EpicSpaceTroll139

Huh... I would think that thing would easily fly then. Maybe me assumption of linear torque / efficiency of power conversion with turbine radius is incorrect. To be honest I haven't worked with turbines of different sizes enough to have a good intuition on it. Good luck with it!

Ok I completed STS-2b and STS-3 in one go. Placed telescope into 560km 26.9° inclined orbit, made a massive set of orbital maneuvers to rendevous with the MulletDyne fuel tank in a 331km equatorial orbit, and brought it back to the KSC. I believe this qualifies me for the commander badge on the STS-2b and 3 missions. It was fun

@PaperAviator How heavy in tons is your heli there? Assuming your blowers are aligned so that their exhausts are impinging on the very edge of the turbine wheel (make sure they are, this is important for maximal power extraction and efficiency), your 6 blower 2.5m turbine setup should get pretty much the exact same torque as my 4 blower 3.75m turbine setup. So if it had the same rotor it could probably fly up to a weight of... somewhere around 80 tons I think, with burners on. Not sure how the tips on your rotor might affect things. This is also assuming ~5 degree rotor blade incidence. Also: Have you installed an antitorque system yet? I've found in testing that single-rotor helis sometimes won't take off if they don't have antitorque, even if they have enough power to do so with one on. I think it has to do with some of the developed power of the turboshaft being lost to spinning the heli. Edit: also I'd be happy to test the thing for you if you sent the file

Managed to crash a kOS script so hard the game crashed. Not exactly sure what happened there, as it worked perfectly fine once I rebooted the game. Had a pretty sunrise on a low pass of Kerbin in my shuttle. Anyways, tomorrow I'll probably finish off this shuttle mission. I'm bringing back a 40 ton tank from a 331km orbit, which gives the shuttle an amazing amount of kinetic energy. Trajectory predictions show that if I deorbit and put my periapsis at the usual 35km, and the thing will skip like a stone off the atmosphere again and again, circumnavigating the planet and then some, compared to the usual 1/3rd circumnavigation that I get unloaded. Might be partially because I have to us a lower angle of attack than normal because of its effects on shuttle's stability. I'm thinking that before my next mission I'll add a small, empty tank to the nose to allow better trim with leftover fuel reserves. I'm fine flying with aft cg, but I really wouldn't want to fly anything with cg farther aft than this.

Worked more on my combined collective + cyclic script. Currently it kind of works. Barely. It is quite jerky and sometimes will briefly reverse its response to controls. I think the culprit is a flaw in the collective, which isn't maintaining the rotor rpm properly. Hopefully this thing will work once that's fixed. If not, it might be that it's simply not feasible with the limited number of physics frames per rotation of the rotor.

Was going to do a pre-flight simulation of mission STS-3 for my shuttle, but for whatever reason, my script has decided to stop jettisoning the boosters. I even put told it to print "Has supposedly staged" immediately after the stage function, and indeed it did print that when it should have staged, but the boosters stayed stuck to the tank. If I hit space-bar they detach alright, but I don't get why they're not decoupling when the script tells them to. Literally nothing was changed about the staging of the vessel, or that area of the script. And the only thing I had changed in the script was the inclination the thing was supposed to launch to (26 degrees instead of 0). KSP/kOS mysteries... Also, while it was technically a couple days ago, I wrote a couple 12 line scripts that can be applied to stock reaction wheel prop planes to make them change their prop torque depending on the main plane's throttle setting. I want to work on them a bit more user-friendly, but then I think I'll release them. I think I could also easily modify the prop script to work for tip-jet rotors/props.

I've been working on a script to assist, and possibly eventually control part of a shuttle reentry. One of the first things I thought I should do was create a function that calculates and displays the instantaneous Lift to Drag ratio of my shuttle. I however think that I did my derivation from the acceleration vector wrong because it does not make sense for this thing to have a LD ratio of 29... Let alone of 117... It should probably be closer to 1 when hypersonic... Though given KSP's errordynamics, I wouldn't be surprised by 5.

The only objects I'm not sure I've been to are Pol and Vall. All the other ones I've been to. I know I've come back from the Mun, Minmus, Duna, Ike, and Eeloo. Don't remember for sure on the others.

Is it alright if I combine STS-2b and STS 3? It seems like a waste to launch with an empty cargo bay, and I think the large plane-change maneuver would be a nice test of my shuttle's delta-v budget.

Well it kind of makes sense. If you just rendezvous without paying much attention, about half of them will occur during the night side of the orbit. Unless you have owl eyes and/or have bright lights on your station, you're probably going to park nearby and warp until sunrise so you can dock without worrying about shearing off the solar panels or even just finding the port (partly why I put the batteries with the little green LED on my ports). Anyways, on topic: I think a more smooth movement of the camera upon docking would be nice, but I don't think it's really at the top of my list of priorities.

Pretty sure by "no spin stabilization" it means just like normal. With spin stabilization would be setting it spinning it like a top to keep it stable during the burns like I did. Edit: @hoioh my bad on not seeing you'd done STS 2a. I hadn't had the chance to look at you logs, and I misread the bit about bringing the tank down, so I thought your latest one was STS 1b

If by mission 3 you mean the STS-2a mission, in my previous post (the second post above yours), I completed the mission in a manner which qualifies for the commander badge (I hope). I went fancy and used carefully fueled solid kick motors to send my satellites to roughly the right orbit after deploying the from the shuttle, but I don't think there's anything that says you can't do the orbit boost using liquidfuel rockets, or even take the whole shuttle up to geo orbit.

Apparently we now have to be somewhere 25-40 because the second part has to be filled out lol. Anyways, I'm in college right now (19).

Completed the STS-2a mission. Out of curiosity, do I swap my current badges with their equivalent of the newer, fancier badges, or should I keep the old ones? All parts stock, 360km shuttle orbit, 3 spin stabilized satellite deployments, runway landing. I believe this qualifies for commander badge Edit: I hope my self-written launch and partial reentry control scripts are ok. The launch script was accepted in the previous thread (although it has seen pretty much a total rewrite since then to use vector math instead of headings). I wrote the 12 line partial reentry control script just before I reentered, simply to reduce the amount of babysitting of the attitude I would have to do. Was pretty much just "hold nose Pilot_input_x degrees above horizon." @Kaname not sure how to make that more stable. Perhaps a less aggressive pitch-over after booster separation? Might be that the high angle of attack is resulting in stalls on the wings.

I suppose I'll enter my Selenium I to the "Cars" category. It's a turbine powered super-car, which also features solar panels and fuel cells for casual road driving. There is a pure race version which has reduced weight and more power and thus can go faster, but it is harder to control so I decided not to upload that one.

Yep. Methinks this should be in the Gameplay Questions and Tutorials subforum

This is quite uh... vague... I'm sure many of us would be happy to help if you gave a more detailed explanation of what the situation is and what you are trying to do.

As far as I'm aware, no. There is no way to convert rotation produced by the reaction wheels into thrust in absence of some kind of exhaust. You could spin a wheel and decouple masses from the rim, but I'm pretty sure that you would always get a better exhaust velocity and thus efficiency from a regular rocket engine.

Ok, so in relation to a shuttle launch script I've been working on, I'm trying to create a function that generates the thrust and torque vectors produced by the engines. Since engine gimbals moving would obviously change the direction of the thrust vectors, I want to account for that in my equations. However I've come across something that's left me scratching my head, that is, what exactly does the "roll" of the gimbal mean? This is a test I ran. I told kOS to display the eng:gimbal:range*eng:gimbal:<insert_axis_here>angle as I figured this would give the angle the engine bell was deflected in each axis. I thought that, since there is only one engine, there should be no roll deflection at all, but apparently the engine somehow has roll gimbal? This would only make sense if there were vanes in the nozzle, or multiple that could add swirl to the exhaust plume, but the engines don't really act like that. The rapier, mammoth, and twin boar are the only ones with multiple nozzles. So really there is only two axis that the engine deflects in, the pitch and yaw axis. If you have two engines on opposing sides, they can produce torque in the roll axis by deflecting in opposite directions in the pitch axis, but they themselves are not gimbaling in the roll axis. So how do I make mathematical sense out of this? Am I missing something simple that would allow my script to get what it needs? Not even really sure if this is a kOS question or a KSP question.

Continued working on the shuttle launch script. Almost done with the main part of the script. Latest test was doing the circularization burn... Looks like I'll need to add a function in to pump fuel around, vary thrust distribution between SMEs, or both to account for shifting of the center of mass. It did get within 1/10th of a degree of the desired orbit inclination however! Thinking I might add an extra thingy that suggests (and perhaps performs the first steps of) the appropriate abort mode if the abort action group is hit.

Thanks for the tip, but the thing has been stable for my purposes. The last picture might look like it's having stability problems, but that is simply the program rolling the shuttle from the belly-up orientation to the belly-down orientation, meanwhile keeping the nose pulled back a bit to keep the SMEs properly aligned with launch trajectory in case they're still burning (in this case they're not).

Not sure if this should go in work in progress thread or here, but whatever. Worked more on my shuttle launch script. It now does the first part of the launch much better. Doesn't fall over and fly sideways a bit before crashing into the ground like it used to. It also now takes Longitude of Ascending Node as an input for the desired orbit parameters. Gonna be a while before I do Eccentricity and Argument of Periapsis, if ever. The current "gravity turn" equation may be a tad is very aggressive though. Should probably try not to be glowing when I reach orbit.

Pretty sure there never were any Aeris or Albatross 1s and 2s. I don't remember on the Ravenspear.

Decided to finally revisit my shuttle launch script and try to figure out what's wrong with it. I told the script to draw a whole bunch of the vectors it uses for the steering. It may lok like a mess but you can see the Launch vector (where the shuttle is supposed to point the nose) and the Roll vector (where the shuttle is supposed to point the ceiling of the orbiter) going off in some oddball directions. I think I must have mixed up some cross-products in the generation of these vectors because KSP is silly and uses left-hand rule system instead of right-hand rule. Also used a simple stall-horn script to help land a small non-vtol-capable plane on the roof of the VAB, launchpad, and numerous other buildings. I also managed to take off from these places, though due to not being very careful in my takeoff direction, I bounced my wheels on the ground briefly after taking off from the launchpad.

I haven't done gotten there in a while (usually takes a glitch or hyperedit), but last I recall you simply stop moving. Your velocity drops to zero and that's pretty much it.