FlyingPete

Rockomax X200-8 fuel tank is the Tuna Can. Mk2 bicoupler is space shorts (warning, once seen cannot be unseen)

One thing I've found with spaceplanes is that you have to watch the balance as fuel is consumed. As you use up fuel from the forward tanks, the COM moves further back and eventually the control surfaces can't compensate for the pitch-up tendency. Gradually move fuel from aft tanks forward as the flight progresses. The trick with spaceplanes is to fly a profile that allows you to build up speed in the atmosphere. Ideally you can get a suborbital trajectory before the jets run out of air, coast to apoapsis, and circularise the orbit with a small amount of rocket fuel. If you reduce the throttle at high altitudes you should be able to keep the jets running just enough at 40km or more. As Van Disaster mentioned, if you're using it to launch a satellite or probe you don't even need the rockets- just get it nearly to orbit with the jets, separate the payload at apoapsis and use its engines to complete the orbit. Vertical SSTOs are less efficient, but simpler. Essentially you're building a rocket with jet engines on the side and lots of intakes. With these you want to skim along sideways to build up as much speed as possible before the jets die. Switch over to rockets and carry on to orbit.

I've experimented a bit with the Mk3 parts, and have to say that I don't like them. I get that they're sized to fit 2.5m parts into the cargo bays, but they just seem so enormous compared to the 'supporting' parts that are currently available. At least the mk2 parts are fairly sensibly sized in that they work with current landing gear/wing parts etc. I very rarely use the big 3.75m parts either, but at least they have appropriate engines etc to go with them. Personally, I think I'll be sticking with Mk2 spaceplanes for crew and small payloads, and leave heavy/bulky stuff to rockets.

I once had Munbus Kerman. No prizes for guessing what he piloted most of the time...

I'm still hoping for a 'rescue Enemy Kerman' contract. He must be a Kerean defector

When I first played 0.13 and saw that the moon-analog was called 'Mun' and given the proportions of the Kerbals, I immediately thought of this and actually burst out laughing

All that's really needed is a target marker in EVA view, the same as you get in flight when rendezvousing with a ship. Set the 'set navigation' option in map view and the target would appear with a crosshair.

I think the main change was the increased ISp of the mainsail engine. The poodle also dropped in mass which will have helped a bit (must do the delta-V calcs somewhen.) I think the point of most of the stock craft is to provide the beginner with something which works, but can is flawed in some way. Thus prompting you to think about improving the design before developing your own craft. In my experience, the Kerbal X still has one flaw in that the asparagus stages collide with the core on staging. The vehicle still works though, as the decoupled stages just tend to blow up their nose cones on the way down.

It's been a while since I've played with the stock Kerbal X spacecraft, but while messing around setting up my gamepad controller I've found that it's now capable of landing on the Mun and returning safely Previously it was slightly short of delta-V, just as how most of the stock craft are intentionally flawed in some way. Seems the changes in part spec in 0.24 were enough to push its performance high enough- you can now get it to orbit on the first stage+boosters alone.

I like the way it forces you to be creative with your rocket designs. Without funds or weight/part limits, you can just make an enormous booster to blast just about anything into orbit of anywhere. With those restrictions, you need to be more efficient- do you need four landing legs or will three do the same job? Can you get away with less fuel? Can I save costs by using SRBs instead of more liquid engines? etc, etc. Spaceplanes and/or fully reusable rockets are now more useful as well

That's the assumption I was making. The ideal would be a nitrogen/hydrogen atmosphere. Then you could use it as both reaction mass and fuel in a specially-designed engine. A hydrocarbon atmosphere might give you problems with soot contamination due to the unburnt carbon at part load. But then this is KSP, and based on the dropped resource plans, we can assume that the atmosphere contains a proportion of propellium which we can use as fuel. I've dropped a probe on Eve before that did atmospheric analysis, so we can assume that engineers on Kerbin can design an engine that will run in that atmosphere

I'd probably simplify things slightly, in the same way that standard jet engines work on both Laythe and Kerbin and burn liquid rocket fuel without oxidiser. I'd have reversed-cycle jet engines work on Eve and Jool, running on standard oxidiser without fuel. Perhaps a higher efficiency on Jool if this is possible. There has to be a balance between practicality and accuracy. Eve has the obvious application of oxidiser-fueled, fuel-breathing aircraft for exploring the surface, while at Jool you could drop a manned capsule into the atmosphere and do science before boostng back out. A part that would be needed/useful for this is a tank that holds only oxidiser. It would be handy for conventional SSTOs too as you could more easily adjust the fuel/oxidiser capacity.

So I've been digging through the parts config, and while it's a fairly simple matter to specify a new resource 'IntakeFuel', modify a jet engine to use it and Oxidiser, and an intake to collect it, the sticking point seems to be in making it work only in certain atmospheres. There's a 'check for oxygen' line to limit regular jets to Kerbin and Laythe, but I presume this sort of data is buried deep in the code somewhere, which I've no idea how to alter On a practical side, I believe most jet engines run very lean as you're only burning some of the oxygen in the air you draw in. With the reversed cycle you'd effectively have a rich mixture, but how this would be affected by a gaseous fuel and liquid oxidiser I don't know.

Nope, I'm talking about taking in an atmosphere that's rich in, say, hydrogen or methane (but no oxygen) and burning it with a liquid oxidiser you carry on board- no onboard liquid fuel needed. The exact reverse of taking in an atmosphere rich in oxygen and burning it with a liquid hydrocarbon fuel. In both cases you're providing thrust by gathering in a gaseous atmosphere and accelerating it, using a small part of that atmosphere as one of the combustion reactants. The other reactant is a liquid you brought with you. It makes no difference whether you're adding oxygen to a nitrogen/methane atmosphere or adding a hydrocarbon to a nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere. I just think it would be an interesting addition to the game if some bodies (most likely Eve and Jool) had this environment.

I think a good setup would be to have a 2-axis flight yoke for pitch/yaw, 2-axis joystick for translate left/right and up/down, rudder pedals for yaw, with the toe brakes used as a combined axis for translate forward/back (right brake=forwards, left brake=backwards) That way you could fly a plane normally, rockets would be acceptable as well, and using the yoke 1-handed you could handle all six axes for docking.

I remember reading a thread a while ago about the potential for a sort of 'reversed jet engine' that instead of using liquid fuel and intake air, would take in a fuel-rich atmosphere and use onboard oxidiser for combustion. Is this at all realistic? To me it seems that all a jet engine is doing is using a combustion process to accelerate the reaction mass through the engine by raising its temperature. The efficiency comes from not having to carry the reaction mass. It shouldn't make any difference whether you're combining onboard fuel with an oxidising atmosphere, or combining onboard oxidiser with a fuel-rich atmosphere. The latter way would end up with a very rich mixture and probably a great cloud of smoke, but should work well enough as far as I can see. What would need doing to make this viable? I like the idea of having engines that work only in the atmospheres of Eve and Jool From my limited knowledge of modding, I believe you could reconfigure the stock jet engines/intakes to run on oxidiser/'intake fuel' easily enough, but I've no idea how you'd specify which planets supply intake fuel as a resource.

I've never used it. Early in the career, the setup costs for any strategy makes it not worth it IMO, if you have enough of any resource to spare in the first place. Later on, need the funds to upgrade buildings before you can make use of large amounts of science, so it might be useful to convert science to funds for a while. That just changes which type of contracts you need to do though- you'll be grinding 'get report from Location XYZ' type of contracts instead of 'Put satellite in orbit 123' ones. Late game, once you've unlocked the tech tree, the obvious one is to divert all science to funds/reputation.

That's what I do when using the keyboard. I basically stole the key mapping from Orbiter: 8/2=up/down, 1/3=left/right, 9/6=forward/back. That's a good point! It never occurred to me that the two could be combined. I guess the only situation where this would be a disadvantage is if you want to hold the plane against the brakes while the engines spool up, though as you said, the keyboard controls could be used in that case.

I guess you could have a part that stores a 'size N' part in a 'size N+1' tank. That would avoid the need to stack the command module on top of a lander and give you a bit more flexibility in your lander design

I'm playing around with a ps3 controller (cheap wired one) that works with PC. The current setup I'm trying is this: Left stick: x-axis = yaw, y-axis = pitch Right stick: x-axis = roll, y-axis =translate forward/back D-pad- x-axis = translate left/right, y-axis = translate up/down (For rovers, D-pad also controls steering and forward/reverse) L1 = Brakes R1 = Cut engines L2 = Decrease thrust R2 = Increase thrust Triangle = SAS on/off Square = RCS on/off Select = Landing gear Start = Lights There's a few spare buttons to assign a use for. For some reason I can't seem to get kerbal EVA control to work from the controller, but I don't mind using the keyboard controls for that. It makes a massive difference to flying planes, and when using a gamepad rather than a joystick having yaw and pitch on one stick is more intuitive for planes than you'd expect- certainly better than having pitch/roll together when flying rockets. It also means that when docking, you have the roll axis under control at the same time as translation for when the exact alignment matters. Assigning the d-pad to rovers and rcs translation causes the minimum of 'interference' between controls- simply turn off rcs when driving around.

As in no fuel needed for the Minmus encounter. For landing on Minmus, I used the asteroid tug to slow its descent for landing. Had to climb slightly so I could scoot the tug out from under the asteroid. The asteroid rolled around a bit on the flats and I landed the tug on its engines near where it stopped.

Tinkering with spaceplanes using the Mk2 parts. Unusually for me I was able to get a single turbojet operational past 40km altitude. I think the final orbit was about 100km x 45km before it finally gave up. Slight nudge with the four radial engines made a stable orbit Just need some development to include a crew cabin or cargo bay and I've got a good reusable transfer vehicle which can rendezvous with a station.

Part 1 Due to the extreme difficulty of reaching orbit from the surface of Eve, Buzz Kerman had long argued that the first Kerballed mission to Eve should be a one-way trip, with the aim of colonising the planet. Eventually, this was agreed, and three ships were initially sent from Kerbin. The first ship carried the surface base itself. The second was a stack consisting of part of an orbital station, a hybrid rover/aircraft for ground exploration and a small lander for a side-mission to Gilly. The third ship was made up of the other section of the space station and a return vehicle for the crew members not landing on Eve. A fourth ship was sent later, carrying a fuel station plus an improved ion-powered plane and a more substantial rover (more on that to come later). We join the action in orbit of Eve, where the three ships have rendezvoused and docked. All three payloads were brought here by a standardised nuclear tug. Tug01 and the base module can be seen at the far right. Tug02 and the station/lander/roverplane stack were docked to it using the medium docking ports on the rear of the tugs, with the science packages sandwiched between for now. The base will shortly make the descent to the surface, but for the time being the crew return/station ship and Tug03 have been docked as one piece to a side docking port. Our intrepid explorers (Base commander Admund, chief engineer Gilbrett and scientists Gus and Obski) are all veterans of the space program, having logged many hours during the exploration of the Mun and Minmus. Lenke is still aboard the space station and will pilot the rover/plane hybrid down later. Hadson, Dangee and Malsy won't be landing on Eve, instead doing a side-mission to Gilly before returning to Kerbin. After a short while, the landing site came into position under the Station's orbit. The eager colonists manned the base module and detached. One of the remaining crew was able to take this shot while on EVA, allowing us to get a good view of the base as it prepares to deorbit. Admund: 'Separation confirmed. All systems showing go for atmospheric entry. I'm retracting solar arrays now.' Lenke: 'Roger, Base 1. Eve station confirms go for descent. See you guys on the surface. The base has accomodation for 12 Kerbals in the crew quarters above the three fuel tanks. The central section has the important science lab, and a lander can which will control the descent and later act as the operations center. The three refuelling arms will connect to the plane to fill its tanks. They also allow data transfer between the plane and station, so the onboard experiments can be analysed. The entry flames were quite substantial in the thick atmosphere of Eve- good thing the base is made of high-durability alloys that can withstand the heat. Here we see the base descending to the target area between the hills. The lakes in the distance will hopefully be the subject of one of the first exploration missions, once Lenke has landed the Roverplane at the base. Gus: 'Hey, Brett, what do you make of those lakes to the East?' Gilbrett: 'Initial data suggested a lot of hydrocarbons. Who knows, there may even be some propellium in them thar waters. It would certainly be useful if we ever decide we want to leave.' Obski: 'Maybe we find fish. Then we can have first barbecue on Eve.' Admund: 'Honestly, comrade, do you ever stop thinking about food?' Okay stand by for parachute deployment.' Given the previously unknown ground conditions on the surface of Eve, Dr. Von Kerman's engineers on Kerbin had opted for too many parachutes rather than too few. Three drogue chutes were deployed first, followed by multiple chutes attached to the four sections of the base. Admund: 'Fifty meters. Speed- 4.5 meters per second. All hands, grab hold of something.' Gilbrett: 'Contact! Speed: zero, altitude: 1435 meters above sea level. Lenke: 'We copy you on the ground, Base 1. We got some guys up here about to turn blue, we're breathing again, congratulations.' Admund: I'll save a bunk for you, Len. Get yourself down here and bring that plane with you. We've got chutes to untangle and a base to set up. Lenke: Did I mention I'm allergic to hard work? I'll stick around up here until you've got things sorted out. Lenke boarded the Roverplane and detached from the station/lander stack, taking with it the docking adapter connected to the retro pack. The four radially-mounted engines are used to perform the deorbit burn, bringing the craft onto its final entry trajectory. The retro pack is then jettisoned and the plane lined up. I like the sunrise in green you get at Eve. Aerobraking flames were even more impressive here. I'd miscalculated the trajectory somewhat, so Lenke found himself falling short of the target area, seen in the distance near the lakes. No matter, this is as much a rover as it is an aircraft, and Lenke would get some good driving experience. Lenke: 'Plane 1 to base. I'm coming up about 40km short of the landing zone. There's a reasonably flat area close by, I'll make a landing there to conserve fuel.' Admund: 'Roger Plane 1, road trip approved.' Lenke managed to bring the plane safely down to the purple surface of Eve. Retracting the nose gear to bring the two rover wheels onto the ground, he then set out to cover the remaining distance over ground to meet up with the guys in the base. Meanwhile, the crew of Eve Station had some rearranging to do. With the plane gone, Hadson detached the Gilly lander from the station and unpacked it from the docking adaptors. Skilful RCS bursts sent the adapters clear and out of the way. The lander was docked to a side port opposite the return module. Next, Tug03 was undocked from its payload to allow the station to be built. The lab/crew quarters section has no control of its own, so the crew return module was used to maneuver it into position on the large docking port of the station core. Finally, the return module was brought back to the other side docking port, and Tug03 redocked to it. This will form the main ship for the trip to Gilly. When the time comes, the Gilly lander will be docked to the nose of the crew return ship, and the science packages (currently sandwiched between Tug01 and Tug02) will be taken along as well. Gilbrett: 'Well hello, mister hotshot pilot. What kept you?' Lenke: 'You know us explorers, can't resist landing in uncharted territory. I see you've got things going here, what's for dinner?' Gus: 'Not so fast, there's no valet parking here. Get that plane secured and fuelled. Then we'll eat.' Obski says he can make something good with the ration packs until we can get the hydroponics operational.' Lenke turned the plane around and connected to the refuelling arm, then climbed aboard the base to claim a bunk. The fourth ship destined for Eve carried a large, 4-man rover, an ion-powered scout plane/rover, and a fuel station carrying both rocket fuel and xenon gas. Aboard the ship are Lusen and Chadoly Kerman. The rover and plane were deorbited together, and share parachutes. This resulted in an odd spiral descent due to the plane's wings imparting torque to the combination. The two vehicles fell into the mountainous area east of the base. Just as the parachutes opened fully, Chadoly- aboard the plane- separated the two craft. The plane dropped quickly away and Chadoly established a controlled glide, flying large circles to stay close to the rover, now descending upright under the parachutes. Lusen: 'Rover to Plane 2. Chad, what's your status?' Chadoly: 'Flying beautifully, this thing really handles in the thick atmosphere. I'm visual with the rover, everything looks good from here.' Chadoly landed the plane on a gentle hill and watched as Lusen's rover drifted steadily to the surface. Lusen dumped the support structure carrying the parachutes and then drove over to meet up with his fellow colonist. Meanwhile, the gas station was on its way down to Eve. The landing point was approximately 10km west of the base area, so it will be a short drive to refuel. Both planes have electric rover wheels so this shouldn't be an issue. We'll wait until the Kerbals inspect the gas station before we take a look at it. Lusen and Chadoly ended up some 60km away from the base, so set out to explore the hills on the way over. Lusen, aboard the rover, decided to drive around the main peak with its steep slopes, whereas Chadoly opted to fly mostly over it to test the plane's performance. The large purple sea in the distance looks interesting, but exploring anything other than the shores will need a boat of some sort. Chadoly: 'Plane 2 to Base. Chadoly Kerman 39km out, requesting clearance to land.' Admund: 'Chad! Good to hear from you, we saw your ship burning in overhead on entry. Looked pretty impressive from where we were standing. I guess we could use another player for some of the board games- clearance granted.' Chadoly parked up his plane next to its rocket-fuelled counterpart, and headed in to explore his new home. Meanwhile, Lusen was getting to grips with the rover's performance in hilly terrain. On flat ground, he could manage a steady 20m/s (no doubt helped by the aerodynamic cockpits used for seating). The low-slung rover was stable at 30 on descending slopes, but started to get twitchy and risked overturning much above that. One very steep slope needed much braking to maintain control. Fortunately the brakes on all eight wheels could still bring the rover to a controlled stop even on this slope. Climbing hills wasn't a problem- one advantage of conditions on Eve is that traction is helped by the higher gravity. With the first crew of seven all safely at the base, they posed outside for a photo. Next time, expeditions to the lakes will begin.

I've recently noticed/remembered, while building a lightweight lander, that one of the stock landing leg parts has disappeared. I can't remember its name, but they were the simple ones that just unfolded through about 120 degrees from an upright position- like the large LT-2 legs, but smaller and not telescopic. They've probably been gone for a while now, but I've just not been paying attention. What's the story here?

It's useful for docking small craft, as previously mentioned. Also with the monopropellant engines it's just enough fuel for an emergency abort system when a launch goes wrong.