Hotel26

I think this is the main take-away. If you are doing a long burn, it's for efficiency (using nukes or ions), so you have to be willing to pay something in return. @Bewing said if you are prograde, your Pe won't drop; but that's true only for an instantaneous burn[1]. If you're going to do a ten-minute burn, 5 minutes are before periapsis and it will lower your Pe[2], so you need to have enough altitude to allow for the atmosphere ceiling. Easy enough, allow for it or stop burning when your Pe drops to atmosphere height; resume at Pe. It's the last burn in the series that really counts. Don't sweat the Oberth effect: (it is over-rated). Hybrid strategies are also nice. When I use ions (check my avatar), I am not zealous about it -- I also carry nukes or more to get the ball rolling. Oberth works better with high thrust: more of a good thing is better, yeah? Ions are for finishing off the job. (Actually, my experience is that ions are for correcting for Mission Planning Laxity... but we don't need to go there.) On this subject, I don't fret mathematical exactitude. [1] Bewing is probably right if you were pointed exactly prograde but the node manager tends to point you the prograde direction *AT* the node which direction is sub-prograde before you get there. In practice, you can see the Pe drop... [2] this is very like doing a MechJeb 90 degree inclination burn: you had better be sure you have the propellant to complete the burn because MJ does not care that it will drop Pe drastically by the middle of the burn and restore it perfectly only by the end of the burn. (Many a vessel in the graveyard atop that hill, matey!)

Awesome bird!! Very pretty. Did you crank the tail authority up to get sufficient elevator control? What speed is lift-off? Ah, OK. Magnificent! You've got a cant on the tail slats that moves the CoL significantly closer to the CoM and that sufficiently amplifies the effect of the tail... Poetry.

A new frontier for me, Inner Space, but I do feel like I just chewed up a day in my life I will never get back. A submarine, Ping, and a "sinker", Nemo. Both of them are launched from a Pterodactyl open-bed cargo plane and chuted in to the target zone. Ping is quite fast above and below the water. Docking vertically is tricky... Oh... This is a surprise! Ping can fly... Oops. Uh, kinda leapt out of the water and kept climbing. I'm a bit shocked as I doubt I can land it on the awkward little gear it has.

I do!! That's the part I can't resist: I have to slide into the cockpit and take the little gems for a spin to see how they fly; I can't just look. I'm gonna follow your instructions about the wings, Master. I ain't NEVER gonna copy your color schemes though, and that's a PROMISE! Most recently, I also rev-eng'd a Rutan design posted in this topic way back earlier this year, but my general policy is not to publish airplanes I've copied, or even screenshots of them, without express permission from the original author.

My first three years in KSP were in haste to get to Jool. Recently, I finally landed on Vall. Since then, the pressure has been off and I don't think I've gone further than the Mun. I seem to spend my hours now traipsing over Kerbin, looking for flowers or coffee beans to smell. It's gonna be a long, looong time before I finish KSP! Now, I can't resist a confession. Whenever I see a screen-shot of an airplane that looks really nice, I can't help myself. Like this little beauty I saw recently: (Once can learn heaps from good old-fashioned reverse-engineering. :) )

B. Kerman took his trusty old '50s warbird for our first Kerbin circumnavigation (can't explain why we hadn't tried this before). You can see he's pretty flushed about setting a new, personal record... (Click the first for a slide-show.)

Just having longitude (for an equatorial constellation; otherwise deriving the orbital parameters) is enough to figure out the orbital period adjustments, I think. It could still work off a lead sat. Well, more or less "what you said"!

@RizzoTheRat too. In my first attempt, I put comsats up by eyeball and then tuned their orbital periods to be exactly the same. But then Brikoleur pointed me to the Meyer reference for resonant orbits and I thought it was very elegant and I got very enthused about comsats for a while. This tutorial is fascinating, too: https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Tutorial:Ideal_Orbits_for_Communication_Satellites especially where it refers to the Law of Cosines. It's a little bit of trig but the result is that you can, for example, put 5 space stations into the same 125km orbit fairly haphazardly and then space them quite precisely at 72 degrees from each other. You can use the line of sight distance (Map View, distance to Target) from B following A to compute how much longer or shorter its orbital period should be for one orbit in order to arrive back into the orbit (and re-circularize) at the precise spacing that you want. I think I found 2m accuracy was pretty achievable. (If the adjustment is large, you may have to divide it over several orbits.) You can then use RCS on fine adjustment to make your orbital period match within a millisecond or two which minimizes the drift over time about as good as you are going to get. (Bet kOS could have a function to sync-lock such orbits if you wanted!?) That got me into the whole geostationary thing after that. (I built a maximum-security installation positioned a little to the north of KSC. ) All in all, very absorbing.

I'm still using 1.3.1 and will be for a while. But have just caught wind of these extra sites. Someone dropped a clue the Dessert Airfield was -- in the desert -- 6S. That was enough for Jeb in his trusty MiG 15 to locate it. Huzzah. OK, now about this Woomerang site. (By the way, for the history buffs, the WRE in WRESAT stood for Weapons Research Establishment and it was a big employer in South Australia. Another British-sponsored test site in SA was Maralinga, where the British tested nuke detonations back in the 50s.) Sounds like there will be no Woomerang under KSP 1.3, but when it exists, it'll be somewhere near Baikerbanur. Would anybody care to post lat/lon for a poor, old navigator? [I do also have a 1.4 installation, so I can still go check it out...]

For anyone interested in this topic, there is a class called VesselTeleporter in the latest KSP API. I'm working in 1.3.1, so I am assuming it may be a new class. (Although, be advised, it inherits from EditorWindow and may be predicated upon deployment from an Assembly Building.)

It's up! Just click the KerbalX sticker in my signature. (I haven't been able to run KSP with Airplane Plus in a 1.4 version yet, but just gave it a good try in order to fly your Flopper. I'll spend more time on this on the weekend.) Also, I installed Airplane Plus and built Mink (in 1.3.1) attempting to avoid the new parts but the small stubby nose and the wing connector I leaked in. Ah yes, and the "short boom". It looked really good. I had to pull them out and now the tail-plane particularly looks kinda horrid. But I'm pretty happy with the performance!

Big thanks to @Mark Kerbin for showing his S-152 Flopper. Inspired me to take a crack at a seaplane, too, but pure stock. This is Mink. 400 kallons fuel capacity and can lift off water with a full load. Mach 1.02 (KER) at 6,500 m drawing 0.14 kal/sec, which makes the range about 1,100km. I have a real dilemma about Airplane Plus now. Especially all those lovely prop engines!

This seaplane is beautiful. It's yearning to be on KerbalX! All stock or are those floats modded?

Maybe a year ago, I revamped my venerable but archaic lander to produce the more compact but still muscular Hawk lander/tug using second-generation technology. Hawk comes with four attachments (to be shown later): fuel pod (5,760 LF; 7,040 OX; 1,500 MP) Klaw small dock for skycrane/spaceplane usage Hitchhiker A jump seat for dare-devil solo riders is also standard equipment. Hawk is powered by twin Reliant engines plus also twin Puff engines. I should have realized long ago (because it seems so obvious now) that Hawk's MP propulsion system, developing TWR>1 (on the Mun), is ideally suited to hovering and RCS translation (rather than thrust vectoring) and this makes it the ideal machine for top-dock operations on lo-grav surface operations. Hawk's primary purpose is boosting fuel to orbit from surface mining operations. It's secondary purpose is ferrying ground equipment to the surface via operation as a skycrane. It also excels as a space station tug and/or orbital lane emergency rescue/refuel vehicle. Hawk is the Swiss knife of the orbital lanes and I probably do more work with it than all other craft combined.

<snipped> Nothing to say; trying hard to keep it that way! </snipped>

From memory (and I could be wrong), SAS does operate while "landing". Find a port that is on the Upside of your craft, turn SAS on, set SAS SFC mode, select Radial Out. Craft should then rotate to the desired orientation while still settling... If you don't have an upside port, then select any controllable port/component in your usual "forward" direction, or failing that, any port on the lateral periphery and perform the same procedure as above, except select Normal instead of Radial Out. That will get you most of the way there (pointing to the horizon) but you will have to fix the roll orientation yourself. (A considerably easier problem.) Well, I just re-installed HyperEdit in order to test this and am happy to report that this technique does indeed succeed.

This is Phantom IV taking a run to Treasure Island. I wanted a ship with VTOL capability but without being too exacting to land.

Good information, thank you. I will keep hunting...

I'm getting this too and it may well be because I have modified a vessel but not called any notification method in the KSP interface. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. (Full details may be found here: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/173347-teleport-to-location/&do=findComment&comment=3365056)

I am very, very close but still requesting assistance. I can teleport once with no problem. Subsequent teleports encounter a shaking that occurs on all craft in the neighborhood but ceases once I have changed focus away and back as shown in the following video: The log shows an error reported by RasterPropMonitorComputer presumably provoked by some error on my part. The vessel contains a crew member, but I have done nothing in particular with regard to it. [LOG 15:14:37.255] Unpacking Aeris 3A [LOG 15:14:40.509] Packing Aeris 3A for orbit [LOG 15:14:40.511] Telemagic: teleported to Baikerbanur 20.6 -146.6 423 [LOG 15:14:40.561] [Aeris 3A]: landed - waiting for ground contact to resume physics... [ERR 15:14:40.564] [RasterPropMonitorComputer]: UpdateLocalCrew() - no internal model! [LOG 15:14:41.596] [FlightIntegrator]: Reloaded drag cube for zeroed cube root part Mark1Cockpit (Aeris 3A) on vessel Aeris 3A [LOG 15:14:41.596] [FlightIntegrator]: Vessel Aeris 3A has been unloaded 9.75999999999112, applying analytic temperature 301.749351045848 [LOG 15:14:44.651] Unpacking Aeris 3A [LOG 15:14:44.681] [Aeris 3A]: ground contact! - error. Moving Vessel down -0.230m [LOG 15:14:44.681] Unpacking Aeris 3A [LOG 15:14:49.191] [UIMasterController]: ShowUI The code sequence I use is: CelestialBody body = vessel.mainBody; var telePos = body.GetWorldSurfacePosition(lat2, lng2, alt2 + hgt) - body.position; var teleVel = Vector3d.Cross(body.angularVelocity, telePos); // convert from world space to orbit space telePos = telePos.xzy; teleVel = teleVel.xzy; // counter for the momentary fall when on rails (about one second) teleVel += telePos.normalized * (body.gravParameter / telePos.sqrMagnitude); var orbit = Clone(vessel.orbitDriver.orbit); orbit.UpdateFromStateVectors(telePos, teleVel, body, Planetarium.GetUniversalTime()); vessel.Landed = false; var oldUp = vessel.orbit.pos.xzy.normalized; var newUp = telePos.xzy.normalized; qrot = Quaternion.FromToRotation(oldUp, newUp) * vessel.vesselTransform.rotation; SetOrbit(vessel, orbit); vessel.SetRotation(qrot); // mult2(qrot, rot) [TM] Can anyone throw any light on this, please?

Thank you; I hope so. I've just fixed a problem in the Windows version. (I develop on Linux.) But I am working (late, but furiously) on the promised April version: it will be an in-game plug-in. I've got it somewhat working (able to teleport to Baikerbanur) so hoping to release the next version imminently and have it checked out also for KSP 1.4.

Perhaps this is a bit tenuous, but I thought maybe retractable rover wheels could do something similar in a more compact form...?

Done. Instantly. I am mortified; please pardon me: I hadn't realized it wasn't just a KerbalX sticker being used in common. Very sorry about that. Thanks for the kind offer -- a link will do me now for the moment.

Thank you; yes: all stock. Just add one retractable wheel under your truck and shift the Klaw out onto a boom and align its orientation vertically. Thanks for the interest!!

Working on a prototype for flexible docking of ground vehicles (fuel trucks and crew buses) with various shapes and sizes of aircraft, especially the midget Mk-1 type. I figured there's always plenty of clean space on the tops of airplanes.