bewing
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Posts posted by bewing
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If you want a few more designs to leverage from, here is a little bit of AeroGav and me collaborating on some SSTO spaceplanes:
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Gotta modify your hopper design to store 2 copies, or to have an external seat that allows unlimited duplicates.
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I agree. Especially if it's a robotic probe and has no IVA. And it takes too long to read the logarithmic analog readouts in IVA mode anyway.
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Well, I often get wheesleys on contracts. And if you build a cute little plane with a wheesley and two thuds, then you can make long trips and still make a hop to 18km and another to 20km+ at the end of it. Often two of the readings that you have to make are very close to each other, so you can complete a "three observation" contract with two hops. But yes, getting a free panther on a contract is a wonderful thing.
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I use the longer distance tourist contracts as a way to shuttle science/rescuees/personnel back and forth between a destination and KSC and get paid doing it. I agree with Snark that upgrading the pad is essential. Three or four kickbacks per launch makes up for a whole lot of other parts in the early game to get stuff up into the sky.
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Well, I don't quite know why you are having problems. I am playing on super-hard mode right now (50% funds and 50% science) and I love the tourist contracts because they are so profitable. Here is my "Virgin Galactic" suborbital tourist bus -- trivial to fly and land on the runway at KSC for a 100% refund on the upper stage.
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I get away with using type A and B swept wings as landing legs on Kerbin -- but IIRC the weight limit is about 5 tons per (wing) leg. The wings themselves are rated for 15 m/s crash, but they can fall off at lower speeds than that. I land my 10 ton landers on three legs at 10 m/s with three parachutes and that works fine.
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Generally, if you click your SAS to prograde, your drag should drop to nearly zero. So try that once you have the Ap you want. If your Ap still drops more than you want, it's going to be an amount specific to your design. So you just need to add the loss into your initial Ap.
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Yes, please don't make the hatch check excessive. The only strange thing about it to me is that on exit the kerbal's helmet collides with the SciJr, but when he reverses the problem and tries to grab the ladder and board, there is no visible collision issue. So I don't quite see why grabbing the ladder works better than being placed on the ladder. Seems like it should be the same process.
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The circular light warns you if you are falling faster than 10 m/s. Slightly useful for airplanes.
The triangular light tells you many things in different colors. Whether you are in atmosphere, whether you are in space, whether you are landed, whether you can recover the vessel.
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OK, I slapped together a rocket that lands on its tail on Kerbin without parachutes. It's an 11.5 ton MK2-based thing.
Of course, landing on your tail in high gravity takes a lot of fuel. Especially with my sort of design, because you can't exceed 15 m/s during the landing phase, or the thing will flip ends on you. This one takes about 300 fuel to land.
If you want a craft file to try out, just say so.
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5 hours ago, Mister Spock said:
Can anyone post a .craft file (of a tier-4 aircraft, stock parts) or two?
OK, here's a couple. Take off and land at a little over 30 m/s for both versions.
One engine version: http://www.virtualrealitytoursllc.com/pix/basic_jet.craft
Three engine version (if you want to play with some speed and altitude): http://www.virtualrealitytoursllc.com/pix/3_juno.craft
urs ago, Mister Spock said:But what do you do if you want to put gear under a cylinder?
If you want to attach a pair of landing gear to the sides of a cylinder, you have to attach them at the midline with angle-snap turned on. Then you can sometimes use the "move" tool to move them around -- but sometimes that doesn't work.
If you want to attach a single gear to the bottom of some slanted surface, then use the rotate tool to make it vertical again after you have attached it.
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It really depends a lot on whether you are building an MK1, MK2, or MK3 spaceplane. MK1 parts have much lower drag than the others, and not much fuel -- but I think they are the easiest. MK2 parts have much higher drag, and store the same piddly amount of fuel -- so they are probably the hardest to get to orbit. MK3 stuff is for going totally overboard -- the main problem there is flyability and durability, I think.
After that, I find that the whiplash engines give the best airbreathing properties. If the nuke rocket engines can give you enough thrust to accelerate, then usually they outperform the rest. If that's not enough thrust, then maybe a vector?
And you must have enough wing to lift you efficiently through the first 10km of atmosphere. Then it's just a matter of minimizing drag, part count, and cost.
So it comes down to some design considerations: how many kerbals? Do you want to lift cargo? And if so, how big?
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It's easy if you have canards on the top of the rocket, and a big enough engine. I assume that you aren't going to allow any parachutes?
The basic deal is that those "fins" on the tail have to be wings. And then you need enough canard on the front to give you aerodynamic control at several km altitude at a few hundred m/s. You come zooming down out of the sky, then raise the nose slowly into a stall over your target. Once you are vertical and falling retrograde, it's just a standard tail-first landing that you would do on the Mun or whatever -- but you need a lot more thrust, since this is in atmosphere and high gravity. But if the engine is good enough to get you off the pad in the first place, it can get you back down again, of course.
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54 minutes ago, PTNLemay said:
Well, at my current tech level the only other control surface I have is the elevon 1 http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Elevon_1
The tailfins are excellent for horizontal control surfaces too. Don't ignore them.
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@KerikBalm: Are you willing to send your scientist out on EVA to grab one copy of the data and reset the experiments while your stuff is slowly floating down the last thousand meters on its parachutes?
Or even more so: take all your experiments flying high. Once the parachutes are out: EVA the scientist, grab all the data, restore all 4, grab one set of data (flying low), reset one more time, store copies in the crew cabin, board the pod, and run all the experiments once more before touchdown? (lol -- I think I'm gonna try that just to see how well it works.)
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If you've got 1000 fuel left, it should be easy no matter what mods you've got. Come in with a high Pe (60km on Kerbin), with your nose at 90 degrees to scrub off as many m/s as you can. When you get down to an altitude where you can still just barely steer (55km on Kebin) turn around retrograde and burn every last drop of fuel. Then turn around prograde with your nose at 30 degrees and the rest should be cake. (Unless 1000 fuel is way too much to burn -- then stop burning when your surface speed gets down to something so safe that your granny could reenter at that speed.)
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3 hours ago, Jovus said:
You and I have different definitions of fast. Mach 2 won't get you to orbit.
*snip*
Before you can light your rockets and zoom prettily to orbit, your SSTO jet has to climb from 0km to the lower stratosphere. Not one of your pictured examples was capable of that. And that's the part that you need the bigger wings for. That initial heavy climb.
BTW -- since you mentioned that you barely made your orbit and you might need a better launch profile to save some fuel, maybe try this: take off in dry mode, and get as high as you reasonably can that way (probably about 2km), then light the afterburner, then at 5km altitude level out, wait a few seconds for the panther to hit max speed, then light the terriers for a few seconds to get your speed just above 400 m/s. Then you need to temporarily turn the terriers off again -- this is most convenient with an action group, if you have them. The panther should start accelerating the whole deal all by itself to about 650 m/s in a nice climb at that point. That should save you a lot of fuel in the end.
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This one is even more basic, and flies nicely. You can (and should) replace the girders with an empty fuel tank, or one or two SciJrs. The main fuel tank is only half-filled, to keep the weight down.
And, in fact, the type B wing connector probably works better than these swept wings.
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I agree with you KerikBalm -- any "orbit" where the Pe is below the top of the atmosphere is suborbital, and you count as "flying" -- you can see the status change any time you do an aerobraking. So set it to 89.9 (which will be a nice place to set up your transfer burn out of Eve anyway) and try it -- I bet it works.
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Unlike what many people say, launching straight up takes very little, if any, extra DV -- so that solution works well, if you can wait until KSC and the moon are both at a node. If you don't want to wait that long, you can just wait until the node, which happens twice a day. If the moon's orbit is inclined 10 degrees from Kerbin's equator, then you aim your heading to either 80 degrees or 100 degrees, depending on whether it's a descending or ascending node. This should put you into an LKO orbit with the proper inclination for a transfer.
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From the tracking station, you click on the flags -- so that all the flags get listed. Then you select the flag you want and hit the "Fly" button.
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It's a known bug and will be fixed at some point. For now, the only craft you can rename are the ones that have command pods or probe cores -- and you do have to switch to them.
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Crew cabins and mk1 pods can both store one copy of the data. So xmit one, put one in an mpl, and return one.
1.1.2 landing struts behaviour
in KSP1 Gameplay Questions and Tutorials
Posted
I fly planes just fine. If you can't fly a plane, then you have designed it wrong.
Yes, the landing legs are buggy now after the brand new physics engine for the game was introduced. They will be fixed shortly. There is no need to get bent about it. You can continue playing the previous version (which had plenty of bugs that have been fixed in the new version), or you can adapt to the new reality in the meantime until the leg bug gets fixed, or you can take a break from the game until then. Your choice.