RizzoTheRat

Clearly I'd misunderstood something I'd read elsewhere and was putting intakes then engines, I'll try it the other way round and see if that improves things. My early designs had way too much wing, and therefore too much drag, the delta wings seem pretty good but I'll try some of the other ones too. Is the Ram Air intake or the Shock Cone better at high altitude? I experimented with both on my first design above but didn't really notice any difference. Can't quite make it out on your picture but are you saying 4 intakes per engine at to top of your flight, so 6 engines and 8 intakes and then shut of engines until you have 2 engines and 8 intakes? My second design had 6 intakes for 3 engines and I struggled in the 20-30km range, where there wasn't really enough air for 3 engines but not enough thrust from 1, so maybe a couple more intakes might do the job. I think before I go to 2.5m tanks, my next goal will be try something with an orange tank as the body with the aim to lift it to 80-100km orbit with the orange tank still full, however that's a 36 tonne tank which is about the weight of my current spaceplane.

I've finally managed to get a plane in to orbit, after uninstalling FAR, giving up on my own designs, and basing the design on one I found in a youtube video by Cruzanak My next step was to increase the size, and after a bit of trail and error I came up with this. My plan was to run only on the single engine at high altitude to avoid issues with flameouts causing me to lose control, however this still proved tricky as I struggled to find the sweet spot where it would still accelerate on one engine, I had to bodge in a couple of extra intakes to get it working on all 3 turbojets much beyond 20km, but I'm finding I need to keep it going to about 40km to get to orbit without using the rockets until apoapsis. So in my quest for bigger spaceplanes (I want to use them to ferry fuel in to orbit for longer missions) I have questions. - To use more engines at 30-40km is there an upper limit on how many intakes I can have before drag becomes more of an issue than airflow? - How do people generally power bigger space planes but avoid flameout yaw trouble without clipping lots of engines together? - Is there a way to work out the optimum speed/altitude curve for turbojets/shock cones against aircraft drag? - Is my approach of getting to 40km and as fast as I can to get the apoapsis out beyoned 100km and then coasting to apoapsis to use the rockets to bring my periapsis up the correct approach?

Keep getting "Plant a flag on Mun" missions, so decided to leave Danby on the Mun do them (he's one of the idiots Jeb had to rescue orbiting in his space suit so he clearly likes being on his own) To stop him getting bored I decided to give him a rover to play with while he's waiting for missions, but that got me wondering how people carry rovers. I opted to use decouplers to build it in to the structure With a lander tall enough to drop it once landed Danby seems be having fun showing off with it So what's your solution for carrying a rover?

Recently I've been using solid fuel boosters throttled to give me a TWR of about 1.2, and then a single main engine running about about 20% thrust to give me good steering via vectored thrust. If I stick a smallish LFO tank on top of each booster I can still have my main tank pretty much full when the booster burn out and throttle up to 100%

I don't plan particularly efficiently either and tend to be of the "add more boosters" school of thought. Ideally I'd use 2 stages to orbit, one to transfer, and then one to land and return to Kerbin. I don't find there's the need to save on weight/cost so tend to over engineer things at the moment. Having started a new game with 0.25 and FAR so far I've only done 1 mission to Mun, with 2 capsules and 12 materials labs/goo canisters, etc. Not got the full tech tree yet so even if I planned better it still wouldn't be that efficient. Stage 1 - Lots of boosters and a skipper for steerage Stage 2 - Drop the boosters and fire up several LVT-45s, keeping the skipper running to LKO Stage 3 - Dump the LV-T's and use the Skipper to get to Mun Stage 4 - Separate lander with 6 materials labs to do 2 landing/sample/eva/flag planting and enough fuel to get back to Kerbin. Stage 5 - Remaining orbiter dumps the transfer stage, does high and low altitude science and then heads home with it's own engines.

Yeah ok, maybe "sorted" is too strong a word but they did manage to launch it a few times. In some respects it's surprising they did abandon the supersonic launches due to one death, there was a much greater acceptance of risk in that era. I remember seeing an interview with Burt Rutan who was saying the reason we don't make the great leaps now that we did during the cold war is because we're now much more risk averse. In the height of the X-plane programme they were losing pilots at a rate of something like one a month, which would be totally unacceptable these days. Properly out geeked Looks like they've got some interesting stuff there that I've never seen.

They had a lot of trouble trying to launch at supersonic speeds but got that sorted out in the 60's. I agree landing would be a lot harder though.

Think how much you might enjoy real meat rather than processed stuff then I think foal or kudu are probably my favourite meat. Very tender and lots of flavour. In a hotel restaurant in Iceland a couple of years ago the chap at the table behind me had had a conversation with the waitress about the vegetarian options. I assume from that he was a vegetarian and therefore probably not too impressed when the waitress brought the food to the wrong tables and tried to give him my Minke whale.

I passed a girl in a "Vegan Runners" top the other day, it was a good incentive for me to run a bit faster and fly the flag for omnivorism

The Yak 141 did a vertical takeoff or landing in practice week for the Farnborough airshow in '92. Once they'd repaired the runway they only let it do conventional takeoffs and landings. Dunno what the Kuznetsov's deck's made out though

Pretty sure the moon has a molten interior like on earth, due to tidal stresses caused by the earth. The Apollo missions left seismic sensors on the surface which have recorded moonquakes too.

Is it worrying that I looked at those photos and thought "Ooo, a Goblin" before I'd seen the link underneath The "space carrier" idea doesn't need to end up with anything looking remotely like a carrier, as you just dock your "fighters" to the mothership, or slowly drift them in to a hanger. And once you've built your giant space carrier you're not going to want to land it on a planet. Plus mars doesn't have any oceans so one of the fundamental criteria for all current aircraft carriers isn't required

Finally starting to get the hang of aircraft, and flew 3 or 4 circuits last night managing to land my latest creation back on the runway each time rather than my previous attempts of dumping somewhere on the flat patch around KSC and maybe exploding in the process. I then tried to get it in to orbit but I think it was too underpowered with 2 turbojets and an aerospike (30ish tonne aircraft). I'm thinking either 3 turbojets and 2 aerospikes or I go to 4 turbojets and fit a more powerful rocket. I can probably cut down on the wing too as I'm landing it at about 60m/s.

I'm a farmers son (arable and sheep). Quite a few of the more militant vegetarians think we should stop eating meat, but still seem to think there would be sheep/cattle/pigs around without the meat industry. Currently in the UK farmers get less for a fleece than it costs to shear a sheep, so no meat industry would mean wool prices would have to skyrocket to reach the point where people can justify breeding them for wool only. The countryside would look rather different too with no grass meadows. Besides, if god hadn't wanted man to eat animals she wouldn't have made them so tasty.

Interesting article on Voskhod 2, the first spacewalk. It's not just Jeb who has near misses, but I've never had to worry about him being eaten by wolves http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/2014/newsspec_9035/index.html

Do most people use joysticks or keyboards? SAS on or off? I thought I'd give FAR a go as I'm starting to get the hang of planes in the stock game and figured I should have a go at doing it properly. However I can't manage to keep anything in the air. I've downloaded Wanderfounds Kerbodyne Evangelist from here http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90747-Kerbodyne-SSTO-Division-Omnibus-Thread/page11 on the assumption that I was building unstable aircraft,but I'm not much better with them. With the keyboard I find all movements are really jerky and unsettle the aircraft so it's quite easy to lose control, and SAS spends ages flapping the controls around trying to fly in a straight line. If I turn SAS off I fall out of the sky in a matter of seconds. With a joystick I can keep it in the air in something approaching straight and level flight without SAS, but no hope of doing much maneuvering. With SAS on it's not too bad but still fairly easy to lose control and I find having to moving the camera angle with my left hand a pain. Chase cam doesn't real help either, especially when the plane's porpoising about.

I had the right click issue and nothing worse until I tried installing FAR and it thought the CoL was way out.

Can't you put the bay in opening downwards? Alternatively have you tried a gullwing design like this but mounted lower down? http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Beriev_Be-12_Gelenzhik_2Sept2004.jpg

At first thought I'm not that surprised that 80 tonnes hitting at 30mph causes some damage, but you wouldn't expect it to blow up the whole runway. The shuttle touched down at about 3m/s, Soyuz capsules kit the ground at 3-4m/s and the Orion capsule has been tested at 7m/s. However a quick calc suggests that's only about the equivalent of 1.6kg of TNT Luckily I don't have this problem as I rarely manage to get my space planes to land on the runway rather the nice flat grass surrounding it

Yeah, I check everything with the fuel drained out and the CoM was close but still ahead of CoL. Started a new game in 0.25 last night and got a contract to test a BACC booster in flight. Decided to use the BACC as the body of a plane and managed to produce a completely stable and easy to fly plane. Its follow up variant to test a skipper and a radial engine didn't work quite as well though and became unstable in pitch beyond about 20-25 degrees AoA on the return flight with less fuel, which certainly made landing interesting. CoM was still ahead of CoL but I think I had the canards too far forward and the off centre drag of the Mk55 radial sat on it's back probably didn't help. Now I know I've got a design that is stable and works well I can make modifications to the BACC plane to explore CoM/CoL variations and I will get the hang of it. Then it'll be time to have a go with NEAR/FAR...

Yeah but the other thing that KSP doesn't replicate is that at 21km ish altitude its stall speed is only 10kts slower than its maximum speed

Career. As a new player (played an earlier demo version in sandbox a year or two back but only a couple of weeks in to the proper version) I love that the contracts systems gives you a purpose, while the science and budget limit your options and make you have to think about it a bit more. I stared a new 0.25 game last night and have been trying to cram as many contracts and experiments on to each platform as I can, eg one last night was a plane to test 2 engines and a decoupler on a single flight, and another combined 2 further engine tests and a decoupler in orbit with a rescue mission, and recovery of science data from orbit. In sandbox I'd have just played about with aircraft dynamics and lobbed a kerbal in to orbit.

I'm running at 20% credit to science and it's a huge difference. I agree it's unbalanced but you've got to remember it's a development game, the mechanism is in there and can be updated for future versions. The trick is to find a balance that works for your playing style, for most people who've already played sandbox that probably means maximising science, unlocking the tech tree early on, but then really having to watch the money and do everything on a tight budget.

I'm with you on that, I do a few test flights and revert to try it with different fuel loads and tweaks until I'm happy with the design, before I try and do a mission with it. From a roll play perspective you'd have put a lot more science in to the design, tried things out in the simulator and got them pretty good before letting a kerbal loose in one. Ejector seats would be a useful addition though In the real world they used to lose a lot of aircraft and pilots in the X-plane days but these days it's pretty rare to lose a development aircraft.

It gets complicated really quickly. Force = Mass x Acceleration; but your mass changes as you use fuel Drag (real world) = 0.5 x air density x Velocity^2 x Drag coefficient x Area; but density changes with altitude, and KSP's standard model uses a bodge for drag coefficient x area. I the real world (and I guess in FAR) that changes again when you hit transonic speeds. I have a degree in Aeronautical Engineering and that document Mhoram produced makes my head swim, I need to work through it properly at some point I do all my atmospheric testing with planes rather than rockets, much easier to get the required height and speed, and with the new parts in 0.25 I'm managing to make some better aircraft too.