farmerben
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Posts posted by farmerben
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I decided to go for over 100 passengers this time. Technically 101 Kerbals if we count the pilot.
It took a while to get things tuned to work around so many Mk2 cabins. But when you can do an 90 degree immelmann straight off the runway, the balance is close to right.
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Fun. I don't do these sorts of missions or use these parts often enough.
With 22 Kerbals, It can cruise at around 1350 m/s above 14,000 m. On the surface of the ice it can go about 311 m/s. Doubling the engines would definitely make it faster.
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In my career game I put big mining landers on Ike, Gilly, Mun and Minimus. In some cases they also carry a lab or something like that to satisfy a mission, but even without that they are very heavy.
The big convertatron is fast. It can keep up with 4 big drills going simultaneously. For this I use the fuel cell array and 2 medium extendable radiators. Works great on Gilly and Miniums, but on the Mun and Ike it wastes a great deal of fuel to reach orbit, rendezvous, and land again. So it's worth it to use rovers to fill on the surface and leave the tonnage of ISRU on the surface.
The little convertatron and little drill I put onboard little vessels to hypothetically refill themselves, but they are actually really bad and take forever. I never understood the point of big ore tanks. The small radial ore tank seems the most practical for all fuel making purposes. The big ore tanks are just for weight lifting competitions.
I don't do giant fuel stations anymore. Rather re purpose every transfer stage used for real missions, by leaving them in stable orbits with a core, coms, and docking port. -
Nice work Sturmhawke! Making a trimararan Mk3 and getting to with enough dV to go to Minimus is hard.
Using hyperedit to get to Laythe is OK. I did it. If you know the vessel can get there, perhaps with mining on refueling, then it just takes a lot of time to do the spaceflight.
Go ahead and use mods parts, just say what you used.
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I think you're on the right track with using a single spark to takeoff from Tylo. And it's not too difficult to single stage the landing with a single poodle, plus all the gear. But, questions of style are at stake.
Spoiler
Starting out at 103 tons, with a cheat to Tylo orbit.
These two boosters with two landers sail off. Two boosters remain attatched to circularize at 20 km. Everything is nearly full of fuel at this point, but I could have had 2000dV to get the rover to Tylo if necessary.
There are lighter landers than a single vector that work. But style is a concern. This ship is about 22 tons empty.
The rover could one day orbit again, by the simple logic that landing on Tylo is harder than taking off Or it might stay and refuel things that come to the surface.
Getting to orbit on a single spark is easy. But adding enough value that it is not debris is a little trickier.
So I went and landed the same ship on Vall that had taken off from Tylo. There is enough dV to go to Bop or Poll as well.
I didn't bring a Laythe Lander this time, or do the real interplanetary transfer. All the individual parts of the Jool5 mission are straightforward to test. But putting them all together is still a huge challenge. Especially with the constraint of no debris.
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3 hours ago, Aeroboi said:
What are you saying. The Ant has 2Kn of Thrust, the Dawn ION engine has 2Kn thrust also
What is it you want exactly?
An electrical device to increase rocket thrust. But it only works on small scale, and or pulses. Xenon has a low ionization energy. But in a flame the valence electrons are already liberated as a plasma. So the positive ions can be accelerated by an electric field.
If it were a KSP part it might have an ISP of 700, and weigh less than the xenon kit, and also perhaps use electricity more than the xenon kit.
There currently exist such engines and they are used for super high altitude airships. Possibly the best way to push lighter than air ships to orbital velocity on Earth and Venus.
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7 minutes ago, vyznev said:
So build smaller. This thing can (barely) take off from Tylo:
Add one more fuel tank if you'd like a bit more margin. The Spark engine has plenty of thrust for it. Building the landing stage around this is left as an exercise.
That looks like a throw away. The spirit of the challenge is that everything has a docking port, power generation, antennae, (probe core?) etc. Nothing is a fully dead stage. And if you think 3 small solar panels is enough you haven't gotten stuck with your back to the sun.
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A plasma booster. Somewhere between an ant and dawn engine.
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I've kinda been working on this anyway. I'm trying to put together a Jool 5 which satisfies my sense of style which includes the desire to create no debris, and have everything I leave behind be a stable satellite or surface outpost with communication.
Doing an Apollo style Tylo mission on a low mass budget is the biggest challenge. It's possible to overcome Tylo just by adding more stuff. But it would be really cool to do it with 3 small modules and a total mass less than 30 tons. It doesn't seem impossible but it is a challenge, especially when we make no debris or crashed stages, and each stage needs a mass of electronics.Spoiler
The brute force approach. 5 Rhino's can haul everything including a spare kitchen sink.
The Nukes are docked to the sides, and intended for interplanetary pushing. The core stage can land and takeoff from Tylo with or without Nuke stages attatched. It is so powerful is simply doesn't matter.
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Kerbal genetic engineers have come up with a type of coconut that can grow in extremely low light conditions. They ask for a custom vehicle to carry scientists, passengers, experimental storage bays, etc. It must be capable of taking off from the sea, and be able to land on non flat terrain. The coconut growers wish to visit as many shorelines on Laythe as possible. They would like to be able to takeoff on polar headings and make multiple landings before going to orbit.
To prove extreme durability and ruggedness it must be able to land on the small island runway and takeoff from the Kerbin sea, with the ability to reach LKO.
Points awarded for:
- Ability to takeoff from Kerbin sea and reach LKO +500
- Ability to land on the small island runway +250
- Visit at Laythe biome, collect a surface sample +200 each (must be able to store all samples)
- Passengers, cabins +50 per kerbal
- Science instruments, coms... + 100 total
- ISRU + 100 (complete kit)
- docking ports, RCS +100
- ability to land on Minimus after Kerbin sea takeoff + 500
- ability to land on any other moon after Laythe takeoff +500
Spoiler
My current favorite sea plane. It has ISRU, science, coms, and 3 crew. It cannot dolphin takeoff because it has no oxidizer but it will lift off form the sea at about 50m/s. I broke a solar panel by moving through the sea at 3 m/s, but I think there is an RTG.
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I sent 24 Kerbals to land on the Mun and Minimus for less that 100,000 roots. The mission could have been optimized a little better. The biggest hiccup I ran into was keeping my electricity and coms up and running especially during aerobraking. The primary launch stage was a twin boar and 6 kickbacks, it could have been optimized a little further. The upper stage of the mission is all performed with a single poodle engine.
I went to the Mun first and left a fuel tank in orbit. After the Mun landing I rendezvoused with it and refueled. On the way back from Minimus I did a gravity slingshot off the Mun and dropped into a much lower orbit with an aerobraking periapsis. I didn't do it carefully enough to get close to KSP, but landed somewhere random on Kerbin. I had about 140 m/s of dV left at the end of the mission which I used to cushion my landing.
Spoiler
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39 minutes ago, linuxgurugamer said:
So what does happen when you use Alt + > ???
No, you use Alt plus the right angle bracket > to increase warp. That is stock behaviour. What the menu at the top does is let you select a different profile
Oh that works. Maybe I could have done ion burns at 4x speed all along and didn't know it. I wonder what other stock controls I haven't discovered yet.
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So I'm able to get crazy fast physics time warp in the atmosphere. But I'm not getting it in space with the ion engines, even though I press Alt.
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Ok I now have Clickthrough Blocker, Toolbar Control, and Better Time Warp. No error messages.
When I try to use it with ion engines I still get the message "cannot warp under acceleration". Because of reading the thread I noticed you're supposed to hold Alt and click on the speed arrows in the upper left, but I still get the cannot warp message.
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Experimental Moho vessel. Acceleration 3.87 m/s^2 and over 3000 dV. A single 1x6 solar panel is not quite enough for 2 ion engines continuously. You could run 3 engines with 2 solar panels...
At Gilly you need just over 3 solar panels per engine. At Kerbin 6 solar panels per engine. The non-retractable kind are the lightest.
My new thinking is that a compromise between charging rate and electric storage is not the way to go. The two extremes are better. Either have enough power to fire the engine continuously and not need batteries. Or have enough batteries to make big burns and then let time warp handle the recharge. 1000 units of charge for one engine lasts almost 2 minutes. Another way to do it is to adjust down the thrust limiter. I don't have better timewarp yet, but I guess I'll be getting it.
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Hi I already read the first post. I was just wondering if the links from two years ago are still the ones to use. I'm using 1.6.1 and it sounds like CKAN is the way to cover the dependencies, is there just one link to get that? If someone can post a couple of the most up to date links, I would be thankful.
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Experimental Eeloo lander. The batteries hold about 600 m/s dV
This one has very few batteries, but the fuel cell array can fully power 2 ion engines continuously. The solar panels take a long time to charge batteries at Jool.
A difficulty with Ion landers is that the suicide burn often starts at over 10km, and this leads to a buildup of downward speed. With ion max acceleration over 3 m/s^2 it is possible to land on most bodies. But having a high thrust kicker engine for the suicide burns really helps.
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11 hours ago, Reinhart Mk.1 said:
The rescue pod that IN THEORY... should be able to pick up Jeb from his Eve orbit and take him to the rescue ship so he can finally see something other than PURPLE
That is a strange craft. What is it's full mission?
No offense but it looks really heavy to me.
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The challenge or mission I've accepted is to develop a set of interlockable craft to do the Jool5 and possibly the grand tour, or the grand tour minus eve. Including the following conditions.
No decoulers at all. Not even on landers. Not the structural ones.
Only docking ports are allowed. Staging and crossfeed switching of docking ports is allowed.
Any stages left along the way must be viable in terms of a electricity, antenna, probe core, and potentially refuelable. They also must be left in controlled orbits or on a planets surface. If anything is left on a planets surface it must be demonstrably refuelable. (i.e. if the only way to refuel it is to land a refinery on the roof, demonstate the ability to do so).
Some of the ideas that go into this project are thanks to other members of this forum. I can't remember exactly who to give credit to for some of these ideas. But if you know who you are, then thank you.
This top bike has mini docking ports in the front and back in line with the center of mass and center of thrust, so it can link up with any number of vessels exactly like itself. It uses a fuel cell array to provide non stop power to 2 ion engines, and it has 2 twitch engines for emergencies. At around 2.7t weight it can handle the smaller moons on ion power only. It has been tested on Vall, Bop, Pol, and the Mun. It might handle the three smallest planets and Ike, yet to be tested.
This giant rig has 16 crew and 41 docking ports, I think. The legs are designed for crew acess without ladders, and 3 docking ports per leg both mini and medium for all rovers.
The Nerva stages can be decoupled, each has 2 engines, 2 medium decouplers allong the center line, 2 mini decouplers and all the basic probe stuff. The mining rig can land on Tylo with or without the Nerva stages. It can land and take off from Laythe without the Nerva stages. The Laythe landing has been tested as a power only landing on Rhinos, no parachutes. And it can take off from Laythe, but not Kerbin on only Rhinos. The picture is on Tylo.
I might be able to brute force it with just these. But I want to develop a few more vessels and airplanes that are compatable. It would be so much more awesome, if it had more stuff.
Also my computer heat sinks can't keep up with running huge part counts at my current settings. What are some ways to relax the settings?
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Inspired by Herbal.
Packing 1 Rhino, 4 poodles, large ISRU with 4 drills and extendable radiators, 2 large fuel cell arrays so the processor can run non stop.... 220 tons 1.72 TWR, 4524 m/s dV.
It can land on Tylo, mine and return to orbit. Probably unsuitable for multiple landings on Tylo, but it could refill easily on the smaller moons. I had about 1/4 fuel left.
The nice thing about stuctural pylons is that they can be fired one at a time by right click menu.
I
I had about 1.5 of these full. They could push significant payloads to the other moons. Remember, It doesn't count as debris if its an active comsat
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I did some tests with decouplers and struts by launching pods vertically at the runway. I have an exact measurement of altitude, which determines kinetic energy and momentum after full separation.. The F3 menu reports maximum speed and maximum G force, but these numbers could not have existed steadily for the .039s I estimate the decoupler force lasts.
Conclusion attatching a lot of struts reduces the relative velocity of the stage, but the struts exert minimal torque on the part during the decoupling process. However putting the center of a pod near the top or bottom of radial decoupler blows it away from the decoupler.
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It's not so much about comparing different players as about having levels to progress through. Like blue belt, brown belt, etc. I've had the game less than a year now and I'm trying to solidify the Madlad level. Everything at level 4 pro seems easy now, but it didn't a couple months ago. We should add a lot more levels of achievements between 3 and 5.
4a. Be able to design fly and land 10 of your own unique aircraft. Be able to land on the tiny island runway or the sea.
4b. Be able to say what moving or rotating any wing surface should do before testing it.
4c. Get an SSTO to minimus with ISRU and a drill (it's ok if you still don't get radiators and electricity exactly right)
4d. Use gravity assists to send probes to eeloo, moho, and dres. Be able to put asteroids into stable orbits of planets or moons.
4e. Show that you can master all the achievements up to this point without dropping any debris (crashing or leaving something with docking ports in a stable orbit is fine)
4f. Show that you can master all the achievements up to this point and land everything safely on the runway.
4g. Be able to land rockets vertically on Kerbin and Duna without parachutes.
There are probably a lot more achievements to add to the list. My computer doesn't like >300 parts as much as simple vessels, so I don't invest much into rovers or bases. Going to Laythe and Eve are my favorite parts
16 hours ago, Reinhart Mk.1 said:so this is the alternative between just a straight up approach and orbit then encounter eve approach?
Good one!
4e. Be able to launch into hyperbolic orbits which escape the local SOI without circularizing, and create efficient planetary encounters.
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9 hours ago, herbal space program said:
After watching that, I think I can say that You Will Go To Space Today if you do just 2 things:
I thought the same thing. But I noticed different things.
1.Turn off gimbal for the side vectors. They are probably wasting over a hundred dV by gimballing and the center one has plenty of gimbal.
2. Always stay pointed at the blue part of the nav ball above the horizon. I noticed the maneuver vector and prograde vector were in the brown zone below the horizon. That means you were lowering your own apoapsis. I would never point below the horizon going for orbit. Exactly 0 degrees pitch straight horizontal is fine. But somewhere between the horizon and the the instantaneous prograde vector is usually best. I usually watch my time to apoapsis. If time to apoapsis is increasing I pitch toward the horizon and then lower throttle. If time to apoapsis is decreasing then I raise the nose up toward the instantaneous prograde vector.
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Sounds like you're darn close. A mountain would probably do it if you only need oxidizer to get to 16.5 km.
The KSP wiki may not be accurate for drag information. It just says drag equals .02 for almost everything. I hope that means they all have the same drag per unit area, but I'm not sure.
I'd consider any altitude under 30km to be a giant fuel suck. In which case some good canards could control pitch while you blast for altitude. It would also allow a lower AOA on the main wing which could make a huge difference in terms of drag. Canard forces tend to be more favorable than tail elevators.
What is it you want exactly?
Coconut express - Sea plane SSTO
in KSP1 Challenges & Mission ideas
Posted
The coconut growers have decided that being able to transport a rover would be really nice, but they also want a plane that can land on rough terrain such as the little island runway.
They would like more photos of the giant trimaran landing on extra large landing gear.