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king of nowhere
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SSTO on Eve: is it possible?
king of nowhere replied to king of nowhere's topic in KSP1 Gameplay Questions and Tutorials
i have seen some SSTO using helicopter rotors to lift past the heaviest part of the atmosphere. that's a huge advantage because it skips the worst aerodinamic and rocket efficiency problems. once in high atmosphere, it should be relatively easy to get to orbit. orbital speed around eve is a bit over 3000 m/s, most of the 8000 required in the deltaV map is overcoming the atmosphere. i should make it with 4000 m/s. i will have some 7 tons of mining equipment and perhaps 5 tons of rover (i could do it smaller, but i want to build all my rover with a cupola seat to drive them in first person). with 12 tons payload, i should have the desired deltaV with an 80-ton rocket. the problem is making a helicopter to lift a 80-ton rocket. i have yet to figure out how to control an helicopter -
actually a nice idea, i didn't think of going inward, and i will have a refueling station around Eve unfortunately it does not work. from low eve orbit i need 2800 m/s to get the apoapsis where i want. which surprises me a lot. it takes 300 m/s more to escape eve than to escape kerbin, and it takes 100 m/s to raise solar apoapsis from eve to kerbin. even if there was no oberth effect at all, i still should need 2700 m/s
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SSTO on Eve: is it possible?
king of nowhere replied to king of nowhere's topic in KSP1 Gameplay Questions and Tutorials
i am the OP, and what i want is to have a large orbiting ship dropping a rover on the surface of Eve and then picking it up, and being able to do it again and again. this requires SSTO. but regardless of this exxcuse of a reason, basically i just want to try it. at least, if i can manage to understand how to control helicopters, since i think the first part of the ascent will use one -
SSTO on Eve: is it possible?
king of nowhere replied to king of nowhere's topic in KSP1 Gameplay Questions and Tutorials
no, i'm just saying that i don't care that it is impractical, because i'm past the point where i do things for practicality -
SSTO on Eve: is it possible?
king of nowhere replied to king of nowhere's topic in KSP1 Gameplay Questions and Tutorials
EVERYTHING in this game past the first few weeks is only about bragging rights. i unlocked the full tech tree without ever going out of kerbin SoI. I could have done it without ever getting past kerbin orbit, if i had wanted to abuse the mobile laboratory and wait a lot of game time. money is virtually unlimited. tourist contracts generally yield ten times what i spend on the rocket. I already have ships that can go everywhere on the solar system, except on eve and laythe. and getting to eve and back is just a matter of reopening one of my old lunar landers and add a first stage that works well in atmosphere, plus scaling up the launcher. i am latching to this additional challenge, when i will run out of challenges i will likely stop playing the game -
I'm trying to figure out the most effective trajectory to get far away from kerbol. the ultimate purpose would be to send a few relays farther than eeloo's orbit, so that they can cover pretty much all the outer planets; on the sun-facing side they are in sight of kerbin and its tracking station, and on the night side there is always some relay to pass the signal. anyway, not really important. what's important is that i was trying to figure out how to best optimize this launch. I'm looking for an apoapsis of 140-150 million km. it would take me 2300 m/s to get there with a single big burn from LKO (and 1500 to circularize, but that applies always). I am trying to see if i can reduce that significantly with gravity assists the problem with gravity assists is that they work well if you reach the planet relatively slowly. this way, the gravity and momentum of the planet have the time to give you a nice big push. if you zip past your planet super fast, you're not even going to feel it. you can also make a manuever at periapsis to take advantage of oberth effect, but then again, you also take advantage of oberth effect if you burn in LKO. and if you reach the target planet slowly, it means you burn less on LKO. I am coming to realize LKO is actually a great place to start, because while you have to pay a steep price to get out of a gravity well, you get a powerful oberth effect from a fairly big planet. on a big enough burn, this outweights the cost of getting out of kerbin. so, i've been trying to use Mun for gravity assists. mun is a good source of assists if you don't need to go far. with 860 m/s you can get out of kerbin SOI, and already on intercept with Eve. however, even just for going to duna you'd have to make an additional burn at mun apoapsis. and you get less benefit from obert effect, because mun is less massive. it is more expensive to go to duna with a gravity assist from Mun than it is to just go straight there. For my purpose, the 2300 m/s that i'd need to get past eeloo's orbit won't even get me to jool. Of course, you can just make all your burn in LKO and zip past mun super fast, but it's not worth doing. i experimented, and i only gained a couple million kilometers of apoapsis. maybe 100 m/s of deltaV. gravity assists on the outer planets all suffer the same problem. those planets are smaller than kerbin, and if their gravity assist is not enough to get me where i want (which is not) then i'd lose efficiency by burning close to them. and if i zip past at full speed i get a negligible benefit. jool is the only planet suited for the purpose. so (barring some unlikely alignment of planets that would allow me to get to duna and from it get an assist to jool), it seems my best bet is to make a single manuever on LKO to get a jool flyby, then complete the rest of the burn on jool apoapsis. unfortunately, getting to jool from LKO is 2000 m/s, so even if the gravity assist get me already in the target trajectory (which is likely) i would not gain much. If I had a refueling station on duna, i could get to jool with 1500 m/s from low duna orbit.so i'd have saved 800 m/s, although it is a bigger hassle as i would have to set up a refueling station and get a hohmann transfer window twice, not sure it's worth the effort. is there anything better i could do?
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what happend to the refueling?
king of nowhere replied to Lechu's topic in KSP1 Gameplay Questions and Tutorials
also saving and reloading generally fixes it -
after much strife i finally managed to build an helicopter that actually lifts from the ground. unfortunately, that's all it does. it's too unstable, so after eaching a speed of a few tens of m/s it starts going out of control. not to mention it is practically impossible to control. i don't have any direct way to regulate the engine power. i set up an action group to activate all four rotors simultaneously, but that's it. i heard people writing about putting the rotor control on the main throttle, but i have no idea how to accomplish this. any help?
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actually, they don't. other parts do. i have seen the "broken" status on some other parts, but not on those solar panels. on the other hand, i decided to go for the brute force approach: I picked one panel at random, copied all its information except position and roation, and pasted it to all the other panels. this fixed them all. but i still don't know where the difference was. I mean, i am spoilering the part code in here for brevity, but the most likely suspects, the lines state = 0 PreFailState = 0 efficiencyMult = 1 were the same for all the panels
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building a submarine
king of nowhere replied to king of nowhere's topic in KSP1 Gameplay Questions and Tutorials
i was hoping to see how he made the propeller work, but he was using a jet engine for propulsion. on the other hand, i see i am not the only one who uses a cupola module to drive in first person view -
one of my ships has 2 OX-STAT-XL solar panels that give a status of "broken". they do not appear damaged or anything, though. i finally brought a level 3 engineer to it, but there is no "repair" option. is it possible to repair the part, or is the engineer limited to fixing wheels and landing struts? i also checked in the savegame file; the ship in question has 8 solar panels of that kind, but i can't seem to find any obvious difference in the status of two of them. if i decide to repair by manumitting the file, what should i do?
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building a submarine
king of nowhere replied to king of nowhere's topic in KSP1 Gameplay Questions and Tutorials
jet engines use fuel. the rover would come with a maximum range. even if i strapped a convert-o-tron on it, it would increase weight greatly, and would require long pauses for refueling. and i'd still be screwed if i run out of fuel on a biome with no ores. on the other hand, a propelled with a few rtg will go continuously. but even if jet engines run with no fuel, i'd still would like to make propellers this is not a game with a winning strategy to pursue, for the simple reason there is not a winning strategy. you are the second person answering to my questions about submarines, and the second person telling me not to do them. why? there's plenty of people doing unoptimized things. there's people making huge rockets with little to no purpose. there's people making ssto, and nobody goes telling them "it would be cheaper to put some boosters and recover them". so, why are people trying to tell me to not make submarines? furthermore, i also need to figure out propellers for helicopters. am i supposed to not do helicopters either? i appreciate advice on how to realize my projects. i even appreciate being told that something is unfeasible in the stock game, it saves me the wasted effort. but i do not appreciate being told that i should do something else. -
they say we know the moon better than the bottom of the oceans. so, i decided i wanted to explore the oceans. and once i have the vehicle ready, i want to explore laythe and eve oceans too. this requires a submarine, of course. and i would like it as close to neutrally buoyant as possible, so i don't have to compensate for it rising or sinking all the time. well, here comes the first problem. i can't make anything that sink. i experimented on kerbin oceans trying to use the densest pieces i could see. mostly i tried using RTGs, they contain uranium and they are shielded with lead, this should sink, right? wrong. well, one of them does sink, all right, but even strapping 20 rtg to a single hecs2 probe with a cupola on top, the thing floated with the cupola completely out of the water! so, clearly not enough. in other news, i have used half a million in nuclear piles as ballast. that should count as an achievement of some sort. So, problem 1) i need something that i can use as ballast. then i need propulsion. and here we come at problem 2) i can't make a propeller that works. i already asked about it previously, but i didn't got any useful answer, so i'm asking again. neither for boats, nor for helicopters. i tried everything i could conceive, but no way of turning the helixes seem to generate any amount of upward force. and this is very frustrating; optimizing a ship design to overcome its limitations is entertaining, but attaching a rotor with some aerodinamic surfaces to a command module and having the thing not work, with no idea why it does not work since in reality it would work and the pieces you are using are made specifically for that purpose...that's horrible. like "uninstall the game, give it a schating recension, and never, ever buy anything from the same producers ever again" kind of horrible, if i wasn't already hooked on the rocketry part. but then, i've already done rockets to go in all the places without atmosphere, so turning to boats and helicopters to explore what's left is the logical choice. i've also seen youtube videos o'f people making boats and submarines, and i can't see how their propellers are done any different than mine, except those propellers work. so, i'm hoping someone can help me figure out how to make a boat that sinks, or a propeller that works, or at least a helicopter.
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SSTO on Eve: is it possible?
king of nowhere replied to king of nowhere's topic in KSP1 Gameplay Questions and Tutorials
why didn't i think to check youtube? i feel silly -
SSTO on Eve: is it possible?
king of nowhere posted a topic in KSP1 Gameplay Questions and Tutorials
this is a theoretical/challenge question. I would like to have a mothership that can drop a rover on eve and recover it in a completely reusable fashion; that would of course require that the rover be packed up into a cargo bay of a rocket that can SSTO on EVE. according to my deltaV map, landing-taking off from eve costs 8000 m/s. a giant tank with a mammuth engine will have 6000 m/s of deltaV. make it 5000, because i will have a payload: that rover must carry at least a convert-o-tron and drill, plus wheels and science instruments. plus the cargo bay, which is not weightless. it seems we are missing 3000 m/s. then again, perhaps 8000 for eve is not the most optimized. the same map gives 3400 for kerbin, but i have seen vehicles get a kerbin orbit with as low as 2700 m/s. also, getting on a suborbital trajectory where i could send in a fast tanker for a refueling would also be acceptable. it would be a difficult manuever, the launch would have to be timed right for an intercept in the few minutes you get out of the atmosphere, and the intercept velocity could be as high as 1 km/s, so the tanker would have to be optimized for the task. but it's ok, if i need a bit of extra speed to finish circularizing the orbit i can do that. finally, perhaps there are ways to use eve's atmosphere to help. maybe an helicopter can lift the rocket for the first few kilometers, or maybe good aerodinamics will allow a more optimized trajectory. anyway, are you aware of anyone managing an eve ssto? would it be feasible to try to build one, or would it just be a waste of time? -
Minmus Gravity Assist for return from Mun?
king of nowhere replied to Qubyte's topic in KSP1 Gameplay Questions and Tutorials
actually, it is also plenty enough to enter LKO. put your kerbin Pe at around 50 to 60 km, this way a single pass through atmosphere won't be enough to deorbit but it will slow you down. do this aerobraking manuever until you have a low enough apoapsis, then you can raise your periapsis out of the atmosphere with roughly 30 m/s I once had a craft in mun orbit with less than 500 m/s of deltaV left, and i used it successfully to rendez-vous with another craft in low kerbin orbit that was without fuel. that specific rescue mission failed because after i made the rendez-vous i realized one of the two crafts lacked a docking port. but the thing is, with 700 m/s on a mun orbit you can go anywhere within kerbin's SoI, with fuel to spare -
the title says most of it. i have this rover with a robotic extensible arm with a docking port in the end, but whenever i try to use it, the rover gets scrambled badly. for reference, the rover is my "dancing porcupine", the second picture there highlights the robotic arm with which i am trying to couple (the trunk). And this image shows an example of what happens when coupling - though different situations give different bugs. it's not a once-in-a-while occurrence. it always gives bugs on coupling, to the point that i cannot use it for its intended purpose. and, granted, it's a complex rover, but i did have a previous version that was only marginally less complex, and this one can dock without bugging. sometimes. what could i do to fix this? (EDIT: so far, since i only wanted to transfer some fuel, i opened the saved game file and manually altered the resource values. but that's hardly an ideal solution)
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Minmus Gravity Assist for return from Mun?
king of nowhere replied to Qubyte's topic in KSP1 Gameplay Questions and Tutorials
with 700 m/s you can get back to kerbin from where you are twice comfortably, perhaps 3 times. it's just a matter of finding the right place to burn. you want to exit from mun orbit pointing in the direction opposite to the movement of mun around kerbin. this way, all your orbital velocity around mun will be converted into orbital velocity to lower your periapsis once you are in kerbin orbit. a single burn of 250 to 300 m/s from where you are should do the trick, properly aligned. you only need to get your periapsis below 70 kilometers, you will aerodrag into the atmosphere. the minmus gravity assist you want... i doubt it's feasible. minmus is very small and slow. what you can get out of a gravity assist is proportional to how much gravity your body has, and how fast it is orbiting. so, you get a really small kick from minmus. mind you, it may still be enough to put you in a kerbin aerobrake trajectory. also, i'm sure you can get to minmus with less than 250 m/s. 200 should be enough, again if you get the proper orbital timing. in fact, with 700 m/s, you should be able to get from mun to minmus, circularize orbit around minmus, and then get back to kerbin. -
yep. if you achieved your first orbit, you should have at least the swivel. if not, it just costs 5 science to unlock. getting a precise orbit with nothing but solid rocket boosters... well, i won't say it's impossible, but it's exceedingly difficult, and impractical when you have best alternatives.
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strange. i never noticed that. i mean, i cruised my rover across half of mun, and the surface module would give me 11% on midlands, and that value remained pretty much constant everywhere, within a 0.1% deviation.1 EDIT: furthermore, i see that every biome i'm visiting with my rover on minmus is consistently giving around 2% more ore than it did while i was flying. it's not random variation, the amounts are very consistent with each other, and they are consistently 2% higher than what reported by the narrow band scanner. the values found on mun are consistent with what i got before, but i scanned mun biomes with a surface module. the results of the surface module are consistent with each other, but they disagree with the survey scanner. it's like the same instrument gives the same values, but different instruments are in disagreement. it looks like a bug from my perspective.
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i am scanning planetary bodies, and i am getting wildly different readings of ore content for the same biome. I put an M700 survey scanner orbiting mun, and it told me some craters were void of ores. except, when i did move a rover there with a surface scanning module, it reported 10% ore. I scanned all of minmus from orbit with a narrow-band scanner, and i landed a mining shuttle to refuel there, multiple times. it told me there was 7% ore in minmus midlands. i landed multiple times, and i always got similar values. except i have now a rover in minmus midlands with a surface scanning module, and it says there is 10% ore in midlands. and other biomes are also different, while some have the same values from the narrow band scanner and the surface scanning module. what the hell? how do i actually know what's the ore content of a place if all my instruments give different readings?
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so, a while ago i got a contract to recover a stranded astronaut and his command pod from minmus. and i thought, cool, something requiring some extra planning. so, i had a rover with a claw, and the claw could be detached and it had a small spaceship attached: i would move in with the rover, grab the command pod with the claw, detach the claw with engine and fuel, and fly away with it. the whole thing was on a robotic arm, so i could point it upwards; otherwise, my rover could even take flight with the rescued pod attached, if necessary. i was confident i could grab the command pod and send it to orbit all right. until i landed (by night), and after a while suddenly saw the command pod rolling down to me, slamming against my rover and breaking several parts. i waited the day to find out what happened, and this is what i saw yep. the astronaut and command pod are stuck in midair on top of a steep slope. as soon as i get within 200 meters, physics reassess itself, the pod start rolling down the slope (it's even the one better suited for rolling) and it crashes down the slope after picking up a bit of speed. i can move in and intercept with the rover, but to get in position fast enough i need to go so fast with the rover, that i would destroy the command pod upon contact. after a lot of save scumming, i managed to get to the point where i could make contact with the falling command pod without destroying it or the rover in the process. too bad the pod bounces off the rover and keeps falling. i am sure there is a way to stop the command pod for good. it did happen, once. although i still had to reload because it broke a piece of rover in the process. in the end i decided to cheat. i set the position of the command pod in a way that it would not roll. i could have completed the contract eventually, but i did not see the point of reloading the game 50 times to get around a glitch. also, i had to do it twice, because the first time my rover mechanical parts disassembled after i saved the game in fact, every single time i made contact with the command pod, the rover arm got bugged. i'm still working on this. i may have to use the cheat console again. again, my conscience feel fine using the cheat mode to fix a glitch.
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Moho Interception
king of nowhere replied to radicaled's topic in KSP1 Gameplay Questions and Tutorials
put a manuever node on periapsis. try to lower your apoapsis from there to get an intercept on the next pass. you may have to increase your apoapsis instead, but that's going to result in a faster intercept. in that case, you can wait one orbit and try again the next.- 4 replies
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- transfer
- transfer orbit
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