Nich

"SIM testing" has shown Da Bizness (space plane) has some serious issues with re-entry heating. 1200 m/s at 50km = death if the nose goes straight prograde. Unfortunately this craft is so stable it is hard to keep it off prograde. However with some fancy flying I was able to get it down to the ground. Plane actually flew very poorly for my expectations. I was able to set up a proper glide around 28km with a glide slope of 6:1 or 7:1 which seems very low. At least with these numbers I only need to get within 170 km of the assent vehicle. This however brought about further issues. Due to poor planing the engineer will be going down with the assent craft. Without an engineer onboard it will take a 388 kerbal days to refill the tanks. The plane only has 396 days of supplies so getting within close range of the assent vehicle is critical. The assent vehicle (Wall-e) performed spectacularly but still disappointed as I only used 150 out of 2600 available abator. Landing gear nearly blew and I lost a couple of airbrakes. Airbrakes were a waste of mass as I ended up having to use spin stabilization to keep the craft steady

I am attempting to land a plane on eve however the plane has to come in backwards so that it can fire its engines to prevent overheating. Currently reaction wheels and control surfaces are fighting each other. I managed to get the plane down by disabling the control surfaces but it would still be nice to know how to invert them

I need to invert how a control surface works but I cant seem to find anything in the persistence file for that part. any ideas?

Finally finished up the Duna Exploration and Kerbin contracts so I was able to time warp to the Eve encounter. Unfortunately transfers did not go as efficiently as hoped. A couple significant correction burns were required and the flotilla almost came in on a retrograde orbit. Only the Gilly base needed to do a 180 and it had plenty of fuel. Assent vehicle and crew transport had plenty of dv for capture but refuel and space plane were short. Luckily I was able to aerobrake at 85km. It was extremely painful (100ish passes between the 2) as my current save is getting too crowded and even craft with only 50 parts are running in the yellow. My 200 part creations are becoming slide shows. Refuel is in a polar orbit so I can drop supplies and fuel to the plane anywhere on the planet as needed. Plane has 1800 dv in the tank for deorbit burn so burning up or missing the lander should not be a problem. Crew transport had to do a very eccentric orbit so it could align planes with the lander for a crew transfer. They were off by 15 degrees from the lander and 30 degrees from the plane. To make things worse AN/DN was very low (less then 150km) however at the edge of the SOI I was able to do 2 burns to match planes with the assent vehicle for only 170 dv. Can wait so see how decent goes.

Wait a second you launched 130t with a 317t rocket?

That is atmospheric dv in the screen shot KER will increase the DV for each stage as you gain altitude.

Pay to win doesn't matter because it will likely be recovered for 100% No incentive to choose 8 over 9. I would suggest giving engines a usable life span but that doesn't really add any value to the game. Perhaps cap recovery at 50% other side of kerbin only recovers for 5%

What commen house hold rocket could kill your whole family. It just might be sitting in your VAB news at10:55

What are the L/D ratios in FAR? I have been wanting to make a glider with 60:1 or 100:1 but sadly wings in stock only get up to 20:1 and increasing AR doesn't help

Ha ha I used to own that book until it was stolen

I like the second antenna

So SSTOs are capable of going interplanetary on airbreathing alone or does FAR reduce thrust too? 10x less drag means about 3x higher top speed

Well if fuel lines transfer fuel then wouldn't the main sail pull fuel from both the external tanks and 95% skippers at the same time? This means that the amount of fuel used from the extra tank would be dependent on the 1/2 the fuel flow of the of the mail sail, the fuel flow of the 80% skipper and the 95% skipper and the amount of fuel in the 20t tank. so your rocket equation calculation would be 9.81*equivalent isp(calculated from another function)*ln(ratio of 20t+mass from external tank used). However I required knowledge of the stage to write that equation so unless I programed it ahead of time to account for that corner case my code would not be able to calculate the dv of that stage. In addition the Equivalent ISP function would require arguments passed to it for engine 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 isp and thrust. Luckily in most programming languages you can pass array with a (nearly) unlimited number of entries and the equivalent ISP calculation is just a sum of ratios. However if you had to do something different depending on the number of engines you would then have to overload the function and write each case by hand. If there are infinite possibilities you would have to write infinite overloads to cover them all. At least you stated your not a programer so I understand your ignorance but what you are doing high level conceptual thinking which is very easy for humans but extremely challenging for computer programs. This is why AI is so challenging. They can only do what they have been told to do. I will put it another way. Curing cancer is easy all you have to do is remove the cancer cells. So why has the medical community spend billions of dollars with some of the brightest people on earth and they still have not been able to cure it? Because it is not easy....

Lets see does it have room for 770 kerbals? lol This is the biggest problem with KSP career. The tyranny of the rocket equation makes contracts either pay WAY too much or WAY too little depending on skill and it is nearly impossible to get the balance right. Even for me I can spend anywhere from 65-300 funds/ton on an SSTO depending how much effort I put in. That is a crazy 500% increase. Rockets get even worse. I have designed a rocket the broke the 700 funds/ton mark (599 is the record) but most of my normal rockets are closer to 2000-5000 funds per ton just because I don't want to do that much optimizing.

Ha ha thanks lol I was actually a little surprised it "looks" like KER does my ugly asparagus correctly however I don't feel like testing it or doing the math by hand. I also forgot to test if fuel flow works based on staging or purely on distance from the tank (furthest first). Sadly my ION did not reduce the ISP to account for LFO in the array but to be honest I never expected that as it gets indeterminate once you add solar panels and have 2 electricity sources. In this case your ISP would change based on the throttle distance to the sun and angle of the solar panels.

Am I the only one who thinks KSP is one of the best educational games to have come around in the last 10 years? It is supposed to be difficult just to get to orbit, making it to the mun takes all kinds of understanding of basic concepts, landing on other planets takes lots of math the students get to learn. Teach a man to fish..... First off Thrust is required to determine the equivalent ISP. Also your pseudo code is laughably terrible. You have no for each loops, no tests for decouplers or fuel lines, you never figure out the mass of available fuel which is a challenge in its self. For example I have a 5 engine lifter. 1 main sail and 4 skippers. 2 skippers are set at 95% thrust and 2 skippers are at 80%. Each engine has 20t of fuel and tanks above it. In addition the 95% skippers feed the 80% skippers and the 80% skippers feed the main sail. Finally you also have 2 , 20t fuel tanks feeding the main sail. This is very complicated and I honesty don't even know where KSP would have the main sail pull fuel from as it has 2 options rather then the normal straight line. And remember the code had to do this without any prior knowledge of the craft. Also have the same code calculate the DV of a lander can with an FLT-200, fuel cell array, a .625m zenon tank and an ION engine.

hhmm.. that depends how challenging you want it to be my best payload fraction SSTO can do 65 funds/ton so in theory 20 kerbals (10t and 5500 funds in mk1 cabins) can be put in orbit for 6500ish funds.

Ok if calculating DV is so easy give me the pseudo code that can calculate the DV of a craft with x stages y engines and z tanks. Don't forget to account for thurst limiter and any engine can be used for any stage or stages

Not to mention using a 50 kg decoupler for 100 kg probe drives me crazy

LKO?

I guess to each his own. If I played sandbox I would still use SRBs off the pad because it is more accurate/realistic to me same reason my kerbals do not go up in chairs. Although after about 150t I stop using SRBs due to part count limitations. I really wish they had some 2.5m SRBs to go with the 3.75m stuff

It is still not an easy task and someone may be able to manage 41 or 42 per rappier. At the end of the day this is a pretty pointless challenge I agree.

40 t per rapier is possible if you don't need payload

@Jetski I love those spacers I may be stealing it in the future. As for what the payload can contribute I will leave that up to the community. I would think we would want rational amounts of batteries, reaction wheels, 100-300dv and command authority (probe or command pod) As for control on the lifter from what I can tell the 2.5m reaction wheel is 2100 and .2t 4 thruster blocks and mono prop are 2600ish and .39t 4 tail fins are 2400 and .5t 4 elevon 1s are 1600 and only .02t In the past I have always used tail fins but a throwaway reaction wheel might be more efficient to control a rocket.

If you are like me you always forget so save your LKO lifters as subassemblies. In addition I have seen some nice families of lifters out their however they are quite large gaps between payloads. As a Kommunity I challenge you all to create a family of lifters. I plan to moderate and input as little as possible. However to get the discussion going before 1.1 is released here are some topics we need to decide on before we even start designing. What deltas do we want between lifters? .5t, .75t, 1t, 1.5t, 2.5t, 5t, 7.5t, 10t, 15t, 25t, 50t, 75t, 100t, 150t, 250t, 500t, 750t, 1000t, 1500t, 2500t (just an example) Do we want a common design strategy? I.e. same number of stages? same TWR for each stage? Stage at roughly the same time? Total dv just short of orbit? Recoverable? I recommend non-recoverable for phase 1 and recoverable for phase 2 Minimum cost per ton? Cheap and cheerful challenge says <600 funds per ton is possible however 1.25 and 3.75 may not be possible to get this low or for different payloads Maximum part count? How much are we willing to sacrifice in cost? Do we want to break the Payloads into technologie segments? If total pad weight is less then xt restric tech to tier y Anything else our family of rockets should consider? Sub assemble naming convention? I was thinking "xxxxx.xxt to LKO" so that all lifters are in order with a description of "xt to 200x200" "xt to geo" "created by Username"