king of nowhere

July 18, 2020

39 minutes ago, bewing said:

If you make one of those probe cores that faces the correct direction into the root part (using the reroot tool), that should do it.

if i make the right probe core the root part, and then reinstate the previous root part (the previous root part was NOT a command module; it was a fuel tank), will that keep the probe core as the control point?

Quote

Also, it really isn't that hard to zoom your camera inside a fairing to select a part and say "control from here". Just try playing with the camera a bit; it's a skill you will use dozens of times in the future.

i never tried. i had no idea it was possible

July 18, 2020

for the first time ever, i want to take a video recording of my gaming.

now, for a long time, whenever i opened any steam game i would see a popup window saying something like "record what you've done" or "share what you've done with your friends" or something similar. and i never cared about it, but i assume from such a message that there is an in-built way to record the game.

except now that window does not pop up anymore.

can anyone explain me how to take video recordings of my games? thanks.

also related: kerbalx has the option to upload videos with your crafts. to do so, do you have to have those videos uploaded on youtube, or is there another way?

July 18, 2020

I have a problem with launching my rover; the command module of the rover, which also acts as command module for the launcher, is tilted 15 degrees over the rest of the rocket (there are reasons¹). this means that on the launch pad, the rocket thinks it is tilted 15 degrees. if i set it to hold a direction, the rocket will never hold that direction, because it will try to point 15 degrees away. knowing this deviation, i can drive it manually while mentally compensating, but it is confusing and annoying.

the rover has an additional command module and a probe core, both of them are facing the right direction. I'd just need to issue a "control from here" command. Unfortunately, i cannot find such an option in the VAB, and i can't select any part of the rover on the launch pad because they are safely inside an aerodinamic fairing. it goes without saying that i cannot launch a rover, full of wheels and dangly bits, inside the atmosphere.

I could add another probe core on the launcher, but it would be wasteful and, worse, inelegant. the only other solution i can conceive is to disassemble the rover and reassemble the forward-facing module first; i assume the game interprets the first command module you attach as the control point. but... let's just say that there are a lot of parts attached in peculiar ways that the editor had trouble recognizing, and then moved and aligned with extreme care. it would be very complicated to reassemble it correctly.

are there other ways for me to fix this issue?

1 the reason is, the command module is a cupola, so i can drive the rover from a first person perspective and feel like i'm really there. but the cupola is made to see upwards, it needs to be angled down to have a good visibility of the ground.

July 17, 2020

the wiki says that engineers can fix broken parts.

today, while i was trying a particularly daring jump with my rover, i twisted a wheel on landing

well, i thought, i have an engineer on board, let's see if i can fix it.

but i can't find the option. neither clicking on the wheel nor on the engineer give me any "fix broken piece" or similar option.

what's the deal? why can't i fix the wheel? what can engineers actually fix?

July 16, 2020

and now that i really used the rover outside of testing ground, i found an even simpler solution: delay refueling

see, the rover is supposed to land on rockets, refuel with a small drill, explore around, and take off again, to visit another low-gravity moon. with a full tank it is very heavy, and sluggish to drive. but i am on mun with one third of my maximum fuel, which is more than enough to straighten the rover when it capsizes (the original purpose of the rockets, before i realized i was already halfway to making a flying car), or to save me in case of whacky accidents, like accidentally plunging over the edge of a crater at full speed (Iwhich i just did). but still, the rover has a lot of acceleration and manueverability.

I'll just have to stop and make fuel before i leave mun. at worst i may found a biome too low on ore to make fuel, in which case i'll just have to move around a bit.

July 15, 2020

Now updated with the most recent technologies: Recycling point express 3!

- solar panels refurbished. Solar power generation greatly increased. the extensible panels can be retracted to protect them during dockings.
- added four RTG. Recycling Point Express 3 now remains functional on Eeloo, or during a long night on Moho, if at a lower efficiency.
- batteries replaced with the more compact version. Power storage capacity tripled over the previous model.
- radiators improved. can now conduct ISRU at 100% efficiency, unlike the previous model.
- probe core updated: now using HECS2, with all its advanced functions.
- added some Vernier engines for RCS. I may want to learn it in the future. Even now, the propellers pointing forward are useful to brake in the last phase of a docking without turning the whole ship around. Warning: RCS propellers are not available for pushing forward: use the main engine. Warning: you must retract the radiators before using the RCS
- added a M4435 narrow band scanner. now you can determine where you can refill your tanks before landing.
- added extensible ladders for convenience during EVA

On the downside, those improvements added a bit of mass, so RPE3 lost 170 m/s of deltaV budget over the previous version. Not a real issue, it still has enough to go anywhere.

Also, those changes impacted negatively the aerodinamics, and the launch with it. It is now advised to activate hold prograde around 80 m/s, which is a bit later than the previous model. atmospheric performance also decreased. It is advised to hold prograde later rather than sooner: RPE3 can capsize if you attempt to steer it at maxQ. Ending up in a high orbit, on the other hand, only wastes some fuel, which you can replenish at the first stop anyway.

download link: https://kerbalx.com/king_of_nowhere/Recycling-point-express-3

July 14, 2020

the amount of rcs fuel is really variable by individual. for example, i don't use the rcs at all, so i need none

July 13, 2020

every hinge has a certain resistance level, if it takes too much force it won't stand still. in that case, use more hinges or use bigger hinges.

i know there are ways to lock hinges better, though i do not know them. but regardless, there will come a time when you will just need stronger hinges.

July 13, 2020

17 minutes ago, Tonka Crash said:
@king of nowhere I modified the Torque curves of all the wheels. I used go 4x4ing in a Nissan Xterra and it could climb a 60 deg slope, so getting stuck on a 10 degree incline really annoyed me. The way squad has the wheels set up the torque tapers off pretty rapidly as speed increases. This is not how electric motors generally work in the real world. They usually have a flat torque output until the fall off at their peak speed. This is what I use for the TR-2L, you might give it a try:
@PART[wheelMed] {	// RoveMax TR-2L
    @MODULE[ModuleWheelMotor] {
	-torqueCurve {}
	torqueCurve
	{
	    key = 0 2.1 0 0
	    key = 5 2.1 0 0
	    key = 15 2.1 0 0
	    key = 25 2.1 0 0
	    key = 52 0.5 0 0
	    key = 58 0 0 0
	}
    }
    @MODULE[ModuleWheelBrakes] 
    {
	@maxBrakeTorque = 2.1
    }

}
I just got done Baja racing a rover 170km across the Mun and was getting 100m+ in the air after running 30m/s up some crater rims. With MechJeb SAS the thing handled acted like a cat to keep the wheels pointed at the ground.

thanks, but modifying the files really would feel like cheating. i would like to publish this rover when i'm done working on it, i can't have it work only on a modded pc.

but hey, good news. i did manage it putting two G-00 hinges on two of the engines. now i can turn them backwards and fire to help me uphill. the good part is, the rover wheels mostly keep up speed, only losing slowly against the slope. so i can give myself a quick rocket push, and then just cruise for a while. i got out of the test crater with less than 100 m/s.

and they cause no stability problems in flight that i could determine.

and i only added 40 kg of extra weight.

July 11, 2020

1 hour ago, bewing said:

The most important first thing to try is turn off traction control on all your wheels. Traction control automatically applies the brakes to your wheels when they slip. And on a low-G world, your wheels are always slipping. All the auto-braking can easily destroy 90% of your propulsion.

well, as i hoped, there was some trick.

it definitely improves traction. not as much as i was hoping, but at least i can climb a 15 degrees slope on mun, and i can even go a long way up at 20 degrees if i have a bit of starting velocity. It drains battery like crazy, though - my 5000 starting battery, that with similar rovers would last me through 10 km of night driving, were depleted in minutes. but it's a function i can turn on and off, so it's ok. i will activate it if i need to climb.

furthermore, i realized that i can increase my grip by using my rockets to puch me downwards (they are mounted to push downwards because, if the rover is flipped, they can spin it in the air again). which i want to kick myself for not realizing earlier. it still takes fuel, but much less than trying a suborbital trajectory on a rover with poor manueverability. i accelerated up a 30 degrees slope, and with enough starting speed i even managed to overcome the 50 degrees slope and get out of the crater i was using as testing ground. though using my rockets so long costed me 300 m/s, it may have been cheaper to go for parabolic flight.

well, at least my rover is now usable. not optimal, but usable.

anything more i can try? next thing i will attempt is putthing hinges to fire the rockets backwards and see how that goes. or maybe i'll try extra wheels.

by the way, what does "friction control" do (i'm translating it back from my italian game, name could be a bit different. anyway, it's the option next to traction control)? i tried to set it to ignore and then pump it to the max manually, without seeing any difference.

July 11, 2020

I have a massive beast of a 48-ton rover, with eight TR-2L wheels, designed for exploration and fuel transfer (hence the mass: it's a Jumbo-64 fuel tank on wheels) on small moons 1.

the rover performs very well in all the many things i want it to accomplish, except for this problem. it can't go uphill when fully loaded. In mun gravity it cannot climb a slope steeper than 10 degrees. on minmus, it barely makes it to 15. Even dry (just shy of 20 tons) it barely climbs 20 degrees on mun. which is a huge problem when you want to explore with your rover.

it seems clear that the wheels aren't powerful enough to propel the rover. I am looking for solutions.

- i could use the massive XL3 model, but it seems overkill. even using only 4, it would add 4 tons of dry weight. now, this rover is also designed to fly 2 on planets with small gravity, i'm not excited at the prospect of adding 4 tons. perhaps worse, they have a top speed of only 15 m/s, against the TR-2L cruise of 30 m/s. i plan to drive around the small planets with this rover, i'd rather have a fast one (i am aware of the glitch that lets accelerate much faster with the XL3, but i dislike using it; feels too much like bug abuse)

- i can put some hinges to orient the rockets backwards and give it a push. it can work as a backup solution, and i won't run out of fuel because i have a small ISRU facility on board 3. At least, as long as i am in a biome with more than 2.5% ore. and i'm not excited at the prospect of using fuel every single time i have to go uphill. not to mention that the more hinges i add to the rockets, the more they shake and vibrate, creating all manners of problems during flight

- i can put more wheels? say, double theirs number? would that even work?

- i can use the very neat trick that i was suggested in the forum. please tell me there is a neat trick to get the desired power/grip for my rover that would not feel like bug exploiting.

- I canNOT make my rover lighter. even at 20 tonnes, it's still barely acceptable in mun gravity. and i'd have to give up on the fuel tank, or reduce some of the other functionalities.

so, any advice?

1: it started as a fuel transfer rover to get fuel from mining operations to landed ships. then i realized, science equipment is light anyway, instead of having one mining rover and one science rover i could send one single rover to do the exploring between one refueling trip and the other. but a mining rover is fine moving only a few kilometers on mostly flat ground, an exploration rover needs to be able to go far on rugged terrain.

2: i already had a big fuel tank for fuel transfer. and i had one engine on a side to rotate it in case it capsized. as i was studying solutions to drop it on mun, i suddenly realized what the hell, it has a tank, it has an engine, i just need another engine on the other side and then this thing can fly on its own.

3: i already had a 45+ton vehicle designed to be adept at a lot of different tasks. adding ISRU was only 1.5 extra tonnes, why not?

July 10, 2020

20 minutes ago, Spricigo said:

Tested with 4 basic fins and it works. But the heat will be a problem if reentrying from anywhere but LKO.

When testing Zhetaan's idea I noticed that TWR was about 0.4 (with full tank). Swaping to a spider engine may give just enough oomph, given the better atmospheric ISP, if one is not enough a pair will be.

Still, the problem is heat you will face when returning from another planet. You need to either shield your probecore from it or have a lot of fuel to reduce the speed you enter the atmosphere.

reentry is not a problem. i always perform some aerobraking first, gradually reducing my speed in multiple orbits. in fact, some of my crafts proved quite vulnerable to reentry and i had to spend 10 orbits or so to slow them down carefully enough. it should be possible to reduce speed enough for capture.

as for the spider engine, i hadn't unlocked it yet and forgot it exhisted. it should be enough for the final brake!

July 10, 2020

so, i have this reusable mun lander. when some tourist pay to go to mun, i send a transfer vehichle, dock it to the lander, land, and send back the transfer vehicle with the science data. it significantly reduced the cost a mun missions.

until the last mission, when i had this strange mishap. on top is the lander coupled, on the bottom are the lander and the transfer module separated. as you can see, the masses do not add up.

from the two separate masses, i should now have 19 tons of ship, of which 9 tons dry weight. i calculated deltaV using the rocket equation, and came out with around 2500 m/s, more than enough to land on mun, take off again, and send the transfer module on kerbin intercept.

but, as you can see on the higher picture, it only gives me a nominal 600 m/s. which, granted, is still a bug. i actualy have more, i tried landing and i did land, which i could not do with only 600 m/s. but landing consummed all my fuel, i checked the tanks and i was left with 20%, not enough to take off again. i'm definitely losing fuel here.

i tried to tinker with the craft, and i eventually found the source: the command moduel i used has an in-built decoupler, and the game thinks that i will engage it before using the engines. this explains why it does not see most of my fuel. however, fuel from the lower tanks is still being drained, and still far faster than it should.

what can i do?

(i have half a mind to activate cheats for infinite fuel. it's not like i don't actually have the fuel)

EDIT: another piece of the puzzle came into place; i tried to exclude completely the landing module from the manuever, and i discovered that the two engines on the transfer module were not producing any thrust. probably they are too close to the tanks of the lander, so their exhaust just slams on them and the push gets canceled.

after i disabled those two engines, the ship is flying as it should be, consumming the right amount of fuel. granted, it still does not see that fuel; according to the staging sequence, i have no fuel left whatsoever, yet my rocket is working just fine.

July 10, 2020

i managed to touchdown at 25 m/s gliding with two basic fins. probably can be improved too, if one is expert about flying. with lift, even the small push from the ant is enough to slow down significantly.

that's slow enough that the small armor i made could have survived that, had i not fallen on water.

this is the design i used; in the end i went for OKTO+wheels not for the 10 kg saved, but because it gave me much more manueverability in air

I am now sure gliding down to a slow speed and surviving the crash is possible.

however, it's complex enough to make it work that for my actual probes i'll stick with a parachute. this is now more of a feasibility concept than anything else

July 10, 2020

35 minutes ago, James M said:

Flaring on wings is probably the most weight efficient way of going about pulling off a lithobrake landing.

(That is until we get airbags if ever)

the ant engine at low altitude has a TWR of less than 0.1. flaring won't help much. flying on wings like a glider is another option i considered, but i don't have much knowledge of flying in this game to know if it can work

July 9, 2020

the difference between lithobraking and advanced lithobraking is that with the latter, your ship remains whole. at least the parts that matter.

i am planning robotic missions to remote worlds. i collect science. yay! but i loathe to transmit it. it gets small returns. but i can't take my whole robotic probe and bring it back; that would require a probe bigger than i want. so, i designed a tiny probe that can return on kerbin with my precious samples.

this probe must be as small as possible, of course. so, an ant engine (20 kg) and an oscarB fuel tank (230 kg, of which 30 kg dry mass). of course the core of it all is a sample canister (50 kg), and i can't go below 100 kg with a HECS probe core (i could use a OKTO2, but i need reaction wheels, so i'd have to add them aside; i'd only save 10 kg, for a massive extra cost). add in an antenna, a battery (as much as i want to be light, the internal battery of the HECS won't last long, and i'm not going to risk a multi-year mission on the chance that my probe will miss a critical manuever because it was being eclipsed by a planet. not if i only need 5 kg to fix this) and a couple light solar panels, and we're at 220-230 kg of dry weight.

and then there's the parachute. i need a parachute to survive reentry. and the smallest parachute is 100 kg. it increases my dry mass by almost 50%.

this is why i was considering skipping the parachute entirely.

the probe is so light, air slows it down almost to the end. it slams on the ground at only 70 m/s. i only need to lose that much.

first i considered rocket braking, but it's not possible. the ant engine has no efficiency in air. i would need to use a spark, which weights 110 kg more than the ant. a parachute is lighter.

and this is why i started experimenting with putting some structural pieces around my probe and deorbiting it. but without much luck. out of three attempts, only once some pieces survived the impact, and the science canister was not among them.

I also considered large, flat surfaces that would create drag and slow the probe further, but alas, they are all too heavy.

so, before spending hours to a task that may be impossible, and without much notion of what i'm doing, i want to ask: is there the chance to make a probe as i described that can survive impact against the ground without parachute, while adding armor that weights less than a parachute?

(i used octagonal struts because they are light. other structural parts are more resistant, but they weight more than the parachute would)

July 9, 2020

so, to make it short, your options are

1) send a rescue mission, transfer the astronauts to the new craft, abandon the old craft. no tech required

2) send a refueling mission, attach with the claw and transfer fuel. not available at higher difficulties. requires the claw unlocked

3) rend a rover capable of producing fuel in-situ, and attach it to the craft with the claw. requires the claw and convert-o-trons.

4) cheat

1 is the simpler option (except 4, of course); 3 is the more effective, since your rover will stay there and you'll be able to use it again

July 9, 2020

Recycling Point Express (RCE for short) is a multipurpose ship that can serve as both exploration and mining vessel.
RPE can land and take off on any planetary body except Kerbin, Eve, and Laythe. It can resupply itself on the ground. It can collect all science and transmit or bring it back.
Once launched, RPE can explore most of the system on its own

DOWNLOAD LINK: https://kerbalx.com/king_of_nowhere/Recycling-Point-Express-RPE

Features

5000 m/s of deltaV when fully loaded
2 mining drills and a convert-o-tron
enough solar power and cooling to keep it effective from Moho to Dres
full science equipment (with light for ease of night use)
3 kerbal crew. one scientist to refresh experiments, one engineer to increase efficiency of fuel production, and one free place for whoever you want (possibly a stranded kerbal you went to rescue)
probe core for automated flight
3 medium and 2 small docking ports, placed for easy access by ships and rovers alike
night landing assistance: only a masochist would try to land amid Moho’s hills in the night, but with this advanced system of floodlights, it becomes ~~easy~~ ~~feasible~~ not completely hopeless
lots of reaction wheels for easy manuevering (necessary when you need to dock and you never learned to use the RCS)
additional ore tanks, for those contracts requiring you to grab ore (you can always take off with them full and squeeze some more propellant out of them along the way)

Launch system

launcher is already angled to launch itself with no need for steering.
Activate SAS. Accelerate to maximum. Launch
At exactly 65 m/s, activate hold prograde
you should reach 300 m/s at a 60° angle, and 450 m/s at a 45°. Check your progress to see if you need manual corrections
boosters should end with a 60 km apoapsis
coast for a while after the big boosters are spent. you need to clear some more atmosphere, and you may as well keep their momentum
activate wolfhound as soon as there are no more flames
discard aerodinamic covers on the tanks over 55 km
this sequence will put you in a 70 km circular orbit.

Check your inclination and speed during ascent. If you hold prograde too early or too late and your values don't match with the ones given above, you will need manual corrections. Shouldn't be a problem, RPE has good manueverability and plenty of spare fuel.

Limitations and future upgrades

on the bigger planets, if you land on biomes without ore, you may be unable to take off and land again. RPE does not have a remote resource scanner. On exploration, it is recommended to bring one along (possibly on a smaller, docked probe)
energy management is not excellent, and fuel production does not reach 100% efficiency. I was lacking some key technologies in this area. Will upgrade on later models. Anyway, it works, just not as fast.
probe core is limited in functionality. Will upgrade with an advanced model when available.
lacks an RCS. I never learned to use them
lacks magnetometer. It was too heavy for its usefulness

July 8, 2020

by the way, since you were at risk of not having enough fuel to return, i think you may find useful a deltaV map: it allows you to calculate how much fuel you'll need for any mission.

here is the deltaV map

and here are instructions to read it, if it laves you baffled

with the map you can readily calculate that once you are in kerbin orbit, you need 860 m/s to get on a mun intercept, 280 m/s to enter a circular low orbit around mun, another 280 m/s to get back to kerbin intercept. you'd need additional 860+3400 m/s to land, but you lose those by aerobraking. so, once you got into a mun intercept, you only needed an extra 500 m/s to also get orbit.

those values assume optimized trajectories

July 7, 2020

since speed is proportional to gravity, and drag is proportional to atmospheric density times speed squared, I think in your case a simple empyrical formula can be constructed as

landing speed = 4,3 m/s * :funds: ((planet gravity / kerbin gravity) / (atmosphere density/kerbin density))

if you land somewhere with twice the gravity and the same atmosphere, you're going to be 1.41 (square root of 2) times faster. if you land somewhere with half the atmosphere and the same gravity, you're also 1.41 times faster. twice the gravity and half the atmosphere means twice as fast - twice as fast generates four times the drag, which in half atmosphere means twice the drag on kerbin, which compensates the higher gravity. the formula should work.

in practice, though, you don't really need any formula, because there aren't many bodies with an atmosphere. if i'm not forgetting anything there are exactly 3: kerbin, eve, laythe. and duna, but i'm not counting it because the atmosphere is too thin to land with that.

eve has moderately higher gravity and atmosphere 5 times more dense, so you will be slower. laythe has less gravity and less atmosphere, you should have about the same speed. duna has a very thin atmosphere, you're gonna fall at over 100 m/s.

July 7, 2020

Quote

It sounds like you haven't visited R&D to spend those science points you gained.

either that, or after doing the research you haven't paid for the parts. after researching a part, you still need to pay some money to unlock it

July 7, 2020

RA-100 is an overkill for now, but i like to apply it to all my space station and stationary satellites anyway, so that by the time i get beyond duna, i already have a deep space network.

anyway, turned out my second minmus probe had a RA5 (i was afraid i'd lose contact with it too, i forgot i gave it an antenna), so i recovered contact once it was closer

thanks to all who answwered

July 7, 2020

to be more specific, we assume you are talking about the science experiments from the breaking ground expansion, namely the SEQ-3, SEQ-9, and the stuff you can put inside those (it helps to refer to the actual name; there are so many parts here, if you ask about "the part that does that thing" we are less likely to understand your problem).

In this case, you cannot attach them to space stations. you have to put them on the ground. once they are in the kerbal inventory, there will be an icon for "unload". you drop them on the ground, they generate science over time.

July 7, 2020

you have to fix the pitch or heading, i don't remember which one. i did it by trial and error.

also, 10 meters of altitude is a lot on eve. try to lower that number a bit; the game gives a warning, but if you put the pitch and heading right, your rover won't appear inside the ground.

July 6, 2020

31 minutes ago, bewing said:

A naked probe core has an antenna "power" of 5000. An HG5 has a "power" of 5 million. To calculate the maximum range for communication between a probe core and an HG5, you multiply and take the square root. Which equals 158km. So don't expect to get into communication until you are closer than that.

oh, i see. now i understand how it works. so, the station won't be close enough in orbit to support communication for now, but it will be once i upgrade it with the RA100

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