bewing
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Posts posted by bewing
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I haven't been doing anything in KSP except watch a few ships doing some orbits for maybe 8 hours. My KSP.log file is suddenly 95MB, and my output_log.txt file is 254MB.
(I just created a bug report on a different issue and tried to upload those 2 files without looking, until it errored out.)
So keep your eyes open! Don't want to overflow your disk space and all that.
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I have a very small pod (about 1 ton) in an elliptical orbit around Kerbin. The Pe is around 68km, the Ap around 330km. I am mostly watching the thing orbit in realtime.
When I am not timewarping, both the Ap and the Pe fall. (In 1.0, it used to be true that when the Ap fell, the Pe would rise, and vise versa.) The funny thing is that it's acting like a drag that's decreasing with altitude. Like the 70km atmosphere cutoff no longer applies.
Is anyone else seeing something like this?
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Generally, canard designs are more efficient than designs with rear stabilizers. (Stabilizers push the back of the plane down, which robs you of lift.) Here's a very easy canard design. The fuel tank is half full. 3.6 tons total.
You can replace the girders with an empty fuel tank, or a SciJr or two.
On any design, you have to be very careful about making sure the LY05 (steerable) gear is mounted vertically to the ground, or the wheel will not work.
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OK, my orbital rendezvous took many more orbits than I hoped, but I finally was able to test. And I didn't see anything strange at all.
I loaded up 345 experiments into the MPL. I was able to scroll more than 40 of them (forward and back), process them, and everything.
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SSTOs are trickier now. Getting them into orbit using nuke engines is the hardest trick of all. Nuke engines are heavy and have relatively low thrust.
Basically, you have 4 problems getting to orbit: Having enough fuel, keeping your drag as low as you reasonably can, having enough lift for all your engines and fuel -- and the nastiest one of all is that there is a heating "barrier" at 1300 to 1400 m/s in atmosphere.
MK1 parts now have reduced drag, so that's nice. Fuel and lift are just matters of experimentation, of course. One hint is that shockwave heating is actually sophisticated enough that putting a blunt front end on your SSTO will cause a detached shockwave, and very little heating. This gets you through the heating barrier, but you need more engine to handle the extra drag from the blunt front end. Shielded docking ports work well in this fashion. Or you can just be very careful about getting through the heating barrier quickly while climbing (with some extra thrust at the crucial moment, perhaps).
On reentry, you have 3 problems: at 35 km altitude, you are facing the same heating problem again from the other direction. Stability control -- a homebuilt spaceplane may tend to swap ends on you, or tumble. And third, landing. Wheels are a bit of an issue with the brand-new 1.1.0 release. (They will certainly be better when the hotpatch shows up.) And there has been some drag reduction in the plane parts. If you come in heavy, and try to land at 190 m/s, you may roll right off the end of the runway. Which may mean that it's wise to land going in the other direction on the runway -- where rolling off the end is not a disaster.
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I just took a couple tries at it, for the challenge. I came really close.
First try: I put a hammer-based rocket on the front end of a panther jet. My design cost 17310 kash.
I used the rounded 1.25m nosecone on the front -- since it has a 2400 degree heat tolerance. For fun, I put a heatshield (no ablator) behind that.
Flew the panther up to a little above 9km, level flight, accelerated to 830 m/s. Lit the rocket. It accelerated in basically level flight to 1300 m/s and the nosecone blew the hell up. But the hammer couldn't push the remaining heatshield through the air that fast -- so the speed dropped to about 1220 m/s after the nosecone let go.
Added 4 small radiators to see if I could keep the nosecone from blowing. They added enough drag that the hammer rocket could only manage 1250 m/s, and it was clear from the nasty little red "overheat" gauge that the nosecone would have blown at 1300 just the same.
So, second try: remove the radiators, replace the hammer with a thumper -- expect the nosecone to blow at 1300, but maybe the thumper can accelerate the bare heatshield.
And in fact it can. But the poor panther really had more than it could handle to drag that thumper up to 10km. It made it, but I lit the thumper with little initial speed.
So, I lit the thumper; it accelerated in mostly level flight to 1300 m/s, the nosecone blew, the rocket continued to accelerate, and it reached 1450 with no further damage. However, I was unable to control the altitude properly at those speeds. And at 1450 m/s it takes very little time for the rocket to go from 9000 meters to 14000 meters altitude (or to 5000 meters, theoretically!). And then the rocket flamed out.
So, I think to make it work you're going to need to light a thumper in a dive from maybe 20km altitude. And you need to get the dive angle right, so that the thumper flames out just after it dives below 9km. But you really do have a very tricky test contract here.
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I have a Stearwing_A300? Were there multiple stearwings?
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I couldn't help but to disagree with Plusck -- fins at the top of tall rockets dramatically improve stability and are vital. They replace the fins at the bottom (just so long as your first stage has plenty of drag).
But your rocket is not tall, and you have a thrust vectoring engine -- so yeah, ace all the fins and see what happens.
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I'm going to test this in a few hours by putting 300 Kerbin experiments into a lab and then see what happens.
Yes, in 1.1 processing an experiment into data in the MPL destroys the experiment. So you need to take (and store) a few extra copies of your experiments to take back to KSC also.
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Yup, with full graphics turned on the kerbonauts do everything they do in the profile pix, and in the IVA. I almost never use IVA, and I think the cutaway views are just the cutest darn things!
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I think having a klaw is an alternate trigger before you get any rescue contracts.
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Nah. Definite bug which nobody else had spotted yet.
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I think I like James' idea. Use a liquid fuel 1st stage to get slightly above 9km. Go into a shallow dive at maybe 500 m/s, stage, and hit the hammer.
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You might want to read this thread, on exactly this subject:
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Beyond just dropping weight and adding a heatshield or rockomax decoupler -- you can also go a different route, and make the aerodynamics work for you.
Try testing out the ship in this link, and think about applying a similar technique to your problem:
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Maybe a hammer, an okto, a heatshield with no ablator, and the decoupler -- make sure you have turned completely horizontal by 5km or 6km. You certainly can't get to that speed straight up. You still won't have much time, either.
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This has been seen at least twice before. The first time seemed to involve retracting landing legs. You didn't mention doing that? Besides entering the atmosphere, did you do anything at all just before the bug triggered, besides make a tiny radial burn?
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1 hour ago, 5thHorseman said:
1.0 wasn't up to release standards. 1.0.4 was, as was 1.0.5.
And after being refined with 4 more version updates, 1.1.4 will be also -- for almost everyone.
For me, 1.1 already works better than 1.0.5 did. 1.1 runs faster. Both versions have glitches. The ones in 1.0.5 were bigger for me -- I had to spend a lot of effort making sure kraken didn't eat my ships in 1.0.5, because I land in the water a lot, and I use klaws a lot. The airplane wheels work well enough for me -- I am mature enough to handle the fact that they aren't indestructable anymore.
I don't really use rovers, but the beta testers who do say the rover wheels work better than they did in 1.0.5. (I hated driving a rover on Mun in 1.0.5 -- couldn't climb the typical slopes; sliding sideways until I hit and obstruction and flipping. Yick!)
And I am perfectly content with not using landing legs at all until they work better.
I'm also using windoze, so I'm avoiding all the Linux and OSX-specific issues.
This whole discussion about "release quality" is nuts, I think. Try farmville -- they released that, and after all these years it still has all the original bugs in it. All programs have bugs. Get used to it.
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My SRBs tend to burn out at over 30km, so that's never been an issue for me. I wait for them to burn out completely, then do a gentle decoupling, and fire the next stage when they have separated a little (so I don't blow up the parachutes with the exhaust from my next stage). And no, by launching straight up, they come straight back down, and end up at KSC for a full refund. Also, there is no noodling when you launch straight up, for a second bonus. Third is that I don't tend to do much at all in LKO -- I'm almost always launching vertically direct to Mun or Minmus anyway, for refueling.
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How can you call extending the release date by 3 months "meeting an arbitrary deadline"? That's completely nuts. They delayed it as long as they thought they could, and when the game became playable and nobody could stand delaying it any longer, they released it.
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44 minutes ago, wumpus said:
Take the whole thing to orbit: Typically reserved for liquid fuel stages. Don't decouple the SRBs, but let the whole stage 1 make it to orbit. The whole operation is similar to a space-x flight: you keep some reserve in the first stage. Fire both stages to an AP in space, then circularize separately. Bring stage 1 down to space and let stage 2 continue the mission. Note that I suspect that SRBs will blow up on the way down, and the only way I've done this is by jettisoning SRBs and recovering mainsails and larger stage 1s. Warning: this makes "going into orbit" multiple times more tedious than normal KSP and can burn you out. Consider landing and returning from Eve before digging this hole.
This works easy for SRBs, too. The SRBs boost everything to an Ap of 150km to 250km, straight up. You have a few minutes to begin the process of circularizing the upper stage (you need a while with nukes or terriers).
When the SRBs fall back down to maybe 55km altitude, you switch focus back to them. If you are clever about your aerodynamics, the SRBs survive reentry just fine, and slow to 200 m/s by 3km altitude. The chutes autodeploy and the SRBs land (velocity = maybe 11 m/s) a little west of KSC. And you need something clever to absorb that 11 m/s. If LT1 landing legs are working, they can handle 12.
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Yeah, there's a bug report about that. It's also true that the tiny drogue chutes have similar, massive drag when undeployed. Makes them much less valuable.
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Kickbacks are worth 2400 kerbucks each, and I recover 97.5% of their value (plus the parachutes, plus the aero fins, plus the landing legs, plus the decoupler). It depends on where they land and what you have your settings set to. But if I weren't recovering them, then I could perhaps use a more efficient launch profile. So as a rough estimate, I save about 5000 kerbucks on a typical launch by recovering my first stage SRBs. According to my playing style, the accountants in my Space Program make me do it.
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Come in with the nose pointing 270 on the horizon (basically retrograde), Pe at 50km, SAS stability on. Burn every last drop of fuel when it hits 45km. Then turn SAS off, and encourage the craft to tumble (by using the reaction wheels to turn the craft faster in whatever direction it's already turning). You will then end up with katateochi's reentry, but you will be going a lot slower at the beginning of it.
For bonus points, come in with the nose pointed straight up, until you are down to 55km -- then switch to pointing at the horizon. This will probably knock another 50m/s off your reentry speed.
PS. I usually find it's better to have an automated drone in orbit to make the first close pass to the stranded victim. This allows the victim to EVA before your rescue ship gets there. Then the kerbonaut can do the entire orbital docking maneuver with your rescue ship using their own propellant.
Giant 1.1.1 KSP.log/output_log.txt files
in KSP1 Discussion
Posted
No mods at all here, just pure stock 1.1.1. If anyone else is seeing this -- I just wanted to warn people to check and be careful.