Temstar

Protractor have an "adjust for TMR" option which gives you a recommend angle for ejection burn depending on the TMR of your craft. You just have to wait till the adjusted ejection angle reaches 0, fire up your engine to max and keep your nose on prograde. By the time you've reached the required speed your angle should be just right so that the sum of your acceleration vector during your burn adds up to be the same as the impulsive burn ejection angle. In my case though I had to start the burn 4 degrees before the adjusted ejection angle because it doesn't understand that my craft's TMR is lower than what it appears to be since I have a big hulking 50 ton lander docked on the nose.

I've been working on just such a ship. The mission involves an interplanetary carrier vessel taking a docked heavy lander to Duna and conduct double Duna/Ike landing. The two ships will then dock together again in Duna orbit and the interplanetary vessel will carry the lander back to Kerbin. Currently the mission is 1/3 done. I've performed aerobreaking and the combined spacecraft have successfully settle down into a Duna orbit. Once the landings and transfer back to Kerbin are complete I'll do a full write up of the mission. But here are some shots of my Interplanetary Vessel Thunderchild in action: (Only mods involved are ORDA, Erkle docking claw and protractor. I'll be happy to post the craft file if you want to varify) IPV Thunderchild at liftoff. Thunderchild burning for orbit with its main engines and the last two asparagus boosters, shortly after stage 3 separation. IPV Thunderchild waiting in orbit after launch. It uses slightly over 1000L of onboard fuel to reach 100KM LKO after separation from booster. Heavy Planetary Lander Tiger Moth burning for orbit to meet up with Thunderchild Tiger Moth and Thunderchild docked in LKO, waiting for refueling from tanker rocket Exotanker-E class tanker rocket coming into dock with Thunderchild. Together Thunderchild and Tiger Moth proceed to take on about 2000L of fuel and 130L of RCS fuel from the tanker rocket while perform inspection of Tiger Moth's landing gears. Refueling complete, Exotanker-E proceeds to undock from Thunderchild and successfully deorbits. Fully fuelled, Thunderchild and Tiger Moth waits in LKO for 3 days for the Duna transfer window. Once Duna phase angle and Kerbin ejection angle aligned, Thunderchild's engines roar into life, sending both spacecrafts into a solar orbit. 17 days and two course correction burns later, Thunderchild report Duna intercept confirmed "Thunderchild to KSC, we have visual on the target!" Thunderchild and Tiger Moth enters Duna's SOI and prepairs for inclination correction and aerocapture burn. Secondary target Ike is visible in front of Duna. Prograde equatorial orbit is confirmed and aerocapture set with 12,500m periapsis set. Sir Isaac Newton is now in the driving seat. Thunderchild and Tiger Moth blazes through Duna's atmosphere during the aerocapture. Aerocapture was successful and we've achieved a 320,000km apoapsis. That's where I was upto last night. Tonight I'll be working on circularising the orbit at 100km and perform final inclination adjustment. Then after that it's Duna landing.

Yes ejection angle is vital, if you think about it that sets the angle of your 9000m/s orbit around the sun once you escape Kerbin SOI. A few % error of 9000m/s is a huge amount of delta-V to burn for course correction.

Asparagus staging - learn it, love it. You can see an example I posted here that lifts something like 80 tons to LKO: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/showthread.php/24015-Avoid-roll-and-ASAS-flexing-during-ascent-with-vertically-staged-rockets?p=298684&viewfull=1#post298684 An Eve return mission will take a lot more than 33.46 tons from LKO I think. You need something like 12,000 m/s delta-V to get back to low Eve orbit from Eve surface if you are using pure rocket power. I firmly believe the best way to reach orbit from Eve surface is a convertable spaceplane that can stage into a pure rocket.

I'll make an updated version of the size comparison for 1.25m and 2.5m On a related note, I got the transparent png of the command pods off the wiki. Anyone know how wiki contributors managed to make those png? They don't look like they were screenshotted out of the game. Since the NASA spacecrafts are actually whole spacecrafts rather than just the capsules I would like to do the same with KSP and also show two rockets each capable of putting their corresponding command pod to LKO on the larger scale against the NASA rockets. Is there an easy way of getting KSP craft in that kind of "blue print" view with transparent background and no one-point perspective thing from VAB?

Space Cthulhu strikes again! http://kspwiki.nexisonline.net/wiki/Deep_Space_Kraken

1.55m seems wrong but it could be reasonable, afterall they're not 1m tall humans. Remember Kerbal and human body proportions are different. A 1.7m tall human might have a head that's 30-35cm long? A 1m tall Kerbal will have about 50cm being head. When an astronaut stretches out his arms and legs from the fetal position (say he's getting out of his chair to put on his EVA suit) the volume he takes up increases by a lot, where as if a Kerbal does the same the volume only increases by a little bit because of how short their arms and legs are relative to the rest of their body. Incidently given the size of their forehead a Kerbal will probably have a lot bigger brain than us. When you then take into account their small build it gives them a much much higher brain to bodymass ratio than us.

Isn't that what some cheeky people said about Wernher von Braun in that movie? I Aim at the Stars (But Sometimes I Hit London)

Nono, don't just move the decouper, add a new decouper so it's: tricoupler decoupler 400L tank with leg decouper aerospike When you stage, decouple the upper and lower decoupler at the same time.

You have to put a decouper between 400L tank and aerospike as well. Pump the fuel from 400L to 3200L tank and then pump fuel from 3200L tank directly into aerospike. I use to have a craft like that, the spacing for the fuel lines can get a bit tight. Alternatively why not just have the 400L tanks and aerospikes on radial mount?

I found a size comparison of the three NASA space capsules and thought it might be neat to see how the KSP capsules compare: For the record, these are the capsule diameter: Mercury: 1.9m Gemini: 3.05m Apollo: 3.9m Command Pod Mk1: 1m Mk1-2 Command Pod: 2m Jesus, from the look of things Rockomax Mainsail is about the same size as LEM descent engine.

Well no, not quite. It does oscillate quite a bit at take off but not quite max in all direction. Fine, fly it and see for yourself if ASAS shakes this ship up. The one I attached is the stock version without the docking and fuel transfer parts. To get it into orbit: 1. Turn on ASAS and throttle up to max then fire the engines 2. Stage SRBs when they run out, stage first set of four liquids when you see 28 empty tanks 3. Once you've stage the first four liquid boosters, nose down to 45 degree until the 2nd set of 4 liquids run out (another 28 tanks), stage those 4. Nose down to about 15 degree on your last two boosters and then watch your apoapsis until it gets near your target orbit then nose down to 0 degree. Circularized orbit as normal.

Oh I do, I have ASAS on all my ships. I have seen lot bigger ships of course, but you can extrapolate the same conclusion upwards. In my view, mainsail is only good for very outer stage of huge asparagus staging rockets, sort of like a rich man's SRB. It's Isp is too poor for upper stages and it's vectored thrust is too powerful for small rockets.

The point is too much control authority makes your rocket unstable, so I wanted to show a big stable rocket which ASAS can control very well with very little control authority.

It's intentional, it has 4 SAS that the spacecraft itself carries all the way to orbit. It's a 9600L capacity interplanetary craft and I figure I need a bit more steering than just the command pod for when the engines are not firing. Aside from the LV-N (which are lit at lift off and fire all the way to orbit), the 4 SAS and the command pod the rocket's lift vehicle are all asparagus staging radial boosters and none of them have any steering at all. If i remember correctly the left vehicle around the spacecraft is: Aerospike x 10 Big SRB x 8 400L tank x 64 200L tank x 4 No vector thrust engine or fins at all. During the burn to the orbit the rocket is only steered by the spacecraft itself and it flys and gravity turns fine. I'll put the craft file up once I'm home.

I can show you a 100ton to LKO rocket that doesn't wobble at all if you like. It's only steered by 7 LV-N, 4 SAS and command pod.

Depends on the design of the rocket. Apollo 6 lost two J-2 engines on the same side and it caused the rocket to flip over till it was horizontal. But then the IU kicked in automatically and gimbled the three remaining engines and the rocket managed to right itself again. Stage 2 burned for 58 seconds longer than normal then stage 3 burned a further 29 seconds longer to compensate for loss of two engines on stage 2 but still couldn't quite reach the intended orbit. Then after that stage 3 failed to reignite for the dummy TMI burn so the Apollo spacecraft separated from stage 3 and fired its own SM engine to perform the dummy TMI. Add to the fact that Apollo-6 also suffered massive Pogo oscillations in stage 1 that went all the way upto the spacecraft and broke pieces of it and you pretty much had full house as problems go for all three stages.

ORDA's teleport function didn't work that well for 0.16 and doesn't work at all for 0.17. I believe it's due to space cthulhu rather than the mod though.

Yes. Basically ASAS doesn't know how maneuverable your rocket is, developers have set some hidden value on how hard it steers based on some assumptions on how they think the "average rocket" would handle. So if you rocket is way more maneuverable than how Squad envisioned a rocket should be then ASAS will constantly oversteer when it tries to adjust for small errors, overshoot the correction then oversteer the opposite direction, hence the wobble and the constant back and forth gimbling of the engines. That back and forth gimbling is very wasteful of delta-V by the way, because any time your engine is not thrusting you directly up it's using some of its thrust to steer the craft and you lose that bit of thrust. In this case it's doing a whole lot of steering to try to get the rocket stable, yet the very fact that it's steering so hard is what's causing the rocket to wobble in the first place and you lose a non-negligible amount of delta-V to steering loss. One of the big hidden disadvantage of mainsail is that it has too much control authority for it's own good. First stage engines (of which mailsail is one, since it has high thrust and low Isp) need no to very little vectored thrust, since: 1. In an asparagus rocket, high Isp gimbling engines that fire together with first stage engine like LN-V or LV-T45 provide enough control authority. During first stage burn you are not turning the rocket, so you only need enough control authority to keep the rocket upright. 2. If for some reason you do need more control authority, you can alway add steerable fins since first stage burn is through the atmosphere So the fact that mainsail has very powerful vectored thrust (as it has both big gimble range and very high thrust) actually works against it and destabilises the rocket. Now the steerable fins on your rocket makes things even worst because: 1 - you already have too much control authority from the mainsails, adding steerable fins makes things even worse. If you have to control spin with fin then use the non-steerable fin 2 - The fact that fins are at the very bottom means that when they move to steer your rocket they give the bottom of those radial boosters a sideway force, thus twisting them even harder into a helictical shape. You will see this when staging. You know how when you stage radial stages without fin then more or less fall straight down? Yet if they have fins on them when you stage they instead twist away from your rocket? That twist is also happening when the stages are burning and unless the radial boosters are very stiff and resist the twisting your whole rocket will start to spin.

Rolling is generally caused by radial stages flexing obliquely relative to each other, so instead of pointing straight up they become a helix and induce roll forces. To fix this you need to add diagonal X shaped struts between the radial stages like so: ASAS causing wobble via oversteering caused by too much control authority. For example in your case you already have lots of mainsail which gives you already too much steering, adding steerable fins will make it even worse.

You have to be within about 2km of your target ship for its docking port list to show up in your docking target list. Before that you have to fly manual.

If you want to rely on ORDA's docking computer's DOCKING function (auto and att): The ship that's the active partner in the docking process (the one you're controlling) should have exactly one docking system and no docking target or docking decoupler, it also need exactly one ORDA computer The ship that's the passive partner in the docking process (the one that ORDA is keep still for you) should have one or more docking target and/or docking decoupler (which also act as target). It needs exactly one ORDA computer and must not have any docking system. That said, by using the hybrid system you can ignore the ORDA limitation by just docking manually while keeping the target ship stationary using the HOLD menu. You can even dock an Erkle claw only ship to Olympus by doing a fully manual dock.

Any differences between this version and beta 0.1?

It's not ORDA that slows your computer down. Once you are within I think about 2km of the target KSP will turn physics calculation on for the other ship, thus dramatically increase the number of part is has to run through the physics engine per frame. Even a top PC today can only run about 500 parts before the game becomes a slide show. So the trick is to reduce number of parts even at the cost of efficiency.

Erkle docking clamps are much stronger than ORDA docking system but they're not entirely warp proof. Once you're on rail there's no physics calculation so the claws can't exert force to keep the two ships together. Over time they ships will drift apart ever so slightly. However upon return to real time Erkle will try to reset the two ships back to docked position if they are close enough. The drift and reset are pretty reliable hence why I managed to fly that two ship combination to the mun. However I'm told when doing interplanety transfer you need to stay away from the highest level of warp and drop back down to real time about once a week for the system to fix itself. The ORDA fuel transfer module drain fuel from a specific tank but it's not necessarily the tank they attach to. Engines drain fuel from the tank furthest away to them, so for example with Olympus when you fire it's four radial engines you notice instead of draining fuel from the tank they are attached to they drain from the rear fuel tank first. ORDA fuel transfer modules draw down fuel using the same logic. For example see below: I have the fuel connection done so it's connected from the forward most tank to the target ship yet it's draining the rear tank. Test shows that you can indeed refuel RCS tank using a fuel transfer module mounted on a fuel tank (and vice visa). The type of fuel transferred doesn't depend on the type of tank that the transfer system is stuck on but instead depends on the type of tank that the transfer line is connected to on the target ship.