Ultimate Steve

Me being somewhat clever, I guess. Also can you do me a big favor and edit your post so it does not contain the entire chapter? Even in a spoiler I think it takes time to load and with the amount of pictures in this chapter (and comment rate on the story) I think it's best not to clutter up the thread too much.

9400+ words, well over a hundred images (RIP page loading times) and many craft just for this chapter... The longest one yet. I'm honestly pretty hyped to write the rest of this arc. And before you ask, I did check my math by doing the shutdown in KSP, and it worked! So enjoy. Chapter 52 - Running Away

It's official now!

Now that I look at that, that sort of looks like the Petersen mothership I designed a long time ago for IIRC my first manned expedition to Jool, Jool Expedition One for the lack of a better name. It was going to be followed by Jool Expedition Two, but the only thing I ever ended up designing and testing for that was a Laythe Boat that worked better as a submarine. Some of the ideas morphed into Project Intrepid, though. I'll see if I can dig out the pictures sometime - remind me if I haven't for a few days!

I agree with @IncongruousGoat. Launching straight up and then turning once you reach space is one of the least efficient ways of getting to orbit, although it is the simplest to visualize especially for people who know nothing about orbital mechanics. This is how I introduce my friends to the concept of orbits sometimes. A more efficient way is to slowly turn on the way up so you're not fighting gravity the whole time (although this concept is a bit weird it works). It takes some practice but not much. 3 things about your launch vehicle, also stated earlier. One, it's somewhat inefficient - you generally want to have your stages smaller as you go. You should consider a more vacuum optimized engine like the LV-909 for the second stage. Two, things you should add for quality of life - fins on the first stage to aid in control, and struts so your boosters aren't flopping around so much. Third, for this sort of mission, even without modification, your launch vehicle looks pretty overpowered. You had half a tank of fuel left in orbit, more than that even. Extra margin is a good thing to have, but I'm guessing that you could probably use that same rocket to put that same satellite in orbit of the Mun. If you fixed the ascent profile and optimized it a bit, it could probably put the satellite around Duna or Eve given a big enough antenna. If you want to shrink the vehicle to the point where it can just accomplish the mission, make the top stage an FL-T200 and an LV-909 and keep the first stage as is. Drop the boosters entirely (but remember fins). If you pilot properly this should work. Lastly I think you couldn't control the second stage because it was out of battery power. I know this appears negative, but you appear to be relatively new to the game, in which case you're doing fantastic for someone so new - it is rocket science, after all!

The reason parts can do this, IIRC, is that there was an issue with parts on the same vessel being able to collide with each other. I forget exactly what the issue was, maybe it was lag, maybe it was vessel fragility, or whatever, but whatever it was, it was fixed by making parts on the same vessel unable to collide with each other. Apparently the problem was worse than the solution, and the clipping won't show up if you have designed your vessel properly (autostruts, normal struts, etc).

It's not ingame build time, it's IRL build time. It would change this story a lot if there was ingame build time.

I continued that discussion in the other thread and I think I answered everything, but since I'm posting here anyway, how's it going? This chapter is taking a bit longer than the others. This one in particular involves a lot of large craft that are used for short periods of time so building is taking a while. I only intended on using them for this one chapter but I might just have to bring them back sometime with all the effort I'm putting into them.

There's 104 days of summer vacationAnd school comes along just to end itSo the annual problem for our generationIs finding a good way to spend itLike maybe...Building a rocket (Check!)Or fighting a mummy (I saw a 3300 year old Egyptian thing in France so that should sort of count)Or climbing up the Eiffel Tower (Check! Only got to the second level though)Discovering something that doesn't exist (Hey! ) (Check!)Or giving a monkey a shower (Nope)Surfing tidal waves (I went swimming)Creating nanobots (How small is nano)Or locating Frankenstein's brain (It's over here! )Finding a dodo bird (Nope)Painting a continent (Check! A very small part of one!)Or driving your sister insane (Phineas! ) (Check!)As you can seeThere's a whole lot of stuff to doBefore school starts this fall (Come on Perry)So stick with us 'cause Phineas and FerbAre gonna do it allSo stick with us 'cause Phineas and Ferb areGonna do it all! Edit: Me on the Eiffel Tower:

Yes. So I have done two playthroughs of vanilla career mode where I try to go to all of the planets as fast as possible (got 7hr 54m and 6hr 40m respectively, but only the first one is uploaded so far so that's the current official record) and something that's bugged me is that especially early on you don't get contracts to go places until you've already left. I had one to test a 3.75m decoupler orbiting the sun once. I had not even unlocked any 2.5m parts if I recall correctly, so i had to store it sideways and from the side, once the boosters had jettisoned, the rocket looked like a huge lollipop.

^^^

I would absolutely love to give this a go. I really really really want to. Except my free time is already minimal... Maybe in a few weeks/months. Thanks for letting me know about this!

What are the main differences between RP-0 and RP-1?

How long are you waiting before turning horizontally? If you're turning over too early you could end up in the mountains, but that could also happen on the way back down.

It's fine. Okay, so seeing as this is now more a control problem than an orbital mechanics problem. Left shift and Left control control the throttle (percent power) on liquid fueled engines. In KSP there are two main types of rocket engines, liquid and solid. Liquid require tanks and can be throttled and restarted any amount, and solid boosters are like fireworks, once you start them you cannot throttle them or shut them off. In addition to shift and control, pressing Z will instantly go to full throttle and pressing X will instantly go to 0% throttle. And as far as control I see you know what SAS is, it will try to keep your ship pointed the same direction, and you probably already know WS (pitch) AD (Yaw) and QE (roll) which is how you manually control the direction. You can use RCS thrusters in space or fins in the atmosphere to help with control authority. Generally try to put fins at the bottom of your rocket. You can also use reaction wheels to help turn, it doesn't really matter where you put those. And I saw your video, it looks like you're using the Russian localization. In that case I would like to say 2 things. 1, I have no idea how a Russian keyboard works so the keys are probably different. 2, great job on your English, I would never have guessed!

@Jeine092 Judging by the previous posts you're rather confused by the whole orbital mechanics thing. No need to worry, that's perfectly natural, it is rocket science after all! I'll try to explain it with all the technical terms if I can, at least to orbit. Basically, how to get into orbit the inefficient but understandable way: 1. Go straight up until your highest point is above 70 kilometers, preferably higher (100km). Turn off your engines. 2. Near your highest point turn over so you're facing sideways (the place where brown and blue meet on the navigation ball). 3. Fire your engines again, sideways, until your speedometer reaches about 2300 meters per second. If you did this at the right time and had enough fuel to get going that fast then in map mode you should see an ellipse instead of an arc for your flight path. This means you are in orbit, and if you are in orbit you should have a highest and lowest point. Expanding on that, here's some medium level stuff: An interesting visualization that shows this concept is something called Newton's Cannonball. Imagine your ship is the cannonball and the location of the cannon is your highest point is where you start firing your engines sideways from. If you don't accelerate enough you'll fall back to the planet (A and B), but if you accelerate enough the gravity of the planet will pull you down at the exact same rate that the surface curves away from you and that leads to a perfectly circular orbit (C). Due to the fact that gravity decreases with distance you can get non-circular orbits, which are called ellipses (D). If you go too fast you'll escape the planet's gravity entirely, called an escape trajectory. The shape this makes is called a hyperbola (E) but the names aren't that important. More medium level stuff and terms: The lowest point of your orbit is called the periapsis. The highest point is called the Apoapsis. If you increase your horizontal velocity at one, the other will increase. If you decrease your velocity at one, the other will decrease. Prograde is the direction you are currently travelling. Point this way to increase your speed/velocity. The prograde symbol on the navball looks like this: . The opposite of prograde is retrograde, the opposite of the direction you are going. point that way to decrease your velocity. It looks like this: . There are several other symbols but these are the most important ones and the only ones you need to know for now. Medium level orbits: So if you've tried to orbit the beginner way and succeeded, then here is a somewhat more advanced way. Instead of waiting until your highest point and burning sideways, it's more efficient (but more difficult to grasp) to slowly turn over on the way up so you continuously build up horizontal velocity. This is more efficient because as you accelerate sideways more you don't have to accelerate upwards as much because the surface curves away from you. This isn't really that important though and that bit might have gone over your head. It is also more efficient to launch into an orbit to the East, which is the 90 degree marking on your navball, because the planet is already rotating in that direction, giving you a little boost. The Mun also orbits in that direction so if you want to go to the Mun you should probably put yourself into this sort of orbit. So if this also goes over your head let me know, but if you can understand some of it please do let me know. Once you get this it's easier to get everything else. In fact once you get this, it's really only one more step to encountering the Mun, and two more steps after that to landing on it. So please let me know what you do get or don't get or if I have to explain it in a simpler way - I'm here to help!

Kopernicus and Kerbol Origins are out for 1.4.5 and OPM has been confirmed to work in 1.4.5 (there's a bit of weirdness that doesn't really matter).

File structure should be the same. I don't use mac but I'm pretty sure it should still work like that as long as you know where your KSP directory is. And it won't be called KSP_win64 because you aren't on Windows 64 bit. You should be able to use google drive or dropbox perfectly fine from a mac though. And when putting in a savefile for your next turn you'll probably want to delete the old one first because having 2 things with the same name rarely works out well. Lastly, are we still doing it in 1.4.3 or shall we upgrade to 1.4.5?

KSP_win64/saves/savename Upload savename folder to Google Drive or Dropbox possibly with your name and turn number suffixed to it so we don't get confused. We could have a shared drive folder or something.

So when will we start?

I do agree, the X-plane contracts weren't worth it for me either. I tried making one plane, tested it 4x and flew it once, it exploded. The main obstacle was the terrain gaps. I would also put emphasis on R&D. In our current campaign I have been limited by one of two things, build speed and R&D time. It's been R&D time for about 75% of the time. The version is one reason for the discrepancy... The other could be Test Flight. We're playing without it mostly because I had a bad experience with it in RP-0 0.90 when it took an hour to load the game and it would crash an hour later, and Test Flight reduced the actual progress to very little. But now I'm warming to the idea, TBH.

Yes, you've got to factor in that Kerbin is 1/10 the size of Earth.

Well I've been doing this wrong! I'm glad I know now!

They can do multiple at once? I didn't know that! I guess I've been doing it wrong this entire time!

Ahh, I've been doing an unnecessary step then! If you have multiple installs of KSP (I have probably over a dozen) then you probably need to have it in your game directory to keep it from getting confused.