RoboRay

118 or so of those pages were before the thread was dumped into the fan-fiction forum, from the general forum. There has always been an active "general pictures" in the general forum, for the last year (at least). This thread needs to be moved back where it belongs.

Two-seater, weighing in at 12 tons. It can dock with any target below 400km or so and return to land at KSC. All stock, except for the little RCS tank on the nose.

I made a 76km flight on the Mun by EVA pack, when a small lander crashed but the pilot lived. I jet-packed him to another craft with an open seat that was landed nearby. Make a high ballistic arc rather than trying to stay low and follow the terrain. It's a lot safer and you'll use less propellant.

Ruins to discover? In stock KSP? Not likely.

Lazor Docking Cam has a rotation indicator, which makes it easy to get a perfect cardinal alignment.

Have I mentioned I love these things for space stations?

Efficiency is not achieved merely by using a single high-Isp engine, but also by minimizing vessel mass. The source of your "unusable without timewarp“ complaint is more about the sheer mass of your vehicle than about the engine itself. In any case, a second engine is almost always worth adding, as it doubles your thrust. Beyond that, diminishing returns begin to kick in.

Sounds good. With NovaPunch abandoning their 2.18m parts, there won't be anything else in between the stock sizes, and there is a big difference between 1.25m and 2.5m.

A Tylo-capable lander is ridiculous overkill for the other Julian moons, and also really difficult to do as a single-stage craft. My suggestion is to do a two-stage lander, with the upper stage able to operate independently to land on Laythe and return to orbit (meaning it can also handle all the smaller moons). Dock it to the "Tylo descent stage" whenever you're ready for that landing and jettison it on the way back up, when it's empty, returning to the interplanetary craft with just the upper section, which can then continue on to any of the smaller moons you haven't visited yet.

That LES tower is a NovaPunch part.

Yes, that would be a good solution. Maybe Damned Robotics will get sorted out soon... it's got some hydraulic pistons that would work for shifting a weight back and forth. Anyway, I was thinking of fuel because I intend to be producing fuel... in flight! I tried to build an airship around the Bobcat HOME air-mining parts before, which is a huge chemical processing facility to extract and refine propellent from the atmosphere, and failed miserably. With the massive lifting capacity of the Cirrus, that is now a possibility! (More pictures) The prototype Akua airship, above, uses a single jet engine and even at full throttle can't keep up with what the air-miner can produce. Dealing with the oxidizer can be a problem, though. Using rockets instead of jets or props would solve that, but would also consume dramatically more fuel. I don't want to modify the air-miner itself to produce only fuel, because I may use it to refuel spacecraft on other worlds. So, I'll probably make an "oxidizer dump" part to simply purge the unwanted dead-weight of the oxidizer when I'm just flying around. Of course, considering the lifting capacity of the Cirrus, I may not even need to bother with a dumping capability. I'm filling the tanks now to find out. The next development version of the craft may feature more fuel tanks, depending on how it goes. The goal is to have a Duna-capable airship, which means I need to be neutrally buoyant at 15km or so on Kerbin.

Thanks! Acceleration peaks at 8 gees. It can cut the drogue on main opening... I just didn't have the action groups set up for that when I tested it.

No, no! That's just a proof-of-concept demonstrator. I have not yet begun to get cool with the Cirrus.

True. My specific example was from an older thread where somebody wanted a way to stack those particular components on top of a parachute. Your method is better if you're only sticking an LES on top. Here's another variation... LES tower Shielded docking port (the LES jettisons off the top of it) Decoupler, with linear RCS ports (not strictly necessary, but more realistic to jettison the docking port before deploying 'chutes) Drogue 'chute Main 'chute

On the contrary... a key principle of rocketry is that "tiny goes farther." Once you're above 30km or so, the same rules apply to spaceplanes that apply to rockets.

Ahem... There are tricks to getting these to attach without enabling Part Clipping in the debug menu, but it's a lot simpler if you just do that. It works fine with or without the decoupler, if you want to keep the hardware attached above the 'chute. And yes, you can easily stack drogues on top of regular 'chutes with this technique.

Having a stack of magazines mounted to a docking port sounds like a viable refueling method... just send up replacement stacks and dock them with a little robotic tug or something.

Second launch. I likely could have done it on the first, but wanted to start with a suborbital flight, Mercury-Redstone style. I was already familiar with the general principles of orbital mechanics and rocketry before KSP, however.

I finally had time to briefly play with the Cirrus. Wow, balancing the craft in the SPH/VAB is critical when using two like that. The buoyancy trim is too coarse to help. I'm definitely going to look into setting up some ballast tanks to pump fuel or something between for trim.

Zoom in and adjust the camera angle to where you can see and click them. Or install the TAC Fuel Balancer mod (if it's updated, not sure). It lets you pump fuel around from a list of tanks in its UI window.

Yes, add an equivalent mass in place of the engine. And if you're concerned that the different size of the part might cause the CoM to be a little off... copy the engine, edit the part.cfg to make it a structural piece with the same mass and no thrust capability, then stick that dummy motor on where the LV-N will be. Sort out your balance with the side-mounted engines, then replace the dummy motor with the real LV-N.

My favorite one is the Gemini capsule mod... But if you want a stock reply, probably the cupola.

Snide comments, yes, but, not completely off-base, either. There are some very vocal people that are completely irrational about anything with "atomic" or "nuclear" in its name.

If you enjoy it, a second must-read by Niven and Pournelle is "The Mote in God's Eye", another alien first-contact novel, but with the star-faring humans dominant this time around. (Or, so they hope.) Niven and Pournelle mostly write "hard" sci-fi, so it's all well-grounded in reality as we know it, and with (mostly) reasonable extrapolations. Some other excellent books by Niven are "The Integral Trees" and its sequel "The Smoke Ring." These are the books that gave me an intuitive understanding of orbital mechanics.