selfish_meme

Just put a lander can on the bottom and transfer, you can leave the can on Eve when you take off.

Wingtip cargo bays?

Be careful, I discovered the parts are not necessarily interchangeable with stock, your craft file wil load but it might not look/work the same.

How would you use stock autopilot only to send a craft to LKO, no WASD keys? I can't play ATM so I thought I would throw it out there, whats the best way. i.e Stabity to 100m/s, then normal, to 25km, then prograde till apoapsis, or some other more efficient combination.

Yeah you guys have the right approach, I was talking more about previous weeklies and what not to do.

The ones I remember treated it as reviews, and pretty cavalierly. Thats why peoples noses got bent. Don't crash and diss peoples hard work publicly is a good rule. Also they worked on submissions, which I think is a good idea o stay away from, a submission often equates with the expectation of a result, even if unwarranted.

One of the worst offenders is those quad adapters. Heavy and draggy, I also found that the precoolers are useless unless you need a little more air for an engine and have no intakes. I preffered to take the radial drag hit and have more fuel.

Foxster has some pretty small ones, actually this one is a lot smaller, you could use mine, but it needs tweaking

A suicide burn to stop at 0m/s on the ground is most efficient, I know some of the guys in my T-prize challenge could do it using nodes and KER, the rest of us plebs had to use mechjeb to finish the burn accurately enough

Haha necroed, I was reading thinking this is the worst advice I have ever read!

You should be able to see time to 0m/s, that and time to node should be close but not exact, your time to 0m/s will be affected by the muns gravity, so you need to add in some pork. Also you will stop faster than the predicted node, bringing the impact point closer than the node. Good luck and if you can figure it out please post an explanation video for dummies like me who end up eyeballing it and making really dV wasteful approaches.

I think physics in U5 may be able to run on multiple cores, or even GPU, it makes little difference, individual ships must be single threaded for affinity, you may be able to have 2 400 part ships near each other, if they dock your FPS will crash to slideshow. U5 brings some performance improvements for physics, but the main winners will be memory footprints.

Seriously though I am getting a little excited, I caught a glimpse of the future today, I have been setting up for a promotional shot and all the bits of the base are getting put together and arranged. At one angle it looked like a movie scene, the Mars base with Rover parked out front. I don't know how interesting the actual trip is going to be but putting it together is damn fun.

See what happens, you build a radio tower on a Mars like world, Boom! sand storm!

Note this is gonna get moved to the spacecraft exchange thread

I did a quick 3 stage to LKO/station for your demonstrator, it's simple and robust with big margins. Download

I think he is referring to construction techniques rather than shape.

Never seen that one, but never looked for the ascent vehicle, if you can get it to orbit from Duna I'll look at it, you can check out my current one on the first page, all he said in the book was pretty much 'gleaming conical' so that's what I went with.

I accept entries from the community, no problems, look at the asset list and pick what you want to do, and submit a craft file. At the moment, my only criteria is that it fit in with the overall feel of the Ares Mars Direct artwork, you can look online to find examples of most things, and that it fit in with the other craft. So for example the Rover needs to be able to tow another rover/and or solar farm. Maybe dock with the hab. I want it to look and play cohesive, so keep other craft in mind when designing. if you see something that could be done better or is not right in some way let us know, tweak things if you want. Cheers for wanting to help.

Your hardware will be the determining factor of the accurateness of this statement

They are some interesting designs, have you tested the rover in a cargo bay? It looks a bit wide. Edit : I think it's just perspective. Did you check out my rover, habitat and solar farm, they are designed to all dock to each other (so you can take the solar farm with you when you leave to recharge the rover).

You might want to see the Stock Payload Fraction Challenge thread. Mine is currently number 11 at 38.23% in the Air Breathing ladder, but number 5 in terms of SSTO's, and maybe the highest placed of the properly practical fully reuseable SSTO's. This is my production model that is based on it for taking Orange tanks to LKO reliably and fairly easily for a 33% Payload Fraction. 40% is doable for an air breathing SSTO and I think I could maybe get mine to do it, but they would not be nice to fly or reliable and would only just make it to 70km orbits with no fuel left at all.

Yes it does, Red Iron Crown has a screenshot on his Laythe Spaceplane Challenge entry where you can see the extra intake air. - - - Updated - - - One thing I wondered, does wrapping an engine (not working of course, but like a nuke) in a fairing reduce the drag enough to make it worthwhile? Because otherwise it's hanging in the airstream for the whole atmospheric flight contributing nothing but weight and drag. My testing has been inconclusive so far.

I have posted up some of the work I have already done, have not had a lot of time to play so this is from last week.

Yeah, I was sick and obsessing over a stupid hinge for Pathfinder. Getting better now, I think I will just go with your idea and have something that looks right but does not work. Plus the docking port Kraken drive ruined my last idea for a smaller hinge. Did you wanna donate any craft files? I'll add them up on the front page.