swjr-swis

Really doesn't require much of any handwaving or suspension of reality. An actual hatch will do the trick: That's the back of the Gemini B (SC-2) capsule, as displayed in the USAF Museum, showing the hatch (smaller circle at the top) meant to be used to pass through the heatshield of the reentry capsule in and out of the MOL (Manned Orbital Laboratory). It was only ever tested in suborbital trajectory, and without coupling to the MOL, so we'll never know how it may have performed from actual polar orbit reentry, but there you go: an actually flown reentry capsule with a hatch through the heatshield. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Gemini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned_Orbiting_Laboratory [Shameless plug: my KSP replica of the above, for the USAF Museum thread ]

Val, transmission is breaking up, but copy that!! (well, they waited until after April 1st to post, so there's hope for them yet)

Build a rocket with a service bay (set open) and a command chair in it Add a barometer in the bay next to the chair Add enough thrust and fuel to make it out of the atmosphere when shot straight up on Kerbin (should be pretty easy) Keep TWR relatively low, 1.3-1.4 - crossing the threshold at a lower speed alows you a more accurate reading Put a kerbal in the chair, with helmet open or off Pin the barometer PAW and enable it, so you can keep an eye on the live pressure Stage and watch at what pressure the kerbal goes poof (there will also be a message 'not enough oxygen, the air is too thin') There you go, you just experimentally established the lowest safe pressure for kerbals. KSP has a cause-of-death message for 'not enough oxygen, the air is too thin' (#autoLOC_6010009), which seems to point to the oxygen concentration, if somewhat ambiguously. There is also text for Too hot/too cold (temperature), too deep (excess pressure), and complete lack of atmosphere ('There is no atmosphere'). Conspicuously missing is a message specifically about low pressure (or 'too high' to contrast the 'too deep'), as in close to but not out of the atmosphere yet, so it seems they didn't feel like differentiating between dying from too low oxygen or too low pressure.

Except we (*) do. The first viable ways to get low-TWR craft out of the atmosphere were by transporting them to the highest convenient point first. Both from Kerbin and from Eve. It's the Kerbal way. Well, that, and strapping a set of solid rocket boosters on the rump of a ghost leviathan to see if we can make it fly...

What people seem to be missing: The Aurora was perfectly safe (*) to land. The QEP doesn't actually fire until the Aurora starts to reverse course with clear intent to get out of the atmosphere again. Which makes perfect sense: it's meant to not let anything get away that could carry the infection to the universe at large. If anyone is stupid enough to land on the planet, they're gonna die anyway; why waste energy on shooting it. There's is zero need for a long-range projectile or beam. Anything landing anywhere outside the crater area is food for pods of territorial ghost leviathans big enough to crash through any type of space-grade hull. Forget needing a projectile to go (sub)orbital... any ship touching down outside of the 2x2 km area of the crater is toast anyway. (and yes, I'm aware they retconned the heck out of that in a so-called sequel, but you can't convince me that actually happened, lalala I can't hear you!) The green of that beam has nothing to do with ion cubes. Clearly, it's the result of mixing the juice of a medium-ripe bulbo tree, two blended gel sacks, and ignited by injecting a mesmer egg in the mix. Not that I would have the slightest clue of what I'm talking about. I could not possibly have any knowledge of this place I'm not supposed to have been able to get away from. No sirree.

Disclaimer: no leviathan-class organisms were harmed during the inception of this cross-over.

Well, that pretty much ends my years-long search for the exact spot on the Mun where I hoped to see a sandcastle appear spontaneously ... (or where the heck I left my sandscoop and bucket. Hrmpf.)

Why? Design it from the payload bay outward, with fuel balanced on both ends of it, and you can get to a 95% solution with very little tweaking required on the end result, or acceptably small CoM shift. But if you really have to change CoL: Include a set of control surfaces as part of the wings or winglets, disable all control authority, and bind 'deploy' to an action group to shift the CoL when needed (or use the deploy angle slider/value for a more hands-on adjustment to live flight situations). Pack a few lifting surfaces in a service bay, and open/close the bay when you need the CoL adjustments. With some proper occlusion of the inner nodes of the bay, you won't even have to suffer any drag penalty from the open bay.

Even in pure stock, you can get a good pointer (almost literally) if you enable the Aero Forces Overlay - the drag and lift arrows. If you include other lift-providing parts, you'll need to compare lift values and distances from CoM to figure out where the actual CoL is, but it's not too hard. https://kerbalx.com/swjr-swis/Nanoo The 0.625m shield I used is not the optimal choice of course, but in that old challenge limiting the size was more important than maximizing lift.

The Kerbin Crater everyone talks about: The Kerbin Crater they tell you not to worry about :

Quoting for relevance. The latter versions of KSP have very frequent random issues with symmetrically placed parts, particularly in combination with engine gimbals, control surfaces, and robotics. I have a huge backlog of never-published craft that I gave up on in frustration, because they would display such problems at the slightest of changes... and often just at loading them onto the tarmac.

Quoi? KerbalX doesn't do anything with jar files. Like, at all.

Looks like whatever was done to get the forum back involved restoring a snapshot/backup. There's at least a couple of posts from the day before it went down I can't find anymore.

I add a zoomed in and somewhat enhanced detail pic for -slightly- more clarity. The two docking ports do appear to be the same size, aligned, and touching. That really only leaves the following possibilities: One of the two ports is attached with the front node instead of the back one. @Vanamonde mentioned this already. You should be able to check this in the SPH with the original craft file of the station and the pod (check both!). I primarily suspect the one on the station, since that port seems to be on structural plates, and the top/bottom nodes are very close to each other and easily mis-snap-connected while building. One of the two ports has some other, maybe small part, attached to its front node. It's a variation of the same thing really - the front node is the one the game checks, if that is considered 'in use' docking won't work, even if the connected part is visually moved to no longer be in front of it. A rare bug that sometimes happened (still happens perhaps?) with docking ports is that they can get in a state where the game mistakenly thinks the port already docked, but doesn't show it in the PAW. This can only be fixed through savefile editing. Been a while since I had that happen, so I don't remember the exact edit. MechJeb would only 'help' in the sense of taking away the need to align the ports manually, but from the screenshot you seem to be able to do that already. It will not solve whatever is preventing the already aligned ports to dock, and really only introduce a new set of variables to the problem.

I had plans this weekend, you know. There was a ToDo list and all. I prepared mentally and was all ready to feel accomplished before monday arrived. Mutter. A third Phantom II, you say. In Hangar 3 even. An RF-4C reconnaissance model. Ok, let's do this. I present the SWiS RF-4C Casper II (Casper, because it's the friendly ghost. Get it? Oh never mind): There is a bit of artistic license and some practical reasons for small deviations, but otherwise I kept very close to the configuration as displayed on the museum's photo's (aside from the usual part and size limitations of stock+ KSP). I think I managed the overall image of the airframe, even the cumbersome tail. No payload other than the cameras and fuel pods. So they send them all to me. That's fine, I can work with them. No trouble with STOL/carrier style departures or fast climbing with a full fuel load. It does need afterburners to punch through the sound barrier, but once there it can cruise supersonic without, for better fuel efficiency and a lower heat signature. When speed is required, we can punch the throttle and stay high and fast for the picture runs. At SWiS, we feel that pelting MiGs with sparkly snack packages does the job too. Since this was the most-requested missing feature in the early F-4 line, we included one in this model too, granting the crew 32 shots at building international relations with our airspace-invading neighbours. And it has enough range to go right around the planet, so there's no place we can't get a few good snaps of. The SWiS RF-4C Casper II. Because it's the season to spook your neighbours. And now officially, finally, truly, I also have a hangar 3 plane in. All hangars done, without needing the Missile Gallery wildcard.

779.4 m/s even, I saw on one of the freeze frames. Points! That said, I can still see you missing a few tweaks (just from what the video shows, since there's no craft file). Here's a snap of SWiS ThereIsNoTry (an educated guess-rebuild of your craft, but tweaked) to illustrate. Doing 786.8 m/s.

All three easily corrected, yes? Is it enough for that 30 m/s gap? C'mon, make it a race. P.S.: Feel free to re-purpose any of what you see in my craft. I'm seriously itching to see if that 810 m/s can be beat within the rules. Just 31 m/s more ...

Especially for @JeDoesStuff, I suboptimalized my next entry even more, getting a nifty 778.7 m/s in stable level flight at near sea-level: Equal use of wing area Even bigger landing gear (after all, "Jeb must ... land alive.") Moar intake! Because we laugh at drag. Note that I forced the wheels to retract when the cockpit closes, so they get shielded only when retracted, and only deploy when opening the cockpit, basically uncheating them (since every other stock part strictly adheres to the in-game 'malfunction when shielded' abomination rule). I could've just left them off entirely and make my life easier, but they're there pretty much for intentional Suboptimalization purposes. I name it the SWiS SubOptimal 1. g]https://i.imgur.com/Oz7j4Zn.png[/img]https://i.imgur.com/Oz7j4Zn. It take off like a plane, flies like a demon bat out of hell, and lands like .... well it lands. She's safe, see?

And even a bit more, as I'd already shown before you chimed in. So how about we stick to the challenge rules as posted?

Ok fine, I'll race you guys too. A single Juno, 2m53s to a full stop on the Island Airfield. Jeb chickened out on this one, so Val had to do it. 348 m/s before she had to cut throttle to land. Full album: https://imgur.com/a/uN2SLet Craft file: https://kerbalx.com/swjr-swis/SWiS-YouKnow

Juno, you say? Just the one? Has to carry Jeb. Hmm. All this in stock too. Not even DLC? And you want records. Hrmpf. Actually I love that little jet. I may have played around with it a bit ... Low altitude sustained flight on a single Juno (less than 0.5 m ASL): Low tech supersonic jet plane on a single Juno (mach 1.6 or 478 m/s in sustained level flight at just under 11 km, with just the tech nodes required to unlock the Juno, 68 tech points used): https://kerbalx.com/swjr-swis/LT-Supersonic-II Circumnavigating Kerbin on a single Juno: https://kerbalx.com/swjr-swis/MinCN-1885 I won't beat you guys on time, but maybe on least fuel used to get to the island? Jeb figured 1.65 units of LF should do it. https://kerbalx.com/swjr-swis/MinLF-165

You're reading into 'global reach' too literally. It's not about literal flight range of individual planes, but about planes that play(ed) a part in achieving and maintaining the USAF airlift, special mission, aerial refueling, and aeromedical evacuation capabilities on a global theatre of operation. At the time of introduction the Learjet 35 / C-21 had one of the best combinations of handling, range and performance, which gained it part of the line-up of planes of Air Mobility Command and the 375th Air Mobility Wing.

I suspect mostly because of missing AoI on the wings. And those intakes are unrealistically draggy even when pointing pure prograde... all the more when angled like they are. For a plane of that size and profile, a single Panther should give plenty thrust to get it to mach 2.5 and higher. What is going on lately with inserting images in posts??

Adding to @Hotel26's instruction: make a copy of the <savename>\backup folder and save it someplace else. KSP1 keeps a backup there of the last 5 (default, could be more if you changed it) persistent files. That way you can test them, starting with the most recent, and see if you can get back to a working situation without losing too much progress.

My kerbals' favourite way of celebrating ... well, anything really: challenging each other to River Runs with their latest flyable contraptions.