Tommygun

I'd like to keep the tech level reasonably close to near future, for me antimatter is too much. I did make a four engine design with two nuclear thermal turbojets and two aerospike engines. It was so heavy I needed to use the aerospike engines to get it airborne and then switch back to the nuclear engines to the ride up to about 9,000 meters before I had ineffectual thrust. Then there just wasn't enough fuel to make orbit. Edit: maybe a nuclear hybrid turbine scramjet is need in the mod? You take off as a high thrust turbine jet using fuel and switch to nuclear ramjet mode at the right speed and finally to scramjet that takes you to the upper limit of the atmosphere. After that you are basically a NERVA engine. It would take a lot of switching modes, but it would be an interesting engine to play with.

The last few days I have been playing around with making an SSTO with the nuclear thermal turbojet without much luck. I keep losing thrust at about 12,000 to 16,000 meters depending on how many air intakes I use and switching to liquid fuel drops the thrust to 8.8kn of power. Liquid/oxidizer combination doesn't seem to help much ether. I'm using eleven intakes and would like to take most off as it takes away from some of the "realism". So I need some secondary engine to push it the rest of the way up. The engine doesn't have a lot of power on takeoff, so I have to be careful how much I put on the aircraft. I was thinking about four small radial rocket motors (Rockomax 24-77), but the isp on those isn't that great. The four engines give me 80kn of thrust and Kerbal Engineer list the Delta V at 1667. Has anyone had a workable design layout they could suggest? Here is one of the designs I'm working with.

I think I'd be afraid to keep it with all the toxic materials they use in some of those satellites. ....and for the record, I just resealed my roof today. There where several hole, but no signs of half melted alloys. Wow, that's like the world biggest disposable camera. All that for four rolls of film.

These are great looking satellite parts. If you are still looking for suggestion for parts, I might suggest looking at NASA's TDRSS Satellite system. NASA used these to replace most of the ground tracking stations. The first generation one is even a bit similar to the shape of your hexagonal satellite. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_and_Data_Relay_Satellite

That's impressive. I can see that being useful for sending into areas that are too dangerous or difficult to send a fully suited astronaut to. Places like off the side of a cliff or a small cave. I would be surprised if it would work on an asteroid that's probably covered in fine dust and pebble sized rocks. I think a mini space uav would be better for an asteroid mission, one that could hop helicopter like over the surface with RCS thrusters. That gripping technology has come a long way sense the last time I saw it. I hope something comes of it.

Logan, I tried to load your Eagle mods in the game and three parts show up as missing. They are ISA.GPS, CarrierR3PlaneDock and spotLightsm. I know what the first one is and I think I can track down the second part, but I have no idea what mod the "spotLightsm" came from. Do you remember where it came from? Thanks. Edit: I have found the first two. Re-Edit: I have found the last two, but ISA.GPS is still showing up. I put the ISA_GPS part in from ISA Mapper, but it is spelled differently and won't work. What version did you get it from?

I think I was in map view when it happened, but I can't seem to be able to replicate it. I only saw it once, if it happens again I will get a screenshot of it and post it.

I've seen it in the last release on Kerbin. At least when close up.

Could generating a strong plasma field be a substitute to a heat shield "in theory". I realize that the equipment would be heavier than the shield with existing technology.

You could make a new piece of equipment with that exploit, a 3D printer/repair station part. Just put the old part in and get a new/repaired part out. The plugin could limit the station to have a limited amount of "part mass" that is subtracted with each use. Maybe even allow it to recycle old parts to get more "part mass" for future use.

. Ya, more exploding rockets! ...I know it's really exhaust.

I'm curious, how are they removing that much heat or are you referring to the interior cabin heat?

Well transporting a heat shield to the landed ship is still easier than transporting the heavier and explosive fuel to it. There aren't that many places that produce rockets fuels around the world. If you want space ports, then you need to pre-place the necessary parts and infrastructure to do it. Just look at that big Airbus A380. It can't just go to any airport, it has to go to airports that have been prepared for it.

I run the graphics pretty high at 1680x1050 with rendering and terrain set at maximum. All the other settings are at default. I also have reduced textured KW Rocketry, reduced textured Squad Parts, Kethane, KAS, Mechjeb, reduced textured NearFuture, WarpPlugin, RemoteTech2 Lite and SCANsat. My Computer I think is pretty average: i7-2600 @3.40GHz 12 GB RAM AMD Radeon HD 6670 I know I have a lot of mods, but a lot of people run their games this way. Would reducing the default frame rate of 120 to 100 help any? Does reducing anti aliasing, pixel light count and shadow cascades have a big impact? Those are currently set at default. I do have some software that sets my computer into "Turbo Mode". It kills about half the programs running in the background and It seemed to help a little in the pass when I was hitting the memory wall limit.

This is my favorite mod and now I have clouds on all the Planet Factory planets as well. The problem I'm running into now is the memory limit. My game crashes more often than a budget airliner. I wondering if enough people are having this issue for there to justify a lite version of this program for all the stock and new planets?

They still fill in for the areas that the stock wheels can't do Angusmcbeth.

Well if you had materiel strong enough, I guess you could in theory, build a ladder to geosynchronous orbit, park your ship next to it and take the ladder down.

Yes you are right, I got the two charts at the first post mix up. Thanks though.

I'm currently trying to get a thermal rocket nozzle to run on xenon, but nothing is happening, I can't toggle the fuel. I am doing this in sandbox mode, do you need to upgrade the thermal rocket nozzle to be able to use xenon?

Nice footage. I wonder if the Russians ever considered parachute recovery of those boosters for reuse?

Yep.......and that's a lonely looking rover. I had a bad aerobraking in Jool's atmosphere that turned into an aerocapture. That didn't end well.

Yes, I remember them, but it just seems like something that this pack is missing.

Great parts pack Hoojiwana. Have you ever considered a 0.625m reaction wheel? Something with maybe 2 to 3 units of torque. I sometimes run into issues with turning my probes when they have large fuel tanks as the probe cores have very weak torque. I usually rescale the stock one and edit its part file, but it seems like something that would fit your parts pack and is missing.

. . I went to new places.

You can get very close to that look with the KW Rocketry mod pack.