Scoundrel

So for my latest career I decided to grind the survey contracts and eventually found myself needing a high efficiency plane that could go anywhere on Kerbin, land, then return. This is the result: The craft features advanced aerodynamic features that make it easy to land, easy to fine tune heading and pitch, and its very sturdy construction means that as long as you are subsonic, you can't make the plane break apart. In fact it has been so carefully designed that it has enough fuel to circumnavigate Kerbin without the drop tanks (which are actually only there for fun or for when I'm spending a lot of time messing about doing important science stuff). Of course, at a certain point one will unlock the turboramjets and that's when you get this: Which is the exact same plane but with turboramjets. And yes, the picture was completely necessary! When flown at 20km+ it can cruise at over 1000m/s and sips fuel so slowly that it is possible to circumnavigate Kerbin at least once, perhaps even twice. Here's a beauty shot of the RJ variant going transonic: You can get the base craft here and the turboramjet variant here. ACTION GROUPS: 1 - Toggles the Ladder

So, I'm not exactly sure if it's a spaceplane or an SSTO since it's really just me experimenting with various lifting-body designs. This one is, by far, my most practical iteration of the concept... which actually isn't saying much. The plus side is that it's only around $35k, which makes it relatively cheap to operate for an SSTO/spaceplane, and it is surprisingly satisfying to land. Download the KDX Lawn Dart To get to orbit, simply accelerate past 200m/s and rotate until you're about 45° pitch. Go up until 10km altitude, then reduce pitch to 15-20°. Don't touch anything - just let it accelerate. Don't worry about the heat, it can take it. Once velocity starts to decrease (you should be getting between 1250m/s and 1350m/s), hit ABORT to toggle the RAPIER mode to closed cycle and go to space. Reentry is easy and can be done one of two ways: maintain 30-35° pitch until velocity has become manageable; or don't worry about it and just use the airbrake. This sucker is tricky to land, so I added a pair of carefully balanced chutes for those who prefer to hedge their bets. Just deploy, disable SAS, and the craft will gently land with no problems. Unless you're over mountains. Then you'll have problems. To land on the runway, hit ABORT to toggle the RAPIER mode to air breathing cycle and toggle BRAKES so the airbrake is on all the time. The landing speed is pretty high so all you really have to worry about is your descent rate, which you want to keep under 10m/s - the craft is almost pitch neutral wheels down, so just let it do its thing. Kill the engines once TD occurs because this baby is super slick and it has the annoying habit of shooting off the end of the runway because it is going too fast. Or so I heard.

The Viggen used one of the world's first digital flight control computers (the Honeywell-SAAB SA07). The AFS pressure head feeds airspeed and other data to the SA07 independent of the other sensors so the pilot would have some sort of feedback on the stick. You can see the pitot and the slight dogtooth in the side view of this image here.

Excellent job. My only critique is that, unless this is supposed to be the KAAB AJS37, the tail should be dogtoothed and have a pitot for the artificial feel system pressure head.

I did when I measured the capsule's velocity from reentry. It was how I discovered that capsules have more drag sideways than any other direction. Also, with a control, I can determine its drag like an ogive on a bullet... within reason. But you are correct. I may redo this experiment later by altering the pod's configs to make the CoM neutral so that it could be pointed downwards or sideways to verify my suspicion. I blame my not thinking of that on the lack of beer.

I have a rocket plane for those ones. Originally built for those contracts that require a reading/report ABOVE a certain altitude (I really should have read those contracts more carefully before I accepted), it's basically a plane with a pair of jet engines flanking a rocket or srb depending on the ridiculousness of the contract... a side note: it happens to also work really well as a low-speed rover due to the broad undercarriage which was originally designed to be really easy to land on rough terrain. If you're interested, I'll be posting it in the rocket builder's forum later in a few days. As for the aerodynamics stuff, I think I am in agreement with NathenKell. The CD for the pods is too low for a blunt body object, and Squad's response has been to increase drag across the board rather than correct the physics for it. To confirm my hypothesis I decided to accumulate some empirical evidence rather than rely on anecdotal bias. My experiments centered around the Mk1-2 Command Pod, the idea being to measure differences in apoapsii between different pod orientations, as well as final velocity impacting into the ocean, again with the pods oriented both upwards and pointing straight down. To educate myself a little on the subject, I used this NASA document on the Apollo CM as a reference for what I should expect in terms of proper blunt-body physics. Some further research led me to conclude that the Mk1-2 Command Pod with its truncated 70° cone1 and 1:4 meplat2 should have a CD of about 0.50-0.65 (significantly less with a nosecone) nose forward, and a CD of around 1.17 blunt end forward. I opted for a 3 part rocket consisting of the mk 1-2 Command Pod atop a rockomax 2.5m decoupler and a fully fueled Twin Boar booster, and did 5 launches of each orientation (staging the upper stage as soon as the lower stage ran out of fuel to avoid the booster striking the pod on the way down) - my control was the same launch vehicle (2.5m decoupler atop a Twin Boar booster) but with an RC-L01 beneath a X200-8 fuel tank with its oxidizer reduced to 264 to bring the mass of the upper stage to 4.1tons (similar to the 4.12 tons of the Mk1-2 pod). The results revealed the following: control yielded a typical apoapsis of 634,014m (got pizza sauce and black olive on the paper I was recording peak v on so data, um, corrupted) pod oriented pointy end up yielded a typical apoapsis of 848,138m (peak v eyeballed at 2477.5m/s) pod oriented blunt end up yielded a typical apoapsis of 724,825m (peak v eyeballed at 2389.7m/s) So there is an effect, but only a dv difference of less than 100m/s, which is suspect IMHO. Experiments trying to get the pod to re-enter nose down have all failed (the CoM causes the pod to automatically flip), but I noticed that pods that re-enter nose down and flip have a lower velocity when they impact the water (195 base down, 178.4 nose down attempt, the control was 1473). This led me to suspect that the greatest amount of drag a pod generates is when it is sideways (this should not be so, as the pod's sideways CD should only be about 0.8)... so I built the exact same rocket with the pod sideways to verify. The results were quite revealing. First of all, the amount of drag the pod generates sideways is enough to reduce the Twin Boar's upwards acceleration from 4g to 2.25g in the transonic regime (300-350m/s) - it could have reduced it more, but the amount of drag was so high that it kept flipping the rocket before I could confirm no matter how much I fiddled with placing the pod to compensate for it! In comparison, pointy end up reduced the transsonic acceleration to 3.25g, the blunt end only as low as 3g, and the control was eyeballed at 2.8-2.9g. A few crude tests with the Mk1 pod resulted in similar behaviour, but I was unable to create a proper experiment due to an unexpected short in the laboratory logistical chain (I ran out of beer ). In summary, I tentatively submit that the command pods have a significantly greater drag sideways than they do blunt end forward, and that, as of 1.0.2, the difference between nose-up/nose-down orientation isn't particularly significant with regards to drag. I encourage others to confirm my results with their own experiments. 1. I have tried to avoid using technical terms where possible for the sake of discussion. 2. Sorry, I come from a background in ballistics and couldn't remember what the flat part of a truncated cone was called. The meplat is the flat part at the very front of a bullet. 3. Before people point out that the control was a superior blunt body, a cone edge first has a lower CD than a cylinder that has a lw ratio of 0.5:1 (it would have a CD approaching 2.0 whereas the pod should have a CD of about 1.17), so the control merely verifies that the aerodynamics are roughly functioning as they should. IMHO, I feel it is safe to conclude that if Squad were to correct their blunt-body physics then they wouldn't need to increase the drag to such high levels across the board to compensate. Edit: So i just discovered Graphotron 2000 and may recreate the experiments if there's enough interest... and if I remember to restock the laboratory.

You are correct Kuu, it isn't the compressors (though it can and has been an issue) but in modern engines it is the turbine inlet temperature which limits gas turbines. This is because the turbine inlet temperature increases in direct relation to mass flow.

Mach 3 sustained at sea level... serious fun! Ferram is right in that it is the gas turbines that are the limiting factor: mass flow would make the turbine inlet temperatures go far beyond what any current or even near future turbine technology would allow. A variable bypass cycle engine could do it, but I shudder to think of the amount of fuel it would gobble (15:1 stoic to start plus burning rich... ugh!). As for landing speeds, it's mostly wing planform and wing loading (it's more complicated than that, but nobody is really interested in every single factor) that determines landing speeds, not the type of engine. Modern jet engined fighters have high landing speeds because of their swept/delta wings (and compensate for it with flaps and slats), not because they lack propellers. IMHO, increasing drag and reducing lift all across the board isn't the solution to kludging blunt body physics, nor is "fiddling with it till it feels right" because that is simply using bias to solve an engineering issue that should have been solved mathematically from the beginning. Work the system until it works, as they say. That said, I guess it's good that they're still mulling aero over. I'd hate to have been stuck with 1.0.2 aero and heating... even if it will break my latest round of SSTOs and spaceplanes.

Why is there no Main Bus B Undervolt that causes something to randomly explode? Or a Someone Left Tape/Chewing Gum on the Sensors notice that prevents SAS from working? What about a Forgot to Tighten the Nuts on the Wheels that makes rover tires go "pop!"? Would you consider a Bob Told A Funny Joke That Made Jebediah Snort Fizzy Pop Soda Pop All Over The Control Panel And Now We're All Going To Die! event that disables the command module? Heheheh. I can't wait until this is 1.0.x ready!

Is the University of Phoenix Online selling MBAs now? Squad's actions are consistent with a company looking to monetize and expand their KSP brand while going through the growing pains typical of a successful company. If Squad wasn't financially solvent they would have either: 1) sold KSP to a publisher; 2) formed a strategic alliance with another developer; or, 3) opened Squad up to investors. Since none of those scenarios has appeared, it is safe to assume that when Squad says they have enough capital to finish KSP - along with financing a film (allegedly) and whatever other projects they have going at the moment - that they mean it. Likewise it is amusing that the assumption is that Squad initiated the partnerships, whereas it is just as likely that Squad was the one approached. The fact that those speculating that generating multiple revenue streams and/or embracing cobranding efforts (fancy term for "makin' swag") is an indication of financial instability must then be convinced that the partnership between Thrustmaster and Ferrari on their steering wheels is a sign that one of those companies has "run out of money" and is making "crazy decisions" because if a business "doesn't need the money" then they wouldn't be trying to "make money" because "making money" is "bad business sense." How about we leave the speculation and second-guessing about Squad's financial and marketing decisions to someone that is not a gamer and who understands how to grow a business properly.

Ha! Well done! Rep from me! Though a question: how is it that you write Koviet, but write Comrade? Also, since communism means everyone has to share, does that mean everyone gets my dashing style of anarchy and rugged individualism?

I would be honoured to be referenced (especially if its Harvard referencing! I'm so tired of APA...) Also I should have been a bit clearer with the second point: you climb to 9000m, accelerate to 400+m/s, and pitch up to 20-30 degrees. The idea is to be at 1000m/s at 20000+m before lighting the rockets... your craft might behave a little differently so the process will have to be fine tuned some (40 degree pitch maybe, depending on its final configuration), but the process is roughly the same for all SSTOs.

So your problem is twofold: 1. You don't need those radial intakes. Air hogging is obsolete now thanks to the new aero, and that drag (and there is a lot!) is keeping the craft from keeping its velocity when you zoom climb to orbit. You just need a couple of intakes per TRJ. 2. You're losing speed when you climb because the engines lose power with altitude. Air hogging won't fix it because it's about velocity. The TRJ doesn't come into its own until about 9000m when it will accelerate you to the point of destruction. You just need to pitch up to about 15 to 20 degrees and let the engines accelerate you into a low suborbital arc. That said, the aerospike isn't providing enough thrust (175kN for 26ish tons = less than 1:1 TWR) to circularize before it goes back into the atmosphere. You should switch the jet engines to rapiers, which will do the trick without the aerospike (whose advantage is high thrust in the lower atmosphere, which we're not using on this craft since we have jet engines). You'll have to adjust your CoM and CoL again, but it'll simplify your fuel plumbing so it should be all right. Also the craft is angled upwards for taxiing, which is great for launching, but causes hopping on landing which makes me overshoot, or I prang the front landing gear because I didn't flare enough. A neutral pitch would make landing much, much easier. All in all a good replica and was fun to fly around with. Enjoy the rep!

Aaaand the cycle continues! I think I've managed to reply to every life support thread since 2012... do I get a space cookie? There only needs to be 1 resource (it was originally Snacks, but the Snacks guy took that so I'm changing my vision of Life Support to be called Munchies) that is consumed once per 4 hours (based on the mission clock), after which a kerbal gains hunger (meaning, Munchies!) over a period of 6 kerbal days. At the end of the 6 days the kerbal becomes uncontrollable and if the vessel has no kerbals that can be controlled, it is like a probe that has run out of energy. Transferring snacks via docking - or having a scientist give an unresponsive kerbal a snack - lowers the Munchies to the point where a kerbal is controllable, and a full 6 Snacks completely removes the Munchies. Kerbals cannot starve to death - they hibernate or something. Thus ships and missions and kerbals trapped on EVA can be rescuable, which fits with the game design principles of KSP. Also it shouldn't require a "flush waste" or "change filter" button that needs to be pushed every 15 minutes (or whatever) or your kerbals die, which is nothing more than a means of cognitively rationalizing OCD being implemented directly into the game. It should only require two parts: Radial Snack Bin: For extra snacks; it could be put in the service bay part for better packaging, and should have a maximum capacity suitable for most long range missions for a kerbal. LS ISRU: it needn't be heavy or large, but it would generate a fair amount of heat, and require large amounts of electricity. I imagine it would have a logo on it or something. By keeping it simple it should mean that long duration missions don't create laggy ships of computer death because we need another hundred parts just to get them somewhere, and should have margins large enough that new players don't waste hours of their time on a mission only to lose control of it because they miscalculated.

The planets are fine. Personally I don't care about the aero, because the focus of my games are everywhere but Kerbin. But that doesn't mean that how others play the game is any less valid. Spaceplane and SSTO strategies have long been a part of space programs (in terms of goals, as none have yet to actually fly), and with the developers including contracts that require flying about the planet doing surveys, aircraft and glide-recoverable SSTOs have become an essential part of the game, and that in turn means that aerodynamics deserve serious attention. Ferram's FAR works because he knows his stuff and has had at least a year and a half to fine tune it for KSP (it is currently 0.14.7 IIRC). Mu basically had 6 months to learn the basics and figure out how to implement that in KSP (along with heating and bug fixing), and like FAR, it will take many iterations of messing around before nuStock gets aero right as well (it's basically FAR 0.2.0 atm, so a ways to go yet). IMHO Squad could have avoided most of their aero issues (and the resultant growing pains that the community is going through right now) if they had simply contacted all the modders who worked with Ferram on FAR and worked something out so they could have hired Ferram as a consultant or something. Right now we get to go through what the early FAR adopters went through and it will take about 6-8 months before the community has caught up with them in terms of what "normal" is.

Thanks for the compliments! Yes this is an original viper, not the reboot version, and was never intended to be an exact replica... more to just get the bird out of my system so I could move on to other projects. And it is a strange bird indeed. It does in fact fly not too badly, but I suspect there's some form of inertial coupling going on. I've discovered a few other craft I have built since the viper have that issue as well. Ironically the new heating makes air hogging far less useful as I've yet to get past 1200km/s without something blowing up, and the drag model makes it so you want to have less intakes rather than more. It is both sad and refreshing that I must learn to spaceplane all over again lol.

I couldn't help myself. I saw that ram air intake and all I could think of was: It's twitchy and it might be able to space, but I still haven't quite figured my way around the new aero to make this baby SSTO. Mostly I've just thrown it on a rocket and gone joyriding on Lathe. Maybe I should set up a challenge or something. Download KDX Viper

I'm imbedding my full response in a spoiler because it's a wall of text that the OP (or whoever) may or may not want to read, and it's pretty extensive as this is a subject that is quite personal for me too. As a graduate of the Vancouver Film School (back when it was a two year course crammed into 8 months) and having had extensive experience in all aspects of production (I've since moved on but still play with after affects for fun), I can say that you are going through the exact same thing every single filmmaker goes through on a big project. Most simply self-medicate to keep their energy up, but a bunch of us (who aren't insane) who have shot and edited huge projects use music (and sometimes a second pair of eyes and hands) to keep us motivated to see the project to the end. Allow me to expand on that a bit further... I suspect that the burnout you have is because you've spent 90ish days setting up and getting your shots, know the footage inside and out, but have realized that there's a lot more work yet to be done. Now you're into the grind of post. Done right, post production is just as fun (sometimes funner) than shooting... but the problem is that you're messing with stuff you've already seen and have already figured out how is going to be strung together, so the editing portion isn't as "creative" as it could be to keep your interest going... and it is hard to stay motivated when the bulk of the workload is yet to come. Furthermore, once the burnout comes on there is a bit of depression - one of my directing instructors, in an obvious pun, used to call it 'postpartum depression' because the baby's been made (the fun part), but now you have to raise it and teach it not to pee on the carpet or play in traffic (the lots of work part). From that daunting realization that the job is far from over stems our self-doubt and rationalizations to quit or restart the project (this pops up because directors/producers fear the finished project won't be worth the large effort put into post and start second-guessing their decisions); most of the productions I've worked on have ended up in freezers because the director lost interest or the producer ran out of money... but the ones that were finished were projects where the creative force pushed through the rationalizations to quit and simply stayed focused on the end goal: tell a story they want to share. But that's easier said than done, right? Well, we non-insane sober types have developed a strategy to keep us motivated when staring at the huge EDL we need to generate: we step back and work on our soundtrack instead. The simple act of hunting down music and listening to it - seeing what scores works with the theme of various scenes, or working out the climax or the intro or the denouement - allows us to be productive, take a break from staring at scenes we know inside and out, and when we finally go back to editing we get to look at the footage from a new, creative angle because we're looking to edit to the music. Furthermore, editing to music allows us to break down large projects into small, bite sized chunks that don't require weeks of commitment to work on (let alone revealing pacing issues in the story itself, another big bonus). This lets us take breaks when we need to so we can stay motivated long enough to see the project to completion. After all, that's the whole point of starting a project, isn't it? To finish? Anyways, it's long winded and rambling, but that's my take on filmmaker burnout. Hopefully this helps someone, somewhere. That said, if the OP is simply soliciting opinions, then I'll say the same thing I say to anyone who is working on a project and is having second thoughts: Finish your damned movie! Everything else is just an excuse to quit!

I can't believe I actually felt compelled to mathematically confirm my answer to both questions.

Personally I don't see the need to further break down geomes (a word eventually to be adopted into exoplanetology! Woo! I'm contributing to science!) into discreet subsets based on day/night cycles. It feels a wee bit like science mining, and I personally am not a big fan of the science grind. That said, it ultimately wouldn't bother me either way. IMHO a less grindy way would be if they gave us contracts for probes that are built to collect and transmit data over extended periods of time. The idea being that we build a probe capable of operating continuously with the specified science bits aboard and the capability to transmit every hour or something (likely being a simple power requirement rather than actually transmitting) and then plop it on the biome the contract specifies. The reward would include a science bump and some cash, I would imagine, in addition to the standard science collected for visiting there.

Tomorrow's countdown Riddle: A hole in the wall. You're welcome, John Cleese fans.

Ahhh, the good old days, when everything was steam powered and we got five quarters to the dollar. I remember walking to summer school in -100° weather, in the middle of tornadoes, and through twelve feet of snow uphill in my bare feet... both ways! And that was after spending 25 hours a day toiling in the factories for tuppence a month and having to sleep in a hole in the ground on a bed of broken glass for five minutes (I know, utter luxury!) before being woken up and having a bowl of gravel for breakfast (and not that delicious premium gravel, but that disgusting bitter expired gravel that was rejected from the gravel factory) before having to go back to work! That aside, no offence to the OP (who put some reasonable though into the suggestion, which in turn made me seriously consider it before rejecting it), I'm simply not really vibing with this suggestion because the end result is exactly the same as it is now. Game design-wise we put tanks on a rocket then an engine, and jet engines follow the same game principle, but with the added complexity of adding inlets (yes, I went there and wrote inlet instead of intake! Jets are aircraft, not vacuum cleaners!) and little else. The fact is that the rationalizations aren't particularly compelling, and I honestly don't see it being a must have in the stock game. But that's just my opinion.

Good news everyone! I knew I'd find it! So we will be able to decide if we want clamshell or confetti or clamfetti. Crisis averted! 1. Bold added by me for emphasis.

I nominate Cupcake's channel CupcakesLanders for best showcase channel. Because VTOL!

IMHO, after a bit of searching through the forums and a thorough examination of the screenshot, I have come to the conclusion that the picture is showing off the ability of the player to determine where and how the fairing separates. I strongly suspect that it will in fact default to a clamshell style of fairing separation, though, for the purposes of interstage separation, HarvesteR likely has designed it so that we can do some inventive stuff with the fairings for whatever weirdness we players decide to create. Furthermore, I suspect that the only reason someone from Squad hasn't confirmed or denied this at this time is because they're still testing it and can't say with any certainty that it will be how the release version functions.