Mister Dilsby

Fun! Can you recommend a consistent way for us all to measure length, width and height of the craft?

I sent Jeb to Moho on a "quick"mission to get *** rank before leading the grand mission to Duna. Well, he's has been trying and failing to get an intercept for at least a year now. After many km/s of delta vee expended he MIGHT get it in another year. The tanker I sent to make sure he can get home will almost certainly be in orbit on the first try. Meanwhile Bob, Bill and two not-jeb pilots have already been to Duna (mission in my sig) and all have *** rank. Hm. You know, i was on hold and just doing challenges waiting for V1 to come out... maybe it's time for One. Last. v0.90 mission: the KSS 'Moho Maybe' WILL get its intercept and Jeb will return triumphant! Or not.

That's...a lot of ship! I'm unfamiliar with TAC, do you need all that extra space and mass to carry the snacks and oxygen etc? In any case a very ambitious mission, clearly with a lot of planning behind it.

You've seen some good advice and some very pretty ships--now get in that SPH! There is no substitute for trial and error. Build a ship that looks the way you want it to look, probably around a single jet engine to start. Concentrate on making the jet work first, that's the hard part. Do your best to fly a profile like the one Slashy cited. Then: --Did you run out of air before you got to a good altitude? Add intakes, climb slower and build speed. --Did you run out of jet fuel too early? Add more, or climb faster. --Did you lose control of the ship? At what altitude? Try to simulate the conditions (fuel distribution, etc) in the SPH. Check your centers of mass, lift and thrust again. Once you can tweak the above well enough to go about 1500 m/s at 20km or so, you can reach orbit with a good push from a rocket engine. The faster and higher you go, the less rocket you need. And if you really want to learn spaceplane SSTO I would stay away from the RAPIER engine. Learning to balance your jets and rockets 'the hard way' will give you more real understanding. See you at 70km! ETA: I see you made it in a subsequent post. Well done!

Little known Easter egg: if you tell any Kerbal with BadS=TRUE that the program is a hoax and that he is a coward, he will reach out of your PC and punch you in the face.

No doubt it gets to Kerbin orbit just fine. On Eve the intakes might be useful as air brakes on the way down, and the jet engines are just 2.4 tons more of mass that will NOT be getting to orbit

That is amazing stuff, thanks for sharing that! Lots of good design points going through that thread. I take it you banned horizontal control surfaces to avoid infiniglide abuses? I'll come back to it after 1.0, but it seems that if you could get a glider into orbit without dropping parts AND without decent control surfaces, it should be more possible than I thought to make an extremely high flier for Eve by allowing myself both of those options. We'll see!

Oh, I have no illusions of single stage--I'm just trying to make my first stage(s) a tad more elegant. - - - Updated - - - Lovely image! Well if you're using TAC you have enough problems, no need to inject anything additional

Yes, I love having to do the prep work--any reason to do a mission other than farming science points for tech! Another good one is to send probes down to scout out Eve for a good landing spot. Since I usually play Career mode with Astronomer's Visual Pack installed, I can't see the surface at all from orbit so it was really useful as well as exciting to 'pierce the veil' with a couple of robot rovers.

I am with you entirely on points 1 and 2! In fact I am ditching 'pods' of empty xenon tanks and even engines as I lift. And yes, if the kerbal is already in a chair no harm using EVA fuel...though I do want to eventually be able to lift a Mk1 capsule, really it does stretch my imagination for the suit to protect the wearer for that long in such a tough environment.

Well, I could be wrong here, but I think what it's doing is pointing against your direction of motion relative to the local surface. At least it seemed to work that way to me when I was landing on slopes...will research! ETA: Yep, I'm wrong. You can clearly see it in the below, I am hovering over a significant slope with nearly zero horizontal velocity and the marker is pointing straight up, relative to center of planet and not to local surface. Apologies! I think what got me confused was noticing that the marker was not correct in 'orbit' mode when I was landing (due to rotation effects being significant) and I made the assumption that this was why. I guess I need to return my undeserved rep for that "tip" now

Hey, just go for it--it's part of the fun! Armstrong famously missed his pre-arranged flat spot and maneuvered for a landing with 25 seconds of fuel left for the descent engine. To increase your odds, pack extra delta-v, land in daylight, and put some lights on the bottom so you can see features clearly. It also helps to pay attention to the navball: in 'surface' mode the retrogade marker is pointing directly away from the local surface and not the planet center, this will give you some clue of slope as you come in. ETA: Kuzzter was talking out of his retrogage marker here. Sorry.

Silly question, sorry, but are you orbiting in the correct direction? I can't tell immediately from the pictures.

I had been working on an attempt using ions for some time actually; not as SSTO, but just using the ions to get a rocket stage high enough to reach: This one got to about 23,500 on ions and the rocket stage was just short by 500 m/s or so. I put the tests on hold when I found out that V1 would have an aero overhaul. Am hoping that the improved drag and lift models will help this type of craft

Briefly, no. But I'll show my work. Well first off, jets won't work so you are stuck with rockets. Let's suppose you came up with a crazy spaceplane that uses LV-N engines (Isp=800). You need 12,000 m/s delta V to get to orbit from sea level. Let's say you launch from a high mountain, and only need 9000. The Tsiolkovski equation gives, dV=g*Isp*ln(mass_full/mass_empty) 9000=9.81*800*ln(m_f/m_e) 1.14=ln(m_f/m_e) exp(1.14) = mass_full/mass_empty mass_full/mass_empty = 3.13 So your ship would need to be 68% fuel at takeoff. Now, working around a single LV-N with 60kN of thrust and a mass of 2.25t. Let's assume your wings, control systems, and cockpit are all massless. Rocket fuel tanks have a full to empty ratio of 9:1. Recalling we need an overall full to empty ratio of 3.13: looks like you need thirteen FL-T100 to get that ratio (or the equivalent). That gives a total takeoff mass of 9.56t and an empty mass of 3.06t. BUT that 9.56t of mass weighs 159.7kN on Eve! (9.56t*16.7m/s2) And your LV-N only has 60kN of thrust. I don't think any wings made can lift you very high with a thrust to weight ratio that poor, before you run out of fuel. Especially the massless ones I just loaned you. And then you still have to get to orbit when your wings stop working--not trivial with a TWR much less than 1. Similar problem if you use a higher thrust, lower specific impulse engine like the aerospike. That exercise I leave to the reader For calculations like the one I just made, crack open a physics text and/or refer to this excellent guide: http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Cheat_sheet

So your ship has a mass of about 75 tons and you have 120kN of thrust. You need 2100m/s of dV Roughly, your burn will take (2100m/s)*(75,000kg)/(120,000kg*m/s2)=1312 seconds, or just shy of 22 minutes. You might indeed want to do it in 'kicks', expanding your periapsis with a burn of a few minutes per orbit, until you can burn one last time and escape right at the departure angle... or pick a closer target if you don't want to do all that

You can do the calculation by hand pretty easily. One newton of thrust will change the velocity of a one kilogram object by one m/s in one second. One kilonewton (kN) of thrust changes the velocity of a one ton object by one m/s in one second. So: if you have a 300t ship with a single LV-N engine (60kN thrust), it takes 5 seconds (300t/60kN) to add 1 m/s to your velocity. If your burn requires a change in velocity (delta V) of about 900 m/s, then (ignoring the change in mass as fuel depletes), this burn will take 900m/s * 5s/(m/s) = 4500s, or 75 minutes. So-- how much delta V do you need for your burn, and how much does your ship mass?

I always fly horizontal for those, to give myself plenty of time to activate by space, right-click, or whatever. It's dodgy at best to take the data just in the right window of conditions--sort of like real life

Most important thing IMO is to make it (1) totally fun and (2) reasonably realistic. As of v0.90 (and much earlier) the game is already totally fun. What's missing for reasonable realism is, 1) aero overhaul -- lift and drag physics model correction will be OK, do not have to go full-scale FAR. 2) end some (but not all) part abuse -- SAS gyros are powerful enough to shift mid-sized asteroids. Turbojets operate perfectly well at mach 6. The team probably already has a list of what to nerf, and whatever you do will anger some users. I encourage you to stick to your guns/launch clamps. 3) atmospheric heating -- burning up on re-entry isn't just a hazard in real life, it's a classic sci-fi trope. Most important addition to making it even MORE totally fun IMO is simply to continue fine-tuning the tech tree and career mode. Make it a logical progression that gives players a story-driven reason to go on missions. Any perusal of the "mission report" section of this Forum will show that we don't need much provocation to make up our OWN stories--I would think of the Contract generator as a writing prompt. In other words: make it make sense, and give us just the flimsiest excuse to be awesome. And thank you for soliciting input, the relationship between creators and the player community is one of the things that makes KSP great.

Oh no, not coaxial, I was going to go Chinook. I may be STUPID but I'm not CRAZY!

Hm. Well, my real motivation in this pursuit is to develop an all-electric helicopter that will bring a (comparatively) small rocket stage to high-ish alitute on Eve. Using two large counter-rotating rotors, I might be able to get a thrust of 200kN or so... which means I can lift less than 12t off the ground... which probably means forget it. Unless I can make a giant reciprocating engine out of docking clamps! Ha ha! Haaa haaa haaaa! *THUD* BTW I looked at that thrust test rig earlier, and it's absolute genius. One of the best things I've ever seen built in this game.

One newton of thrust will change the velocity of a one kilogram object by one m/s in one second. One kilonewton (kN) of thrust changes the velocity a one ton object by one m/s in one second. So: if you have a 300t ship with a single LV-N engine (60kN thrust), it takes 5 seconds (300t/60kN) to add 1 m/s to your velocity. Intercepting Mun from LKO requires a change in velocity (delta V) of about 900 m/s. Not accounting for the change in mass as fuel depletes, this burn will take 900m/s * 5s/(m/s) = 4500s, or 75 minutes. Your navball and other tools will do this calc for you when you're in orbit, but I find it's easy and very useful to scribble out something like the above when I'm considering a low thrust design.

I don't use FAR myself, but I find that a shock cone plus a pair of "bassoons" (and I do love that imagery you used) is enough to bring a single turbojet up to a reasonable departure altitude. For unreasonable altitude and I think a not too unrealistic look, here is the Kerbojump: That's three shock cones and four bassoons feeding a single turbojet. Max altitude on jets is about 34km. You (and FAR) will have to decide whether this sort of layout is shenanigans or not. My personal rule is simply no stacking, every intake has to be unobstructed. ETA: Looking at @Slashy's research, I may just replace the outboard intakes with rams and see how much higher I can go

I like that--you're using half the bearings I am, I have separate races for radial and thrust bearings. Tarantulae, I asked the same question here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/113195-Stock-Rotor-Techniques and Azimech gave a great response. I learned a lot by downloading and disassembling his craft.

Honored! And it worked, too: I made an electrically driven centrifugal 'chunker': ...I went with 12 wheels per radial bearing, which is maybe too much friction. The lower thrust bearing does rest on a cone with four wheels, which seems to work pretty well. I will probably add an upper bearing for a bit more stability.