AHHans

I just tried to re-create your plane. It's not exactly the same: my craft has only 42 parts, but weights 34.157 t fully fueled. But I did manage to get it into orbit. My flight profile was about so: Start climbing at ca. 20 deg nose-up. Make sure that I keep accelerating. If it looks like I'll stop accelerating, then I lower the nose. (I tap the <F>-key, which temorarily disables SAS, which in turn causes the nose to lower.) I made sure to get through the sound barrier well below 10km (ca. 7-9km), I needed to lower the nose to about 5 - 10 deg nose-up. You know that you got through the sound barrier when both the speed and the engine thrust increase while you are still climbing (at around 340 - 380 m/s). Don't input pitch-commands anymore, the increasing speed and the curvature of Kerbin will raise the nose (well, relative to the surface) on its own. When I stop accelerating with the whiplashs alone, then I activate the swivel engines. (At > 15km and > 900 m/s.) When the thrust of the whiplashs drops below 50 kN (I keep a PAW of a whiplash open) I shut them off and close the air intakes. (I have both on the same action group.) When the time-to-apoapsis gets above 1 min I switch to prograde-hold. When the apoapsis reaches 80 km, I throttle down, coast to apoapsis and circularize. One issue with your design is that you don't have any Lf-only tanks, but you do have a significant portion of the flight where you use the whiplashs in air-breathing mode. On the first try I had ca. 700 units of excess oxidizer after getting to orbit. So change some of the rocket-fuel tanks for Lf-only tanks. P.S. In case you didn't know: both the whiplash and the RAPIER in air-breathing mode have a significant increase in their thrust at supersonic speeds. So once you get through the sound barrier the craft will accelerate a lot quicker.

Hmmm... If you look at the latest "Threads of the Month" then you see that there are already two threads in there that are dedicated to showing specific new craft, so in a way this already exists. What you could do is to start this yourself: why not do a post "Klapaucius' Craft of the Month" e.g. in the "KSP Discussion" subforum every month. Maybe that'll get the moderators interested enough to make it "official". Well, I'm much more proud of my Flying Rock than of the Train of Hype. And I'm surprised that the Flying Rock Kit is the least downloaded of my craft on KerbalX, even less than the Train of Hype. I mean, one is a slow train with one gimmick, the other is a giant flying rock with wings, how cool is that?

Not exactly on the same topic, but IMHO close enough and probably helpful to some: I found that setting SAS to "radial out" in "surface" mode will help keeping your craft upright so that you don't need to worry about righting an upturned craft. (And hitting the "Z" key in case the slope was more inclined than I expected...) Ah, you didn't need that parachute anyhow, did you?

A general explanation how the deployed science works can be found in this thread: An explanation of when the experiments (try to) transmit their science and why this can cause them to not transmit all (or even most) of their science can be found here: So the communotron nearby will do nothing for the deployed science because it isn't a relay antenna. ... Hmmm, sandbox mode ... O.K. Apparently in sandbox mode the deployed science does not transmit. The experiments generate "completed science" but don't even try to transmit that. The percentage of seismic science you get from crashing a craft onto a body will depend on the crash energy - i.e. mass of the craft and it speed - the distance of the impact to the sensor, and the mass of the body. My experience is: On Kerbin: if you set up the station close to the KSC, then the discarded boosters will gather the full science over time. (Even if it is in small increments.) On small-ish planetoids without atmosphere (Mun, Ike, and smaller), just crashing obsolete parts (the transfer stages for trans-Munar or trans-Duna injection, old landers, etc.) into them collected the full science. Duna and Eve were a larger problem: on Duna I got it by crashing a streamlined rocket from its Kerbin transfer close-ish to the sensor. Eve was the usual pain in the posterior: anything from the orbit either explodes or gets slowed down to terminal velocity in Eve's souposphere. Winged cruise-missiles that filled up to 315 t total mass by mining on Eve, and then were steered to impact close to the sensor only gave a few percentage points when doing it without "cheating". When I did the impact at 4x physics warp I got the full science... I haven't done the Joolian moons, Moho, or Eeloo yet.

Nope. Well, when you dock two craft together then the root part of the combined craft will be the root part of one of the two pre-docked craft. So in a way the root part of the other one was changed. But I don't think that is what you were thinking about.

Yes, there is a toggle in the cheat menu (<R-Shift> - <F12> on Linux, <Alt> - F12> on Windows), in the general "Physics" tab.

Hmmm... Here I can reproduce that only when I enable fuel crossfeed on one of the decouplers but not the other.

Not really today, but over the last few days, I taught a 17 t rock how to fly: Valentina is not sure if it flies better than Jebediah's idea of a rock with wings, but it has a decidedly higher rock to craft mass ratio! Feel free to check out the Flying Rock Challenge

Up front a PSA: As of 21st March 2020: In version 1.9.x there is a bug that affects the mass of small asteroids: #24855 on the bugtracker. Affected asteroids get a mass of 150 t assigned to them instead of the correct value. In the bug report on the bugtracker there is an explanation of a patch that fixes this issue. But the main topic is a new prototype for a flying rock, the: Jet Rock In an effort to create a flying asteroid that is easier to fly I tried a system that relies on jet thrust to keep in the air, and using a large number of reaction wheels to control the craft. With somewhat mixed success: using SAS to keep it pointed upright (select "control from here" from the probe core and set SAS to "surface" -> "radial out") it is easy to get into the air and land in one piece. You can also fairly easily decide on the postcode in which you want to land. Precisely landing on a certain spot - like the helicopter pads on the VAB - is possible but pretty tricky. Even with a fully mined out asteroid it has a fairly large inertia, so that it reacts rather sluggishly to the controls. Also the - let's say unconventional - aerodynamics of the craft means that it can easily go out of control, from which it usually doesn't recover. But it does fly, and it will take you where you want to get! Even if it looks a bit like a giant turtle while doing so. P.S. The full gallery on imgur: https://imgur.com/a/5WEaYtO

Ah, this issue #22946 has nothing to do with the toggle points or so. It is just something that came to my mind when you wrote that you are working on doing your own reaction wheels. It means that when you have your own reaction wheels, then the built-in SAS will not be able to use them.

O.K. That is strange! I haven't seen that before. I have done essentially the same on some of my craft and I didn't have this problem. My suggestion is to report this in the Technical Support (PC, unmodded installs) subforum. [Edit:] I just tried this again on my system, and here it works fine.

Ah, best of luck with that! Are you aware of issue #22946? (Feel free to vote that up. ) Hmmm... Wouldn't "incremental control" be a more appropriate mode for self-made reaction wheels?

Ah, yes. I don't think the single actions on the KAL work well together with absolute control mode. I'm not sure that a KAL will trigger them when it "teleports" directly on top of them. If you are trying to do something like yaw control with a tail rotor by running a propeller forwards or backwards, then I'd suggest to keep the propeller RPM constant and change the pitch of the propeller blades instead. [Edit:] Or use the collective control mode that was introduced with KSP 1.9.

I'm afraid some details might be lost in translation, so I repeat what I think your problem is. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.) So you launch two different ships, one of them has a docking port at the end of a robotic part, e.g. a hinge. You dock both vessels in space, and then undock them again. Up to here everything worked fine, the two vessels undocked and nothing broke.(*) But then when you try to move the robotic part the part doesn't move? Or the part tries to move but it cannot move the attached structure? Do you have autostruts activated on any of the parts? Can you post a screenshot with the PAW (the "right-click window") of the robotic part and the attached docking port? P.S. If you post an English version directly from Google translate, then I suggest that you also post the French original. (Yes, post both!) There are many who understand French even if they cannot write it. (I don't, but I believe others so.) P.P.S. (*)One common problem with the combination of robotic parts and docking ports is that after docking the two docked-together vessels start shaking. Sometimes so much that the break into pieces. But AFAIK this mostly affects rovers and other craft on the ground.

Well, if you got KSP via steam, then I would do a "verify local files". Is that the <ESC> menu or the cheat menu? If you can open the latter, then you could check if any input locks are active and try if removing them helps. (But IIRC the problems I used to have didn't lock the camera.)

Hoi @Zwartekop, welkom bij de Forums.(*) A single action - like "toggle motor direction" - in the KAL sequence is triggered whenever there is a point or marker (a blue square) at the time-stamp in the sequence that is being played. You can add more points with the "+" in the toolbar which adds a point at the current time-stamp, and which you then can drag around. So in your example it should change the motor direction about halfway through the sequence. Are you saying that it doesn't do that? [Edit:] Just gave it a try and here it worked as it should. P.S. (*)Is that correct? And I assume that the meaning is clear enough that I don't need to add an English translation, even if that violates the letter of the forum rules. P.P.S. If you add a ".png" or ".jpg" to imgur URLs of images, then you get the URLs of an image file that you can directly include in a forum post.

Indeed! If there is one recommendation that I give for rocket design, then its: start from the top and go from there to the bottom of the rocket. I.e. design the payload first, and then start thinking about the booster needed to get it where you want it to go. If the job is to land a science payload on the Mun or Minmus, then 1.25 m parts are perfectly fine. If you want to get a station that can hold a few thousand units of fuel into orbit, then you probably want 2.5 m parts. If you want to actually haul several thousand units of fuel into orbit then you might want something even bigger. You may want to challenge yourself to try out every part that there is in the game. But it's also fine to decide to see how far you can get with tiny probes and stick to 1.25 m parts for most of the game. One thing I like about KSP is that there are so many ways to play it.

I think that the patched conics as such are fine, but your orbit changed. I have the impression that when you switch immediately to a high time-warp then the way that the current motion of your ship gets converted to an orbit has at least rounding errors(*) that causes you orbit to change a little bit. And a small change in orbit while escaping Kerbin will translate to a large difference on where you'll arrive around Duna. I do two thing to minimize this issue: one is to not jump to high time-warp when controlling a ship, i.e. not just click on "jump to next maneuver" or so, but first go to 50x or so manual time-warp and then hit that button. Or to leave the vessel completely, e.g. by going back to the KSC, and doing the time-warp there. The other is that whenever I come out of time-warp with an already set maneuver node I check that node by clocking on prograde/retrograde/whatever without actually dragging - and thus changing - the marker. That will apply the maneuver node to my currently actual orbit, and I can adjust it if needed. (*) I think they are not typical rounding errors but probably errors with the getting the time-stamp right for the conversion from one reference frame to another.

Well, you wrote about having a Kerbal pick up the units... In case I wasn't clear: I would send another crew to collect the science. But that's me, there are other options. (E.g. use the "previous save" and keep the crew there to collect the data.)

Yes, but as @a2soup wrote in the (currently) last post in the thread there: if a Kerbal picks up a unit that already has the full science, then they pick up the science and can carry that back to the KSC.

That's up to you. My station on Vall - that had only intermittent connectivity via a station in orbit around Jool, just inside Tylo(*) - will get a visit soon. Well, soon-ish, not before my mining lander arrived at Jool and maybe also only after the battery upgrade for the rover arrives and I can finally use the scanner arm. But as you can see, I need to land again at Vall anyhow. (*)I didn't know that Vall is tidally locked to Jool, and thus that the relay on a lower orbit around Jool is never within reach of the station....

Yupp. As long as it is on the side of Eeloo that points towards Kerbin and a DSN antenna is in sight.

The extra comm-dish has indeed the same strength as the strongest antennas. That is not the problem, but if there is no relay around, then you don't have a line-of-sight for at least half of the time. (When you are on the other side of the planet / moon.)

You probably had no commnet connectivity at the (relatively few) moments that the experiments tried to transmit. See my explanation here:

Well, you could use a plane/glider - i.e. a craft with enough aerodynamic lift that you can fly it a good distance cross-country - or you do a propulsive landing - i.e. a craft that can traverse a reasonable distance on rocket engine thrust. (Jet engines work on Laythe so that gives you more options.) My plan is to place my (one-piece) Laythe base with a combination of parachutes and rockets: not much traverse needed for this, just want the ability to fine-tune the place where it goes. And then visit it with SSTO space-planes. (Both are currently in transit to Jool.)