DerekL1963

Yes, they are combinable.

Not really. Most systems you need repaired underway in order to survive (in or post combat), you need the spares NOW. Not in a day or two when the 3-D printer spits them out. Assuming you have power to the printer and the printer itself is not damaged... The military is looking at them because anything destroyer sized or up does have enough minor things go wrong that a 3-D printer can be useful in making them right. They can also be used to keep the inventory of spares topped off (as opposed to print-on-demand.) Indeed. Setting spares inventory levels is... something of a black art. And dealing with only a small number of installations of a given system just makes it harder because you don't really know if your statistics are truly representative.

One trick is to launch a relay bird and circularize low (as you did), then the next time it's in comms increase it's AP (I usually went up to about 500km) then circularize again when the Ap is in comms. Then do the same with a second one at about 490km (so it has a different orbital period). Lather, rinse, repeat as many times as desired - I usually went with four birds. Each subsequent bird gets easier as previous birds give wider/more comm windows. The truly brave can be playing comm billiards with all the birds in orbit at once, leaping from one to the next as they come into comms... Another trick is to add one or two relay birds in high (750-1000km) polar orbits to this constellation.

My experience in the Navy pretty much agrees with that. Failures tended to be either in the power or electronics systems, or high wear mechanical items - pretty much the things that 3-D printing doesn't do.

Indeed, thanks to Angel and the Heisenberg mod - you CAN fly a blimp on Duna.

If you've been following the Heisenberg mod or my Airship Adventures thread... you've seen all the hard work from me and @Angel-125 (especially Angel in patching bugs in Heisenberg, a huge shout out !) over the last week-and-some. Today: Proof of concept. You can fly a dirigible on Duna. Still a ton of practical problems and mission techniques to sort out though....

Got today's writing done, and I could resist no more... Slapped a prototype drive package (not so different from Skydancer's) on the tail, hyperedited into Duna orbit and..... Success on the first try. Still a ton of practical problems to work out before an actual mission, but here is proof that the concept is sound. Thanks a ton to @Angel-125 and his work and patches to Heisenberg over the last week.

So.Much. This. ISRU hasn't been tested beyond laboratory bench prototypes - and it's a long and rocky road from bench prototype to flyable test hardware. And a longer and rockier road from test hardware to something you can stake lives and billions on. For all intents and purposes, despite decades of handwaving by Zubrin and his fact resistant acolytes, the current state of the art for ISRU is just barely this side of "vaporware".

If you can return a crew from Eve, you'll have accomplished the hardest single challenge in the game. This isn't meant to discourage you! My hat is off to anyone who can manage it. That's one way of looking at it! It might discourage newer players though... OTOH, the argument could be made that by the time they're ready to go interplanetary with a blimp, they've got the experience needed to rework Skydancer and her booster system. (Though you might pop in and look at/replace the HL-10L segments, I bet they're bugged.) Sorry for going kinda dark after all the intensive work, but it's the end of one anime season and the start of another and that means I have a lot of writing to do. KSP is but one of my hobbies, and unlike my anime blog - one not driven by an external schedule. Did get some high altitude testing on Kerbin done (equiv of 2km on Duna) and I've already discovered my radiator system needs beefing up... But that's why I do these tests before committing to the final mission.

Thanks! It's not easy, but it is doable... There's an example craft (Skydancer) in the Heisenberg mods folders, but (with apologies to Angel-125) it needs a lot of work. I've flown one to Duna but I haven't mastered re-entering and shifting to hull borne flight there yet. (Though I've done so on Kerbin.) Eve... With it's dense atmosphere should be easier to design a craft to fly in, but reentries there tend to be pretty hot. I have no idea how to manage it. And I don't know how you'd get your crew back. (I don't like stranding crew, but others feel differently, to each their own I say.) So, why not give it a shot! And be sure post pics in the "what did you do in KSP today" thread in the KSP discussion forum. Folks like to see cool/hard accomplishments.

Exactly what it says. Longer range antennas are larger and heavier than shorter - when in reality most of the power is in the ground segment's amplifiers. New Horizon's antenna is only 2m across for heaven's sake. No. If it doesn't go far enough, you need a larger heavier antenna - either onboard or as part of your nearby (same SOI basically) relay network. That won't fix anything, because (in RT) you still need a satellite constellation to relay from those "ground stations" to KSC. Close enough.

I thought I saw a mod that fixed the 1.4.x bug where SPH vehicles spawn above the runway then drop down and explode... But now that I need it, I can't find it. Any pointers?

Which engine does that apply to? (And what does it do?) And taming those big fans is turning out to be a serious bear... I still haven't figured out how to take off w/o flipping the blimp on it's nose. But I think that's mostly because I'm launching from clamps due to the "drop and explode"bug. I saw a mod to fix that, just need to track it down. And go back and start from zero with a proper Duna Dirigible rather than working with a hacked version of the Norge. (Which is designed to a rather different goal.) It's work to do that, but better than doing the current and future engineering development work twice.

How is RT unrealistic? 1 - Larger antenna for longer range, almost impossibly large for Jool and beyond. 2 - One antenna site on the entire planet. 3 - The complex "pointing at a given satellite" mechanic. How is CN unrealistic? 1 - The same stupid antenna size mechanic. 2 - The pointless dichotomy between direct and relay antenna. 3 - The vast increase in weight for relay antenna. Vanilla CN's "not interrupted by planetary bodies" applies when, say, Duna is between your probe at Jool and the DSN on Kerbin. It doesn't apply if you're on the backside of the Mun for example. Neither one really makes for a "more realistic" career mode, though (IMO) CN comes closer than RT since it doesn't require you to set up a constellation of comsats.

Everything seems to be working properly now, thanks! FWIW, some preliminary testing shows those big new fans may have hit the showroom floor just in time. I don't think the tilt-rotors are going to cut it.

Hyperedit made this trivially easy, thanks!

Isn't that technically a spaceplane rather than a SSTO?

What pressure altitude does 15km ASL on Kerbin equate to on Duna? Does anyone know of a table or a really, really simple equation where I can can look up/calculate this myself? Mostly interested in altitudes below 10km ASL on Duna.

As usual, writing up what I did last night before heading to bed... More testing of a potential Duna Dirigible and looking at some of the new parts in the latest release of Angel's Heisenberg mod - details in my Airship Adventure thread.

This is turning into something of a dev blog between adventures, but honestly I spend as much time and have as much fun doing engineering development as I do flying/adventuring. Still working on a potential Duna Dirigible... Because of Duna's thin atmosphere, gasbags can't really lift a vehicle on their own. Some kind of powered vertical lift is absolutely required. I outfitted my Norge prototype with tilt rotors from Angel's Buffalo mod and headed out to the runway. They worked surprisingly well, the four tiltrotors are bearing the entire 50 odd tons of vehicle at about two-thirds throttle (based on my manual testing). There's no lift contribution from the gasbags at all. I'd forgotten that Angel provides his own VTOL manager, which is nice because it separates the lift engine and drive engine controls. This makes the pilot's life so much easier and means I don't need a separate throttle mod. The latest release of Angel's Heisenberg mod, which provides the dirigible parts, included some powerful new lift fans. (Think S.H.E.I.L.D. helicarrier or small island sized vehicles.) I'm testing the tilt-rotors first because they consume less power and even with the latest patch to Heisenberg (which vastly increased the power of the reactors) power and weight are still a consideration. The weight margins on the Duna Dirigible are very narrow. If the tilt-rotors don't work, then I'll try the fans. (Plus, to be honest, I prefer the aesthetics of the tilt rotors.) At this point, it's probably time to develop the Duna Dirigible itself...

The WB-50. I did put new ones on after the newest version was released, and I see the menu changed, but it still doesn't reverse in an action group (though it can be manually toggled with the right click menu). Hopefully I haven't done something boneheaded again...

When I did my Jool-5 mission, that's more or less exactly what I did. One lander of essentially the same design for Laythe, a second lander with a design much like yours for everywhere else. In Tylo mode (it's first use) it had a crasher for the deorbit burn then descended on a core and two radials. On mine however, the radials landed to avoid a disastrous last minute drop in t/w ratio. They burned out and were jettisoned about thirty seconds into the ascent. A tanker then re-fueled it for future use.

Which predicted re-entry time? I saw at least three... The ESA prediction, the Aerospace Corporation prediction, and the STRATCOM's prediction. And whose morning? The three never did entirely converge, though they got close in the last few hours. As recently as a month ago it was predicted to come down sometime during a window as much as a week and a half long. By the time they could start narrowing it down to a day, it started sliding gradually to the right as space weather was actually a little calmer than predicted. By the time they could narrow it down to an hour plus or minus a couple of hours (I.E. within the last twenty four hours) it was low enough that space weather was no longer particularly relevant. So no, that it re-entered within 3 minutes of the center of a predicted error window says nothing about our knowledge of space weather.

Hopefully in amongst all that, you'll get a chance to look into why the engine fwd/rev toggle doesn't work in an action group? My preference would be to make parts rather than configs, but that's mostly because so many parts aren't what they seem to be it makes me dizzy. I'd also add a chassis decoupler like Buffalo has. Something to make it easy to pop into a fairing and launch.

Once it's communications relay system has been gutted and replaced with one appropriate to its mission, and it's propulsion system replaced with one suitable for going to Lunar orbit rather than GEO - I doubt it'll be as cheap as you think. Plus it's GNC will have to be replaced, and the power system too... and remind me why we were doing this in the first place? There's no doubt cheaper ways to do it, but jacking up the nameplate on a commercial bus and sliding an entirely new satellite underneath isn't one of the smarter ways.