noahtech

So do you normally get into orbit in order to test the engines? I'm not really talking so much about engines in orbit (those I can figure out). I'm talking about the ones that require me to be going at a suborbital speed at a suborbital height. Also what if I attached parachutes to all the stages so that I can recover them?

I'm trying to figure out an efficient way to get to all the biomes on Kerbin, but I can't find a way to calculate how much fuel I'll need to get to a given biome. Do I use S=v*t+(a*t^2)/2 ? Because I can't figure out how I would use that when going to the North pole.

So then adding a gui for it shouldn't be too hard.

Maybe Squad can add an option to start you off with fully developed facilities in the difficulty settings. That way everyone can be happy!

That's what I'm doing except that I'm attaching parachutes to all the parts so I can get them back.

What do you mean "do the math up front"? I'm trying to calculate how much delta v I'll need for the test. before all I was doing was building one that could get to orbit and hoping that I could pilot it to do the test instead of orbiting.

Oh. What about the unmanned pods like the stayputnik?

Is there a way to do it that doesn't rely so much on trial and error?

Even with a pilot it still won't let me use SAS most of the time.

I keep seeing contracts asking me to test X engine at height Y while going at a speed of Z and I can't for the life of me figure out how to do the math to design a rocket that will meet those requirements. I'm trying to design one that will launch straight up, meet the conditions at some point in its trajectory, then fall back down.

Does anyone else think that going without SAS is too hard?

I built a unicycle.

Is it too late to buy a ticket for the hype train?

Yep. Now I just need to figure out how to set the thread to "answered".

Oh I get it! I should focus more on horizontal velocity rather than vertical. Thanks! That has to be the most scenic ascent to orbit I ever did. ^^ Thanks.

Well for most flights I'll start to run out of jet fuel pretty early and then I'll switch over to the rocket engines and they'll run out of fuel too.

Yours. I've already tried it both manually and with Mechjeb.

I can't seem to get it into orbit.

Wait a minute. Do you mean to tell me that when I turn the jet engines on and off one will be turned on/off before the other one depending on some arbitrary rules that I can't actually work around? D: How on Earth does anyone design space planes then? What's the point of programming the game to not turn both engines on/off simultaneously? I honestly can't think of a single reason for why someone would want that (but I can think of plenty of reasons why someone would NOT want it).

Well I'd like to make the changes myself, but I'd also like to get the craft just as a reference. Btw thanks for the help!

Well to be honest I started playing KSP to learn rocket science and/or engineering in general, so I'm not really that much in favor of it, but I'm curious to see how you actually handle error tolerance in real life.

I just came up with an idea: What if each part had a small degree of error in terms of its mass/fuel storage/whatever just like how real parts have some amount of error that is randomly added/subtracted to/from every part just before launch.

Here let's try this one: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2NoZidKOY53MTZMYjJOeWt6NUk/view?usp=sharing

The thing is that I didn't upload the wrong file. I know this because I tried it a few more times and I kept running into the same problem.