Wolf Baginski

The biggest job I did Monday was to back up my v0.90 install, with a huge folder of downloaded mods. It's safely there, for if I want to do things the old way. I may transfer the data to a USB stick in a few weeks. v1.0 is different enough that I wouldn't guarantee any earlier schemes will work. So what? The early days of the Science mode are hard. Fairings aren't a huge problem but reentry heating blocks off designs I used. It's not impossible for me to go back to v0.90 but it would feel like a bit of a cheat. We're all learning again. I just wish the KSP streams didn't depend on having a Facebook account to join the chat. I have a slide-rule and know how to use it!

Somebody is complaining about not being able to use a nuclear rocket in-atmosphere?

I am running a from-scratch science-mode operation and the first fins/winglets available seem more like the flights on an arrow in effect. So it's hard to make a faster start to the gravity turn. And the battery is so vital to maintain attitude during reentry. SAS-mode isn't bad for power use, but you need more battery than you might think. Starting the gravity turn low-down, lower than v0.90, is good. Don't be frightened of going supersonic, but it may be inefficient. It depends on the drag you get and how high you are. MaxQ for ApolloXVI was at Mach 1.7, 14.3 km, but Kerbin is smaller. That was still the first stage. The MechJeb standard for starting the gravity turn was somewhere between 7km and 8km

I am staying quite conventional, and using a heatshield. The 1.25m Service Bay will protect Science well and the extra weight is within the limits of a single chute, whether for landing or splashdown. Until you get batteries, you have to be extremely careful, because you burn electric charge to maintain attitude The Service Bay expects items to be mounted on top of the heatshield and the bottom of the capsules The latest Kerbal Engineer Redux is working. MechJeb works, but I have chosen not to use it yet. Module Manager seems to work.

The early days of KSP v1.0, oringially reported via Twitter. The first #kerbal orbital mission is telling us a great deal about the upper atmosphere of Kerbin, but we cannot yet predict the landing. Jebediah Kerman says he can find a farmer's daughter and is not worried. Our other pilot-kerbonaut, Valentina, says she has ground hog-feed back home, and, as cap-com, advised him to be careful. Wernher von Kerman admits we don't know how Jebediah landed as the site was over the radar horizon, but KSC had regained contact. Valentina Kerman explained that the local wolves are friendly, unless you run out of sausages. Bill & Bob Kerman looked scared Gene Kerman explains to the journalists at KSC: "The throttle-valve stuck. Jebediah lost his de-orbit fuel, and was in the wrong orbit." "He was grazing the atmosphere, and came down eventually, but we couldn't predict the landing. We got a lot of Science." "As planned, Valentina Kerman will fly the next mission. She insists we find room for Snacks. And a proper survival kit." Kerbin News Network With dusk arriving in the predicted landing area, the air-search for Jebediah Kerman's capsule will cease. Kerbin is a nice bijou planet. At the Astronaut Center Bill and Bob Kerman were lucking worried. "Valentina," said Bob, "How sharp was the LOS?" "It wasn't sudden..." "It was the battery." Gene Kerman nodded. "It's possible," he agreed. "It's enough to move some of the search, but where to?" "There" said Valentina Her finger pointed at the map. "The radar track is a good line. Trust that. Jebediah just flew further than we thought." The High Plains of Kerbin The sunlight was putting a streak of light into the capsule, and the scratching at the hatch had stopped. Jebediah was hungry Jebediah looked at the illicit Duna Bar. Not yet, he thought. And then he heard an engine, and the beat of kopter rotors. He opened the hatch. It looked as though more than one something had been scratching. He threw out a smoke candle. Rescue! The Voyager's Return "Good bread, and a little salt. It is a tradition," said Valentina. "I baked the bread," she added proudly. Jebediah sniffed the bread. It smelled of sun and open skies and Kerbin. "Gene, Valentina..." He broke the bread into three. "Share with me," he said, passing bread to his Cap-com and Mission Controller. "You travelled with me." So Jebediah came home.

Up until v0.90 the aerodynamics model had problems With v1.0 nosecones reduce drag. I have never played a full career, just science, but there are so many changes because of the new aerodynamics. I am worrying about electrical power more than DeltaV More Batteries! That's Jebediah's new watchword.

I have only made launches so far in science mode, but this does fit with what I observe. Done right, you can get out the atmosphere with less fuel than v0.90 but you need very fine timing on the burn to get the circular orbit. The single nose chute will land on hard ground with a service bay and heatshield. Battery management changes a lot with the need to keep close to retrograde alignment for re-entry. It seems crazy but radio depends on batteries. It may be safer to not fit a radio. Burnout with a periapsis of about 65km can give you Science without a need for radio and a certain landing somewhere, eventually as long as you have been careful with the battery.

A google on "Mexico City time" pops up a clock giving localtime for Mexico city amongst all the other search answers. So I'm six hours ahead. Most of the EU is seven hours. I shall do a quick check when I wake on Monday. Guesses that we won't see anything until Squad have reached the office and have their coffee in hand aren't crazy. That's going to be late afternoon for me, and then it's up to their internet connection. Remember, it is a big download. Steam will cope better, I expect, but 600 MB will take time. With my line, my local internet, call it three-quarters of an hour if nothing else slows it down. I can live with the likely delays, but I am not going to say I like them.

It was a long time until the USA recruited their first female astronaut. I reckon too long. Look though the history of aviation: it is full of women who were the equal of the men in ability and courage. So there's an imbalance at the start? I can live with that. I hope we can choose, and choose better than the history. I hope we, the players, have learned to be better.

Two nominations: And Some of you are two young to remember those days. We had The Beatles as well.

I reckon that v0.90 is already better than the initial releases of some games. There's going to be some time needed to settle down, some Mods that need checking and some made redundant by new stock features. By my count, there are three main large-booster mods, and I have only needed one of them. Get through the transition, and maybe the best choice will change. We can expect bug-fixes. What scares me a little is the prospect of gameplay changes, but nothing looks critical. I think I want the time to explore the new world, and maybe a part of that is Squad catching up on the Wiki. If MechJeb and Mod Manager are working, it will be easier for all of us. My cunning plan is to install v1.0 in a different folder, and leave v0.90 untouched for if I get frustrated. And here's a sort of challenge for you: whenever you think of Jeb as pilot, substitute Valentina on the crew.

Too late to change, I suppose, but my Naval Syndicate colleagues tell me that "heading" is the direction a ship is pointing and "bearing" is the direction to the target, either relative to the bow, magnetic, or true.

This is the current version of the rover-carrying lander that I had crashed in the original pic, up-thread. The fuel tank on the right is an attempt to balance the rover, both can be dropped off after a landing. There is also a general stiffening of the structure, though I think I may need to add a few more struts to take the load from the 'chutes opening for a landing on Kerbin. This does have the RCS capacity to act as a tug. The TWR is crazy-high for Mun or Minmus. If you didn't expect a Kerbin landing, you could could cut back on the radial motors. You could also reduce the nass of RCS fuel, and maybe use a stock capsule with a docking port on the nose. It would help to use lighter landing legs. The main reason for the extended radius is to make it less sensitive to the ground slope at landing. This is certainly not the most efficient option, but it looks good. If you want to use fairings it would look very ungainly.

This sort of tweaking seems tailor-made for Module Manager. That will even deal with Stock Parts

Maybe one of the Project Orion mods is the closest we already have. That's the propulsion system which detonates small nuclear devices near a pusher-plate. Real life idea, from the early days, which got a lot of design effort but was killed off by the atmospheric test-ban treaty, and maybe other stuff. It's popped up in a few SF novels, such as Footfall and Charles Stross is up to something that also involves parallel worlds. The W66 warhead on the Sprint missile massed about 70 kg, and the first stage accelerated at 100g for about 1.2 seconds, Just an idea for the booster-freaks, you understand.

If you have KER, go to the VAB and build a test vehicle, same fuel and same empty mass as the mass of the landed vehicle. (Yes, you will need fuel to take off again) and try a few different engines, watching the TWR and the deltaV. The gotcha is the destination-gravity. Your TWR needs to be greater than local gravity. I have built a few landers with those small radial rockets. 1000Kg landed on Mun needs more thrust to balance the gravity than 1000Kg landed on Minmus. The basic Rocket Equation shows that the faster you burn the fuel in these conditions, the more deltaV you get. That's what a suicide burn does. If you need to burn X units of fuel per second to balance gravity and your system can burn X + Y in total, only the Y gives you deltaV. The precise calculation is a bit more tricky, so I shall keep it quick and dirty. if you need a 10-second burn, the total fuel is 10 ( X + Y ) and 10 Y is what stops you. Double the excess thrust, halve the burn time (This is where the rocket equation comes in: it isn't really this simple) and the total is 5 X + 10 Y So you have saved 5 X fuel. Now, what does this mean for system weight? Check the http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Parts#Liquid_Fuel_Engines for the stock parts. The first thing to check is the TWR for the engine. Both the OV-10 Monopropellant Engine and the Rockomax 24-77 have the same TWR of 22.7, which is pretty good. The Rockomax has a slight edge on isp, which means it will use a little less fuel, and if you think you will need it in atmospere, the margin is bigger. Engine mass is 90 Kg. Let's assume 20000Kg on Minmus, which is rather large for a lander. Both these engines have 20 kN of thrust, which mean 1 Newton per kilogram, which is 1 m/s2 total acceleration. Not enough. Two of these engines gives us 2 m/s2 and Minmus gravity is 1.635 m/s2 so we have the excess to stop. But the useful acceleration is only 0.365 m/s2 which is rather pitiful. Add a third engine, which feels more balanced as well although two will work, and your useful thrust is is nearly quadrupled to 1.365 m/s2 A fourth engine, for a total increase of 180 Kg over the minimum, gives us 2.365 m/s2 That reduces the burn time a lot, by a factor of more than 6. What does this mean for the fuel consumption? That table shows the Rockomax burning 9.3 Kg/s to balance Minmus gravity. So for every 6 seconds of the minimal system's burn you can save 5 seconds worth of fuel, which is conveniently half the mass of one of those engines. So if you expect more than 24 seconds, using four of those engines instead of two will pay off in mass. 24 seconds with the minimal 2-engine rig is less than 9 m/s Radial Engines? I do have a preference for radial engines for landers. There is also the Rockomax 48-7S which has a thrust of 30 kN and a TWR of 30.7 to work with. It's a bit more of a fiddle to place them, and for a practical suicide burn the weight difference seems marginal. You don't need automatically need the weight of landing legs for radial engines, though they give you more margin for error. The Tsiolkovsky rocket equation. This is really old, and at the core of rocket design. It's described on the Kerbal Wiki in this tutorial: http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Tutorial:Advanced_Rocket_Design#Delta-V and you will notice that time doesn't really come into it. Well, I hope I have showed why, when working against gravity, a faster fuel burn pays off. Other Factors. This is where there might be a weakness in the simulation. The structure of the craft has limits in Kerbal Space Program. Connections between parts will break under sufficient load. But these limits are generally quite high. You could build a real lander with less inherent strength and reduce weight, because of the low gravity it operates in. KSP sets these limits quite high. Some real-world rockets have needed them insanely high. The Sprint missile, developed in the Apollo era, accelerated at 100g http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_%28missile%29 . The warhead massed about 70 kg which meant the support structure has to be able to support 7 tonnes in flight. On the other hand, while the Apollo LM was lightly constructed to land on the Moon, it had to survive launch too. The design started with three landing legs, the most stable configuration was five, but the engineers compromised on four to save weight. Also, a lot of the landing process is the deceleration from orbit. The gravity effect only bites in killing the vertical speed. Which is also why just blasting straight up on launch wastes fuel. You can do a vertical flight to Mun, but it's a rather crude and unsubtle way of doing the job.

I find the M27 cockpit from the B9 Aerospace mod gives me the right feel for an orbital work-craft. I added a crew module and a service module from the Station Parts and NearFuture sets, and used it as a base. It can be landed from orbit at need, but it's meant to stay up at a station. With the length and the two sets of RCS thrusters it's good for manoeuvring larger station components. Or you could mount something other than a docking port at the nose. Remember the fuel crossfeed problem is you use a docking port rather than a decoupler. You need to check the fuel tanks before you undock from a booster.

Thanks. (I think I could get faster searches of text-based files under MS-DOS.) It's a good set. The looming v1.0 doesn't need to improve how we find parts, but I'm not on the internet all the time. It's something to think about.

I am looking for which Mod contains a part I am using. Here's a picture. The command/control pod the the M27 cockpit from the B9 aerospace set. The conical part below it, with a 2.5m top and a 3.75m bottom, is the the Utility section of the VAB system. It can hold 4 kerbonauts, and is named PXL-2 Pressurized Conical Storage Container. A plainer 2.5m cylindrical version, a bit taller, is labelled PXL-1 "Hostel" and can accomodate 8 kerbonauts.Other Data: manufacturer = Kerbalmax Industries Description text for the PXL-2 includes "Unluckily for them, we couldn't afford seatbelts." The PXL-2 has an astonishing 70 m/s Crash Tolerance. I can find it OK so as to use it, but I am trying to reduce the number of Mods I have loaded, and so far I have had no luck checking which Mod contains it. I am guessing that it is something that uses the anonymous part.cfg filename, but it may simply be a unique filename that doesn't have any obvious connection to the item name. I'm feeling a bit frustrated right now. I might have missed something. It's this sort of problem which can make passing around CRAFT files awkward: I can find the name of the thing in-game, but I can't tell people which Mod they need. I know it's not KW Rocketry or Novapunch, I didn't need three different Mods covering the same area. It occurs to me that I might be able to get somewhere with a general file search, but I am at a bit of a loss on that. Windows XP could do it, but Windows 7 seems to have it well-hidden...

I rather like the cockpit. It's the M27 from the B9 Aerospace Parts mod, but it took me a while to find it. You can put a tube under the cockpit to mount a docking port, but I recommend adding a few struts if you want the connection to the cockpit to hold up to parachutes. The Fustek set has a docking module which works well, and there's a couple of alternatives. With two kerbonauts in the cockpit and four in that conical capsule you have something that can be a good start for supporting a space-station. There are other alternatives in stock that can carry the extra kerbonauts. The PDP-10 Hitchhiker container, for instance, has the same diameter as the command capsule. A bit of length, to allow two widespaced rings of RCS thrusters, lets the beast handle some awkward objects. I have already mentioned this on Twitter. Searching for the right part can be tricky. I should have done some better planning when I loaded the Mods, there are some thoroughly awkward Mod creators out there, and the default filters (use the Advanced tab in the VAB) could be better. You can filter by the (fictional) manufacturer, you pick by clicking on the corporate flags, but they are tiny grey-scales. Some designs, OK in colour, are just grey blobs. At least there is a text pop-up. This is a bit like discovering that you only have one button on the mouse.

Just don't try it with a flying boat. This can be done with stock parts. The idea is that by making the base wide, it can land on slopes without falling over. But I had set MechJeb to show the TWR on Mun, and then I tried to land on Kerbin. and there wasn't quite enough thrust. One thing I had done was use one of the multiple-engine adaptors in the Space-Y set. which gave me space to carry extra fuel and stuff. The sky over the Space Center experienced a rain of decouplers and part-filled fuel tanks. but I couldn't quite get rid of enough weight.

It's good if the counterweight is something useful after landing which you can leave behind. It can be a bit tricky to manage, but a small fuel tank with a controlled fuel crossfeed is one option as a balance weight Instead of a proper two-stage lander in the style of Apollo, you use a single stage, land on internal fuel, refill from the drop tank, and drop both that and the rover, maybe with other kit.

Not a full asteroid belt, but some bigger worlds of the Pallas/Ceres/Vesta sort, scattered through the same orbital space (but not in the same orbit.) We have one in-game at the moment, Dres, but the big point is that they have been known for about 200 years. We have the more-transient asteroids coming and going that can be pinned down if we track them. As for something like the Pluto-Charon pair, we get a real fly-by in mid-July, and then a long wait for the data. But it's not really something that the game engine would manage well, two worlds in each other's SOI.

Somebody made a procedural SRB mod, and there are other SRBs in the big-tank mods such a Novapunch, KWrocketry, and Space-Y. The procedural SRB can be toggled between a low-altitude and high-altitude nozzle on assembly. So a small diameter SRB optimised for high-altitude is possible if anyone wants to try out the ideas.

Some Mods can help. Kerbal Engineer Redux doesn't replace the pilot, but gives you the deltaV for each stage as you build it. which is useful. Once you build a stack with two stages you can see what changing the relative stage sizes can do with the same fuel. Or you can do the calculations by hand. It's easy to make the first stage a little too big and lose total deltaV One thing to consider is having a slightly too-big stage and don't quite fill the tanks. It gives you a margin for a heavier payload. But you don't want to lift fuel you don't need.