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When I'm not using ullage engines, I usually also use it during staging to make sure that the next stage's engines have cleared the shroud decoupler before firing them. Reduces the odds of the previous stage's catastrophic failure taking them out. To quote the famous 'Jose Jimenez, Astronaut' comedy routine I linked over in the 'Signs that You're In for a Short Flight' thread: 'To me, the most important part of rocket travel is the blastoff. I always take a blast before I take off. Otherwise, I wouldn't get in that thing!' Rotational hand controllers (the attitude control stick) have always been set up like aircraft controls--pull back to pitch up, push forward to pitch down. (While it may seem counterintuitive in a video game, in the actual vehicle, it's completely intuitive--you move the stick in the direction you want the nose to go.) The only difference is that they controlled yaw by twisting it instead of rudder pedals--so if you have a Saitek X52 (or many other sticks that work that way), you've actually got a very accurate idea of how the RHC works. The one that is a bit of a brainbender is the TRANSLATIONAL hand controller, a T-handle held with (usually) the left hand, where you push it in the direction you want to shift the ship--push forward and you'll thrust forward, push left and you'll thrust left, push down on it (like pressing L3 or R3 on a Playstation controller) and you'll thrust down. Once you've gotten used to it, it's pretty natural, and offers a whole lot more control than a simple throttle where you can only translate forward, but it does take some adjustment. You *hold* the control on? Man... in my designs, that's a recipe for disaster, but I tend to build large rockets that make good use of the Wobbly Rockets parts. Only way to safely control them is carefully timed 'pulsing' of the steering thrust, to prevent Ye Olde Banana Rocket from happening *and* avoid hitting the resonance frequency...

What Xivios said. The basic thing to remember is that whatever burn you make won't affect your position when you make the burn, but rather will affect the position 180 degrees later. So you burn at perikee to adjust apokee, and burn at apokee to adjust perikee. (Good lord, it's almost getting more natural to type those with the K instead of the G...) If you follow that rule, you can usually get a successful *de*orbit burn with a delta-vee of under 50 m/sec by burning at apokee to put you on an elliptical orbit with apokee of about 34km. When I'm doing an Apollo 4 emulation with the Kerbal Katapult V (available at http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=1530.0, shill shill shill!), I usually end up with about a 45km perikee and roughly 200km apokee; from that, I can do an apokee deorbit with a mere 10m/sec delta-vee. (This leaves me with gobs of extra fuel to perform downward vertical burns to increase entry speed, just like Apollo 4 did.) The other rule, of course--which I'm sure you understand, but just to make sure newbies who might stumble across this know it--is that posigrade burns (ones aimed for the TVV, like Xivios suggested) will result in a higher altitude (and, perversely, lower speed at that altitude!), while retrograde burns, aimed 180 degrees from the TVV (at the green circle with an X in it), will result in a lower altitude. And unless you're trying to shift your orbital plane (which has no point in KSP as of this writing), burns from a stable orbit in any direction other than posigrade or retrograde serve no purpose and just waste fuel...

Now, if only there were some way you could make a Gemini-style 'part hangs sideways' version. Once the more modern lift model is available, it'd let us modify it into a parafoil and conduct the sort of horizontal runway landing that was originally pictured for Gemini! ;D

Probably broke it into a bunch of pieces, then just kept adding them to the bottom and raising it up to clip through the roof.

Honestly, I like the GG-M4. I've gotten lots of use out of it as an upper-stage engine, and it's also a major feature of my first booster to put Kerbals into orbit, used for that Russian look with the clustered four-nozzle engines.

New from Vulpine Kerbospace and Jeb's Auto Salvage and Spacecraft, a booster for all your heavy-lift or Kerbin escape launch needs, the Kerbal Katapult V! On its very first test launch, the Kerbal Katapult V successfully conducted an equivalent of the human Apollo 4 unmanned test mission, placing a standard Mark 1 Command Pod directly into a 198km by 42km elliptical orbit, with approximately 50% of its third stage fuel remaining. At apokee, the third stage conducted a successful 25m/sec retrofire burn to deorbit the spacecraft, then, as programmed, turned vertically downward and burned its remaining fuel to exhaustion, followed by the command pod and service module separating before the service module's onboard engine also conducted a downward vertical burn to exhaustion; these unconventional maneuvers were made to boost the spacecraft speed at entry interface, achieving a peak speed of approximately 3.2 km/sec at interface, adequate to verify the integrity of the spacecraft heatshield for a direct re-entry from just about any plausible transfer, including orbits of the Mun and Kerbsol. Despite gravitational loading peaking at over 14 gees during re-entry, cockpit temperatures remained comfortable, and all three members of the crew were recovered safely, although Bill and Bob did soil their pressure suits. Additional test flights have been mostly successful, all with safe recovery of the crew, though two flights did see failure to make a fully stable orbit due to failure of first-stage engines following SRB jettison. The booster's heavy-lift capabilities have not yet been fully explored, but Jeb is confident that it can put almost anything you want to try into orbit in a single throw. (Hi, guys, it's essentially a Kerbal-scaled Saturn V-class booster, though somewhat different in execution from the Saturn. It's almost all add-ons. Required add-ons are Wobbly Rockets 1.8 or later, NovaSilisko's SIDR&SD pack 0.9 or later, CaptainSlug's radial booster pack 1.3 or later, Trust Thrust's radial stack decouplers, Vaccer's Big Effin' Engines, the MTS Tuned SAS set, Xemit's MicroEngine and tank, Killerhurtz's thermal control pack 1.2 or later, and Dartstriker's Mk16-3 triple parachute (in the Mk 17 parachute thread). Note that the ullage engines on the third stage and the service module do tend to cause wild gyrations when fired, though it seems to be less of an issue with the SAS off and the throttle closed. All ullage engines fire with the decoupler, *not* the stage they're mounted on, so you have time to settle the vehicle down again before firing the next stage. Don't launch at full throttle, or you're in for a short flight, but you can bump it up to full thrust once the engines are running. In four flights, I've had a 50% full-success rate; the other two flights, the SRBs literally knocked off the main engines they were aligned with as they separated...)

My favorite from seventh grade was when someone who always knew that she knew better than anyone else bought one of the standard Estes cargo-carrier rockets, the ones that say a minimum C engine, and proceeded to launch it with an A engine with an extremely long delay on the ejection charge. And after it buried itself almost up to the end of the nosecone in the dirt, she just ran over to start pulling it out. You guessed it, recovery charge went off just as she grabbed the tube. Somehow, she didn't lose her hand...

The 2 and 3m variations could just be new decoupler bases, since the same panels would cover the larger area if you used 8 and 12 panels, respectively, compared to the 1m version's four.

You hope they don't launch anything in Missouri! There's a few hundred rather impressive solid rockets just waiting to go scattered around there, after all... ;P Sadly, I never had the patience or money to really get into model rocketry much; I did build and fly an Estes Bullpup as part of my seventh-grade science class, and a few more with the Young Astronauts Club that I was part of after that, but without money and with the attention span of a gnat, I couldn't really go anywhere more with it. Probably would have done more if the final launch of my Bullpup in school hadn't had a recovery failure. (No, not a melted parachute; apparently, the wadding got stuck or something, because after it came down vertically onto the street, just missing a passing car, when we retrieved it, we found that the retainer clip was hanging by a thread, the wadding was all burnt, and the parachute was completely intact. Even if it weren't for the retainer clip, it was no longer airworthy; the nose had been blunted, and two of the fins now had cracks along the grain...)

The experimental lifting bodies of the 60s and 70s were even worse, of course. The pilots of THOSE claimed that if you dropped a cinderblock out of the bomb bay of the NB-52 mothership at the same time as you released the lifting body, the lifting body would reach the ground first...

ULLAGE ENGINES! :hailprobe: :w00t: :w00t: :w00t: I've desperately needed those since I started building, since I like building big multistage, and I prefer not to lose velocity waiting for the previous stage to fall away. And while the 'fire in the hole' staging works for ICBM derivatives (ever see video of a Titan II staging? The first stage always exploded when the second stage fired), ullage engines for separation are so much more elegant for manned boosters... (And anything for stabilization on my first stages is a good thing!)

So for now, a winged spacecraft will glide about as well as the Space Shuttle? ;D (Seriously, I remember an engineer stating, when Columbia was first delivered to the Cape in 1980, that the Shuttle had the glide ratio of 'a pair of pliers.')

The name isn't that creative ('Russian-style 2'), but my second attempt at building a 'Russian-style' (clustered tanks with quad-nozzle engines) booster is now here, confirmed to put three Kerbals into roughly-circular orbits anywhere in the 50km to 60km height ranges, while still retaining enough fuel for a successful deorbit burn fired from apokee. (Unfortunately for me, on my first attempt, I managed a 50.0x52.5 km orbit and discovered that, firing from apokee there, the landing point is on nightside, hence the 'catastrophic failure.' Still, I made velocities that the calculators say were right for the orbit I listed, and easily managed to slow enough for aerobraking to bring them back to Kearth!) It does require some piloting, particularly before the boosters burn out, and careful throttle control up until then, too, to keep it from tumbling at low altitude, but once you get it going, it's a stable, smooth ride to LKO (low Kearth orbit). SAS is used in preference to fins to save weight (because with the number of fins it'd need, we'd *never* get off the ground!). I recommend liftoff at default thrust, then up to 50% power after tower clear, and full throttle after booster separation. Pitchover to 45 degrees can start at 10km, 30 degrees at 25km, 15 degrees at 30km, and about 5 degrees once clear of the atmosphere, for a roughly 60km orbit. Launch uses the first four booster stages (up through KSP stage 07) completely. Stage 05 is an injection module, fired at apogee to circularize the orbit. Be sure to save some fuel for deorbit! (Note that I included the heat shield on the capsule; it needs to be jettisoned before parachute deployment.) An impressive sight on the pad. It's not exactly snorting along at first stage burnout, even with booster jettison... but it *will* keep climbing until burnout. This was from a second launch, and even with apparently losing one of my liquid engines to... something, I made the 62km orbit on that flight. Acceleration picks up nicely once you're on the second stage, though. Proof of a survivable landing... ...no matter what the game said. Data from the first flight. (Yes, I probably need to think small and light quite a bit more...) Addons required: Moach's heatshield, Wobbly Rockets 1.08, SIDR&SD parts 0.9, Xemit's micro-rocket (for the injection/deorbit engine). (I *hope* that's all; I have a whole bunch of addons installed.)

I thought 'flying deathtrap' covered just about every KSP rocket? ;D

Belated, but a thought--why not make a custom radial coupler that has purple top and bottom nodes off to the side, and attach the fore and aft parts of the bomb to that with purple nodes? On many combat aircraft, after all, the weapon pylon is released along with the bomb... (just a thought from someone with zero experience making addons since the days of MSFS 4.0 and the Aircraft and Scenery Designer.)

Every time I've tried using the 3m solids as anything but the central core stage, I've had this problem, even if it's the first two parts I've placed, so I'm not sure it's a problem with Silisko's parts so much as one with the game itself...

Thanks! Never tried that before... it's pretty non-intuitive, but then, I've not had *that* much time to futz around with staging. Useful tip is useful!

This... looks like it could be a solution to the short range of my simulated Minuteman ICBM! (Particularly since the Minuteman really does have a large-diameter first stage and smaller upper stages...)

That, or, in the case of the Russians and Chinese, vast empty wastelands (Siberian steppes and the Gobi Desert, respectively). The two really big reasons that the US has always preferred water landings for capsules are: 1) Even under the parachutes, you're still coming down at about 20 mph/35 kph. Anyone who's ever been in a car crash knows how 'gentle' an impact that is; a water landing cushions the blow quite a bit. (The Soyuz, and, presumably, the Chinese Shenzou derived from it both use a braking rocket on the parachute harness that fires about ten meters off the ground to slow the descent at the last moment.) 2) American spacecraft, if they have a launch abort, are going to land in the water off Florida, so they have to be designed for water landings anyway--if you're gonna put the weight in for a water landing design, you might as well go ahead and use it as your primary landing zone, too.

I'd like to be able to have both my stage 1 liquid sustainer and my stage 0 SRBs light simultaneously, but be able to jettison the solids after burnout... ah, well, maybe in a later version. As for picking up speed, depends on what you wanna do. If you want to go into an elliptical orbit or acheive escape velocity, then wait for perikee and fire full thrust along your current velocity vector ('posigrade', in rocket science-ese). (If you want to be *really* technical about it, fire just enough *before* perikee that you hit perikee right at the midpoint of the burn, but really, don't make it more than a ten-minute total burn; if you have more fuel than that, wait until the next orbit and repeat the process.) This'll maximize your velocity and get you the highest possible apokee, if you don't hit escape velocity. If you're trying for as high a circular orbit as you can, you'll actually need to make two burns. First, at perikee, you'll need to make a posigrade burn to raise your apokee to your desired level. Then, half an orbit later, at apokee, you'll need to make another posigrade burn to raise the perikee to the same level. Remember, if you want to bring the boys home, you only need to make one retrograde (opposite velocity vector) burn, preferably at apokee, to lower your perikee to below 35km, at which point aerobraking will perform the rest of the deceleration needed to deorbit them! Horizontal burns perpendicular to your velocity vector, for the record, will shift your orbital plane (inclination) so that you are travelling north and south of the equator on each orbit. (You *are* launching due east, right?) So, short version: Burn at perikee to adjust your apokee altitude. Burn at apokee to adjust your perikee altitude. Don't bother burning in any direction off your current velocity vector unless you're trying to change your orbital plane; vertical burns (usually) just waste fuel, though some low-orbit-only spacecraft (Mercury, Space Shuttle) have included a downward component in their retrofire to get them into the atmosphere faster and save weight on retro fuel.

Really? Even above 35km, where there's no air for the winglets to bite into? (Winglets also are of limited help if you're doing multiple long parallel stages; the parallel stages will still wobble all over the place, and the winglets might collide.) Need to retest my only design to make orbit again, this time with the orbital calculator--I didn't have it, and I got bored while still going up last time, so I fired the retrorocket and ended up completing about 3/4 of an orbit before coming down into the nightside glitch...