One Winged Angel

I upgraded from .18 to the current version after not playing for a few months, and made it my mission to plant a flag on every orbital body, and get home (Optional objective: Do it without killing any crew). First things first, I decided to try my hand at a Mun landing. Designing the ship was cake; it had plenty of fuel to get me to the surface, let me plant a flag, and take me home. The outer 6 tanks drain into the central tank, so it still has a full tank after the outer 6 fall away. (Also, landing struts don't seem to want to work right, and there are duplicates of parts... Any idea why?) My flight mechanics are a bit antiquated, and pretty inefficient. I blasted out to the Mun's orbit in a single maneuver, then circularized once I got out there (leaving the periapsis a bit short of the Mun's orbit so I can catch it). Fast forward a few weeks, and I've caught up to the Mun. Time to land this sucker. And I did! Only, I was coming down on the dark side of the Mun, and couldn't see the ground... and crashed (who's surprised?). Now, the crew capsule is intact, the engine and fuel tank are 20 meters away, and I'm stuck. Usually, this is game over for me, I reset, and try again. But not this time. This time, I can have multiple flights. This time, I'm bringing them home the right way. So I design a new ship, with moar boosters (to keep more fuel in the lander stage), and no crew. To control it, I stuck a little girder on top of the parachute, then plopped a probe on it. First flight, the launch went great. I kick the apoapsis out to 11,100,000m, I set the circularize maneuver, and cued the warp. I get to the burn point, and the ship won't throttle up. Or turn. I'm outta juice. Damn. I'm coming Jeb! As soon as I add some solar panels... So, I've added some solar panels, launch, fly out, and find that, once again, I'm dead in space. You need juice to extend the solar cells.... Reset! Take 3. I launch, *extend the solar cells*, fly out, circularize, get captured by the Mun, and accidentally decouple my engine as I'm trying to land. Cut! Take 4. Same flight as above, only this time make it down to the surface, and go splat 1.8km from the capsule. Takes 5 and 6 result in similar splatterage, but I'm getting closer! I think Bill's starting to get hungry... Take 7. I fly out, get within 300m of the ship, and hit the surface with ~4m/s sideways velocity. I lose two lander legs, and the ship topples on its side, pointing downhill. Damnit, Rese--- Wait, you want to do what? Launch it sideways?! That's just crazy enough to work! Lets do it!! I fly Bill, Bob and Jeb over to the now sideways rescue ship, strap them in, and throttle up. It's a bit hairy at first, but I point myself at the horizon and burn baby burn! I leave the Mun doing 1000m/s and see Kerbin rise. Home sweet home. Only, when I get captured by Kerbin and the orbit map changes, I find that I'm outta fuel, I'm gonna miss the planet, its atmosphere, and fly out to space. So, I *ahem* cheat a little bit. I load the save just after Jeb climbed in the rescue capsule, and try again. This time, I just burn straight up, kill the Mun's orbital velocity, and fall nearly straight back to Kerbin. This plan works. Mostly. My orbit's intersecting Kerbin's, everything's looking good, and I hit the warp. I see myself coming down way too fast and start to back out of warp. Too late. I brace for the inevitable impact, but it never comes. Somehow, I warp *through* Kerbin, and wind up heading back out on my orbit. Strange. But hey, I'm still alive. So I come down again, and this time, I pull out of warp earlier, and burn the last of my fuel to slow down a bit. I decouple the engine as I hit the atmosphere at 3,000m/s, and see shock heating for the first time! I fall through the atmosphere for quite a ways, slowing down and pop the chute at 1,000m altitude and 100m/s, and splash down somewhere in the ocean. Doesn't matter where, Bill, Bob, and Jeb are home. They survived over a month on the Mun, they can survive another few days in the ocean as they send a boat. Not a big feat compared to some of the other things I see on here, but it was a big deal for me

The sun is a point source gravity well. Once you break kerbin\'s gravity well you won\'t need any more fuel, you\'ll fall towards the sun. Just crank the warp to 10,000x and wait.

I\'m currently in a stable, nearly circular orbit around the Mun. Perapsis at 1700m, Apopasis 1900m, velocity 568 m/s. All of this was done without any orbit tables or anything, just shear dumb luck (and the orbit map 8)). Not sure if I want to land or go for a ~600m orbit .

Well, the problem I\'ve noticed is that in order to get around captchas and 'bot proof tests', some spammers use spambots aren\'t bots, but rather spampeople working in spamsweatshops.

TI99/4A in my Dad\'s closet. It last ran a few years ago, but when I tried to fire it up a few months ago it wouldn\'t work. He still has the receipt from Sears dated 10-13-83 (after they had been discontinued). The computer cost $55, he had the family 10% discount, and his total after tax was like $52.50. Dunno the specs, it\'s got a 16bit processor though! Oldest computer I remember was an old Compaq that ran Win 3.1 + Dos (via command prompt). Had 16 MB RAM and a massive 450MB hard drive (lol!) Oldest working computer is a different old Compaq with a P3 @1.5GHz and like 20GB of HDD space.

It wasn\'t the SAS\'s that killed me (they\'re the nano-SAS things, I think they\'re from Nova\'s pack; they just keep me pointed where I steer) I think it was the horizontal velocity when I hit the ground. So when the engine hit the stage pivoted over and the pod hit the ground. My ship is stupid simple, 5x of the 3m, 5000 capacity tanks, 7x M50 engines for the first stage with 6x C7 Delta Wing + 6x heavy control surface to keep it stable in atmo, 1m-3m decoupler shroud, and then Chute+Pod+Yawmaster+6x Nano-SAS+1m 1000 fuel tank+ NERVA engine for stage 2. I burn 4 of the 5 tanks in Stage 1 to get out of the gravity well (TIME COMPRESSION FTW) then use the last tank to stop my vertical velocity and start heading towards home. I light the NERVA till I get to 1500m/s (TIME COMPRESSION FTW) then at 1 Mm I do a downwards facing correction burn, then at around 200-300Km I do a upwards facing correction burn. Then upwards correction burns as necessary till I get to ~1000m where I deploy the chute and do constant minimum throttle flight. It\'s very easy to overshoot the pad...

Inner ring, what what! I just need to put a decoupler under my command pod and I\'ll bring them back alive (the tank+engine+pod combo is too heavy for the stock chute)!!

Yep, lemme get the screenies.

Aren\'t there issues with the fluid staying at subsonic speeds, or do you use something other than water?

I\'m getting disturbingly good at hitting the KSP terrain, the bullseye not so much; it\'s very hard to land a rocket tail first. One of these days... I think I might just do a low speed flyby over the launchpad, decouple from my main engine and hit the chute at the same time. Not as cool as a tail first engine, but I would be the first to land on the pad, right?

I think it has to do with the splashdown effect cause when I hit land I penetrate the surface and die.

I have achieved C, and then some! 900Mm/s! This is the warp-shake showing up at 100Mm/s 1 Light Year of travel!

I\'ve been unable to survive past 100Mm/s before the warp-shake kills any hope of staying pointed up. I\'ll reduce masses further and see if I can basically warp to C...

Dunno how, but I got into a ridiculously circular orbit at ~184,000m. Apo was 184,400 and Peri was at 183,600. +-400m at 184Km up; not too shabby IHMO. No screenies, sorry. Side note, I went into 50x warp, and when I came back, my ship was locked in it\'s orientation. If I turned on SAS it shook around, and when I turned it off it stopped. Weird as hell, and unfortunately cost me the mission. Since I couldn\'t rotate my ship I couldn\'t decel and I was eternally stuck in orbit.

So my ship went on a diet. Weights are...1/400th of the original weights I think. Breaking strength is OVER 9000 (i.e. 9001), and crash strength is 900. Tank holds 5000 fuel and the engine puts out 2000 thrust and burns .001 fuel/sec. I had some fun just flying this everywhere and one thing I noticed in my attempts to wreck this thing (so far it\'s impossible) is that Kerth is elastic. I hit the ground at 5Mm/s, and left at 5Mm/s. Here\'s a bunch of screencaps and the modded parts I used. Immediately before impact: Immediately after impact: Before ya think I posted my images backwards, check the times 8) Gee load was 34469873.7 G So I did it again from a bit higher of a runup, and registered 45507185.2 G. I lined myself up for a second shot off of the rebound and when I hit...Boy oh boy did our Kerbonauts turn into Kerbo-Goo, registering a mind boggling 347074798.7 Gees of acceleration. Back on topic, anyone notice their ships getting horribly unstable at ~100 Mm/s (.33C)? Even with a cranked up SAS I still bounce around and then just start randomly spinning. No inputs at all but my ship\'s outta control.

I don\'t think it\'s possible. I tried to do a water takeoff and my boat looked like it had hydros, bouncing up and down like a ghettomobile. no offense if you drive a ghettomobile.

Nope, you\'d have a nice capsule-sized hole through your torso. It\'s the reason a small fast bullet will go straight through you, but a slow heavy round won\'t. While the smaller round might have less inertia, it has much more kinetic energy since Ke is .5*Mass*Velocity^2, but momentum is only Mass*Acceleration. Inertia is how hard it is to change an objects momentum, but if the object is moving very fast it will pass through you before it\'s momentum changes very much, even if it doesn\'t have much momentum to begin with. tl;dr: Nope.

So, tries 3 and 4 are in the record books. Mk. 1 was a kersplosion right before the SRB\'s burned out, Mk. 2 was the slingshot, Mk. 3 became a stable orbit (I missed Kerth on the way back and had to burn a shitton of fuel to turn myself around again and ran out of fuel before I could slow myself below orbital velocity), and Mk. 4 was a success. I attempted a powered landing (which didn\'t fare so well) but it was a success, and I landed (okay, exploded) within a few hundred meters of the KSP. Try 5 will land on the pad, I guarantee it. This is the ship I\'m using. I\'ve downloaded C7 and Sunday Punch\'s packs, can\'t remember which parts I used in all though. The SRB\'s + 7x main engines take me to ~15k and 700m/s before the SRB\'s burn out. There\'s a moment where thrust to weight is <1, but it\'s only a few seconds. The rest of the fuel takes me to 1200m/s, then the second stage takes me to escape velocity with about half a tank left. I use that and the third stage (nuclear engine with 4x C7 tanks) to get me home. If I do it right, I have about 2 and a half tanks worth of gas to do orbital crap and powered decel. EDIT: Oh, I used the Saturn V pack too (the first stage F1 engines are my second stage, 5x stock LFE\'s would blow up; same thrust and burn rate overall though) EDIT2: So, I flew to the sun and back. Only to find out that I could really use a pair of wings and a parachute. Anyways: Here\'s the sun: On the way back now when suddenly: A pale blue dot appears! One Winged Angel uses Boost! It\'s Super Effective!

I had a similar thing happen the second time I tried this; I wasn\'t paying attention to my heading and cut around the Kerth. Since I was falling mostly parallel to the gravity well (I was only a few degrees off) Kerth\'s gravity accelerated me (I traded gravitational potential energy for kinetic energy). As I was going around the planet, I had eventually traded enough GPE for KE, and my velocity was greater than the escape velocity. I was cruising at 2800m/s to get back from the sun and ended up with a max of ~3500m/s and finally stabilized at ~900m/s. Bill, Bob and Jeb, were never heard from again. Basically my trajectory made a giant, wide < shape.

Nice job! Have you played Star Wars Battlefront 2? The Imperial Shuttles were the very definition of 'Flying Brick'. I think every other command ship outclassed it in maneuverability .

If you point down, you decrease altitude without decreasing velocity. Since orbital velocity decreases as altitude increases, your current speed is now less than the orbital speed at your altitude, and you fall out of orbit. Or, if you fire backwards, you decrease velocity without decreasing altitude, which means you're now going slower than the orbital velocity at that altitude, and you fall out of orbit.

Killed off my previous orbit after 5 hours. At the altitude I was at, the orbital velocity table said my orbit time was 34 minutes, so I completed just shy of 6 full orbits (though I passed over the launch pad 6 times). I've just achieved my second orbit at just under half of my first orbit altitude, 62km @ 2309m/s. Apogee looks to be 62205 and perigee looks to be 62050, much more stable than the previous one. I used the HKM engine with one of the black hole tanks, with 3 detachable SRBs to get me off the ground. Sunset baby!

I had a rocket that was cruising at 2000m/s after escaping the Kerballian gravity. I then proceeded to take a nap. Which turned into an 8 hour sleep (for future reference, naps at 2am have a tendency to become 8 hour sleeps). When I woke up, my rocket was at 66894K and counting, T +09:34:23.

Woohoo! I'm winning! I'm finally winning something!

Do you still have any vertical velocity? If so, that could be your issue, you're flying sideways while still flying upwards. You could also be in an eccentric orbit, or you could just be flying through space in a stable, nearly circular orbit and don't know it. I didn't suspect I was actually in a stable orbit till I noticed I was at the same altitude two hours later.