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Everything posted by QF9E
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Land on Jool... (Yes it's possible)
QF9E replied to Aliquido's topic in KSP1 Challenges & Mission ideas
Ok, I did look it up. According to the KSP wiki it is not possible to land on Jool: Source: https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Jool. This matches my own experience in trying to land on Jool. My own experiments went as described: the craft will explode once you reach -250 meters, although I haven't experienced glitches or corrupt saves as a result. As to the note on "prior to version 0.23": Version 0.23 was released back in 2013. I don't think many people will be willing to play such an old version of the game, just to be able to complete this challenge. That said, by all means prove us wrong. Fly your own mission where you land on Jool, take a surface sample, plant a flag and get back to Jool orbit, and present video evidence of your mission here. -
At 1:47 in your video, at about 10k or 11k altitude you give a series of yaw inputs to the right, as is indicated by the gizmo in the lower left corner. This dips the nose of your craft below the vertical, initiating flight with an angle of attack on the wing. Which in turn initiates an uncontrolled roll, which ends when your craft is flying with its wing vertically and towards an azimuth of about 160 degrees, at about 1:51 in the video. Please don't presume to know what I did or did not do. You have exactly zero evidence so your opinion on the matter is entirely baseless. That does not make any sense. Of course I try to keep my vehicle under control. You can use the airbrake part to lift your rover off the ground as @miklkit describes in their post. You can also use an airbrake to right a rover that has turned over. We are well aware what you are talking about. What you are apparently unaware of, is that it is possible to land a Kerbal on their own from low Kerbin orbit. Or build a small craft based around a command chair and re-enter the atmosphere with that. In cases such as these, a personal chute comes in handy to land your Kerbal safely. As to "but even in a returning craft from space there is no use as it either lands or too fast to bail": Yuri Gagarin, Gherman Titov, Andriyan Nikolayev, Pavel Popovich, Valery Bykovsky and Valentina Tereshkova would like to have a word with you. In case you don't recognize at least some of those names: those are the Vostok cosmonauts, Vostok being the first Soviet crewed spaceflight program, somewhat akin to the US Mercury. They ejected from their capsules after re-entry and landed under their own personal parachutes. This can be done in KSP as well.
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That's not what is going on: 1. The gimbals of your engines are not balanced. This induces roll when you give pitch input when you initiate the gravity turn, which makes your craft hard to control. 2. Flying with a non-zero angle of attack on the wing panels inside the atmosphere induces lift. And since the center of lift is a long way away from the center of mass, this lift induces so much roll torque that SAS is unable to compensate. Your craft ends up with the wing oriented vertically because of this. You also end up no longer flying to the East, and trying to compensate by giving yaw input again results in a non-zero angle of attack and uncontrollable roll. 3. During your circularization burn the craft was clearly out of balance. Note that the pitch indicator at the bottom left of your screen is way off-center, which means SAS must work overtime to keep the craft on course. Also note that once the pitch indicator is fully at the top or bottom of its range it cannot control pitch anymore, as your engine torque is by then more than the reaction wheels in your craft can handle. If you fly the same rocket model 90 degrees rotated on the pad to what you have been doing, you can avoid 1 and 2, and you can even control your gravity turn using differential thrust. I got a close copy of your craft into a 75 x 75 km orbit with over 600 m/s dv to spare without too much effort and without ever losing control.
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Please indicate which of my suggestions amount to brute force. It is entirely possible to build and fly a Space Shuttle without using excessive RCS, if that is what you mean. That said, you need the RCS system anyway if you want to be able to maneuver your shuttle accurately in space. If I may offer you some personal advice: please refrain from posting stuff like this. It's no use boasting about your achievements, and it may well result in unnecessary friction with other forum members. Real life space missions also require RCS and mid course correction burns (MCC). Of course, these are usually planned meticulously, but occasionally there has been some eyeballing in real life. Apollo 13 comes to mind, where they performed an MCC entirely by hand, because the flight computers were offline to save on electricity. Another, less successful example is Gemini 4: it attempted a rendez-vous with its own upper stage after launch, but failed to do so as the astronauts tried to eyeball the maneuvers and wasted most of their fuel. A more recent example is the Nauka docking with the ISS, which was "eventful", for lack of a better word. That said, if you use the maneuver planner to plan your MCCs in KSP, you don't need any eyeballing beyond switching the engines on and off at the appropriate times. Moreover, if you own the Breaking Ground DLC you can use the KAL-1000 to perform a very precise and entirely computer-controlled launch: While this is not a Space Shuttle, I don't see why you couldn't use a KAL-1000 to balance the thrust of an asymmetric craft. However, it does take a bit of patience to program the KAL-1000 just right. Which, given the amount of man hours spent on real-life spaceflight avionics, is quite realistic. If you want even more computing power to control your craft, I can recommend the kOS mod. That mod offers a fully programmable flight computer inside KSP.
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As to asymmetric rockets: there's a really simple solution to the problem: don't use them if it can be avoided. A side-mounted Space Shuttle should really be considered an advanced type of craft, much more difficult to design than an inline design. Here's an example of an inline Space Shuttle that I built: That said, it is possible to fly an asymmetric design. Some of the things you can to to alleviate the problem: The problem is much worse for Buran type shuttles (which do not have rocket engines on the orbiter) than for US Space Shuttles which have their main engines on the orbiter. Better not to build a Buran type until you know how to build the US type You can rotate your engines such that their thrust goes through the center of mass. The KER mod can help with this, as it can show the torque an engine exerts on the craft in the VAB You should use engines with a high gimbal range becasue the center of mass will shift during flight as propellant is consumed. Basically the only choice for this is the Vector engine Include a hefty RCS system. I found that the monoprop RCS thrusters simply do not cut it; My suggestion is to use Vernors instead. And of course you should be using SAS to help you keep your Shuttle in a stable attitude With these pointers it is perfectly possible to fly a Buran type shuttle to orbit by hand. See, e.g., this video of mine:
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Not really: I sent this thing to Eve inside a payload fairing as part of a challenge:
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When I build helos I usually build them with a single pair of counter-rotating rotors on a single axis. That type of helo is very stable. Would that work for your Eve ascent vehicle? Example helo using this setup:
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My suggestion would be to completely disallow the landers from entering the other moon's SOI. That seems the most consistent ruling to me.
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Sounds like fun, count me in! One question about the rules: are EVA jet pack landings allowed? If they are, I think there might be a way to swap Jeb and Val without doing a rendez-vous. Another question: the rules stipulate that "no unapproved ship may even be in orbit around each respective moon". Does this include flybys? I.e., is the Munar lander allowed to go inside Minmus' SOI without entering orbit, and vice versa?
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I built a rockoon: Loosely based on this X-Prize contestant: http://www.astronautix.com/w/wildfire.html, a rockoon is a suborbital rocket carried to the stratosphere by a balloon before lighting the rocket engine. I don't think I've ever seen one built in KSP before so I just had to make one.
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Build a two or all rockets from X-Prize.
QF9E replied to Sky Kerman's topic in KSP1 Challenges & Mission ideas
Among the rather mundane (at least KSP-wise) ballistic suborbital rockets, mothership launched rocket planes and jet / rocket plane hybrids I found one that is so weirdly different from the others that I just had to build it in KSP: http://www.astronautix.com/w/wildfire.html. Wild fire is a rockoon, a rocket that is carried to the stratosphere by a balloon before lighting its engine. The craft is described as To replicate this I used the 3-man Soviet style capsule; Some airbrakes were used to replicate a shuttlecock in form and function. As the landing speed is a bit too high to be survivable, I had to use the engine to slow down just before splashdown. I decided against using the inflatable heatshield to replicate the "inflated shuttlecock" and "inflated blunt conical cone", as the stock inflatable heat shield, while a better fit, is too big for this rocket. As to how I managed to build a stock balloon: it's not a balloon, it just looks like one. Technically it is an octocopter drone, with the propellers clipped inside the cone at the base. The balloon itself is a massive payload fairing on a 5 meter base, with a large stack of reaction wheels inside to keep it stable during ascent. -
An improvement over my previous attempt: No in-flight user input of any kind is needed to orbit this rocket. There's one Stayputnik probe core underneath the fairing, no reaction wheels, no RCS, no movable fins, no thrust vectoring, no throttling and no KAL-1000.
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My submission: A simple two-stage rocket without any means of steering. Its fixed, non steerable fins keep it on a surface prograde course through the atmosphere, and it has been tilted ever so slightly on the launchpad to initiate the gravity turn. It only needs user input once during its flight, to separate its 1st stage and ignite the upper stage. The reason it works at all is that the rocket keeps pitching down, even when it is above the atmosphere. The result of which is that it points approximately prograde orbital at AP. I think what happens is that the rocket gains a bit of angular momentum from its curved trajectory through the atmosphere that it keeps when in space.
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Northward autonomous rover challenge!
QF9E replied to Pds314's topic in KSP1 Challenges & Mission ideas
Could you perhaps do something with a flag planted at the North Pole and using that as target? -
Northward autonomous rover challenge!
QF9E replied to Pds314's topic in KSP1 Challenges & Mission ideas
Incredible! What an epic journey, I'm glad you made it to the pole! My kOS craft isn't fairing so well, but I am intentionally not using any waypoints, as that would make the challenge trivial. I'm running a fairly simple program that just aims North but avoids obstacles: if below 50 meters or above 1000 meters it tries to go around. I'm also using an autothrottle to avoid getting launched by humps in the terrain but that one needs some fine-tuning as my latest attempt crashed at 16 degrees North after going over a hill too fast. My craft does have a self-righting mechanism but it tends to get damaged on hard landings. My rover uses rover wheels, but seeing your attempt I think I'll change to landing gear and props, as landing gear is less prone to being damaged. It also makes a self-righting mechanism redundant: instead you can simply carry a second set of landing gear on top of the craft, and deploy those when coming to rest upside down. And you can swim across water, which comes in handy as well. -
Perfect auto-orbit. How low can you go without controls?
QF9E replied to Pds314's topic in KSP1 Challenges & Mission ideas
Further improvement: The way I got this one is by carefully timing the circularization burn (it's 0.2 seconds earlier than in last night's attempt) so that the end of the burn coincides with the craft hitting AP, and by carefully throttling back the engine by a couple of percent near the end of the burn, in order to be able to control the amount of dv better than with timings alone. Now KSP inaccuracies are taking over again, and a second run produced worse results: In the second run the gravity turn resulted in a slightly higher AP (69927.0 meters compared to 69863.5 meters for the previous run) and I doubt that can be fixed. Fine-tuning the gravity turn to remove small kinks from the launch profile might help but would also be very time-consuming. Here's a video of a third launch with the exact same KAL program: I've tried to capture a video with the KAL editor window open, but it turns out that having the KAL editor window open in flight influences the result, so a screenshot from the VAB will have to do. -
Perfect auto-orbit. How low can you go without controls?
QF9E replied to Pds314's topic in KSP1 Challenges & Mission ideas
With my new KAL-controlled trajectory I've been able to improve on my previous result. I also ditched the two-stage design I used earlier for a single stage rocket, as staging events are bound to add uncertainty. With the new steering mechanism the gravity turn is now very stable, reaching the same AP plus or minus about 100 meters every time. Unfortunately I haven't been able to lower AP below 72 km without PE going below 70: I'm hitting the limit of timing accuracy, as the difference between 72 x 70 km and 71 x 69 km orbits is a single KSP clock tick or 1/50th of a second. Perhaps this can be overcome by lowering the engine thrust for the circularization burn, but for now this will have to do. The good news is that it is repeatable: Second run with the exact same KAL program. -
Excellent, nicely done! Very brave of you to forego a separate battery, but you had just about enough electricity for the mission, so well done indeed! With that you gain the top spot for the challenge for Category #1, Unmanned. Since I am not the OP I cannot edit their post to add your name to the scoreboard, I hope that's not too much of a disappointment. No problem, that sounds all too familiar. Nowadays, when doing challenge missions I capture video of the entire mission and select screenshots afterwards with my video editor. That saves me the hassle of taking screenshots during complex maneuvers. Maybe that would work for you as well? Im using OBS Studio and Shotcut, both are open source.
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You used the KAL-1000 in that build. Since the current challenge is from 2016 and the Breaking Ground expansion wasn't around back then, the only way to be able to use the KAL-1000 back in 2016 would have been via a parts mod. However, the OP has explicitly forbidden part mods: Therefore I judge your craft to be invalid for this challenge. And as a more general note: by now we are all acutely aware that you know how to abuse the KAL-1000 to over / underclock engine parts. Kindly stop spamming the forums. Henceforth you will assume that every old challenge includes the rule "no KAL-1000 overclocking or underclocking" even if it does not explicitly say so. If you want to build something that uses the KAL-1000 in a legitimate fashion, there have been no less than 4 challenges over the last week or so involving the part.
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Perfect auto-orbit. How low can you go without controls?
QF9E replied to Pds314's topic in KSP1 Challenges & Mission ideas
I've been relying on fins to keep my craft oriented in the Surface Prograde direction, and I tipped over my rocket slightly on the launchpad to initiate the gravity turn. I think the biggest errors in the flightpath arise from that. So far I haven't used the KAL to control my trajectory, I've only used it as a timer to start and stop the engines and initiate the stage separation. I've got an idea to use a docking port on a hinge to let the KAL steer my trajectory, but I'll have to get some good values for the hinge angles. I might even write a kOS script to record those angles from a manually controlled flight and see if the KAL is able to reliably and accurately replicate that flight. -
Perfect auto-orbit. How low can you go without controls?
QF9E replied to Pds314's topic in KSP1 Challenges & Mission ideas
Thanks! Some more testing indicates that this is at the limit of KSPs accuracy, at least with my current craft. I did do a run with slightly different timings which ended up in a 72 x 74 km orbit, but I did not get a screen capture. And when I did a re-run to capture video, my craft did not make it to orbit. -
Sorry, no. This is what a stock version of your craft would look like: As @swjr-swis has already noted, the names of some of the parts are different. The mass of the craft is also different from your version, and the delta-v is much lower. As to you linking to the KSP wiki: I did not find the "R-20 Dumpling", "RC-02 Probo" or "Zs-06-200 Recargable Battery bank" on the page you linked, can you please clarify? The parts from my version, on the other hand, can be readily found there: https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Probodobodyne_OKTO2 https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/R-4_'Dumpling'_External_Tank https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Oscar-B_Fuel_Tank https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/48-7S_"Spark"_Liquid_Fuel_Engine https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Small_Nose_Cone https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Z-200_Rechargeable_Battery_Bank As to your short video: I asked for a video of your craft in flight, with the engine ISP, TWR and amount of propellant visible. None of that is visible in your video. I'm starting to wonder if you are fully honest with us. You get one last chance to prove that your craft is legitimate. If you don't, I will judge your submission as invalid.
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@ReeoNew Sorry to bother you again, but could you please tell me the exact parts that you have been using? I'm trying to replicate your design but my version falls short considerably with respect to dv (as in, my version has less than half of yours). Moreover, your design is considerably lighter than the other submissions to the challenge while at the same time being a rather straightforward design. So I'm wondering: have you been using any part mods that alter engine performance or add high performance engines not present in the stock game? Please keep in mind that OP banned all parts mods for this challenge: I would also like to see a screenshot of your rocket in flight, just after liftoff, with the staging / dv indicator at lower left and the resource tab on the right expanded so that I can see engine ISP and TWR as well as your propellant load-out.
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Perfect auto-orbit. How low can you go without controls?
QF9E replied to Pds314's topic in KSP1 Challenges & Mission ideas
Fun little challenge! My best result so far: