Tiron

You mean to make more free ads for the game.

I've glide-landed on Duna a couple times before. The spaceplane in question didn't have enough fuel left to fly any substantial distance in Duna's Atmosphere, so the gliding was mostly neccessity. I did find one rather substantial problem while I was doing it: You can't steer worth crap until you get slowed down in the lower atmosphere. Lift wasn't really a problem (at least not on my doubled-wing design with almost no fuel left), but I'd try to turn and just end up flying sideways. Once the speed bled off and I got low I could steer kinda okay, but still not spectacularly well. The fact I kept ending up on Plateaus that were several KM above datum didn't help. From what I can tell it's actually one of the better ways to land on Duna at all, since Parachutes barely work and you need several metric tons worth of them (literally).

That's because it moves them all in concert, which is really weird looking when you watch it. This also means you can't use gimbals to control roll at present, which isn't strictly accurate. But yeah, this is mostly a thing with mainsails, which are so powerful that they can literally tear a rocket apart with their control forces.

There's another way around this, involving something I discovered that was painfully obvious after the fact. Like 'First five minutes of high school physics' kind of obvious. Your ability to get the nose off the ground is primarily a leverage issue: on most designs the rearmost set of landing gear acts as a fulcrum, with the control surfaces being the input points(and the entire PLANE being both load and the lever arm itself). This is why adding a set of canards on the nose helps a lot in getting the nose up sooner: Being so far forward of the rear landing gear gives them way more leverage. But what it boils down to is that if your control surfaces are too close to the rear landing gear, it's not going to be able to get the nose up on the ground because they've got no bloody leverage. Most of my designs have the control surfaces pretty far back so moving the rear gear forward helps a LOT in getting it off the ground faster. It also makes it harder to get off the runway without destroying things on the back, though! Getting off the ground sooner means you're not rolling on the runway as much, and don't get up to speeds that are nearly as high. On some of my poorer designs in this respect, they couldn't get the nose off the ground until over 100 m/s, despite not actually "stalling" until about 30-40 m/s-ish. Granted most of my designs are modified ravenspear Mk3s (some of them VERY heavily modified), and it can't get the nose up on the ground at all!

Since it was added...you just get so much Kraken once you get even close to the surface that actually surviving, much less doing anything, is basically impossible.

Hate the Zero Bypass Turbine so much. I cheated once several versions back to try it out on Kerbin...bloody aweful. I looked into the CFG to find out why, and well... It uses Kintakeair instead of Intakeair, so normal intakes don't help it any. It ONLY uses the Intake integrated into the engine itself, and it's set up...really badly. It LOSES efficiency as speed increases, and it's set up so the primary driver of Kintakeair production is... throttle. So to get maximum kintakeair you have to max out the throttle, but that increases your speed, which cuts your kintakeair production. Hopefully he's fixed this next bit, but...the biggest problem I had with it is that because of the link between Kintakeair and throttle, the thing would actually FLAME OUT if you cut the throttle too much. Including if you activated it on the runway with too low of a throttle setting. And since the kintakeair production is primarily linked to throttle rather than speed, it's EXTREMELY difficult to get it to restart if it flames out (Flameout = no throttle = very little kintakeair = flameout). I'd want to test it again to see if he's fixed it (There have been a LOT of new Kethane releases and a KSP version or two since then), but if it was still like that...I'd probably just hack the normal intakes to also produce kintakeair.

It's probably gotten less Bug Report and Debugging love because it's so hard to get to. Fewer people have been there to notice!

Unlike Earth's, Kerbin's atmosphere flat ENDS at 69,078m or so. In order to accidentally de-orbit the station you'd have to drop below that altitude, so that drag started pulling it down. Even then, at that height the drag is extremely minimal (consider that most real-world orbits are constantly in such conditions). In order for it to be a major problem you'd have to drop below...say 50,000 or so. It Won't single-pass deorbit until down to about 30,000 if I recall correctly.

ISP is the technical abbreviation for 'Specific Impulse', it is indeed a measure of how efficient the engine is: How much Change in Velocity (More technically known as Delta V) you can get out of it for a given quantity of fuel burned. It can have units of either time or velocity. KSP uses the Time version, so the specific impulse of our engines is measured in Seconds. A higher specific impulse value means that the engine will produce more Delta-V from a given amount of propellant, which is actually far more important than the consumption rate. Very true. It's especially confusing in the case of the Ion Engines, which lists consumption values of 12 electricity and 0.1 xenon: like the liquidengines it's actually just a ratio. The ISP of 4200 seconds on the Ion Engines gives actual consumption rates of 0.121 xenon and 14.548 electricty per second.

Agreed. Switching back and forth just confuses me, and I end up doing the wrong thing because I forgot which I'm on. There's also a checkbox to 'use staging controls in docking mode', not sure but I'm guessing it does exactly what it says on the tin. Haven't used it myself though.

The whole 'reusing stuff' is to save money. It's cheaper to use something you already have than to make something new. That said, the J-2X is kinda an exception. It's a new version of an old engine that itself has never actually been used. And I recall that the main tank at the bottom is based on the Space Shuttle's External Tank.

MSI Afterburner. Thing you run into is that TR-2Ls have a tremendous amount of friction, even on the sides of them for some reason. If the bottom touches the ground, it catches and spins the wheel. no big deal, really. If it catches on the side, or on the bottom while moving sideways, it develops a tremendous amount of force that gets put onto its joint with the rover. Past about 40-45 m/s I haven't found any way to keep that force from tearing the wheels off. Get up around 50-55 m/s and things like RTGs and Command Chairs will start breaking off just from the G-Forces induced by the impacts. That didn't happen in the video, because it never got going fast enough down the hill.

Yep, engine gimbaling can't really do roll. You need something else on there to deal with it, because with a rocket that size a command pod's built in SAS isn't strong enough, let alone a probe core. And regular SAS isn't nearly as good for this as it used to be: At some point, probably in 0.20 or one of its patches, they removed the Integral component from it, essentially making it a bigger version of the command pod's movement-damping-only built-in SAS. Mechjeb's killrot can't, so far as I know, use SAS torque itself, and doesn't really like to turn on the SAS anyway. You'd need an ASAS unit as well to make effective use of regular SAS. Control fins really work better for this anyway... I normally use Delta Deluxe fins if I can, as they're low drag and light weight, with high amount of lift. If their control forces are too weak I'll switch to Canards.

Yeah but the Saturn V Instrument Unit (which the large SAS looks rather like) not only flew the craft mostly-automatically, it also would recalculate the ascent path in-flight to optimize it based on observed conditions. And the Mercury Astronauts had to yell, whine, and complain to even get the ability to fly the craft manually at all. What we've got is WORSE than 50s tech, let alone 60s or 70s!

You could always just use ISA mapsat to get your own maps of them in-game.

Here you go, death of a superrover by hill. In HD 1080. Entry speed was higher than the first time, and sideways rather than upward, but basically the same. I actually wanted to get over farther before tumbling it but lost control. Edit: Okay, death by mountain. It's a big frakkin' hill.

Video Made, Trimmed, and Uploading. ETA 15 minutes.

A teeny bit. I'm really a hardware dork, so my training and experience in programming are...minimal, at best.

It got up on two wheels near the top of the hill. Then One. Then none. It started slowly tumbling downhill, then faster, and faster, and faster. Surprisingly the wheels themselves didn't rip off, the girders they're attached to did. One of them even has a cross-girder attached to that one still. The first thing to break was one of the wheels. And there IS some way for the side landing legs to touch without anything breaking off first, because one blew up from a gentle rolling before the tumble. Most of the stuff that was destroyed (except struts) broke off from the rover and went flying through the air, being destroyed when they hit something. Mostly the rover itself. I was planning to go over the hill and tumble it going really fast down the other side, but it tumbled on its own from the top of the hill. It's a big bloody hill. Just for you I'm gonna try to take a video of it.

I didn't get over the hill. I nearly did by driving backwards, but lost it near the top and started tumbling. Couldn't get it to stop...and, well... The command seat is destroyed. Jeb survived falling out but not the slide down the hill. All the RTGs are destroyed. One of the batteries is destroyed. Two of the landing legs, destroyed. One of the headlights destroyed. Multiple Struts Destroyed. Three of the wheel assemblies are scattered on the hillside. That wasn't even nearly as much energy as what I was intending: I was going to tumble it while it was going downhill at 50 m/s plus. It was doing maybe 10 m/s, UPHILL, when it started to tumble.

The impact pushes the beams out of position, far enough that things which are normally protected can hit the light. They're also small enough that they can get between wheels, and other elements that would normally be hit first. I've got my own pretty darn tough rover, and the whole 'surface imprecision messes up the suspension' thing likes to send it tumbling down hills. If you're going fast enough when that happens and it starts flinging off the command seats and wheels, even as the rest of the structure survives. I'll be trying that with your rover in a minute, I expect to lose wheels. Edit: Oh and this thing has waaaay too many RTGs. The wheels only use 2.8/sec, the lights and probe core hardly use any. Four RTGs produce 3/sec, that'd probably be plenty for everything. Half the number that are on it right now. Edit2: First explosion, and I haven't even gone tumbling yet: One of the side landing legs blew up while rolling gently down the hill. This thing has major problems with hills, it starts tipping over backwards trying to drive up them if it's too steep, and is extremely prone to rolling in a turn to begin with, but it's far worse on a slope. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to get OVER this hill to start the tumble testing.

*Facepalm* why didn't I think of that. Gaaaah. I knew that too. Sorry Zathras.

I'll note you didn't say anything about trying placing the wheels individually rather than with symmetry to avoid all the wheels on one side being able to slide around on the end of the beam

Yes but there's Moholes on Moho I hear.

None of which helps me in recreating my Kerbin, Mun, and Minmus maps in the event they change in 0.21, does it?