zarakon

(0.13 sun dive)

So you want to use a rocket someone else designed, on a flight path someone else figured out, flown by autopilot? Why not just find a youtube video?

Is there some trick to getting these aerospike engines to actually attach to the rocket? Sometimes it works just fine, and sometimes they refuse to go on..

I didn't get any pictures or videos, but I had a guy jump from Minmus back to Kerbin with just his jetpack, and he somehow survived

Yeah, I had one of my guys survive a trip all the way back from the surface of Minmus using only his jetpack, after my silly rocket fell over and left him stranded. I wish I could say it was Jeb, but he exploded earlier in the mission when trying to jetpack down the the surface of Minmus from orbit

Thanks I guess since I couldn't highlight them I didn't think to try that

I want to put some ladders on my lander so that my guys will actually be able to get back in the pod if I land them somewhere too big for their jetpacks to save them. I'm trying to test them out on the launch pad, but I can't figure out how to even get them to deploy! How do I get these things to work?

I'll give the X-shaped radial struts a try, thanks Too much control authority coming from the thrust vectoring of the main engines?

Ah, thanks

Is there a quicker way to switch between Kerbals or the ship during EVAs other than exiting out to the Space Center and going to the Tracking Station, which seems to reload the whole scene?

So activating fine controls affects ASAS behavior?

When I make somewhat large/tall rockets, I tend to get two annoying issues during ascent. 1. The rocket starts to roll as it picks up speed, and I can't overcome it unless I add fins. Even with the fins, it's annoying that I need to keep fighting against it. What could be causing this roll, and is there a good way to just design it out? 2. Using ASAS tends to make my rocket wobble and flex a lot. Even when it doesn't break it apart entirely, it's probably pretty inefficient to have the engines vectoring back and forth constantly. Adding a bunch of struts helps, but is there any way to just get the ASAS to behave better and stop overcompensating? Does it help to have more of them? Does it matter where they're placed? Would it help to add regular SAS modules too?

Damn, just had this happen to me twice on what could have been my first successful Jool mission. Now I've lost ~12 tanks of fuel, and my only remaining engine is on one of the outer cores so I can only burn at about 7% without destabilizing, and I'm pushing around 4 full tanks of dead weight fuel in the center core that I can neither use nor jettison. I might still have enough usable juice to complete the orbital insertion, but it will take forever at this ridiculously slow burn rate.. around 0.2m/s^2, and I need to lose around 2000. Is there any way to force time warp while burning?

Cool, I've always used radial staging with fuel feeding inward, but never thought of dropping the outside off in pairs like that before

So I had a couple of Kerbals landed on Minmus. Their ship was broken, so they appeared to be stranded. One of them decided to try to get to orbit with his jetpack. He made it pretty easily with over 60% fuel left. From orbit, he changed to an escape trajectory back into Kerbin's SOI. About 60% jetpack fuel left. Deorbited from there to a Kerbin re-entry trajectory with <20% left. After slowing to terminal velocity in the lower atmosphere he tried desperately to use his remaining fuel for a soft landing, but there was no chance of that. The jetpacks are far too weak to overcome Kerbin's gravity. However, burning the last of the fuel meant his jetpack wouldn't explode on impact! He hit the ground hard, bounced a few times, twisted into terrible positions, but eventually came to rest, surely dead, but in one piece. Then to my surprise, he actually stood up and was able to walk around again! I don't know if I just got lucky, or if they're just immune to all non-explosive injury, but it was quite an adventure! I wish I could say it was Jeb that did this, but he died earlier trying to jetpack down to the surface from an orbit that was way too fast.

Yesterday I was trying to see how hard I could crash into Kerbin, but I was too slow in turning down the time warp and went straight through the whole planet at around 8000km/s

I don\'t think I have any actual record of it, but a while ago I hit the moon at over 6000km/s with a fairly large rocket (stock parts). It kind of glitched and went through the surface.

why does it matter? it\'s not like this is some political discussion that\'s lost its relevance 3 stages of SRBs, where each stage dwarfs the one above it?

how in the world did you manage that?

That\'s nothing. In my journey to the sun I reached 626,812m/s smoothly before getting ejected from the system at 54,462,119m/s http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=3008.msg66852#msg66852

Here\'s my first attempt at a big explosion Stock parts, originally just designed for Munar landings. Didn\'t eject any stages until just before impact

ahh, I\'ll try to keep that in mind. I never though of the copies as being any different from the originals

Stock parts. It was actually built for LANDING on the Mun, so I could definitely get more raw speed by stripping it down some Screenshot 1: T+01:29:14 : Just about to impact the Mun at 6408m/s Screenshot 2: T+01:29:15 : Impact! Apparently my craft clipped through the surface to make a cool explosion underneath. Screenshot 3: Flight Results

Yesterday, someone posted a ship in a challenge thread that was able to reach ~9600m/s straight up from Kerbin with stock parts (here). I realized that was perfect for decaying my orbit around the sun to fall right in. I hadn\'t read anything yet about what happens at the sun, so this was all new to me.. In the attached images 1-11: 1. Orbital velocity eliminated. Starting to fall toward the sun. 2. Getting close to the sun, speed at 30km/s 3. Map view showing straight-line trajectory. It doesn\'t display perihelion.. 4. Only 64km altitude! 188km/s 5. Strange, altitude is going back up, but so is my speed. 200km/s 6. Map view reveals that the altitude reading has gone negative, and I\'ve still got a ways to go. 7. 59Mm into the sun, speed is up to 627km/s. G Force meter is maxed out 8. Never quite reached 60Mm, that must be the radius of the sun. When I approached the very center, the physics simulation broke down and I got flung out at 54,462km/s! 9. The forces in that slingshot apparently broke my ship in half, and the two pieces are slowly separating. 10. My craft was sent out of the system, almost straight down from the plane. I only lost a few hundred m/s of velocity while escaping the sun. Not pictured because a screenshot wouldn\'t show anything, but the navball was flickering back and forth between two different headings, and trying to view the solar system in map view started to produce similar glitchy behavior. 11. I let it run at 10000x speed for about an hour, and approached the 999999Gm mark. At 999000 I started slowing down speed so that I could get a screenshot at 999999, but when it reached about 9991500, everything broke, as you can see in the screenshot. It was a fun trip!