Carl

TLDR of why that is happening is that aero drag is exceeding the parts impact tolerance force resulting in the part imploding from stress. Go fast enough and thick enough atmosphere becomes solid rock for all intents and purposes.

If you have the right way of using it anything can be a heat shield, NASA studied but never flight tested a design that sprayed the underside of the craft with water to function as a heat shield.

Before that we need 2.5m and 3.75m liquid only tanks. Stripping the oxidizer out is hellishly weight inefficient compared to 1.25m liquid only fuselages.

This. As someone with an engineering background let me tell you, you want precision like that at closing velocities measured in an initial value of 100's of meters per second you need a computer to handle it from start to finish you cannot tiem it by hand period. TLDR of why. If your burning to decelerate at a specific TWR with a mostly unchanging target elevation and with the same rate of change, (be that a fixed or a variable value), of angle of burn on decent for each attempt your landing point will be X meters in front of the point of ground under you when you start a burn. (X varying on all of the prior listed factors). What that means is at the moment you start the burn your projected landing point is moving across the terrain below at a rate equal to your orbital velocity. Even a slow orbit around the mun is a couple of hundred m/s. You cannot hit a 100m area when you need to time it to a few tenths of a second, human reaction times just aren't reliable enough for that. And thats assuming you can manually hold the desired profile. You can't, again no human is that acurratte. An error of 700m is simply phenomenal for what your attempting. My advice, either accept a less efficient decent, or accept less accuracy and bring a rover, it's contracts like this that are why the rover exists.

So good news. Mission Success. Writeups gonna take a bit but after i pulled the probe i was out there to provide a comm linkup to into duna orbit i managed a low ike flyby before wandering onwards to have further ike encounters that setup more ike encounters that ultimately threw my out of the duna system. Had to use most of the monoprop stages fuel to pull the deorbit burn and slow for a safe landing on kerbin, (note, need moar chutes), but got 1200 science out of the deal. Price of probe. 211k. Price of rescue relay. 3.25m. Knowing you've beaten a particularly tough challenge, priceless. Relay still has like 6k odd dv in it too, so lulz.

So DER 5-2# attempt 2 of the duna decel burn is underway, i dropped my kerbol orbital velocity from 7.2kps to 3kps starting at 65 minutes to duna SOI and ending at 16 minutes from duna SOI, that raised my periapsis at duna from 500km to 5500km, and briefly during the burn produced an ike encounter, i'm now in duna SOI and burning to get a polar orbit. We'll see how it goes. Looking good so far though as it's a burn of just under 10k, which is well within the crafts ability to do in the time allotted. Now just gotta let her burn and document. Then write up time. Assuming "fun" does not unexpectedly occur.

Cheers, knew about that but though from a comment i'd seen in another thread recently that it was outdated... Nicely done. Go to your KSP instal location, then go into the folder marked saves, then career, then find the folder with the same name as your career, then vehichles, then VAB, then find the craft name you just lanched, then upload that somwhere.

Try changing the conics mode, happens somtimes. Had that issue while running my DER mission, it would keep losing the target resulting in the node auto deleting resulting in having to start again.

Eh we were all there once, not sure what the demo has version wise but i doubt you've done too badly. Minor question does anyone have a dv map where the values between planets are listed separately from the capture burn needed at the other end, Looking like i can make DER 5-2# work, (touch wood), so then it will be onto write up and seeing if i can work out a reasonable challenge criteria. The required dv for a retrograde transfer is fairly easy to figure out, but you do need to know prograde transfer burn numbers too and most include the capture burn which is much, much bigger for retrograde transfers.

The point is those mods use a lot of very complicated code to do what they do. Replicating it without outright copying it would involve more man hours of work than is reasonable for such a small feature. And copying it without the other mod authors permission is a very big no no. TLDR: it's not that it can't be done, it's that it represents a ridiculous resource investment to do.

Your sig seems so appropriate right now. Also simulator reports from DER5-2# suggest it may not complete it's duna decel burn in time. You know what that means don't you. We're gonna need a bigger rocket. Again... Yes, thats been a bit of a catchphrase for the DER project. We started with somthing like 2.5 kt designs, where now upto 7.35 kt designs. And we need moar rocket. Actually what i'm going to try first is decelerating for about an hour prior to duna encounter, but if that dosen;t work we might need a bigger rocket ;).

@accidents happen, sounds like autosave on your phone browser is misbehaving. Also i actually got curious after seeing the KSP plane and looked up the F104, it's interesting that the accident rate varied so highly between operators with Canada and Germany having particularly bad records, whilst spain had a complete zero accidents record.

Me likey :). ALso DUna Emergancy Relay attempt 5.2 is underway, (v5.1 had unexpected disassembly, rebuilding the ion stage appears to have fixed that, now to see if it has enough TWR at duna to dump 14kps in time, math says maybe).

Check every node of the new save tree, check it hasn't migrated to elsewhere on the tree.

Wait you even did corrections with SRB.s Ok thats cool, (bit busy to catch video atm, sry will look properly later).

Even at contact velocities of 14kps? EDIT: I know the dipping part is a nightmare on a retrograde, i tried messing with it during one attempt a few days out. The what happens when you hit atmo at those speeds is a best guess/worst nightmare in one neat package. Also random point, i want to punch myself right now. Just been messing with the ion stage trying to diagnose the source of an unplanned disassembly. I thought i'd used the biggest ion tanks then surrounded them with the little radials. i hadn't. Somehow missed the 5k tank. Think i thought it was an ore tank or somthing stupid. Ughhh, thats going to smoosh the part count, (:)), but ugghhh, so much pain setting up the other method.

It's a nice idea but i'm not aerobraking. For 2 reasons. 1. Setting up a specific intercept altitude at Duna on a retrograde run is tough, really tough. Te problem is at long distance you have the usual accuracy of burn issues. At closer ranges the dv for modest duna pe changes of a few thousand km is measured in kps. That's just the extreme closing velocity at work. 2. That same extreme speed means you'll pass through Duna's atmosphere in a matter of seconds on all but the lowest passes, and even then to get enough time in atmosphere to see serious enough velocity drop you'd need to be experiencing extreme deceleration. So much so that A) i suspect even the best heat shield would just flash vaporise in a heartbeat, and B) the force on the parts due to drag would grow so high it would cause the parts to explode, you wouldn't be aerobraking, you'd be lithobraking. At these kind of closure velocities atmosphere might as well be solid rock. That said it's not as bad as it sounds, i've got the dv, it's my twr at duna thats an issue, but my last attempt came very close and a miscalculation left me with insufficient power gen, i've corrected that at minimal loss to peak twr so i should do it the next shot i get an intercept on, but doing thats introduced a few new bugs so squashing those atm. Cheers for the thought.

Use CKAN, it checks for stuff that would cause this and warns you afaik.

KSP is the only game to compete with DF in "fun" factor . Also attempting the DUna braking burn atm, i think we're gonna need a bigger rocket. Boop.

Heh, i'm one of those until recently. But i have the excuse that a couple of long breaks means the last version i seriously played was ohhh, 0.17 somthing, back when mainsails where new and squeaked and docking ports where cute creatures you fed kerbals to and stuff. Given my tendency to over engineer and to be a bit conservative with using parts i have no experiance with that made out of kerbin trips tough as 1.25m part with the old optimisation and my old PC couldn't build big enough. Now i'm doing half and half, using the lab to get a jump start on certain things, but i'm also working on a duna emergancy relay to rescue a probe headed there with several hundred science aboard allready from minimums and eve flyby's and another couple of hundred at duna if i play my cards right and the dv holds. Despite the fact that i've had to build a 7 kiloton rocket with over 40kps of dv on the pad to do it, (the emergency that is, the probe i'm rescuing ran to somthing like 1kt and a few hundred k credits if memory serves me right), and looking at expenditures in the 3.6-4 million credit range.

Auto Strut. Like best thing ever.

Um i assume it goes blue to orange to purple to green to red? Also lulz.

Thnx. I keep expecting people to make "crazy B******" comments, but so far no one seem to even be raising any eyebrows, seriously is this that commonplace or somthing . p.s pics will likely be tomorrow or day after but in middle of ion stage burning, a few 100 m/s off completing initial kerbol SOI burn, will need a follow up correction burn most likely to setup the initial duna intercept, then i can move onto the duna deceleration burn.

Since Kraden is still liking the progress reports on my failures to get a relay to duna, more info on the latest attempt. increasing available d/v could only really be done one way over design 3. Setting it up so i can drop the tanks as i empty them. A real nuisance given the size of the old rocket, but necessary. I also decided to up the available dv in the LFO boosters that do the final to orbit burn and from v3 provided the dv to break orbit. I did that by switching those to rhino's and adding a bottom mammoth in line booster stage and an extra radial mammoth boost stage. After all the weight gains. 7166 tons, (876 parts, i think), on the pad. HOLY.... It burns over 30 tons of fuel a second at liftoff. Given this screenshot i'm not sure weather this should be called the BFR or Atlantis, (note this is from a failed attempt due to bad accent profile and is out of order with some of the screenshots): It lifts just under 4,000 tons to 22km. And just under 1400 tons to a 260km orbit. With just under 38kps of dv in the tanks. *Boop* I hope this is enough cause i'm running out of idea's... I'll let you know how it goes. The good news, one way or the other if i haven't set a dv record i suspect i've made the top 10, so uh, yeah, there's that .

Radar Domes dear boy, Radar domes. And if you understand that, gz :).