DancesWithSquirrels

Heavy sighs. Kerbal 2 "is no more", "has ceased to be", "bereft of life, it rests in peace", and "is an ex-parrot", to quote Monty Python. This release appears to be a wrap-up. Really an illustrative example of bad management, locked expectations, scope creep, basic greed, unwarranted secrecy, and all the other corporate faults seen when dealing with a property as a money making 'thing', rather than a project with it's own complications. Shadowzone's videos are excellent references for the mistakes made over the course of KSP2, I highly recommend them. Engineers and engineering managers (software and otherwise), take note. There are some important lessons under the "never do this" category to be found here.

I haven't done triples, but I've done double ports in the past by placing them without 'snap to symmetry', then turning on symmetry and dragging them to the same location. Seems to work for me. But usually I just place them separately - as per the magnetic issue... History note: I was so glad when the Docking Port Sr. came into the game - prior to that, I had to use something like a triple adapter with 3 ports on it for the needed strength on large missions... Duna 0.25

Rockin' it! Experimenting with rocker-bogie suspension. The differential bar is a bit clumsy, but works well. It can even climb into and out of the pond next to the Admin building!

KerikBalm - When a real-world rotor tilts with cyclic, the blade disk does indeed tilt. And that changes the thrust angle, not the thrust distribution, inducing a rotation around the helicopter CG. When it goes in opposite directions for two rotors, like in a tandem helicopter, the helicopter will yaw accordingly. I feel the gimbal mechanic used for jet/rocket engines would work well and fairly simply with a rotor hub - and it's more true to life.

Currently props and rotors manage pitch/roll/yaw by changing the amount of thrust on different sides of the motor hub, with the imbalance tilting the helicopter. However, this means that designs like the tandem Chinook or the Kaman side-by-side helicopters cannot use prop this for yaw control (shifting the pressure point right on a front rotor and left on a rear rotor zeros out), and multi-rotor helicopter controls are therefore impossible without SAS, RCS, hidden horizontal tail rotors, hinge mounting the motors, or something similar. Would it be possible to implement pitch/roll/yaw with propeller thrust vectoring, rather than changing the amount of thrust on different sides of the motor hub? Especially since thrust vectoring has always been available for rockets/jets? Helicopter dynamics would become far more realistic as a result.

Looking at the various comments regarding differential thrust rather than rotor plane tilting - couldn't rotor plane tilt be managed akin to gimbaled thrust rockets/jets, rather than differential linear thrust? Tilt the thrust vector, rather than shifting vertical thrust side to side? (That design choice explains odd yaw behavior I've seen in a number of my designs..) That mechanic has been in the game for a long time - and would allow proper Chinook style yaw control! Assume the thrust point is either the center of a blade, or more properly the attach point, tilt thrust from there. It would be nice to also tilt the rotor itself, to look cool and allow rotor collision accidents, but I could certainly live with that limit.

I tend to start with a single core, then add 2-8 SRBs as needed to actually get it into orbit. Lots of SRBs do tend to collide with the core: I greatly reduce that by: Moving the SRBs down so that the couplers are on the top portion of the booster, using that force to push the top of the booster away. Adding a 'Basic fin' to each one so that there is some outboard drag to pull the top of the SRB away from the accelerating core. Those two tweaks work with up to 12 SRBs, although with that number you might want to add 2 Basic fins or AV-T1's to provide more separation drag. Sepratrons also work, but they aren't available at lower tech levels, and I sometimes find them fiddly. And I've also seen parachutes staged with the coupler to pull the boosters away (haven't tried that in quite a while, not sure how well it works now).

How do I properly embed an Imgyr album?

A couple of years ago I build a solid rocket to the Mun mission, if that counts Here's the album.

I used to use the tricouplers all the time in early games to build my Mun ships first/second stages (SRBs, three stacks with LV- 30s, in line decouplers, then three 909s and 400 tanks for my lander and return), but since it for moved so much later in the tech Tree I have better 2.5m solutions by that point.

IRL this technique suffers from a lack of brakes and control - you can't adjust the steering with a single point of pull, pulling with multiple winches just makes the pieces move faster, and you just can't slow things down.

My next step is usually a mission to Gilly with a bunch of probes and a rover to the Eve surface. I'm overdue for a big Jool mission, though.

If you have sufficient SAS, set to radial out and spin/parry/thrust until you're pointing ever so slightly up, and you can go full throttle for altitude. Folded (remaining) landing gear provide some nice bumps. I once got an Orion nuclear pulse rocket that had fallen over to launch by ever so carefully (single pulses) going up the side of a crater and over, with full throttle as soon as I cleared the edge.

Where are the download links for this? Oops, nevermind.

Mods installed are/were: Kerbal Alarm Clock 3.7.1.0 Kerbal Engineer 1.1.2.8 Trajectories 1.6.5 In reverse order: Steam automatic update from 1.2.1 to 1.2.2 resulted in hangs that required rebooting my Windows box (Windows 10), corrupted a save file, and required uninstalling then reinstalling from Steam to get a reliable executable. The log file shows no issues that I can detect - I can send it to whoever is appropriate if desired. Training and scenario games in 1.2.2 lack patched conics - this makes the Asteroid, Impact, and frankly any rendezvous situation unplayable. This was not the case in 1.2.1. Just as heads up, I don't think there's a good answer to these issues....

I've hit this a few times, and I find it most useful to disable the fuel tanks for the probes in the Assembly Building - just re-enable them when you launch the probe, and you're good to go.

Well, I didn't do a propulsive landing (that hadn't been mentioned when I started this), but here's my successful ship, the Shuttlecock 1: I used deployed control surfaces (I think those are available in the demo?) to slow the capsule below 45 m/s on landing, with a big sacrificial crumple zone. Worked just fine...

Adiabatic temperatures explained in short: Molecules bounce off of things, and that transfers energy. Expand the gas (drop the pressure), fewer molecules per unit time are bouncing, less energy comes from the gas, it's perceived as 'cooler'. Compress the gas, more molecules per volume and more molecules per unit time are bouncing off your object, higher energy transfer, it's 'hotter'. If you start with the gas and your object at the same temperature, you can modify the summed heat transfer between the two by either compressing or rarefying the gas. The equation used is PV = nRT; 'nR' is the number of moles and molecules per mole, P is pressure, V is volume, T is temperature. Increase pressure in front of the vehicle, and temperature goes up. Now, as to reentry effects - compression ahead of the vehicle greatly increases the energy per unit volume, to the point of being a plasma for a fair bit of the trip. You can see an example of this kind of heating by compressing gas in a piston. Most of the heating of the craft comes from IR from that compressed gas, not conduction, but the principle is the same.

Aha! I knew there was somewhere more appropriate!

The other method I've seen (Scott Manly did this) is to set your reentry or adjustment boosters to a low thrust, watch what you're doing in the map mode, and start tumbling the ship when you get close - the rest of the dV will average out close to zero.

The fixed dV per stage is a bit clumsy, but I found it possible to get the orbital changes I wanted by either changing the altitude of the burn (adjustment a la Oberth efficiency) or to accept a bit of normal or radial dV thrown away to get the prograde/retrograde I wanted.

Yes, yes, I'm _far_ from the first to do this. But heck, was it fun to do it myself! Based on the British Interplanetary Society solid fuel moon rocket design, complete with a bit of RCS for fine adjustments and pretty much all attitude control out of the atmosphere. Here's the album.

The name is Blond. James Blond...

Post what you did, it will be helpful for others who run into this. As I understand it, the best use of your fuel would be (assuming you landed near the equator of the Mun) to wait until your landing site is on the trailing edge of the Mun, then burning straight up opposite the Muns orbital velocity as hard as you can. That way you burn as low in the gravitational field as possible and maximize the Oberth effect, which is surprisingly helpful. But before that you should calculate your delta V and check it against one of the various Kerbal dV cheat sheets to see if you're even close. Or in a more Kerbal approach use F5/F9 to save before launch from the Mun, and just try it out... Edit: Do just _one_ burn for escape and into a low Kerbin periapsis, not two - control from the map mode. I do these burns in map mode after tabbing to focus on Kerbin, and just watch my periapsis drop until I'm at the right altitude.

The current editor is a bit finicky - often the part you're trying to attach ends up just hanging there unconnected. The trick I've found is to very gently ease it up and down until the part changes color, then release, and then it's attached. Unmanned pods and reaction wheels seem to have the worst issues IMO. The color change flips back and forth over just a couple of pixels - keep trying and you should get the knack. Edit: I wonder if there's some relationship between the part thickness and the viable attachment range? Thin parts are the worst...