Stoney3K

This is done for the simple reason that Kerbals do not face certain death when their cabin is not pressurized and they go into space. The light, 'unpressurized' cockpits would be at a major advantage in terms of mass while having no drawbacks.

Which raises my question: Why choose that ratio instead of, for example, 2:1, 3:1 or 4:1? I understand the need to get at Apoapsis while Kerbin completes a full revolution, which would be a 'half' orbit on your own.

I would like to see the calculations that @Kryxal used for this. An orbital period of 216 minutes is not resonant to KEO, which has an orbital period of exactly 6 hours (one Kerbin day). You'd expect a 1/3 resonant transfer orbit into KEO to have an orbital period of 120 minutes, so something else is going on here.

Not if you read the background of it. Of course in KSP it doesn't matter, but in real life, a Nerv that comes crashing down or explodes in mid-air will cause a serious radiation hazard. You're basically lobbing a nuclear power plant skyward, and you want that power plant to return safely to Earth (or in this case, Kerbin), under any circumstance. Self-destructing the Nerv is not an option if it was a real scenario. The rocket is pretty harmless if you blow it up, because it's nothing more than pieces of titanium, hydrogen and oxygen which may cause a big bang, but won't spread any radioactive gunk over populated areas. A Nerv is crammed full of radioactive nuclear fuel (enriched uranium) and you don't want to be within miles of it when THAT goes. Yes, it means there is some role-playing and imagination involved here, just think of the Nerv as very precious and fragile cargo that can never be destroyed.

Nice entry to start off with, I will keep the records in the OP. My own entry is not included because it was only an example. Anyone who wants to be eligible for any records, screenshots are fine, pretty much the minimum you would need: * A screenshot of the craft in the VAB/SPH so statistics are shown. * The craft landed at the island runway (to prove you can fly it there and land it.) * The craft landed back at the KSC (to prove you can return it in one piece.) * The craft at maximum top speed during its speed run if you want to be eligible for the speed record. * The craft at maximum altitude if you want to be eligible for the altitude record. * An orbit map view in case you achieved orbit. Part clipping is accepted as long as it doesn't involve spamming tanks and engines in a single place to get more performance. Be reasonable and feel free to clip parts that would otherwise fit together like in real life.

You can use any engine you want, as long as your entry gets you to the island runway and back to the KSC (pad or runway). So in any case, your mission will involve escaping the atmosphere, re-entering, making a vertical landing on the island, and flying back to the KSC. I am only ruling out nukes at the moment because they would make it too easy to build an SSTO, but in any case, re-entering from orbit in an open-topped craft AND landing at back the pad is going to be one hell of a challenge.

The challenge is to build an abort system that can ditch a NERVA (or LV-N, Nerv) without destroying it in case the launch vehicle underneath it decides to disassemble itself upon launch. The LV-N engine is just dead-weight payload in this case, so the challenge is pretty much to build something that can safely separate the LV-N (and maybe the fuel tank that goes with it?) from the launch stack and get it to the ground safely.

It's the near future and Jeb found himself a hobby to kill some time between launch windows. In a corner of the SPH, he threw together some parts from an old Karley-Davidson together with one of his crashed business jets, and hauled the kit out to the runway to have some fun. Challenge! Build a micro-sized craft that can fly to the island runway and back. The conditions are straightforward: The craft can have no wheeled landing gear and must carry at least one Kerbal in a command seat. Carrying more Kerbals is allowed, as long as they are carried in command seats or EVA. No command pods, probe cores or cockpits. There are no strict size restrictions, but no bonus points are awarded for bigger craft either. If you want to build a hover railway locomotive and fly it over there, your bragging rights for is all your own to carry. Stock parts only, but Tweakscaling is allowed. I will allow part clipping but I would recommend doing it for cosmetic reasons only, because clipping other parts into each other will only make the craft heavier and impossible to fly. Any other mods are up to you, I would highly recommend installing Kerbal Flight Indicators which is a very useful mod if you fly VTOL aircraft. Scoring / Achievements "Eye of the Needle": Complete the challenge of flying to the island runway and back. 1000 points awarded. Achievers: "How's the weather up there?!": Fly your craft to a service ceiling of 12.000 meters or higher. +100 point bonus. Achievers: "Hop on!": Carry a second Kerbal to ride in tandem with your driver. +100 point bonus. "Shotgun Rider": Carry another passenger alongside your driver. +100 point bonus. "Meep Meep": Hold the record for the fasted recorded speed in the challenge. +100 point bonus. "Look Out Below!": Hold the altitude record in the challenge. +100 point bonus. "Long Ranger": Hold the record for the longest distance travelled in the challenge. +100 point bonus. "Jet Ski": Build a craft that can sail on water. +100 point bonus. "Wet Nellie": Complete the challenge with a craft that is submersible. +500 point bonus. "Boom!": Achieve supersonic speed with your jet bike. +500 point bonus. "Chasing the Sun": Circumnavigate Kerbin. +500 point bonus. "Are we even supposed to be up here?": Escape Kerbin's atmosphere with your jet bike. +500 point bonus. "Loud Pipes Are Useless Here": Achieve orbit with your bike. +1000 point bonus for anyone who achieves orbit, +500 additional for the largest orbit record holder. "West Koast Kustom": Have the best looking craft in the challenge. +500 point bonus. Penalties Of course, the challenge wouldn't be very challenging if there were no penalties, right? "Rolling Thunder": Complete the challenge with a wheeled craft. 250 point penalty. "Lift Hiker": Have wings, elevons or other airfoils on your craft. 250 point penalty. "Lazy Robot": Use automation mods (other than SAS) to control your craft. 250 point penalty. "Gamma Ray Hazard": Use RTGs or nuclear engines. 500 point penalty. "Physics Defiant": Use excessive part clipping. 250 point penalty. "Points for trying": Try to compete with a craft that is obviously not a hover vehicle, e.g. a rocket, jet aircraft, or an SSTO spaceplane. 2500 point penalty. Disclaimer: Scoring is for entertainment purposes only and I am still looking into a more progressive scoring system, without placing too much focus on craft performance, but rather on "doing fun stuff" with your craft. If anyone wants to give me a hand, drop a DM. And of course, for good measure, kicking off with my own entry which is pretty much the bare minimum of what you would need to get to the island, and back: The HoverSpeeder 1000 was thrown together as a hobby project by Jeb, out of some jet parts, duct tape, and the old vacuum cleaner that was sitting in the broomcloset. The craft has enough fuel to get to the island runway and return to the KSC. It has a service ceiling of 12.000 meters and its fastest recorded flight speed is 146.5 m/s. This craft would give a total score of 1100 points. Records / Leaderboard Highest recorded altitude: 12.050 meters. Highest recorded airspeed: 146.5 m/s. Lightest craft in the challenge: Heaviest craft in the challenge: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

When you TweakScale the Kickbacks and to 150% size and the orange tank to 200%, you will find they are scaled *exactly* right for a Shuttle replica. Why Squad chose to shrink those parts while they were obviously "inspired" by the Space Shuttle system is beyond me.

That's because a real autopilot does the exact same, at least when it comes to pitch trim where it matters most. Yaw and roll are only used for turning so they will usually return to zero, while pitch is used for speed control so it is generally a more persistent setting. SAS behavior needs some attention. When you touch the controls now, SAS is temporarily disabled until you release the controls again, the controls are returned to zero and SAS tries to correct the rotation that results from it. Which results in the unwanted oscillation because SAS is totally oblivious to the dynamic behavior of the craft, and overshoots. The best course of action would be to let SAS handle the trim controls while the pilot can add control inputs without affecting the action done by SAS. When the pilot disengages SAS, the flight profile should not change (it does not when you disengage an actual autopilot on an aircraft). The other way to realize this action is to make the pilot control inputs the setpoint for SAS control when SAS is enabled. This way, the pilot can command a certain attitude (momentarily or persistently using the ALT+control keys) which SAS will hold in a similar manner to a maneuver node. This could be indicated as a separate marker on the navball. This is the way a 'fly by wire' autopilot like in an Airbus works. When SAS is turned off, in any case, its last commanded control setting should be retained as trim so there is no sudden change in flight profile when it is turned off.

I'm game for air-bags to allow Curiosity-style drops of probes and landers. What I'm still missing is heavy (double axle) landing gear that doesn't have ridiculously high struts to mount the wheels on. Every time you build a plane with a flat bottom, you need to either have the same size of landing gear back and front, or have the nose dig into the runway with a "big in the back, small in the front" configuration.

If you only want to land on Minmus and collect surface samples, build a craft that can get into Minmus orbit. That's all you need. From a low Minmus orbit it's easy to EVA jetpack down and get back into orbit, and still have plenty of fuel left to repeat that 3 times over.

Well, if we want to cram more data to more Arduinos, there is no reason to send everything to all connected devices, all of the time, right? Since Arduinos process serial data on a byte-by-byte basis you can connect them on a bus (just wire the serial input pins together) and send bytes which are received by all Arduinos. Sending an address byte first would give you the option of sending different bits of information to different controllers. If the address byte is different from the Arduino's address, it's simply ignored and the packet does not take up any memory. Giving the users an option to configure what is being sent and received in a packet is also a pretty useful thing. 255 bytes of information is pretty big, and I wonder if all of the information is necessary in all use cases. (If you have a display that shows Ap and Pe only, why send information about the remaining fuel to it?). So a configuration file which can tell KSPSerialIO which pieces of information it can send where (e.g. orbital information on COM1, fuel status on COM2, action group buttons on COM3) could be a useful thing. That does require a little more intelligence on both endpoints, though, but I suspect it's worth the effort if we keep expanding on the features in a simpit.

I believe this is caused by a physics restriction in Unity. Switching vessels means the active vessel needs to be "packed" and the next vessel is "unpacked" so its physics can be loaded. That is impossible when physics is acting on the vessel that is being switched from (such as moving over the surface or in atmosphere). It's the same reason you can't switch from a vessel that is under acceleration due to a burn, which is the biggest nuisance for people flying ion engines.

Your calculation is perfectly valid if the entire path to orbit is straight up. Which it isn't. You spend the biggest part of your burn building horizontal speed, which is perpendicular to gravity. Your cannon example would instantaneously launch a payload to orbit if it launched that payload level with the surface -- in essence, if you speed down the highway fast enough, your're going straight while the planet is curved, which makes you go 'up' with respect to the surface. Payloads are not launched straight up, they're launched as horizontal as they can possibly be launched. And gravity doesn't matter squat for horizontal Delta-V. The only gain you get from a high TWR is in the first few kilometers of your initial ascent. But that is offset by the lack of control caused by that extreme TWR.

If that means a 50% (or even a 100%) higher chance of your ship blowing up, then it's all about taking chances, isn't it? I mean, current parts in KSP never fail on their own, the only reason parts break is because of pilot error (usually caused by spacecraft crashing into other, more solid, objects) while random part failures are a real thing. Usually the probability of those failures would be really, really small, but if you start overdriving your engines, that probability may get a lot higher. So if you're willing to risk the entire mission and the lives of your crew on that 25% extra thrust (which has no significant impact on the required delta-V to go anywhere, BTW) then go ahead and play Kerbal. Shorter burn times matter when you compare an ion engine to a Mainsail, but then you're talking orders of magnitude which may cause you to miss a transfer window if the burn becomes too long. If you need a LOT less dV when you have a TWR that is 25% more than your original craft on the pad, you need to re-design your craft since you're probably losing a lot of energy to drag. I can get craft to orbit without any trouble having only 4000m/s of vacuum delta-V and a pad TWR of 1.5 or even lower. More thrust does not mean your craft gets more efficient.

Which completely defeats the point of overloading engines since overloading means they will be running above the rated thrust. The heck with safeguards and protections, I just want to floor the engine until it blows up! In earlier versions of KSP you couldn't run a Mainsail at 100% forever without a lot of stuff overheating, which means you had to throttle it back sooner or later. This was different with the new thermal system, which allows anyone just to run the engines at 100% of their rated thrust all of the time. (Which makes sense, because "rated" thrust means they're running as they should.) However, going over the rated thrust just by slamming more fuel through the engines is no longer possible. I don't think this makes anything overpowered, it may give you a little more thrust in short periods but it also means your engines will overheat and your craft will get destroyed if you keep overloading your engines. So it would only have a very limited impact on balancing stuff like shortening your burn time, sure you can burn your engines up to eleven, but do you really want to run the risk of blowing up your craft just to get a 25% shorter burn? If you do, I would say that qualifies as the fun that "Kerbal" stands for, instead of the cool, calculated engineering with tenfold safety factors like NASA, which is boring!

Exactly that, in Kerbal land, overloading engines up to eleven should be perfectly fine. Maybe have a yellow/red backdrop with the tweakable if you move it past 100% or 110%. Engine overheating at 100% thrust is less of an issue than it used to be, so why not have the engines overheat more rapidly when you overdrive them? I can imagine a lot of missions where budget is tight or you're missing the tech node for that Skipper so you're still stuck with Reliants and Swivels, but you need the thrust to get the mission done. Why not have the option to crank up the Reliants to eleven and have more chance of your craft going poof in the meantime?

That happens because a double click will always unset the active target. IMO, that *is* an annoying bug which needs to be tackled because accidental double-clicks happen all too often with part selection or mods which have their own UI.

OK, you've got 5 minutes to explain one crucial but important thing: Why on Earth did you cannibalize a perfectly good quality tape deck?

That's just an example of bad planning. You can launch an interplanetary craft into a parking orbit ahead of time (when the weather allows it) and do your transfer burn when the window pops up.

I suspect it doesn't matter as long as your ejection burn is either in prograde or retrograde. There may be some difference in the amount of time until re-capture, though. Ejecting radially outward is also possible, that will get you slightly above and ahead with a second intersection just a few days later.

So we can finally drain rocket tanks from the bottom up to prevent flip happy rockets? Sweet.

If you exit Kerbin's SOI ahead of Kerbin (prograde in Kerbol orbit), Kerbin will catch up and you will get back into the planet's gravity, you only need a tiny burn at periapis to make it back into an elliptical orbit. "Higher is slower", so if your Kerbol apoapsis is just slightly higher than Kerbin's, you will end up back in Kerbin's SOI only a few days later.

I think he's programming his own mod which needs to determine the right moment to launch.