Clouds

Was doing a "grand tour" and managed to land on a hill and tip over (intact) on BOTH the Mun and Minmus, and both times managed to continue on by toggling the landing legs for a little hop, and cranking the rotation. It felt pretty Kerbal to be all, "Lander fell over? Feh, minor setback." When trying a crew-swap orbital rendezvous-EVA, I ran out of Jeb's RCS fuel while trying to reach the ladder. Bill (and by Bill I mean me) saved the day by maneuvering the ship right up to the helplessly floating Jeb so he could grab on.

I did that a lot in .13.3 (free version) because it was relatively limited, so you had to derp around to try to do something new and interesting. Now, especially with part rotation, you can make pretty much anything you want so there's less specialness to it... Derping with planes is pretty good fun, though.

That's a wicked use of the bi-coupler. On a tangent, I wish someone would make a projectile mod that doesn't use placed parts and staging for control of its ammo and firing.

Spent most of today making a stock-parts Saturn V look-alike for a slightly more (visually) relevant mission... Had to MechJeb it most of the way due to 0.3 FPS.

Nice! Very nice recreation.

Well, I don't have the patience you do so I don't have proof of the long-term behavior, but I got a decoupler (never would've thought to try launching JUST a decoupler - it's fun!) to glide on a slow and level flight with 4 canards and no control input (see the next part). The heart of the Magic Turbine is that there's an accelerating force, not just levitation, from control surfaces that are not centered, but applying rotation. Also, handily, control surfaces stay at their last commanded position when decoupled... I gave it a shot and had 800+km ground distance and no sign that it would ever cease bouncing into and out of the atmosphere. Then, I ran out of battery power unexpectedly and lost the flight.

I'm not sure of your design, from that description. So, I couldn't say. You could check by looking at what fuel consumption all your engines report by right-clicking, and seeing if that much fuel is really draining.

Yes...that would indeed be why the questionable physics on control surfaces/canards are known as the "Infinite Glide Glitch". It might be prudent for there be a categorical separation between designs with any control surfaces, and designs without.

Yeah, there's a bug report thread about it, though the explanation there is somewhat lacking...I'm trusting the complete overhaul of the fuel programming in .17 will have caught it. It's not to do with aerospikes specifically. The setup is complex to explain but simple (and common) to build: if fuel is coming from tanks which are at least one part away from an engine, and that part which has the engine directly attached also has a fuel line coming from it to ANOTHER part or tank which is itself at least one part away from an engine, that "further" engine's fuel use is cut by half. This bonus can be stacked. It pretty much means the "feed inward, jettison stacks with their own engines" configuration is getting an erroneous improvement.

I'm sorry to say, based on the screenshot, I think you're running afoul of one of the .16 fuel use bugs that would make your Aerospike engines run with 1/2 the proper fuel use. This design will probably use more fuel when .17 (hopefully!) fixes those bugs.

I almost succeeded to launch an asymmetrical Space Shuttle-type rocket by using SRB power on the tank side, and compensating the whole way up using the throttle of the shuttle's liquid fuel rockets. The problem was, the stock SRBs are really hard to work with and usually ended up either too strong at the very end stages, or just too jarring in the stage delay. It was a really good-looking shuttle, too...

Um...what? So, my 25m/s-capable fuselage+wing setup is disqualified then.

I've noticed this sometimes, too.

What's fun for me in KSP is to set my own challenges and try to accomplish them, or see what other people have done and try to match/best them. For example, fastest time to 100km...build a seaplane...drag race for peak speed while stopping (alive) before the end of the runway...do a crew swap orbital rendezvous...build the most minimal Mun land/return craft possible...do a Grand Tour of Mun>Min>Kerbin with a nonlaggy launch...build a no-decouple Mun land/return craft (possible in .15.2, have not succeeded in .16!)...make a bomber plane and destroy a ground target (stock parts only)... (Granted, the efficiency/minimalism challenges are almost pointless until .17 and the hopeful fix of all the fuel use bugs!)

Perhaps it is ship-dependent, but it just so happened with my test vessel that MechJeb's default settings (10km start, 70km end, 35-40% on the curve slider) wound up being most efficient. It's also wound up being most efficient for me to tell it to get in the biggest orbit possible and then just wait it out for the proper orbital injection point (eg. to go to the Mun, I do a 10km-70km default gravity turn targeting ~10Mm orbit).

There's another bug whereby fuel use for an engine is halved if the fuel source goes "past" another engine, but is not directly connected to that engine, yet must be connected by a "node" to whatever that engine is on. Coincidentally, this is a common setup for efficient rockets, where all the fuel is fed from outer stacks (with their own engine) to inner stacks (also with engine). Except now, a setup like that is "cheating" as well... Yes, it's been reported. I hope it's solved with the .17 overhaul. I hope .17 comes out soon! This whole fuel use fiasco seems like it could use a .16.1 hotfix. I've built a rocket that uses not even 1/20 of a 200L tank to visit the Mun, Minmus, and return to Kerbin with a powered landing, running on the biggest 1200 thrust engine...at full throttle.

Not related to this challenge directly...I re-piped a ship of mine and now it gets about 1/2 the fuel consumption for the same number of engines and near-identical everything else. I was trying to make a minimalist grand tour capable 3-Kerbal-capsule rocket and this pretty much means it's a pointless endeavor since this bug, coincidentally, kicks in for properly efficient designs (all engines running, sequential fuel piping). REALLY hoping .17 comes out, soon...

Better safe than sorry! Post it, I'd say.

That's just how it keeps the net thrust at near-zero. They're swivel-engines, so they turn whichever way will make the ship rotate; that skews some of the thrust to the side but only for turning. Let me diagram it with text: >===< :A ship with engines just pushing against one another. 7===L :A ship with those same gimbal engines swiveling for a turn. They'll spin you but not move you...at least not much. Well, that's another way, but not what I meant.

Just one full large fuel tank? The pod's gyro should be able to work that around. Just turn slowly and let ASAS recenter it once you've arrived. The big parts weigh so much that RCS is mostly useless, I find. Something I've wanted to play with (and have only tried in proof-of-concept capacity) is to mount pairs of equal gimballing engines facing in opposite directions. This would just "waste" fuel, but it lets you turn a very heavy ship with good responsiveness and no net thrust. You'd have to switch them, and the main boosters, on and off by disabling or enabling fuel tank flow, though, since you can't individually control LFEs.

I was testing whether I'd set up staging correctly (with intent to restart mission) and ejected my radially-mounted liquid fuel stacks while still in full burn. They separated correctly and flew away...only to have made a symmetrical turn back inward off-screen, and bullseye'd what I was still testing a good 5 or 6 seconds later, like a 4-way guided missile attack.

I offer "The Carver", which...carves through the air... You didn't really say what scenario to test loop size in, so I did full throttle and lowest speed glide. Full throttle radius: 218m Best glide radius: 41m Turn rate: 72°/s and G-meter needle buried at maximum

It's not so much having too many wings - it's having too much lift-value forward of the center of mass. As it is, any tiny wobble away from a perfectly straight course will make those wings catch the air, like trying to throw a dart backwards. It keeps flipping because there's thrust. You'll need to move the center of mass forward, or add a lot more wing-drag in the rear to overpower it. (Or add a ton of control surfaces and let ASAS muscle it in line...)

OK, here's the same design as I used before, only minus the jet engines (everything else identical). 5,460m/s ~149,000m ~10.19MJ/kg

Final speed = 6866m/s Height at burnout ~ 243,900m Orbital energy ~ 19.387MJ/kg