TiktaalikDreaming

Speaking of logos, I'm aiming at some variation of the Von Braun coat of arms, probably eventually with EMW next to it (ElektroMechanischeWerke). As per Coat of arms still needs two peacock feathers and three fish. Hardware is of course easier. :-)

The calculations would need to adjust for the fact that the thrust is delivered in impulses of delta V rather than force over time. People have done this though. And it's not horrible. For an idea of thrust per mass of "fuel", all you'll need the impulse force (eg: 3.0x10^6N), and the mass of each pulse unit (eg: 141kg). So about 21280 N/kg, or 2170sec (Newtons/pulse / kg/pulse /Gin m/s). For the mod, it depends on the pulse units and atmospheric density (like for rockets, except the other way around). For the Kerbal scaled (5m) Orion, the best will be from the biggest pulse unit, with 50,million Newtons, at 144kg per pulse unit. For 35,395sec Isp in a vacuum. The most recent edition of the mod includes scaling the impulse in an atmosphere. It uses a conservative multiplier for 1 atmopshere of x13* (actual impulse variation could be up to x35). So, at sea level, the effective Isp is 460,000sec. With the largest bomb, which will ruin your day if used at sea level. But, that's to demonstrate the equations, not how you'd want to use an Orion. That's not the exact same thing as a rocket's Isp, but it gives you an idea where you don't need to consider the TWR of the engine system, and you're not actually concerned with propellant velocity. A more detailed and accurate Isp for Orions can be found at http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist.php#id--Pulse--Orion More specifically http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/supplement/orionisp1.jpg and http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/supplement/orionisp2.jpg and more detail than you'll likely ever want at http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/supplement/GA-5009vIII.pdf :-) * the code multiplies the bombImpulse by (((float)(Math.Pow(((double)this.vessel.atmDensity),0.333))*12)+1)

Yep, looks like you can now define which mesh is the control surface. You can choose not to, in which case I'd guess it defaults to obj_ctrlSrf. Right click details of parts matched to cfg details is handy for figuring out what the values actually are. deflectionLiftCoeff seems to be surface area of the whole wing surface in m divided by 3.5ish. ctrlSurfaceArea appears to the the proportion of that that's a control surface. For instance if you have a 7sqr m wing, with 25% as control surface, deflectionLiftCoeff would be 2, and ctrlSurfaceArea would be 0.25. I think. Not 100% sure on any of that.

The reasons for stopping the project weren't actually the obvious hazards, although the fallout was probably a contributing factor to killing ground launches. The political environment and lack of any agency funding it killed it pretty dead. And the inability to test anything after the NTB treaty. And yes, the C4 test is how I know you get about four pulses using conventional explosives. So about 1/8th of your loaded mass per pulse for conventionals, vs pulse units of about 140kg (which is significantly propellant, rather than just bomb) yielding around the equivalent of 1kT of TNT. It doesn't take a lot of math to show the Isp of nukes is around 10,000 times better than TNT. The best conventional explosives cap out around 1.6x TNT, C4 is around 1.4-1.5 I think.

OK, this is just an early notification. I'm going to mod up a Footfall Michael. Althoguh it may not fit in the hanger. And I'll feel required to adjust to fit what is now known of Orions. Back when Footfall was written, Orion was a bunch of press releases dating back from the early sixties, but very little hard data. So Niven/Pournell had little to go on for putting detail in about the craft. At the very least I'll be using a flat pusher plate with everything else being in the pusher plate shadow. Which will mean a central pulse unit dispensor, rather than side mounted cannons. And probably a bunch of other changes. I'll also be doing just the propulsion systems, framework, and shield. Control, weaponry, etc can all be had from other mods or from stock. In other words, "the Brick" section will be an open framework with lots of attachment points but very little substance of it's own. I've started some basic work on the Michael, but as I'm rereading Footfall for the first time in decades, I've not settled on a design yet. Also, I can't believe I wasn't following this topic. WTF?

Nuclear explosion yield per mass of bomb is several orders of magnitude higher than any conventional explosive. So, unfortunately, when you switch over to conventional explosives, you get a few hundred feet up and run out of bombs. The idea works just as well, but you have to carry so much explosives, you get about four pulses. And at about 1 pulse per 0.84 seconds, that doesn't last long. The thrust, weights, etc all come from the released data from the studies done on the propulsion system. I'm sorry if you feel it's over-powered. It is when you compare it to chemical rockets. One of the reasons (among nuclear test bans, freaking Kennedy out, no-one wanting to pay for it, etc) for the Orion project being cancelled is it would have obsoleted the Saturn project overnight. That was why the NASA Orion was pushed as a 10m pusher plate (which is extra innefficient for Orions), so it could be lofted on a Saturn and everyone could feel good about having spent all that money developing the Saturn. If you're using the Nyrath edition, then you're getting vacuum performance regardless of atmospheric density, which is slightly unrealistic. The updated version on KerbalStuff has a modifier to boost performance in an atmosphere, as the yield per KT is radically higher in an atmosphere. Unfortunately for the purpose of game balance, Orions just are better in virtually every way. The difficulties are around the "you're nuking your launch pad", and the propulsion system is developing thrust in discrete pulses. While this mod doesn't model nuking the launch pad, it does model discrete impulses rather than steady forces. Also, your craft will tend to be large and heavy, and hard to turn. But before you complain about something being unrealistic and not real, it might be worth researching said thing. Orions just kick poophole. Yes, they violate every nuclear treaty ever, and irradiate their launch site, suck at docking, and god help you if one crashes on the launch pad, but if everything goes right, they liquid on every chemical rocket ever. By orders of magnitude. The Orion project team in the early 60's were talking manned missions to Saturn's moons by the early 1970s. In a single stage.

The yield vs mass of pulse unit is not coded into the module. That's set by the magazine selection. And if you're using my modified edition, also by atmospheric density. What sets the Orion drive apart from most chemical rockets is the Isp and trust being dramatically better in an atmosphere. So when you need that big thrust, you get it. When you'd prefer gentle efficient thrust, you get, well, more gentle, and less efficient. Isp is basically all over the shop. The limits really come down to "do I break my spine?".

Both the engines and the tank are LiquidFuel + Oxidizer unless modulemanager detects RealFuels to be installed. If so, they convert to LOX+Ethanol75%. The code to convert is the same for both (as far as I can tell). So, the questions will be, which version of Wernher's old crap are you using? The latest version has the A-10 engine, but no associated fuel tanks. And of the following, which mods do you also use? RealFuels, CommunityResourcePack (old versions used this as the fuel switch), RealSolarSystem, ModuleManager.

I'm pretty sure I've looked this up before, but when I do now I don't get far. When the tracking station (and only the tracking station) will not let you select a craft, debris, station,base whatever, but you can still use map mode to take control of things, then the save game is corrupt? Or is there some specific issue I've forgotten? Thanks

Updated to the first of the yellow and black patterns from http://www.postwarv2.com/paintschemes/ Specifically as it covers all bases of a bold, highly visible pattern for distant viewing and that the wing section (when chopped into four, as this mod does) all have the same pattern. I'm considering switching the yellow for a more Kerbal green colour. Logo for the agency has been added but will be changing to a cartoony Kerbalized edition of the Von Braun coat of arms as soon as I remember how to cartoon (which I was never good at anyway).

And now I think it was that my HDD SATA cable was fubar. Corrected and not only does my KSP work fine again, but the separators work nicer. I'm not sure what was wrong with the old ones, I can't tell from importing the mu file into blender if the collider was marked as convex or not. Thye behaved like convex colliders. So I'm going to update the two main adapters that this affects and upload the updated Nexus.

The v2rocket site had occupied a fair bit of my time. I hadn't seen the past eat patterns before though. The first yellow and black one might be unique in having a rotational four way symmetry on the fin section. Making it very tempting. Not so sure about the spiral pattern on the "rockets". :-)

Cool, thanks for the clarification @ferram4. I'm going with four identical wing pieces around the engine. The original/real had a single piece, but I decided that would make for very confusing stack nodes, so went with four side stack nodes, and the rear section divided into four. Also, this way it'll be easier to mix and match sections from the A-4b, A-6s, A-9s etc.

Glad you knew. :-) @Shaggygoblin brings up a question I've been meaning to ask. What colour scheme? I've been picking the late plain olive green because it's by far the simplest. While I'm still working on shape, and alignment etc, it's handy to just apply one colour. During early tests, they used the black and white "test pattern", of which there were at least two patterns. There were then at least four different camouflage patterns. Plain Olive green. And probably some others. I'm leaning towards the black and white test patterns. Partly as, in KSP, these are test rockets, not bombs. The camouflage patterns and so on were only used on rockets with bombs. But I'm open to ideas from others.

Well, the scheme of adding a bunch of convex colliders in a circle to form a non-convex collider works fine. Apart from slowing everything to a horrible crawl. Hopefully that'll be fixed by the time non-convex colliders can't be used (aka, unity 5, KSP 1.1). At least I think it was the colliders. :-/

I did a fair amount of rearranging things and creating new objects and then making those parents of objects to swing my parts around to the right axis, as I got around to reading about wings and control surfaces after doing all the blender work. I'll tidy that up, and see whether it behaves.

The wings are all independant, although they include a quarter of the shell each, not sure if that causes any issues with FAR. My problem is that now I have the control surface moving on the right axis, it seems to move the wrong way. I need to check which directions my axis are in and which directions they should be in. I *think* they're controlling in the right direction, but with visuals of them flapping the wrong way. I could be wrong (about them controlling correctly) though, the control surfaces on the base A-4 are pretty small. The A-9 surfaces are bigger, and it wasn't until I was testing that that I noticed they bend the wrong way. Anyway, more messing about with changing stuff in Blender, reimport into Unity, resave out, etc etc. And using Taniwha's mu import to look at other wings again. "limited usefulness" isn't the same as useless. :-) But the Isp etc on these is (and should be) fairly low, so, most of the time, other rockets should be a better choice. Mostly.

@tater, yep, that's the sort of direction I'm aiming at. A lot hinges on the A-10 engine, which was used for most of von Braun's future plans. 9 in a cluster for an A11, 60+12 for the A12, with the Marsprojekt Ferry rocket being basically an A12 with variant upper stages. Other aspects of the rocket plans varried wildly, but they all used some simple engine concepts. But, although I think I have a working A-10 engine, I'm mostly working on some technical issues with winged control surfaces (I find myself doing it for the first time), and trying to decide how many parts to have for the A-1,2,3&5. It's tempting to just make them single units, they'll never launch much, and they're really just there as oddities. I'll include the A-10 engine in the next update, but as yet, it has no fuel tanks, so it's usefulness is limited.

Concur. This is my test redownload mods install, and the textures are missing from the nose, the control, the fin, and the engine frame. The textures (at least the plain olvie green one) is pretty small, going to try the next upload without DDSifying. My working install of KSP where I mess around with these things isn't DDSified, and the textures are picked up by the meshes fine. It may also have to do with reusing the same texture for several parts (it really is a 16x16 blob of olive green), so, it may stay silly until I get the parts textured.

Well, I thought I was done. My control surfaces swing the wrong way. :-( I suspect we need to check the other axis.

I can clearly see the issue with the nose cone. Fixing. The Fuel tank and engine are the only parts with actual texture maps. The other parts have a plain green applied, although, clearly not applied reliably. I'm trying to sort some issues with the control surfaces on the fins, and when I have that, I'll upload a fixed A-4. In the meantime, the following text should replace everything after the at symbol (stupid forum will not let me type an at symbol without insisting I use it to annoy a user) in the parts/A4Nose/aerodynamicNoseCone.cfg file @PART[A4noseCone]:NEEDS[RealSolarSystem] { @rescaleFactor = 1.0 @mass = 0.832 } The issues are pretty obvious. I blame copy pasta. I'll see if I can fix the textures. It may be related to DDSifying the plain green texture.

The 6xA-4 motor would have worked, as it really was just a cluster of A-4 motors exhausting into a shared nozzle, but I suspect they had issues making it behave with all the required propellant flows and having all 6 motors not interfering with each other's thrust through the single exhaust. I'm kinda glad they didn't. The A-4 is already absurdly complex with it's 18 pre-combustion mixers, 6 sets of that would have me making so many damned pipes I wouldn't finish this side of next century. Also, test rigs designed for the expected thrust (360tons, as opposed to the A-10's 200) were found after the war, so it's likely the design was tested. I think the dual chamber idea was a large mixing chamber feeding to the main combustion chamber, but I'm just hazarding guesses. The reasons for the A-4's complexity was that they had trouble getting even mixing and burning with a single large chamber. Leading to hot spots, and unburned fuel inefficiencies. So my premise (read "wild guess") is they decided to premix fuel and oxidizer to create a more evn combustion. And considering the post war efforts at rocketry, esp in the US, I strongly suspect we know the 2-chamber design (what-ever it was) doesn't work is because it was tested. The direct successors are the redstone rockets followed by Mercury etc. At least directly descended through von Braun. USSR, France, Briton, etc were all working on their own derivatives.

I got trapped on this for a bit, so here's my learnings. Both the non-control surface and the control surface should match their X-axis along the line of hinging. I spent a bit of time messing around trying to figure out why my control surface kept pivoting around the wrong axis. :-/ It was pivoting around the axis of it's parent object's x-axis, not it's own X axis. Although, pivoting at it's own origin.

Preview of coming parts. These are all Blender renders, so it won't be as shiny in KSP, although it may end up looking better with textures instead of assigning whole colours to meshes. The first few shots are the A-10 engine. This started it's conceptual life as a weird melding of six A-4 engines, but then they ditched the 6 chamber combustion single nozzle plan for a dual chamber thing (that future rocket experts say would never have worked) and is represented as a single, long combustion chamber. And some of the shell/body parts for all the variants that spawned from the A-4. There's an A-6 wing (not the A-4b yet), an A-9 wing, one of the cockpits (I forget which, not the A-9), and the beginnings of the underbelly ramjet that would have replaced one of the fins on some of the manned variants.

Considering the differences between unity animation versions I was guessing the emissive animation at least would need to change. Not needing to is pretty awesome from a mod point of view. Not sure how much it cripples adopting advantages of unity 5.