Janus92

My Starship refuelling after 2 trips to Mun and back:

The big ship is my favorite, as it can SSTO straight to Duna, Minmus, ánd the Mun (the most difficult, requiring a 6G suicide burn!)

Reserved for update

Touring the Kerbol System after updating two of my VSSTO ships:

The bigger of the two ships can SSTO straight to Duna, the Mun, or Minmus. Not kidding!

Hmm, hard to say, and also it's been a while since I've flown the craft. I just know that the delta-V is really sensitive to the flight profile being flown on ascent. I think I followed a pretty flat ascent, and waited all the way to engine cut-off to switch the engines. Training often helps in finding out what works!

I recently posted my best SSTO in this forum. This ship can SSTO to Duna, Minmus ánd to Mun as delta-V in orbit can go up to 1750m/s (due to low drag, all fairing design). And it can control the body flaps for a precise high AoA aerobrake or re-entry after which a landing consists of pressing a single button (backspace), the ship flips over and MJ autolands it. Vacuum delta-V of 4950m/s. Also includes a lab, and ISRU for refuelling. The Starship SSTO:

Thanks! Decent performance and aesthetics are difficult too combine sometimes!

I love the craft! Wonderful stock design ánd functionality! As for re-entry heating, the only way I know is to put some really heat-resistant parts on the forward facing side during re-entry. I went with a full body fairing on my Starships, but you lose the very cool capability of loading and unloading cargo.

Update 2021-05-25: I am working continuously on an automated takeoff and landing script for this ship, which, along with the craft, can be found here: The ship also got a nosejob! I felt the nose was a little off. I'd say this is an improvement:

Actually your ship mostly inspired mine! That awesome solar panel setup and the functionality of your ship was THE inspiration for mine. I wanted to scale it up to Mk2 sizes though! :) I also used your movable-engine-system for mine.

REMOVED - BUT FOR ARCHIVING PURPOSES THE POST REMAINS: I'm proud to present: Features: - Fully Reusable! - Vacuum delta-V is an amazing 4890 m/s, and in orbit over 1750 m/s. That´s enough to suicide burn somewhere on the Kerbin-facing side of the Mun. - Seats 6 Kerbals. Livable space of 225 cubic meters (good for those privacy-sensitive Kerbals). - A Research Laboratory, and many science experiments and ISRU for refuelling enroute. - Cargo Pod (2500L) - Controllable Body-flaps - Extendable landing struts for stabilizing on uneven terrain. - Autoland function (Mechjeb, press backspace 2x to activate) which flips the ship from high AoAs to retrograde by using the body flaps, engages the engines (in case you forgot), and performs a soft-landing. - The Stainless-steel body (2 fairings) shields most stuff and is perfect to shed heat from a hot Re-Entry or Aerobraking maneuvre. Requirements: - Breaking Ground DLC - TweakScale - MechJeb (optional, for re-entry and Autoland feature) Guide to a successful Mun Landing: - set and engage MJ’s Ascent Guidance (71km, 19% curve, starting the turn at 1m/s) - Launch - Plan & Perform a Hohmann Transfer (check min. 1750m/s in LKO, and using MJ’s Landing Guidance, modify maneuvre to select a landing spot with enough ore to refuel) - Do a suicide burn! (press backspace for Autoland!) Download Link: SHIP REMOVED See you Space Cowboy!

The Arrow Queen, an Interplanetary VTOL SSTO (Breaking Ground required) The Arrow Queen is a Mk2 style spaceplane, designed for VTOL and delivers 6 kerbals and up to 2020m/s delta-V in orbit. This is enough to land on Mun (with a suicide burn, but margins are maximum 100m/s), Duna (no parachutes necessary, just aerobrake and use retrograde nuclear thrust, margins around 500m/s) or Minmus before continuing into the rest of the universe. It also includes an ISRU unit for some (slow) refuelling. For VTOL, it features 6 rotating hover engines that are stowed away into mk2 cargobays for horizontal flight. It was a lot of work balancing CoM, CoL, CoT together into a functional spaceplane. But I think the result is quite well balanced. Download The craft was the result of an experiment with a VTOL SSTO, and through many iterations it reached the current status. Feel free to improve its design anytime! Its deltawing shape means it's highly aerodynamic: As nuclear engines provide all of the delta-V from 30km+, reaching orbit is not easy. Here's a screenshot during a 3 minute burn to Mun (acceleration of around 4m/s, so patience is required): As delta-V for Mun is marginal, I recommend flying straight into Mun and doing a suicide burn (THANK YOU, MECHJEB). Don't start the landing burn too late: Once you have landed, it's ISRU time! (Take enough food for 60 days at least) Landing on Duna seen from the cockpit (after some serious aerobraking, retrograde nuclear thrust is the easiest, like on the Mun): https://imgur.com/1UrtT Also check out it's lighter, and easier (non-nuclear) sister for LKO operation, The Arrowmaker: Download Arrowmaker

It's that simple? Yeah makes sense.. Somehow I thought TU was required for a basic functioning craft when I downloaded it. LOL. Great work though! I'm having a lot of fun!

for those of us who have had black textures (with Texture Unlimited etc), I found out some things, and I thought I could share these in case someone is looking for it: -In KSP settings render quality needs to be set to "Good" or higher for PBR to work correctly, as well as "reflections" not set to off (or so I have read in this forum, I haven't personally tested this). -As performance on my little laptop only allows a maximum rendering quality of "Fast" without slowing to a halt while looking at Kerbin, I renamed the TundraExploration\Plugin\SootyShaderLoader.dll to SootyShaderLoader.dllold to disable the shaders. And with this I can enjoy the basic textures (not blackness) again without performance losses.

SHIP HAS BEEN REMOVED SINCE KSP UPDATES BROKE THE SHIP - FOR ARCHIVING PURPOSES THE POST REMAINS Unity Mk5 - a stock Starship interpretation Unity Mk5 The Unity Mk5 is the 5th iteration of a multipurpose VSSTO capable of flying (nearly) everywhere. It includes a simple launcher that delivers 2750m/s delta-v in orbit. That's enough to reach Duna for a refuelling stop and some lunch. From there the Universe is wide open! The first 3 iterations had aerodynamic problems and crashed, however the Mk4 turned out to be a relatively good ship with its quirks. So development restarted and the model was soon optimized for its use case. From increased heat-resistance, a redesign of the interior, reducing weight and drag, to hiding (and shielding) drills and experiments, the Mk5 became a highly optimized and versatile ship. A docking port was left out, but can be added anywhere on the ship as needed. The Mk5 features: 4780m/s vacuum delta-v (w/ launcher 2750m/s in LKO, as SSTO 1200m/s) Laboratory for all the science ISRU fuel production (fuel-cell powered) Designed to belly-flop and land vertically without parachutes (Some thrust may be necessary to flip stable retrograde, and check that the nosefin is not deployed) (tested on Kerbin, Duna and Laythe) Emergency drag chutes are available (limited performance) Landing legs for up to 15 degrees slope Some Re-entry tips: Use the aerobraking mode ("2")! The resulting Angle-of-Attack (10-20 degrees) and lift vector enables a precise flying to a landing spot of your choosing, as well as bleeding off energy (read: speed). Designed for a re-entry with <1500m/s delta-v remaining fuel. If heavier, prepare for a more difficult belly-flop (maybe use drag chutes for turning retrograde), and slightly less effective steering while aerobraking. The thermally critical part is the forward fairing, so don't let it explode!! The ship can be downloaded from KerbalX: --SHIP HAS BEEN REMOVED-- Let me know what you think! Some more photoshops (made with Kronal Vessel Viewer):

I present to you the PteroTaxi (breaking ground required) 5 seats (including pilot), easy to fly VTOL. (because I say so) Fuel-cell powered (max speed 210m/s@3500m), or solar panel/battery powered (max speed 108m/s@3500m). 6Hrs+ fuel-cell power (but if the fuel tanks are completely fuelled up, then way more) Water & Mountain landings approved. Throttle controls both Blade Angle and Torque: power saving mode (solar panel/battery only) is < "1 notch above 2/3 throttle". High power mode is > "1 notch above 2/3 throttle" (fuel-cells automatically provide power). Keybindings: 1 - "VTOL-mode" vs. "Flight Mode" 2 - Start/Stop Engines 9 - Ladders Have fun, and tell me what you think! Here's the link: https://kerbalx.com/Janus92/PteroTaxi

Yes, and I realized later, one also needs the SAS to point down for it to work. And I guess one can't mount an invisible speedbrake within KSP's limitations. It's pretty well balanced now anyway , from landing with little fuel to full tanks, I've been able to land the thing on the landing pad (once i figured out to not fold the wrong fins at the wrong time) Still not sure if you could make a control surface out of it though (but I'm pretty sure that SAS won't handle it correctly). We'd need a custom built auto-pilot for that

Ah I see. Anyway it flies wonderfully! Thank you!

That looks great! I was experimenting with putting in a ModuleAeroSurface part to make the fins act like a Speedbrake controllable by SAS, but I can't manage to get this working. I read somewhere that transformName = should reference to the "moving part" (I don't know what it's called in it's hierarchy), but it doesn't move or work at all actually. Any tips to get it basically working? I was wondering what the current options are to make the Fins into control surfaces or speedbrakes? In one of his newer videos about the BFR, Everyday-Astronaut put some actual side-mounted (and 5x accelerated) speedbrakes on to control the attitude with SAS, which works wonderfully. There must be a way to make it working with this BFR.

It's ofcourse important that it's controllable enough to reliably steer towards a landing spot throughout a wider re-entry envelope. And the current version starts wobbling and rolling uncontrollably for me at high angles of attack and low fuel on board (read: very aft Center of Mass, hence unstable by nature). That would suggest we need a slightly more forward CoM (read: more stable, but also less control authority) and increased pitch, roll and yaw authority (to fix the reduced control authority). In my previous post, I managed to fix these for myself, but I noticed that at half-full tanks and subsonic glide to landing pad, there's the danger of becoming stuck in a situation of heavy mass, low AoA, higher speed glide and slightly too much forward CoM, where it's impossible to flip over at 2km altitude. Maybe requiring more RCS power? Or is a half-full-tanks-landing by definition unrealistic and just outside of the Vehicles envelope. Ah, the questions.. On another note: I wonder if somehow we are experiencing different behaviour? I also don't have any problems with the rocket breaking apart during launch (I haven't managed, even though I tried). Is everyone using the provided BFR 2018 ship saved under "ksp main folder"/ships?

It's really only two changes on your latest download version on github: Commandpod cfg: name = ModuleReactionWheel PitchTorque = 800 YawTorque = 800 RollTorque = 800 //Was 400 name = ModuleRCSFX thrusterTransformName = RCS thrusterPower = 26 // Was 13 Engine shroud cfg: CoMOffset = 0.0, 3.0, 0.0 -Check for a second CoMOffset with 2nd value -2.0 in it, and remove the whole line. 3.0 works well for me. Or would you like the whole cfgs?

I played around a little with the aerodynamics too and I managed to get a well flyable machine, even enabling a difficult re-entry from the mun. See here: I noticed these things in the aerodynamics: - In the engine-shroud cfg I found the CoMOffset entry two times. Removing the last one made flying much more stable for me. (I'm guessing it didn't use the first one?) - The Forward fin L & R configs have different values for drag at max and min AoA. No noticable change for me. And I also changed some things in the CommandPod cfg that helped me noticably: - Reaction wheels power from 400 to 800, since we don't have actual control surfaces. Not so much for stability, but SAS and flying capability. - RCS power doubled, to ensure the flipping maneuver at low enough speeds. So far it has resulted in something more easily flyable in all my tests (weird re-entry angle, half full tanks etc), but ofcourse I'll leave the actual tweaking to you.

This is one wonderful machine! On my first mun-landing I was surprised to see I had enough fuel to return to Kerbin. And even more surprised I managed to land right back at the KSC in one try (after two kerbin orbit test flights though, and with help of the trajectory-mod to get at least slightly at the right entry-point). https://imgur.com/Xr2OTgp Re-entry was slightly chaotic though. High AoA to bleed energy, and then it flipped already at pretty high altitude. Once retrograde, it kept side-slipping a bit (no pure retrograde), but the lift vector was usable for steering the ship towards KSC. Man, I haven't had this much fun in ages! Thank you!