Bluejayek

I have a solution. This is a game about flying rockets. Fly them yourself manually

The capsules tolerance depends on what it is attached to. Try landing at 14m/s nose first with only a capsule, and then repeat with a stack of full fuel tanks behind the capsule. The first will likely survive, the second will blow up. This is because the force required to stop the second rocket is much higher for the same landing velocity. It would be like taking a car, and smashing it into a cliff face at 20km/h. The front end won\'t be pretty, but the car will be intact mostly. Now attach that car to the front of a fully loaded freight train travelling at 20km/h and smash it into the cliff. I guarantee you that the car will be utterly and completely totalled, because there is more mass behind it that had to be slowed down. The cliff might be gone too.

Welcome! In 0.15 I have not had issues adding ASAS or the like in the middle of the stack. It seems to hold my options. Another thing that I had previously had an issue with, but seems to be gone, is that struts and fuel lines will reattach as before if I detach and then reattach a part. Happy flying. And remember, if you spend more the 3 hours playing this, its already cheaper then going to watch a movie.

Welcome to KSP! I\'m sure you\'ll get there eventually All of us have trouble at first. One tip, less is more! You\'d be suprised how small a rocket you can get into orbit. As a more practical note, stack no more then three fuel tanks atop a LFE-30, beyond that its really just added pointless weight, and maybe you won\'t even be able to take off. Good luck! PS Plaatinum, how come your name is spelled 'wrong' (if it is supposed to be Platinum) ?

That thing must have been a pain to build. How exactly to you get the symetry perfect with the sixfold symetry around each booster section, and then mirrored?

30-40 degrees sounds like what you would need for a rocket without wings. It seems to me you need more lift on your craft. As per your question, what you are fighting mainly is drag from the atmosphere. This decreases with height, so just go as high up as you can with your engines still working. For turbojets the cap is near 15km.

It is much more fuel efficient to use the retro fire then not. This way he can save the enormous 0.8 mass of the decoupler from his ascent stage off the mun, saving a lot of fuel, easily enough fuel to do a semipowered landing on kerbin. I personally like to use a capsule, halftank, fulltank, legs as my ascent/decent/return stage. It easily has enough fuel to do the full maneurver, and a fully powered kerbin landing. The velocity you can touch down at scales with the mass of your craft. 14m/s is probably ok for a capsule, but too high once you add in your engines and such.

To begin, when I say relativity, what I mean is 'Physics must be the same in all inertial reference frames' not the special/general theory of relativity dealing with the speed of light and gravitation. Now, what I am discussing is the kinetic energy of ships at high velocity. The kinetic energy scales as velocity squared, so you require a lot more energy to accelerate the same amount when at high velocity. (exempli gratia: 0 to 10m/s for 2 kg object is 10^2 - 0^2 = 100J, 1000-1010m/s for a 2kg object is 1010^2 - 1000^2 = 20,100J) A rocket that spits out rocket fuel gains momentum equal to the momentum of the rocket fuel relative to the ship. Say the exhaust velocity is 1000m/s and you spit out 0.1kg of fuel from a ship that is 1kg at the end, the rocket will gain 100 kg m/s of momentum or 100m/s of velocity. Assume the ship is originally travelling at 1000m/s. An observer following alongside at 1000m/s sees the ship accelerate from 0m/s (relative) to 100m/s, gaining 5000J of kinetic energy, and he sees the fuel accelerate from 0m/s to -1000m/s, gaining 50,000J of kinetic energy. He therefore sees a net increase of 55,000J of energy from the fuel being ejected; this would be from the chemical explosion, or ion propulsion or whatsoever device propelled the fuel. A second observor who is stationary sees the ship originally travelling at 1000m/s. It accelerates from 1000 to 1100m/s gaining 105,000J of kinetic energy. The fuel decelerations from 1000m/s to 0m/s loosing 50,000J of kinetic energy. The net kinetic energy change is an increase 55,000J, the same as above. This means that your ship is gaining a heck of a lot more kinetic energy when you burn at high velocity then low. Does this have any ramifications for how orbital manoeuvres should be done? Like, should you only do burns when at highest velocity possible (periapsis) in order to have best fuel use?

Your using mods anyways, so why not go into the config file, find the line that allows the cones to cross feed, and delete it?

Ever noticed how when you are in a stable orbit, no engines thrusting, your orbit on the map view will flop around anyways on normal time? This is the kraken. I believe the probable cause is rounding errors in the physics engine. It is extenuated at high speed, to the point that when you go into near kerbol orbits physics just implodes completely.

I\'m impressed. I\'ve never tried anything this large. However, what I have tried is to make a rediculously tall tower of fuselages to set my rocket on, with the idea that if I launch my rocket from 100m or 200m off the ground the air is thinner and I should save some fuel

Yeah, 1000 is good. The kraken will throw it more then that on 1x time warp anyways. Good job Also, nice polar orbits.

You should be able to get the velocity difference down well below 1m/s... This gives a significant period of time to get the next one in place, and you can always readjust.

Keep trying! As I mentioned, this successs took an hour messing around with the RCS thrusters before I got it right. A couple tips: 1) Popping time warp to third setting for a second and then back down will kill the rotation of your ship, and the ship you are trying to dock with. You might consider this cheating, but it is very useful, and much easier then swapping over to the other craft to kill its rotation when you accidentally bump it 2) Try to make sure your RCS thrusters are symetric verticalls as well as radially on your craft. For exampl,e if you only have RCS on the bottom of a long craft every thrust you make with it to move up/down left/right will additionally cause you to start tilting, even with ASAS on. 3) ASAS. Really, this is neccesary.... way to hard to try to close in with RCS if you also have to keep adjusting alignment. 4) Bring enough RCS fuel. You don\'t want to run out when you are just inches away. Good luck

I finally managed to perform a successful docking maneurver! For this, I had a ship in a 5 million meter orbit around kerbin, almost circular (part of a ship array I had orbiting here). I launched my docking ship up there, spent half an hour circularising the orbit and synchronizing, and then another hour fiddling around with rcs until I got it. I tried to grab on sideways first, and that didnt work, it just sent the ship spinning away, which almost made me quit right there. Then, I tried to grab onto the front, but the contact broke off as I was tryin to fly away with it. Finally, I managed a solid contact with the front of the craft, and was able to burn to deorbit it, and switched over to safely land the brave kerbals back on wet water Very satisfying to have it work, and very fiddly to do so. http://imgur.com/a/cuz9c

Its the force at that exact distance. What is really more meaningful is the acceleration (a = F/m where m is your ships mass). Then, you can compare it with the centripetal acceleration (a_c = v^2/r) to figure out the velocity needed to maintain a stable orbit. v = sqrt(r*F/m) This is a stable circular orbit by the way.

Yup, simple substitution.

We use g for simple math near the surface of the planet mostly, since the altitude is nearly constant. g=9.8m/s/s at the surface of the earth, and you an use this formula for things like projectile motion. You can also talk about the value of g at different altitudes. The same value also aproximately works in LEO, as an altitude of say 100km compared with the earths 6000km radius is only a correction of 4% or so. Basically the formula F=mg where g=9.8 is a quick aproximation, but the more accurate is always to use F = m1m2G/r^2. Using the general formula g = mG/r^2 for acceleration is convenient as it shows that all bodies in orbit around the same object will have the same orbits, as it is acceleration whihc determines the orbit, not force directly.

Managed 141kg with a dropped periapsis as many have done. Botched the kerbal return and crash landed in the ocean at 29m/s. I supposed I am cheating however, I have the fps pod addon installed which gives me proper altitude.

103.8 for a direct descent.

I freaked out a bit at around 3500m becasue the ground was coming up way too fast for my comfort level. Thankfully the lander is pretty light so I was able to reduce my descent rate in time. In the end I touched down at ~3.5 m/s with 113.3 kg fuel remaining and everyone\'s just happy to be on the ground. I think I have enough fuel to at least get back into Munar orbit so a rendezvous can be made to get the intrepid crew home, but if someone can land this and get back to orbit around Kerbin I will be impressed (but not surprised given the skills of many forum members). I say 'orbit' because the lander has no parachute or decoupler to provide a safe return. Now it\'s your turn. Honor, glory and bragging rights are at stake here! Claim them if you can! Leaderboard: 1. Tarmenius: 113.3kg Also note: This is my first attempt at submitting a challenge, so helpful suggestions are always welcome You say it is not possible to make a safe return. I would argue with that. The lander stage looks to be easily light enough to slow down significantly under kerbin gravity. You might be surprised at how little fuel it takes to drop from 100m/s (terminal velocity) to a landable 10m/s if you time it right. Also, an ASAS on a lander stage is a massive waste of mass! This challenge looks like fun though, I\'ll be sure to try it later.

I don\'t see this happening. The publisher is under no obligation to provide a means for resale, or facilitate it, they just can\'t prevent it. I would think that the only way a company would be sued is if they intentionally made their software so it could under no circumstances be resold, eg nasty DRM (which kerbal doesn\'t have). Sueing a game developer for not having a method to resell the game would be like sueing Barnes & Noble for not running a used book store.

then I don\'t call it broken But I must say I never saw an orbit curving like that... Acually, I did get something similar to this. Not a butterfly like you got, but an orbit that had a solar escape, and had some very odd kinks in the orbit. Curiously, it was a weird bug how I got into it in the first place. I put myself in a solar orbit, just below kerbin speed. I then went out to tracking station and back in, at which point there was a random strut sticking out. When I tried to turn my ship it went into an insane spin, the game stuttered for a moment, and then popped me into an orbit going the opposite direction at 18,000m/s.

If you find one of the old drag force threads, i did a calculation of what it would take to clear atmosphere at orbital velocity with a slingshot/cannon. I believe the starting velocity was some hundreds of thousands of meters per second. 700,000 m/s seems familiar. Now, if we consider doing that with a slingsht, say over a kilometer we get a gforce of 24,999,999g, which is clearly absurd. Put another way, it is accelerations to 700,000m/s over 2 thousandths of a second. That is 2.45E14J of kinetic energy for a 1 ton spacecraft, for a power requirement of 12.25E17 watts, or 122500TW. The current worlds power production is around 1TW, so it would take over a day to store up the energy required, even if you could somehow store it.

Nope, keosynchronous orbit is around 2.8 million meters. 10km diameter orbit just felt like a nice round number is all. The polar orbit was a pain to set up, it uses so much fuel...