MaxL_1023

Ok - who mined all the ore from Thalia?? Galileo? Ohiobob? Jadeofmaar? Bob had to get out and summon the Magic Boulder just to get to Eta and refuel!

Currently trying to get my 11000 ton Thalia mission into orbit - the emancipator nuclear engine lets me get to Thalia if I can just put 1000 tons into orbit. Issue is, my last two launch attempts led to my crew pod being Kraken swat into a 938 km/s solar escape trajectory. 43 Vectors is not the most stable sustainer configuration - lesson learned.

It is worth noting that you will almost always be at least slightly off the ideal trajectory - porkchop plots for these kind of transfers have a global minimum (per periodic cycle), a couple local minima (corresponding to different kinds of transfer orbits) and a whole lot of slightly suboptimal solution space surrounding them. You will likely need a little more delta-v on ejection, especially if your orbit is a little more inclined than the minimum possible from your launch site. Also, small errors on ejection can lead to BIG differences in capture requirements, especially for highly eccentric transfer orbits. Going slightly too fast leaving Gael's SOI (then correcting your orbit to still hit Hox) will result in a lot more excess velocity on Hox SOI entry, as you are close to a solar escape trajectory. Thalia and Icarus are also difficult in this respect, especially since the Oberth effect can't bail you out like it can for Tellumo (or even Gratian/Niven - these both have decent gravity). I recommend using Mechjeb to start out - planning interplanetary transfers on your own is not THAT hard, but planning GOOD ones is much, much harder. I still can't do it - I just overdesign my rockets to make up for my limitations.

What type of engines are you using for the SSTO? I can't seem to get a realistic mass fraction using available engines - I have been trying to mod a few but have not settled onto a good configuration yet.

The delta-v numbers assume you are burning from low Gael orbit on a direct transfer. Essentially, you can use the velocity you need to escape Gael as part of your transfer burn. What matters is your velocity when you leave Gael's SOI - this velocity increases rapidly as you exceed escape velocity. An extra 1 km/s in LGO (getting you to about 4.2 km/s) will have you leaving Gael's SOI with something like 3 km/s, not 1 km/s - you "save" 2 km/s. If you time it right, that 2 km/s will give you half of what you need to get to Hox. In fact, you can get ALL of the required velocity (including the plane change) in ONE burn from LGO - the delta-V for that burn would be equal to adding up the values on the chart. What you are doing is the following: 1. Burn to escape Gael. Just barely make it out, losing all your velocity to Gael's Gravity. Cost: ~ 1 km/s 2. Raise your AP while in Solar Orbit. Cost: ~4 km/s 3. Correction Burn(s) to encounter Hox. Cost: <1 km/s What you should do: 1. Burn to escape Gael from about the evening terminator. Give it some extra push, so you end up leaving Gael's SOI with about 4 km/s. This will have your solar orbit AP at Hox's orbit. Cost: About 2700 m/s (You start at about 5 km/s, lose one as you fly out due to Gael's gravity) 2. Correction Burn (if you can't plot a plane change as part of your ejection burn). Cost: < 1 km/s You save a LOT of fuel this way.

I didn't have enough funds to launch it - I need to do some design optimization. I wanted to have a lander which could land on Thalia, refuel using an ISRU, launch into orbit and then get to Eta to refuel again - kind of like a Thalia-Eta alternating refuel cycle. I needed more than 6 km/s of delta-v, plus another 7k to ensure I can circularize at Thalia, then 4-5k for the return burn and 6k for the initial transfer. You can see the problem.

Well then - I was trying to make a rocket for a Kerballed Thalia mission. I ended up trying to use one of those 10m SpaceY 43x1.25m thrust plates with 43 Vector Engines... As the Thalia Transfer Stage. I need some more advanced engines.

What would I need to do to convert a Ramjet into a Scramjet in this setup? I would likely want two thrust modes - ramjet for under about Mach 5 with a mode switch (like afterburner) to supersonic combustion available at speeds above about Mach 3 (minimum speed where it works), with Mach 5 being the point where the SC mode becomes more efficient. I want to be able to make a SSTO in 10x, and need an air-breathing engine that could get me above Mach 10 and be able to maintain flight at something like 50km (Karman line is 100km, so it should be easily possible at Mach 10). Otherwise, I'll get re-entry heat and extreme drag trying to pick up speed down low. I have heard that Scramjets would basically skip off the top of the atmosphere for long range flight - this profile would let me use more efficient engines for vacuum maneuvers and make an SSTO viable in 10x scale games.

Does Gael at least have flat water? I know Tellumo has pack ice (in headcanon).

From now on I am just going to land on the grass. I am getting close to a workable SCRAMjet engine - got the stock ramjet with altered configs to make it hit max thrust at Mach 10. I just need to figure out an atmosphere curve which lets it produce thrust until it runs out of air, as SCRAMjets don't really have compression problems per-se.

So - in my 10x game I FINALLY get around to unlocking Mk 2 plane parts and the panther engine. I build a decent plane (WTFBBQ, mine usually randomly fall apart), and enjoy the scenery flying over the 18km high volcano (this is the first plane I made that could do it on air-breathing engines). Besides losing maneuverability up above 15km (no excrements, air is rather lacking up there) everything works great. I even manage a zoom climb on full afterburner from 5000m, managing to hit 32500m over the bay near the KSC. Seeing the curve of Gael in a plane makes all that fuel (and Jeb holding his breath) worthwhile. I regain control, manage to fly back to the KSC (an achievement in itself considering my experience with planes - more of a huge rocket jock) and actually line up with the runway on a survivable glide slope. Touch down at ~70m/s, begin braking... and hit one of those glitch-bumps in the runway. Instant fireball and explosion. The perils of messing with scaling - ye be warned!

What would I need to do to mod the tech tree for scaled games? In 10x/10.6x, you really need the larger fuel tanks and some clustering equipment (interstages) earlier than normal - otherwise you get insanely tall stacks when using 1.25m parts, even with full SMURFF. I think it is a square/cube issue. Engines can stay where they are, we just need the stacks. Procedural parts are limited by the tech nodes as well.

I'll give it a try - knowing my luck I'll somehow make the antenna ranges negative and collapse the DSN into a black hole.

I guess getting to Grannus in my 10x game will require adding 2 zeroes to the .CFG files!

Can we please get a tidally-locked super-Gael with a dense, extended atmosphere and black vegetation which evolved to metabolize near-infrared light? I'm sure you know where to put it.

Is there any way to write a patch CFG which automatically rescales the range of antennas to match the sigma scale? Manually putting an extra zero on everything gets annoying after awhile.

The scenery in this mod is ALMOST enough to make me buy a better computer. Sadly, I can't afford one at the moment, not at the level I would need to do this planet pack justice. Maybe a university server...

In stock scale solar systems I rarely have a problem - I usually use a 2.5m stack for a 1.25m payload, giving me room for a decent fairing or to have little science/equipment bits sticking out the side of the 1.25m core. Try designing your first stage as a sustainer (TWR of 0.8 or so on the pad) and use a couple radial SRBs for liftoff thrust. With the sustainer firing, you can thrust-limit the SRBs down to about 50% thrust, giving you maybe 1.4 TWR on the pad and 1.2 or so after SRB burnout. The Space shuttle used this configuration, just with huge solids so the TWR of the sustainers alone was more like 0.3 and 0.8-0.9 at SRB burnout. You can get away with that in RSS/RO where solids last 2 minutes or more and get you to 40KM, but not in stock.

I would like to see the standard ISRU have a couple radial attachment nodes - it gets annoying when I can't put radiators on the part which actually needs the cooling.

Once, I messed up the config files and somehow ended up with both a 6.4x mod and a 10x mod active at the same time. They somehow stacked, so I had a RSS game at 64x scale. I had to give it up since I was in a RP-0 career with low science sliders - good luck getting ~20 km/s of delta-V from early AJ-10s and 248s ISP methalox engines! 20 Km/s would not be that unrealistic with KRnD plus high science sliders, but anything beyond perhaps orbiting Iota/Ceti would be out of reach. You MIGHT be able to do Niven, Tellumo and Gratian using aerocapture, IF you could survive 30km/s re-entry speeds!

The Donut of Death (TM). Please keep your hands and feet INSIDE the spacecraft at all times...THAT MEANS YOU JEBEDIAH!

So I screw around with the Whiplash to make the JX-55 "Hellfire" SCRamjet Engine. Ramjet thrust curve to Mach 3, about level to Mach 5, then scramjet mode with thrust peaking at Mach 10, a slow decline to Mach 15 and then a linear decline to zero at Mach 25. Make it a bit heavier, somewhat worse TWR but a little more overall thrust, and I'm golden (supposedly). Mess with the atmosphere curve to flatten it out and give better performance at very high altitudes, as SCRamjets are supposed to work at 40-50km altitude (otherwise good luck getting to Mach 10+ without becoming a semi-controlled meteor). Seems like this might work. Then, realize that air intakes stop working at Mach 5-8, and curse SQUAD and all of its minions. I guess this part needs its own air intake...

Trying to code a SCRAMjet for 10x SSTO shenanigans. If you hear about an explosion in Newfoundland, I probably messed something up.

In that case, I activate repulsors (hack gravity) until I clear the runway. Someday I will make a SSTO spaceplane in 10x - it is much harder since jets do not really help you get the speed you need to reach space.

It is also worth noting that it is significantly easier to get into orbit of Gael than Earth when playing at 10x vs RSS - Gael is only about 91% as large saving about 500-600 m/s off of the delta-v needed to get to orbit. Also, Iota is significantly smaller than the Moon (I think Ceti is as well) so landing missions are much less difficult.