Nuclear_Wizard

Hmm, that could work. I'll start messing around with some parameters, and hope I don't break everything. Edit: I found a solution. I took the Hooligan Labs mod and made an "anchor" airship by modifying the small "cirrus" part. The main change was making the envelope volume parameter negative. I also removed the animation, so it didn't expand at all when activated, and increased the impact tolerance so it didn't break when it got to the ocean floor. It took some messing around to get the ship to sink, and hit the bottom at a reasonable speed, but it works wonderfully. I have a Kethane oil rig floating on Kerbin, with a drill module (attached to a modified KAS winch) just over 1km under the water, filling up the surface tanks. Now, do get this monstrosity to Laythe. And also a seaplane and/or floating runway.

Thanks! That was an interesting read. The weird water physics, however, is making me lose hope in this mission being possible.

I've thought about that, but then I'd have to haul an 80t anchor to Laythe, which I cannot imagine to be fuel efficient.

I'm looking for a method to make a craft sink to the bottom of the ocean. It's to be part of a floating Kethane mining rig on Laythe, which drops a capsule to the bottom of the ocean to mine from the sea-bed. Any methods to achieve this, or mods that can do this would be great. I have the airships mod, but can't seem to modify it to get negative buoyancy to sink the ship.

As a physics student, I find this all quite interesting. Maybe I'll read up on the physics of planes on the weekend, when I have some time. The COM/COL height thing makes sense, I can see it effecting the stability in ways I can't imagine. This is good to know. As long as I don't have to slow down from orbital velocities with engines, it should all be pretty easy to upgrade the rover landers.

That was a good video, mewp, I didn't actually know that about planes. I assumed I needed the COM on top of the COL.

Thanks, I'll look it up. Worst case scenario is I manually land them, and a few of them crash. Expensive but no lives lost.

Yeah, that's looking more and more like the best option here. I wanted to have a ship in low orbit with 8 or so mini rovers on it that are just fire and forget, so they auto parachute and land themselves. Might need to get more involved with the landings now.

RobotRay, that is a cool truck and landing. My question is, more specifically, if my rovers are currently landing at around 5 m/s (assuming they are adequately slowed from orbit) what speed will they land on Duna? What is the rule of thumb, and is there some equation I can use?

Related question: what is the comparison between parachuting on Kerbin and Duna? I want to air-drop in a bunch of rovers, and I'm not sure how slow they need to descend on Kerbin to correspond to a safe descent on Duna. I don't want to bomb the surface, I want to explore it. EDIT: Even better, if anyone knows the equations they use to model air resistance in terms of atmospheric density, I could just figure it all out myself.

So I've been preparing my Duna program, I have 4 ships in orbit ready to go, and I want to add a space-plane to the mix. The problem is, I have no idea how the planes will react to lower gravity and thinner atmosphere. I have a plane built that flies pretty well on Kerbin (rocket powered, of course) but I don't know if it'll get enough lift to fly properly on Duna. Is there a good rule of thumb for designing planes and testing them on Kerbin? Or more helpfully, how does the atmospheric thickness contribute to lift?

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