VincentLaw

In that case, except for that carbon dioxide level which is lethal, you could live on Laythe without a pressure suit or oxygen mask. Its definitely the second most habitable place in the solar system so far. Earth's atmosphere is only 20.9% oxygen.

This is a 100% stock parts, fully functional turboprop. The two propellers are counter rotating to eliminate torque. This does not exploit the magic turbine bug to generate thrust because there are no control surfaces on the propellers. If it did, you would know because it would go faster. It is big, slow, and ugly, has terrible maneuvrability and range, but it works and is adequately stable. Thrust on the propellers increases with speed. This is because they are fixed pitch, so they start out beyond the stall angle. As forward speed increases the blade angle of attack decreases. Regardless of this, due to the slow rpms of the propellers, the cruise speed is around 40 m/s. The propellers will windmill if you cut power during flight, but this does not provide any forward thrust. If you are not convinced that the props are generating thrust, then you can try putting a strut between a prop blade and the wings and it will not reach takeoff speed. Despite any resemblance to the osprey, this is not a tilt rotor and the TWR is much less than 1. The rotor diameter required for a TWR > 1 at the available RPMs prohibits taking off or landing with forward facing props. Having large props mounted on the wing tips was simply a design constraint due to the laser beam of doom effect that jet engines have. Do not ever time warp to any degree while the props are spinning unless you want to explode. Also don't touch the props in the SPH or you will break symmetry from the VAB. Takeoff Here is the most aerobatics this thing does. Level Flight Vortexy smoke trails. Mountainy Prop closeup. A nice comparison for scale. Trees Not Recommended.

No, The NERVA reactor is a closed system. The liquid Hydrogen propellant travels through isolated heat exchanger tubes and doubles as a coolant to keep the reactor from melting down. None of the radioactive fuel is expelled. Actually, the game should make the rocket overheat more at low throttle for this reason.

I made the mistake of trying to push 7 fully filled Rockomax x200-32 tanks (22400 L) out of Kerbin orbit with just one nuclear engine... Over 4 hours of continuous burning later I reached Jool. Next time I will use more engines. Some people were talking about it not having enough thrust for the high precision burns needed to get the right angles for interplanetary travel but there is a simple solution for that. If you get into a nearly parabolic escape from Kerbin (any direction will do) then you will have a convenient parking orbit around the sun that is nearly the same as Kerbin's orbit. After that you can accelerate time until you get to the right angle, and since the period around the sun is so long burning for minutes or hours really doesn't make a difference.

I can confirm that the jet engine was actually generating thrust on Laythe. From an orbit of 100 km, I decoupled a turbojet engine with retrorockets and a small fuel tank. The jet engine was tumbling slowly, so the change in velocity from the thrust was very obvious. Once it got low enough in the atmosphere, the speed oscillated several times between around 70 m/s when it was pointing up to 200 m/s when it was pointing down. If it had been piloted it would have been able to safely land with engine power alone.

I got the following numbers for Laythe entry. 55200 m Edge of atmosphere 41000 m Upper atmosphere 24500 m Middle atmosphere 14000 m parachutes deploy 9000 m lower atmosphere 500 m parachutes fully open 0 m exactly sea level Also, I can confirm atmospheric engines work. I advise using power to slow the decent before the parachutes deploy because they were frequently ripping off at high speed.

So I am pretty sure Tylo has a giant rooster on the side of it.

When I discovered the new mini SRB part, I decided to see how well they would work as weapons. It turns out that they are quite versatile and can be used for many applications. Since they can fire and decouple simultaneously, only one click is required per shot, which makes them much easier to use as launchable rockets than the larger SRBs. The main problem is that the rocket attachment point is off the center of mass of the decoupler, but this can be overcome with some trial and error. These rockets are weight balanced and spin stabilized so they have reasonable accuracy. There are 18 missiles on this airplane for a total of 15 shots. The last 3 shots fire double for stability reasons. You will need a direct hit to damage other vehicles. The takeoff speed is about 60 m/s and it is fairly tailstrike proof. If you have any stability problems, try disabling the front tank fuel flow before takeoff. I was thinking about naming it "Rocket Truck" but then people might think it's really a truck.

Here is my very own version that I entered in a challenge' date=' but it was obviously disqualified. The jet engine is just to get it off the pad and immediately falls away after that. This bug is where the term "Magic Turbine" comes from. It is actually capable of "orbiting" inside the atmosphere at about 1.8 km/s if you launch it at the correct angle.

With some camera trickery, you can hide stealthy struts inside the connection between fuel tanks.

I strongly advise building prototype lander modules and test flying them on Kerbin before you try sending one off to the mun or minmus. If you master powered vertical landings on Kerbin, you will find its much easier to do in lower gravity environments. Also, restarting is much less frustrating when your launch site is 30 seconds from your landing site. This helped me successfully land on the mun back before landing legs existed.

Considering that I have unlimited time, no life support to worry about, and lots of time acceleration, I'm not really too worried about nailing the SOI when I get there. If I completely miss, once I am on approximately the same orbit I can keep my period shorter to catch up. That's basically the hassle free method. Obviously if they ever do implement life support I will need to be more precise.

T is tera. Here is a convenient chart. Also the 'k' in km (kilometers) should be lower cased, but usually people get that wrong.

If you have the same mass of propellant, then you would have the same mass going faster, so you have more momentum.

In the most basic sense, it has to do with Hydrogen being lighter than the water molecule (or others) that you get out of combustion, so you can accelerate it to higher velocities at the same material temperature limits. That's how you get a higher Isp than with a chemical reaction.

Real NERVA rockets use a liquid hydrogen propellant with no oxidizer, but I assume in the game they will use generic liquid fuel for the sake of simplicity. This should have the highest Isp of all the rockets in game, but considering the fact that it includes a nuclear reactor, probably not the best TWR. This is definitely intended for fuel savings on interplanetary missions.

This is definitely the easiest solution. The fact is that without cheating in your orbits, there is no way that they are going to have exactly the same orbital periods. Even if you did space them at perfect 90 degree intervals, they will eventually drift from those positions too. One test you can do is decouple two pieces of junk from an orbiting ship at the same time, then max out the timestep. Eventually the two pieces of junk will be on opposite sides of the mun from each other, and then at some point in the future the same side of the mun again. If you have enough things in space on approximately the same orbit, they will on average be evenly spaced around the mun as you desire. Another trick you could use is to have one go retrograde. Then they would only be at the same longitude twice per orbit. As others have already also suggested, if for some reason you really do want to adjust your position along an orbit relative to another orbiting object, to catch up with that object you need to decrease your altitude at an apsis, and to go slower than that object you need to increase your altitude at an apsis. Once you are at the correct angle relative to that object, do another burn to synch up the orbits. This requires fuel of course, and is not permanent for the reason I described above. This technique is very useful for rendezvous though.

You do not need a retrograde orbit to make a transfer to an inferior planet. Just wait half a period to do your escape burn.

A little bit overkill, but I got it in space.

It's time to junk up space. Here is Jeb, Bill, and Bob in their orbital junk deployer. This junk is retrograde equatorial. The objective is to increase my chances of slamming into junk without intentional rendezvous. One trip deploys 204 pieces of junk. Edit: turns out that much debris lags my computer too much to fly even when it's on rails.

He was not referring to nuclear rockets. The principle of a jet turbine engine does not actually require internal combustion, only some mechanism of heat transfer. You could make a nuclear engine that uses a reactor driven jet turbine to create thrust in atmospheres with no oxygen, and without expending any stored propellant. Now to be a little more on topic: I know that the devs have said that atmospheric engines will not work on other planets without oxygen, but I do plan on sending deployable engine probes into each atmosphere to see if any of them have oxygen anyway.

Clamping is not the only way to dock. Here is my stock orbital hangar in action. (Sigdred thinks it's really scary up close)

I believe you are moving so quickly from the first blast that you essentially teleport through the others. I also tried a number of techniques similar to this. Even exploiting the VAB to mount engine parts inside of each other at the exact same position does not provide any additional launch speed.

Here is my entry (fully stock). I went with a biplane for the obvious reason of structural integrity since I wanted a long wingspan. The launch clamps are just to keep the wheels from sticking at engine start. I have no trouble designing larger airplanes, but any more parts than this and my computer gets angry. I think using fuel before landing should still count because in real life airplanes often take off with more than their max landing weight, but I do think it would be possible to land this plane with full tanks too, just difficult. I didn't really push the limits too far, but here are some stats. The mass is calculated and the others are estimates. Takeoff mass: 119.29 units Max Ferry Range: +1200 km Flight Ceiling: +12000 m Max Speed: +300 m/s So I was thinking about what to do with my new giant airplane and I decided on an expedition to the south pole. (technically that's landing on water)

If it does, mine is smaller. Total mass = 0.82 Max altitude = 130 m Max speed = 34.1 m/s And as you can see, the max altitude is higher than the launch clamp, so it can fly forever.