Corona688

In a sense it doesn't matter if your craft is a SSTO or not. If it can hit 3000 m/s straight up from a standing start, it's got at least the oomph it needs to make orbit. The spaceplane part makes it trickier, in that you can't just aim it straight up to wait and see. Delta-V calculations for air-breathing engines may not be meaningful. You're liable to spend minutes at a time all but coasting and your jets will mostly be operating at their worst possible ISP (either too thick or too thin air). These uncertainties aren't going to make the numbers better, they'll make it a whole lot worse. So I'd just calculate the delta v of the liquid fuelled part. If your spaceplane can reach 1500m/s at 25,000m, how much more delta-V do you need to get to orbit from there?

Within an order of magnitude! But I mean -- you can get five entire spark engines for that, which between them would have 50% more thrust with excellent efficiency anywhere from ground to orbit! On the ground, one spark actually out-pushes the Terrier. There's no better T/W ratio than the Spark's until you start getting up into things like mainsails, and nothing worse than the Terrier's except weird things like NERVAS and CRRAPIERs. If you only need a little thrust, the weight savings is immense. I used to be able to get to orbit with one terrier and two sparks until they nerfed them somehow.

Some of them pay a LOT of money though, which is the only reason I'm considering them. That, and to stop them from perpetually clogging my queue when I could be seeing better ones.

Is that all debris...? How, man, how?

T I never really liked the Terrier. Its efficiency is amazing, but it weighs a (literal) ton, which is a lot for the pitiful thrust it gives. It's just about the worst possible weight balance in that respect -- only useful for larger craft, and for that you'll probably need several. It's also not really a "lander engine" despite that being its stated purpose, it's shortER but not really helpfully so. I like to build smaller yet and use the Spark. Less efficient, but weighs so much less you can save just as much fuel from that. I indeed hadn't paid any thought to using it in aircraft. Thanks.

I don't have the Terrier engine... Yet... but obviously I'll be wanting that next. Thanks. This mission may require being willing to throw away most of the plane when I get to the destination 69,000m above jeb's outhouse was a slight exaggeration of "above the flight ceiling of conventional engines but annoying to get to on a suborbital hop". I have spent a lot, *A LOT* of time trying to get to these places from orbit, more quicksaves than you've got fingers and toes, etc. I don't think it's practical without something like mechjeb.

Asparagus didn't even work until fuel tubes were added, making it a pretty modern innovation, unless the term 'asparagus' has mutated to just mean 'wide' by now.

Of course. Most of us aren't complaining about whippersnappers, just remembering good times, which I see nothing wrong with. Off-topic nitpick, but asparagus actually makes things smaller, by throwing away fewer perfectly good engines and hauling less dead weight with you. It made my smallest orbital vehicle. Of course, people are free use this strategy to build even larger yet monstrosities too

Sure, but does an unshielded antenna work as one?

You know the kind of missions which start filling up your queue after a while: "Measure temperature 69,000m above Jeb's Outhouse" or what have you. Bloody unrealistic without ramjets, VTOL and infinite fuel. Or so they seem so far. I've tried a number of approaches. Setting a pack of small rockets down nearby so I can aim for these high-atmosphere spots with greater precision. Requires a massive plane or massive rocket and massive luck, and doesn't work. Adding rockets to my plane to push it into higher atmospheres. Doesn't work. Doomed by weight and center of gravity problems. Aiming at these spots from orbit. The orbit planner isn't accurate enough. I've never actually *NEEDED* mechjeb before, jeez. At this point I realized I could get into kerbosynchronous orbits above a spot and descend *STRAIGHT* down and felt clever for about 3 seconds until I realized a) That only works for spots on the equator b) Re-entry would wreck you every time c) Once you leave orbit it gets harder and harder to stay on course These missions seem to require something like a balloon or dirigible which can loiter for days at a time in the high atmosphere. I don't know anything in the game like that, nothing capable of lifting a crew pod anyway. How do you deal with them?

Fair enough. They both have wind up of sorts. But a gyro is a lot stronger.

Yes and no. Unlike reaction wheels, they don't wind-up just by maneuvering. If the ship starts at rest, it will stop at rest in a different orientation once you stop twisting the gyro. They will still wind-up when you use them to correct steady off-center forces but do so far more slowly than reaction wheels, because they're much more efficient. Because gyros are notoriously unreliable over the long term. The Hubble needs only two gyros to move, but was equipped with six in the expectation most would fail. It was down to three "sort of" working gyros by the time its final servicing mission replaced all six. They're just really complicated. Reaction wheels, on the other hand, are so boneheadedly simple they very seldom fail. So, reaction wheels are used for long-lived little satellites which must be aimed with precision, like all the tiny telescopes we're launching these days. Gyros are still in common use for giant heavy things like the Hubble and the International Space Station.

I've done so a couple times before, but aren't sure I could do it any more. The EVA controls are so *twitchy* now and you can't ever tell when a kerbal is going to reorient himself.

My Goomba emergency re-entry vehicle. Stay behind the heat shield and you're okay. Jeb screamed, SCREAMED all the way down to about 100m/s or so, when he went back to his usual cheerful self. It's a bit tippy once the chutes deploy, and maybe the chair could be centered better, and I can probably leave the probodyne out entirely -- it performed well enough after its batteries died. Otherwise seems to work well.

When sending rovers and instruments, I like to build asymmetrically. Instead of sending two rovers and two booms full of instruments, a rover on one side and a boom on the other carefully balanced to keep the center of mass where it ought to be. Or you can have instruments on one side and a radial chute on the other. In real life they'd drill out sections or add little weights to make it absolutely perfect, in KSP you can get close-enough and manage the rest with SAS. Sometimes I find it easier to build my top stage upside-down than right-side-up, especially when NERVA's are involved. Not having to make room for that enormous fairing is such a relief.

Surely. This does not mean they suffer from the same windup problem. Their flywheels operate at constant speed, torque is generated by forcibly tilting the flywheel, which takes force.

I wish I had the foresight to vid capture it, but in the VAB I once saw a kerbal look at his clipboard, look at the rocket, look back at his clipboard, and run away screaming. Probably just an effect of camera angle but it was perfect and hilarious.

The "Old Way" was the "Old Way" in part because of how jellylike the atmosphere used to be. You couldn't really "go small", just have to keep slapping on more and more engines to get enough burn-time to plow through that jelly.

I don't see much use in the strategies unless you're stuck in a corner, which I consider to be what they're really for, considering what they do, exchange one resource for another. For that use, though, they don't do enough. You have to apply them early to get significant benefit, and early is the time you can afford them the least. If you have a playstyle that constantly finds you stuck in the same corner though, they'd be useful.

That's just business. Bluntly speaking, they might lose your participation, but they won't lose your money. KSP isn't a subscription game (for which we're all very thankful) but this means they have to keep reaching out and finding more customers for development to pay for itself. Once any game gets big enough porting seems to become a necessity... Which is fine. Not every game is an MMO. I think I certainly got my money's worth, even if they stopped development right now, which they're not.

If they just called them gyroscopes it wouldn't be a problem, I don't think you can saturate those.

I found it! The Glory of the Brick A challenge made by Nova himself. Huh. The Brick is a little smaller than I remember.

I'll look, but I'm not sure the topic still exists, this forum has been through several upheavals since then.

I remember olden-days KSP. You couldn't put fuel tanks anywhere you wanted and expect them to work. No vectored engines. No RCS, no struts, but lots and lots and LOTS of SAS, which did double duty as gyro packs. Landing on the dark side of the planet was instant death. The main thing limiting the size of your rockets was the evil launch tower. Kerbals couldn't leave their pod. KSP would be running unattended at 4am because there was no map system, no orbit planner, no timewarp, and people were still figuring out where stable orbits began. That unattended KSP would rattle rattle your house at 4am because a bug in the game's mute setting prevented it from muting explosions. Good times. People were screaming bloody murder for a moon, but it wasn't ready yet. Mods were primitive to nonexistent, but someone modded in a chunk of concrete the size of the VAB and said "there's your moon!" ...offering a prize daring anyone to try and put it in orbit. Someone did, and the prize was only this gif because he didn't seriously believe anyone could put it in orbit. Then someone made the infamous "Ball Tank", allowing people to get far enough to have their first Kraken encounters. Good times.