HalcyonSon

How about not jumping down my throat when I'm trying to get my game to work and in the process of thanking someone for updating a mod that he really didn't have to?? Yeesh. Anyway, thank you jrbudda for updating this! I've delayed updating to 1.3 and now 1.4 because I depend on KER and don't feel like learning to develop mods myself. Your fork works great so far, though I'll admit I've only tested a couple small rockets.

Downloaded KSP 1.4.2 this morning and found that the KSP 1.2.2 versions of KER and Bon Voyage cause it to crash before it has finished loading. KAC works, though the buttons don't load. Navball DPAI works fine, but gripes about old version. Praying that jrbuddas' version of KE works, because 9/10s of my early ships have Engineer Chips. 7/10s of my later ships have BV antennae. Fingers crossed!

Motorized wheels with range of motion similar to the aircraft landing gear would be a huge asset! It would be much easier to tuck a small rover into spaceplanes and service bays. It would reduce part count on bases, mining stations, and large manned science rovers. ...I take it that's not what we got in 1.4?

That looks like an absurd amount of fun. I wonder if it's possible using stock parts? Could probably get by with a pair of canards and separatrons... Ion engines may be enough for something that small even in atmo...

Help! I can't find a version that works in 1.2.2!

Finally got the 0.625 m design working right. Gave up on new bearing designs with reduced part counts and went with what worked on the 1.25 m design. The motors themselves easily fit into a Mk 2 Cargo Bay or 2.5 m Service Bay, but the props stick out. Still working to make the rotors mate back to the housing and make the prop blades detachable. https://kerbalx.com/HalcyonSon/Electroprop-sm-1

Motor testing continues apace... with lots of lost bits and explosions. You know, typical Kerbal fashion. All-RCS ball bearings don't seem to be quite as stable as RCS/thermo bearings. The 0.625 m motor fits neatly into a 2.5m service bay or Mk 2 cargo bay, but the propeller blades stick out. It might be possible to place the propellers on docking ports, though I'm not sure what kind of ground equipment you'd need to replace a prop. I'll play with it more tonight and try to get something on KerbalX.

I appreciate the offer. Your designs look elegant, but very very large. I've been looking at erasmusguy's stuff too. I tried out his eg02, but that thing has a nasty roll on a plane as small as what I've been testing. His outer solar panel rotor is interesting, but lacks punch when it's scaled down. I have a few ideas I'm toying with. It seems that compact engines are even more difficult to make effective than large ones, so I'm trying to combine small slick bearings with multiple types of rotor vane. Also testing different ways to negate or occlude the jet thrust to prevent roll. I thought fairings would work for that, but they really don't. I pushed a plane right off the runway with a pair of junos pointed sideways in a closed fairing. A service bay might do the trick, but that's a very very small space to work with, and I'm not even sure the jets will start in a closed service bay.

My design can probably be shrunk to 0.625 m with some creative offsets. I happen to be using the 1.25 m inline fuselage as the root for my plane, and I want a fairing to minimize drag, but all the critical components are smaller. You could use a 200 EC 0.625 m battery inline, slip an RTG down the middle, then move the docking ports till the housing ports overlap in the middle with an octostrut capping the bearing... Shoot, I might play with that idea tonight. I'll have to look into sending the craft files, maybe post them on KerbalX. I'm currently working on a turboprop that fits into a 1.25 m fairing. Most of them are much larger, with a much higher part count than I like to deal with. It seems to take a lot more fiddling to get a turboprop working than it does an electroprop. My 2 and 4 Juno designs go faster AFTER the prop has burned and smashed to little pieces than they do when operating as intended.

Ditto! Asking the real questions. KAC and KER are my only "must have" mods. The Navball Docking Port Alignment indicator is right up there too. Other stuff like Texture Replacer (Replaced) is just a "nice-to-have." I never knew the toroidal tanks were actually hollow! Has anyone used them for a hinges or bearings with 0.625 m parts?!

I built a narrower but longer rover... My medium wheels overlap at their mounting point which is well ahead of the main body, with struts to hide the fact that I had to offset them so far. I tried mounting them at an angle, but anything more than about 15 degrees meant the drive and suspension stopped working. My solution to the "vault and explode" was to place the docking port well above the floor on the forward bulkhead of the cargo bay... of course, this means the rover has to use a larger reaction wheel to get the backside in the air to re-dock.

Bearing details. All those joints can get a bit wiggly, and it doesn't take much for the rotor to get cockeyed and pop the RCS ball outside the Thermometers. I've tried rebuilding it with an I-beam down the middle and struts holding the end reaction wheel to the I-beam, but it was even more wiggly than before.

I've seen (between the forum and youtube vids) three main styles of bearings (Stayputnik / Fairing, Stayputnik / Structural Fuselage, and RCS ball / Thermometer). Smaller hinges (not motors) use Antennae and Thermometers. My attempts at the Stayputnik / Structural Fuselage / Fairing were less successful than my designs with the RCS ball and Thermometers. It's fairly sturdy and reasonably low friction as long as the clearances are just right. I have a single OKTO2 probe core attached to ten 0.625m Reaction Wheels with four 400 EC batteries on the rotor, and use a 1.25m fairing and 1.25m : 0.625m adapter on either end of the housing. I use 8x symmetry and overlap the RCS balls on either end of the rotor, then cage them in 8x symmetry thermometers on each end of the housing with the propeller and nose cone offset from the end of the rotor to outside the housing. A 0.625 m decoupler holds the rotor to the housing on load-in, and is offset so it blows clear of the motor after staging. I can tell you right now, that docking port won't reattach. You need about two meters straight out (maybe more) before they'll reset and reattach to the same port. I'm testing a docking port between the side of the rotor and the inside of the housing now, but haven't got it sorted. If you haven't played with it yet, Bon Voyage is a great mod for rovers. It lets them traverse in the background so you don't have to constantly reload or repair blown wheels.

Tried that already. Didn't work. Luckily it's a simple design - the entire plane is probably 12 pieces - and I didn't lose much time screwing with it. It was hard to tell what happened at first, because I would see the engines flame out at about the same time they hit the ground and exploded and the plane bounced back into the air... before hitting the ground and exploding. The goliaths are nearly as tall as the Mk3 fuselage parts, so I couldn't be sure the landing gear compression wasn't allowing the engines to hit the ground. One little strut fixed the problem where even autostrut couldn't. That's one thing I'm enjoying with stock prop planes - they're so impossibly slow that max achievable speed is barely enough to blow up a cockpit on impact. They'll fly reasonably well at 15 m/s, so stalling is never an issue (unless the engine wiggles loose of the bearings).

Yeah, I fixed the problem with the engines falling off. Tried autostrut at first, and that didn't cut it, so I buried a strut inside the engine mount to the wing. I thought it was a weird effect because I haven't seen that with any other engine. Even with only two Goliaths, my version is absurdly over-powered when compared to the real deal. I haven't tested the cargo capacity yet. So far, I've only carried a manned science rover to the next continent over. Building something narrow enough to fit on the Mk3 cargo bay floor was a challenge in itself. I would build a rover that fit the widest part or the bay, but then couldn't drive out because it wasn't flat on the floor. I thought so. I've been struggling to fit a materials bay with medium wheels into the standard Mk3 bay. I like the removable wheels though - I did something similar on my Duna / Ike rover that includes room for 12 Kerbals and a science bay. Wheels and parachutes are mounted to i-beams and docking ports so that an RCS only mini-tug can connect them in transit. The whole rover (minus parachutes) will land on Ike, then grab more fuel and chutes from an orbital tug, then cruise over to Duna and explore some more.

This thread is getting a bit stale, isn't it? Don't care - I just flew my first ... well, second ... successful prop plane from KSC to the island. Suchel very much enjoyed her first joyride around KSC, but Haldun's trip was more fraught with danger. Suchel's joyride topped out at 65 m/s in a wide-gapped, open-air, rattle-trap that nonetheless had zero issues. Haldun's trip to the island topped out at 105 m/s but started out with about a dozen false starts where the motor dashed itself to pieces against the fairing or departed the aircraft entirely, or the prop pitch adjust sent the motor into shock which required the fairing be dumped to allow a go-round back to KSC. I've found that a perfectly balanced electroprop is a nightmare to glide once it's lost all of the nose-forward weight of the engine, but due to the extremely low speeds involved, nearly any landing (crash) is survivable.

They would have to fart out he window... them's some chilly buns!

Is that Mk3 Cargo Bay tweakscaled? That rover looks much larger than anything I've been able to squeeze in.

I built a USAF C17 ripoff... really just a simple STOL cargo plane. Goliaths on a Mk3 start getting toasty above Mach 1, and get VERY unhappy pushing that brick close to Mach 2. So unhappy that the heat they generate will *poof* the wings. If I manage to keep it sloooow, the stupid engines fall off the first time wheels hit the runway (even at 0.5 m/s sink rate). It's a work in progress.

How do you DO that?!

Reminds me of the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft setup at the Houston Space Center.

I have yet to make my mining rigs actually useful. So far, they've only been a means to complete surface station contracts. Much easier to fill up 6,000 units of fuel after landing an empty tank on Mun rather than trying to launch a full tank. The crew capsule, refining rig, and fuel storage were launched on top of each other and reconnected side-by-side using docking ports. I am getting more creative with them though - I pulled an "expand station" contract, so I sent a Science Lab as part of that launch. I'm about to send a mating adapter so I can dock an existing Science Rover to the newly renamed Minmus Surface Research Base - which was previously called the Minimal Minmus Mining Mission.

Good idea, but it didn't work for me. On closer inspection, the fairing juuust clipped the corner of the Gigantors in the VAB. The moment they become "ship" and "debris," the dumped fairings interacted with the panels and destroyed them. Ion powered interplanetary ships don't work well when you lose 3/4 of the solar panels.

I feel your pain. Same if you build your fairings too tight - even if you release them at zero throttle and over 70 km. Surely fairings aren't there just to PROTECT the SENSITIVE solar panels and antennas?! "Perfect gravity turn! Fairings released! Hey what's that glinting in the sunlight...?? Krud... mission failed."