Zacspace

Busy IRL lately, had a few minutes tonight to refine my space helicopter. Turns out the cure for drag is, as ever, more thrust (and an internal structure that braces the rotors against transverse torque with an offset servo while keeping everything occluded by a fairing). Still doesn't orbit, but it's now in the same problem solving realm as a normal SSTO, so just a little more iteration and I'll have it. It only needs to make low-orbit, it's purpose is to ferry Kerbals between a station and an amphibious aircraft-carrying mobile base (also wip).

I had this bug the other day. You can't interact with the parts in build mode anymore when they're like this.

Attempted to build a space helicopter I attempted to arrest the blades with servos and then use them as wings. This works, but the blades cause way too much drag, even when they're stopped. Back to the drawing board I guess.

What did you do to make it that small? No chance you actually play on a tiny screen like that. It looks like your screenshot is hosted on the KSP wiki for some reason, that might be related. Most people on here upload screenshots to imgur. You can drag them out of your screenshots folder or wherever onto the upload button there, no account required. Then you paste a link to the picture in a comment and it will show big like everyone else's.

Only if infinite speed = instant happening. It's either that or near-instantly, but that might be a huge difference, especially given that, as mentioned in another comment, this flattens the light cone making the entire universe the observable universe. We might have particles that have to travel an infinite distance to have whatever thing happen to them if the universe truly is infinite in size. I think this might actually break a fair number of theories that support a multiverse too (any that involve black holes at a minimum since I don't think they would be able to form). OP is possibly the greatest supervillain of this or any reality.

The speed of light isn't really the speed of light so much as it's the speed of causality. You wouldn't be just raising the speed limit of one thing, but of almost all things to infinity. This basically breaks everything. I don't think current models are complete enough to describe how broken everything would be.

I've never had any conflicts between EER and any of the other mods I use, certainly none of the graphics mods, so I can't really help you out with that. I'll tell you that you can delete blizzy's toolbar if you installed it for this, though. That's an old thing from back when KSP didn't have it's own toolbar, lots of mods support it, but no mods as far as I know require it anymore. All editor extensions requires is click through blocker and toolbar controller by linuxgurugamer. The whole sky dimming thing sounds to me like it could be from the mod planetshine, but I don't know if you're using it or what could be going wrong if you are. Not much help, sorry. If you make a post on the technical support subforum for modded installs you might get some better help. Be ready to provide your KSP.log and a list of the mods you're using.

A recent discussion elsewhere on the forum about efficient SSTO design made me decide to revisit an older plane: By sticking a thin fairing through the whole fuselage and moving to just one air intake (replacing the old inline intakes with more fuel) I was able to increase the on-orbit dV of this plane from around 2000 to just over 2800, making it competitive with my mk3 based SSTOs. It can now land on the Mun and easily reach Duna or Laythe. This screenshot is from the test flight where I confirmed that this plane can absolutely not land on Duna. I'm still dialing in some stuff about it, hoping to get 100m/s more range out so i can easily return from the Mun. If I can do that It'll probably be my preferred craft for moving crew around the Kerbin system.

I'm still at this. I spent a few months mostly away from the game, but I've moved everything to Moho for reasons and from now on everything should go smoothly. Perhaps not quickly, but smoothly.

You should probably make a thread about it elsewhere. Troubleshooting on linux gets complicated and could easily add another page or 2 to this challenge if it were done here. I'll leave you with some advice though. if you've run an update and haven't rebooted since, try that. Nvidia drivers can come unloaded after a kernel update and the easiest way to load them again is to reboot. Run glxinfo from a terminal. Your system may not have it by default, I don't know what package it comes from on ubuntu. You'll want to see your graphics device mentioned by name in it's output, and the correct driver. For nvidia it's nvidia, for AMD and intel it's mesa. If you see llvmpipe that means your system isn't using it's graphics card at all. Try running ksp through a terminal. You can do it through steam, but the easiest way is to navigate to your ksp folder from the terminal (usually ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Kerbal\ Space\ Program) and then type ./KSP.x86_64 It should spit out a bunch of messages and, if it fails to run, an error message Also, all installations of KSP are portable. The game has no DRM, you can just copy it into a folder straight from the steam install and run it on a pc without steam or anything.

This has to be when your craft has the optimal amount of wing for its mass, right? I can't imagine trying to run anything I've built with 5 degrees, even the stuff without fairing tricks, but then I usually just build wings that look cool. As far as the scope of this thread, is there a better one? I've been noticing players confused about SSTO stuff around the place lately and I'm never sure where to send them. It seems like knowledge about how to design and fly efficiently is spread pretty thin around the forum and mixed with a good amount of well meaning nonsense. I guess I'm guilty of that myself with my 1 degree comment earlier.

I gotta shout out Editor Extension Redux again here. It lets you select a bunch of different angles to snap to, even just 1 degree at a time, instead of just being snap or don't snap. On all my good SSTOs the wings have either 1 or 2 degrees of incidence. The one I linked earlier had 1. The sweet spot for wing incidence should keep your fuselage facing directly into the airstream to minimize drag while still producing enough lift with your wings to ascend at an agreeable rate.

The strakes pull double duty as fuel tank and wing, so 2 parts for the "price" (in terms of mass and drag) of one. They use them over the shuttle wings I think because they have a better fuel/weight ratio Put downloaded craft files in "Kerbal Space Program/saves/{your save}/SPH" Then it should show up alongside your own planes in the spaceplane hangar. Hopefully you're on PC since I don't think console players can use downloaded craft files.

They do with the mod Editor Extensions Redux. I actually forgot I was even using a mod, since it doesn't cause craft incompatibility with stock games. I personally find it indispensable for technical builds, but now that I'm thinking about it, between the mod and my use of both DLCs this plane probably isn't the best teaching tool. Maybe I should build an SSTO just for that purpose. I spent a lot of time trying to come up with a more elegant/realistic solution for that. Nothing else worked as consistently as the floating squares in the end though.

It depends on the maneuver and situation, but in general (almost always) having half your burn before and half after the node is best/good enough. There's a setting in the game that will show you when to start your burn and that's all it does, half the time your burn would take before you reach the node.

I remember having a pretty confused exchange about this with you in another thread, it might have been me. To clarify, you go as fast as you can on open cycle. The limit's when you blow up, and even then there's tricks you can use to go a little faster. I tried to find a tread about high-efficiency SSTOs to help explain how they work. The best I could find is this (where you'll find both me and our friend 18watt). It's unfortunately pretty light on documentation, but it has a lot of pictures of highly min-maxed SSTOs and some of them being flown. I'm dropping a link to one of my own SSTOs which has what I hope are pretty easy to follow flight instructions on its kerbalx page. It uses a lot of the same construction techniques and a similar ascent profile to the crazy high-performance SSTOs you'll see in the thread I linked above. Hopefully if you try it out and take it apart to see what makes it tick it'll help you out.

I had no idea that engine plates had any aerodynamic effect at all! In my SSTOs I used structural tubes and fairings to achieve the same result. I could probably both improve them and eliminate the making history dependency with this technique.

I started writing what I did today in this post, but I really like how this screenshot raises a lot of questions and answers none of them. Especially after I tell you I was working on an ornithopter. I actually had no idea the liquidfuel rotors could generate electricity. That's the kind of information that I know is useful, but I have no idea what for yet

I was looking through my screenshots and came across this from a few years ago, I present Seaship III and the PL-32 Electric Tinamou: I don't know where we landed on VTOL craft as far as counting for the challenge goes, but that's what I have here. The smaller planes can land on it too, but as pictured they came like that out of the hangar. The flight deck has a flap on the front which both assisted with the takeoff and landing of aircraft and also acted as a loading ramp so I could use it to move a large rover between islands on Laythe (at least in theory, I never got it to work right). The carrier's powered by 3 goliaths and is designed to hydroplane so it is/was actually pretty fast for it's size. The VTOL was broken by a breaking ground update. I was pretty sure the carrier bought it then too but now that I'm thinking of it, it might still work. Definitely more hassle than it's worth, though.

Completely true theory. It's hard to tell from the screenshot you posted but based on that and what you've said I think your deal here is you're picking up speed from your rapiers actually too high in the atmosphere, and then too much of it all at once because of how many engines you have. Rapiers go crazy hard at sea level above mach 1 and then drop off with altitude. Sounds like paradoxical advice since I was just like "too fast", but it's true. You're only going a little faster than I usually do at 40km in your screenshot, but it's enough to matter for part heating. It is more efficient to go faster lower in the atmosphere, so I thought you were trying to do an unreasonably super-efficient ascent profile with a noticeably not super efficient plane, but I guess that's not exactly the situation.

I'm looking at this plane and I'm wondering why you're going so fast so low in the atmosphere. Like I get that it's more efficient for a number of reasons, but your plane doesn't look like a super min-maxed design so surely the losses you'd incur flying an ascent profile that the whole plane can survive aren't going to make or break your mission. Of course doing it like that just because you want to is perfectly valid too. Their comment has nothing to do with your plane or its thermals. They're announcing their intention to post a modified version of a stock craft that comes with the game. If you start up a new sandbox save and go to the spaceplane hangar you'll see the Aeris 4a ready to load up and fly.

You can probably get a bit faster by exploiting KSP's aerodynamics system, but ultimately unless you're making an SSTO there's going to be a practical limit to how fast you can go, that limit being heat. The stock game only really has heat shields for dealing with atmospheric heating in flight. As others have pointed out, those cause a lot of drag and will slow you down. SSTO spaceplanes (which also go very fast) handle heat basically by just dealing with it while they climb out of the atmosphere until they can reach space and start radiating it away, but if you're not going to space you won't have that opportunity. Maybe you should let that plane climb as it runs up to speed and add some oxidizer for the closed cycle mode of those rapiers. You'll find that plane is actually a spaceship. You can limit or completely disable the control authority of those elevons you're using as wings by right-clicking them. Their responsiveness is a function of speed and surface area, since they're the biggest control surfaces in the game and you're going so fast it's only natural that the plane gets a little touchy. You can set them to an action group and probably just control the plane with the cockpit's reaction wheels at high speed. If you're interested in cheesing the aero system to go even faster, it may be of interest to you that 2 service bays clipped into each other experience no drag or heating at all at any speed. Clip an engine half inside and you can go as fast as you want. You can also get a lot of aero-cheese mileage out of clipping and offsetting stuff into fairings to achieve unrealistic reductions of drag.

if I recall correctly, the pre-cooler part doesn't actually do any cooling and is just an intake. The wiki suggests it has slightly better thermal transfer and heat radiation than other comparable parts, but it's not something you can rely on to manage the thermals of an aircraft. As far as I know, the performance of a jet engine in KSP only takes speed and atmospheric pressure into account and intake air heat isn't directly modeled.

I recently realized that my largest launch vehicle for my largest rover is able to reach orbit and land on Minmus without dropping any of its stages, making it by far my largest SSTO. After refueling on Minmus' surface, this flight plan lets me land the rover on Moho or Tylo.