Mikki

I took a small break from KSP2 and came back finding my Kerbals doing very weird stuff. They claim that they have anything under control and are performing a break check on the new Münbase... rover... plattform... thing. Yeah. You can review all this stupidity in my missionreport, soon....

Just in case you never got up to the top levels of the VAB... this is how it looks from a Kerbals perspective

Hi there, i can tell you from my own experience that in real life Elm`s Fire is a very, very faint happening, i have seen it twice, once as a child and once many years ago on top of a mostlikely deep frozen (living) very tall spruce. This was only visible because in this area there was basically no artificial light pollution and our eyes have been adapted to the dark for some hours. Both times it was green and it glowed from the top 1.5 meters of the tree and around the end of the topmost branches. I haven`t seen any accurate photo of this ever, maybe once a real picture that came close to it.

This is a very nice and detailed missionreport, the yellow glider is specially well designed. Thank you for the good read and insights! Cheerz!

This looks like overkill for most PCs, i really wonder how your installment doesn`t crash any other moment... I am very impressed by your benchmark of KSP2, i hardly believe there`s much comparable progress around in the community, at least i haven`t seen any. My own game is way lighter than yours for sure, i am carefully increasing the partcount on my station with focus on experience with the behaviour of the software. I love it and i hope we can go much harder in the future! Cheerz!

Thank you ! I had to pull a dirty trick on this plane, and this one gave me headaches. I covered all the empty cargo bay nodes with small cones and shifted them out of the way to the wing surface... And now it has hell-of-a-speed since then, it has very little drag i think and the damn NASA X-37 wing layout is somewhat utterly failsafe, and having the wings on top makes it literally deathproof at descend and landing. I am bit ashamed to exploit the game mechanics in such manner...

I have started a truely cursed probe, if i just knew earlier... I`ve put two large comm dishes to a xenon driven probe with a nuclear powersource and some batteries, hence the high dV... I launched before dawn, so my probe would leave the Kerbol system in a brachistochrone trajectory... i pointed straight up and watched it rising... After leaving Eeloo`s orbit the communication ended with the probe, what a failure... now it shoots away with close to 11 km/s without any control. Farewell, farewell...

And this is insane btw, how do you cool your CPU, liquid nitrogen or what??? I bet your game will crash at some point without recovery...

My Kerbals have begun with serious orbital construction, despite random questions from the staff about anything going on in my space program...

"THE CHUNGUS" "There is a ladder, come with me..." Early in the morning some Kerbals pulled a rather large plane thing out of a side hangar, turned out it was a huge SSTO. Inside was the core piece of our first interplanetary research vessel, ready to be docked at "ALPHA-II". - "Oh my Kod this has a lots of thrust; i can`t even stretch my arm to grab my drink from the console... are we fast now?" - "Yes we are going very fast, i see some glasses shattering over there at the tower... it is also very loud..." "The Chungus" as it was named soon after takeoff went up to rendezvous with "ALPHA-II"... The robotic yellow tug pulled out the core piece and switched over to another dockingport... After that the tug moved the truss to the station, which was awfull because i realised just later that i have deactivated half of the thrusters on the tug, but it played out well anyway... the tug returned then to another parkinglot. The crew of "The Chungus" picked up some methane from the station just for safety and decided to leave immediatly, so they don`t miss lunch at the KSC... After a successfull landing the crew disembarked "The Chungus"... - "Hey who has put this thing together? Why are there small cones attached to the back of this plane? Why are we here in first place?" - "The guys at the "Nightly Builds Department" have done this last week. They said we must ignore the funny cones on top and just keep full throttle all the way up to orbit, "The Chungus" is just a testarticle and subject to changes..."

I have docked "The Chungus" to "ALPHA-II", the cargobay holds the core piece of my first interplanetary vessel in KSP2. My Kerbals are somewhat stupid megalomaniacs but the same time they can keep insane stuff going... This has become a serious adventure for me...

Yeah, it`s time to activate my Kerbals braincells since the know now how to brute-force all kinds of stuff to space.... FOR SCIENCE ! ! ! sorry i had to

I have the impression that KSP2 development is maybe nine to twelve months ahead and the published pre alpha updates just mirror the definitive base to further progress and build on a very quality oriented product. It would be just logical when developing such a software with focus on longterm (Hundreds if not even thousands of hours sometimes) playability, much unlike most other games. Common gameplay bugs can be solved `"on the fly by" with such a method, without disturbing the main roadmap of gamedesign. I can grasp where KSP2 is going and my feeling is more than happy about the carefull communication about the direction this company takes.. Nate Simpson seems to me to be a well worthy and adequate administrator of KSPs legacy, and i think he is well aware of his responsability, much respect to the directors of KSP2 from here. For science!!!

Meanwhile soon in my hilarious missionreport... "...Uhmm, let me guess, we are inside a humongous upside down cargobay and you wanna tell me this giant pile of scrap metal you found by the road goes to space..." "Yes." "Ahahaha..." "We must deliver the core piece of our first interplanetary researchvessel to "ALPHA-II"... " "Oh, it still floats around up there?" "Yes. All our crafts must fit the demanded size of "Too much Chungus", i`d like to know who on Kerbin came up with this idea... Someone ordered 5 truckloads of welding sticks last week, so i don`t think it`s getting better..." "I see no ladder..." "There is a ladder, come with me..."

No problem, they`ll come back. My Kerbals are "The living dead"...

Maybe too much thrust applied? There is a G-force indicator aside the Kerbal portraits. Landing gear has an optimum on spread and load too, and oscillation induced by excessive SAS input can hurl your craft around aswell. There are many things to consider. You can find excellent plane building tutorials in the KSP 1 Forum, you may have to go way back a few years though, they still apply in KSP2. And welcome to the Forums!

This bugs me all the time aswell, this would be a major creature comfort...

SpaceX is obviously a private company with very flat operating hirarchy, they decide and construct their ideas "on the fly", with how it seems very capable and motivated staff and other small private contractors... Instead of paying lots of "unproductive and questionable desktop" wages they actually get things off the ground, a classic enterpreneurs success story... I quite like it. SpaceX will definetly change human history or has allready.

There are gyro forces on any turbine for sure. Rpm on Turbopumps is in the range of 30`000 to 110`000 Rpm. Raptor 2 output is stated at 30 and 36 MWatts per rotor. I have read somewhere raptor 2 spins at 90-100`000 Rpm at full speed.

...a bit off-topic the recent events at SpaceX... I would slap some wings to SH and weld a proper cone on top (Blast cone hehe) and land SH like a glider... Hoverslam is nice and all, mechazilla is great but i think landing like a plane would be more logical. Or is this tube too bottom heavy to glide at all?

I guess if SpaceX is keeping the the SH engine assembly as it is they will focus on a much more refined timing of booster separation. The might try to keep SH running by rotating it way, waaaay slower than before. The structural strain on three Raptor 2 engines running at full speed is aequivalent to the torque exerted by a cargo train weighing roughly 18`000 10`000 metric tons (!) accelerating 1 meter/second, only by gyroscopic forces carried by the 6 center rotor nose and side bearings. If the propellants can keep up with cooling this hellscape they might get away with SH "return to launch site" profile. I have read meanwhile that the middle ring of thrusters is kept spinning and flushed with LOX while flipping to keep the temperature of the pumps ready for re-ignition, correct me if i am wrong about this... Bubbles have killed the SH in one or the other way, which is sure by now. I am most courious for the next launch and really hope SpaceX can surprise us...

... Plumbing is doable, turning some engines inline with say Y- Axis also... but not in a few weeks.

Exact, the needed pumps could run during the flip maneuver with zero gyro forces when mounted horizontally and inline with the flip axis... I am searching for Raptor 2 pump cut images or the specific engine details but this seems hopeless on the internet (for reasons ), so i estimate the both shafts at around 80 and 60 kg... rpm is unknown during flip as is the shape... Only the weight of the whole motor is known to be around 1`600kg (sealevevel). The torque is insane btw, i don`t want to upset anyone here because basically no-one can imagine it. I think the rotor shafts just start glowing white hot despite full or partial flow rate and then melt away at 1`300° (degrees) while flipping, the bearings might be made of zirkonium alloy... or melt aswell when made of inconel. I am sure SpaceX has very nice video capture (and sensor data) of their pumphousings desintegrating into shrapnell

Flipping rotating uniform, narrow, straight shafts in a housing is not much of an issue, tangential forces proportional to the rotational energy (!) build up immediatly when fast rotating disc-like shapes are suddenly accelerated no matter the direction except for the longitude axis of rotation of said shaft. And not along the new vector, but tangential, which is is the problem... A simple live test for you at home in your workshop/ garage, whatever, is a anglegrinder without a tool attached and doing 3500 rpm, you can move it with one hand around in all directions, the rotor inside is quite light. Then attach a heavy disk (I.e. made of steel and diamond tipped) for concrete or stone and try to move the tool with one hand around, and you can experience the very unintuitive forces acting on the anglegrinder yourself... and this is only few hundred grams at 3500 rpm. The kinetic force of a say 80 kg turbopump rotor at say 30`000 rpm excerts sideloads in the region of tons for sure, tangential to the new force vector (Right hand rule) when flipped around 180 degrees... I can imagine SpaceX is well aware of this issue, because the pumphousings of the raptor look narrow compared to other pumps used in other types of rocketmotors... But fans and impellers must go somewhere... The direction of the pumprotors along the flip maneuver axis would solve this issue to 100%(see above), but as we all can see the pumpshafts are mounted straight down the rocket long axis... Edit: Apparently the two raptor turbopumps develop between 30 and 36 megawatt kinetic energy at full speed and this equals to 30- and 36`000`000 Nm/s potential energy... This a lot of torque depending on the weight of the shafts, which i don`t know actually

I just re-read Alemberts gyroscopic theory and it states that fast rotating bodys exert unusual very high counterforce (torque) tangential to a second applied rotation (force vector), which are unpredictable and surely very uneven on complex shapes like pumprotors. You can calculate this force on a fast rotating straight rod, but a pumpshaft with curved blades and impellers is just structural chaos.