maceyneil

I have a ship with a swept back flower petal design powered by a single engine 900000miles from earth where there is no wind buffeting barrelling out of control all of a sudden. The ship design is balanced using the auto snap to feature and technically it is just a spear head of mass thrusted in a single direction against gravity and as i tried to align it even with gravity. I mean WTF i can understand the problems of the \'in atmosphere chair lifting\' designs causing this sort of problem, but there seems to be no rhyme or reason a balanced single directional thrust vehicle with 3 advanced SAS units and a vectored L2 thruster should be rolling like a marble in space.

The design basic idea was to try to keep a centralized grouping of powerful engines with peel away fuel tanks. later stages were added and were by necessity made self contained stages. This craft uses SAS as i have not tried to control it manually due to it being hard to tell where the \'front is\'. I have reached Minmus with about a fuel tank worth of heavy thrust to align myself with this ship and if i must say looks awesome as compared to your standard hot dog roll ships.

Here\'s my Friable Lotus Super Heavy Lifter Prototype (yes i haven\'t even finished tweaking it yet but the results are in. 4.3 big fuel canisters worth of fuel in orbit, over 30 salvageable parts inclusive of 4 of the mid type (maneuverable, thrust 175) engines. That\'s enough to make 4 separate functional landers ;P

A perfect \'Jeb\' Launch marred once more by the GUI.

I made a spaceship and naturally the most tacked on parts are on the bottom and the most aligned pieces are snap together by multiple copies on the top. When i reach stage 5 (the quad stage with the central minor booster) usually 250000feet the craft goes from the nice stability of lower atmosphere into an incomprehensible barrel roll. I can recover it when not under thrust, straighten and stop the twist but as soon as engines return to thrusting it\'s like a man standing on his toes on the edge of some stairs being shot with a cannon. Is there like massive jet streams in this game? Mad scientists arbitrarily changing thrust qualities of like engines? Or is this another example of why Jeb should not be allowed within known space of the space program.

I would have to agree with you at this stage (ver1.15) the greatest thruster you have can handle 5 fuel cells at 2.5 mass each and a glorified 3 stage rocket still has a bugger of a time escaping earths gravity well, which considering anything more expansive introduces crap-loads more drag as well as cataclysmic complexity to the build means there\'s currently some major balance problems. I mean explain why the rocket pictured should have problems getting more than a 3rd of the way to the moon? It has very low drag, the stages are balanced to continue the necessary amount of thrust to continue an increase to acceleration, it\'s re-enforced enough not to shake itself out of existence.

I prefer to go without mods so i can keep an eye on how the balancing in Kerbal space program is going. I mean anyone can mod fuel tanks to carry 5000% more fuel and thrusters that give the same explosive power as a nuclear bomb, but the fact of the matter is your really just cheating your way to the moon.

In trial I found that the higher thrust burners didn\'t propel you as high as those (good as a bunch of lighters) slow burners; the trick is you need to use them in triplets to get decent load bearing (almost equivalent to the 175 thrusters). Why this is so by logic is to do with wind resistance... the faster you try to go the more pressure the atmosphere gives to put you back in your place. The downside is wether it\'s worth the unit drag of a tri coupler over just a single 175 burn 7 thruster, but testing saids yes though logic saids no the numbers shouldn\'t stack up.