Jonfliesgoats

"Meat Poodle" sounds like a great metal band!

Very true! I am playing on Xbox which is still waiting for 1.2. Spread angle became a factor in 1.2. You can approximate this, though. If your canopy is offset less than thirty degrees from the slipstream (vertical) you should be within 90% percent of these. If you are highly clustered, a 45 degree offset means your canopies are only about 70% effective. IRL canopies also interfere with each other and generate lift rather than simple parasite drag (drag which varies as the square of dynamic pressure). So canopies close together will jelly-fish, interfere with each other and really lose quite a bit of lift. KSP doesn't model that stuff yet.

Stock. I am not sure about FAR.

Okay, now I really have to go...

Sure I just used the drag equation. Substitute the rho (free stream air density) values. I find from my experience on Kerbin that the above figures are pretty accurate.

Also, I imagine Jeb pointing straight up, nostrils nonexistently flaring as he makes unblinking eye contact with me. I can't imagine Jeb delicately climbing to 20km, accelerating, pitching oh so gently skywards and only then belching flame and money out rocket bells. Right! Parachutes, drag in general varies geometrically with dynamic pressure. I ran the numbers and saw I could get down to a SL vertical speed of 30m/s with only two radial parachutes and 20m/s with four. Up until now I have been massively inefficient with my parachutes. Whoops! Late for work! I look forward to reading more of everyone's rocket insight! Thanks for the help an conversation!

Already been down that way! Actually the whole reason I had speedbrakes as far forward at they were was to provide more pitch control as the center of pressure moves with different angles of attack. The design actually works great provided I don't lower my AOA too soon and start cooking my craft. I am not opposed to a wee bit of wing on a vthl or vtvl design. Scaling up my vtvl lifting body was more of a challenge. Perhaps I will return to it?As is my reuseable rockets only get about fifteen tons of payload to LKO. 7 tons if I am entirely reuseable.

A VTVL lifting body is an option. All you'd need is a relatively low drag wedge, which launches easily enough. Adjusting alpha on reentry would give you decent control and provide the benefits of a lifting reentry too. I experimented with this successfully some, but had trouble scaling it up enough for the payloads I wanted to deliver. Once subsonic, I would deploy parachutes and splash down. I had a similar problem with using speed brakes during a lifting reentry. When I wanted to get less draggy, I would lower my alpha but the heats at my leading edge stagnation point would go sky high even from LKO. Guess where my speed brakes/spoilers were? If I could round off the leading edges a little more I'd get better heat distribution.

Very sexy! I am driving toward the math behind optimum rocket designs. VTHL is cool. Lugging whiplash engines, extra fuel tanks, intakes, etc gets out of control. A lot is about my personal tastes, too. After getting a spaceplane SSTO to orbit a few times, flying a long ascent and descent profile to put small payloads into orbit gets a little monotonous. Reliable, reuseable rockets get lots of stuff to orbit quickly and have negligible increases in cost. HOTOL has its place though. It's just not my idea of fun after five or six times. Also, I am more familiar with high performance aircraft, so fixed wing spaceplanes don't seem as exotic or exciting as rockets. Again, this is just a function of my personal tastes.

Desired Vertical Speed (m/s) at Kerbin Sea Level. Mass per Radial Parachute. (tons) 5 .4 10 1.7 20 6.8 40. 27.2

You have a working lander! You can fret about efficiency, like we all do. That's part of the fun of the game, right? At the end of the day, efficiency is a luxury while reliability is a necessity. You have a reliable lander! Show it off! Brag to your friends. Make your wife review your math! Have your children draw picture of rockets against their will!

Each radial parachute can support about 1.7 tons at about 10m/s at sea level on Kerbin. So a 20 ton vessel should require about twelve parachutes (which is in line with what I use.) to safely splash down. So I am carrying 1.2 tons of parachutes alone! If reduce my parachute load to only lower my craft under canopy at 20 meters per second, each radial parachute should be able to support a little more than six tons. That means only three or four radial parachutes would be required and a teensy burn at touchdow would slow my craft to a survivable landing! I could save .6 or .7 tons! Only .4 tons of fuel Can slow from 300/3000. Only trace amounts of fuel would be required for that final slowdown on touchdown! Have you guys experimented with rocket assisted parachute recoveries? It seems this is a nice way to save weight without carrying large reserves of mulligan propellant. I bet I can seriously reduce my funds spent on SRBs!

My reliance on parachutes is a display of my rocket-cowardice. How cool would it be to have altimetric switching in stock to initiate some of these burns?

Very cool, valens! I have tried rotating re entries to distribute heat but but always did it with a slow rate, which probably wasn't fast enough. From LKO I have recovered rockets without heat shields too. I do wimp out and thrust to pass through qmax as quickly as possible (usually a burn around 25000 meters). With regard to slashing down, I find my parachutes sequentially disappear, so the ones mounted high also slow that final tip of my rocket onto its side. Also, guys, I started playing with my calculator. Given a 20 ton rocket with a 280isp motor and speeds of 300m/s at 3000 meters altitude, I came up with the following landing fuel requirements. A free fall to a single landing burn would consume a mere .4 tons of fuel. Of course a second too soon or a second too late and your rocket explodes on landing. Realistically, I think it would take about a ton of fuel to make a decent landing from a 300/3000 window. This accounts for corrections, errors and a less suicidal profile below 100 meters. Do these figures check with your experience? So, assuming smoke sloppy flying, having more than a ton of parachutes becomes wasteful and a landing burn or combination thereof becomes more efficient, right?

better question: Am I flying an efficient landing? I use aerodynamic braking fine tuned with speed brakes to get a 20t dry mass rocket down to about 3000m and 300 m/s over KSC or Booster Bay, then deploy parachutes. I have neglected the math on this phase of flight!

I play on Xbox and am at work ATM, so pardon my lack of screenshots. I agree about NS being a little fugly. Also, my standard reuseable rocket can only get about 7 tons to LKO, maybe more if I fly a nice gravity turn. I can get that up a lot with disposable SRBs. Have you been using heat shields or just burning retrograde when you hit qmax? (Maximum aerodynamic pressure and heating). From the shots I see, there is little for heat shielding. I use tons of parachutes, and try to splash down near KSC. I wonder if it's more efficient to carry fuel for a powered landing or parachutes? There has to be some crossover point in mass.

Anybody want to share their latest and greatest reuseable rocket designs? It seems like KerbalX is loaded with spaceplanes. Even birds tuck in their wings when they are done using them! For those of us who think it's silly to lug wings into the vacuum of space, let's share ideas! (This is a shameless attempt to improve my own reuseable rockets on Xbox.)

The point of tweakable airfoils is to affect aerodynamic properties rather than aesthetics. I would imagine the same models of parts being used. Tweakable airfoils would modify the lift and drag properties of each wing and wing panel. Really a mean camber and leading edge radius could work. Even simpler, you could have the option t select supersonic, high speed, low speed and aerobatic airfloils. With regard to procedural parts, I am all about it. The problem is getting accurate modeling of fluid dynamics around those parts. That's a tricky feat, unfortunately.

Hopefully we can drum up support so wind tunnel mode arrives for KSP 3.0.

Hmm. On console we don't have 1.2 yet. Having GLOC with Kerbals means Kerbals have circulatory systems! This means Kerbals can bleed! Keep your Jebs away from sharps.

I interpret those as drop tests too, but we don't actually drop things. Having contracts to drop parts seems "Kerbal" to me.

This is a really good, really simple idea! Dunebugmi, you're hired!

Right! The regolith does nothing to make a better extraction turbine. I think we could get more science from recovery of craft AND positioning of craft. We learned a lot through mid course drift of the Pioneer probes which were never recovered. What about science points which can be sold and build reputation and a whole new system of engineering points for achievements with craft? Achieve a land speed of 100m/s with a 100ton craft: new landing gear! That makes a lot more sense than getting new landing gear by measuring the non existent atmospheric pressure on Minmus The tree of engineering acheivements would be visible just like the tech tree. Speeds, altitudes, accelerations, temperatures, rotational velocities all specific to particular situations and biomes would count.

Daveroski makes a good suggestion. Along his lines, how about this: Money unlocks tech nodes but some number of days must pass before you can use those parts. This simulates the commercial sector developing new materials, manufacturing techniques, etc. Scientific research would reduce this time. So you can sell science or you would conduct flights to make your unlock of parts more efficient.

Golden Princess' Eternal Search for Light