Horn Brain

I thought this was going to be about this:

Nosecones don't affect the drag of the whole vehicle, they just have slightly less drag themselves than a normal part. They are more for enhancing stability than for making you go faster. If you really want to compare, go make sure that all the vehicles you're using have exactly the same mass by adding parts to make up the difference. There will be very little difference.

"OK, time to stage." There is seriously no more dangerous moment than staging during a test flight. I've said this or heard it said right before: The side boosters take out some engines on the central stack, causing the vehicle to immediately start spinning out of control. The wrong side boosters are separated while still full of fuel, and rapidly accelerate, pinch in on the command module, and kill the crew. The bare capsule decouples from the fuel and engines... in a 100 km circular orbit. The top stage decouples instead of the boosters, while the central core pushes the rocket on uncontrolled until the top stage rolls lazily to one side and crashes into the lower stages. And so many more...

Why can't we use all of those structural parts? They're only cheaty if you use them as major structural components. I only use them to attach things to surfaces. How else do I get the stupid jet fuel adapters to attach to the rocket fuel tanks without looking weirdly off-center? Example:

You are completely wrong on every number except for the NERVA boost and the starting figure. Eve's gravity well is nothing when you're travelling 22 km/s. It wouldn't even add 1 km/s. Gilly giving you a 3 km/s boost at 35 km/s is also ridiculous. Gilly has no effect on objects with that speed unless they hit the surface. Finally, 60 km/s is not possible for an object on an elliptic orbit around the sun with a periapsis at Eve's orbit. If you add solar escape velocity at Eve's orbit (~19 km/s) and Eve's orbital velocity (~11 km/s) you get 30 km/s. To get 60 km/s you need to do a sun dive all the way to near the surface of the sun and burn a ton of fuel at periapsis, then hit Eve on the way out. Don't make up numbers.

I was trying to make a mock Skylon, but the RAPIER engines are not powerful enough with just two of them for a vehicle that lifts the size payload I wanted to bring (my test payload was a 4.5 ton fuel tank), so I had to use four engines. It turned out ok, though, and I've designed a small lander that fits in the payload area which is capable of easily travelling to the Mun and back, maybe even Ike if you're careful. Part clipping was not used and it's all stock! I even managed to use the Mk1-2 and Mk2-3 adapters in a way that isn't hideous. Craft file: Google Drive Photos: Flight instructions: 1.) On load, switch control to the probe core at the back end. Turn on SAS and hit '3' to close non-essential intakes. Throttle to full and space to start engines. 2.) Once you hit about 80 m/s, pull up gently until the nose moves. Watch the tail because it will drag. Just nose up a little bit and wait for the craft to slowly lift off the runway, or else just wait for the end of the runway and pull back a little more. It takes off ok but you have to be patient if the payload is full. 3.) Once clear of the ground, nose up to 45 degrees and hold until the intake air drops below about 0.20. Hit '3' again to engage the remaining intakes. This moves the center of drag far forward and the vehicle becomes slightly unstable, so now is a good time to turn on RCS. If your payload's center of mass is high, you will definitely have to be careful from here on out to prevent from flipping backwards. Don't trust SAS, but leave it on. NOTE: To be very clear, you pretty much have to hold 'W' all the time while all the intakes are open to keep it from flipping over. SAS sometimes gets overpowered and switches to "damping mode" which doesn't do a damn thing. If you build your payload to have a low CoM, this is not such a big issue. 4.) Lower the nose to prevent flameout. You should now start to rapidly accelerate up to over 1000 m/s surface speed. Just keep climbing and keep the nose down so you don't flip. When the intake air drops to about 0.15, it's time to switch to rockets. 5.) Hit '2' to disable all the air intakes, the engines should switch to rocket mode automatically. Since the intakes are closed, the vehicle is more aerodynamically stable again, and you can raise the nose to about 45 degrees to pick up the apoapsis and get out of the atmosphere. IF YOUR PAYLOAD IS TOP HEAVY (like the included payload) THROTTLE BACK TO 75% OR SO OR YOU WILL DO BACKFLIPS. 6.) Once the apoapsis is above 45 km, follow the prograde vector until the apoapsis is above about 80-85km and kill the engines. You can use RCS or more fuel to counteract drag if it becomes a problem. 7.) Circularize at the apoapsis. If you did it right, you should have extra oxidizer and liquid fuel for return. Staging will detach the payload. Using RCS, just give 'I' a tap or two and you should drift free of the payload. 8.) Deorbit and land. I recommend hitting 2, then 3 to turn on the rear air intakes to aid in stability if you are using the jets to fly once you slow down. The vehicle doesn't glide well until it reaches the lower atmosphere, but you can turn slowly if you're patient. Keep about a 30 degree dive and only pull up to land. Be careful of the tail dragging again when you flare. That's it. I hope you enjoy. What's the heaviest thing you can launch with it? I've only tried 4.6 tons, but I know it can do more because I delivered that payload after doing two backflips.

Build a shkadov thruster and fly one of your stars through their planet. I mean you've got two.

Is this independent of gravity on a planet? Imagine a world with 10g surface gravity but a thick enough atmosphere that flight is still possible. Is the dV always guaranteed to be higher for a lifting vehicle than for a vertical launch system? I suppose it eventually comes down to an energy balance, so maybe the effects cancel.

This is a cool idea, not unlike some stuff that the Australians are doing right now. However, you guys are basically completely overlooking the fact that it's very difficult to make an experimental scramjet, let alone one with the variable-geometry intakes, combustion chambers, and nozzles that would be required to have it function at low speeds initially. You basically have to design a transition from a converging-diverging-converging-diverging flow pattern to a converging-diverging flow pattern, with each intermediate position of the internal geometry being a problem as difficult as designing an entirely new vehicle. It is very difficult to design these vehicles because at the speeds they're operating at, burning the fuel only produces about 10% as much energy as there is in the incoming flow (due to kinetic energy from the high speed). This means that drag reduction is as, if not more, important than thrust maximization. Therefore, you're going to have to find some way to inject, mix, and burn the fuel with almost ideal efficiency over a very wide range of speeds, using little to no redundant hardware (multiple parts which do the same job at different speeds), while the geometry of the vehicle drastically changes. This is why most of these ideas end up using rockets to get a pure scramjet up to speeds where it can operate with constant geometry, to avoid multiplying the difficulty of the problem by a factor of thousands (multiple geometries which may require different schemes for fuel injection and ignition).

I think mine's pretty slick: Everything is perfectly symmetric around the initial center of mass until the jets are fired up after reentry. The two 1.25m rocket tanks are mounted at the center of mass along with all the monopropellant, so draining them doesn't affect the balance. The RCS is perfectly balanced so it's incredibly easy to dock. All the pictures show it docked to a lander that I used when I was doing a fancy Apollo-style mission. It launches vertically and jettisons the two 1.25m tanks (and all the space-specific hardware except the engines) before reentry. Then it uses the two jet engines to make sure it lands at KSC (this was when I was worried about not being able to recover vehicles in career mode that landed far from KSC). In one picture you can see one of three landing legs on the nose. It actually lands on its nose after the chutes deploy (I didn't know that landing gear have no mass, or I would have just used them and some extra wings to glide to a landing). All the jet fuel comes from the ugly adapters (which look pretty cool in this). It's the only attractive thing I've ever built with the Mk3 cockpit or those adapters.

I will still play the game, but it just lost a lot of value for me. I was really excited about building bases and stations in every planetary system to support novel mission architectures. Now I've pretty much done everything in the game that we'll be able to do. I definitely play it less now, usually only when I come up with some crazy idea for a design, like a Falcon 9 reusable replica or some other design challenge. There is no reason to go to planets more than once unless they offer design challenges, of which resources would have been able to introduce a whole new range. I would love to have to design a vehicle to get blutonium from Eve's oceans to orbit, or shuttle fuel to my Duna station from the surface.

I'm still waiting for someone to come up with a use for multiplayer that isn't so complicated that it requires mastering the game (which was part of the reason the devs said resources were "unfun"). The best ideas I've had are flying the first stage of a reuseable launcher back to KSC while the second stage continues to orbit, but that's obviously very advanced gameplay. Heck, DOCKING is pretty advanced gameplay for most people. Also note that I'm not throwing out some challenge to the pro-MP camp, I'm actually trying to think of something to do with MP that would be 1/10th as fun as installing resources. Here's another idea: you can do rescue missions where you jump a kerbal on EVA from the surface of, say, the Mun into a suborbital trajectory, then the other player rendezvous with him near apoapsis and then gets back into orbit to take him home. Again, very niche, very advanced gameplay (one-shot rendezvous, building a vehicle with enough dV to do this maneuver, etc.), and in this case it requires a ton of setup time (getting the ship and kerbal to the Mun) that wouldn't even utilize the MP feature! Not to mention you can already do this in single player, it's just a little easier with MP. For resources, the ideas are endless! Try this: if asteroids with modifiable orbits are implemented, imagine landing on an asteroid with a ship carrying a mainsail or a bunch of nuke engines pointed away from the asteroid. The ship also carries a drill and refining equipment to make liquid fuel and oxidizer. Guess what? You just turned the asteroid into a huge flying fuel tank, which you can maneuver to intercept Kerbin and eventually get into orbit. Now you can mine what's left of it more easily, or just leave it for scenery, or whatever. It's also not more difficult than designing a mission to Dres or Eeloo. It's docking with a huge asteroid and adding a couple parts to a rocket, along with some interplanetary maneuvering. It's a big project, sure, but it's a completely new type of mission that is specifically enabled by resources. I would define that as a lot of new fun.

The following is my opinion. I do not even pretend to suggest that I'm right and others are wrong. This is the biggest mistake the devs have made. Resources would add mountains of gameplay to KSP. Multiplayer adds almost nothing that can't be accomplished by sharing a save file. The fact that resources would be localized would give players new tasks (map and sample resource distributions, deliver hardware to gather/process resources, deliver infrastructure to get resources off planet, and it would also add a useful purpose for space stations), but it would also invoke or strengthen the importance of new skills (targeted landings and larger-scale mission architecture planning). It also gives more opportunities for the devs to challenge us in different ways on each world (put resource-rich areas only near the poles of one planet, or have one planet with propellium at the equator and oxium at the poles, Duna and Ike have complementary sets of resources, requiring you to develop a method of transporting material between them, etc.). Multiplayer adds... what exactly? Docking is a one-player operation. Two players trying to actively dock with one another would be annoying, so what will usually happen is one player will just point at the other and hold his craft still while the other docks. That is exactly zero percent fun for one player and exactly the same amount of fun as solo mode would be for the other player. You can do things like build a space station together... which you can already do by sharing save files. You can race each other to the Mun... which you can do by just setting your laptops on the same table, or calling each other on speakerphone. You can fight each other... but KSP isn't a war game, and the devs don't want it to be a war game! I just fail to see much reason you would want to add multiplayer to this game that can't be done already. The best I can come up with is that you could simulate a Falcon 9 or White Knight/Spaceship 1 reusable mission where one of you flies the first stage back to the launch pad while the other flies the second stage into orbit. But then part of the excuse given by Harv during the interview as to why resources weren't fun was that they required you to master the game to use them. I feel like being able to design and use a reusable, multi-stage launch vehicle comes pretty close to being a master of KSP. And yes, at the far end, resource utilization in some ways can be as difficult to make use of, but there are many simple applications that most people could simply bolt on to their missions (Say, attach a processor and drill to your Mun lander to refuel your ship after landing). If resources are complicated, then why are we adding parts specifically designed for space planes? It doesn't get much more complicated than balancing the CoL, CoM, and CoT in a space plane and also trying to find places for all the parts and remembering that the weight will shift around during flight. It's certainly more complicated than "you need a drill and a processor and an extra tank to mine resources". I fail to see a single reason why multiplayer makes sense but resources do not. I'd like to say that I'm not trying to be rude or angry, I'm just honestly pointing out how

I think kerbal skills should be exclusively used on automated missions once we can design and assign missions. Things like: Fly this vehicle to this space station, dock, transfer all of your fuel into the station, undock, reenter and land at KSC. Each of these activities requires certain skills or certain levels of those skills or you can't assign him that mission. You should have to fly the requested mission yourself with the same vehicle once to prove to the game that it's possible, but then the game just does it for you automatically. This would be easier to implement because you don't have to install an autopilot or anything, you just build up your kerbals' skills by taking them on missions and then they are valuable to you because you can use them to perform simple tasks like maintaining a fuel depot in LKO. [append] I should also say that it would be nice to be able to watch the missions in real time, but that would require a fully functional autopilot. Ideally, you could even have these missions ongoing while you fly your own missions manually. It would be cool to be doing some construction at your space station and then see the automated fuel tanker rendezvous and dock while you're working. It would be fun and give the feeling of being immersed in an actual functioning space program, where every kerbal is running around doing its own little job. It may even cause unplanned F.U.N.* if, say, you find yourself directly between the tanker and its intended docking port when it comes in for a rendezvous... *Fiery, Unplanned Necrosis

Here there is a table showing halving masses for gamma rays, which puts air at the same halving mass as water. The Laythe atmosphere (if it were air) would actually be slightly more than necessary to protect against Jupiter's radiation at Io. If Jool's is not so bad (presumably, since it's much smaller), then you should be fine.

With that level of shielding, you would receive dosages that would be safe for indefinite residence. You can basically ignore Jool's radiation belts because you would even be shielded from cosmic rays to nearly the same extent that you are on Earth. It would probably be comparable to flying around in an airplane all your life at worst. The dosages would almost certainly be less than certain places on Earth which have a high concentration of radioactive elements in the local bedrock. Order of 100 mSv/year at the VERY most.

Just a note about the radiation: if Laythe's atmosphere has roughly the same molecular weight as air, then the density at sea level is around 1 kg/m^3. If the scale height is 4km, then the mass shielding from the atmosphere is around 4,000 kg/m^2. That's equivalent to a few meters of water between life on the surface and the radiation, which would be a very effective shield, even against cosmic rays. Additionally, life could exist under the oceans on Laythe for even more shielding. The tidal heating would likely result in volcanic activity and probably hydrothermal vents, which we know are good habitats for life on Earth and would be completely shielded from radiation. If more shielding were required than the atmosphere, then a submarine base for visiting Kerbals would only have to be something like 10 feet below the waves to provide very effective radiation shielding. The challenge would be in getting to and from Laythe. As for the atmosphere being sputtered away by the radiation: That process occurs over hundreds of thousands of years. Healthy volcanic activity could renew gases lost to space just like it does here on Earth, and it might not even be necessary if Laythe's composition is like Europa, which has something like twice as much water as the Earth, despite having less than 1% of its mass. The atmosphere could be in a nearly steady-state as Laythe slowly loses light atoms to radiation which are replenished from the effectively inexhaustible supply at and below its surface. Not all of the processes that would be necessary for Laythe to be "possible" are modeled in the game. There are no clouds, no volcanoes, etc. I think with some imagination (and some borked Kerbal physics along the lines of the 10x gravity constant/super dense materials), it isn't hard to imagine such a body being possible, at least within the game.

Thanks! I could not for the life of me remember what it was called. Enjoy your rep. I think my addition to your rules would make the challenge more attractive. Obviously you can build something that weighs 1000 tons that no one could orbit, but what's the smallest craft that can't be orbited in KSP? In this case, there would be two kinds of winners: 1) The person with the lightest craft that no one has managed to orbit. and 2) the person with the best solution for a given challenge. Think about it!

I've been looking all over, searching the forums both internally and through Google, and I can't find a challenge I'm pretty sure I saw on here before. I realize that if I knew the right keywords to search for it would be trivial to find if it exists but I don't remember what it was called. The basic idea was to design something that no one else could get into orbit (they were allowed to add whatever they wanted to add to the craft, but they couldn't break it apart). I think the goal may have been to design the lightest object that was impossible to get to orbit intact. If anyone can find it, that would be wonderful. If we can't find it, I'd like to try to start it again. Thanks in advance to anyone who can help.

I think that you can have both here. Just make science from probe samples worth less than science from crew. Make it take multiple missions and/or hours of grinding with a probe to get the same science output as a single well-planned manned mission. That way we can still design and build our cool robotic sample return missions, but it would motivate bringing Kerbals along, and it would also be more realistic, since a single manned mission to Mars would have been able to do everything we've done on the planet with all the other robotic missions combined many times over. I hear people from JPL say this kind of thing all the time (but they just want astronauts on Phobos controlling robots in real-time on the surface since JPL makes robots).

It's pretty easy to find peaks near the Mun's poles which are always illuminated by the sun (except during an eclipse). It makes for a sweet base. If you find a place that is just barely in shadow for part of the "munth", you can land a tall tower there with solar panels on top to catch the rays. That was one of my favorite things I did in the game.

Everything but Tylo and Jool, just because after I did Eve (which was back before we had lawn chairs and the mini lander can) I was kind of burned out building clever asparagus rockets. I haven't been to Laythe in a long time. I think the last time I went there I was using a mod to dock and refuel. I think I'll launch Tylo and Laythe missions at the next transfer window to Jool. I have no interest in building a stock vehicle that can "land" on Jool. None.

I hope they fixed rovers jittering around uncontrollably on every other surface panel. That almost ruined my Duna campaign.

There is an atmosphere on the moon... They're just sending the probe to get a better idea of what it's like in detail. The fact that it has an extremely thin atmosphere is well known and confirmed already. The atmosphere is so low that it wouldn't be noticeable in the game.

Yes, you can use that in that way. Note however, that the last 1000 m/s for "return" (in your example) is to get back into LKO, not to get to Kerbin. The 100 dV to break orbit (in your example) should be enough to put you on a path back towards Kerbin. You can then either enter the atmosphere directly or apply the 1000 m/s to circularize your orbit and then land, or do some combination of the two. The figures should be used as estimates, of course. Your mileage may vary depending on how accurate your transfer burns are and how close you get to launching at the proper angles and in the proper windows.