Hotel26

Leg 12 [prev] [next] [progress] [click & arrows] Departed: -10.017/138.732 @ 3.178.1.56 Airborne: 26m Heading: 240 Distance: 157.7 km Altitude: 0.5 km Arrival: -17.151/125.015 Dick Smith will refer to this flight in his subsequent autobiography as his "Apocalypse Now run". Flying low over water, he had time to discover that the Chippewa's top speed could be extended from 100 m/s to 113-115 m/s by selecting SAS Sfc Prograde and then dialing the collective back to 0. (@ralanboyle is going to say, "well, I did tell you".) The difficulty was in dialing back for the transition. Dick says he has finally gotten it through his millionaire brain that the most reliable method to transition back to the hover is to maintain a modestly positive climb rate of 1-2 m/s while the airspeed decreases, using attitude to maintain that climb and, only finally, pulling up collective approaching the real hover. Well, the engineers have said it's only the landing pontoons that took the 15 m/s impact that have to be replaced and, rather luckily, they have that in their standard kit. Repairs will be made and the mission will continue! Just to remind everybody that the KHC Challenge is primarily an endurance challenge, although not limited to that single aspect. Only those who continue to the end, ehm... will make it to the end. Figuratively speaking. You know what I mean... [Update: I've added the correct images, now.]

While one is at it, then, a ship dock. The number of times I've run a ship across the grass to launch it in the water to do the most basic of failed test... Of course, I eventually just installed VesselMover, but it would be nice to have a wharf to deploy from as well as use for Operations. Downvote more, specialized buildings though. And snap-shift does well enough for aligning things front and back. What I really want much more, however, is configurable, deployable airports. Time to "nationalize" Kerbal Konstructs because: sorry, I have never gotten it to work.

There's a serious 'take-away' here. We all know the internet can be a rough-and-tumble place. This is simply because 'anonymity breeds cowardice'. Some web-sites are (much) worse than others. Everyone knows that we 'rocket scientists' are the politest band on Earth (and the moderators have worked overtime with the whip & scissors to make it that way!). The hidden cost of "throwing one's weight around" in a forum -- indeed, breaking any of its rules -- is to gradually lose reputation and make oneself irrelevant. Actions have consequences.

Shots like this make me exquisitely happy. This one is destined to be wallpaper at work... I've decided to give a Mun interplanetary departure point a go. The reason is because I can now get more fuel up off the surface of the Mun than I can from Kerbin[1]. So I've shifted MX6 Pole Star and MX2 Nova to a 250 km orbit and combined them. (Neither station were designed with RCS, so this dock was very far from easy.) I contemplated using a trailing orbit at the Mun's altitude, or possibly slightly elliptical to bring station and moon closest together twice every six days. But I think 250km is a good balance to get some Oberth from the Mun and then again from Kerbin before ejecting SOI of both but not have too much orbital latency. (I chose 250 km because its orbital period is just over 2h.) Another advantage of using the Mun is that my Escort interplanetary transfer injection boosters typically burn-back for a capture by the Mun for subsequent refuel. We'll see what the Kerbals think... [1] I use an Atlas miner to boost the fuel to 6.5km orbit. A nuke Crab (12 NERVa) towing an Egg spherical tank will then lift the fuel to this 250 km orbit.

For the record, your English usage was perfect. "That's a shame", "that's a pity", "that's too bad" all are good renditions of "c'est dommage". Also for the record, the creators of the game, whose vision -- and imagination -- has made it what it is, have stated their deliberate decision that it be a game and not a simulator. Borrowing from reality is not, per se, an exercise in Imagination.

I've always imagined that such fuel tanks contain end hatches and an internal bladder... You know. As long as a volume of fuel has been consumed/pumped from the tank, equal to the volume of the kerbal... and they just inch their way along. (POWs used to tunnel out the last N meters this way, "mole" style. I'm sure Kerbals would think of the same thing.) @kerbiloidwill likely back me up on this...? P.S. welcome to the forum!

So here's a funny story (and this is going to be quite a coincidental post)... My wife is having a dinner party with her friends. One of them came in to check my wine glass. She asked me what I was doing. I was reverse-engineering the above. So I explained to her all about the Lego nature of KSP and how the wings are the most intricate part of reverse-engineering; but they have twisty little patterns all different, so it's kind of a detective game to recreate the beauty. But the thing is that this beautiful machine wasn't quite making it to space and I was wondering where to increase the tankage and had just decided on the engine stacks... ...when, perceptive creature, she pointed out that I was missing the back row of Type E Wing Connectors. Eureka. Mystery solved. Those tanks are now FL-T400s and this machine just went to space (with 112 m/s dV in reserve). I did elect to make a couple of minute changes to this wonderful design. I omitted a pair of Type D Wing Connector plates that were being used to cover up collision of the inboard elevons with the RAPIERs and substituted equivalent mass (50 kg) airbrakes to maintain levels of panache. I see I need to shift a pair of Vernors aft to match their rightful position (victim of experimentation with center fuselage tankage...). The charm of reverse-engineering is that, if you choose the right subjects: each machine, faithfully reproduced, flies first time. Such a kick!! But, of course, one must possess the detective powers of a Hercule Poirot to solve each unique mystery...

Very elegant! More photos!??

I believe it is highly recommended not to use the autopilot on the ground. Switch it off before landing and don't engage it again until airborne. (Reason is that AA builds a model based on aircraft performance and an airplane looks like Dr Jekyll in the air, but Mr Hyde on the ground.)

Coincidentally, I have just repeated this trick. But instead of using a naked fairing (for the attachment points), I simply attached the hard point to some point in the craft, then gizmoed it out into the open, then attached the rover (a sub, in my case) to the hard point, then gizmoed the hard point back inside the cargo space, make sure the hard point is staged(!), then gizmoed the 'rover' to cover up the hard point with the rover such that the hard point is now internal to the rover... Don't worry if none of this is obvious and do read the thread if you get stuck, or ask more questions. When the hard point stages away, it and its encompassing rover will be released from the cargo bay. The only downside here is that, peering into the cargo hold, your rover is going to appear to have no visible means of support, but this is the same as e.g. using attachment points on a fairing -- and it's also "payback" for my first two years in the VAB (see below). You're also possibly just having problems telling the VAB guys where to join what you are doing. You can't use the offset tool to connect to nodes, just shift ("offset") an already connected part. Sometimes you need an angle in which you have line of sight to the dock you are moving toward and no other parts behind it. (That's where the VAB guys get confused.) Which is why my next comment:... Cargo bays are hard to work inside, so it is always good to gizmo e.g. an internal dock, out into the open to work on it; then gizmo everything back. I hated the VAB for two years and then I was shown Shift-gizmo... it changed my life.

@Astrion +5 for your latest video

Like when the terrorists accidentally spill the bottle in the home lab...

You are correct about this. My standard approach is to circularize down at 70km. Then lower PE to 50km at 70E. This is the opposite point to 110W, which is the tip of the desert, 36 deg uprange from KSC. The idea is that, at 50km, most craft are still maneuverable (in the atmosphere) such that you can go retrograde, do a long decel burn, then still turn prograde again[1]. There is a concensus that says that that decel burn over the desert should bring your touch-down trajectory around about to the Island Airport off KSC. This is all well and good for a ballistic return but still kind of wildly inaccurate. By the time you are low enough to control further with chutes and airbrakes, you are in thick atmosphere and it's too late to control your descent -- your bed is made. With a winged glider, you can do better but only if you are maintaining the glide at a lower altitude, e.g. at 40km descending, where you can quickly get some bite on the atmosphere with wings. By the time I get to the western KSC coast, at 35-40km altitude, I think it is possible to use speed and lift to hold off the landing at will, possibly even using whatever fuel is left in reserve to assist. This is what I am attempting and I think it is controllable and reproducible and should yield pinpoint accuracy. Certainly a properly-balanced winged lifter should outperform one without wings. (The glide ratio on Zephyr degrades to about 2:1 in the lower atmosphere.) Your comment suggests one of two ways of "orbiting" in the atmosphere. #1 at PE where you keep AP higher. #2 at AP in which you keep boosting PE. I use a combination of both, switching as needed. [1] I've experimented with a couple of winged lifters (e.g. Star Knife and Blister), that are intended to "fly" backwards on final descent, such that you don't have to attempt to revert to prograde once you've completed the final decel burn...

Zephyr is my most-used and most-heavily developed lifter. It's second stage is recoverable. (I've also started refueling and sending spent Zephyr lifters to Eve. There, they will wait in orbit to be refueled and then serve one more time as a 'decelerator' to step-down the speed of any attached payload. No more finesse required to land anything, even heavy and/or fragile, on Eve.) Meanwhile, though, I am perfecting the re-entry to make this repeatable with excellence: The trick is to settle into a 45-50 km orbit before/over the desert and then fly like a buzz bomb...

As a former compiler-writer, this doesn't sound strange to me at all. (i.e. "not a shower thought") In the beginning, some of the earliest high-level "symbolic" languages, like FORTRAN and COBOL, indexed such collections with the typical ordinal numbers, 1, 2, 3, etc. Just like math; just like English. Address arithmetic (machine language) prefers pointer (address of the collection) + offset (index to the element) for simplicity and performance. Thus, I would object, "machine language /= natural language". So, some (specialty) languages began to reflect the machine world, not the math world. Fine with me, too. Meanwhile, naming in computer languages does attempt to convey the intended purpose/operation to the human programmer (and is irrelevant to the machine), so the choice of 'first' originates easily from natural language.

Well done, too. [The translate gizmo] suggesting that Galileo was correct when he muttered, "eppur si muove"... I'm predicting that if you move it, though, nothing happens? Meanwhile, I went ahead and refined this idea of Juggernoob. Launched the first Egg in my Orbit production world, rendez-voused with KX2 Pole Star to refuel, and now on the way to the Mun... It looks like a spider's egg sac, doesn't it? (Or is it Kraken?)

Juggernoob just published this interesting work at KerbalX: 5m Sphere It's quite beautiful!! It has a total fuel capacity of 7,500 kallons of LF. I've been looking for spherical tanks ever since I first saw them long ago. Maybe I saw them in this ancient mod: [0.23.5] Spherical and Toroidal Tank Pack So, I decided to prototype a large one. A Jumbo tank is 1.25m radius and 7.5m length giving a volume of 53m3. Two 5m fairings can be used to construct a 9m radius sphere with volume: 3,054 m3. The ratio is 53:3,054 so we can scale up the fuel capacity of 2880 LF / 3520 OX of a Jumbo tank to: 165,953 LF / 202832 OX, for a total of 368,785 kallons. Arise, the Egg!: I'm not going to publish this (KerbalX), because it's Juggernoob's idea, but please download his creation and, if you like, study the construction technique and make your own large Egg, if you want. I'm hoping that Juggernoob will approve and upgrade the capacity of his original work!? [Fair warning: this may turn out to be the fabled Kraken egg, for all I know, so far, so beware it doesn't hatch!!] First dock. From left-to-right: Zephry (lifter) + Mule (tug) on approach to Egg (spherical tank): Visitors will dock with Mule to be supplied with fuel or to supply it. The Mule may then efficiently de-orbit the suppliers, using its nukes, before returning to station.

Leg 11 [prev] [next] [progress] [click & arrows] Departed: -10.794/161.983 @ 3.167.1.38 Airborne: 48m Heading: 240 Distance: 237.7 km Altitude: 2.8 km Arrival: -10.017/138.732 Flight over the Land of the Lakes. (Mission Control has 2 weeks leave from IRL, starting today. Yahoo.) 2020 will come to a conclusion and so, too, will this mission!!

Tag line: "Please, sir, I want some ore."

Operates under my usual flag (see top left). Air-Sea Rescue, too. I'd like to see your flag, though!! (Screenshot?)

After two recent incidents involving the first type of rotary aircraft shown below: <--- that one; not this one ---> the KTSB have conducted preliminary tests on it (above left: Chippewa) and also on the Coaster Sports (above: right) to determine whether: a) these aircraft are "safe to fly" and b) whether KSP, a publicly-traded game "for amusement", is capable of supporting auto-rotation, which is deemed essential for the safety of the game-playing public. Here, KTSB employee, Donsted Kerman ( I believe that is pronounced "Don-sted Ker-man"), risks his life climbing to 3 km to test the Chippewa across the bay, so as not to endanger the lives, also, of the Kerbin Space Center Fire Fighting Units. Donsted was able to safely guide the Chippewa to a soft touch-down after cutting the gas to the twin Junos and initiating a precipitous dive [sink rate: 50+ m/s]. Rotor revolutions were maintained on limited battery power. Donsted also determined that the Coaster Sports is capable of level flight at a mere 12 m/s with the rotors turning at 460 rpm with zero collective applied. Note though that the Coaster is not a pure rotary craft (as it has wings). The KTSB report filed stated that the first incident involving the Chippewa was caused by a failure to refuel the vehicle before use ["pilot error"] and the second incident (crash site pictured above) involved a high-speed, wheeling descent at an altitude of 5 km "without due care" or "commensurate understanding of the operation of a rotorcraft at high altitude, nor of proper procedure recovering from a high-speed descent [pilot error]". Finally, after a separate test, using the Coaster, the KTSB issued a NOTAM indicating that "KSP does not support true auto-rotation" and advised "all airmen to desist using KSP, for any purpose, until the software problem is diagnosed and repaired[1]" [1] KSP2?

Leg 10 [prev] [next] [progress] [click & arrows] Departed: 5.46/-170.07 @ 3.164.0.36 Airborne: 70m Heading: 240 Distance: 333.1 km Altitude: 5.2 km Arrival: -10.794/161.983 Mostly an over-water leg, but some pretty scenery. This is the Juice Goose in action, refueling the Chippewa.

It is now.

Leg 9 [prev] [next] [progress] [click & arrows] Departed: -6.53/-144.03 @ 3.163.0.15 Airborne: 62m Heading: 295 Distance: 293.8 km Altitude: 6.1 km Arrival: 5.46/-170.07 Dick is very happy with the new, long-range Chippewa LR! Leg 9 was a big, 300 km push and is still possibly only 75% of what the LR can do. A pleasant surprise was to see Ben Creag come into view. (Amelia phoned it in when she landed her new Juice Goose[1] just behind it. Yes, the Logistics team talked Dick out of using the massive, 147t Manta++, which would have been a nightmare.) For the very observant reader (with a monocle), close examination of shot 3 above may reveal the location of the remains of some other, unfortunate rotary pilot who has left the remains of his machine dumped into a twisted heap on the slopes of Ben Creag. (Nobody hurt, but a nasty lesson about what happens when you get your blades out of the power band...) [1] Juice Goose is another reverse-engineered knock-off that I happily credit @purpleivan for. It carries a heap of fuel and its nose claw is near-perfect for refueling the Chippewa...

Regroup [prev] [next] [progress] [click & arrows] As the whole team enjoys a little R&R in "Vegas" (Dessert Strip), Logistics are taking the opportunity to regroup the mission, based on progress so far... Mitlas Kerman [shot 1] got the Pterodactyl airborne after the Chippewa had radioed in a successful landing at the Strip, only to note a low fuel gauge. Yup. Funny how one keeps doing the sums on the calculator and it keeps falling short, but the pilot's mind continues to hope the flight is going to make it somehow. 9 kms or so before reaching the Strip, the Pterodactyl flamed out. Touch-down at a mercifully slow 33 m/s in the blinding dessert [sic] glare. Mitlas, following Air-Sea Rescue regulations, used his electronic wristwatch to dial in the coordinates to the sats above, to command the teleport recovery of the equipment, after he had first unloaded the Gryphon. The drive back to the Strip wasn't too bad and another fuel truck is always welcome at Base! Amelia Kerman experienced no such problem in the Euler and touched down without trouble. Her machine, too, was recycled, leaving Amelia in the bar for some catch-up with the lads. Her new ride, a brand new Manta++ [shot 2], containing an Invader rover and a Gryphon III fuel truck. (The Pterodactyl simply didn't carry enough fuel to last very long in the field as a fuel resupplier for the expedition.) The Manta++ carries so much fuel that the Strip Base Commander insisted it be parked on the other side of the runway, far from the flight line! Dick Smith, naturally enough (being the financial backer of the expedition), also received new equipment: a brand new Chippewa LR [shot 3], with long-range skid tanks that more than double its LF capacity. The LR has the same cruise characteristics as the base model -- just longer range, presumably. It hasn't been tested yet, but it may also be able to alight on water and stay serviceable. (The base model simply turns over, blades in the water, quite useless.) Thanks to all others who have reported in, especially for their peachy-keen tourist snaps!! I've posted an Honor Roll in the OP and a Participation Badge should be ready by the end of the week. Cheers!