Mister Dilsby

Hey, partially in response to this question I posted my hauler, the Kranefly Mk.E http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/114595-Asteroid-Hauler-Kranefly-Mk-E. It worked for me to get class E rocks into Kerbin and Minmus orbit. No reason it can't haul to Duna as well, if I were doing that I would just build a bunch of tankers with their own klaws and link those to the rock somewhere in Kerbin orbit (then dump them when empty). Hopefully this gives you some design ideas. The key learnings I applied to this ship were (1) it's a lot easier to pull (with klaw set for Free Pivot!) than push (2) if you're going to pull you need a long boom so the exhaust doesn't hit the asteroid and cancel thrust.

I've seen a lot of posts asking for help shifting large rocks, so I thought I'd post my Class E asteroid hauler, the Kranefly Mk.E: Class E Asteroid Hauler (Towing) Takeoff Mass (with lifter): 1630t Orbital mass (fully fueled): 236t Vacuum dV (ship only): 5495 m/s Hauling dV (3000t load) ~150m/s Crew: 2 Main Power: 16x LV-N Auxiliary Thrust: 4x T30 Other Features: Loads of RCS fuel and gyro torque. Floodlights on boom for asteroid targeting. Instructions: Standard vertical launch ascent profile. Turns well in atmosphere but don't push your luck. Note that the SRBs do not separate--one stage to 70km, then eject the lifter, light the LV-Ns and circularize. Take care separating from lifter, you can damage the towing boom. Action Groups: 1. Toggle LV-N engines 2. Toggle conventional rockets (emergency thrust) 8. Toggle solar panels Craft file: http://kerbalx.com/kuzzter/Kranefly MkE.craft" target="_blank">download Kranefly MkE</a>'>http://download Kranefly MkE

Sorry, but sounds to me like you didn't build a strong enough ship and you're blaming the parts for your troubles. The fact you rely on a mod to reinforce your joints is a good indicator of this. No one should need to post a video here to satisfy you; a quick look at the Eve Rocks Challenge thread and several other sources on this forum will show you that a great many players have landed on Eve with completely stock ships, and not had them blow up even on reloads. A small but significant subset of those players have even managed to get back to orbit. Why not post a picture or .craft of your ship? (the non-exploded version) There may be something you've missed in the design that your fellow rocket scientists can help you with. Alternatively, download one of the many .craft files of stock Eve ships available on the forum and see if that one works in your game.

I can definitely feel that! When you get back to it here's another thought: could it matter what decouplers and tanks the algorithm 'finds' as it traces a path back to root? That is, would it work if you laid it all out in one line with no branches like so: [ROOT][T1]=[T2]=[T3]=...[Tn] (where [T] are tanks and = represents one decoupler) rather than having multiple branches like this, and trying to differentiate by adding decouplers: [T1]=[ROOT]==[T2] ...Hypothesis being that the multibranch method reaches a limit in number of stages but the linear method does not.

Did you get to the 7-stage config by copying and pasting a subassembly from the 4-stage config? If so I wonder whether the stage precedence somehow got copied along with the parts...one way to check would be by hand-building a trial stage 5 onto the 4-stage and seeing if that works.

I've done it both ways in a successful Class E asteroid capture: the first, intercepting the rock in solar SOI and steering it, the second making an intercept in Kerbin SOI to refuel my tugship and finish the capture. As others have remarked what you're trying to do is hard, but I've done it and it's not impossible. Head-on intercept is easy, but most call that "impact". You need to match the asteroid's orbit, in whatever SOI the asteroid is in at the time you intercept it. If it is in Kerbin SOI and on a collision course with the planet, the intercepting ship also needs to be on a collision course. Another way to think of it: pretend the asteroid isn't there at all, and you are fulfilling a contract to match its orbit. I think the intercept you're showing is about as good as you're going to get given the velocity involved. I would fly the ship out on that elliptical track and then just thrust straight at the asteroid as it approaches. You do this by putting the navball in 'target' mode and thrusting like crazy to "pull" your prograde marker onto the marker showing direction to target. Then as you approach you need to match its velocity. You do this by thrusting even crazier to "push" your retrogade marker onto target direction--ideally slowing your velocity relative to target to zero as your distance to target goes to zero. You may find yourself running out of delta V as you do this. I would be surprised if you have enough left, even after intercepting, to shift a class E rock out of a terminal trajectory. My big tugship has several thousand m/s dV on its own, but only about 150 when attached to 3000 tons of asteroid... that's why I needed to run a refueling intercept in Kerbin SOI, but by that point the rock was already half captured and I just needed to prevent its escape. Your kilometrage may vary, of course

They're not hand-drawn, that's camera shake.

^^^I did, I did, you ninja'd me you ninja you!

I think when you run out of a resource, you should be able to get more by spamming Facebook: KUZZTER NEEDS MORE OXIDANT! FIRST CLICKERS GET 1000 XENON!

My (failed) Eve ascent ship has multiple staged ions that worked, sort of. Here is the .craft file: http://kerbalx.com/kuzzter/Evoglide 2B.craft" target="_blank">download Evoglide 2B</a>'>http://download Evoglide 2B If you want to fly the silly thing, EVA the pilot and he will be able to board the command seat from the lander can's ladder. Then throttle up, spacebar to eject the lander can and tower: space again to light the aerospikes and release from the portable pad, climb at any angle up to 45 degrees and eject spent rockets with spacebar, spacebar yet again and you are now running on ions in Stage 4. I have the outer two pairs of ion engines attached to droppable pylons. Intent was to run on 9 engines, draining only from the tanks on the outer pylons, then run on 7 engines, draining only the second outer set, then eject those and run on 5 engines for rest of flight. This is where ion staging gets strange. It seems to treat all the detachable tanks as one group regardless of what stage they are in. In other words it will drain from the Stage 4 and Stage 3 tanks since those are all on the other side of separators, but not from the core set of tanks permanently attached in Stage 2. My workaround in this case was to simply disable all the tanks in Stage 3, as shown: When the Stage 4 tanks are nearly empty, I start feed from one of the Stage 3 tanks in each pylon. That way when Stage 4 is empty and I drop the tanks, the remaining 7 engines still get fuel. Then I enable all the rest of the tanks in Stage 3. From that point everything works as you'd expect--only the Stage 3 tanks drain, and when you drop them Stage 2 will start feeding. Hope this helps! ETA: RIC's explanation makes perfect sense. All of my pylons each have one decoupler between themselves and root, therefore they all feed together. Adding a second decoupler to the outermost pylons should make the Evoglide 2B stage as intended.

Quite far, but I don't worry about it. One interesting paradox I've noted is that a place you'd expect to get lots of rep, answering Gameplay Questions, is actually very spare--I suppose because if someone is n00b enough to need help getting to Minmus, he is also too n00b to know how to give rep. I try to pass out as much as I can myself, if for no other reason so that I never get blocked for giving +2 to an excellent and deserving poster.

Not really an entry because it's not crewed, might have too many parts (I never counted) and is only mostly SSTO--but I thought you might enjoy my Spacecow Mk4 none the less. 170t at launch, 20 turbojets, selectable in two groups (12 in #1, 8 in #2). SRB-assisted takeoff. Brings 50t of fuel/O2 to LKO along with up to 750 units of monopropellant. Four standard ports ventral in an incredibly suboptimal "Space Udder" configuration, two ports dorsal, and one small port on an extended forward boom. I think I could definitely squeeze more altitude/velocity out of her on jets and thus deliver more fuel to orbit. But I don't want to spend time optimizing a spaceplane in the last weeks of v0.90. It works, sort of, and it's what I'll be using to tank up my fleet for what will REALLY be my last v0.90 mission, an Eve Rocks attempt.

Ah, this is important--Are you in fact trying to make an SSTO spaceplane with FAR installed? If so, a lot of the pointers we can give go right out the airlock--for example you cannot get a turbojet up to 2000m/s in FAR, as it (realistically) limits thrust at high Mach numbers. See this thread for more discussion on SSTOs in FAR: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90780-FAR-jet-engines-are-seriously-nerfed

They protested in my saveworld when I used up all the xenon in the atmosphere.

Well, at least give yourself a (nuclear) qualifier on the leaderboard...I'm still #1 with Isp <400!

Hey OP, I thought nukes were for pussies! but nice run

Well, do you want to dock a vertical-launched rocket propelled spaceplane (i.e. a Space Shuttle) to your station, or a horizontally launched, jets-then-rockets SSTO? Modeling a Space Shuttle is a LOT harder than making a jet-rocket or rocket SSTO in KSP, though Space Shuttles have existed in our world and SSTOs not quite yet. If you can be a bit more clear on your goals the forum can give you loads of help. Let me put it this way: describe the movie that plays in your head when you imagine your ship lifting off from the space center and meeting your station in orbit. I guarantee someone here has done something like that, and I also guarantee when you play long enough you will do something no one else has thought of.

WHOOO! Looks like Mr. John FX was correct. 14days 5:47:48 to Eve! Made some modifications to the ship used in the Duna attempt (two LV-909 interplanetary stages instead of one Poodle and one monopropoellant). May have to try that config on Duna as well. Got very lucky in choice of a landing spot, I could not see a thing through the EVE-rendered clouds of Eve and was really worried I'd hit the Explodium Sea and, well, explode. Nice and level, will have to remember where that is for my Career game. ETA: And imagine my time if I'd remembered to drain the monopropellant out of the capsule!

Made it! I think I might be able to shave off a few days from this attempt, I saved about 1000 dV to brake in Duna's atmosphere and I don't think I needed all of it. To Duna surface in 34d, 4:46:12, conventional rocketry. Method: aim at the red dot.

Wacky. I'd try a couple of things to troubleshoot if it were me: --copy/paste a VAB craft to the SPH and see if it loads --start a new save, paste the VAB craft into there, see what happens --look in persistent.sfs, search for text 'VAB' and confirm that the file doesn't think it's destroyed or you can't enter it etc. If all else fails, and other saves don't seem to be corrupted like this, you could try copying/pasting the Goddard save into a clean folder by hand including using a text editor to make a (hopefully) clean copy of persistent.sfs. I honestly have no idea if any of this would work, but those are the steps I'd take to troubleshoot. Wait, on secomd thought...nope, got nothing

In addition to CoM being on the wrong axial side of CoL, you could also flip because the center of thrust of your rockets is not lined up certically with CoM. I have had this happen when putting the rockets on the wings. The ship is stable at low altitude, but then when it's high enough that atmospheric control surfaces don't work anymore it flips. I eventually debugged it by (1) using the tools in the spaceplane hangar, especially the part shifting 'gizmos' with snap ON, and (2) hyperediting to deep space and confirming that the rockets could indeed thrust in a straight line.

If you don't mind carrying oxidant, I find the Vernor engine an excellent choice for easily controllable stock VTOL. Just place enough thrusters pointing downward to lift the ship, enable RCS, and press 'K' to go up. If you balance right and have enough torque/monopropellant RCS, SAS will automatically tune the thrusters for you and the ship will stay quite level. You can then move around in a hover either by steering control surfaces/torque with WASD or via RCS thrusting with IJKL controls.

Been experimenting with tiny, high velocity craft--yeah, just hitting a couple of pins results in a huge score. OP might consider varying the points based on a strict definition of pin destruction, e.g. full points if none of it is left standing, partial if the top is knocked off or the bottom is destroyed but the top settles in place, etc?

Here is the oh-so-cleverly-named Ball One: ...size paramter= 4.07m * 4.39m * 4.73m * 15.5t = 1309.9 t*m3 Releasing the shrapnel cloud... Destruction: TOTAL! I did not include a picture of the Ball post-impact because no parts survived other than the litter of structural pylons. Score: 10pins/1309.9t*m3 = .00763

Ah, I never knew that information was there! Ok, building...