Syvwlch

Thank you! Going by the name of the craft the eighth launch is the one that made it to the Mun. Took maybe a day of off and on tinkering? The tweak it took me a while to realize I needed to do was sizing the two canards so that they did not induce a roll when used to raise/lower the nose, especially on takeoff. Wasted some time believing it was a thrust imbalance.

They also update automatically if you are in Move mode. Not sure why, but when I'm working on an SSTO tweaking CoM position, I always do it in Move mode. EDIT: Specifically, if you change fuel load of a tank while in Move mode, the CoM moves in real time.

Yup, I see this regularly. In my case it's most often the small RTGs or any docking ports.

Yup, have a base module landed near the Minmus polar anomaly in the same state of Schrodinger's Kerbal. The crew are safe as long as no other craft goes near them or I don't take control of that module from the tracking station.

Well, you win some, you lose some. Night launch went off without a hitch.,, even tho our engineers forgot to stow the deployable antenna before rolling the launch stack out. The pilot barely complained about the rocket's tendency to pull south on ascent. Sticking with the night theme, a 3+ minute burn in the dark got us our Jool encounter. A small mid-course correction burn got us all lined up for a beautiful low-inclination capture at Laythe... ... but once we entered Jool's sphere of influence, our solar panels refused to work. Rolling back the mission telemetry to a prior save shows we had decent power generation outside Jool's reach: So this mission plan is going on the back burner for now. I could redesign with other power sources, but that would put a time limit on the service life I'm not willing to put up with. I guess I will pivot to a single launch with RTGs to get the Stowable SSTO to Laythe, for now? Or perhaps work on the Val level of the Asymmetric SSTO challenge? We'll see!

Landed an (asymmetric) SSTO on the Mun for another challenge: only bug encountered was a tendency for the gear to fall off when loading a save or using timewarp below 20km altitude… so I was very motivated to get the landing done in one take (took two).

Worked on a modular space station system for Laythe orbit, including: A hab module with three medium and two small docking ports which also doubles as a Jool-class comms relay An orbital unmanned space tug (green, for monoprop only) Various 35 to 50 ton tanks (yellow is hydrogen, agency colors for methalox, and orange/white for methane) A SWERV-based interplanetary ship EDIT: I think I can do it in three launches and three trips to Laythe by the interplanetary ship, which I've beefed up the fuel capacity of. I've combined the methalox and methane storage into a single tank, which should be enough to refuel the small SSTO a dozen times, so plenty of exploration of Laythe before we need to do another milk run.

Today I landed an Asymmetric SSTO on the Mun! For reasons! Beside having fun, I'm learning a lot about SSTOs with this challenge, mostly about things that just happen automatically with symmetric designs but no longer do when you throw that out the window. Not sure that will ever come in handy but I'm better a debugging a design than I was before I started doing this for sure. Today's big lesson was that when you have asymmetric placement of control surfaces, it's not enough to size them such that the CoL is placed where you want it... you also need to size them such that when they deflect they produce a balanced control force. My first version of this SSTO would roll right during pitch up maneuvers, e.g. on takeoff, until I made the right side canard larger, which required tweaking all three wings to get the CoL back where it needed to be. You don't need to get it perfect, but within what the cockpit's torque can handle.

Jeb level entry - Landed an Asymmetric SSTO on the Mun! Again, barely made it (definitely don't have enough to get back to orbit) but it counts... Elbas volunteered, I swear! Here are (large) screenshots showing we started with 2km/s dV in LKO and where we landed with less than 100m/s dV left: This is a complete rebuild from scratch, using some larger methalox tanks as a starting point: Here's our target! Caught a weird double intercept but since we captured on the first pass, it remained theoretical. Looked at the planned landing spot from orbit before initiating descent. Caught Kerbinrise on our way down! I managed to get one screenshot during the actual landing because I was rather busy with the usual SSTO vacuum landing: zero velocity relative to ground a few meters up, and pitch nose down to land on gear.

Yup, the outboard pod is radially attached and then moved into position. All three Rapiers are parallel to main fuselage, but the thrust limiter on the outboard one is adjusted down to move the position of the thrust vector in line with CoG. The various wings are sized and placed such that the CoL is also in line, and only slightly aft of the CoG. Main difficulty is finding a fuel tank layout that does not move the CoG as either fuel type drains (methalox and methane). I basically laid it out so the outboard pod has 1/2 the number of tanks and roughly half the dry mass to keep things simple. As fuel drains the ratio of the vehicle's mass in either part stays the same and the COG doesn't move . The only control surface tweaking is reducing the authority to keep SAS from oscillating which at best is inefficient but usually results in a tumble and explosion.

After a little bit of tweaking and adding some more methalox tanks, got to 1km/s dV remaining in 80x80 LKO: That main fuselage is starting to look ridiculously long and you have to baby it a little more off the runway, but still flies very sedately.

Nooooo!

Here's my entry for the Bob level (flown by Bill, oops): Wheels up Saying goodbye to the KSC Mode switch altitude and speed Coasting to apoapsis Circularization Barely made it but it counts! Note I have waaaaay too much methane on board, so can probably improve the dV in LKO by just leaving 3 tons of CH4 at the KSC... but not enough to attempt the Jeb level challenge.

Today I checked that the Stowable SSTO can handle a rough field landing after ascent and deorbit burn (so fairly light). Took a few tries to work out the procedure, but trimmed out to glide at 60m/s it came down to a three point landing and a combo of brakes and SAS to keep the nose pointed the right way got us stopped and in one piece. I opted to work on this rather than a launch stack to send this to Laythe because I'm finding the VAB much harder to work with than before patch 2 with multiple assemblies. EDIT: I also cleared the Bob level of the Asymmetric SSTO challenge:

Thanks for #2, will try it tomorrow!