Wcmille

Here's my app. The part circled in red tells an important story. There are many possible rocket combinations, but most are not going to yield useful designs. As the number of stages increases, we need ways to avoid brute force search. @GoSlash27 I think the problem that I run into with a single-stage lookup is that there are situations where two or more stages will out-perform a single stage design. There are also situations where composite engines (e.g. Swivel + 2x Thud) will outperform a single engine (e.g. Skipper).

Here's my orbital Mun station and mothership construction yard. A number of different ships are currently docked. The orange tanks are pushed through the Mk III Liquid Fuel tank to make multi-directional docking port senior ports. At the bottom of the station is the power grid, cooling, ore tanks, and ISRU. The ore tanks actually do most of the refueling, since you don't have to do anything for them to refuel. I don't launch fuel from Kerbin anymore. To get fuel to my Kerbin station, I send the tanker in the lower right. It's the ship with 6 large holding tanks stacked in a column. That way, I don't have to manage whether I need mono, oxidizer, or liquid fuel. It just makes the right thing. I don't actually have a lot of oxidizer stored. I try to use nukes often, which just need liquid fuel.

Here's the file. Please note -- this is just an example. Surely you've had situations in landing or at launch where parts separated. I'm trying to understand how the game decides when that happens, so I can engineer for it.

What is meant by "e-fold"?

Here is a simple design that fails: Start with a large ore tank. Add a large ore tank on top. Add four large ore tanks, mirrored radially around the top tank. Add 4 LT-1 Landing struts mirrored radially around the bottom tank. Fill all the ore tanks full of ore. Launch the vehicle. The tanks fall off. Now do the same thing, but remove the landing gear. The tanks will stay on the vehicle. So here, we've designed a very fragile vehicle. Suppose the vehicle was fragile, but not extremely so. I might land at 10 m/s on Tylo and everything falls off. What a mess. I can over-engineer and strut everything to death, but how do I *know* that a connection is pushing the limit and needs a strut?

I'm currently building a program that will build optimal rocket designs for a certain stagecount and payload mass. At present, I try all combinations of rocket engines for every stage. Then I start to add fuel to the engine that will yield the highest differential dV to the vehicle until the goal is reached or all TWR limits are reached (which is a failure). As you might imagine, trying all combinations explodes quickly, making it very important to not try designs that can never succeed. I think I'm leveraging that nearly all the fuel tanks have the same wet/dry ratio (which, OK, they don't) and assuming everything is just 9:1 for fuel. Spark would be OK in my example, because it does not have BOTH a lower Isp AND a higher mass than a LV-N. It's only lower Isp.

Could this be restated as: A design cannot be optimal (for mass-optimal dV) if a later stage has an engine which is both a lower Isp and a higher engine mass?

What is the strength of a bond?

How does the game determine the conditions for two parts separating? Does the area of contact matter? Are shear forces treated separately from tension forces?

Do any of the mods support integration with Kerbal Alarm Clock?

Its a useful mod. Thanks for maintaining it!

I mean in KSP, not the forums.

What is the reputation equation? That is, if my reputation is R, and I gain x reputation, what will my new reputation be? Same question goes for loss of reputation.

Hey there. What a great mod! I'm using it to reverse engineer the constants in the spring equation for the lander legs. I'm curious -- is the measurement for surface altitude the measure from surface to the lowest point, to the center of mass, or to the graphotron center?

I find it useful to place flags at the west and east ends of my runway. This lets me line up on the runway at a distance like rifle sights.

Rovers are the best way to find a locally optimal flat slope or a locally optimal mining site. You could do these with kerbals or ships, but I find rovers much more optimal for this.

What do you think of allowing Engineers to change the properties of a BL-01 indicator light?

I've added several new ones. Would love to get thoughts on these.

@KerikBalm once I hit Alt-F12, what do I do next, to see the aero stats? By cruising, I mean most efficient height and speed in terms of distance/fuel.

(I don't use FAR) Are you putting your engines slightly below center of mass to counteract pitch down from lift? How do you engineer ideal wing AoA? How can I engineer level lift force at 100m/s? How are you calculating sufficient air intake? How are you calculating which landing gear size to use? How can I calculate ideal cruising altitude and speed?

I think I can get to Duna for a really small dV from 75km above Kerbin. Wondering what the smallest possible amount might be. Here's the plan: Create an elliptical orbit that just barely enters Mun's SOI. The timing will matter a lot. See below. Enter Mun's SOI to establish an Elliptical orbit from Mun's SOI to low Mun Orbit. I think this will require very little fuel. Wait a few days, so that the ellipse points in the best direction for Kerbin => Duna transfer. Leave Mun orbit. The energy required will be very small, since the Ap is already MUns SOI. This should, or little extra required, to arrive at Duna. The process could probably be applied to go anywhere, though you might need to use it to free-return to a planet and "Oberth" to reach farther distances.

What about USI makes it the one you are currently using? What about USI do you like?

Which life support mod(s) do you play with? Which ones have you tried? Why do you prefer the ones that you do? How long have you played with them?