Fendleton

Today, I buzzed the tower......like a pro: They both survived! While it's quite difficult to glide the mk.2 cockpit in by itself, those canards made it really very easy to land safely.

Those kooky Japanese! (Is that an I-400?) Actually, that's HMS M2. First ever submarine aircraft carrier and a pretty good example of why the idea never caught on. Designed as a K-class steam powered submarine (yeah, that went well. The K-class were insane deathtraps even by the standard of World War One submarines. And that's saying something.) but converted to a regular diesel-electric design.....with a 12-inch gun mounted in the front of the conning tower. The idea was that because torpedoes were terrible back then you'd surface off the side of a merchant ship and blast it with the massive gun the instant you surfaced. This had some rather massive issues as a concept, but they built three of the darned things anyway. After realising how bad an idea this was (also after M1 sank because a merchant ship accidentally rammed it....ripped the big gun off, and the sub flooded through the loading system), M2 got converted in 1925 or so into what it looked like in that picture....the gun got removed and the space where it had been fitted became a hanger. Trouble is, having a really big door leading into your submarine (which from that photo looks like it might even open inwards?) is a really bad idea. Especially as, since it was built in the same way M1 was, that hanger bay wasn't that well sealed off from the rest of the submarine. One day the hanger flooded during a launch and the sub just went straight down. As you'd imagine, the Royal Navy didn't really pursue the idea after that. [/end history lesson] In KSP however we don't have pesky things like water pressure, tensile and compression strain on materials, or having to worry about the wellbeing of our crews at all. So a submarine aircraft carrier should be perfectly viable ingame. Though it might be easier to make one that launches and recovers aircraft from a proper flightdeck rather than using seaplanes. ------ In terms of actual seaplanes, I tend to build flying-boats. Much easier to build and control, and I'm used to high-wing designs anyway since that's what I normally make anyway. Really big planes also tend to flip a lot less. I modified the Mallard that comes as a stock plane recently....buffed it up from the weedy stock engine setup to having a 4XPanther setup in the wing roots (also more fuel, obviously). Using my standard test for long-range stable flying (turning on SAS, taking off with full afterburner, then having the crew bail out so I can fly it until the engines run out of fuel using only the flap-deployment menus that don't shut down in an uncrewed vessel) I made it almost halfway around the planet *on afterburner*. And then landed it in the dark using only flap deployments. So you can get pretty good range out of a big flying boat even if you do something really stupid with it.

Are you using any swept-back wing parts with ailerons attached to them? I've experienced control reversal on these parts in the past, particularly the stock swept wing (the non-modular one). If that's the case, then swap them over to pitch (or flaps, or delete them), and use another part instead. This is a really, really annoying glitch when it occurs, but it's usually possible to work around by swapping out where controls are.

Awesome to hear about this. Rocket Lab started out here in New Zealand (they're building their commercial launch pad near the city I'm living in for uni) and moved a bit over to the US for funding. The only mission they've done so far was a suborbital test flight a few years back....the launch was successful, but the recovery mission failed so they couldn't prove they'd been to space. It was good enough for getting funds though, it seems. (It's pretty funny though. In the NZ press releases they crow about "Rocket Lab, a NZ company", whereas in all the other ones it's 'Rocket Lab US'.) The mass budget will be interesting though. The Electron is designed to be absurdly cheap (about $5 million), but it's only designed for about 150kg of payload (to sun-synchronous orbit). For a high-profile launch like this I'd expect them to tweak things for as much extra payload as possible.....but it's definitely a super-minimal mission. Possible? Probably. But it'll be interesting to see how they do it (Electron itself is kinda odd: it uses electric fuel pumps rather than gas-generators, plus a lot of it is apparently 3D printed. A lot of new things to either be very exciting, or break and make pretty explosions). If I'm still at university when they get around to launching this thing, I'll probably take my bike out and watch the launch. Unless, of course, they get that extra payload by doing an equatorial launch from somewhere else (we're not exactly equatorial here). Then I'll have to see if they stream it, I guess.

Deep beneath the mountains, the magic boulder sleeps....... (But yeah, it's almost certainly just a rock in the wrong place)

Part of the issue for replication is that even attaching stuff to it is really hard....it's hard to select in the build mode if you want to move it, and it always feels as if the actual collision mesh of the part doesn't match what you're looking at (although I daresay it probably does match it).....it may have improved in the 1.0 family of versions, but I ditched it back in 0.23 or so and never looked back. It's just a horrible, horrible part. Sad really, because the idea of it is actually pretty good. EDIT: I have also had some glitches with it, but that's so far back it may not be applicable with the part today.

I had this crop up with BDArmory.....dropped a load of bombs on KSC, and it took revenge on me by heating my pre-coolers up to maximum and blowing my wing off. My experience seems consistent with the other explanations in this thread.

Personally I'd go for 'Kerman' being the honorific/title for the job. It's like in the military or whatever....rather than Major Bob or whatever, it's at the end of the name, and denotes that the person is in the space program.

Because I haven't blown up a ship for a while, my best is from all the way back in 0.16/17 or so: Size 2 parts were a wee bit fragile when they first came out.

It's a good starting point because it doesn't work, but it's not actually that far off. Thus, you can see what's wrong with it (and there's quite a long list) and fix it while making an actual wokring ship. Edit: Except when you run it perfectly as other seem to have done. Do you have to adjust each of the shuttle's engines individually, or can it be action-grouped?

As stated above, you should still be able to recover the lab, but if you can't there's still a far simpler solution than trying to augment the ship in orbit: Send up a spacecraft where the final "capsule" consists of 2 or 3 Mk.1 pods joined by a bi/tricoupler, each with their own parachute. Load one copy of each experiment into each pod (the number of replicates dictates how many pods you need). Then send that lot back to Kerbin and retrieve your science once it lands.

Hmm. it's a bit of a handful on takeoff (I'd suggest rolling it around before launch), and a bit underpowered when the boosters first eject.....but it's not that bad. Until you reach about 25-30km, at which point full RCS couldn't hold it and it spun out of control. ....it may need some adjustments in order to function properly. Good starting-point for a shuttle build though.

Personally I'm a long-time Transcendence player. It's a space roguelike game from before such things were fashionable, and still actively developed 11 years after its first public release. Core game is free (and highly moddable), but there's an entirely optional paid expansion that partially supports the developer. Has a small but very enthusiastic community making mods and extensions for it. Windows-only, but works perfectly on Wine once you configure it properly (or so I'm told). Other ones...let's see. Oolite is nice if you're waiting for Braben to finish up Elite Dangerous and want to get into the spirit of things. Especially since you can edit your savefile to give yourself more money if you want to speed things up a little. I think the original BBC-micro version of Elite is out there as well if you feel like grabbing an emulator and revisiting (or visiting) the 1980's. Personally I think Oolite is more fun though. Dwarf Fortress is currently in the middle of a spree of small updates patching bugs out of the 0.4 major release.It is a free donationware game. It menaces with spikes of !!Fun!!. It took me 11 months and 4 attempts at playing it before I could navigate some of the menus, and 3-4 years later I'm still learning stuff (just made my first powerplant, currently working on first super-weapon. Expect to be working on first "undrain the fort" device shortly after latter project is completed). If you don't mind an interface that's like trying to play a church organ from inside a bag tied to a weight at the bottom of a lake while being peppersprayed, a crippling difficulty curve, extreme micromanagement requirements (unless you use external utility programs), and graphics that require extreme imagination.......it's still the best simulation game in existence. In terms of flash games, I've always been a fan of the MARDEK RPG series. The second game is probably the best one, especially the 2010 remake.

Terror in the skies over the Abandoned Airfield

It's non-optimal, but it should work. Gilly is annoying to get an encounter with and your orbital speed there will be tiny. Aim for it when you're close enough, then burn for an encounter. At 250km or so you should be able to see it. ....You'd probably end up burning downwards for your landing anyway, since it's really really boring and hard to aim if you don't.

....what is this "Safety" of which you speak?

Structural pylons with struts on them. They'll provide some rigidity, and can then be ejected once the ship's in orbit. Or just spam struts, or just use a seperator with struts attached to it.

On spaceplanes I avoid it because the opening mechanism can clip into other parts and cause Unplanned Spontaneous Disassembly. It's also absurdly weak and has issues mounting stuff directly onto it. So I just use regular old docking systems. On everything else, it's just easier to use the other clamps.

For contract work, I have a pair of small spacecraft. One is for rescuing kerbals, the other is for landing on Minmus or the Mun. Both of these are optimised and have only a little more than what is absolutely needed. The lander does a powered landing on kerbin with 5-10 units of fuel left. Everything else I build has a safety margin.

I'll definitely have to give this a go.....normally I only do a single sub-orbital mission for my Tech-0 level. But it *should* be possible to go quite a bit further. With only a pod, parachute and 8 SRBs you can do quite a nice trip into space....up-scaling that rig should allow a trip to orbit, which means that Minmus is definitely an option. Electricity will be an issue though. Decoupling via overheats is clunky, but should suffice for staging.

Having forgotten about this old challenge until now, I dusted off my Dove Mk.4, and did a trial run. Made it around in 37mn 50sec, with half my fuel left over. Not a bad first successful circumnavigation. With a bit more optimising, I think I can get this thing going about as fast as a jet can physically go, and I suspect I can do a faster landing than some entries...although fixing some structural "issues" with this thing will require putting the thing over 700 parts, which is sure to make my laptop love me. So on this attempt, I botched the launch setup and lost at least a minute...I launched too horizontally, and lost some control. Had to level out and build up speed then continue the climb. I can definitely save time here....a pure vertical launch will get me up to cruising altitude faster, letting me burn off more fuel faster and end up going faster towards the end of the flight. Eventually I did get into a nice vertical climb. I've got plans to improve the SRB setup as well.... This version of the Dove has 14 engines, of which 8 are clip-on boosters, designed to burn off fuel and make the early part of the flight faster. It's entirely stock as well (only mod I'm running is Environmental Enhancement). However, I screwed up and ejected the booster jets too early, losing me maybe 2-6 minutes of time overall. Eventually though, I got the thing up to over 30km, where the large wing let me slowly get up to orbital speeds. The orbital camera sucks for flying aircraft, BTW. Of course at this point, travelling at nearly 2.2km/s, I now need to slow down. The Dove 4 has a pair of SRBs to act as brakes. I'd tested these the last time I flew this, but not at this speed/altitude. However after a little trial and error with quicksave/loads, I got the drill. These rockets aren't so much for the "slow down" part.....they're actually more to force a descent....allowing me to put the nose down, then blast away with the main engines and get down as quickly as possible. With some more practise, I can also save some time here....maybe 30 seconds to a minute. More RCS thrusters would certainly help.....holding pitch 40 degrees away from prograde is quite hard at 2km/s. But here we go. After a wild, shaky ride I flew over my launch clamps and landed. I stopped moving a few seconds earlier than this, but eh....I'm not winning any places regardless and the next go at this should work much better. HEading west, getting the launch right, not ejecting boosters too early, and fine-tuning the landing should get me below 30 minutes.

Sorry for the delay, lost track of this thread. I have downloaded the persistence file and will slot it into a save. I'm guessing that it's sandbox mode. Edit: Starting on Year 1, Day 117. 49 flights in progress, and I've no idea what's going on. Not really doing the timeslot rules, are we? Ah well. I'll just go for exactly one year from this point. Edit 2: Tried de-orbiting a spaceplane. Uncontrollable (crew survived, but the plane didn't). Tried activating a munbase. Nothing worked. This savegame isn't particularly reliable. Still, I've got an idea for what I can do with it. Fortunately the space stations themselves seem to mostly work. I'm going to lob a new Mun base up and land it on the surface.

Keep in mind that SRBs will only work to boost TWR in the early stages of the flight. By the time they burn out, you need to also have positive TWR or you'll waste the delta-V you got off them. (Plus I'm not sure that my lander will actually work still)

Huh. I'm going to need a lot of optimising, it seems. Or jets. I just docked my new science packages to the Yet To Be Named Mothership. Total mass is now 499.11 tons ....on 6 nuclear engines, this is going to take a while to move around, I think.

Hmm. What kind of power is needed to get into orbit from Laythe? The lander for that mission is the only thing I haven't built yet.