Jonfliesgoats

My gravity turns always suck. The math behind efficient gravity turns looks great, but the effectof me constantly making course corrections, correcting a little too much one way or the other robs me of a fair bit of DV. Also, if I am interested in saving DV by doing a gravity turn it means I don't have much DV to spare. If I don't have much reserve DV, the success of my launch depends entirely on the smoothness of my thumbs. So for every time I manage to get some extra mass into orbit with a good turn, I wind up jacking up a launch and raining tons of orbiter down on kerbin.

Full throttle reduces DV loss to gravity to be sure. With a bulbous, goofy payload, throttling for control becomes a necessity, but the window where aerodynamics causes problems passes quickly. So even with control difficulty a high TWR can be used to minimize gravity losses. When the throttle comes back up, smooth throttling allows a manageable control situation and gives you a chance to slowly approach controllability limits v. bashing your head into those limits with extreme vigor. I think we lose like ten percent of ours to gravity and only a few pwercent to aerodynamics, so..,you know...get fast as fast as you can.

I was trying to convince my friends to build sugar rockets with me, and they told me about KSP.

I shoot for about 2 at a minimum. High TWR let's you rapidly accelerate to 300m/s, get above most of the atmosphere by 10-15k and then rapidly ascend. You can offset some of the flipping through gentle application of throttle, too.

My previous career Jeb lives in the astronaut complex. My current Jeb died when I clumsily yawed into an uncontrollabe position during reentry. I was eating a snack (wasabi almonds!) as it descended through 20000 meters, so my love of salty snacks cost Jeb his life.

"This children's game is nothing! I professionally airplane and engineer in real life so I know how to...and Jeb's dead. Well, this time I will use my superior intellect and insight to..and I killed more Kerbals."

The planes spawn on a 090 heading. Once the physics engine kicks on, a little after you see your plane, it settles onto its landing gear, weight gets distributed among parts, etc. This sometimes causes a little bit of heading change. Beefier landing gear and a stiffened airplane design should fix this problem.

Way to go, Jovus! The actual work of fielding a new aerospace system, be it a rocket, airframe, accessory or even a procedure requires a lot of slow, tedious work. Watching one of your projects at work, regardless of what role you play in the development process, is still a thrill. I am genuinely excited KSP got you fired up enough to do this! I just landed in Guam, and this made morning,

I landed in Japan and found myself thinking "Should I focus on capturing asteroids for orbital refueling or improve the payload of reuseable rockets to decrease the cost of lifting more fuel from Kerbin?".

For me it seems they only work when I am within just a few hundred meters of the target craft. On PC, when I played on PC, they worked within ten kilometers or so. I think when 1.2 is released to consoles this may be hashed out.

Left bumper and d pad left or right. It does work but seems a bit finicky to me. If you still struggle you can do it laboriously tracking station too. On a side note, I play KSP on Xbox too! Yay us!

Tex Johnson! How did I not suggest him. Wan Hu was great too. Elon Musk is a great suggestion. You guys are chock full of great ideas! Alexeyev (sic) and Seversky are less famous but also very Kerbal. What do you think of Zeppelin who bout giant, complicated dirigibles full of hydrogen and painted with thermite? That seems rather Kerbal. American dirigibles like Akron and Mackn were capable of launching Curtis fighter planes which had no landing gear and were recovered with a trapeze system. They evolved from Zeppelin's work. Airships as nuts as that are pretty retro-Kerbal.

There's this emotional let down many of us feel after we hit some achievement, look around and think "That was it?". Unchecked you can kind of lose track of whatever passion got you into your field in the first place. Something similar happens when you become personally over invested in a program turn into a workaholic, etc. At some point you realize that even your best triumphs and greatest accolades really aren't that big of a deal. Perhaps this is the risk in marrying our identities to our professional and academic credentials? For me I bought an antique plane and got back to my roots. I rediscovered why I loved flying and later, why I loved engineering. I am happier and more productive at work and much less of a jerk at home. Along those lines, look at Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in the years after Apollo. Neil tried settling on a farm in Ohio and teaching at the University of Cinncinnatti. His marriage struggled. Buzz is still driving red cars and hanging out with blondes as he advocates for more space exploration. You get some sense that he is looking for some kind of satisfaction he just can't find. Hmm. I'm incoherent again. Time to put down my iPad.

I have some degrees. None of them mean that much really. I am definitely a legend in my own mind. Yay me!

Good responses, all! The loss of sleep thing is actually a benefit for me. I play KSP while relieving my wife during baby-duty when I am home. Flying pretend rockets keeps me alert enough to address my fussy baby at night.

I am on a trip for work at the moment. I will take another stab at an ornithopter when I get back home. I have been going with large wingspans and slow beats along with as light of a wing loading as I can get. a

Drop testing parts could be a nice spin on part testing contracts.

A wind tunnel mode has been suggested before. Listening to others suggest modifications to science I think we could have great ways to incorporate exploration into improved craft design. Imagine if you have the options to to set sliders in the wind tunnel for speed and altitude and get numeric data regarding lift and drag in kilonewtons and temperature in degrees kelvin. Adjust your craft angle to see these values at various angles of attack and sideslip. If you want to see these values for a particular planet, you can toggle Duna, Eve, Laythe or Jool providing you have explored them with probes and conducted atmospheric analyses. A separate, toggleable interface would give a much more detailed engineering report, provided you have invested sufficiently in R and D and perhaps, hired a specific engineer. KSP already computes these values in flight, so the code exists. Similar things could exist for testing suspension in the R and D center provided you have conducted gravimetric surveys of particular planets. This would be an additional reason to return to a body and conduct more science after you sufficiently improve your R and D center. Sending probes would make your larger designs much more efficient and reliable. Fun or no? This would also make the R and D center a much bigger part of the game than it already is.

Someone had an idea to link parts to specific achievements in sped, altitude, orbit, acceleration, etc.. I think that would solve a lot of this problem. At some point, I think science will be overhauled (I base this statement on nothing more than my intuition). When that happens I think it will be more challenging. On that note, this game needs to remain accessible to lure people into engineering and operational nerdgasms. If we make it too difficult we turn off a lot of people that just want to casuallly fly rockets and collect science.

The Boeing 747, including the 747-8 has steerable body gear (center main gear), but that landing gear is only capable of 20 degrees of pivot. The nosewheel is more akin to our medium landing gear than heavy gear. The A380 has no steerable main landing gear. A fully steerable heavy landing gear sort of feels like an over powered part, but, properly set up it may have some value.

This is a great idea! I also agree that it's silly an engineer has to plant a flag on the Mun in order to fix a wheel, but he can operate an off-planet drilling rig right away. Perhaps we have engineer experience affect their efficiency at tasks rather than their ability to perform tasks at all? Also, burning or a motor or failing an internal bearing is more realistic than shattering a tire. KSP could make the wheels look unhappy (charred or slightly off angle) rather than shattering them.

So what, specifically, are you trying to calculate? Many times we are talking about averages, (mean chord, mean camber, etc.). You can probably get within 10% of reality of those numbers with the data you have in front of you. You have rough dimensions of the JAXA craft in front of you via these drawings. Without actual technical data, you could eyeball this to get close enough. It looks like this thing will stall around 30-40 degrees AOA which is actually typical of delta wings. You can even use the data to figure roughly how steep this thing should glide once it's below the speed of sound. With regard to mass, you know what rockets the Japanese have and have planned. If this thing is going to ride one of those to orbit, it's not going to be much heavier than the other payloads they launch. I'll bet you imaginary donuts that you can google the relevant equations, make some rough estimates and get within ten percent of reality. You'll surprise yourself with how well you'll do. There's a famous story of an American engineer doing tins with satellite photos to estimate the performance of Soviet ground effect vehicles. I just saw this was two years old! Oops!

This is why I think a wind tunnel mode in KSP would be cool. IRL we still have to do wind tunnel testing because we still can't always predict exactly how a craft will behave as various parts interfere with each other. We get pretty dang close with computers, as others have said. With a wind tunnel mode in KSP, you'd get some numbers to calculate lift and drag coefficients at different angles of attack, yaw and with different control deflections. From there your could get a decent idea of the Amax, qmax and even estimate maximum reentry heating of your vehicle based on a given, reentry angle.

Hey! Do you want to reverse-engineer some stuff?

59 hours in 3 days? Welcome to the ranks of aerospace nerds! so in your 59 hours, what is the most challenging/rewarding thing you have managed?. Also, I was terrible in school. I didn't get my act together academically until I got to university. Doing your homework really does pay off, even if it seems sort of pointless.