TouhouTorpedo

Uhh... Theres just way too many reasons why real world rocket science is hard. The easiest way to sum it up is "KSP is a game for fun" and real life is, well, real life. They just aren't even comparable. Heck, real "rocket science" doesn't really happen much anymore. Its more rocket engineers and established theories.

Okay first entry going up: Total time 6:25. Quite beatable I'm sure but this was my first time around the course and its a good bar to set. I didn't fancy rushing it and turning into a pile of rubble that -didn't- have an entry!

You did notice the video up there of someone doing this in a pod racer right lol Though I'd love to know how hes got what looks like seat IVA there. Anyway this looks great, think I'll try it. EDIT : One thing quick. I think B9 aerodynamic surfaced aircraft should have their own class. They are significantly more maneuverable than most other mod aircraft are capable of being.

I have no plans to expand the MK2 system. It's too small to really carry anything, so theres not much to add. At best it could get a docking port and an ASAS. a very small cargo bay is possible, but quite limiting.

For some reason, my thoughts went on a tangent this weekend. I was trying some new ideas regarding carrier aircraft, and how a parasiticly carried plane is always hard to put in a bay - why put it inside? well its unsightly stuck above isn't it? So why can't we stick it in a fuselage dent shaped for a smaller craft? AHA! I give you - Fuselage Embedding! (there smooth adapters in the mod for MK3 and to MK2, this is an early testing picture!) NEW MK3 Embedded Fuselages this is the first version of the pack partly to test the waters on the idea. MK3 Embedded Fuselages adds MK3 type fuselages with dents in them. "but couldn't I do that with a hammer?" Create finely curved 1.25m wide fuselage length dents with adapters to normal fuselages?! I don't think so! Use these to fit rockets, smaller planes, anything on top of another MK3 based aircraft. In the future, I may add other fuselage types, or embedding in different places. (say under, sides, something like that) For now the finely crafted dent sits on top. There are three parts in the mod- MK3 overhead embedded fuselage, MK3 to MK3 embedded fuselage adapter, and a MK2 to MK3 embedded fuselage adapter. Download here! (ignore missing picture, its missing because spaceport is being terrible as usual) http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/ttembeddedfuselage/

If you do resize them, heres a tip if they aren't getting perfect ground contact and appear to float. Fiddle with the "contact displace" property in the CFG. You can use that to alter the height the wheel "floats" above the ground. (because Unity wheel collliders are derp) To be honest my original plan was basically what the OP suggested, but I decided the stock landing gear module was just aweful and dumped it fairly quickly. I'm thinking of looking into more smaller gear soon, but for now a lot of my smaller planes get built with dualgear pods and "tailwheels" which I've found make good nosegear when angled as well.

three of > 400,000 one of > 300,000 < 400,000 one of > 200,000 < 300,000 11 pockets in total. And some Kethane exploration and technology development news! On the Kethane Frontier: The Mobile Kethane Base was design was further upgraded, though needed to do an emergency landing after the first flight attempt and was deemed nearly uncontrollable in roll (hence not landing directly on runway - too risky to attempt) but lucky no damage done. This was then relaunched with better Airelon placement, and worked perfectly. Its new Kethane Scanning function instantly bore fruit, too. A very rich Kethane deposit, found only quarter of the way through the journey and halfway to the Site Alpha fuel stop! Site Alpha fuel stop. Kethane was mined here as well to test the systems. Afterward, a cable was set between the two to offload any Kethane left onboard, since it was undesirable to carry Kethane inflight. It was also a good oppurtunity for some R&R for the little runts. Nearly onsite, flying at a higher altitude than these types had ever flown before, it became apparent an alternate landing site may be available. Course was altered to scan the unscanned area near the deposit. Big mistake. At this higher altitude the aircrafts bad low load characteristics returned, and there wasn't enough airflow to fight the problem. However, the Kerbals hung on dear to their sickbags and stuck it out till lower altitude. Sure enough, control eventually returned. A fourth site has now been established. Interestingly, this is the lowest land I think I've seen near a shoreline. its 66m up, and thats including a slant from the shore. Although, it does drop steeper near the edge, like most beaches on Kerbin do. Technology Update: Having Kethane mining is great, but how do we get the fuel from one site to another, or offload the converted material? well we need trucks for that (or planes, but I'd rather my planes actually fly) but trucks -can't- fly. Or shouldn't. So how to solve this conundrum? Meet the newest craft in the TT arsenal of carriers, the "It Delivers" prototype. "It Delivers" with a LFO storage truck about to enter. It didn't turn out to fit reversing in too well, so in the end it was turned around and drove in forwards. Tying down the truck using KAS winches in "plug undock" mode. Don't use "plug dock" for this. Ever. Its bad news. We're still trying to pull the kerbals from the last phased through truck accident. Inflight, it took a while for the payload to settle nicely, which meant to fly straight it was neccesary to take somewhat unusual angles. I really wouldn't have wanted to be in that truck for the whole flight. (theres 3 Kerbals in there all the way) approaching the landing site (about 50km away here) the carrier flies a lot more level by the end of the flight. and reveals it has another trick up its sleeve - with the huge wingspan and a lot of fuel burned, as well as an empty fuel truck inside, it reveals that it has quite amazing gliding characteristics. able to more or less float to a stop almost parked next to the base. speaking of the truck though, how did it fare in there... releasing clamps, all looks good... Its out! Theres now somewhat of a functional capability here now to drill and supply fuel for a reasonable distance around the site. (previously, aircraft HAD to land next to the base.) Site Alpha just got a lot more populated!

*reserving a post incase I want this later.

One thing I love about this game, is you play it how you want to play it. And I decided I wanted to do an adventure around Kerbin, using satellites as little as possible, and aircraft and ground vehicles as much as possible. The idea would be to spread out, build fuel depos, and eventually have access to the other side of the planet even with the heaviest of aircraft and ground vehicles, through Kethane. To start with, I built a simple satellite check for Kethane on the far side. I had no intention to use this to find nearby Kethane, only to test if the mod was even working. A big BIG deposit shown up, but its far too far away to do anything about right now. (well, i could probably fly something real small capacity there, but its not worth the bother - and dropping down from orbit isn't my goal here ) Kethane Scanning Soarer So once that was done, I built a small fleet of scanning planes. To start with I built a Jet powered Kethane Scanning Soarer to scan from the air. It was fast, but limited by range and maneuverability, and didn't find anything (But did scan about half the height of the starting continents width) I got away with two refuels before an accident on landing damaged the engine, leaving it out of service. The second plane used solar power and an electric prop for massive range, but less speed. After searching for a long time though... still nothing!! The unfortunate landing incident which disabled the Kethane Scanning Soarer Solar Electric Kethane Scanning Soarer A long time of flying later, the fruits of my search... (satellite tracks from testing can be seen as the scattered pockets of detection) Eventually got desperate and built a kethane scanning satellite made for the job, put into an orbit for the job (near polar). It detected a large deposit to the north east, as well as a smaller deposit to the east (but how large not confirmed) but still not exactly close, as well as some useless ones in the sea, one on the other side of the north pole (reasonable size) and of course a massive one on the absolute opposite side of Kerbin. Sending Solar Electric Kethane Scanner to investigate Easterly site (south here of aircraft here) After sending the Solar Electric Kethane scanner to investigate the smaller nearer site in the east, I decided this was a prime spot. So, needed a mining base to go get that Kethane, didn't I? Made this for the job: Now in theory, it should have been light with empty Kethane tanks and only 4.5 tonnes of liquid fuel reserve. I was quite wrong. It flew at a rediculous angle of attack and was difficult to fly, with low ceiling (5km) and low speed (~170m/s) On landing, I was concentrating so much on holding heading I forgot to shut off the throttle... resulting in the loss of both wingtips and engines. On the other hand, it got where I needed it with all the equipment surviving, so its now full of Kethane and ready to settle later. Any landing you can mine Kethane from... The dilema now was what to do about the higher up deposit. with some changes, I decided I should be able to make the plane get there and fly better. The wings were made longer and the piping for fuel improved (I had to manually shift a bit of fuel last time) and I set out. It was a quite easy journey aside from landing again. There was a stability issue that arose that meant roll control wasn't possible, or didn't seem so. But by combining yaw and roll it did become controllabe, and was successfully landed. So what to do next? well, I'm thinking either deliver some more equipment (storage tanks, maybe a manned outpost) to the sites. Actually if I did this to the northen site, I can probably drill up all the Kethane and use the same plane to keep moving north. I'll have to come up with a better name than Site Alpha. EDIT : I've also just noticed on the East of the Planet another good direction to head in...

If you like, open up Multiwheels source code and trawl through how each wheel is finding their direction and location. The way I did it is check the parts forward vector compared to the forward/up of the vessel, and for choosing which way steering goes check where it is relative to that and the CoM, and if its infront or behind it. Or something. I wrote that ages ago. In your case, just knowing if you're on the Left or Right of the CoM should be enough to be able to tell it which way to turn the track. If the left and right are seperable in some way, (set two modules to drive the MK5) then you could have them run without any knowledge of each other, so long as they know they are offset from the part center.

They would still exist as a part unless I changed the Modular Wheels main module to allow public and persistant suspension distance (then just have the part explode or something so it no longer exists) Which I guess I could do as well, anyway. On the brightside I figure I can turn off physics significance, the collider, the mesh renderer, and give near infinite break forces, and I think that'll probably make its effect compared to a normal part ingame near enough negligible (since there wont be any physics or rendering to do) Alternatively I could just make 1 single part that changes the suspension height on every single wheel, and not neccesarily bother hiding it. This would slightly limit the usefulness, but reduce the tediousness when using a lot of wheels.

How did you get on with them? This is something I've been considering. Sound is something I'd have the Engines make, once I work out how to do that. (I've got some idea but not put this into practice) as far as cosmetic exhausts go my idea was to make them produce small amounts of smoke under throttle. On mod news, I've had a new fairly easy to implement idea of "lowering kits" so truck wheels can have their clearances reduced by placing a radial part on them. I can make it just vanish when in simulation, so it shouldn't be obtrusive.

Quite incorrect. I don't know for certain on this, but I've heard this rocket had a unique configuration of stages compared to the normal proton. Now the first Ariane 5 was in theory just a big upgrade of the Ariane 4. The autopilot software should have worked fine, right? wrong. It crashed due to errors in the autopilot software.

Fair do if thats why you use it. I admit thats part of why I use it, but I actually mainly use it so I can get really interesting wing shapes that actually MAKE lift. (forward/backward facing wing panels actually don't make any lift at all - so really nice stock designs are often terribly ineffective)

Interesting idea. A few problems with it, though. The issue with moving wheel colliders or multiple wheel colliders to control behavior is that you end up with suspension issues. If you don't plan to have suspension, or instead use hinges to control it and depend on physics external to the wheelcollider module, at this point it might be a dependable solution. I'm not sure if parttools can actually export hinges yet though. It doesn't pull out everything you can do in Unity.

Time to download some bigger fuselages by the sound of it. A simple trick around both of your problems would be just to put on more than one pWing next to each other and blend them together.

It looks like one engine is gimballing in the wrong direction. If so, then that leads back to some quite entertaining implications of how thats even possible. It does make a lot of sense why the rocket rolled quite strongly after it went off course if one engine is correcting in the other direction. Be interesting to see what could have caused such strange behavior. I doubt its possible to install the engine backwards, wiring it backwards is a possibility however implausible it sounds. You'd think those sorta things wouldn't happen, but then you also wouldn't think the Genesis probe would have crashed because the parachute accelerometer was on backwards, or that mars climate orbiter would have instead of gain a nice orbit around mars fly straight into it due to using the wrong units. Unfortunately, space programs still have the same unreliable faulty piece of equipment common to every step they did 50 years ago. Us. EDIT: wait, rewatched it. Its still strange one engine is behaving differently but I've just noticed something. There doesn't appear to be any differential control going on here. when the rocket is nearing straight up its still thrusting into the turn, something it absolutely should not be doing. When you add time lag from the system in (if a computer says, "turn motor to here" it'll take a while for the motor to respond, especially on something really big) then thats just setting up for some really nasty oscillations. So on rewatch and reevaluation of what I've seen, I'm not convinced the engine was the cause at all. This was quite certainly a software problem in the controller.

If I'm honest, I think you really need to find a way to define these models in a similar way to the VAB/SPH/Trackingstation/runway/radar in the game view. Now I don't know how this is done to be fair myself, but Nova seems interested in your project, and given as far as I'm aware he made the planets, hes probably a good source for how this could be done. I can see there being some potential for glitchy behavior if using parts, and if you can make a decent plugin for adding buildings - maybe even custom ones, at any location as defined by another modder - that would likely be as if not more useful than whats currently being suggested. I look forward to seeing how this goes, but I honestly think the level of work you're suggesting is overambitious (especially the CAB - I doubt adding another scene is even possible.). Stick to just getting fixed buildings added into KSP and allowing definable ones. That would be the most valuable outcome of this project.

Here just to say finally trying this out. Having a lot of fun trying to scan Kerbin without using any satellites (though I did use one to detect a tiny bit of Kethane on the far side of Kerbin to check it was working properly, then shut the satellite down) Not found anything near KSC yet, but its a neat feeling to be prospecting for something interesting. Covered about half the starting continent now, yet funnily enough not found anything yet lol. Still after just how much I've played today, I think I'm starting to get what the big deal about resources was.

Pretty devoid of detail here. Which mods is this shuttle based on, or is it based on none? any pictures?

Uhh... from the trailer though it just looks like a space horror movie. Exactly what you're saying its not by the looks of it? Quite sure there seemed to be some kind of aliens and such, which made me instantly think - 'nah not interested' If instead the trailer approached it with more "oh wow, theres life here" rather than "OH NO LIFE HERE" then I probably would have had a more positive view set up of it.

Rovers too slow? What you need is some kind of faster, or maybe definable speed wheels mod. *cough* as far as things to do go, set a target you want to drive to before landing, land near to it as you can then go there. Be it oceans, geological features (a crater), mun arches or caves (I'm sure there is one somewhere, Tylo was it?, driving in that would be cool) Personally I love aiming for the mun arch and jumping through the "hoop".

What he said here. Omniwheels are basically the same as using RCS in space on a spacecraft, except you're fixed to the ground. if you want to translate forward, you'll have to press translate forward, not use the rover controls. The idea is that you can use them to move ANY direction at any time. I'll check out the craft file soon Darren, thanks!

RCS rovers will work on other worlds. Electric ones also. I've had some on EVE to test that and the mun. Care to eleborate?

oh wow. that took no time at all!