drones. GOD they were annoying to shoot down... EDIT: Huh. Auto-imbedding of images from mobile has failed.

Huh. I know that KIS is having CTD issues at the moment. Maybe they're related?

Succeeded in rescuing my stranded shuttlebug lander... Shortly after docking was achieved, the tanker that will refuel it was launched... (Gotta love BDB. That Dual Engine Centaur is awesome for medium payloads. Finally, dispatched one of (at present) two rovers to go with the Minmus Outpost I'm preparing to make. This one will be for utility work and light cargo. The next one is an Ore hauler, and will be used to carry ore from the mining rig that I'm planning on setting up near the base to the base proper, where a future mission will deliver an ISRU unit to turn the ore into both monopropellant for the Shuttlebug and LFO for other vehicles needing a top-off. The engines are the compact variant of the Spark, attached to a pair of tweakscaled radial attachment mounts, and the gear is attached to the node at the base of the fuel tank. Nice and compact, and it actually looks pretty nice.

I can't recall exactly what the intended missions are, but the premise was that, even though they are considered expendable, it's still cheaper to recover and reuse them a few times than to throw them away each time.

Yeahhhh... Not exactly the most auspicious of events, now is it... But, I did manage to make the docking without issue today, so now I just need to make up a monopropellant-loaded tanker and a docking port expansion truss for the station, and we'll be back on track in a hurry.

Okay, I have to have this... you've just made it possible to assemble a functional aircraft in the field using KIS. Granted, I'm going to have to build it in the SPH first, then remove the parts in question and store most of them in an appropriate KIS container, but still... High aspect ratio wings for Duna are no longer a dealbreaker on launch. Just package the sections and attach them to the wingroot panel after landing it safely.

Pfft. Parasite aircraft date back to WWI. The Brits were the first to experiment with (and successfully perform a launch of) parasite fighters, but the best example is probably the US Navy's flying aircraft carriers Macon and Akron, which fielded a complement of five Curtis F9C Sparrowhawk scout-fighters. That said, there is work being done by DARPA for in-flight deployment and retrieval of small drones.

The built-in engine in the service module is used during upper stage burns for escape, right?

Hmm... Have you ever read through "Eyes Turned Skyward"? The author had an idea (a rather clever and elegant one, at that) to use a pair of essentially vernier engines for both the boost and landing phases, with the main engines used only during the boost. Perhaps they could do something similar? It's added complexity, yes, but it's also not going to require development of a new, large-scale, deep-throttling engine... just a smaller engine of the right thrust class to handle the nearly empty stage at, mmm... 2:1 TWR? Maybe less.

How are they planning on recovering the first stage?

Yeah, that definitely seems to be their mantra for manned spaceflight. An acquaintance of mine said they wanted a 1-in-10,000 chance of mission-critical part failures.