Temstar

It is possible to make loops, but it's a pain in the ass to setup and require a good understanding of both KSP's tree structure and how docking works once simulation is actually running. Plus you need a steady hand. If you insist you need the L shaped docking here's how to achieve it: First, attach your payload to the cargo bay like normal with end on end docking ports Now, put a docking port on the floor of the docking bay, use the translate gizmo to shift this docking port along the length of the cargo bay so it lines up as pixel perfect as you can get with the payload's side docking port. You may also need to adjust how deep / how much protruding out this docking port sits on the floor so you get almost no gap between the lips of the two docking ports That's all. But wait you say, those two docking ports are not actually docked in the VAB/SPH! You are correct they are not. But once you actually put this craft on the launchpad/runway and the simulation loads the two will instantly become docked, assuming you lined them up well enough.

It would be good to have the formula for recovery value curve that plots distance to KSC vs recovery %. The wiki just talks about greater circle distances and so on without giving us a straight answer. Without this it's hard to do analysis. Having done my share of tail sitter rockets I have to say I'm not too fond of this recovery method, particularly if the landing needs manual control of braking rockets. Seems to me like a lot of things can go wrong - hitting the deck too hard, landing on a slop and fall over, landing in water and fall over and so on. For tail sitters I prefer a passive safe design like this: Where it can safely land under only parachute power without braking rockets. And that's what I mean hard to scale up since we don't have giant SpaceX style landing legs.

Why do you need to have both docking ports actually docked in VAB/SPH? Can't you just have the top docking port of the payload docked to the SSTO's cargo bay docking port, then have the payload's side docking port not actually docked to anything? If you need stiffening of the payload so it doesn't wobble about inside the cargo bay then just run a strut from the floor of the cargo bay to the payload?

I say approach this problem from the other direction - make the pre-cooler do something unique. How about an actual togglable "pre-cool intake air" function that consumes LF but decreases effective airspeed as far as your jet engines are concerned by 100m/s. So for example RAPIER normally runs out of breath at something like 1200m/s, generating minimum thrust above this because the intake air after compression is so hot that very little fuel can be burnt to increase the exhaust temperature further before the engine melts. But with a pre-cooler running it now thinks and behave as if its on a plane with 1100m/s airspeed. Make 100m/s decrease as the max and each pre-cooler can only cool a finite amount of air, so if you need a lot more air because you are running a large aircraft with many engines then you need more pre-coolers or else suffer a smaller cooling effect.

This seems pretty easy since "modules" is undefined they could in fact be tiny and just there to make up the numbers. I'm guessing though you had in mind something that's launched as a cylinder then reassembled in orbit to be a more complex shape. In that case you might want to set a minimum tonnage requirement. Still, it seems like it's just a case of making a really big launch vehicle and have some orbital tugs in the payload that can then move the different sections around.

I posted this in the other thread but I'll put it here as well: 2.5m cockpit, say SpaceShipOne shaped, 3 man crew 2.5m LF tanks of different length short 2.5m to mk3 adapter, the current one is too long 2.5m cargo bay, would be useful for rockets too 2.5m inline docking bay, with built in RCS storage hollow double ogive (ie, bullet shaped) nose cone, the fact that it's hollow allows you to fill the inside with all sort of instrumentation ala mk1 fuselage

I want to see more options for building spaceplanes using 2.5m stack. The 3.75m stack fits well with mark 3 because the adapter is very short and the circular section of mark 3 has an identical diameter as 3.75m stack so they naturally blend in well. 2.5m stacks don't have anything like that and I would like to see: 2.5m cockpit, say SpaceShipOne shaped, 3 man crew 2.5m LF tanks of different length short 2.5m to mk3 adapter, the current one is too long 2.5m cargo bay, would be useful for rockets too 2.5m inline docking bay, with built in RCS storage hollow double ogive (ie, bullet shaped) nose cone, the fact that it's hollow allows you to fill the inside with all sort of instrumentation ala mk1 fuselage

I want to emphasis: the goal of this is not to nerf Nerv, in fact I would say if this radiation thing is implemented then Nerv is due for a buff, move the weight back to 2.25ton for a start. In fact it wouldn't be a bad idea to buff the Nerv to close to its real life NERVA counterpart. The shield wouldn't increase drag, as you would only deploy the shield to wide angle once you're in space. In real life the shield is only deployed when the engine is idling since the radiation flux will be much lower. The real life shadow shield must be in the retracted state when the engine is firing to give adequate protection. We won't bother with that detail in KSP. Lastly if you really want, there's always the possibility of designing your ship so that your crewed section is more than 300m away from the engine, weather that's in pusher or tractor configuration. In the extreme case where you just don't care about radiation sickness you can just run shield-less and rely on probe core. Per my suggestion there's no adverse effect except the "radiation sickness" flag on your kerbalnauts.

@WedgeAntilles, you know, I never thought about it that way but you're right, since nuclear pulse propulsion is still the golden standard for high thrust high Isp we should probably practice it just to have some data on how it will work, when the time does come to save Earth you can't just send Bruce Willis. Politically it's not workable, and not just because of Partial Test Ban Treaty. If the US came out and said "we're getting NASA to launch a hydrogen bomb on top of a Delta-IV Heavy to nuke an asteroid so we know what will happen", how do other country know this isn't actually a disguise for a Fractional Orbital Bombardment System that's a prelude to a first strike? Or alternatively, if you say you're developing this technology to learn how to deflect asteroids away from earth, then by the same token the same technology would also allow you to replace the word "away" with "towards" and "earth" with "the Kremlin".

I'm not saying Nerv is not useful, on the contrary I would argue that Nerv is too versatile at the moment despite the 1.0 TWR nerf. Once I have access to the Nerv almost all of my big spacecrafts, weather that's interplanetary motherhship, or reusable Mun lander or deep space probes use it. Outside of edge cases like Tylo lander (where you need TWR), low Kerbol orbit probe (where abundant energy makes ion practical) Nerv becomes a no brainer once you get it. In particular having landers where the crew has to crawl around the bottom of the craft around the NTR engines doesn't sit well with me. That and as @tater said, tractor designs. This seems like it's just begging for the response "make more nuclear engines". Of course I'm not saying stock KSP should be all Orion drive and Nuclear Salt Water Rocket, but small stuff like radioisotope rocket or even space based reactor for power generation would be welcome.

It's not the first time that this sort of decision has taken place in NASA, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury-Atlas_6#Reentry Basically a faulty microswitch was showing that the heat shield has come loose. After talking to his flight controllers the Flight Director Chris Kraft decided that it was most likely an instrumentation problem and reentry can go ahead as normal. But he was overruled by his bosses who wanted to keep the retrorocket attached to the heat shield while the spacecraft reentered so that the force of reentry will push the retro pack which will then push the heat shield against the spacecraft until it hits denser air. So that's what they had John Glenn do without telling him why he shouldn't jettison the retrorockets. He survived the reentry but was quite a hallowing experience with bits of the retro rocket breaking off and thumping against his spacecraft in reentry. After this Chris Kraft said: "My flight controllers and I were a lot closer to the systems and to events than anyone in top management. From now on, I swore, they'd pay hell before they overruled any decision I made." Glenn wasn't happy either being denied information about his spacecraft. He said since astronaut needs to deal with problems as they arise in space (which is after all the whole point of having a pilot rather than "human cargo") they need to know everything about their spacecraft. So yes unfortunately, it's always been the case that NASA admin, the flight controllers and the astronauts have different priorities when problem arise.

I do, It actually makes a material difference on how you would use a NTR rather than what we have now where NTR is basically a chemical engine with higher Isp, lower thrust and runs on LF. It's also a way to arrange a drawback for nuclear powered engines, rather than endlessly nerfing Nerv's performance to make it "fair" next to chemical rockets.

Playing through a hard career myself I can definitely see where you're coming from. Unfortunately as I discovered to unlock my ultimate dream launch vehicle family requires unlocking pretty much the entire tech tree, by which time the low cost per ton to orbit is no longer a big issue since presumably I'll be rolling around in roots anyway. But yes several cheap launch vehicles for common jobs does help. I have four vehicles that I've spent some time on to optimize for cost (the cost all include the launch vehicle): A craft to rescue Kerbals in LKO, $7000 a pop A three man workhorse space taxi, capable of entering orbit around Mun/Minmus and dock with the station there and return back to Kerbin all without refueling, cost $33,000. This is my bread and butter craft that I use for everything, think Soyuz or Apollo CSM. LFO tanker (and a LF only version, for my new atomic lander), for refueling any of the three space stations around Kerbin/Mun/Minmus. $40,000 per launch. For Mun and Minmus I dock the tanker to the LKO station first to fully fill the tanks before heading out. Satellite launcher to grab all the satellite contracts, can place satellite anywhere in Kerbin SOI. $8000 per launch. The other stuff like space station modules or SENTINEL IR space telescopes tend to get custom launch vehicles. Some jobs like small modules can reuse the LV from above so I reuse them, otherwise I don't sweat it since the custom jobs are rare enough that it's not worth my time to fully optimize the launch vehicle design.

Normally the mirror is done between the port and starboard side of the craft. So you want the mirror through a different axis right? Like say top/bottom? In that case yes, the easiest way is to turn the whole craft via the root part. You can also rotate just the part you want to have funny mirror symmetry and attach radially to that part. That works too while keeping the direction of the mirror normal in the rest of the craft. I run into top/bottom mirror problem all the time moving subassemblies between VAB and SPH because of that stupid "pitch axis is North-South in VAB but East-West in SPH" problem.

Maybe we need a part that's explicitly designed to store data, like a space station file server. Then have data be transferable just like electricity.

It's a particularly touchy subject with manned spaceflight. After Apollo 11 (take that communist!) and Apollo 12 (we need to do it again to prove it's not a fluke) people were calling the later Apollo missions "mundane" or "routine" too, and look what happened to the last three. These days ISS gets labeled as "doing circles in LEO and not going anywhere fast". Basically there's always going to be a segment of the population that see space flight as waste of money and if you're here on the KSP forum reading this you probably are not very fond of that opinion. That's why this use of the word "mundane" strikes such a nerve.

This line of R&D has the potential to make Eve ascent a bit too easy though. Still it's totally the sort of technology I would investigate if I was given the problem of making a craft that needs to ascent out of a thick co2 atmosphere. Of course taking this idea to the logical conclusion we get this: http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html

Yeah some proximity warning is probably good idea. I wouldn't go as far as doing neutron flux calculation with multiple engines or anything complex like that though, that's probably too much for a game. It's actually a pain in the ass if you do want to put more than one nuke engine on a ship - besides shadow shield they have to be carefully shielded from each other since you control the reactor activity by adjusting how much neutron is bouncing inside via control rods and you definitely don't want excess neutron from the other engine getting inside and causing unwanted fission.

People have been repeatedly asking for nerf to the Nerv atomic rocket motor since it was first introduced and it has indeed been nerfed from it's pre-1.0 days by increasing the mass from 2.25 tons to 3 tons. It now has a much worse TWR than its real life equivalent. At the end of the day the Nerv is a solid core nuclear thermal rocket and no amount of nerfing will make chemical engines competitive to it over interplanetary trips unless you take away the fundamental qualities that differentiate it from chemical rockets. Instead of any further nerf I say decrease Nerv's weight back to previous level but simulate one aspect of NTR that make then truly different from chemical engines - the deadly radiation coming from the unshielded reactor. First of all, I propose a 300m stand off distance from a fired NTR engine (unfired engines are pretty safe). Any kerbal with in this distance will immediately suffer the effects of acute radiation poisoning - pilots/scientist/engineers all lose their primary function, cannot EVA and cannot transfer (so basically, like tourists that can't be transferred), their IVA portraits should also show them unconscious inside their IVA suits and flickers of static on their screens.. Once they leave this hot zone, kerbals return to normal on account of kerbals having much higher tolerance to radiation than humans. However on their personal log (the thing in Astronaut Complex that says "Orbit around Kerbin", "Landed on Mun" etc) there will be a new "radiation sickness" entry. This flag doesn't have any material effect on the kerbal, rather it's just a reminder that you weren't as careful as you could have been with the crew. Now to mitigate the effects of radiation coming from the reactor we need shadow shields: Basically it's a flat, curved part similar to a heat shield but thicker. It comes in 1.25m, 2.5m and 3.75m size. When attached to the top of the Nerv it produces a cone area above the engine that is shielded from the radiation. At launch the shield is the same size as the stack but once in orbit you can toggle to extend the shield and the shield will have several lobes that slide out to expand the protected cone area to perhaps 90 degrees. It should weight a bit, so that a unnerfed 2.25 ton Nerv + shadow shield works out to be about the same weight as we have now, say 0.75 ton for 1.25m shield, 2.25 ton for 2.5m and 4.5 ton for 3.75m. Docking a manned craft to the nuke stage will then have to be done with some care as you will have to approach the stage front on and stay with in the shadow. Similarly when undocking you will want to back the two crafts away from each other till then are more than 300m apart before you flip the nuke stage around. The aim of this is to make NTR engines unwieldy enough that some thought needs to go into a vessel using one, yet to make the drawback not so punishing that no one will want to use them, and simulate this drawback in a way that it's unique to this type of engine.

You know you play too much KSP when walking down the hallway into a room you find yourself grabbing the door frame to perform a gravitational slingshot to curve your trajectory through the door.

I like the fact that Michael didn't really have any exotic wave motion gun or anything like that. Basically every weapon on it: the battleship guns, the gunships, the spurt bombs etc all either shoot nuclear bombs or are powered by nuclear bombs. In the face of almost certain alien conquest mankind didn't try to mess about with death rays or wunderwaffes, they stuck to what they knew worked and built a ship that literally embodies the statement "how I learnt to stop worrying and love the bomb".

Probably Michael from Footfall: I rather doubt you can mount 16" and 5" battleship turrets like that, but the rest of the ship is pretty believable. Hey I think those RCS engines on the top are actually F1 engines from Saturn V. Now that's a real man's RCS block.

Huh? That sounds like uncontrolled pitch or yaw to me. I have seen planes go into uncontrolled roll but I've only seen this happen when SAS is engaged and the SAS was fighting against uncontrolled yaw and/or pitch. So instead of tumbling on two axis, the SAS try to straighten the plane and it ends up tumbling in all three axis. Roll wasn't the cause of loss of control in the first place. You can test this by doing your reentry again, then as soon as you feel you're starting to lose control turn off SAS and don't touch any controls and see in which direction the plane flips.

When you say spin, do you mean uncontrolled yaw, uncontrolled pitch or a mix of both?

I optimise for: Meet mission objective - else no point going Low part count - if the ship can't be simulated, the mission can't be done Overall low cost - something to aim for. Although I take a very long term view on cost so I'm bias towards reusability at the expense of upfront cost, within reason There's one other condition that's difficult to place in the above list - plausibility. This has to do with mapping between the perfect simulation of KSP and real life. On one extreme of the scale is space shuttle replica in KSP. We all know it's hard to design, hard to fly and not very practical solution for reusability in KSP, yet you could take up the position that it's a worth while endeavor to do in KSP because it was done in real life. On the other extreme, you could send a single Kerbal to land on Duna and back with the entire trip done ridding in a command chair on the side of the rocket. It's perfectly valid in KSP but you wouldn't be able to do that in real life going to Mars, some people would find that acceptable. Most people including myself probably sits somewhere between these two extremes. It's a fine line to walk though and has the power to override any of the above requirement depending on how far a certain solution crosses this line.