G Addict

I realised the \'blow out in damper three\' was a reference, but couldn\'t for the life of me remember where it was from. Either way, it\'s a suitably amusing phrase on its own, though I\'d have thought something like \'bit off more than they could chew\' would be more appropriate to my stupidity. After a bit more fiddling, I\'ve found this craft has some trouble getting much further than a 75x75km orbit and returning, so have gone about pulling as many bits off as possible to eke out as much performance as possible. It\'s wonderful when flown as a jet, but a terrible rocket.

VAB engineer: \'Oh, that\'s where that rivet went!\'

That\'s a standard cargo plane airframe?! That\'s the sort of crazy design I always wish I could get to work properly, which promptly falls apart or starts backflipping on launch. I love seeing those designs, but my inability to produce them means I have to settle for sleek. I actually preferred the look when it had the shorter fuel stacks on the aerospikes in the original design, and preferred the design before that which didn\'t have the RCS tanks at the nose even more, but this version looks acceptably slick. Now to see just how far I can push it... EDIT: Are all those turbojets on the Albatruss actually necessary for flight? I find that the performance of my craft in the atmosphere didn\'t change much whether it had four, five or six engines in its various iterations, but those jets have a really large performance hit once I switch over to rocket propulsion. You\'ve probably already tried all the possible combinations, but I bet you could get away with removing one of the pairs of turbojets on those outer tricouplers. Or does that cause too much of a change in your centre of thrust and send you off balance?

Put some advanced canards on the front - now I don\'t have to roll down the hill to build enough speed to take off! ;D Put more control surfaces on the back but that made it too heavy to orbit and deorbit, added more rocket fuel, still too heavy. Took off some wheels and the small rocket (it runs out quickly and is basically just dead weight in the original design, no way to get it to use the rocket fuel and not the jet fuel in the new design), currently orbiting with a tank and a bit of fuel for each aerospike and two and a half tanks total for the turbojets. Looking promising... EDIT: Gone too far the other way now. Where before it went crazy, it\'s now absolutely rock steady and refusing to come down, preferring to glide around at 50m/s. Currently circling with no power (have fuel, don\'t need it) to lose height above what I suspect is either a monolith or a tree - it\'s nighttime so I\'ve no idea whether I\'m going to have a safe landing or crash into a hill. : EDIT 2: False alarm, it was a rock. And, despite it being nowhere near EITHER KSC due to a horrifically miscalculated aerobraking (too early by a rather large margin), I have successfully landed the soon-to-be-given-something-that-isn\'t-working-title KiG Spaceplane Mk2c! I\'m really happy I didn\'t have to make it look *too* utilitarian - I prefer my spacecraft to be pretty. 8)

I\'ve got more than enough wings to keep the rear end in the air - I have another version which is identical but has four less delta wings at the rear and can just about take off stably. They\'re not actually canards - they\'re the AV-whatever movable winglets. That make any difference? I just checked and I do need them to get it off the ground - even with them it only just gets the nose up in time to avoid going plop into the ocean, and tests while full have shown that it is able to land - even with about three times its intended landing mass. I\'ll try sticking more control surfaces on the rear, and replacing the forward winglets with proper canards. While I\'m at it I\'ll put the Aerospike engines on the decoupler hardpoints to stop them nicking the turbojets\' fuel on reentry. I think the separation between aeroplane fuel and rocket fuel will make this is thing fly a lot better. :

Hm. Once I get into the lower atmosphere with the craft I posted, it goes into an uncontrollable tumble, I suspect because the canards behind the forward RCS tanks lift the nose more than the rear wings can lift the back of the plane. Any way to fix that without completely redesigning?

The kiwicycle+propane tank/thruster from the carts pack=big air! 8)

Flew this into orbit after a lot of balancing problems in development, thought, \'hey - I could use this fuel to get back and win the prize!\' and decided to shoot for the Mun. Then crashed and died. :

Wow, the bike\'s fast! Maybe it caps off at a lower speed, but it certainly hits 50m/s easily on Kerbin. Can\'t wait to get it to the mun! Though, while it seems rock steady even while turning at high speed on Kerbin I doubt it\'ll be so well behaved up there.

I reckon using rotation to aim engines down would keep the vehicle on the surface long enough to hit overland escape velocity, then just cut engines once you hit a bump.

Still can\'t get the damn landing. > Loads of near misses, but always either a headlong crash into the back of the carrier, or losing control of the plane either because of a stupid mistake (banking too far and such) or a bit of lag messing with my controls. Ballons are all gone in two minutes on a good run, then I screw up. Still fun, though.

Definitely got a plane that can do it now - added a few more wings to my original design and now it\'s way more stable. Shame I suck at precision landings. : I\'ve noticed that actually ramming the balloons doesn\'t work - I die when I crash into them, but occasionally they\'ll just explode when I get near as Volt said. What\'s the deal there? Of course, if I\'m getting close enough to ram them, I\'m screwing up because I should be using the railguns.

Gah! Shot down all of the targets, but my stupidly oversensitive joystick then decided my plane should flip over while trying to locate the aircraft carrier. I\'ve turned the sensitivity all the way down in the options but it still considers pulling the joystick halfway through its range to be full on turning. >

Wow, this is great fun to fail! First I tried modifying a longer range, three engine fighter with lighter fuel tanks and railguns, but that\'s too unwieldy. Now I\'m trying a way smaller single engine design which is having far more success. I first tried with a helicopter - way easier than with a plane! Using the Sunbeam as a laser sight for railguns helps loads, as does the hull cam, but the laser\'s rather heavy...

No plugins required, but are they allowed? I can see r4m0n\'s hull camera being really useful for aiming.

Do we actually have to use guns, or can we use the Sunbeam particle cannon? Hitscan weapons seem a little cheaty if everyone else is using railguns.

Is that thing stable? I have loads of trouble with any VTOL craft which has horizontal wings (even just control surfaces) anywhere other than at the centre of mass/lift, as they resist going up/down and flip the craft.

It\'s the Damned Aerospace part pack. Really fun. power5000, your aim is unreal! I prefer to use sunbeam lasers on my aircraft, for the autoaiming. In fact, I just built a helicopter for cleaning up debris around the KSC. I\'ve got another, dual rotor one with railguns for playing around with, but it likes to flip itself over for no good reason before getting anywhere meaningful. I see you\'ve got wings on there. Don\'t they destabilise the helicopter at high speeds? They do me. :-[

For shutting off rocket engines, try disabling flow of fuel through the tank the rocket is mounted on. I think that should work, though by the looks of it shutting off the rockets in this manner will also kill the jets. The reason you\'re getting stability issues is because rocket engines are very heavy compared to jets and your control surfaces aren\'t enough in the extremely thin atmosphere to steer the plane, which is made worse by the rockets burning far back from the centre of gravity. You should be good if you put stupid numbers of RCS thrusters on the plane but I don\'t like that solution. Try going easy with the throttle on the rockets until you\'re out of the atmosphere - IIRC it\'s more efficient to go relatively slowly in the atmosphere, then punch it once you\'re out anyway, plus the lower speeds will stop air resistance messing with your trajectory.

Is there any reason for this not to work in .15.2 before I dowload? It sounds really, really awesome.

Ahhh, that explains it. Thank you.

Apologies if this is something that\'s already been done, but I just read that a moderately recent update (0.14.2?) put trees into the terrain. I\'m not seeing them in 0.15.1. What gives? Were they taken out again or something, or do I need to have a box ticked which I don\'t?

Aww yeah, 860.7m/s. Do I get bonus points for basing it on Thunderbird 1, complete with wing pivots? 8) : I\'ve even got some dead weight on there in the form of a weaponised laser. That\'s the red line in the screenshot. Don\'t think I\'m ever going to get close to khyron42 though!

That\'s the thing - I have been. Do you have to\'ve been in 1 or 2x timewarp for your whole journey? Doubt it, since it\'d be really boring waiting for your ship to get up there but nothing I try seems to fix it. Might be relevant that the detector starts out inside a cuttlefish lander, so is obscured initially? I\'ll try fiddling with my graphics settings, since I doubt it\'s the fault of the plugin... EDIT: I just took some screens of one of the sats as it passes over the location of an arch. The first one shows the satellite with a rover stationed at the arch being the pink target. The satellite is moving away from the rover. The second screen is the complete lack of red light (or any light) on the scanner a few seconds later. In both cases the time warp was not active. EDIT again: Aha! I\'ve found the cause. If the Muon Scanner is obscured at launch (like in the ship I posted, with the cargo pod holding it), the light does not work. Odd, but pretty obvious now I think about it. Just wish I\'d realised BEFORE putting three of those sats into orbit around the Mun. :

I\'ve got a weird issue with the long range detector. On rovers (on kerbin at least), the red/green light has been working fine (though I\'m apparently both an idiot and blind so haven\'t even found whatever it is near the KSC), but on my satellites orbiting the mun I haven\'t been seeing the light. I\'ve got one orbiting at 20km, another at 15km and one at 12km, and I haven\'t been able to see the light on any of them. One of them still helped me to spot an arch, but that\'s no help for the smaller munoliths. Do I have to have a certain graphics setting?