Starman4308

Well, for me, the most unforgettable one was the head of my spaceplane program, Dodos Kerman. Dodos took many craft to orbit and back, pioneering the SSTO station refueling program. He now languishes in an old, no-longer-used save.

Please be much more specific (what is the desired payload, are you using game-modifying mods like FAR, RSS, or RF), and for that matter, instead of just blankly asking for a heavy lifter, tell us what your problems are in making one yourself. I'll help you, but I won't do your work for you.

It's all a matter of perspective. It's linear with respect to overall rocket mass (double the payload, double the rocket), but the additional rocket mass is exponential with regards to payload (additional 1 kg payload means an exponential amount of booster, at the same ratio as the rest of the payload).

Only if you installed FAR (Ferram Aerospace Research) or NEAR (Neophyte's Elementary Aerospace Research, basically FAR with a few of the more complex elements shaved off). Otherwise, since stock aero gives everything drag proportional to mass, Procedural Fairings will actually make your rockets worse. FAR/NEAR majorly changes the game: you need to figure out how to do a proper gravity turn (none of this 45 degrees at 10 km altitude business), and once you figure that out, the delta-V to get to orbit plummets*. *If you get tired of this, I strongly recommend the 6.4x Kerbin config for Real Solar System, combined with RealFuels and the stockalike engine configs (RF helps out a bit with the vastly increased delta-V requirements).

That's because RealChute comes only with four parachutes: resizable cone, double-cone, stack, and radial parachutes (click on the Action Groups tab, and then the parachute to tweak). EDIT: Also, to save us all further posts: delete the stock parachutes config file in RealChute/Module Manager (something about 0.25 caused stock parachutes to horribly break the game if modified to act as RealChutes), and if using Deadly Reentry, don't deploy parachutes at supersonic (> 330 m/s) velocities. Wait until you're at 200-250 m/s or so.

Did you try adjusting your reentry orientation in the Trajectories window? Trajectories defaults to assuming you reenter directly prograde, and since your trajectory strongly​ depends on orientation in FAR, it will give you very inaccurate results if you were reentering tail-first.

Do your best to reduce part count on the station: look for places where you can replace many small parts with one big part. Otherwise, the most likely fix is "get a faster processor" Since KSP is single-threaded at the moment, you want good single-thread performance, which right now tends to favor high-end Intel chips. I think that might change with the next Unity engine, fortunately.

It's a known bug with the decoupling physics: something causes decoupled parts to scythe viciously inwards, destroying rocket parts. If you don't mind using mods, I would use Claw's stock bug fix for this. Otherwise, you can either edit the config as mentioned above, use Tweakable Everything to set decoupling force to zero, or use a bajillion Sepratrons to ensure they all fly away. EDIT: I can't keep my modders straight.

I'm not 100% sure, but it looks like you're booting the Windows x64 version. RSS is disabled on x64 because Nathan, like many mod authors, is tired of getting bug reports from Windows x64, most of which trace back to x64 being unstable for so many users.

I can't quite follow my own twisted logic, but my best guess is that I was thinking he might have been having heat conduction problems from having the heatshield worn away, and that the chutes might be more heat-sensitive than the rest of it all. Granted, you get weird situations: my pod was once heating up, and I couldn't figure out what was going on. Turns out my RCS thrusters were poking just a little bit out over the heatshield, and they were conducting heat into the pod (well, at least until they exploded).

I presume he drives them backwards to just alongside the pod, and then uses those landing struts to jack up the rovers until they magnetize and attach. He might lower the legs on the pod to make it easier.

Bonus! Hang it from clamps, and move everything to the top of the VAB.

I think this illustrates the maxim of "Think of what you need, and whether you can possibly design with less". Your lander doesn't have the Science Jrs or goo pods, uses the 1-seat pod (the 2-seat pod is ludicrously overweight), dispenses with the large Clamp-O-Trons, and uses the lightweight legs instead of the max-size ones. That's 1.4t science payload shaved off*, 1.9t of command module shaved off, about 0.7t of lander legs shaved off, and 0.6t of Clamp-O-Tron shaved off, for a total of 4.6t less payload to the surface. There's some added back with the rovers, but if I had to guess, you just leave the rovers behind. *My preference would be 2 of each, which would add back 0.7t. The third and fourth suffer really bad diminishing returns.

Slap a couple wings on with bilateral symmetry, and attach the control surfaces to those. An example is in Wanderfound's post.

Suggestion: way bigger tail section, with full wing sections and separate elevons. The elevators can help pull the CoL backwards, letting you drag the engines back as well. You might also ditch the tail connector: it's not really doing you that much good. One final demon to look out for is CoM shifts as fuel burns: I use RCSBuildAid to find where my dry CoM is. I've had an egregiously expensive (fortunately unmanned) spaceplane lawndart on re-entry because the CoM shifted far backwards.

Going to defer to Wanderfound here, who has vastly more experience with spaceplanes. What I knew offhand, though, is that if you design your canard right*, you can get it to stall before the main wing; that'll cause your nose to tip downwards and return you to stable flight. *And if you do it wrong, it stalls later​, making the problem worse.

All that matters is how far it is from CoM. There are other reasons to have a tail empennage vs. canards, but for pitch authority, just think of control surfaces as levers. Lift rating isn't the same as control capacity: the first is a winglet with a small built-in control surface, whereas the second is all control surface.

Control surfaces act like levers. In the case of the elevons on your wings, they are so close to CoM that they provide little pitch authority*. The canards, however, are much more distant, and so allow for much greater pitch control. You could also accomplish this with a more traditional empennage (tail section). Given the size of your spaceplane, it probably would be a better idea to increase the rudder size by replacing the winglet with a full wing (with elevons), which would additionally let you place elevators in a T-configuration. *They will do well for roll authority, because when you change perspective to roll, your wing elevons are distant from CoM.

That's not what I'm asking for. I know about the margins, and they usually work perfectly well, dropping you out of time warp basically on the dot. What I'm asking for is whether there's an option to make KAC more aggressive about slowing time warp, because I've missed alarms by 45 minutes at high time warp: it's not stepping down quickly enough.

If they're burning up during re-entry, your heatshields are having issues keeping your pod cool. If they're burning up when you deploy them, take a second, contemplate the fact that 330 m/s is the speed of sound, and start deploying your chutes at subsonic velocities (I usually wait for 200-250 m/s at the maximum).

Is there any way to force KAC to start killing time warp sooner? I've been overshooting several alarms, and I suspect it might be because RSS over-writes the default timewarp settings, so KAC takes too long to kill timewarp.

Were you using stock (dinky) planets, though? The delta-V requirements for 6.4x Kerbin are brutal, the delta-V map I use tends to overestimate how much you need, I engineered a healthy safety margin on top of that overestimate, and I was limited to half-Jumbo tanks, the Skipper, and 1.25m engines. Regardless of whether I should have used fewer parts, the deal is that, at least when I have RealFuels going, Engine Ignitor is what is limiting the size of my craft. A single mod should not so badly crimp what you can do in KSP. EDIT: For perspective, in stock, one can engineer a Minmus round-trip mission on ~6.2-6.5 km/s (slightly uncertain on how much dV is required to go from Minmus orbit to Kerbin reentry). In 6.4x Kerbin, even with FAR to remove the souposphere, you need 7.4-7.6 km/s just to reach orbit. I think I built in 14.3 km/s to that mission (calculated 13.5 km/s from the map, added 0.8 km/s safety margin). In theory, that's a rocket 9.67x larger for the same mission (assuming average Isp of 350s). I also double-checked: while my second stage used highly efficient (Isp = 440) hydrogen-liquid oxygen engines, everything else was at 320 Isp (there are problems with LH2: it's not very dense, so the tanks are colossal, and it's subject to boil-off, reducing its utility for engines not used for ascent or initial transfer).

Figured out what was going on with the liquid methane boil-off. #1: I didn't account for the fact that very low Kerbin orbit is warmer: up to about -60 degrees Celsius, enough to boil methane. #2: there are weirdnesses with temperature calculation during time warp: it doesn't properly update, so if start timewarp at very low orbit, the tank/ambient temperature will persist through timewarp, even if most of your orbit is in the -200C zone. Ergo, for now, it should suffice for me to lift up my methane-propelled rockets to the -200C zone, and kill time warp once I'm out of the boiling zone.

Okay, sorry, liquid ammonia propellant is not, for practical purposes, subject to boil-off once you get it to orbit. Also, is sub-boiling evaporation/sublimation modeled? The ambient temperature in LKO is -200C, which should be colder than methane's boiling point (its melting point too, for that matter*), but I did see loss of methane from that tank in LKO. *There's probably somebody who'd get a kick out of having to melt frozen propellants before use.

Hey Nathan, would you mind mentioning on the first page that liquid ammonia is the only non-cryogenic* nuclear fuel? It's kind of an important consideration for interplanetary missions. *Unless a minute of max timewarp isn't enough to see boiloff. But even if there is slow boil-off, it's so slow that it wouldn't matter for 99% of missions.