Excalibur

After quite a bit of research (mostly spent smashing aircraft into the ground) I present to you Xenolith Alpha\'s second KSP game guide; Kerbal Space Program: How do you build a Spaceplane? Any corrections/suggestions are most welcome. Hope you find it useful.

Clever indeed. I did think about trying to fix it myself but I don\'t know enough about plugins to have even attempted it. Thank you.

I had read that little tidbit after I\'d first seen the video. Just adds to the legend I think.

Mechjeb may get more of the limelight since it\'s more relevant to actual flight manoeuvres, but I\'d say your plugin is equally important and will become more so once more of your planned features are added. I\'ve only noticed one bug with the latest release. One time it seemed to think I had an extra stage, though it only showed zeroed figures for that stage and did not affect anything else so I wouldn\'t call it a game-breaker.

Lots of views but no replies I\'d have thought this would have been a major talking point! Unless I\'ve being a little dense and someone posted this up recently. I hope at some stage we can use rocket sleds as part of any R&D programs we may have in the future. Especially if it ended up being something similar to nVidia\'s Rocket Sled graphics demo, complete with G/Wind blast distorted Kerbal facial expressions. Think of the hilarity!

Hell, if you\'re looking for a planet that far away to come over the limb you\'ll have a very hard time seeing it anyway. Makes me wonder, once the full planetary system arrives, will we actually be able to see distant bodies and how will the renderer cope with it? I think it would be pretty cool to look up from Kerbin at night and see the planets twinkling in a string along the ecliptic (assuming the system is like ours). I\'m sure you could even navigate by them...

Great book (though I think it\'s \'Voyage\'). I found the whole Apollo-N business in that book rather grizly. Still it\'s a great insight in to what may have been had NASA not pursued the flawed (but still incredible) Space Shuttle Program. Mr. Baxter has produced some excellent hard science fiction - if you liked \'Voyage\' give \'Titan\' a go - I think it\'s even better. Back on topic, I like this brute force approach. I think it\'ll be the first one I use.

Gravity assists (slingshots) are quite hard to explain and took me a bit to get my head around. If you already understand them then ignore me, but if not this may help you grasp the idea. You cannot gain velocity relative to your target body. In this instance we\'ll say you want to slingshot around Mun without performing any burns. Let\'s assume you enter Mun\'s SoI at 100m/s relative to Mun. An observer on it\'s surface will see you leave it\'s SoI at the same 100m/s. You can however gain velocity relative to Kerbin by a Munar gravity assist. Roughly explained, the best trajectory is as follows; Enter Munar SoI from a direction directly opposite from it\'s orbital velocity vector (an orbit identical to Mun\'s but orbiting the in the opposite direction will achieve this). Ensure that you have a low enough Pe to skim over Mun\'s surface and leave Munar SoI in the direction you came from. Once you\'ve left Munar SoI again any observer on Kerbin will see a large increase in your ship\'s velocity. Now if we call the Mun\'s orbital velocity \'U\' and your crafts initial velocity \'v\' it can be shown through vector addition that it\'s possible for your craft to leave Munar SoI with a total velocity of 2U+v. Quite an increase. Orbits are also have reversible properties so you can reverse this technique to lose velocity as well. Bearing all of the above in mind I don\'t see why it\'s not possible to achieve a gravity assist in KSP. I\'m sure I\'ve heard of other people doing it but I\'ve never actually done one myself and measured any change in velocity relative to Kerbin. Will have to try it!

You make it sound like he\'s gotten himself lost! His profile says he was last active a few days ago, probably busy with other things. I\'m sure when he gets the time he\'ll be back to update this awesome plugin.

Thanks for the transparency - always nice to know what\'s around the corner. I like the idea of a secret feature too. I don\'t use this mod for space planes yet, but I find it nigh-on indispensable for building rockets. I think I generally have a good \'feel\' for what engine/tank combinations work for certain rocket stages but this gives you the option of total precision. Makes design much simpler for novices provided they have a basic knowledge of the terms involved. I provided a link at the end of this guide (I didn\'t think you\'d mind) for that very reason! Perhaps you should get in touch with the Squad team and see about getting this integrated into the stock game engine. When some kind of a game manual comes around and the basic terms are laid out, it would remove the need for beginners to get calculators out and prevent a lot of guesswork. As you add more features this will become even more relevant (delta-v for example; if we supply the novice with the information that it takes approx. 4000-4500m/s to get into orbit, they could build at least that amount of dv into their vehicle and have a decent chance of making it up there first time). Integration would probably mean a whole lot more work for you... but it\'s an idea. Thanks again and keep up the good work!

CoM and other features would be nice - but at least you\'ve got the thing working again. Thank you and well done sir.

Are you trying to treat the D-Pad as four buttons? KSP sees the D-Pad as two axes, so if you want to use it you\'re limited to the axial assignments only. I\'ve changed my own setup somewhat and I think it\'s optimum for spaceplanes. Besides I\'m quite happy flying in space with keys. This is what I\'m running now: LB/RB mapped to throttle increment LStick L/R: Camera horizontal Axis LStick U/D: Camera vertical Axis LStick Button: Camera Zoom In RStick L/R: Roll Axis RStick U/D: Pitch Axis RStick Button: Camera Zoom Out Dpad L/R: Yaw Axis Dpad U/D: Unused X: Cut Throttle Y: Gear A: Stage B: RCS Start: Toggle SAS Select: Toggle Precision Control For me this is the best setup. It allows you to get around the buggy \'chase\' camera in the game with easy camera controls. Yaw is still easy to get at and logical. As I\'ve said previously, I think the key to getting the most out of any joypad/joystick/peripheral is to get your sensitivities and dead zones set to your tastes. Everyone has different opinions on the exact numbers - but once you find the ideal ones for you flying will feel natural.

Yeah, I hope sarkun can find the time to fix this issue - personally I think at the moment that this plugin has the best landing legs and solar panels found in KSP. Can\'t wait to use them again!

Good man, looking forward to it

Yeah looks like 0.15 broke it Shame because I used this all the time!

Damn, in that case I\'m going about 450m/s too fast! Was really surprised at how docile the thing was to control - not like most of my other creations! Didn\'t have any music on at the time unfortunately. \'Highway to Hell\' would be fitting, though I think I\'d choose \'Soundgarden - Jesus Christ Pose\' off the top of my head.

Excalibur Exoatmospheric Proudly Presents: EE Hyper Streak Unlimited Land Speed Record Car We\'ve seen quite a few attempts at attaining the highest speed possible whilst in contact with the ground. We\'ve yet to see any evidence of any machine achieving over 500m/s (feel free to write to us if you know otherwise). As a result Excalibur Exoatmospheric have developed the Hyper Streak. Not the most balanced Kerbal vehicle as it\'s primary propulsion system consists three RD-170 rocket engines fueled by C7\'s lightest one metre fuel tanks (750x0.9). However apart from this oversight not a single .cfg edit can be found, and all other aspects of the vehicle are balanced. We also switched the Ground Interfacing Tackle (or G.I.T.) from Tosh\'s standard cart to Tiberion\'s landing gear parts due to stability issues. Good brakes too. Due to this modification we soon realised that the vehicle could not handle anything but the smoothest bumps without launching itself skyward. This led us to seek a perfectly flat environment and we found that in the polar regions... This led us to develop the Hyper Streak\'s pièce de résistance... the abilty to launch as a suborbital rocket, fly to landing as an aircraft before pursing the land speed record as a \'car.\' Due to around 2 hours of intensive testing the vehicle is very stable in all modes of flight... just be sure to make your landings with lots of turbine power, you may land nose-first at high velocity otherwise! On the pad.. Separating second stage liquid boosters... Gliding in before powered landing at the Southern ice cap... Successful polar landing... Conversion to LSR vehicle... Ready to rock and roll... Hard acceleration to top speed... Final velocity before engine cut-off... Jeb accidentally locked out the controls during testing of a new water speed record prototype based on the Hyper Streak. This resulted in the untrained occupants being launched straight up under full thrust. The following image was taken of the errant craft just after MECO... Don\'t think we\'ll be seeing those poor saps again any time soon... As I said this isn\'t necessarily a balanced vehicle, hence the \'unlimited land speed\' category. Further development pending to break the 500m/s barrier. If anyone has beaten this figure without .cfg edits or ridiculous mods and have the pictures to prove it - please let us know! Stay tuned.

Though it wasn\'t really my intention to have efficiency as the focus of the guide, might as well get the beginners off to the best possible start and get them using efficient ascent profiles from the get-go. I\'ve added some of the info, and your table of terminal velocities as long as you don\'t mind... I did say thank you at the bottom of the guide. As an aside, recently I\'ve been launching ridiculously large rockets, so my main focus hasn\'t been so much efficiency as just getting the thing off the bloody ground without kerploding!

Is this the kind of thing you\'re going for? http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=10570.0

Thanks closette - I\'d missed that post on my travels through the forums! I must admit I did skim over a lot of the gory details, especially concerning the initial stage of ascent. May update the guide based on the information you\'ve shown me. What I don\'t want to do is confuse anyone or overwhelm them. Might actually add a link to that post at the end of the guide. Many thanks for your comments though. I based much of the guide on a lot of information \'off the top of my head\' and from what I\'d learnt myself - so there were bound to be inconsistencies and gaps!

Thanks, I wanted to make the it much shorter but too many big ideas to touch on as you mentioned. Good point! I\'ve gone back and added that in, which incidentally led me to spot a spelling error so thank you.

I have no idea how I got 182 PJ. My senses must have taken leave of me... I looked at the calculations again and got a more reasonable figure of 181 GJ. :-[ Nowhere near the power of an atomic blast... but still got enough boom to tickle your cockles. Perhaps you could add an extra prize for the first person to get a kinetic energy on impact of over 1 kiloton of TNT equivalent (4.184 TJ according to Wikipedia). I do have a new entry though: Final image taken ~500m above the Munar surface. Engines off, final mass 81tons. Final velocity 5196.9m/s Impact momentum = 81 x 5196.9 = 420,949 tons/ms-1 Works out about a quarter of a kiloton. It\'ll be hard to get 4 times the energy. I\'ll mean either doubling velocity or doubling mass!

I sent my target craft into a 1000km 90 degree circular orbit. I made it as perfect as possible (turned out to be about 1,000,550m x 1,000,470m or thereabouts). This took some patience with RCS set to fine, but didn\'t take too long. I then launched West with the chase craft and let MechJeb put me in a \'rough\' 1000km 180 degree orbit. Once that was done I focused the camera on Kerbin and zoomed out just enough so that I could still see the orbital traces of both ships (i.e. the traces are close to the camera so you can see any differences easily). There are two points 180 degrees apart where the orbits intersect. I made a burn normal to my orbital course at one of these points and managed to synchronise both the target, and the chase ships\' inclinations. Then all I did was match either Ap or Pe with the target\'s orbital altitude and circularise. I did all tweaking burns with fine RCS. Managed to get a lot of precision that way. At the end of the day though it took a fair bit of eye-balling and patience. I\'ve got quite a bit of spare time on my hands at the moment...

I just tried the challenge again with a different rocket and also clipped through it at ~5km/s. As a random aside looking at my previous attempt, assuming all kinetic energy was converted to thermal energy on impact the total energy released would have been ~182 PJ of energy. Thats about 43 kilotons of TNT, or about twice as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. Now that\'s Kerbal!