king of nowhere

i was trying to experiment loading/unloading stuff from the cargo bay, but could not do it because the plane keeps moving. i activated brakes, and the plane rotates around its center of mass. it does not move forward. it rotates. slowly, but fast enough that it disrupts my operation. and i don't want to know what will happen over a prolonged time. i tied putting a landing strut to act as brake, but it still turned. i thought maybe it was a problem of stress on wheels, so i added more wheels and removed all the fuel, still it rotates.a bit more slowly, but still. the paw says stress on wheels is 0 now. at least it starts at 0, though it increases over time. how do i fix that? EDIT: i take this chance for a related question: those large airplane wheels will only go forward and backwards. if i want to turn around while on land, do i have a good way to do it?

science from the lab has always been fluff for me, because i don't time warp to ridiculous amounts. i run all my missions simultaneously, so i have several interplanetary ships that i launched months ago (both in-game and in real life ) that still haven't reached their target because i've been busy dealing with all the stuff in the kerbin system so far. i'm still around day 170, no time to gather enough science with the lab. on the other hand, i already unlocked the full tech tree with nothing but mun and minmus landing, without ever launching a dedicated science mission. simply, every time i got a tourist contract to land on mun/minmus, i made sure to land at a different location. face it, this is not a game where "balance" is a concern. getting infinite science, as well as infinite money and close enough to infinite reputation, is trivial. that's not what the game is about. i considered lowering science/money returns, but that would only encourage grinding, taking on boring contracts only to net some cash.

ok, the first flight test was ended for lack of battery power. the second ended at 3000 m of altitude when i crashed into the side of a mountain (testing by night has limitations). i identified the source of the torque as all propellers accidentally turning in the same direction, and i retified that. third test was promising. until 5000 meters, the plane fly itself. it climbs steadily at 10° without need for touching the commands. above that, it tends to lean downwards, but it is still possible to climb at 5° until 9000 meters. it's possible to go even a bit higher, but at this point i was fighting the controls, and i just got tired of trying. so i decided to test rocket flight. the results there were less promising. as soon as i turned on the rocket, the plane started to turn in all directions. holding prograde was pointless, i had to do it manually. worse, it had a distinct tendency to point the nose upwards. if left to drive by itself, it would perform a full 360° turn. in the end, the 2500 m/s of fuel only allowed me to reach 25 km of altitude with a speed of 250 m/s. i need get the plane higher first, and then to find some aerodinamic fix. i also tested it in water, and it can move around. it can't take off, but it can reach land. EDIT: i also tested atmospheric reentry, and i really need to use the rockets to brake. even the wings don't survive the heat, much less the rest of the fuselage

i'm mostly eyeballing it and going by trial and error, so we'll never know. what i'd be curious to know is what would happen in reality if you put two wings one on top of the other like i did to gain some lifting surface. aerodynamics must be pretty rough around it. though biplanes actually had that setup, so maybe it works better than one would think

ok, done. that was good to know, i gained a bit more of speed nice, i've been looking for such an option. aaand... we have first takeoff on eve! i reached 1700 m before running out of electricity (even activating infinite electricity apparently didn't work without some source of power on board, and i hadn't yet put the rtg). the plane has a slight tendency to spin clockwise around its axis that must be compensated manually, but it is otherwise capable of flight and stable enough. in the next days i will have to see how high it can go, and if that height is enough to reach orbit with rockets. i will also need to find a good way to turn the plane when it is landed, in case i can't pick up speed because i face a mountain. i need to find ways to deal landing on water. and i need to learn to survive an atmospheric reentry. but for today, that's enough progress

yes. it is. a good challenge that will keep me interested for weeks is indistinguishable from self-flagellation. just this morning i took on a mission to recover 27 tons of ore from eve. it's hauling a lot more junk than my plane project. but it wasn't particularly challenging. it just needed a very big ship. I started stacking my asparagus, and once i tried and found it was not powerful enough, i just added another stack. I already have a rover that can take off and land from any world without atmosphere, refuel, explore, it's fun to drive and almost indestructible. whatever stuff i want to do on those planets, i send my rover and that's it. and i have an helicopter that can go anywhere on worlds with an atmosphere. plus the mechanism to put it in a cargo bay. if i just wanted to do things in a simpler way, i'd strap some rockets to the cargo bay with an expendable staging mechanism. having a rover that i can land and take off from eve in a reusable way is pretty much the only real challenge i have left. at least, the only one that interests me. i would agree, though, that i should learn to make planes in general before trying an eve ssto spaceplane. but that's pretty much what i'm doing. right now my objective is simply making a plane of that size work. i already can make a small plane, unfortunately the square cube law means i can't just scale things up. EDIT: i almost missed a perfectly good opportunity to quote

i can't help with your problem because i don't understand what you mean by "shimmy", but since you are fine with orbital refueling, have you considered also rocket braking during eve descent? you already have the rockets to lift from kerbin, and you already have the fuel tanks, and you don't have to get crazy with heat shields. i tried that solution just today with a 1200-ton eve lander (i needed it because a contract is asking me to mine 30 tons of ore from eve and bring them elsewhere, otherwise i'd never consider a lander so big), and it worked great when heat shields failed badly. with the added bonus of simplicity, from kerbin ascent all the way to landing on eve the ship does not shed a single part.

yes, i'm sure all those arrows mean... something. ok, i can see that those arrows are telling me that the wings are pushing upwards, and i have some drag. none of that is exactly surprising. and let's not start talking about the effects around the propellers hey, now that's something actually useful. numbers, i can understand. and what the hell, it's telling me that i have a total lift of less than 50 tons. going as fast as i can with the propellers (and not all that slow, i'm over 200 km/h, most planes have takeoff/landind speed slower than this). according to this screen, i'd need to quadruple my wing surface. i'd rather not use 20 pair of wings; any other trick i may use? by the way, it says total resistance 25 kN, of which only some will be caused by the clamp-o-tron. one single propeller blade gives me that much forward push, so i am right in assuming i can afford it. what i really can't afford is trying to make a spaceplane working in a most hostile environment, with a heavy payload, when i barely even know the basics about atmospheric flight. there's a reason i tried to make a helicopter first1. and now that i decided to go ahead with a fully reusable eve lander, i'm too headstrong to admit defeat, so i'm trying to learn spaceplanes. now i tried to remove that docking port and put a nose cone in its place, and the resistance is actually a negative, so maybe it's not what i assumed and i can't have a hard number of how much drag it is providing. but the plane is 4 m/s faster on the runway. i don't see any difference in lift2. 1 also, "helicopterocket" is a much better name than anything i can conceive for a space plane. 2 if the docking port shows to be such a huge deal, i have a plan for it. I attach another docked clamp-o-tron, with a nose cone, and i will put a claw on the orbiter. upon docking, the orbiter will pick up the nose cone with the claw. upon landing, the lander will get reattached to the nose cone. the question is, are those 400 kg of dry weight i would add any better than the drag?

yes, because on the back it generates suction. however, i assume it's still less bad than it would be in front. unfortunately, there isn't a shielded version of it, and i want to have it to couple with an orbiter. on a 200-ton vehicle, it won't be a single docking bay that makes the difference

I decided to do my seismic mission with some drop-tanks, because i'd hate to waste perfectly good rocket parts for a seismic experiment. so i used those tanks for the trip, refilled them in situ (isru fuel is free fuel, so i have no qualms wasting some of that to increase the mass of the impactor), went on a slight suborbital trajectory and dropped the tanks, then raised the orbit of the ship again. but i got very few points for it. speed was about 500 m/s, i had 3 impactors with about 1.5 tons of mass each, very close to the sensor, and still i netted maybe 50 science points for the whole thing. but at least it's an experiment i got to carry out for free. back to main topic, i got saddled with a contract to bring ore from eve to gilly. and not just some ore, but 27 tons of it! i needed to lift 30 tons of payload from eve! then again, the contract paid very well, so i set out to work and make this ridiculously oversized rocket at over 1200 tons, it's by far the biggest thing i ever launched. yes, it "trascends the preposterous into the truly absurd", but it's not my fault i was asked to lift 30 tons of payload from the biggest planet out there. i tried smaller models, but they would not lift. on the plus side, i don't need a launcher because this beast is capable of going ssto on kerbin. it just has enough fuel to reach orbit, then it refuels to my orbital tanker. which was the biggest thing i ever launched before this, it holds 600 tons of fuel, i refueled it around mun with a dozen trips from smaller vehicles (those vehicles themselves big enough that they can refuel many individual missions by themselves), and in 100 days of missions using it for resupplying i barely made an impact in that huge amount of stored fuel. but it doesn't even come close to refueling this monster. so i'll just load enough to get to minmus, where i have my heavy duty mining vehicle - itself a monstruously big thing i made with the sole purpose of refueling my orbital tanker quickly. thus refueled, i will send it to eve, where i will need all my fuel to brake from orbit. this thing is way too big for aerobraking. i tried with 4 overlapping 10-meters heat shields, it was a complete failure. they weren't even slowing it down! so, i will need to burn most of my fuel to reach the surface safely. there i will start drilling. slowly, because i don't have an engineer on board (i have few enough of those, i don't want to spare one for the years it will take). i will refill all the tanks, and fill the ore tanks. then comes the madness. first thing i detach the drills and convert-o-tron. then 9 mammoth engines going together. in 30 seconds the outer layer of the asparagus will be dry, 300 tons of fuel burned in istants. with those engines i also shed the larger solar panels i need to supply the mining operations, and the parachutes. i could not find a good way to attach them to the convert-o-tron, so i will just carry them on for the first leg of the trip. their weight is irrelevant over the total. the second part of the asparagus will get me to about 20 km of altitude and 400 m/s of speed, the inner layer will get me in a suborbital trajectory, and finally the central section will slowly circularize orbit with a poodle. once in orbit, i will again need refueling to make it to gilly. the multipurpose science-mining vehicle i have on eve can only resupply 30 tons at a time, luckily i only have the central section to refuel, as everything else was shed during eve ascent. and finally, after 3 and a half refueling stops, i will land this ore to gilly. i really would like to know who is the dumbass who is paying me 2 million to land ore on gilly when i could just extract it from there. heck, the final refueling will be done with fuel mined from gilly. i'm burning fuel made on gilly to bring less fuel to gilly. well, as long as they pay. i am so glad i could take advantage of my wide resupplying infrastructure. i don't want to know how big this thing would have needed to be otherwise. big enough that even this ludicrous 1200 tons rocket would seem reasonable in comparison.

even if i had a kerbal stranded on another planet (on the kerbin moons it would be trivial) and i wanted to have someone else rescue it, it would not be possible. i have a dozen missions running together in my career, and running the rescue mission alone would lose the others. unless the rescuers also controlled all my other crafts for the years of career time it would take for the rescue. just not feasible.

and that is how it does look. the pictures are from before i tilted the wings i know they make problems, but i want a clamp-o-tron senior on the craft, and this setup allows me to put it on the back. put it on the front would be too much drag, and it can't be put radially, or at least i never figured out a way. otherwise i have to put the engines radially, i'm not sure it would be better. but i'll certainly try other models.

the only reliable way i found to deal with the bug is to save and reload. sometimes, if i have many tanks, i must do it multiple times

was difficult to estimate, until i finally realized i could just block the rockets from gimbaling. after that, 80 to 100 m/s. maybe a bit more, the plane had a tendency to go down at those speed, and trying to pull up makes it stall. EDIT: i tried on eve, and there i was able to lift around 60 m/s. which i could only reach going downhill, so i could not stay in the air. propellers are a pain because i have to change the blade angle constantly to adjust to velocity, and it's not clear exactly how much to adjust it.

i did both. 5 degrees angle incidence of the wings, using the shift-W technique described. it wasn't able to take off without rockets, but it did take off as soon as i activated rockets, at a much lower speed than was needed earlier. so, it mostly works. now i have to optimize a lot

i've read it - in fact, i was linked to this already in the past. unfortunately, it does not tell me why my thing won't fly - not below 200 m/s, at least. i tried the propellers and i can get to 60 m/s on kerbin, it's a good target speed for takeoff. for ease of reference i post a couple of pics this second one also has the smaller rover that goes into the cargo bay i've chosen an even harder task, because a thing that just goes up and down does not suit me, i have additional specifications: - vehicle has a 3-ton cargo bay containing a 3-ton rover. it must be possible to deploy the rover and getting it back into the cargo bay with a robotic arm (this adds 7 tons of dry mass, and forces me to make a bigger vehicle. plus the cargo bay must be high enough from the ground) - vehicle must manage ssto on kerbin and laythe too. if the vehicle needs rocket braking, then it must be able to refuel on site. - vehicle must have a clamp-o-tron senior - vehicle should manage to lift off from water, or at least to reach land without additional fuel expenditure then again, that's pretty much the only challenge i have left that i cannot solve with bigger rockets or more time

that's actually good to know, but that's the kind of small kinks i work out later. right now, what i really want is to figure out if three pairs of big-S delta wings are enough for a 200-ton vehicle, or too many, or too few. if they are enough, why my vehicle does not take off below 200 m/s, and if they are not enough, how many will i actually need.

after my previous project for an helicopter-based eve ssto failed, i'm trying again with a different project, this time as a spaceplane. the project calls for a propeller-powered flight until at least 15 km, followed by turning on rockets. the previous project failed because gravity drag costed too much fuel and i had nowhere near enough left to circularize orbit. hopefully, wings will keep sustaining my ship until the upper atmosphere. i've seen the concept is workable on a youtube video, but i don't want to take anything else from there, i want this to be my ship. anyway, i know very little of making airplanes in this game, so i'll probably post a lot of questions in the coming weeks. first one is, i put together the fuselage with what i presume will be enough fuel to reach orbit. now i need wings, but how the hell do i know how many wings are enough? how about control surfaces? all i know is that if i try to launch the plane on kerbin with rockets (i've yet to work seriously on the propellers) it will reach 60 m/s without taking off, then it will turn to the left (always the left, though it is perfectly symmetrical) and crash. an expected outcome for a first prototype. but i have no way of knowing if that's caused by lack of wings, lack of speed, lack of control, or whatever other issue. in the wiki i can see a drag coefficient and a lift coefficient, but i don't know how to use them

i spent weeks working on a reusable eve lander. it would rocket brake in the atmosphere, then deploy a smaller rover. it would refuel in situ, then it would start up as an helicopter, get past the densest part of eve's atmosphere, and finally turn on the rockets and get to orbit. i called it the helicopterocket. i put a huge amount of effort to design and test this thing. several days went just to design the robotic arm that would deploy the smaller rover from the cargo bay and pick it up again, without glitches - and makind the smaller rover fit inside the cargo bay while fulfilling my specifications was equally challenging. i had no idea how to make an helicopter and had to learn it all from scratch. and find a way to provide 100 electricity per second. and then those rotors make for horrible aerodynamics and i had to find ways to keep the rocket stable. and i did eventually overcome all those obstacles through trial and error and trial and trial and trial. that one in the picture is model 8-c. and i reused some numbers if i ditched a new variation soon enough. all this, only to discover that helicopterocket still falls short of its objective. it has 3600 m/s of deltaV available. i was hoping they'd be enough to cross the upper atmosphere and circularize, or at least get close enough that i could rescue the mission with an orbiter doing a quick rendez vous. not so. i can barely get out of the atmosphere. gravity drag is really horrible. i'd need at least 2 km/s of deltaV more than i have. i worked so much on optimizing this design, there's no way i can still squeeze enough power out of it. today i accepted that project helicopterocket has failed, and that all the effort i put on it has been for naugh I'm sad.

my vertical speed is between 8 and 15 m/s. as i move upwards, i also tend to pick up lateral speed. the whole rotor mechanism is pretty stable now that i refined the whole procedure, i have to do it in real time but i can do something else while ksp run in the background. i reach about 19 km before stalling. i even got rid of some batteries. right now, i have fixed the rotor ascent. unfortunately, once i turn off the rotors and start the rockets, orbit is still far. even though i have 3500 m/s available, i can barely reach a suborbital trajectory. i need at least 2 km/s more to get to orbit. 1 km/s would be the bare minimum to try to have an orbiter slow down and intercept the rocket with some hope of success, and even that goal is pretty far. the general idea is sound, but i may have to scrap the design and restart from scratch after several weeks of working on this project I need some serious edge to get the deltaV I'm missing.

ok, i did it. upper rotor rotates counterclockwise, lower rotor is clockwise. but i haven't noticed any improvement in performance. limiting the rounds per minute to avoid overtaxing the rotor and blades work, instead. but it seems i still need 100% power to reach higher. on kerbin i get to a point where even with lower throttle and higher blade angle the rotors are moving at full speed, but on eve this does not seem to happen. the air is still too thick.

unfortunately, after all the times i forgot to put parachutes, or forgot to put solar panels, or to deploy solar panels, it's not funny anymore. it's just another day of ksp

balancing the rocket to give a uniform push has been a challenge, as the ship is asymmetrical (i tried several reworks of the shape, to make it symmetrical while keeping the cargo bay mehcanism, none was successful). i moved the engine upwards and downwards by small increments until i could find the closest to the center of mass. i could not center it perfectly, and i decided to have it tilt down slightly (in a vacuum test), so that in atmosphere it should counteract the drag caused by the rotors and blades. still, leaving the atmosphere is a bumpy ride, the ship won't stand still, putting on autopilot and telling it to keep prograde results in the ship tilting too fast. it also starts spinning at some point. getting out of the atmosphere requires all my piloting skill, succeeds only half the times, and it is very expensive. i'm uncertain how much of that is drag by the blades and how much is uneven push. i'm fairly sure the lack of a nose cone on the forward docking port is not a huge part of it, though i will experiment there too

for each couple of rotors (as in, two rotors put on top of each other), one is turning in one direction, the other opposite. for building, i put an octogonal strut on the ship, to anchor both rothors to it with the clipping trick. then i attached the blades with the toggle snap (that's the name of the tool to attach at fixed angles, right?); it aligns them vertically by default, i rotated them horizontally manually (with toggle snap). then i set the angle when opened, initially it was 10 degrees for all. for inverting one rotor for each pair, i choose "direction: inverted", and for the blades, again, i choose "inverted". I have no idea why there are so many ways to invert the blades rotation that all do apparently the same thing. i'm suspecting perhaps they do not do exactly the same thing. i put autostrut on rotors, not blades, as autostrut don't mix well with moving parts. this setup would fly in kerbin and laythe, but not eve. when i realize a lower blade angle may help in eve, i put on a kal controller, and i set a program to change blade angle from 0 to 15 degrees. i set an identical program for all four blades. i control that manually, adjusting the sliding bar (i can't come up with a better way to name it, not even in my native language) manually as i go up. and i selected "rigid attachment" for the blades. that experiment went well, but it drained the batteries too fast. even making a continuous line of solar panels around the ship (which i did, later), i could not supply enough electricity. i decreased rotor power to 75% on all rotors, that's the most i can afford to consume (and i saved 1.6 tons in the process). but now the rotors aren't powerful enough to propel the blades to full speed in low eve atmosphere, which is causing problems again. next thing i will try will be another kal controller to set maximum rpm; i came to the conclusion that if the problem is one rotor going faster than the other and the other unable to catch up, then forcing all rotors to slow down should work. the alternative, powering up the rotors again and swapping the current solar panels i'm using for gigangtors, would add too much weight and hurt aerodinamics even more. even then, i'm not sure i'd be able to keep the rotors powered for the 30-minute ascent. i will power up the rotors only if it can lift me a few more kilometers bfore i have to use rockets, and i would use them at half power through most of the ascent in that case. by the way, i tried removing the convert-o-tron and drill and try for full gliding descent, unsuccessfully. even using every trick (opening the cargo bay to brake, tilting the ship so that the fusolage would provide some lift and keep me higher in the atmosphere for a bit longer, spinning to cool pieces off) i was unable to land the thing safely without adding at least two tons of wings to help braking. even then, it was a very narrow thing, a dozen pieces reaching the deepest red, most of them times something did break anyway. and i still needed to burn some fuel to finish landing, and those wings would increase drag going up. adding heat shields also increased weight very fast. not enough gain for the effort. so i will rocket brake on atmospheric reentry, and replenish fuel on land. i saved weight by swapping the big convertotron for a small one, at the price of decuplicating the time needed for refueling. i also ditched two radiators.

nope. i can recognize the difference between my ship howering mid-air and my ship getting faster and faster but never getting close to mun. you can only squeeze TWR so far. even if your acceleration once out of the atmosphere was istantaneous, you still need hours to go to mun, and during those hours you're losing speed all the time by gravity drag, in addition to what you lose by gravity potential. consider this: at 600 km, gravity is 0.25 g. say that in average from LKO to 600 km you are subject to 0.5 g. say that you immediately achieve 3 km/s once out of atmosphere - that's the amount of deltaV it would take to reach mun by normal means. so, at 3 km/s, you need 3 minutes to cover that distance. and during those 3 minutes, you lose (180*g*0,5)=900 m/s. no, worse, because as you slow down, you need more than 3 minutes. which result in going even slower. and you're losing speed by gravity potential too. and then, once you are to 600 km, you still need to get farther. the 0.125 g (1/8) mark is at 1800 km. sure, you are subject to less gravity along the way, but it's a longer road. and you are going slower. you should see that going straight up, you can never reach mun with a fuel budget comparable to the normal manuever. of course, you lose less speed if you start faster, but by now it's already no longer economical. and don't forget that the faster you go, the faster you will be at mun intercept, and the more fuel you'll need to slow down. EDIT: oh, i forgot to mention that in practice it would take you several minutes to achieve those 3 km/s with a rocket burn. and all the while, you are still losing speed because you are burning against gravity. sure, a more powerful rocket can help you there, but remember that 1) bigger engine means more dry mass, translating to less deltaV, and 2) engines with high TWR have poor Isp, again translating to less deltaV. as it is, if you had a TWR of 4 (extremely big and overpowered rocket) you could get an upward acceleration equal to 3 g (1 is required to counter the gravity), and it would take you 100 seconds to reach 3 km/s. you'd make 150 km along the way, and you'd have burned 4 km/s of deltaV. already much higher than the normal manuever