Xenotheos

I picked up the Manned Orbit for 3 days mission and 3 days into it I read the fine print to see why it's not completed only to find out the duration is 12 days. Is this just 2 different definitions of day? Our 24 hour day vs the Kerbin 6 hour day. I noticed it said 72 hours in the fine print as well so I'm guessing it's just that. It is misleading however when there are 2 separate definitions of the same word in a contract, now I have to spend my science to pick up life support earlier than I wanted to.

I haven't done physics in years and I wasn't all that great at it when I was in practice, but the link said F1 = F2 which means both their forces are the same. If you look at the equation for force, F = ma, where m is mass this means that while the force is equal the larger body has a lower acceleration than the smaller body.

It sounds like you are equating the effects of micro gravity with those of Martian gravity. Living with essentially no gravity vs living with partial gravity that is over a third of earths gravity is a very different thing. We don't know how Martian gravity will affect a human body. The trips to Mars and back, without any artificial gravity will be damaging to be sure but life threatening sounds unreasonable.

Simulating 1g may be ideal, but it doesn't seem entirely necessary for anything but the most long term of missions. I would think 0.5g would be a much more cost effective goal and would be enough artificial gravity to significantly improve sustained space travel. As for spinning the entire ship, what is the solution for solar panels and communications?

Don't mean to keep up the derail but... Taken from What Not to Suggest topic. Of course that then references the Planned features wiki last modified Jan 30th, but since resources were stated as part of the plan and were featured for an earlier release before being postponed the What Not to Suggest is more likely accurate as it was changed whereas the wiki could just be dated.

I think most people agree that the data sensors should be transmittable for 100% science, temperature and the like. I also feel that these type of instruments should come before the goo/materials lab(with the exception of gravoli maybe). I personally don't see the benefit of the science lab, I'd rather just stack 8 goos/materials and return with them. As to the grindy aspect, I honestly have found the science a breeze up to this point (with interstellar tree mind you, not that i've really used much of it yet) and i'm almost through most of the science nodes. I haven't returned to the same place once yet including the Mun and Minmus, even though I know that I've only got 1 biome worth of data from each. Throw your instruments onto an interplanetary ship, collect data high above the planet, just in space outside it, high above it's moon(s), just in space above it's moon(s), and plot a return course, easy.

40 parts. I didn't do any staging, but i did right click off engines so if that isn't allowed then obviously this submission doesn't count.

Are you using this on a vessel with rover wheels? I believe there is an issue with rover wheels and most of KAS (I've gotten it to work with winch + a dock port though).

I'm having trouble with Eve as well, and am assuming that I would have the same problem with Moho. The problem is due to the fact that I've found the transfer calculator to be a good guide but not completely accurate so setting the velocity to exactly what is specified isn't necessarily going to be correct, and this can of course be corrected rather easily with a pro or retro burn until the map shows an encounter. However with orbital inclination thrown into the mix I'm left with an inexact velocity as well as a need to get the right inclination, and it doesn't help that I don't know when along my orbit I'm suppose to be meeting up with Eve. In comparison I got to Duna the first day and Jool the first time I attempted it, so the problem is dealing properly with inclination (at least for me).

This is my first posted design so go easy on me. Only mod used is mechjeb and is pretty much required for something this size for my computer to perform the ascent for me. Due to some botched math I had believed that the large tanks were better than using the smaller tanks so it's a bit of an odd design, but it's worked for what I've tried so far. It will leave some spacejunk in orbit around the star/kerbol, but most of the early stages are gone before an orbit is establish around kerbin. To pilot I manually stage so that I can power up the outer turbojet engines before releasing the stabilizers and starting the rocket engines. Mechjeb's auto throttling works fine for this, the engines go a little past 50% overheated but haven't ever overheated for me. The rocket starts so high off the ground via stabilizers because it would collide with the launch tower if near the ground. This isn't the best of designs but I've been able to reach a low duna orbit with ~2.5 rockomax x200-32 (big ones) left of fuel. [ATTACH]33486[/ATTACH] <- This one, not sure how to get rid of other one that is 191.9KB. It's probably a bit much, but I prefer overdoing it to underdoing it. Around 900t before launch, gets 220.9t into a 125km orbit with 2952L of fuel for the each of the outer stacks with 3 aerospike rockets each.

Use Asparagus-Stalk to get efficiency from your design, feeding fuel lines inwards to ditch outer tanks/dead weight. Try to have most of your rockets able to fire from liftoff so they aren't deadweight until later stages when they become unobstructed. Nuclear engines are great once you get into the upper atmosphere and in vacuum so use them for interplanetary transfers. I find using turbo jet engines on outer stages are good for fuel conservation, they need a little wind up time so stability enhancers are needed to hold up the rocket till they have a couple seconds to fire up. The large rockomax "mainsail" is inefficient so I try to minimize use of them and instead put on a tricoupler with three LV-T30's instead. These 3 man's require a fair amount of thrust in my experience, and I probably overdo the struts, so I use mechjeb for ascending as it's a slideshow. This isn't the best of designs but I've been able to reach a low duna orbit with ~2.5 rockomax x200-32 (big ones) left of fuel. It's probably a bit much, but I prefer overdoing it to underdoing it. Around 900t before launch, gets 220.9t into a 125km orbit with 2952L of fuel for the each of the outer stacks with 3 aerospike rockets each.

If I understand correctly, one of the outside tank stacks is colliding with the main body. What is likely happening is that the outer tanks are being released mid or late into the gravity turn and the main body is between the outer tank and kerbin so when gravity acts on it they collide. I had this problem as well, and what I did was rotate the rocket 45 degrees when it gets to that stage of the rocket, and I was using mechjeb at the time but was still able to get it rotated there easily.

Once you start building big time rockets that require a bunch of struts you'll be needing mechjeb to autopilot the first stage or 2 of ascent, it's a slideshow.

Do you mean vertically along the body? Radially I've had no problems with 4-6.

Been trying to do this with no drop tanks, it's really hard to get a stable configuration. I think I'm overbuilding as my models are ranging from the high 40 tons into the mid 50 tons. I also noticed that I was using around 9 small liquid fuel tanks and that 9 small = 1 large in terms of fuel but the large nets 0.25 less tons of dry weight so I've been trying to incorporate that. My current most stable design is an early one that got me over 1/3 of the way around while keeping all 6 engines running for far too long. My latest design is having some trouble after I get it higher into the atmosphere like 5 minutes into the flight mechjeb rotates it about 45 degrees in order to keep the heading I've set, and it just continues to fly that way.

Recently I was brushing my teeth and thought to myself I should turn on symmetry mode so I could brush both sides at once, I've been spending too much time tweaking my plane designs...

In reference to my earlier post (don't see an edit function, probably due to time since post) here is an example of what I mean. The only mod is Mechjeb, which is essentially required for launching this thing as it's a major slideshow until the separation of the outer engines/tanks. All the fuel lines feed in from the bottom tanks, and up on the main tank so upper stage engines can fire without exhausting their fuel supply. When in doubt I use struts, which I might overdue... This design is based off of Ziff (I believe) from these forums.

The larger parts aren't all that great. The engines are inefficient compared to the smaller ones and the decouplers are weak for their size. I can't take credit for this myself, I saw someone's designs and explanation for this on the forums, but a good approach is to use to the large fuel tanks and engine as the main body of your rocket while using the smaller fuel tanks and engines around the large tanks.

I'm finding rule 1, with the time limit on reaching cruise speed, to be my biggest limiting factor currently as I either burn too much fuel to get that fast that soon or I set up a ton of fuel tanks to counteract this and have problems with weight distribution at some point in the flight from take off to 15km up.

I'm rather new to the game, and even newer to plane building (finding it much harder than rockets) but i've been working on this today. I got a 4 engine model with enough fuel for the trip but I could not hit 500 m/s cruising speed up at 14km, I was maxing out in the low/mid 400s. I've tried tweaking the design but am having trouble with balance and takeoff with 6 and 5 engine modifications. I expect that tomorrow I'll have a working design though, that's the plan at least.