Vanamonde

In mine? That was an early EVA experiment to see if a pilot could survive bailing out of a plane by descending on suit RCS. Answer: no. The plane was under power and the airflow shoved the pilot between the fuselage and engine as they flexed apart while vibrating. (Ouch!) By the time he vibrated loose again, they were descending at a considerable rate. In the few seconds left before impact, I doubt any RCS alteration to his velocity could have been measured. Splat. Science marches on.

If you watch what the engines are doing, they all move in unison. You never see some pointing in one direction and others in another direction. So they can pitch and yaw, but not roll the vehicle or stop its roll. But I don't consider that much of a problem anyway. If it gets out of hand it can overwhelm your guidance system, it's true, but as long as your axis of thrust is pointing in the right direction, it doesn't matter if you're rolling around that axis. If you can't stop a roll when you're out of atmo and it's time to make course changes, then you're boned, but if that's the case then it's a vehicle layout problem rather than a steering issue.

Try turning on the RCS pack, though that doesn't always work. Also, you can try having another Kerbal come over and give him a push (run into him).

Yes. Before placing the piece, tap QWEASD and the part will rotate 90 in various axes. Hold down shift while hitting the keys, and you can rotate parts in 5 degree increments as well.

Send a rescue pilot to get in the cockpit and fly the plane around in sharp pitches until the stuck guy falls out. That's what the fire department would do. I saw it on Emergency once. Of course, he'll likely fall to his death, but at least he won't be stuck anymore. By the way, this is not an uncommon occurence.

That was delightful. Nice choice of music.

In the VAB, save your design, then delete everything below the lander, then take just the lander out to the launch pad. You can play with the ladders and landing gear to see if they reach the ground properly. Then return to the VAB, load your save, and make the necessary changes. DO NOT SAVE THE SHIP AFTER REMOVING THE LOWER STAGES, though. I know you know that, but it's an easy and EXTREMELY frustrating goof to make, as I know from bitter experience. I love that term. The first time I ran into it, I laughed for several minutes straight. Whoever came up with it deserves a medal or a tiara or something.

But you don't lose anything by using vectored engines, do you? They have a slightly lower thrust, but proportionally lower fuel consumption, yielding the same delta-v. (At least they did in .15, though I haven't thought to check that on the new engines.) So don't you get the same bang for your fuel buck either way?

The part that reaches orbit will be relatively small. (Looks like just the capsule, parachute, that one tank, and the engine, right?) Sorry, I wasn't clear. I think they are, but it says "thrust vectoring = yes" or something like that in the part description for the gimballed engines. The "gimbal" is the mechanism that allows the engine to vector thrust.

Let me see if I'm following the argument correctly. I'm not clear about what you mean by the mass decreasing at altitude. Are you talking about the expended fuel? If that's what you mean, it's true, but will you also be accumulating velocity at a lower rate if you reduce the throttle, which means the ultimate total speed you can reach isn't getting any higher by getting to it slower, you're just taking longer to reach it. And burning the engine longer means burning fuel longer, cancelling out any savings from burning it at a lower rate. But reaching a certain speed less quickly is also no more efficient. In fact, it means you're fighting gravity drag and air resistence longer. I don't see what you mean by that. F=ma, and if you're lowering F, you must necessarily be lowering a as well. If you mean that the net speed isn't reduced by a thrust reduction, that's true, but neither is the total speed increased by a thrust reduction. If you throttle down in order to use less fuel to reach a certain altitude, you will also have less velocity when you get there, and just fall back down again because you haven't accumulated the velocity you need to orbit at that height. You can stay there, but only by burning whatever fuel you may have saved on the way up to close the gap between your current speed and orbital velocity for that altitude. There's no savings in taking longer to reach the altitude, because that's not the only factor involved. As I understand it, the fuel has a certain amount of potential energy, which the engine converts to kinetic energy with an efficiency specified as the Isp. And I'm told that Isp does not vary with the throttle setting, which means the throttle setting is not a factor when considering the total velocity the rocket can reach. In short, you can't increase the total potential energy of the fuel by burning it more slowly.

I'm sure by now you've all read in the papers about the disaster that befell Munahab 1, when miscalculation left the orbital research station stranded in a highly eccentric Munar orbit with no fuel, and the crew had to abandon ship in their spacesuits. Well, there's good news and bad news. On the downside, Philmey Kerman learned that it's very hard to land on Mun using only the RCS of a spacesuit. Our condolences to his family. And then Macford Kerman fell off of the rescue rocket as he was getting out to make room for the rescuees. Our condolences to his family. And then Hersel Kerman missed the orbital rendezvous with the rescue ship and didn't have enough RCS fuel for a second attempt. Our condolences to his family. However, we are pleased to report that Orgel Kerman was able to rendezvous with the rescue ship piloted by Samson Kerman, and the two are now safely on muna firma. (I don't know why that one's not working. Well, here's the pic:) Said a spokesman for the Kerman family, "So just as many of our relatives died as if you hadn't attempted the rescue? Uh, thanks. I guess."

You watched 2 minutes of a spaceship's habitation drum providing artificial gravity through centrifugal acceleration, seemlessly simulated with 1967 movie-making tech. Neener! (Perhaps I'm not that good at the flaming thing.)

Certainly. In fact, for a ship that small the capsule's inherent attitude control might be enough. But to change trajectory as well as attitude, you'd have to call on the main engine because it's the only source of thrust. An RCS tank and some thrusters adds negilble mass while giving you all kinds of additional utility, such as translating on other axes beside that of the engine. Like I said, perhaps not important now, but fun to play with and good practice for later.

If you really want to know, [don't look] sometimes the best way to finesse something is brute force. They just built that whole big set on an axis and rotated it. The actor was always at the bottom, and the camera was bolted to the floor and rotated with the set. If you watch, you can see the actor slightly step to the side to go around the camera. [/okay, you can look again] (Stupid formating.)

I used to put fins on all my rockets, but then I found that they're pretty much redundant if you're using gimballed engines. I only place them now if the rocket is rolling badly, or sometimes just because fins look cool. However, Kodemunkey, you won't be able to manuever much in vacuum without an RCS tank and some thrusters. The weight you save by removing the two extra ASAS means the RCS won't make your rocket heavier. Perhaps not important now, but fun to play with on you get into orbit. Also, if you are working toward the goal of keeping the little guys alive, which I realize may not be #1 on Kodemunkey Aerospace's agenda, consider placing a decoupler between the capsule and that fuel tank. That way, when you're ready to come down the parachute will only have to support the weight of the capsule, and you'll land more gently. (And upgrade to the full game when you get a chance. It's pretty cheap, and among the best purchases you'll ever make.)

I am continually astounded at the work people here will do for fun and to help other have fun.

On the subject of special effects, watch this and remember that the movie was made in 1967-8. (Skip to :54 (Why doesn't anybody edit Youtube videos?!))

I don't recall. First-stage burnout: maybe 300m/s? If it's too much for the 'chute, instead of having a lesser effect, it just rips off? I suppose that's reasonable. The booster stages would be much heavier than the capsules the chutes were designed for. Anyway, I haven't tried it for a while because I got around the problem by changing the layout of my lower stages so that they naturally spread outward as they break apart.

When you add stages to the sides like that, very weird things can happen in the stage sequencing, and components can end up firing in an order other than what you intended, and other than the order in which you attached them to the rocket. Once that starts happening during rocket assembly, it can keep happening even after you fix it, so it's really odd, confusing, and sneaky. So check to see which decoupler is actually firing when you're hitting the space bar. Is it possible that it's one of the ones high up in the rocket? Maybe fly up to zero G and try it there, so you can see which parts float away and which stay attached. Also, I don't know if it's related or not, but it's generally a good idea to make decouplers be little stages on their own. That way you don't accidentally start an engine on a stage and eject the stage at the same time.

Thanks Ziff, I did remember that you did that in my "Wallows like a drunken cow" thread wherein I whined at length about how badly my crappy rocket design was flying. I cleared out a bunch of my old attachments to try to get my limit low enough to post logfiles, so I don't think that craft file is floating around here anymore. (Just as well; it wasn't a good design.) I think I will try the dismantle-and-rebuild trick, though, because I do like that layout for lander designs, if it could be made to work.

So far I have only ever been able to award a given person one point, and then it just keeps telling me to spread the love around. I don't have a problem with that, and I see that it prevents abuse, but I have awarded a number of posts to others and so far still can't give anyone a second point. What's the limit on that?

The book is a better story and makes more sense, but the movie is just plain a hell of a movie. A lot of the special effects in it would not look dated in a movie that came out this year, even though it was made 44 years ago. It's also got that nifty Kubrick way of going slow without being boring, and interesting use of camera angles and such. It's a good moody movie to watch in the middle of the night, though the end is confusing and unsatisfying. As I recall (it's been a while for me, too), the second book 2010 explains what went wrong with HAL. Confirming what Ziff said, Dr. Floyd explains that HAL is a machine designed to convey information accurately, so he went crazy when he was ordered to lie.

Also, the longer a rocket is, the more it flexes. Struts will help somewhat, but it's often a good idea to build them shorter but wider.

I tried using parachutes to draw discarded boosters away so they wouldn't smack into my rockets, but they seemed to just instantly rip off as soon as they deployed. In fact, on suborbital flights parachutes seemed to rip off any time they were deployed while the ship was ascending, even if it was going much slower than speeds at which the chutes stayed on while descending. Can that be made to work?

stanNL_97, were you also using the 20-thrust engines with no stage beneath them? I've never noticed a sound associated with it, though possibly because I'm usually watching the map view when it happens. Okay guys, thanks for narrowing it down. I'm going to try going in and out of warp while watching the engines, and see if I can grab an output log just as they fall off.