eberkain

watching too much LEXX?

I updated to the new DEV RELEASE in CKAN and landing at coordinates are not working. Rolling back to prev version... EDIT: release 1036 landing works fine. EDIT2: ok so it did it on that version too after several perfect landings, its just trying to hover way before getting to the landing site. EDIT3: ok, its an issue with what part is the root part on my ship. EDIT4: or not, IDK, landing just not working no matter what now. /sigh what did i do.

Feature suggestion... Automatic channel selection when a vessel changes SOI.

Year 1 Day 3 After days of hard work the engineers have finally completed their new vehicle and are working up the nerve to send a manned mission to the Mun. The Krew gather at the test site to inspect the cargo bay capacity, but they mainly just stood at the edge enjoying the view. The goal is to build a self sufficient Mun outpost, but the first order of business it to build a communication network and do some planetary surveys to find a good place to build an off-world home. The engineers have been hard at work developing communication and scanning satellites and packing them into the cargo bay. All packed away and ready for launch. Booster ditched just before circulization. After achieving orbit the flight computer indicates 4500m/s of DeltaV. A course is set for a high intercept with the Mun. The uplink relays are intended to live at a 1000km orbit to relay signals back to Kerbin, so that is the first destination. The SCANsats need to be deployed into a polar orbit, so midway there they are released and perform course correction burns. The ship successfully entered a high resonate orbit around the mun and began deploying the uplink satellites that synchronized their orbits to 1d 3h 4m 34s The primary Mun Uplink relays are deployed and active, on course to reestablish a low orbit. The global relay system is set to be deployed into a 35km altitude and inhabit six planes at 55 degree inclination. The orbital period at this low altitide is 46m 50s. According to the Kerbal math wizards we need to deploy one set of sats every 468.3 seconds. After dealing with a couple snags related to fuel transfers and poor planning, the sat groups were deployed successfully. With all the satellites deployed it was time to return home for some well deserved rest and food. Jeb takes one final look out the window at his future home. The blunt nose shape has no trouble absorbing the heat of reentry and the opposing aero surfaces quickly slow the craft down. As the speed falls, the aero surfaces are reversed and the entire craft flips for a powered landing. which touches down in the middle of the ocean. After a while in the control room back on Kerbin, all the satellites are deployed into their proper orbits.

I think I need a bigger launch pad.

So I've did a bunch of missions with my 5m starship and I had a list of things that I did and didn't like about it. The great things was that with as much as 20 tons of cargo I could launch, land on the mun, drop cargo and return without bothering to do an on orbit refuel. And with an orbital refuel I could take as much as 50 tons of cargo. I was thinking, why not go bigger? Bigger ship, more cargo, less trips. I'm having a lot of fun figuring out base building with a crane and unloading the starship on site. What is the practical limit? Landing gear can only scale to 400%, so that kind of puts a maximum size. I starting working on a 7.5m version, but ditched that and went to 10m. One of the things I didn't like about the last version was the upscaled mk3 cockpit, it kinda works for 5m, but it really doens't look right at 10m, so one of the things I wanted this time was for the crew parts to not be scaled. I also wanted a crew exit inside the cargo bay. I also wanted to not have any mods, but I don't see any way to do unloading without KAS winches, so that remains a requirement. I tried every combination of parts that I could come up with to do a cockpit nosecone and it just can't be done and look decent with stock parts IMO. I was also having real trouble figuring out what to put above the cargo bay without using a scaled up mk3 command pod. there are only a couple choices and just the dry mass of one of the empty tank adapters at 10m is over 40t. I was about to give up and I discovered that the MK2 crew cabin can be surface attached. I played around with a few ideas and ultimately decided on a crew section as a kind of spine in the back of the cargo bay. This meant I could just make the nose cone a nose cone, so using a fuel tank with fuel in it on both ends of the cargo bay makes sense. Still trying my best to keep the part count at a minimum so its playable, this is how it stands. The main stack comes out to 14 parts: 1 fairing as nosecone, 2x tank adapter, 1x cargo bay, 1x fuel tank, 1x engine plate, 1x tube, 1x tri coupler, 6x engines in the nosecone we have 4 parts, 1 probe core, 1 radiator, 1 battery, 1 reaction wheel. The crew spine is only 5 parts, 2 crew compartments, 1 cockpit, and 2 decorative parts. The crew compartments are arranged so that the door for one opens into the cargo bay, the other one would not be needed, but the crew access elevator has to have a place to get stored, and I didn't want it to take up a chunk of the cargo bay, so the second one is needed so we can have a crew egress to the side of a fuel tank. I could do an inline cockpit there instead, but then would need 2 decorative parts to accomplish the same thing that the regular cockpit does aesthetically. In reality the crew elevator mechanics could be hidden inside the dead space along the corner of the fuel tank curve, since these tanks are so massive there would probably be significant space there to work with , so I'm good with the crew elevator system being clipped into the tanks when stored. The crew elevator is 14 parts, 1 hinge, 1 piston, 1 winch, 1 winch connector, 1 beam, 1 plate, 4 wings, 4 ladders I really can't figure out a more part efficient way to do it and it be functional. True you could not have one on planets like the mun or minmus and just rely on jetpacks, but that isn't going to be an option everywhere. The rest of the system is 24 parts, 2 solar panels, 4 landing gear, 4 aero surfaces, 12 thrusters, 1 antenna, 1 docking port. After a lot of experimenting I have figured out that all I need for unloading is a piston and a winch, since the bay is so massive I opted for two sets, which is 4 more parts. We also have the space for 2.5m Kontainers inside the engine skirt. We connect those with docking port jrs. So that adds 6 more parts. I have a booster built, and I need to do some math to really see what the Dv looks like, but I think I can take a couple hundred tons to the mun and return without refueling. It has a stupid low terminal velocity with those aero surfaces working to brake, like 60m/s , so it doesn't take much to land. The booster is beyond the pale tho, will detail it later. Gotta get my son to bed.

Imagine if you could take a fuel tank, and then clip some other part partially inside it, and the game would reduce the usable volume of the fuel tank based on volume of the part that was clipped into it. Would this even be worthwhile?

BTDT, I'm having a much better time with just a lightly modded install, loads quick, good FPS, no yellow clock.

See all the movement in this bottom hinge when under pressure. It doesn't break, but is there a way to have it not do that? the big hinge has much less movement, but is so unweildy to actually use. Looking at the configs, they look virtually identical. So I tested the hinges to see how much offset force they can handle, and the big flat hinge is far and away the best. So I guess I need to figure out how to build a crane with three of those bad boys. Ok, so I redesigned my crane again to try and minimize the angular forces on the hinges and it works like a charm. This ore tank is scaled to weigh about 10 tons and this lifts it with ease.

Thank you, this is so much less floaty than using struts to complete the loop.

I've spent the entire day messing around with a 10m stock starship using tweakscale. These are 2.5m Kontainers in the engine bay. Kerbal for scale. Cargo Bay scale

How come no scaling on the flags?

Fool I am, still wanting to connect base modules, but I think i discovered a new way to get into orbit.

I suffered a kraken attack. I sent this perfectly fine rover to the mun to go investigate some anomolies. And after a BV trip I load it up to see this mangled mess.

It would be nice if all the Ranger series parts from MKS could be placed into inventory...

I don't see that part in the current version...

I see what you mean.

first your big craft with all 24 sats and split it into 6 big craft with 4 sats each, send them all together as one package. So 4 sats per plane need to be at least 133 km to have LOS to each other. So lets make that 150km to have some wiggle room. Get into a resonate orbit 251km x 150km, every orbit release one of the sets of 4 sats and circulize at the Pe. Now each set of 4 is evenly spaced along the 150x150 orbit. Now if you could do an inclination change for all the sat clusters at the same time you would be done. You can instead do a different one each orbit. So look at the orbital period to see how far apart those burns need to be.... excrements you know what, you could probably just do that to begin with. After you get into your equatorial orbit, look at the orbital period, divided it by 6. Then every time that much time elapses just release one set of 4 and immediately do an inclination change. Then you have to go back to each one and do a resonate orbit to distribute them evenly along each plane. That sounds the easiest honestly.

I would start with a resonate orbit. 5/6. You can get the math from... that will distribute your sat groups to an equal spacing. Then you need to do an inclination change at the exact same time for each group. You cant do that, so look at the orbital period. Do each inclination change that much time apart, setup some alarms with KAC to get it done. Now, doing it this way is going to take a ridiculous amount of Delta V. If you are building a system around a moon of the home body you can do it much easier. Look at the time it takes for the moon to make an orbit of the planet and divide that up by how many planes you want to occupy, then spread out the injection burns by that amount of time, it should come out real close if you do all the burns the exact same way. I've never actually done that kind of constellation around a body outside the home system. I would maybe look at the launch window resonace and see what it would look like if I did a launch to one plane on each window, might take a long time to do depending on where its going. Or maybe do a single big launch and capture to the extreme edge of the SOI at a polar orbit, then split the craft by plane and let those change their orbits . Its something I'm planning on tackling in my current sandbox game once I figure out MKS bases.

Yeah but connected bases are cool.

ReCoupler does exactly that, or at least cheats it in a way that gives the same result.

4 struts, 2 are not strong enough. I wish ReCoupler would work, but it was patched to ignore robotics. There is actually a pull request to make that optional, but I don't know how to recompile it.

And here i am trying my best to do exactly the opposite and can't figure out why it wasn't working.

tried to figure out a reliable way to do base construction I think i finally figured something out.

I believe that is this issue. https://github.com/Gameslinx/Tessellation/issues/12