tjoreilly

Thank ya' for the chance to help KSP!

Welcome! and, indeed! This is the infini-glide bug, a well-documented, lil' unintended feature of the current lift system. Now go strap a handful of canards on your cockpit and have fun!

Here you go... a gen-u-ine replica of the Enterprise from the original series, and she flies like a beaut! ...sorry.

Hah! My thoughts exactly. BTW, where\'s yours, pbutler?

Presenting the five-minute, nigh-unflyable, white-washed and stock Bird-of-Prey... Now with bonus canards! And, of course, it only flies level while upside-down.

I have answered those questions in this thread. Best of luck to both of you.

Yes, there were several problems and/or potential problems with your .dae file. More accurately, these would be problems with your .blend model. Please review reply #1 at the beginning of this thread for an overview.

The changes made to the cfg file are noted as comments (text following '//'). Other changes would have been spelling and capitalization corrections. And, again, I cannot recommend enough the tutorials that are available on the KSP wiki.

Here are the files that I reworked so that your part could be loaded into the game. You guys will still need to modify these to get the part to your liking and in a form that will be useable in the game. A good place to start might be the attachment nodes in the cfg file. If you haven\'t already, I would recommend that you both take a look at the KSP wiki and check-out the Add-on Development tutorial. Best of luck to you both, and keep up the good work!

In the case of your rocket, replacing one of the engines on each tricoupler did make the craft more stable as a result of added control. As far as height goes, the larger the craft is, the harder it can be to control, even more so as the height to base width ratio increases. *on a lark, I cut your rocket in half, removing everything below the 2nd stage engines. She\'ll get to Minmus with fuel to spare.

The thing with ASAS is that on increasingly larger crafts it needs modules to send its commands to, e.g., winglets, sas, rcs, thrust-vectorable engines. In your case, you have abundant SAS units, so roll is kept well enough under control. However, as your rocket drains more and more fuel it becomes unbalanced and your ASAS has no modules to command that can make the minor course corrections to keep the craft flying straight. You might try replacing four of the engines on the lowest stage with LV-T45s or adding AV-8 Winglets to your rocket. That being said, it might be worth seeing if you could reduce the overall height of your craft. The ASAS at the top of your rocket gets worked pretty hard.

You can take a screenshot by pressing [F1]. I have been using Imgur to host my screenshots. It seems to work well. I\'m taking a look at your rocket now. My first impression is that it looks too heavy and the bottom stage looks unbalanced with the four tricoupler setup, but I haven\'t flown it just yet.

Could you post a pic, or better yet, a pic and .craft file of your rocket?

If you press [alt+F2], you can pull up the 'debug' screen. Your part is generating a couple of errors. There several things that I had to tweak to get your part to load. What modeling software are you using? Using Blender, I moved your objects to world-center, applied their respective scale/rotation/location, and gave both meshes their own datablock rather than having them share the same cylinder shape (I don\'t know if KSPs importer has a problem with this, but better safe than sorry, I thought). As for the cfg file, I just went through a made sure all capitalization and spelling was correct and simplified the referenced filenames, cutting out spaces, dashes, underscores, anything that might make misspellings easier (again, better safe than sorry). I accordingly changed the filenames on the files.

Perhaps a little off-topic, but I\'ve found ASAS to be useful if one is doing a near vertical descent as it magically/gyroscopically 'locks' the crafts orientation. I normally land smaller craft like the one in this challenge without ASAS, opting for a less vertical approach to the landing site. I tend also to forego the landing gear, as I have a tendency to snap them off anyway, and just land on the engine. 3rd attempt: Immediate de-orbit to landing site, killed most horizontal velocity at 8km, vertical descent from there using the graciously provided ASAS, and a final vertical burn around 1800m to shave off most of the descent speed. All landing legs intact (in case craft condition becomes a challenge requirement), and 136.3kg remaining. I am totally done spamming this challenge now. ;D

Looks like a great challenge! Thanks, Tarmenius. Circularized orbit at about 12km, retro-burned down to about 300 m/s in order to get rid of some of the horizontal velocity, and started the landing burn at about 3km. Popped a leg off the lander, but other than that, a success. 140.3kg remaining. edit: 2nd attempt Immediate creation of decent path (no circularization). Reduced horizontal velocity at 3km, quickly followed by landing burn. Landed at 1003m altitude. Popped two landing legs off this time. 144.2kg remaining.

I\'ve been happily launching in KSP for about two months, even posted to the forum a few times, but I have not taken the time to say howdy. So, howdy, community! Devs, fantastic job! and same to the Mod team!

While not a perfect antiseptic against... Bah! I\'ll just let the mean ol\' wiki-nerds get ya\'! More old man jokes, please! Why doesn\'t the Dog Star ever laugh at jokes?

Wow. Before you watch your stories and go to bed, grandpa, you should tell us all about how you weren\'t allowed to go swimming for fear of catching the polio and how you could buy steaks for only a nickel.

It looks to me that as your rocket depletes its fuel in the first stage that it begins to become too top-heavy for the SAS units to correct. Also, I could be wrong, but I mostly use the SAS units to mitigate craft rotation. So, I reworked your craft a bit, replacing all of the SAS units with a single ASAS. Your craft climbs straight as an arrow until about 60km. Then, the rotation starts.

Oh! pictures. Ascent profile: gravity turn starting at about 9km, full throttle until craft reached altitude of about 50km (apoapsis at about 70km). Then, modulated throttle just enough to keep from losing too much altitude from remaining atmospheric drag until I reached apoapsis. Then modulated throttle some more to circularize, never letting the apoapsis get more than +/- 5 seconds from craft. Very slight correction burn (200m) at periapsis.

I had an 89.35 with just a little over 2,000 m/s prior to the circularization burn. Kosmonot, I had been starting to get curious about the same thing. I killed the throttle at about 50km thinking I might try to shorten the length of time between raising the apoapsis to 75.5km and starting the circularization burn. This put my apoapsis at around 70km. I thought that, perhaps, I would try to incorporate as much altitude gain with circularization after getting beyond severe atmospheric drag.

Well, YOU VE PUZZLEd me. I haven\'t SOLVED THE signature. CONGRATULATIONS. 7/10

None, preceded by Spinoff.

7/10 But a code need not be secret.