mystik

I smell a WOT player in the mist. Good read. The tank is soviet bias garbage. Your model is funny. Now make a T95 for extra sluggishness. In Soviet Russia tank drive you.

I will add this post from a different thread to use as reference, because the long trips to and from work help with ideas, which I like to keep for when I have the time to implement the plans. 1. I believe it is capable of landing and taking off from Tylo as it is now. It does require to visit some other moon first to refuel so a direct mission isn't possible. In fact, none of the missions can be direct, all must be done by "planet hopping". I launch it to orbit, then refuel it via another SSTO that carries lots of fuel, then continue the journey, not knowing it this will work for sure unless I try landing it there. 2. I think it is time to go 3 ways and experiment to see which is better: a. Make it 4 horizontal tanks and engine ratio it currently has. Because each tank has to pull less central weight, this will increase the dv remaining, but as long as I keep it aerodynamic to not create too much drag. This model isn't really that great because it makes the ship huge, clunky and heavy. Because I intend to land on planets with low gravity this will become a problem because I won't be able to control it very well on landings. The Spike engine under the ship won't be enough if I double the weight. This has low chances of success. b. Make it 3 tanks, making it look more like a prism. This requires switching to a delta wing to be able to carry the thing as the current layout will not allow for the thing to fly anymore. It is already on the limit and the wings would snap off the moment you try to make any maneuvers. Assuming you can actually take off. This has a moderate chance of success. c. Create an orbital tug ship that launches separately and functions as a rocket instead of a space plane. Switch out the front claw with a docking port. Create something like a sky crane that tugs the space plane to preserve fuel on the main ship and use that to get places and use the ship itself to land and refuel and take fuel back to orbit to the tug ship to refuel. This will also allow me to add a backup propulsion system based on ION engines for emergency cases where I get stranded in space. I can add 30 engines and that should return it back in case it gets stranded. Since the tug ship does not need to land, it can carry ridiculous amounts of fuel and can be assembled in orbit via multiple launches. I can even create a dedicated part of it to decouple into a giant ISRU for low gravity objects to carry the crazy fuel needed to orbit. This has the highest chance of success but it will create a logistical nightmare for the non experienced user that has issues with docking. There will be a lot of docking. A LOT. More time will be spent preparing for missions than the actual missions. Not sure if that is very appealing to the normal user, but that means you can visit most of the places, except Eve. For that, I have to figure things out, maybe make a SSTO rocket that I can deliver there in advance then travel with the space plane and transfer the crew. Either way, it will enable people to fly everywhere, using 3 ships in total, one of which can be permanently left in Eve orbit for reuse. Sorry for using this thread as a scratchpad, hopefully this does not break the forum rules, I constantly come back to this thread to see what I can research or follow up on ideas.

Oh, I tried hard to make it fly better. I couldn't. Unfortunately the Thoth has reached it's designed limit. From here, there are a few ways to go: 1. I believe it is capable of landing and taking off from Tylo as it is now. It does require to visit some other moon first to refuel so a direct mission isn't possible. In fact, none of the missions can be direct, all must be done by "planet hopping". I launch it to orbit, then refuel it via another SSTO that carries lots of fuel, then continue the journey, not knowing it this will work for sure unless I try landing it there. 2. I think it is time to go 3 ways and experiment to see which is better: a. Make it 4 horizontal tanks and engine ratio it currently has. Because each tank has to pull less central weight, this will increase the dv remaining, but as long as I keep it aerodynamic to not create too much drag. This model isn't really that great because it makes the ship huge, clunky and heavy. Because I intend to land on planets with low gravity this will become a problem because I won't be able to control it very well on landings. The Spike engine under the ship won't be enough if I double the weight. This has low chances of success. b. Make it 3 tanks, making it look more like a prism. This requires switching to a delta wing to be able to carry the thing as the current layout will not allow for the thing to fly anymore. It is already on the limit and the wings would snap off the moment you try to make any maneuvers. Assuming you can actually take off. This has a moderate chance of success. c. Create an orbital tug ship that launches separately and functions as a rocket instead of a space plane. Switch out the front claw with a docking port. Create something like a sky crane that tugs the space plane to preserve fuel on the main ship and use that to get places and use the ship itself to land and refuel and take fuel back to orbit to the tug ship to refuel. This will also allow me to add a backup propulsion system based on ION engines for emergency cases where I get stranded in space. I can add 30 engines and that should return it back in case it gets stranded. Since the tug ship does not need to land, it can carry ridiculous amounts of fuel and can be assembled in orbit via multiple launches. I can even create a dedicated part of it to decouple into a giant ISRU for low gravity objects to carry the crazy fuel needed to orbit. This has the highest chance of success but it will create a logistical nightmare for the non experienced user that has issues with docking. There will be a lot of docking. A LOT. More time will be spent preparing for missions than the actual missions. Not sure if that is very appealing to the normal user, but that means you can visit most of the places, except Eve. For that, I have to figure things out, maybe make a SSTO rocket that I can deliver there in advance then travel with the space plane and transfer the crew. Either way, it will enable people to fly everywhere, using 3 ships in total, one of which can be permanently left in Eve orbit for reuse.

I think it's time to go back to the drawing board. I managed to do some brute force using high twr engines, but I still end up with low dv in orbit. Maybe I need to go bigger. Add another set of tanks on the sides and more engines.I'm thinking that would help. That would require a redesign of the wings as well, to improve lift, but would add more weight. It's time to go full delta wing.

It's built on the limit. Everything kept to the bare minimum. Have you seen the size of the ore tank? Nothing is added extra more than needed. I had a version with 12 rapiers. It required to go to 10000, go into a dive, reach 500 m/s, then pull up slowly to gain altitude. It worked. But I lost many wings doing that. And wasted a lot of fuel, so it was better to add extra engines. It does give you the "Oh man, this is going to crash" feeling. If you pull hard at the end of the runway it will fly. It is light for its size but this makes it fragile. I have an idea. What if I stick 2 orange tanks and clip them inside the fuselage. It's cheating but it adds no drag, no extra size, only weight. Might just give me that extra dv to reach the moon or minmus. I have a user manual on how to fly it and how to operate the rover. I will post it once the dv stuff is sorted. Sorry for the whole mess. I will try to improve it and come back with updates. Thanks for trying it out. It's great to have some feedback.

How do you @user on this forum? Anyways, I wanted a universal ship to get me places, and since some planets have atmosphere wings are required to reduce delta v and make it easy to fly around. I am sticking with this design. It's compact and it works. It just needs better fuel management.

Something medium weight, able to travel to all places minus Eve and Tylo, that is able to refuel on site.

Hi, I finally added the link to the craft in the first post. I also add the link here http://kerbalx.com/mystik/Thoth-III I am happy with the design, however I have a major issue. The Delta V is not enough. I can get to space with about 1200m/s left but this is not enough for getting to the Mun or Minmus to land and refuel as I run out fuel. The plan is to start with full fuel but less oxidizer as I end up with too much oxidizer and too little fuel and I just end up carrying the stuff which I can't use. Currently I can get 10.9 km/s. To be reliable I need about 15km/s. I am stuck. I don't want to use Nerv engines since that means that I have to use liquid fuel and crawl anywhere. I use the Poodles and I can move about with them quite easily. I feel frustrated. I tried to reduce the weight so much and optimize everything but it's just not enough. If anybody has any ideas, I am listening, willing to add more weight, but not wanting to add too much mass overall. Be careful when trying to fly this thing. It is very FRAGILE. The wings will clip off if you push the maneuvers over 500m/s too hard. This is to save weight and keep things useful. I could add a tank of liquid fuel to get me to space and have lots of total fuel left, but that means that I waste the tank once in space since I won't use it anymore. I aim for efficiency, not carrying useless stuff in space. I need about 15km/s to reach places. I could do it with ion engines, but that's ridiculous and they are not refuelable. Feel free to criticize the poor design because I'm sure I could have done something better. PS: Don't bother operating the rover, it's there to simulate the weight, but getting it on and off implies the use of the landing gear of the plane and the landing gears of the rover that needs to be used in a certain sequence. I will provide additional details how to easily operate the rover loading and unloading once I can get this thing to work. I don't care for the rover right now. Also, I know that the model has a landing gear wrongly alligned on the right engine, you can remove it for tests, it's something that appears when I try to duplicate the engines, you can ignore that (reuploaded fixed model, screenshots not updated). Thanks, M.

I am building an SSTO that can fly to other planets. The right tool for the right job is the Rapier in this case. Because they're not dead weight that I just carry around so I can use on one planet out of all. People use Rapiers because you can create more compact ships also, by not wasting two slots for doing the job that one engine can do while occupying less space, which creates utility. I created SSTO using a few rapiers that can go to orbit and back, but creating one that can go places won't work with your design very well because you have weight that has no reaction.

They're still better. If you build one space plane and use whips you will use them on Kerbin, but from there on there is no place to use them anymore and they just become weight that you carry around in space with no use. Good if you keep it local, but the moment you want to land on another planet they become an issue. At which point you wish you had Rapiers because you can use them to take off and land on other planets. Plus, if you're going too fast you can really slow down almost instantly. You can use the nukes, but they are so heavy and very bad at landing on anything with significant gravity, which is where it becomes obvious that you really need more power.

I know what you mean, I could replace a few of the engines with Whips, but the problem is that they will only be useful on Kerbin. For the rest of the flight they are just useless weight. I want to have stuff that I can use at all times everywhere. My flight is very forced when I go for orbit. I use air mode up to 25000m then switch to rocket mode and point it to 45 degrees to get as high as possible and have to deal with less atmosphere as possible. I know it's not best but I found it more doable to jump to 50000m as fast as possible and then gain orbital speed. I pretty much use rapiers to circularize quick then switch engines. The thing I started with had 486.36t (check the link) so I've lost almost half the mass on the way. The thing surely flew better then than it does now, but it was too big and heavy for what I needed, don't think it could have landed on other planets very well. Speaking of landing, I have added one dart engine mounted under the front wheels and hidden inside the cargo to help position the front slowly after landing without being affected by drag. I wonder if this will work as I have not yet tested it like that, I know you come in with the back and slowly maneuver until you slow down enough to retro burn close to the ground, cut the power, then flip, at which point you use a control engine to keep the nose from slamming the dirt too fast, does anybody have any tips on landing these things?

Converted it from a liquid fuel to a rocket fuel setup. The weight is now 300t full. Lost about 50% of total delta V but it's important it gets places rather than flying and not being able to slow down enough on descents. Now it has 10000 m/s instead of 15000 m/s. However, space wise should be about 6000 m/s which should be enough for planet hopping, but I have not yet performed the flight to Minmus to refuel. 2 Poodles and 12 Rapiers barely have enough for orbit. End up using half my liquid fuel and I run out of it while still having 60% oxidizer left. So, not wanting to increase the number of engines to save weight, I think I should start with 50% less oxidizer. This will make it easier to take off which should mean I don't need to add extra engines. All the other planets have less gravity than Kerbin, except for Tylo and Eve, which require special ships, and by that I mean rockets. I also only use 2 delta wings and small control surfaces to keep drag and weight down. Tanking off is a challenge since the ship wants to drop badly, but it does fly if you throttle to max, hit the brakes, wait until you reach 90kn and then release. At the end of the runway pull hard and it should barely go up, avoiding the ground barely with the rear engines. It's very tricky and I crashed it many times before I could get it flying. Hoping that with less fuel on board it should be able to do this much better. I tried with a canard but I think it actually causes more drag and problems than helps flight so I ended up disabling it in flight and the drag improved considerably. I will remove it later. I will test this a bit then post the craft here along with the files for it so that you can give it a go and tell me what you think. Sorry for the long delay, I always start the game and say I will post something then I get into building it and hours fly testing and I forget.

Very informative replies. I mean, I should already know all this stuff already, but my mind can't math well when I first look at a problem. After I receive a small boost things start to spin and then before you know it I get these elaborate excels and graphs and colors and I go to bed late smelling like math.

I see. I thought you meant the g but I wasn't sure because on the wiki it says that the Moon has 0.166g. To work out a comfortable descent profile I'd say twice of this value would guarantee not to flatten on the surface.

That's scary indeed. Looks like my ship is terribly inefficient at landing. Would I be better off with two poodles instead? I can find the place for it and manage somehow to make it work if this proves to be a better choice. Plus, I remove 12 tonnes and add only 3.5 and that saves a lot of weight. Burn times would decrease also and get responsive maneuvers, plus increased maneuverability. I know there is a downside too: I have to replace the liquid fuel with liquid fuel and oxidizer. I don't mind it as long as this allows me to planet hop without becoming stranded. How do you know that 0.23 is the minimum for the Mun? How do you do the math for this? I would like to know so that I can make a table and see if my ship meets the requirements for certain planets and can better plan landings and not do dumb things like descend and run out of fuel during that. If I scrap the nuclear engines like I said above I could ensure I have equal fuel for everything and save some weight but have less fuel. What do you mean by the blade radiator? Is it the edge kind that sticks out perpendicularly if you mount them on the outside? I can see how to clip that inside the hull if that's better. I don't plan on mining asteroids as this will be strictly for planetary travel and the refueling is only for the purpose of fueling itself and nothing else. That being said, I have no interest in spending 40 days per huge tank to refuel. I carry a lot of fuel and by your math that may take more than 150 days to refuel. That is too long. I can spend a few days on the planet then go. I want to be able to regularly tour the system and require little maintenance. I will replace the AIRBRAKES then, sounds like it's pointless to have any, and open all my 3 cargo bays to see if that helps with slowing down. Sounds like the large ISRU has to stay, and that thing is so heavy. Was hoping to save some space and weight. Maybe I can squeeze the rear cargo bay a bit to move the rover further back without clipping out. The thing is, I wanted my ship to be able to do full orbital surveys and as such I have included the M700 scanner attached to the back of the rover, which I intend to deploy once near a planet so perform the scan and then retract once I have the data. I am wondering if it's not better to just send out satellites to each body and forget about the extra scanner on board. I have a very good satellite model that has all the science on it and very light, able to travel and return from just about anywhere on it's own with the use of ion engines. Is carrying the M700 useless and should just launch satellites before I start missions to have them on site before I get there? They are also relay sats and will help with comms so once the science is done they remain relevant. Reading my reply makes it clear to me that I should scrap the M700 and maybe the Narrow band one as well since it's better to do it via sat.

You mean the TWR is not good enough, right? I wish I had a table to understand how much weight is recommended for one engine. I can add a few more engines to balance stuff out but I don't want to overdo it. The nukes are for interplanetary travel mostly as I plan to save some fuel for the engines to do quick slowdown burns while landing. I know you can calculate TWR and stuff but it would help to have some fixed values. Very useful reply. I am not sure about vernors as I have never used them. I see what you mean, and adding these should allow me to drop RCS completely, getting rid of the RCS thrusters and replacing them with a few of these as they have higher power for movement and stuff. That would mean 2.5 tonnes shaved and less control parts. I like the idea and will look into it. I would however like to add a small tank with crossfeed disabled for emergency usage only (these engines and for ISRU). In case I mess up and really need to use them. I would like to have about 2 minutes of full control without stopping so I will do some math and see how much fuel I need for this to work. I currently run with 5 reaction wheels but I think it can run with 3 just fine. That shaves some weight as well and reduces the need for cargo space. This may also make the whole thing smaller. No sure about the radiators. I think the current config is better than fixed radiators but I will look into this. Definitely fixed ones are more durable. I do plan on taking the engineer with me, but how stupid would it be to drop the large ISRU and go with the small one, is it going to make things unbearable slow and inefficient? AIRBRAKES are only used for slowing down when in the atmosphere. If you think these are useless I can give them up and add more parachutes for stopping faster after landed. I added them to help me not miss the runway when returning. Thank you for your answers.

Hi, Sorry for not getting back sooner, I had a fever the past week and didn't feel like working on it too much. I have modified the plane more and reseated parts and now it goes straight. I do get some left yaw when pulling upwards, so I will take a look at the control surfaces to see what's wrong. I am almost done with the design, but now that I look at it, I wonder how this will actually work. I mean, Taking off and landing on Kerbin is fine, even if the actual stopping is difficult. I have added two parachutes and 6 AIRBRAKES to help slowing down, as well as increasing the braking strength to 200 on all wheels. It does stop well enough without crashing as it lands at about 100m/s but it takes a while. I have not tested the parachutes yet so I am hoping this will help stopping. But my real question is how do you land such a thing on a planet with no atmosphere? I worry that I won't be able to slow down a 250 tonne plane with only 4 atomic engines to land. I don't know what else to do to lose weight but the following options remain: - clip like crazy to reduce the length of the cargo bays and maybe save 3 tonnes (but I don't like this idea too much) - use only one science instrument instead of two (but that seems a waste since they are so light and creates a convenience to have some of them double in case you pass through two areas in flight and have not collected the science already). - use the small ISRU, but I wonder, if this is a good idea, because while I would lose 2.75 tonnes, I wonder how much efficiency I lose as well. - reducing the large radiator to a smaller one since the ISRU and drills no longer produce as much heat and saving 0.75 tonnes, but I wonder what happens if I try to land on Moho and start mining to refuel, would that create overheating. - use only one large drill instead of two, not interested in using the small one since it won't touch the ground and is very bad to mine where resources are below a certain level, saving an extra 1.25 tonnes. - replace the small holding tank with one small radial tank for the ore, saving another 0.37 tonnes, because I am not interested in storing ore, just converting it. - remove one fuel cell, saving another 0.24 tonnes, since the small ISRU and single drill only require about 45 energy to work and with 3 I can generate about 54, plus I can plug in the rover for extra power needs if I want to transmit a lot of data or keep lights on around the ship during night. - reduce the amount of doubled science instruments, batteries on the rover I carry and the amount of RTGs, completely dropping the solar panels and only use my front wheels for driving and disabling the back wheels so that less energy is required, even though the weight saving is small for the plane, it does make the rover light as well. - reducing all the above means I can drop some control surfaces as well, improving aero and looking more weight, meaning less needed fuel or more delta V remaining. - less weight means I can carry less RCS and that means I can use about 500 units instead of the big 1000 unit I have now, saving another 2.41 tonnes by dropping the mk3 tank for two R25 internal tanks (should give me a total 600 units with the mk3 cockpit). As you can see reducing some weight usually means you can reduce more supporting weight. I wish I could bring it under 200 tonnes full but I doubt I can shave that much weight from a design. I will post some pictures so that people can understand better what I am making. With the savings above I can shave about 10 tonnes, without counting the removal of the additional control surfaces, which means less fuel needed. I would like to know your opinion about the items, if it is worth it or not to change those things, or if it is just better to add more engines instead. Sorry for providing so much info and asking so many questions. I am struggling with efficiency but I want to make a ship that can travel almost everywhere instead of constantly wasting time returning and launching new rockets. Anyways, thank you for your help so far. Promise to post pictures soon, still wanting to tweak more before I submit it to analysis and review.

- Boost your boosters with a little boost. - I don't always spend hours designing a ship that can return, but when I do, it fails to reach orbit the first 10 launches. - Ha! Some idiot got stranded in orbit again. Let's go rescue him. LAUNCH. Ship name: Munar orbit rescue rescue rescue ship. - I'll just hop only a few m/s for some extra science points before we leave, I should have enough fuel to return to orbit... *A MINUTE LATER* -> *GOES TO SPACE CENTER* -> Create new ship "Rescue Mission 99999". - Attaches satellite to top of the craft with jr docking port and no fairing or struts. 15 seconds after launch, the first rocket powered dildo takes flight for all public to see. Science.

Depends. If you just wish to poodle and moan, or request some feature, you can use the forums. If you wish to report a bug as the industry does it, you need to report it at http://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/projects/ksp but you need an account. Tips: Report the issue, inclide the steps to reproduce and also mention what the normal behavior should be. Programmers aren't always hard core gamers and will need as much info as possible. Screenshots are recommended.

I thought a few minutes about this. It's not practical. You need tocking ports. Even if you have a few docking ports to connect the wings you still have wobbly surfaces. That is bad for reentry. The last thing you want is for your control surface to wiggle and to potentially snap during reentry. Plus, you're saving s small weight, but you'll waste fuel and RCS to dock with it.

http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Biome Duna has more biomes, plus if you have an atmosphere measuring tool and parachutes (extra build cost), you will get to use those on Duna and won't be useless weight. Duna has a spiritual feel to it. Ike is just dark. A cold rock in space with difficult steep terrain that can mess your rover. I'd go for Duna. It's like Mars and you have gravity to keep your rover from tipping easily.

LOL, DAT NAME, you win the Top Internets Award!

I am playing around with my SSTO and replaced all intakes with shock cones. Would not go past 375m/s. Replaced some with ramp intakes and now the thing maxes out at 1350m/s. Well, I stop there because the claw starts to melt, at which point I point it towards the sky and it whooshes out of the atmosphere. This is weird. Seems that the shock cone does not have enough power to get the thing up to the critical speed on it's own. It's a heavy beast at 400t, but still, having half ramps seems to change the flight significantly. I don't understand. If all intakes are left as ramps the engines cut off on the runway. It has 6x2 rapiers, 5 whips, struggles to reach orbit since the ship had over 18 rapiers in it's original config but had a weight of over 500t.

Hit a wall. Unfortunately the plane seems to shift left gently and I went and checked all parts to make sure everything is aligned. I have no idea what could be causing it. I only place things with snap activated and symmetry. I see these planes that go straight as an arrow but when ever I make something it always ends up drifting sideways.

Awesome, so I will reduce the drills to 2 and will keep note of the examples posted, should help reduce the weight and part numbers on the ship.