EpicSpaceTroll139

While I like the idea, and might use it every now and then, I can see why it hasn't been a thing (yet). As control surfaces don't require electricity (they really should require electricity or something), control of your aircraft does not require electricity (unless you're a drone, in which case you should probably have good battery and such anyways). Sure, maybe you'll lose your reaction wheels, but I've found that they usually don't make much of a difference even on small planes anyways, except in the edge cases that you spam them or have knife edge stability and extremely wimpy control surfaces. Don't get me wrong, I'd be happy to get a ram turbine (and power-drawing control surfaces), I'm just pointing out why squad probably hasn't added them. Now that I think about it, such a device would need to be carefully balanced to make sure it couldn't just create electricity from nowhere (Eg: reaction wheels spin a giant wheel with ram turbines at the edges, which power the reaction wheels, and so on. Then again we do get unlimited power from rtgs, so...)

Halfway correct. You can make your RCS thrusters fire with/as the main engines, but not the other way around.

Fell from a high place

Ah yes I saw that. Might take a look at the workings of that. Will have to watch a landing vid or try it myself to be sure, but I think my landing strategy might be different. Mine uses a Vernor RCS system to tilt the rocket and use aerodynamics to move it from side to side as needed, and only turns on the engines at the last second (TWR never dips below 5 or so during landing burn). Though perhaps a combination is best, perhaps arresting the vertical motion 10m or so above the surface, then using another loop to remove any remaining error, as it might actually not be practical to use aerodynamics as precisely as I'm trying to.

More a case of "you will not go to space tomorrow", but... Had that SpaceX landing leg failure moment.

Been working on a script to land a rocket back on the launchpad after its been sent up several kilometers and shifted a bit in some random direction. So far I've got an error range of about 20-30m. I think this is partly, but not due to some bug that results in the place the code thinks the launchpad is (seen by green line) for whatever reason moving east or west of the pad for no obvious reason, despite being locked to the geographic coordinates previously determined to be at the center of the pad. Though most of it is probably due to bad tuning of the PD loop, as it can be seen to land a significant distance away from the green line. A PID loop would be preferable, but I can't figure out how to make that work as horizontal distance from the launchpad is never negative, thus the integral term would never "unwind". Nope Got lucky this time! Leaning rocket of Kerbin. *Insert Cleveland "No no no no no nooooo!" as rocket slowly tips over* Planning to do some work on the skin of my Saturn V replica, to see if I can make it less ugly.

@Azimech that bug with the rotor-turbine assembly colliding with the baseplate on your Apache sounds very similar to a bug I experienced when building my E-24 helicopter. I had the same thing happen except my "baseplate" was one of the I-beams that made up the spine of the helicopter. The only way I found to fix it was to completely rip out the spine (in your case the baseplate) and rebuild the helicopter around a new one. I think it might be the result of the part getting bugged in the craft file.

Made a rocket do something useless Ok maybe it might be useful at some point but it's not for me right now. It can't even maneuver laterally. Ugh I need to figure out why my audio keeps getting out of sync when I edit in Lightworks!

So, a few months back I started work on a replica of the Saturn V and the various other components associated with the Moon missions. I started work first on the Lunar Module, as I thought it would be the hardest thing to build. Indeed it was, and it took me quite a while to get it working right with the custom legs and whatnot. It came out looking pretty good (imho) though! Finally finished with that vehicle, I started work on the Apollo CSM and S-IVB. Those are mostly complete now: I forgot to put on the boost cover between the CM and the LES though, and the CM could probably use some improvements on the details. I also need to modify that bottom bit of the fairing that's on the engine bell as it currently interferes with the engine firing. Also I have a bare-bones starter for the S-II stage. I made the basic structural tube for the S-IC stage, but I've kind of lost the drive I once had to finish the thing, no doubt due to my ADHD which has in the past made it hard for me to finish many work-intensive projects. However, I don't want this work to go to waste. Would anyone else be interested in continuing the project? I don't recommend this for anyone afraid of lag because just the portion from the S-IVB up totals 454 parts, and probably when everything is put together it will be 1k. If you are interested, please PM me! We can discuss... things... and I can share the craft files and help and... stuff... Anyways I'd love to be able to eventually release this as a joint project! Heck, redo significant parts of it if you think you can do a better job! I just feel like my lander is crying every time I scroll past it because it can't go to the Mun (Moon?) where it feels best at home. Notes: Scale is 5/6ths. Yes I know it's a strange number, but I started using it as my standard after I made my first replica, an Airbus A-380, and it just so happened to be 5/6ths scale, even though I hadn't started work on it with that in mind. I want my replicas to have accurate scale relative to each-other, and it would have been a PITA to rebuild the 450 or so part A-380, so that's why they've all got that oddball scale now * This "ish" comes from the fact that I have edited the craft files to some degree to put more fuel into some fuel tanks, eliminate the capacity on others, increase/decrease thrust for some engines, not because I couldn't make the thing work with default part settings, but simply because I want to reduce the number of parts used. As it stands it's probably going to be about 1k finished, I don't want it to be 1.5k because of using a lot of fuel tanks and clipped engines (there aren't any engines big enough and with enough thrust to match the massive F-1s, even at somewhat reduced scale). Despite these edits the craft will be fully loadable in any stock game (well, assuming your computer can handle it) and will fly the same.

It's been so long while since I made or flew a SSTO (intentionally). So I made one. Worked quite well. Now back to working on my shuttle for the mission. Then lets see... I should finish my Apollo replica... and my CH-53E replica... and a lot of other things...

Been testing that "robotic arm" thing I made earlier. Looks like I'm either going to have to do some redesign, or get a lot of practice using it, because the sections inbetween the grabber bit and the shuttle like to hinge in directions that block me from moving to where I want to go, like directly across the cargo bay, and which might also make it hard to fold back into the stowed position. Still, it's a neat thing. Might try to create a kOS script to limit the speed in each direction, since sometimes I can accidentally get it moving such that it acts like paddle-ball.

Well this is the thing: My shuttle is definitely way overkill for launching a few satellites to geo orbit... Maybe I should go overboard on the size of the sats so it feels more reasonable...

Adding to what @MiffedStarfish said, I've made stock solar powered propeller planes before, which would have no trouble circumnavigating the planet as many times as you like. The real question is Do I feel like flying that long just to demonstrate that it can? and the answer is, to quote The Office, "NO! GOD! NO GOD PLEASE NO! NO! NO! NOOOOOOO!" I don't know, maybe one of those guys with those aerodynamic zero-drag-fairing exploit supersonic prop planes would be happier to do it.

I redesigned and tested my new helicopter. Gives sort of an attack helicopter feel now. Wanna build the aesthetics on that. Can go pretty fast too. Wish aero effects were based on the velocity of individual parts instead of vessel COM, it's kind of disappointing to see aero effects on the wrong side of the retreating rotor blade. Also designed a robotic arm thing to help deploy sats from my shuttle for the next mission.

Flew my shuttle to orbit again. Had some slight problems on reentry due to forgetting to turn on auxiliary RCS, but still landed safely. Flew my new heli some more. Might release after a bit more work

Thanks! Funnily enough on this launch the script actually ran less of the flight than last time. I had the circularization burn part removed as I'm working on improvements, so that was done manually. Also during reentry I didn't use a script, but rather just gave a few commands, such as "set steering to heading(90,30)" which holds my pitch at 30 degrees above the horizon, because I was too lazy to babysit it. I plan to try to add a reentry script at some point... gonna be really hard though.

STS-1b successfully completed! Took the MulletDyne fuel tank up to a 331km circular orbit. Had a slight problem on reentry due to forgetting to turn on my auxiliary RCS system, which provides roll and extra pitch control. The crew recovered however and landed safely! Edit: might end up reuploading the video. Not exactly sure what the heck happened to the audio in the end. Completely out of sync

I designed a new heli with an articulated rotor. I also somehow managed to mutate and clone my kerbal while flying it. I tried to make the tail look like it had NOTAR but it didn't quite work because it's beyond the edge of the rotor... ah well

I always saw our turboprops as representing, well, turboprops, but whatever! To each his own.

Sounds cool, but when you think about it, adding a turbocharger to a jet engine... does that even make sense? I mean... That's pretty much how jet engines work already...The exhaust drives turbines which power a compressor which gives air to the combustor which produces hot exhaust which powers the turbines and provides thrust and so on...

Tried to visit a friend in DMP in a jet car. Got within 3km then bottomed out the suspension on a small hill. Tried to visit in a helicopter. Went well... ...until I landed, and my rotor disappeared. Then 30 seconds later it respawned inside the fuselage flipping the thing upsidedown. Tried to visit in a plane shipped on a rocket. Should have given the fairing more ejection force.

I love it!

You might be able to learn some from the stock helicopters and turboprops thread:

Messed around with a modified version of @jfrouleau's Flapping Blade Demo heli. @Cupcake... ya think you could pull off some of your magic piloting shenanigans in something like this? It handles surprisingly similar to one of those dropship things of yours!

Do you have the AJE (advanced jet engines) mod? It modifies jet engine performance to be more similar to real life. Without it jet engines can seem overpowered in FAR. It might also be helpful to have a picture of your plane. You may have just stumbled on a design with really low wave drag or something.