swjr-swis

Two questions: I don't really know what this means. With rudders you mean the control surfaces that affect yaw, yes? Are those not by definition already vertical? To work correctly, they have to be pointing (mostly) aft/backwards. If you point them literally up or down, they are no longer (and will not work as) rudders. And: Assuming people go to the trouble of making their entry capable of landing (or splashing down), one can post a screenshot showing any arbitrarily low number for altitude, right up to zero. In fact, it wouldn't even need to be able to land at all... the screenshot doesn't show what happens right after. So perhaps changing this to asking for a video that shows the low flying was actually during flight? That said, here's a craft I made once that seems to comply with every one of the listed requirements: Open cockpit (or rather, none at all), with two EAS-1 seats. Using pure stock non-DLC electric propellers. 2 rudders, placed vertically (how else?). If it helps: the left one is 'pointing up', the right one is 'pointing down'. or something. Landing gear is used only for take off and is then dropped. Landing is done without landing gear. No RCS (the linear ports in the build are only used as bearings for the stock propeller). Resource panel shows no monoprop is carried. No mod (or DLC) parts. No Kraken Drives. No docking port. Video showcases the craft design, the propellers, taking off, close to ground flying, and a safe landing (even though that is not a listed requirement). Lowest altitude shown during flight (disregarding take off and landing) is 79 m ASL. (8m56, right before flying over the monolith). Radar altitude gets down to less than 10 meters several times, but since it isn't showing anywhere I can't use that. Word of warning: I have odd music tastes. If you don't want to subject yourself to that, you can leave it muted - the craft itself makes no sounds at all (electric props are soundless in KSP). Craft is my Kerman Flyer. Cave at: in current versions of KSP, sometimes the antenna break due to dynamic pressure. Other than that still performs as shown.

<gasp> They'll have to pry 1.3.1 from my cold dead fingers. Hiss!

Btw, if you want to see a really amazing example (not mine): https://kerbalx.com/9595w/Wingless-plane No wings at all either, and even no control surfaces.

I could troll a bit and submit my miniature Nanoo 'aircraft'. But even though it uses no wing parts, the heatshield sort of is, in a typical kerbal way. So let's not. C'mon, we can do truly wingless aircraft, people. It's really not rocket science, not even for Kerbals! How about the SWiS FlyBoy I then? (supposed to be Flying Body One, but Logistiks told us they were still waiting on a new shipment of 'd', 'e', 'n' and 'g' letters, so we had to shorten the name). 19 parts, of which zero wings. Aerodynamic lift is entirely provided by the Mk2 body parts used. The elevons only provide control, together with the Panther thrust vectoring. No expenses spared otherwise! Full state-of-the-art Mk2 body and cockpit, two seats, twin afterburning engines, and even actual landing gear. The works! Intakes are clipped, for balance. Very controllable flight, capable of mach 2.9 @ 9 km and climbing cruise flight, and forgiving enough to enable off-runway landings. Craft file: https://kerbalx.com/swjr-swis/SWiS-FlyBoy-I

I just imagined them doing the 'possum thing in distress situations, simpleton that I am. But your explanation is delightfully contrived and is now part of my head canon.

It depends a lot on your terrain detail settings. I've been up there as well, settings on highest terrain detail, and while it does have very steep sections, it doesn't have the sharp breaks I see in your screenshots. The transitions are much smoother, which helps when driving a rover up there.

Glad to hear it started working again. Better make a wholesale backup of that install so you have a recent last-working-good situation to fall back on if it were to happen again. I can somewhat say 'me too', except it wasn't with KSP: mine happened with Euro Truck Simulator 2. My nephew wanted to try remote convoy with the laptop he got from his parents, so I went and reinstalled it, downloaded my old cloud saves, and we had a fun few hours. The next day I still had the bug and sat down to run a few more deliveries, and suddenly the game kept crashing every time I tried to go into driving mode, telling me it detected mods and that might be the cause. Except, I specifically did not install mods on that profile because I had already lost a long playthrough before due to mod incompatibility after game updates. Spent the weekend unsuccessfully trying to remember and figure out how I had somehow managed to activate a mod, which one it was, and how to restore the working situation. Was almost resigning myself to having lost a 112 hr save and starting over, when one last look at the support forums turned up a post saying that the culprit may be a recent change to the Steam client's controller code, and to try disabling Steam input. Just like that, it loaded up the last save again. In the mean time, Steam seems to have updated again to solve the issue they caused. So yeah, totally different game, but I know the feeling. Not sure if your KSP install can at all be affected by the Steam controller thing, but that could be one explanation.

True, we've seen the same issue with some of the other partless mods. It's preferable to get some false positives rather than the reverse (mod unrecognised/unlisted) - with a false positive, the downloader would get the craft working and looking exactly as shown on the page, while the reverse situation leads to a craft that can be wildly different from how it was intended (if it even loads at all).

Hi there. The thumbnail process does lag a bit behind updates, especially when you quickly change the thumbnail image after uploading. This usually fixes itself after a bit. Also, sometimes it's actually the browser caching an image and not fully refreshing the page. You can try force a full reload (F5 on Windows-based browsers), or clearing the browser cache. If that doesn't make a difference: can you post the link to the image you want to see as thumbnail? It will help checking if something else is at the root of this. The automatic mod recognition is primarily based on added parts, so with mods that don't add new parts the logic sometimes requires a bit of tweaking. I will leave @katateochi a message about this one. Thank you for reporting it!

A small nosecone will remove a small bit of drag, but if you're already doing this, might as well go all the way: use a 1.25m part to get the full drag-saving effect. The round nosecone works, but the circular intake is quite effective as well. Just offset it inward so it won't block the exhaust and you're good.

I agree with @Snark. Not so much due to drag - the RAPIER brings enough thrust to overcome that tiny extra bit - but because you can achieve the same thermal protection effect with a much smaller and lighter part: the linear RCS port. Attach it radially to the cockpit, then rotate it properly and offset it right in front of the cockpit nose. KSP does account for the wake, so you will notice the cockpit takes longer to heat up with just that one simple and lightweight trick. Ablation is a real effect in KSP, but not with just any part; you would have to use actual heatshields that include the ablator resource. You can find those in the thermal section. They can help keep heat away from less hardy parts, and ablation works even when they're not facing the air directly. They also have a very high temp tolerance and are configured to transfer heat more slowly. A good place for them is right behind 1.25m nosecones, for example. Just don't face them 'bare' into the wind (unless its at the bottom of a command pod on a reentry from space), they're very draggy by design. Three things to keep in mind when using heatsinks/radiators to cool in-atmosphere: They only draw heat away from the part they are directly attached to, and the parts attached to that (so at most one part 'away'). You need to ensure they are not directly in the airstream - radiators by nature are just as good at soaking up heat as they are at radiating, so they need to be 'behind' other parts in the airstream to prevent them from having the exact opposite effect from what you want. Even then, as you speed up and the surrounding air heats up, they will become less efficient. They are unfortunately very draggy parts, even in their most optimum orientation. So their use will always be a compromise - whatever cooling they can achieve will come at a cost in top speed. If you add a bit of Oxidizer to your tanks, doesn't need to be much, you could use a fuel cell for the power generation. The fuel cell will double as battery. Remember to activate it. Other than the above, keep in mind that while flying higher does help to lower drag and heat, it also lowers the total thrust of your RAPIERs. If you really want to get the utmost out of them, you literally need to face the heat and fly lower! But yes, first make sure your craft is dealing with the high temps you are already seeing. Fine-looking craft so far.

The description text is somewhat misleading: it does nothing with the intake air. That particular part does have a small bonus in drawing off heat and radiating it away, but to be noticeable it needs to be directly attached to the engine (or other part) you want it to affect. In a row, no, because then they're no longer directly attached. But you can attach multiple of them radially to some engines, and then they will all affect that engine. The key is attaching them directly, one way or another. Again, no, because then they would not be directly attached to the engine. If you're serious about achieving the fastest speed possible with only jets: Go directly for the RAPIER, do not pass Go, do not waste time with any other engines. Do some research into KSP engine atmospheric/mach curves. The way KSP works, the speed optima are in fact lower in the atmosphere. Build with high-temp resisting parts - you will need them. @Snark's advice on wing AoA is good, but if you're trying for the highest speeds I'd recommend using Big-S elevons as wings. You can 'deploy' them and regulate their AoA with the deployment slider, which will let you finetune the angle live as you fly. When first lifting off that angle needs to be higher, but once you're in the speedrun, you'll want to tune it down to the bare minimum to just stay in the air. Good luck in your endeavours, and don't forget to post some progress reports! Screenshots and craft files... or it never happened.

I'm guessing this is all mod stuff, but... what?

There are obvious non-stock parts in the lower left corner of the screenshot. Not sure what mod those are from, OP will have to say.

You can't, been broken for years now. Other sites can still embed albums to this day, so it's not a technical impossibility, but for some reason this particular forum can't do it.

Now we're talking! And obligatory: "You came in *that* thing? You're braver than I thought..." Ah yes, Lightspeed Kerman, notorious known for consistently losing contact and 'disappearing' from all radar screens as soon as he punches the throttle. No worries, they'll just as mysteriously show up again, as soon as he decides to slow down.

I would've gone with one front, one rear-facing cockpit, and really confuse the hell outta them blasted imperials (and their Thalmor allies).

It's called Kerbal Space Program, that's what you did. Or as we know it over here at the KSC: Tuesdays. Now stop yapping on the forum, go EVA and get started on pushing her back. Looking good, but I'm gonna have to take offense with the dual cockpits and dishes. You can't just make excrements up, dude - stick to the lore. Is it transwarp capable, btw?

Ok I have to ask: how many suns are there in your solar system? Why are there three sets of shadows of the parachutes??

That small intake is purely for aesthetics: it doesn't do a thing for intake air once at speed, pointed backwards as it is. When I had the plane design how I wanted, the edges of the rudders and wings were visible through the engine exhaust, which I end up looking at a lot while flying, and I didn't like how that looked. What happened in that video? I was really just test flying the plane and the placement/delivery of the underwing payload of 2x A2A3 Chainsaws. Those things really fly off when fired: they're barely more than an Oscar B tank and a Spark rocket engine, so even at mach 3 they will easily sprint away from you. They also fly quite a long way on the one tank - I've had them at times go suborbital on me. So usually they're fire-and-forget in the sense that once fired they will quickly be way out of range to the point of despawning. They do however glide extremely well. So every once in a while, one of them will veer off in such a way that it will stay within physics range and fly within your immediate air space for quite a long time. Since they're not actively being controlled anymore, their flight/glide path can be delightfully random sometimes. Which offers a rare opportunity to play at them being an invading bogey and needing to be intercepted and/or escorted - until its path inevitably intersects the terrain. This one time I just happened to remember hitting record before 'engaging'.

Pure stock game, no mods, no DLC, usable by anyone. That's what I meant. A point of note: it is usually considered bad form using such techniques in challenges, unless the challenge owner explicitly mentions they are allowed. It's not exactly a challenge if the reasons why it would be challenging are effectively removed or circumvented. Not my call though.

Slowly recovering from a crashed HDD and several months of serious play-time deprivation, so easing back into KSP by going through the data I restored/recovered. Which once again brusquely confronts me with the myriad of unfinished KSP projects I have. I really need to make some recordings and screenshots and do whatever final tweaks I feel are needed and publish. Some of these have been lingering unfinished for years now. So I asked Jeb for help again. Here he can be seen field testing the SWiS Mujoob 1F prototype VTOL carrier jet, by chasing down and escorting a rogue A2A3 "Chainsaw" snack delivery device that was flying through KSC airspace (one of two he fired from under his wings just moments before... but nobody needs to know that). He was also kind enough to dust off the 1.3.1 update of my 1.1.2 UFO-Mk2. His verdict: start from scratch please, no longer fun in the newer atmo physics. So I did. Decided to go with supercharged ion propulsion and virtual particle fuel this time, and simplify the design (read: 66% part reduction). It's coming along nicely - it's SSTA now (except Eve, adapting a secondary propulsion system for high pressure environments as we speak). Jeb taking the current iteration for a spin: Jeb still prefers to pop the top and ride it tank commander style. Supercharged VTOL and HTOL ion propulsion, fed by virtual particle physics (trademark pending). Restarting from scratch allowed me to significantly simplify the design, dropping total part count by 69%, although part count may increase a bit before the final iteration. Also in the plans: a separate 1.12.3 version, to use a few ideas I have that require the new-fangled (and possibly DLC) parts. One oft-requested feature for the 1.1.2 version seen here: using the more UFO-like landing legs instead of plane gear. The reason there's no craft link yet: still working on a secondary propulsion system for high pressure environments (ie. Eve), where ions -even supercharged ones- are effectively useless. More soon. Also: Jeb found this forgotten project under a tarp in the corner of the hangar. He assures me it's fully functional and quite operational (in that creepy Sith emperor voice he does sometimes). Here he is demonstrating long-range capability and thermal stability, finishing a circumnavigation cruising at a balmy mach 6.1... on supercharged RCS propulsion. In an Mk1 cockpit! More from that soon too. And then there's a whole hangar full of prototype SWiS spaceplanes I never seem to finish. Valentina wants some time with those. I haven't made any promises, yet.

The Kraken is just misunderstood. Kerbals are friends, not food. ("He never knew his father!")

Your calculation is technically correct, but so far none of the entries have deducted recovery cost. @4D4850 - you might want to clarify how you wish to see the cost per kubesat calculated. Eg. with or without discounting the recovery cost of the lifter. It makes a difference.