Vanamonde

I just got to Mun orbit and found that my engine had fallen off somewhere along the way. It was a completely different ship design, but that same model of 20-thrust engine. Is anyone beside me and Olsson seeing this happen? Is it happening with any other engine types? Does it always seem to happen somewhere between attaining Kerbin orbit and reaching Mun? Does it seem to be associated with warp? So far, it always seems to happen to those 20-thrust engines when they are not sitting atop a decoupler. Has anyone seen it happen under other circumstances? Any help folks could give in pinning down the circumstances of this glitch would be appreciated.

I'll tell you one thing that's making me reconsider my dislike for autopilots, and that is that it would be nice if my stupid ships would sit still while I'm EVA or in another ship for rendezvous. Right now I'm hardly doing any spatial EVAs because I'm not sure my guys could get back inside a ship that's wallowing around like it's having a bad dream, and when I did my first rendezvous in .16 yesterday, I couldn't keep the ships close together because of the risk of the spinning one smacking parts into the one I was flying. > Does Mechjeb keep one ship still while you're flying another ship? And I seem to recall reading that it takes up space so there's less room for crew?

It's so cute! It looks like a Pixar character.

Yes, thanks, I've played with the RCS that way, but I see videos where players are making their little guys whirl while jumping on the moons. I can do that by spinning the camera just as I hit the jump key, but that doesn't seem to be what these people are doing because the camera doesn't move. My guys are happy jumping on the moon, so I want them to be able to twirl.

I didn't realize the fuel bug was an issue that high up the throttle settings. I've been cheating without realizing it, and now have bad habits to break. An aerospike is similar to a parabolic engine bell turned inside-out, right? It's the same curve, but it forms an inner core rather than an outer shell, if I understand correctly.

That's a nicely written article. It seems what we're doing in the game are not true gravity turns because the operator is changing attitude? I wonder if that could be done in the game? Leave SAS off and let the vehicle's balance do the steering? It would be quite a trick. It's also to this simulation's credit that I understand what the article is talking about from playing KSP.

Doesn't this game give one a great sense of accomplishment? By the way, how do you get the little guy to spin in the (lack of) air like that?

If I could piggyback on this gentleman's post, what are good ascent speeds and accelerations? Too slow and you're close to hovering and wasting fuel, but too fast and you're still wasting fuel but this time fighting air resistence. What's the happy medium? I've always gotten to orbit and moons well enough by lifting off at 1-2G on the ship's meter, but then I hear people talking about 6Gs and such, and I wonder if I'm doing it wastefully.

Wait. Are you telling me I did the math right? Seriously? I think I may faint. Score one for hazy memory and blind fumbling! Geez, I was so excited about the math that I forgot half of what I wanted to say. In my figures, payload for a stage includes the actual parts the mission needs, but also everything that isn't fuel, such as the engines, SAS, etc. And then each subsequent stage just uses the full weight of the cumulative stages above plus its own engines, struts, fins, etc. as its total payload, Sound reasonable? If I understand correctly, lower thrust would linger in atmo and the heavier gravity of lower altitudes longer, thereby making less efficient use of fuel, thereby running out at a lower peak. Does the throttle setting affect an engine's Isp? In the real world I would think so, but I'm asking about the game's simulation.

That's not anything you're doing wrong. It's a little weirdness that seemed to show up in .16, and a lot of us are having trouble with it. Although I generally don't like to mess with mods, the HSTW cart is just invaluable for making rovers. Building a rocket around it can be a little tricky, but all you have to do is stick a capsule on top of it and you've got a tough, steerable vehicle with which to explore worlds. (Though even it is a little hinky on the current terrain, and it sometimes bounces around even when the ground seems smooth.) The landers are the tricky part, so people tend to be more proud of that part of their designs. Besides, the launch vehicles all have to be somewhat similar to get the job done.

Does the plugin recognize the new parts and calculate their weights properly? (Oh, and Major-Major, are you a Joseph Heller fan?)

That looks like a useful plugin Ziff, but it doesn't seem to have been updated for .16 yet. Besides, I'd like to do it myself for a while until I understand what's going on, and then I wouldn't mind letting a calculator do it. I forgot that inverse natural log is equivalent to ex, thank you, but embarrassingly, it's the solving for X in that equation that I'm having trouble with. Substituting L for e(dV/(9.81*Isp), I end up with X = payload * (L-1)/(full tank weight - L * empty tank weight). First of all, I'm not sure how to read that, and second of all, I suspect I went badly wrong somewhere and it's gibberish.

For a long time I had orbiters at around 5000m around both Mun and Minmus. I would jump to those missions and just watch the terrain roll by beneath me. It's fun. I haven't taken the time to do that in .16 yet.

The Mononational Space Station: Most of the parts are dummies just for looks, but it's got scattered handholds and ladders for EVA practice, and up toward the nose, there's the "external treadmill" for kerbinaut exercise.

Thanks for the numbers, AA. You're a mensch. Yes, when I'm feeling lazy, I just fly a Mun-design to Minmus. But I always arrive with enough extra fuel to float a boat, which is a habit I want to break before economics are added to the game. So. Turns out I've forgotten how to do math. I keep getting different figures every time I try to add up the same rocket. This is embarrassing. But that just takes practice. More importantly, I'm trying to work backwards from the payload the mission requires to figure out how many tanks a stage needs. Can someone remind me how to solve for X number of tanks when: Desired delta V =9.81*Isp*ln[(payload weight + X full tanks)/(payload weight + X empty tanks)] ? I get as far as: (payload + X full tanks)/(payload + X empty tanks) =ln-1(dV/(9.81*Isp)) and then I have no idea what to do with a fraction where the variable is in both the numerator and denominator. I mean, yeah, multiply both sides by the denominator, but then things get scary and I want my mommy.

Was that one of the JPL guys complaining about how hard KSP is? Please say yes, because I won't feel so incompetent if actual rocket scientists struggle with it.

It seems that since we're going to be getting planets soon, I'm going to have give up my "Five tanks seemed to work last time" design method and bite the bullet and do some math. Do you gents have similar figures for Minmus flights?

Ziff put a lot of work into that post. Somebody give him a ref point, huh? (I would, but I gave you one a couple of days ago and it's telling me it's too soon to do it again, or some nonsense like that.)

You can directly activate one of the new, big decouplers by right-clicking on it, no matter where it was in your original staging. Of course, trying to right-click on it while it's flying through the air after a catastrophic explosion would be a bit of a trick. But hey, nothing worth doing is easy, right?

Naiba, you realize you could takeoff from a neutron star with that many engines on a bare capsule, right?

The easiest method is to aim for its orbital height, then look at the map to see if your projected path is going to pass above or below Minmus' orbit. If you're heading below, turn your ship due north (where the gold north line meets the horizon on the navball) and burn, then watch the map and shutdown the engine when you've got an intercept line up. If you're heading above, burn toward the south.

Try zeroing your horizontal speed higher up, then descending vertically. That way you can concentrate on controlling vertical speed. Different players do this at different altitudes; some people like to stop at 10,000m or more and then descend, though I like to come down to about 3,000m before trying to stop. Or, a good way to zero horizontal speed gradually is to always aim for your retrograde marker as you steer backwards toward the surface. That way you will constantly be slowing vertically and horizontally as long as the engine is running. Don't try to touchdown until the retrograde marker is directly below your ship, because that means you're not moving sideways at all. Also, it looks like that ship is carrying much more fuel than you need to get home, and the heavier it is, the harder it is to stop. Consider redesigning your lander to make it lighter, and then it will stop faster and be easier to steer. Maybe get used to landing a small 1-man ship before you try the much larger 3-man. It's a nice-looking ship, though.

Just now I was using a cart-mod-rover to make a high-speed jump on Mun, and it crashed, of course. The cart part went flying, so I ]-ed to it to see how far it would fall. It turns out this thing is nearly indestructible, so instead of hitting and blowing up, it would just keep bouncing until it landed on the wheels. But the cool part was, it was stuck on full throttle. So each time it eventually landed on the wheels, it would just start accelerating again. For the next 12 minutes, I watched this thing blaze randomly around Mun at speeds of up to 379m/s, once bouncing itself on a 3 minute arc that threw it to a 9000m apoapsis. About the 10th time it slammed into the ground, it finally blew up.

My method of saving backpack fuel has been to get the little guys up to speed, then let them gently come into contact with the ground. You don't have to hold down either W or Q as momentum keeps him sliding and bouncing for a minute or two. Also, the flailing and bouncing is highly entertaining.

Fellow shutterbugs: check out this nifty crater in the northern regions of Mun. It has a high ridge on the north side (from which the screenshots were taken), a slightly raised middle, and crater walls around 600m high.