Baricus

How exactly do the pistons fire? I know you have the fuel tank/piston head that is pushed by the engines, but what stroke order did you use to allow you to let all the jet engines run continuously? I assume that's why you needed a starter rocket engine, so that it could build up the necessary rotational speed to push the piston heads against the thrust from the engines. I still don't see how you get energy out of that though, as its looks like its pushing on it the whole time. I know its something simple I'm not getting here. . .could someone explain it to me?

I find they work great on sky-cranes, especially for heavier payloads. Most of the time, though, I use them on spaceplanes for a little extra thrust (I guess that applies to rockets as well). They also look pretty neat if you clip them in a little so that they mesh with the side of the tank they are attached to.

Sorry that it took so long for me to get back to you @Cunjo Carl, I tried out what you suggested (unfortunately no pictures yet), though I think that I messed up the resonance, because I forgot to account for time to escape. Do you know what the altitude was for the resonance orbit? The time to periphrasis has given me an intercept around 15 years into the future, but as I warped to the last maneuver my computer crashed. Once I get the computer issues sorted out I'll try to get to an intercept one more time before transitioning over to 1.2. Afterwards, I have a few ideas that might be able to make my design practical for actual use. The lag my current design generates is killing it. Also, I looked back, and I'm pretty sure that the first stage is in some of the pictures. Its a little hard to tell, because it very hard to put the whole contraption onscreen at once. The part with the giant white fuel tanks is the first stage. Afterwards it decouples and the reaction wheels next to it spins the tether faster for the second launch. My first post showing the actual design has some pictures of the first stage. The one in the VAB shows it and there are a few pictures in the spoiler near the end of the post. I'm sorry that I can't upload more pictures to make it clearer. Once my computer troubles get fixed I'll see if I can.

Well, I tried to post this a few weeks ago and then the forums lost it all. I've finally got the time to rewrite this though, so I guess here's my (hopefully first) entry to this challenge (finally). After my failures with interplanetary travel, I decided to start with something a little smaller. I set a maneuver node for the Mun (after looking this appears to be a photo from when hyperedit glitched and I needed to reload. The ship started at a 250km orbit, not suborbital as is shown here. I sadly cannot find another picture until after I fired the first stage which is in the spoiler below). Of course, I missed completely. I mean, this thing is almost impossible to aim. Yet somehow, when I looked at the map view. . . I had gotten ridiculously lucky. I have no clue how that happened; I still don't really believe it myself. It seems this contraption has a lot more power than I thought. Somehow I was able to send Allan to the Mun in: Needless to say, Allan did not survive to witness the celebrations that took place upon his "successful" journey. So through the magic of quick-loading, I altered his trajectory using his jetpack. After a close Mun flyby, he exited the Kerbin system to find himself on a final orbit of about 13 billion m by 8 billion m, which crosses Eve's orbit. Unfortunately, it seems it will take a very long time for anything interesting to happen for Allan. I looked ahead for a while, but he didn't end up encountering anything. The design hasn't changed much, the earlier photos are still accurate. If anyone's interested, i can put some more photo's up of the actual launch process, but it is pretty much identical to my earlier posts. I can't wait to see what some other people will come up with for this challenge. I have a few ideas floating around in the back of my head, but they all seem rather outlandish. I think @Cunjo Carl summed it up perfectly, faster = farther. PS: when I looked at the picture again, it seems this thing was able to impart somewhere over 1000 m/s onto Allan. I don't really know the exact numbers, but that looks like it should be plenty for an interplanetary transfer. Maybe its time to head back to Ike.

While I had a habit of pressing f1 without really knowing what it did, just tapping through all the function keys, the first screenshot that I know that I wanted to take is this: It is my first successful mun landing, which needless to say, did not remain successful for long. It was not thought through at all and immediately after taking this I realized that I didn't have enough fuel to go home because I never connected fuel lines to the outside tanks, not to mention it lacked a parachute and decoupler . I don't think I ever got them home. . .

In an oversimplified way, yes. Just because we cant see something doesn't mean we want to. The case changes whether you are referring to Kerbin or another planet, but either way it is the same end result. Kerbin: Other planets: If your goal is to increase the amount of exploring players do, this is not really a wrong way to go about it, as it would certainly force players to do some sort of "exploration task" that is built into the game, whether it is mapping satellite or just simply getting close enough. What it does not actually achieve though, is making the player want to explore. The reason why we explore is not to discover the unknown, it is to satisfy our curiosity about the unknown. Just simply draping a curtain over the planets makes them unknown, but it does not make you curious about them, especially if the only action necessary to uncover them doesn't even require exploration at all. Instead, it becomes a quick chore to do before we can do more interesting things, just like sending the resources satellites up before mining. In my opinion, SQUAD has already put a way to incentivise exploration into the game. All they did was make that one monolith easily visible from the space center screen (I assume done while they fixed the other hidden surprises). In that one stroke, they show the player a peek behind the curtain and hinted at what else there is to explore out in space. This little easter egg, just by being very badly hidden, hints at all the others that are hiding everywhere in the solar system. It makes you curious and you start to look for them as you fly your missions. Eventually you'll find more (or hear about more) and you soon begin actively searching for them. To do so you scour each and every body in the solar system, exploring every mountain and valley to see if there is another interesting tidbit that was left there for you. You'll find the easter eggs, but you will also explore the land and find all the great sights that this game has to offer (unfortunately one of the areas it is lacking). Just through the easter eggs hidden away in the game, it incentivises you to explore much better than any fog of war system could.

While this feature sounds like it would add a nice feature to the game at first glance, it seems to me like it wouldn't make much sense at all in the way it was suggested. If a "fog of war" was implemented on Kerbin, in a manner similar to many strategy games, it would only break the player's immersion. It makes very little sense for the home planet of a species to be entirely covered by clouds or some other representation of the unknown until you happen to fly a plane over it. I doubt that the Kerbal race needs to put a telescope in a polar orbit to be able to tell where a mountain is (I could see it adding more detail to the existing map). All other planets also shouldn't be completely hidden from view. Its possible to simply look upwards and see five of the eight planets in the sky. Of course that tells us little about them, but we know that they exist and their orbits can be calculated from their motion. If some sort of system to obscure the planets was implemented, it would make more sense for it only to reveal information about the planets. Perhaps before you get into a planets sphere of influence, they appear as grainy, rough photos in the map view (or if you wanted to go all the way, they would be colored circles). Once you enter, it takes the best photo's that you have about the planet and uses them in the map view. The issue with this approach though, is deciding when you are close enough to take a better picture. A special camera part could be added, designed for taking photos of planets, but that might require a satellite in polar orbit to get the best pictures of a planet, due to its field of view. If there isn't a special part though, then exploration would wind up rather arbitrary. Overall, I don't really see a way that this feature could work and add something to the game, unless hiding knowledge from new players is considered an addition. It seems like something that would be great when considered by itself, but when applied to KSP, it does not create an incentive to explore and it does not fit with the general concept of the game.

I'm now on my fifth design, but I was rather surprised to realize that it performed so differently. I don't really know why I have a lot more deltaV though. It could be whipping affects, but I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that. Is it the same reason a whip's tip goes supersonic? My ship doesn't spin up fast enough for anything but a slight buckle during the start (its agonizingly slow sometimes). I think the main design difference that I've seen is that I have an offset tether while it appears everyone else has a symmetrical one. I think that while that design may provide a few benefits in the max RPM achievable, the extra deltaV might just be because mine is about 200 tons and as long as the SPH. I'm not really sure though, it could be either. This might help to explain it. . . Here's a shot in the SPH, just ignore the engines at the front as those were from my foray into launching through hacked gravity. I forgot the center of mass indicator, which would explain this a little better, but at the end of the long line of girders is the payload (the first stages treats that and the set of reaction wheels as the payload). All the stuff to spin it is on the other end, with the center of mass always as close to whatever is doing the spinning as possible which is why there is a ridiculous amount of fuel for the first stage. This, if I understand the physics right, acts almost like a lever, and propels the payload further for a lower overall RPM. However, since I made it so long, this quickly became a battle of structural integrity. Almost all of my major design upgrades involved struts or positioning pieces to be able to withstand the most possible centripital force. As you can see, this resulted in over 600 parts (KSP does not like it in the slightest) and most of them struts. I have a hunch that this is letting me spin a lot faster, which is probably what is giving me the majority of the extra deltaV. Currently the only limitation that I've found when revving up my second stage (the first will still break off if spun up to gaps between the tanks of about 1 inch on my screen) is this: Normally the kerbal is supposed to be inside of that service bay and the docking ports should be touching (the capsule in the other photo is just to get the kerbal there). This is just slightly under the limit of the seconds stage's max speed (no physics warp was used). I don't really have a way to track the g forces or RPM (the in game accelerometer surprisingly works from the center of mass of the craft), but I'm pretty sure this would not be pleasant. Even with the large quantities of struts, the girders still separate, its just that the payload now snaps before they do (before the second round of struts the reaction control wheels would snap off first and then the kraken would be summoned and/or kerbin's graphics would break). Needless to say, it does give me quite a lot of power to work with. In terms of actual missions I think I may have shot to high. I attempted to send Edlu Kerman back to kerbin, but I found that aim is the hardest part of this challenge. After wasting almost all 1,000 M/S of my deltaV by firing in the wrong direction I think I need a mod for slowing down time (assuming that is allowed). I was able to easily escape Duna's sphere of influence though, so I guess I'll take that as a consolation prize. I hope that I'll actually end up somewhere next time. The pictures of my spin at this are in the spoiler below. I will have to try again to see if I hit anything interesting. Its rather odd just how fun it is to spin these things up, I am constantly trying to guess if I can throw on a little more speed without it snapping in two. Its surprising addictive.

For me, it really depends on the save file. In my careers or other saves in which I am trying to run a space program, I try to ensure every Kerbal will come home alive, make sure that I don't do overly risky missions, and keep debris to the minimum. All in all, I just try and act as if there were consequences beyond the game for my actions. In different save files, which mainly exist to try the crazy things which I would not do in my other saves, I act entirely without moral guidelines. Pod racers, catapults and all the other crazy ideas I can dream up are created without regard to cost, practicality and morality. Any casualties or other issues in these saves are just considered part of the testing process and are entirely unimportant.

When I saw this, I knew I had to try it. I immediately booted up KSP and created a momentum tether which, after some testing with hacked gravity and no drag, seems to be able to impart a little over 500 m/s onto the flung Kerbal. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to launch an actual mission with it yet, as I wanted to go bigger with multiple stages and I think I went to big for my computer. I'm pretty sure that its mainly due to a fairing I created over the entire original tether, which ended up being almost as many parts as the original craft. Once I can get it up and running again, I will have an entry for your challenge, possibly a return to Kerbin if I can squeeze a little more momentum out of it. ---------------------------------------- I fixed my issues with my computer refusing to load the machine and I figured I might as well upload the results from my latest test, which got about 850 m/s onto the "capsule" (no Kerbal was inside at the time) even though the launcher snapped which prevented the use of the main source of acceleration. Please note this was done with hacked gravity and no drag to simulate space as I learned quickly it was a pain to launch this thing. I hope to launch an actual mission with this soon.

Hello! I have been viewing these forums almost since I got KSP a couple years ago and I was tempted to respond to countless threads, but I had never made an account on any internet forum, so I was afraid to go and make one. Now I finally gave in and made this account so I could start participating in the great community of people I have only been able to watch.