king of nowhere

i found another source of problems. the rotors have some random variability, and sometimes both rotors on one side will slow down a bit compared to the others. this wouldn't cause any problem, the difference only lasts for a few seconds. but! this difference causes the part of the rocket where the blades are moving faster to go upwards. to compensate this movement, the game does something with the rotors to avoid the rocket tilting. but this change in blade angles increases friction with the atmosphere, fixing the tilt, but making those slower rotors slow down even more. this movement feeds upon itself. i discovered that i can avoid this mechanism simply by reducing the maximum rpm of the faster rotors. unfortunately, it's not reliable enough to use during ascent. i will study the possibility, though. counterintuitively, this mechanism happens more often at higher altitudes. not sure why.

of course they don't have a 24 hours period. they have a 6 hours period.

on the down side, i'm now trying the rockets, and i suspect that the previous time i did this, i forgot to deactivate simplified mode. i still need to burn over 2000 m/s to get out of the atmosphere, and i can't get close to orbit. those helkicopter blades are causing a lot of aerodinamic problems for rocket ascent (unsurprisingly). still, it's something i can work with. i am confident i will be able to complete my vehicle within a few weeks.

looks like i found a workaround. blade angle was 10°, which is good to get grip in the high atmosphere, but in the dense lower atmosphere of eve overloads the rotors too much. i linked the blade angle to a kal controller to be able to change them during the ascent (i'm controlling the kal manually, feels safer) and by using a 4° blade angle i was able to lift off from eve surface without problems. as i move upwards, i'm gradually increasing it when i start losing speed. i reached 20 km of altitude, could have gone a bit higher but i raised the blade angle too fast without raising the rotor power at the same time, which resulted in the rotors abruptly slowing and the ship losing control. still, from experiment in kerbin atmosphere, that's close to the limit. maybe i can get to 25 km, i doubt much higher. the ascent lasted for half an hour i will need more power generation. helicopterocket packs 30k battery power and a lot of solar panels, that's enough to reach the upper limit on laythe and kerbin but not on eve, where i need 100% rotor power and i have a much longer ascent. still, it should be no problem. i also realized i don't need isru capacity on helicopterocket; if i have an orbiter to pick it up, the same orbiter can be the one to refuel at gilly. helicopterocket can land fully fueled, it only needs a little bit of rocket to slow down just before touchdown (putting enough parachutes to slow it enough on laythe would have been too much weight, i put enough parachutes that i can glide down at a moderate speed and a quick rocket burn in the end is enough for a safe landing). this will save me 5 tons of dry weight, more than compensating all the extra solar panels i will have to put in (EDIT: or maybe not; atmospheric reentry looks more troubling than anticipated, and i may have to resort to rocket braking there too). i also have to experiment with warious ascent profiles, if i manage to get by without ever using 100% rotor power i may get away with reducing the motors, which would save another ton or two.

well, youi were indeed right that there was a small difference with one blade angle caused by uncertainty in the sliding bar. i fixed that. the issue improved. now i capsize around 1000 meters, instead of around 800. though i even made it to 1600 m once so, this is the start. rotors are standing still, blades are retracted. interestingly, despite everything standing still, two blades belonging to the same rotor still show very different attack angles. how can they have different attack angles when they are all standing still is beyond me. unless maybe this game is simulating wind speed, but it says air speed 0. or maybe it's an artifact of dividing by 0. there is still one blade angle different here, i fixed after taking this screenshot. here i just started flying, everything is nominal. interestingly, the forward rotors are slightly faster than the backwards ones here, so it's not a systemic problem. as asked, i activated the aerodinamic overlay, if you can make any sense of it. angle of attach changes seemingly at random even on blades attached to the same rotor i went upward a bit, all still looks normal still more upwards, now the slowing down of the forward rotors is noticeable. in my most successful flight, when i reached 1600 m, the forward rotor did slow down several times to 240 rpm, only to pick up speed again. once it fell below that value, though, it never recovered. backwards rotors are accelerating, as would be expected because the atmosphere is less dense finally, the helicopterocket is starting to capsize.

i can't understand what you're doing and what's your problem from your description. this community is always ready to help, but it's hard to help when you don't understand the problem. so, come here asking whenever you need advice (and you will need a lot of it; even i, who had a pretty advanced knowledge of rocket science before playing, needed a lot of help to figure out how to do some things in the game, as well as to refine the fine points about orbital mechanics), but try to be as clear as possible when describing your problem. possibly post pictures. if i can surmise your question, you don't know how to start doing stuff? first thing you need an objective. if you started in career mode, go into the control mission, you will be proposed some missions (i recommend that, because for a beginner not having an objective can be daunting at first). otherwise you will have a sandbox to do with as you please. still, the first tasks to undertake are generally: - go into orbit, get a mun flyby, land on mun, land on minmus. when you have mastered those things, you can go to the other planets. once you have decided what you wanted to do, go in the vab (see deddly post) and start building a rocket. if you don't know how, there are the tutorials. they are not particularly good, but they at least give you the basics.

thank you very much. i've been posting questions about helicopters for a while, and i got very few good answers; it appears not many people in this community have much practice with them, and i was pessimistic about my chances of having someone look into such a complex thing as my vehicle.

when all you're trying to do is slowing down your fall, drag is indistinguishable from lift

then again, i need my helicopterocket to get as high as possible as helicopter before i turn on the rockets. otherwise i still get screwed by the atmosphere. especially since the helicopter blades give the rocket a poor aerodynamics. so far, my helicopterover+helicopterocket project is almost complete. helicopterover is done. it flies well in kerbin, eve, laythe. it's not a perfect helicopter, but light enough that some sas is enough to keep it stable without adjusting the controls. i haven't managed to land it as helicopter. i tried, but when it starts moving downward, suddenly the blades don't generate enough lift anymore, so it starts plummeting. only way i have to fix this is to throttle up again. but i have a parachute, i use that to land. the engineer on board then packs it up for another use. then i can manuever it on the ground on wheels. helicopterover then moves underneath helicopterocket. a robotic arm inside helicopterocket cargo bay unfolds, grabs helicopterover, and brings it into the cargo bay. the cargo bay closes and holds helicopterover, with no clipping involved; the whole movement looks natural. the helicoptercoket activates its rotors, and goes up. it goes up as much as it can, then it turns on the rocket and reaches orbit, where yet another piece of the spaceship will dock to it and refuel. it works on kerbin. i can reach about 9000 meters with the rotors, then i use the rocket. i achieve orbit if i do the ascent well. on eve i won't have enough fuel to circularize orbit, but i can get a good enough suborbital trajectory that i can use the orbiter to dock the helicopterocket and drag it to full orbit. i can make this manuever work for up to 1 km/s of difference. it seems a full eve ssto is beyond my skill, but that's fully reusable, which is enough for my purposes. there is only one thing i haven't managed so far: eve ascent. i start my rotors, i go up, everything seems to go well for a while, then suddenly the helicopterocket capsizes. and i can't find any apparent reason, which is why i am unable to fix this. here i am ascending, all looks nominal. i get some strange values for lift on the blades, i have no idea why they change so much and often go in the negative. is it relevant? is it normal for those values to shake? no idea i moved upward some more, still all looks right. lift values are always very shaky for no apparent reason. forward rotors seem to have a slightly lower rpm than backwards rotor. is that relevant, or just statistical anomaly? and why would it have lower rpm when the two rotors are exactly identical?? with no apparent reason, at some point forward rotors will slow down. just like that. lift values are still going up and down at random, making me question if they have any real usefulness. they were reliable for helicopterover, maybe this thing is too big and my pc can't calculate it accurately? but it should lag in this case, and it doesn't. at this point, doom is inevitable. I'm baffled, and i would like the understand the problem here.

ah, there it is. when i started a thread i was very surprised that there wasn't a similar thread already

huh. according to my (pretty good) understanding of physics, this would never work in reality, because attrition would always cause some torque to be passed, but i can't speak for the game physics. maybe it would be possible, maybe not; someone more experienced should confirm it. you could try setting "damping" on the servo to 0. maybe it is trying to counteract the torque for that reason. in case it cannot be done with a servo, you can use two rotors and reduce the maximum power to 50%. this will mostly eliminate the extra weight.

alas, i also have been playing with helicopter in the last few weeks, and it is apalling how few people will answer about those. and few of those answers will be good. as any other kind of question get answered quickly and in depth, i can only conclude that few people in this subforum know helicopters. so, i'll try to help you with my imperfect knowledge, because it is unlikely there will be somebody more expert who will. and i must premise i never used a rotation servo, nor do i know what they are supposed to do that's different from a rotor. but, unless gthere is some artifact of clipping that's hiding it, putting one rotor on top of another does not work. as the upper rotor is attached on top of the lower one, it will start rotating with the lower one. while it will rotate its own blades in a different direction. it may be possible that there is some way to make it work by carefully calibrating torques and rotational speeds, but i would not try. the way to put two rotors on top of each other, instead, is to attach both rotors to something else underneat, and then use clipping to make them look good. You generally want a structural octagon or cube; you place the first rotor on it, then you use clipping to move it upwards, so now you can place the second rotor (which must be equal, but rotating in the opposite direction) also attached to the top of the structural piece. then you move the rotors up and down until they look natural. the structural piece gets hidden in the process. this way, the two rotors are truly applying equal and opposite torques, and your helicopter won't spin

is there a difference between helicopter blades and helix blades, large and small rotors? because the helicopterover is now flying very well. but its mothership, a 200-ton rocket that's supposed to get through the worst of eve's atmosphere as helicopter, uses the largest rotors and blades, and it works in kerbin's atmosphere but not on eve. on eve, it always capsizes immediately. since it works on kerbin, it should not be an issue of center of mass.

when i went to a walk in the mountains, in a secluded valley, and i had no signal on my mobile phone, and i thought there is a gap in my relay network and started planning an orbit for a relay satellite to cover this gap. when, in the aforementioned valley, i start wondering which of my rovers could make it up the slopes, and what would be the best trajectory for those who cannot

well, since i had to rework, i decided to make a bigger version. i said the model could be scaled up at will, but there is one limit i overlooked, my CPU. i wanted to expand the original from 5x5 panels to 15x15 panels, but when i got to 11x11 and 790 parts the game already lags really badly, that's the most i can do without a bigger computer. https://kerbalx.com/king_of_nowhere/bigger-cake-tray-no-parachute-lander this time landing was a bit more complex because the craft exploded on freefall (except the first time i did it, when i tested if it had enough wheels to survive. that time it did not crash. it did crash all the times i tried in an actual reentry. probably i should have added a few more landing wheels). so i had to angle the surface a bit to use it as a wing and slow it down. those 5 m/s are enough to make the difference. lander mass is now 149 tons, all else unchanged, i get 74.5 points for mass, total 165.5. looks like @ralanboyle will have to rerun his model.

the deltaV map tells you how much you need to get there from kerbin, as others have explained. however, there is no exact way from the map to figure out how much to go from two other destinations. if you want to go from laythe to vall, you certainly need to spend the amount to get in orbit around laythe, and up to escape speed, and you certainly need to pay the cost to land on vall; but how much for a hohmann transfer between the two moons? and what will be your intercept speed afterwards? if that answer can be calculated (and not simply eyeballed), i don't know how. i had a similar issue for going from gilly to moho.

the cheapest way to fulfill those contracts is to mine fuel directly on mun and minmus. which, if you are getting the contracts for enlarging space stations, you should have the technology for it. in fact, if you have the facilities to mine fuel, you'll want to refuel most of your vehicles in orbit to save weight at launch. this way, you don't need to send 36 tons of full fuel tank on mun orbit, you only need to send 4 tons of the empty tank. but wait, it gets even better! why send a rocket with its own fuel tanks to lift an empty fuel tank? you can use this fuel tank as part of your second stage (or whatever stage you send to orbit). then, when it is in orbit, instead of jettisoning it, you send it farther to mun. perhaps you could jettison the engine alone, and have a smaller engine for orbital manuevering. regardless of the specifics, you can send a fairly cheap rocket for 20-30k that includes a few empty tanks, send those empty tanks to the space station, and refuel the station with a mining vehicle. here is an example of one such mining vehicle. it's a bit expensive, but mostly because it has 4 RTG. the older version is less efficient, but it cost 170k including launcher, and it holds 64 tons of fuel; 15-20 of those are needed for takeoff and landing from mun, the rest you can use for other vehicles, and it refills in a few days. so, with the 280k from the contract you can make a mining vehicle for 170k, a few fuel tanks to add to your station for 20-30k, and you're not only left with 80k gain, but the mining vehicle is fully reusable. before this, to launch interplanetary missions i needed 3 stages; one for liftoff, two for getting to orbit, and a third one with all the fuel for interplanetary travel, which is quite expensive. No more. now i have two stages, the second stage goes to mun orbit directly (it's much lighter without a third stage), it gets refueled, and it goes interplanetary. it saves a stage, and it lets the first stage be significantly smaller. as an added bonus, that mining vehicle can also collect science, so wherever you land for refueling, you also gain science. I even improved on that by launching a giant 600-ton tank. it wasn't even that expensive, i put two S4-256 fuel tanks together with a mammoth engine and a few boosters. in orbit i detached the mammoth, and i had a more efficient wolfhound (5, actually, on an adapter tank) underneath. i sent it to mun to get refueled, which i did with multiple trips of the mining vehicle. then i sent the giant tank back on kerbin orbit. now i only need enough fuel to get to orbit, where i refill my ships on the giant fuel tank before sending them off again. so i can make my rockets even lighter and cheaper. if you are concerned with money, it definitely pays off in the long run. it's also more elegant. on the down side, you need to make a lot of rendez-vous manuevers.

... i never stopped to think that the radiators are also thermal parts. and they are not even needed; they don't help cooling down during reentry, i discovered. they don't even get warm. do i have to make a new entry?

so, serendipity. i did not learn how to improve flying control to the helicopterover. that design used in the video would make it too big to fit in the cargo bay like i want (i spent, like, 3 days working on a cargo bay and rover design that would let me deploy a robotic arm from the bay, pick up the rover, pull it into the bay, without clipping or pieces sticking out). But! I learned that i have an alternate design for the landing module, which is better suited for rovers or vehicles; being narrower, it should even make it easier to stick in the cargo bay! and even most important, i finally learned how to make two rotors one on top of the other! i was always trying to attach one rotor on top of the other, which would not work because their rotations would disrupt each other. i never considered that it would be a trick with clipping. this is not terribly useful for helicopterover, but it comes very handy for helicopterocket, the mother vehicle that should pick up helicopterover in its cargo bay, fly up in eve's atmosphere high enough to skip the worst of the aerodinamics issues, and fly to orbit. i was having serious issues fidning space for rotor blades, this allows me to skip some lateral struts i used to put more rotors that were increasing dry weight and worsening aerodinamics.

ok, i improved on the design https://kerbalx.com/king_of_nowhere/cake-tray-no-parachute-lander with this thing i took advantage of those structural tubes having higher thermal resistance than most other parts. i put them like a cake so that no single part would be fully exposed to the air blast. i put it (with cheats) into a highly elliptical orbit to get more speed. around 150 km of altitude i accelerated prograde to get even more speed. then a little antiradial burn to correct periapsis around 70 km, and then there's just time to jettison the engine before entering atmosphere at 5.1 km/s finally the cake tray has slowed down enough. not it must be on land, as it will crash on water. if it's not on land, i must reload before the reentry and change slightly the periapsis until i can find land. in this case, it was a close thing i retract all those cumbersome cooling and solar panels and i point the wheels downward. i use the flat tray as an improvised wing to adjust a bit my trajectory and make sure i don't end up on water i impact the ground at 27 m/s, the wheels survive. 51 points for speed 20 points for 40-ton lander 40 for no parachutes or aerodinamic parts and lost nothing (the engine was jettisoned before rentry) 111 points I could certainly keep the design and make this thing bigger to score more points, and i could try to go a little bit faster, but i don't see the need to try. P.S. I should win a prize for originality of design and name. perhaps a cake...

this abomination managed it. orbital speed 3.1 km/s, mass 5.5 tons, no chutes or wings (you said no parts under aerodinamics, those are all structural panels), lost no parts. if i counted correctly, that's 74 points. i may want to improve on this design later.

almost scrapped an asteroid capture mission, then salvaged it. i needed to get a D class asteroid, which is rather big, so i made a "rather big" rocket, at 30 tons. then i used the cheats to simulate the rendez-vous, and i discovered that the asteroid would be over 200 tons! i had 100 m/s of deltaV left, nowhere near enough for capture. but i already launched my probe, and already placed it to intercept at periapsis. i was about to scrap the mission and send a bigger rocket, when i realized those 100 m/s could be enough to get closer to kerbin if i intercept in advance. so i devised a trajectory that would rendez vous with the asteroid 50 days before periapsis. from there i have enough fuel to deviate the asteroid by 50 m/s, but i need only 20 to get inside kerbin's atmosphere. i'm going to make an aerocapture manuever. then with the asteroid safely in orbit i will send something with more parachutes to bring it down to ground. I am planning to aerobrake a 200 ton asteroid in the low atmosphere with no control. a real space agency would fire me for even thinking such a mission.

so, i discovered two interesting facts trying stock helicopters 1) all stock helicopters use the KAL controller ( which i haven't figured out how to use.) to do something with blade angles. so, it would seem i'd need to learn the KAL if i want to make helicopters, except that the most important fact is 2) stock helicopters don't work better than mine. even with those, at the first slight mistake they start going wild and i can't get them back under control. so, it seems it's mostly to do with my piloting skills.

it's very close. the deltaV map shows 130 m/s to get from kerbin escape to duna, but that's from kerbin orbit, when you have a lot of oberth effect to help you. i tried getting to duna from minmus, where i have little to no oberth effect, and it costs five times as much (though it's still convenient because you save 930 m/s to escape kerbin). on duna you get less oberth effect than you get on kerbin, but far more than minmus. so, the 130 m/s manuever to reach kerbin intercept will be more expensive. how much more expensive? enough that you can cover it with the 200 m/s you have spare? maybe. but add in that it's rare to make a rocket landing without spending extra fuel, i wouldn't bet on you not neding a rescue mission

yes, or you must point it manually if you just started your career. advanced probe that can authomatically aim for manuevers are great