Evanitis

It is totally awesome.

I use the dullest names for rockets, starting with Untitled Spacecraft - kinda every early career vessel gets it that goes obsolete after one launch. Than comes Munar Flyby and Munar Lander, Rescue-2, Rescue-4, Eve Probe, Duna Probe, etc. Anything that makes me instantly recognise them on the map. Though my beautiful planes and memorable constructions get names of animals they resemble - either by look or function. Or I just name them after something silly or inappropriate.

Oooow, cybertechnology! I love the topic, as it looks closer to the present available technology than other 'sci-fi magic' we encounter. And it has some very dark prospects. I heard about studies that suggests that the base of the technology is already available. Think of prosthetic limbs that's moved by neural impulses. That's a very basic application of translating neural impulses to digital data. The question is how complex impulses can we transcode, and if the process can be reversed. Imagine if we could convert audiovisual sensory information to raw data and back. That's essentially the plug from the Matrix movies. There it was used to fake a reality and digitally exchange experience. That's dark enough as it is. But for example in the Shadowrun universe, it's used (among other things) as drugs. It can easily reproduce the effects of classic substances, but it's harder versions are the 'Better Than Life' chips. Imagine Felix Baumgartner's jump not just recorded by a go-pro camera, but by a 'simsense' rig that stores every sensory information, that can be relayed to any user's brain. Brrr. One step further, and we aren't just talking about reading and writing senses, but motoric and congnitive functions. Have it done by an evil very practical AI, and we arrived to the Borg. The common borgified creatures are drones. Basically zombies, controlled by the 'hive mind' - I assume it's motoric AI control. The Queen (and the assimilated cpt. Picard in the series) are a step further - they kinda' keep their personality and creativity, so I assume it's a higher level of digital control - not a motoric, but a cognitive one. I always found the borg infinitely more interesting than anything the ST universe could come up with. Now in 2010, I read about a prototype prosthetic eye replacement for blind people. It was big, monochrome, and had a resolution of 34x34 px. Maybe the technology failed or was a dead-end. I'm not the type of guy who goes into conspiration theories because the lack of further data. But if were a sci-fi writer, I'd totally imagine some government buying the project up to the last pencil to further develop it. For the betterment of mankind of course.

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Ahh, indeed. What I should have wrote is to 'only pitch really slowly'. Indeed, keeping the nose on prograde on reentry is a silly advice.

They can totally survive entry from LKO, or -slow- aerobraking from the Mun. I wanna figure out the exact speed that they can withstand when doing an aerocapture (with the ideal PE) for a while. Though I secretly hoping someone else will do it, as I always find some better occupation when playing.

Hope you mean Mk3, and not the actual 3.75 rocket parts. It wouldn't be much harder to use the latter, but such plane should be landed -really gently- as those have lower crash tolerance. Rockets were never intended to land - not that it stops anyone to do so. I recently build an Mk3 spaceplane that's as close to being a shuttle as it can be, without being one. Stock parts only, on the bottom of this post if interested. The big blueprint picture is a download link. It intended to be a joke, but to my great surprise it wasn't just be able to do a Shuttle challenge by jettisoning the lifter parts, but it could even reach orbit in one piece (with an orange tank as payload). Though it has some silly design choices - the shuttle part can only land on water as it has no gears (by default). But you could just add wheels. Hope you mean 'atmospheric manuvers', cause there's nothing on orbit that should make a craft go boom. One should only steer a heavy aircraft -very gently- in the air when it travels with escape velocity or on re-entry, as the aerodynamic forces can rip it apart if pitching too fast. As a rule of thumb, if the dot in the middle of the navball goes out of the circle of the prograde marker, trouble is near. But you -need- to pitch up on reentry to slow down. If it still breaks that way, you could add struts. Struts are magic. Landing needs some practice, and on land it doesn't hurt to have a mod (KER or MJ) that displays true altitude instead of the stock sea level one. The trick is to bleed as much speed as possible without gaining altitude. Ideally, I'd aim for a horizontal flight on less than 50m. You will notice that as the plane slows down, the prograde marker crawls downwards on the navball. When that happens, slowly raise the nose, so the marker keeps sitting on the horizon line. So you'll keep the altitude while slowly decelerating. This way by the time the plane stalls it will travel less than 60, or even 40 m/s (depending on the relative wing area). That should grant a gentle touchdown. I suggest posting a picture or two of the craft if you require further assistance, as it will greatly help to rule out some possible problems if the above method fails.

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I did a 'hardcore' Mun landing once. I did the math (ok a mod did). I left 10% leeway on ascent and transfers, 40% on the landing, as doing the perfect suicide burn is hard enough with saves too. I double checked stuff. I was paying attention to every detail. Success was cool, but the process didn't feel so. I found it isn't as cool as -not- paying attention while coping with my stupidity. As I'm getting more experienced in KSP, I feel I concentrate less and less. And I enjoy the results greatly. Not long ago when I was about to rescue a kerbal on LKO, I had to notice that the craft I sent couldn't be boarded, and had no parachutes. Mission was a success anyways. Now -that- was cool.

If the above doesn't work, I'd try attaching the lower gears to the fuselage. Just to have them on the wings could cause veering.

0 (-) I'm on the neutral side.

I'm pretty sure you could still do that if you turned down re-entry heating. And it would take a lot of trial and error to actually prove that there is no PE for a Kerbal returning from Gilly where he gets captured but still survives with the default setup.

F1 makes screenshots, 'imgur' is a nice way to upload pics or albums to this forum. Post us when something worked so you can gloat. Post us if something didn't work, so others can tell why it didn't. If it's stupid but works, it's not stupid. Find what you like to do in the game. Find what others like to do in game, for those will be fun too.

Got too much free time these days. BTW - made a version scaled down to the size of the original K-Prize badge. The current forum has a very neat rescale function (ctrl+right click), but many doesn't know about that.

Made a quick one for ya if that suffices:

At first I though someone at the Daily Mail has a good sense of humor. Now I suspect the author of the article pulled a random image while he didn't know that 'Kerbal' isn't the name of a particularly big NASA rocket. There is even a "©Nasa" watermark on the image.

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You attached the same album twice. BTW, in the posting interface there is an 'i' icon in black border on the top-right. If you paste the last bit of an imgur album's link there ("rcjVq" in this case), it gets nicely embedded into the post. Congratz on winning the space-race by the way!

Great stories (both the posted and the linked one), enjoyed them both pretty much. Makes me wanna' do Tylo run - I'm somehow unsure if I ever returned from there. Though probably I'd remember if I did. More like MSTP (Multiple Stage to Poles). Not that it makes the creation any less lovely. I'm fond of the hedgehog look and the 'chute landing.

I mean... -1 (+)

Totally awesome... and that was my opinion before I knew it's also an SSTO. Guess it'll be the first KSP craft that I actually download.

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I don't think it's the part count, rather just a long ship that you try to 'push'. You should 'pull' it instead. Umm... I'd need a relevant picture to demonstrate... Not the best one (not an actual interplanetary craft, just assorted junk docked together), but it will do. Now if I tried to burn the mainsail engine (lower right corner), it would wobble like hell, possibly even break up. To fire the two radially attached Nerves (upper left corner) would be better because of less trust, but it's still pushing. But if I turned the same orange-tank part around and burned that way, it would be fine.. unless the engine exhaust touched the solar panels. Also (unlike on the pic) use the bigger docking ports, those hold better.

Pretty tricky plan for going on your first interplanetary trip.. You'll need the Launch Window Planner. You just enter the start and destination planets, your orbit, the date, and click calculate. It will give a colorful chart - click on a deep-blue spot (that means the least required dV), and it gives you the ideal time to depart, as well as the ejection angle to aim for. In case that angle is just a strange number for you, it's explained here what it means. The next step is tricky. You can orbit Eve and do the same process above to find a window for Duna. But going for that orbit will probably take some dV (even if you can use Gilly's gravity to slow down a bit). It would be better to use Eve's gravity to get you to Duna during a flyby, but than the red planet should also be on the right spot. I don't really know how to find a planetary alignment for all three. But anyhow, I'd read up on gravity assisting too - even knowing the very basics and using the moons on the way (Mun, Gilly even Ike on the way home) will let you save fuel on the trip. And if you are lucky (or do math that's beyond me), Eve will just fling you straight to Duna.

Not that I know of. But this forum is -crawling- with SSTO enthusiasts who can't wait to give general advice based on the problem description, very specific advice based on pictures or even direct doctoring if you attach a .craft file. I can already try the first. Burning wings means too much speed. That could indicate a too steep descent. Coming from a like 300km AP to a 40km PE can be painful. It's best to lower the AP before attempting to land as low as possible. 100-70km should do the trick. Now that's logical, and I doubt it's the problem, just wanted to rule out the too high AP option. What's more likely is that you aren't putting the widest profile (read: the 'belly' of the plane) into the airflow. You should do it as soon as reaching the upper atmo (70km). If you reenter by pointing the nose prograde, you can't slow down enough before the thicker atmo around 40km hits hard. Another common problem is if you know that you should hold that belly into the flow, but can't pull up the nose (~ raise the angle of attack - AoA - to 30-40°). If that's the case, it's happening because when you used up the fuel, the center of mass (CoM) shifted backwards, probably even behind the center of lift. If that's the case, you'll need to redesign the plane. Check how the CoM-CoL looks when the tanks are full and when empty. Ideally the CoM shouldn't move much, or at all (and should be slightly infront of the CoL). Rearranging the tank placements and tweaking the wings can fix this.