Fearless Son

[quote name='RocketPilot573']Ok I think I just turned the pilot to mush. [URL]https://i.imgur.com/JzDrPF3.png[/URL][/QUOTE]Just looking at that picture gets "[URL="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siwpn14IE7E"]Danger Zone[/URL]" stuck in my head...

Excellent rovers! Though one thing my rover experience has taught me is that while deployable solar panels are great for recharging the batteries quickly, the limitations on movement mean they are only useful when you have reason to bring the rover to a complete stop. Might I recommend fixed solar panels? While they do take longer to fully charge, they are constantly active, even while the rover is in motion. The wheels might drain charge faster than those fixed panels can replace them, but the wheels need not be continuously accelerating either: rovers can coast a long way on their momentum, especially when going downhill, and the rover can charge itself up in motion by letting gravity and inertia do most of the work of keeping it going along.

[quote name='Mjarf']That's a mighty fine jetplane by the way.[/QUOTE]Why thank you. :)

When I saw the new small jet engine, I thought that might be ideal for forming the 2D exhaust of the F22, so I tried to make an F22 replica. It went okay. Shortly after takeoff: [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/NGQWPXy.jpg[/IMG] Coming in to land (the landing gear fold up into the internal bay): [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/aVYyA6m.jpg[/IMG] I was a little worried because the landing gear is necessarily so close together, and the center of mass is so near the rear gear. Initially this used small gear bays, but they were a little too short to feel entirely comfortable landing with the bay open, and it forced me to place them in locations that caused such bad clipping that the plane blew itself to pieces the instant the gear tried to deploy, so I had to swap them for medium gear instead. A little fuel balancing and it is balanced well enough that I do not have to fear tail dragging. It does actually fly pretty well, nice easy takeoff, smooth motion, controlled landing, though its thrust is a little lacking, but that should be expected since those four tiny jet engines do not output much. Looks pretty good, though I could not replicate the shape of the actual F22's internal bay since we have no square cargo bays in stock.

I built a replica of an F22, with landing gear that folds into its cargo bay. It took off okay, flies okay, closes up okay. So I turned it around to see if it lands okay, opened the cargo bay, lowered the landing gear... and the plane promptly blew up.

[quote name='Geschosskopf']As you get close to the ground, burn a bit harder and more often to slow down to about 10m/s, then just above the ground burn some more to touch down as gently as possible. Welcome to Minmus.[/QUOTE]Something I wanted to add to Geschosskopf's excellent landing advice is to remember to kill the throttle just as you touch down. There is a button to completely zero the throttle, which defaults to X. This is especially important on bodies as low gravity as Minmus. In these environments, if you have the throttle even a little up as you touch down then your landers will have a habit of bouncing off the surface, forcing you to make some frantic and wasteful corrections before touching down again. This goes double if the surface you are landing on is sloped, and triple if your lander has a narrow base and/or high center of mass. Fortunately, Minmus has large wide salt flats that make for ideal easy landing zones, and I would advise you to aim for them for your first few missions before you try anything more "adventurous".

Sepratrons are certainly useful, but I do wish that there were some inline versions of the same. Some little light structural rockets would be ideal, like ones that thrust laterally so you can push the nose of boosters away from the ship, and ones that thrust in parallel with their axis so you can (for example) eject a heatshield and trigger breaking rockets at the same time before deploying chutes. The external ones have flexibility, sure, but with the atmospheric and heating overhauls recently, some that can be neatly "tucked-in" to the ship's fuselage would be welcome.

Wow, that show is like... campy seventies [I]X-Com[/I]!

Have you tried adding radiators to them? My understanding of the mechanics (which recently changed and the community is still discovering the specifics of so I might be off base) is that radiators should effectively increase the surface area that can radiate out built-up heat. Alternatively, try turning your plane around and flying it in aft-first. Assuming you have engine parts back there, they probably are a lot more heat-resistant than the mk. 1 cockpit.

I made a spaceship inspired by Jolly_Roger's "Reliant" model, but with an extended science suite and copula module at the rear for the ship's engineer to monitor the engines and ore-extraction augers in operation. It also gives easy ladder access to exterior scientific instrumentation, as well as manual deployment/stowage of the solar arrays and thermal control systems. Pictures will go up later.

Actually concerning getting off Tylo, its lack of atmosphere would make it ideal for building an industrial mass-driver across the surface. It would be useless for crew launches (too much acceleration for soft bodies to take) but it should allow bulk cargo to be launched on an arc for rendezvous with orbiting cargo-tugs. No atmosphere means little need to evacuate the interior of the launcher, and no air means no drag to fight against the acceleration. It would make it much cheaper to build and operate than a surface-to-orbit mass driver on another body. Assuming minerals are valuable enough, it would be an extremely economical option to a mining colony there to provide raw materials for any other Joolean colonization efforts.

"By your Jebs combined, I am Captain Kerbal!"

The "flickering" may have been from the game recalculating your approach. You might have been on the cusp of a Mun encounter but slipped away from it. The physics model is an approximation that gets updated at periodic intervals, it happens. As for affecting how "high" you go, it depends on which side of the body you move around. Move around "behind" its orbit, you can gain more altitude, move "in front" of its orbit and you lose more altitude. Further, how close you get to the target body will affect how much of this you can do: a closer flyby will result in a stronger slingshot as you power around it.

I say drop it into Jool on the way through:

I believe that if you have those small, steerable, always-deployed wheels unlocked, you should also have unlocked the larger, fixed, unsteerable wheels, the ones that stick out diagonally from the hull. I would think of those as better options for your rover, because they tend to spread the wheels wider and allow the mass to be slung lower relative to them than most other wheels can. Granted, you will still need a few non-fixed tires for steering, but you only need a few of those. To be fair, additional wheels (particularly of the delicate self-driving kind common to rovers) have practical reason to have some redundancy beyond additional power, and that is to allow for a certain amount of drive system failure without compromising the entire assembly. A six-wheeled rover can loose a wheel or two and still be functional (if not quite as optimally.) This is a particularly big concern with unmanned rovers which necessarily have no engineer capable of field-repairing damage caused by a rough spot in the terrain.

I spent the weekend building one of those spaceships with a built-in research lab and mining equipment, along with limited VTOL capability and enough aerodynamics to allow it to glide from orbit back to the KSC runway. At least that is the theory, I am still running my shakedown trials to verify that everything will work as intended. I know I can get it from a horizontal launch into orbit using some "Orange Skipper" liquid-fuel boosters, still testing re-entry though. I intend on posting pictures once I know this thing can complete the Kerbal-3 Challenge.

I concur with many other comments here, I think that fewer, bigger wings will do you better than building out elaborate ones out of several pieces. Fortunately the post 1.0 lift model is much more forgiving of having less total wing surface area, provided you have enough thrust.

Fortunately, Porkjet is already on that:

So a while ago I made a set of modular three meter diameter surface base components that I can stick together with docking ports, with little rovers I can use to lift them up and tow them around to dock with one another. Tested them all at KSC, proved that the concept was sound and I could build a functional surface base of whatever size I needed to. Wonderful. The problem for me though is how best to get all of these components from Kerbin to an extra-Kerbin body. Sending them up on individual rockets to their destination felt too inefficient, especially if they had individual landers. Sending them up in one big rocket felt too heavy, too over-built, and too expensive. I have thought about using a simple "carrier" craft to park in LKO, rendezvous with modules sent up in SSTO cargo rockets, then take them to their destination along with a reusable lander, but I have only partially implemented this plan. What are your preferred ways of actually getting surface bases to an extra-Kerbin surface?

One of the quotes they added near the end of the film (that was not in the book) though does sum this up pretty well, and is honestly one of the most Kerbal ways of looking at things I can think of:

I have been to Duna orbit and back with a crew, landed on the surface with a probe. Never been further out than that, but tend to be very conservative with my resources (money and lives mostly) and have yet to design something that can visit it and return, let alone go further out than that.

I love that picture, and while I doubt this is what you actually did, I can imagine Isaalla turning on her helmet lamps to use as impromptu landing lights for the rescue craft, the flight crew remote controlling it from Kerbin using her as a lighthouse on their camera feed to judge their distance from the ground as they bring it in for a soft touchdown.

I did always want to make a (relatively) close-orbit probe to study Kerbol, with a heatshield so oversized the probe can fit behind it, and a big thermal control system deployed behind it, using the autopilot to keep it with the heatshield always pointed at the center of the orbit.

Yo dawg, we heard you like spaceplanes...

You know, some aerodynamic nose-cones with built in Sepratron-scale SRBs would be a nice addition. Should allow that functionality without adding additional drag near the top of the rocket, and keep the total part count down.