king of nowhere

what happened to @JacobJHC? he was always reviewing new entries in a few days, and now mine has been unanswered for one month

you can use imgur. go to https://imgur.com/upload and upload your pictures. then you can right-click copy the pictures there and paste them on the thread.

oh, I see. when expressed like this it feels like bug exploiting though, just a step short of kraken engines. I will build something else.

I completed the circumnavigation of Polta, my fifth OPM world. Though technically I won't complete it until I return the crew on kerbin, which I won't do for a while because I'll be circumnavigating Priax and Tal first. So, besides being the first to circumnavigate a modded planet, I'll also be the first to complete a whole modded gas giant subsystem. whether @18Wattdecides to add this on the leaderboard now or later is up to him.

Part 10: My rover will go on Dancing Porcupine finishes the circumnavigation of Polta. I decide to also circumnavigate Priax.

I was experimenting with a lightweight laythe rocket, but was twarted by an abnormal drag on the aerodinamic fairing. I see people with aerodinamic fairings all the time, and I heard that if you make it the root part, it will have very little drag. well, I tried to do just that, here's the result. drag is 4 times greater than gravity drag, and it's all on the fairing. i tried by comparison with a mk1 pod, which is almost frictionless only 0.08 kN, 250 times less drag than the fairing, despite having the same speed at lower altitude. there is still a significant drag, but it's mostly the flat bottom. i experimented with a more pointy fairing, and with changing the root part, but got no improvement. what's the issue with fairings and drag? I see people flying vehicles made of an external chair inside a fairing all the time, they wouldn't do that if there wasn't a way to reduce drag.

I can confirm that OPM changes antenna settings

well, it says there is no oxygen in the atmosphere, so the spectrovariometer is working exactly as it should. the planetary resources, on the other hand, are not. i see you have a bunch of other mods, it could be a compatibility issue

as i said, it's not protecting the payload inside. the game physics engine is limited like that.

a legit question, with a moltitude of answers. because I don't like making planes. but I have an idea to try a fully reusable whirligig world grand tour, and that mod has 2 eve-like planets. because I am already capable of making decent planes, and I seem to have hit a wall when it comes to improve there. because I can easily value the performance of a spaceship and where it is lacking (too much dry mass, too few electricity, too few reaction wheels...), but I don't even know where to start in valuing the performance of a plane (wing angle? propeller power? center of mass? maybe the plane is fine but my flight profile is wrong?). and without being able to value performance, I can't improve. because starting with something smaller and more manageable is boring. But even accepting to make something smaller and going incremental? I already have several propeller planes that can ssto from kerbin with considerable payloads, despite sacrificing a lot of performance to luxuries like good iva view or fancy add-ons. the next logical step is eve. and I already had a model that could reach 13 km on propellers, then it could not orbit. I got the feeling that if only I could improve flight performance a little bit and gain a couple more km of elevation, ssto would be within my grasp. also, because making planes in general doesn't seem to apply much to making something capable of eve ssto. stuff like angling the propellers or putting the CoM behind the CoL goes against the basics I knew of planes. and I am keeping the same mass/wing ratio that worked on smaller planes, but this time it's not working. but perhaps more to the point, I am actually doing exactly that: something simpler and more manageable. So far, what I am trying to make is a plane that's 4 times heavier than my previous heavier model, that has similar wing and propeller ratios, and that flies. And I'm stumped, because I'm doing all the stuff that worked to make smaller planes, and it's not working anymore. I'm not even worrying about rocket flight so far, those rockets are only there to simulate the mass. EDIT: I mean, this is Arrowhead, possibly my most successful spaceplane it has a mass of 50 tons, its propellers generate 200 kN of thrust, it's got 4 wings, it flies easily on kerbin - though it's not very maneuverable. It reaches 7-8 km before needing the rockets, and it carries to orbit its dry mass of 20 tons, plus a bunch of spare fuel, so it's got almost 50% mass ratio to orbit. Despite using draggy Mk2 parts (I needed them for kerbalism reasons) and having that docking port on top and a similar one on the bottom interfering with a smooth flight. As first step, I tried to make a plane that was 4-5 times heavier, I gave it 1000 kN of propeller thrust, 16 wings before I got talked into reducing them, and I streamlined everything to remove all the inefficiences arrowhead had. I fully expected to get something that would fly better. Instead I got something that can barely manage level flight at sea level, and I have no idea why. I may have underestimated the task, but really, given that I've already taken all the steps before, what else could I do as practice?

Ok, it took me a long while to test with this stuff because my life got busy. I tried your suggestions. 1) as already mentioned, I had 32 blades already. I moved them one at the front and one at the bottom. 2) I now have 2 vectors and 2 nervs; I am sure I'll have to add one or two more nervs, but that can wait; right now, it's important to just get this airborne. 3) I angled the propellers downward 5 degrees as you suggested. I removed a pair of wings, since you mentioned those planes are supposed to be underwinged. 4) I moved the CoL forward as you suggested. I forgot the horizontal stabilizers at first, but I tried them now, didn't help. So, first model. the first model at least can take off reliably at the end of the runway, without crashing in the ocean half the times, so I guess that's some progress. but it starts to pitch up and up. it flips and crashes. so I moved the CoL back. one tick at a time, until I had a stable plane. here's what I got. and it flies, but it stops there. It's barely air-worthy. it does not pick up speed. It does not climb, at least not significantly. and it was slowly losing speed. in eve's greater gravity, this model wouldn't be able to get past 13 km, while it should reach 15 on propellers alone. As I said, after reading again and realizing that I was missing the aft stabilizers, I tried to install them and move a single wing pair forward by two ticks. Plane tipped up again. I'm still stuck with something that doesn't fly well enough

what kind of calculation is that? why are you doing *2/4, and what is 3 hours supposed to represent? and what are you trying to achieve exactly? if you want those satellites equally spaced, you have an easier time launching them at 2 hours interval, since that's how you equally divide in three a kerbin day.

the problem is with the game modeling system. to you, it seems like you made a perfectly closed hatch. but the game does not model it that way; as far as the game is concerned, the nose cone is not closing the cargo bay. so your ship flies poorly because it has a giant hole on the front, making it super draggy. as for the hinge itself, it may be subject to vibrations and deformations. if you want to make a nose cone that opens, there's no convenient way to do it with stock parts; the physic engine of the game simply does not allow it. but there are nose cones that open in the near future mod, so I suggest you look there.

Part 9: From north to south pole Exactly as the title says. The land is mostly highlands of average difficulty, with some stretch at lower elevation.

the ship turning around generally means aerodinamic problems, but your ship looks aerodinamic enough, so I'm a bit confused. I agree with superfluous, reducing thrust is probably your best bet. another thing I see that I want to comment on, though: you have two radial decouplers for each booster, and that looks nice, but it doesn't actually work. the way the game models the rocket, you can't bind a booster on two points. you can use struts for that, if the boosters are unstable. that could be a reason for the issue

just delete the kerbalism folder. if you want to keep different careers with and without kerbalism, you can copy the game folder to have a second install of ksp, and have one with and one without kerbalism. i myself have, like, 6 different versions of ksp

as you can see, i keep the aerodinamic window open while flying, and I check drag (resistenza totale in my italian interface). the kal controller sets blade angle, I just move it up and down until I find the value that gives me the most negative drag, and I keep adjusting during flight. people talk about angle of attack on the propellers, I guess they are using mods to show it, I don't so trying to calculate it according to air speed and blade speed would be too complicated. max rpm is defaulted at maximum, though I had prepared a second kal controller to balance that too - I discovered that in dense atmospheres I can get better performance by reducing rpm, though maybe that just happens because the propeller itself is not powerful enough to reach it anyway, so lowering the value to something the propeller can sustain improves stability. anyway, this is just prelimitary testing and I wasn't yet using that. I also considered reducing maximum torque for parts of the ascent to conserve electricity, but again, preliminary testing, so far I just want to have a plane that flies reasonably at standard pressure and up to half an atmosphere. if it can do that on kerbin, it can generally reach 15 km on eve. so, tl dr, I keep torque and rpm at maximum, and I regulate blade angle with the kal controller by experimentally picking the value that will give me the best negative drag EDIT: when the plane is standing still, I get -1000 kN of drag, so that's about the power of the propellers. as speed goes up, that number goes down, and I have no way of knowing how much of that is due to reduced propeller power, and how much is due to actual drag rising. when I take off at about 100 m/s, total drag is around 0 to 200 kN depending on angle of ascent. I suppose the wings must generate a lot of drag to lift a 200-ton plane anyway

I do have 32. It doesn't show well in the picture, but each of those service bays has 2 rotors, each with 8 blades. ok. though it doesn't affect the poor flight performance the plane currently has Interesting. so I am actually supposed to have to point the nose above prograde at kerbin's atmospheric pressure. I don't understand how that causes issues with the center of mass, but i'll take your word for it. weird, I'm no plane expert but I know that you generally want CoL behind CoM. And I also suppose the plane is intended to fly poorly at normal atmospheric pressure; it's only supposed to fly in those conditions for a short time, pushing up as much as it can before using rockets. also, when using rockets my first instinct is to get out of the atmosphere fast, but since I'll have low twr with two vectors, I guess I am supposed to keep flying horizontal - or nearly horizontal - for a while more, until the wings gain more lift, and let the plane be pushed upwards solely by lift from the wings until I am... what? 30k meters? Will give it a try. I'm still puzzled as to why this experimental model would fly so poorly, while an older plane I did (dubbed Arrowhead) had roughly one fourth of the mass, one fourth of the wing surface, one fourth of the propeller power, and it worked very well on kerbin and laythe despite many more sources of drag. but it's not really important at this point. (edit: I went to reread the relevant mission report, turned out that spaceplane also had limited speed and maneuverability at standard pressure, so perhaps it's consistent)

... are you aware that on eve rapiers don't work? did you read that I'm not concerned about that atm, I am only testing the propellers so far? i also mentioned that other stuff will be added later, once propeller flight works as intended. i believe you completely misunderstood everything about my post

After doing pretty much everything else, I decided to try an eve ssto (actually not for eve but some similar modded planets, not important anyway; basically, I have to optimize a model). unfortunately, if there is one aspect of this game that I never mastered, it's planes. Oh, I can fly, I made a few neat propeller-rocket models, but nothing special. I can make a propeller rocket plane that can ssto on kerbin, but eve is another matter entirely. Anyway, I've seen a few eve ssto, in particular this model used for a single stage grand tour that can ssto on eve with enough fuel left to land on gilly, while carrying mining equipment. I would not copy other's designs (where's the fun in that?), but I have a solid base to start. I certainly wasn't expecting my first experiment to go ssto, or even to get particularly close. But I was at least expecting it to fly. Nope. this is the plane. 226 tons, more mass should help reduce drag by the square cube law, the working models I've seen are all around 200 tons. 10 wings, it's more than other models I saw, I actually added some because I could not take off. I haven't yet placed the nuclear engines, that will come later - if I can make this work, which is doubtful at this point. on the airstrip, at low speed, propellers are generating a lot of thrust. so far so good. but around 100 m/s, I mostly stop accelerating. I can't tell how much is drag and how much the propellers lose power; I know it's easy enough to reach 200 m/s with propellers, so I must assume the plane is making drag the plane can lift off, but it lost speed here it recovered a bit, but it's still slower than when it took off. and I can't accelerate it the plane is very unstable during flight, it tends to pitch down hard unless I correct for it constantly. of course, this causes the plane to have a sinusoidal movement that greatly increases drag. additionally, the plane has a lot of trouble generating lift; I have to point the nose upwards of prograde if I want to stay in the air, else I fall down fast. And I already used 5° angle of attack - I'd have tried for less, but as I said, I wasn't getting enough lift. From what I heard, successful models use lower angles of attack and less wings per mass unit, but I already had a hard enough time getting this design to take off, and I can't imagine what it would take to get it to land in one piece. The plane is incapable to ascend at more than a few m/s, and it is incapable of going faster than 100 m/s. the design is very basic, and very similar to other successful planes. yet it barely stays in the air. and I can't tell the difference between this model and others that work. anyone can enlighten me?

I'm considering using that mod myself, so let me get this straight: I tested the mod, and i run into all the stones i saw, and none of them caused a collision. do parallax also add stuff that causes collisions? or maybe those are juust the obstacles from before, the ground features related to the breaking ground expansion?

first, check that data transmission is fine. maybe the experiment generates samples, and those samples must be returned to generate science. second, if it is indeed a bug, you can use the cheat menu to cheat the contract completed. it's supposed to be used as a debug tool

Part 8: Getting away from the north pole The land is so difficult here, it deserves a special chapter.

Part 7: Swallowed by the polthole Polta has a massive sinkhole in the north pole, just like Moho. Having rockets, I went down it all the way.

I have no idea, but the way science works is different in stock and kerbalism. maybe there is some compatibility issue