Respawn

try to replicate the path of "Asteroid" J002E3 ..

I have done a couple of interplanetary dockings and it's just like docking in kerbin orbit, except the distances is higher. I've found that when in loading range of your target don't use time warp, as your target will tend to jump around several km when physics is unloaded. Use physics warp instead or just be patient.

yeh the challenge of a "there and back again" eve return mission is the planning it takes. I made a minimalist challenge entry for the "Smallest-Craft-to-Various-Milestones" challenge. (eve return). Going there, landing and getting back is not that hard when you've been playing for a while. I think Eve is an excellent planet to challenge your self on, so i hope it stays as it is. That Jool "lander" awesome concept, but looks very inefficient. hm.. Seems like a fun challenge to try and optimize though.. "sub-suface" sample return in 0.22? ..sounds like a plan. XD

btw: Its manual but with kerbal engineer info panel.

doh. 0.00 @ 75499 x 76750 abit slow on killing engins at the end there haha.. tight margin for sure i'll do some more attempts. Edit: yeah.. after a couple more attempts I managed to get an orbit of: 77556 x 75045 With some fuel left. 1.43 units of liquid fuel. Better than 0.00 Here's a quick video: (2x speed playback)

hm.. one thing struck me as very odd. why does it deflect away from L1 at the end? I would expect it to curve slightly towards L1.

You'll find that the closer you get pe and ap to the same hight, the more twichy they get. Any forces applied to your craft will move them around including small sas corrections, try turning off the sas and you should see less twitching. To completely stop the twitching you need to stop the physics simulations on your craft by either time-warping or switching vessels to something outside loading range. (Think it's about 2km, unless it's modifyed by mods.)

It is possible, and not to hard to make All you need is enough control surfaces and you can fly it like a bird, by pitching up and down or roll. You can even let sas do the pitching required to continuously apply force, but you do need some way of generating power. Before the 0.21 sas changes you would need to add a asas part to make your "flappy-plane" "flap" by itself. Here a video I made a while back, in response to someone doing a kerbin circumnavigation trip on this forum. Firehawk (w/asasovercompensationdrive) For manned "orthocopters" check out this thread: The-no-engined-flyer-challenge! enjoy

Yes capi3101 is more or less right. 1 Liquid fuel unit = 5kg 1 Oxidizer unit = 5kg 1 Monopropellant unit = 4kg 1 XenonGas unit = 0.1Kg They are mass units not volume units, but as suggested stock parts does seem to follow a certain volumetric density rule. But they wouldn't have to.

The units could be anything. you don't know the state of the substance in the tank. It could be pressurized or not, it could be cooled, or even heated. Anyhow the units seem to correlate to mass not volume, so its not liters nor gallons. You could fill a 1 liter tank with 1 liter of oxygen, or if you wanted you could fill the 1 liter tank with "860 liters" of oxygen, but you would have to cool the oxygen down to a liquid state to achieve that. At this point the oxygen would weigh 860 times more than it would in gaseous state but still only occupy a volume of 1 liter. Whether the fuel is pressurized or not the "units" of fuel refer to the fuel mass not the apparent volume of the tanks, even though it looks like they've tried to keep mass fairly consistent with volumetric size.

Yeh.. i have a small 8.925t rocket which delivers a kerbal to about 75km orbit. With 3.1t mass left when in orbit (that's if it compleetly runs out of fuel). not a big rocket.. however according to your scoring thingy it would give me 2879 points You should change the scoring abit if you want to see huge rockets... Something like --> Pad Mass * (Orbit Mass/Pad Mass) would give you some huge rockets

I just tried building a transfer stage for a grand tour without refueling. I ended up taking a second look at the "no refueling" part of my plan. Breaking the mission into 2 parts. Inner planets and then outer planets. Sending a second transfer stage to Jool for a meetup there, and leaving the old transfer stage as a laythe station core. Still leaves me with a Core ship and some fancy lightweight landers to transport all around the system. Still I think i'll wait for 0.22 and do it in a fresh save. Gives me something fun to plan for while waiting. ^^

I would really like to see asteroid belt or kuiperbelt like structures. also maybe some rogue comets or asteroids in weird insane orbits.

I have also been thinking of doing a grand tour. My current thinking is to build a craft that carry all landers needed, and plant a flag on all planets+moons with surfaces. However once the landers have been used they'll be left behind. I would start with Eve so I wouldn't have to carry the eve lander along through the rest of the mission, then to wherever my next heaviest lander would be used. Shedding weight as i go. I'm thinking of assembling it in orbit. Every major part being attached when leaving LKO. Only 1 kerbal planting all the flags. No refueling. But i'm not sure if I can figure out how yet. Still in the earlier stages of planing this mission. I might even wait for 0.22 and do some science stuff on the way.

-hehe XD ..the satellite grid is a collection of 21 satellites with gps transmitters (part of a gps mod) and was used to test out an alternative orbit spread rather than the normal 60º spread. They used to be 120º apart (3 satellites in each orbit x 7 orbits), worked pretty well. However after several years of time-warp they have drifted quite a bit out of their desired positions. -The first design I used the smaller tanks and 1x 48-7S engine for each tank, Without the kerbal, fewer and smaller landing legs it has about the same dv. As a result of the lower lander mass, both the transfer and the launcher had less weight. So the total mass of the mk1 was less than 200t. However the smaller landing legs broke on impact and with the kerbal in his seat the dV just got to low.

Here it is Finally made it. I went through 4 different versions of the craft with no success. However "The not so magic carpet mk5" did make it and I recorded the whole thing. Lots of hours of video, not easy to compress down to a short. Finally ended up with something that is almost watchable, sorry it's 43 min long. And most of it is 4x speed with some 2x and some 8x speed parts. hehe.. Anyway. Kerbin -> EVE landing -> Kerbin return (with crew) Craft: Starting mass: 255.36 tons Total dV: about 20km/s (depends on eve transfer and what you are left with in return vehicle.) 3 major parts in 1 launch. Launcher: engines: 5x skippers and 8x LV-T30 dV: 4386 m/s Transfer and return vehicle: (also used for finalizing Kerbin orbit) engines: 1x LV-N dV: (depends on use) (not optimal use gave me about 4k-4.5k) Eve lander and launcher: engines: 37x Rockmax 48-7S dV: 9334 m/s (Just abit shy of what was needed.) (jet-packed last part of Eve circularization.) Craft file: The_not_so_magic_carpet_mk5.zip You need the Engineer mod to load.. I think.. maybe not? I've added the engineer module to all the command parts so I don't need to add that annoying chip all the time, so maybe anyone can load it up. EDIT: Turns out you don't need the engineer mod to load this craft. Works perfectly fine in a stock KSP install. Here's the video. (For those interested.)

Seat loader plugin would be awesome. !! I have been struggling for hours messing with the cfg for the seat trying to make it load kerbals on launch. But have had no luck. I don't know enough to make dll's. The furthest I've come is to be able to choose which kerbal to put in the "error spam chair of instant kerbal poof!". Its expecting internals which doesn't exist, and trying to call random phrases listed in the .mu file doesn't help. hehe.. The only way i've been able to add them without manually walking over to the seat is to edit a quicksave and reload. Which is more work than actually walking over to the craft and boarding the seat So seat loader plugin yeah. That would be awesome. +1 and thumbs up and all of that.

So I've been messing around with the external command seat a lot lately. Tried to modify the cfg to add kerbals on launch but it seems it's not that easy. (I couldn't figure out how anyway.) So i installed this mod in the hope that it would be possible to just add a guy to the seat while on the launchpad. I read some comments about this a couple of pages back where "this was not functioning as intended" (collecting souls and whatnot.) I would love to be able to do this. Feels a bit awkward having to add an extra command module just to climb over to the seat, then throwing the command module away before launch. My question is: Will this be implemented at some point? (adding kerbal to seat at launchpad) Or is it simply not possible the way this thing work? Or better yet, does anyone know any way to modify the cfg easily to accomplish the same thing?

Interesting. I just attempted a eve return here the other day with a 150t lander. The whole thing was massive.. hehe.. Was unable to get it fully back into orbit, my best attempt gave me a pe that was still within the atmosphere. My starting altitude was at about 400m However after looking through this thread i think I've come up with a new minimalist design which should be able to beat your eve design by potentially hundreds of tons. I shal call it: "the not so magic carpet." stay tuned..

So when I'm not using the engineer mod. (does not happen.) however its easy math. rough estimate. Weight (t) * local g * 10 = (gives you in kN what power you would need to have 1 TWR) so anything more than that would get your craft to lift of, anything less than that will not. on kerbin at sea level (asl) the local g is 1, on the mun it's 0.166 g on minmus it's 0.05 g on eve its 1.7 g on gilly its 0.005 g ..and so on.. (its listed in the info thingy in map view)

Today i sent a wobbly rocket too eve, with a return (attempt) vehicle. Funny lessons and stuff one notice when taking on this kind of mission. #1: Launching the 150t eve-launch stage. I didn't know rockets could bend almost 90º and still carry on going as if nothing had happened. They usually tend to break apart with the slightest wobble. #2: Sending up a transfer stage for the eve launcher. Just guessing how much dV it would give me, no numbers or anything. (yeh.. that looks right..) Doing this often turn out not in your favor. #3: Docking the transfer stage to the launcher in kerbin orbit. Who would have thought docking without RCS could be this difficult. #4: Time warp to more or less the right phase angle and fire up the transfer stage. While looking on the map, I had barely reached escape velocity when my transfer engines shut down. ? huh?? turned out my dV estimate was way off #5: Quickly build a new better transfer stage with rcs this time. Launch and head after the eve rocket which by now was on its way out of Kerbins soi. ..Quicksave more often, swapping out a transfer stage in orbit would have been way easier. #6: Docking in interplanetary space. Turns out even 5x time warp is a bad idea when far enough away from your current gravity-well center. Small floating point errors at that distance from the "sun" makes your target craft jump several hundred up to a 1km when you activate time warp. #7: Transfer vehicle with drop tanks. Turns out when docking multi-stage crafts together you might want to check if stages are still correct. After some way to long trajectory corrections i was about to drop a empty tank, thankfully noticing that my staging was all jumbled up. #8: Eve aero-brake. Note to self: quicksave more often, and watch out for sneaky moons. #9: Sending eve-launcher down to surface and leaving transfer stage in orbit ready for trip home. Now with just enough fuel to get back. #10: Several wet landings later, i managed to find a dry spot. Needed all the fuel for re-launch so had no control, except for when to release parachutes. A small tank and a small correction engine would have been nice.. Also 500m from surface some of the launch stages kept falling off.. (More struts.) #11: Ended up having to use first stage of the launch vehicle to slow down just a bit for the 500m mark. and also had to slow down a bit for the landing. 150t at 20m/s is a hard landing it turns out. #12: Finally on the ground, almost full tanks. Ready to go out and plant a flag to commemorate first eve launch try. No ladders... doh! #13: Launch try 1: everything looks great but quickly realize i need to throttle back if i want to make it to orbit. Waaay back.. Launch try 2: wobbly rocket is wobbly. Launch try 3: apoapsis almost outside the atmosphere Launch try 4: overcorrection.. no chanse. Launch try 5: yey! apoapsis outside the atmosphere, no sign of the periapsis. Launch try 6: perfect launch however periapsis still low inside the atmospere.. #14: Realizing Eve is way to hard. This rocket is not going to make it from only 400m alt starting point. #15: Launch 7: Pointing the pointy end of the rocket towards the orange part of the nav-ball and full throttle. #16: Back to tracking station and clean up the mess.. Realizing that Bob Kerman is now listed as missing in action. Also realizing that I've had no kerbal deaths after 0.21 until now. although that might have been more due to quicksaves than anything else.

I usually use 1 normal clampotron on each craft, as most of my crafts is "tiny". Unless the crafts are bigger than 100t + then it all depends on what I plan to use it for. I had a big modular spacecruiser a couple of saves back, each section was about 150t and i had a massive command craft at the end which was supposed to control the whole thing. there i used 4x tricoupplers (12 normal clampotrons) for the command craft and 4 single clampotrons for each module attached in front of it. So it all depends.. Rarely use jr. or sr.

I'm not sure but i did find a couple of suspects, in your craft file. (part = ladder1_********** & partName = Strut) ? dunno what thats all about.?? However the last one at "line 3827" seems to be a telescopic ladder.. might be the thing your looking for.? @line 2700: PART { part = ladder1_4293268456 partName = Strut pos = 1.006282,1.035774,0.4672698 rot = 0.5078726,0.8614324,6.535396E-07,-6.333856E-07 attRot = 0,0,0,1 mir = 1,1,1 istg = 0 dstg = 0 sidx = -1 sqor = -1 attm = 1 srfN = srfAttach,roverBody_4293269820 EVENTS { } ACTIONS { } } @line 2721: PART { part = ladder1_4293268414 partName = Strut pos = 1.01678,1.2326,0.4748701 rot = -2.980233E-07,5.066396E-07,-1,8.42937E-08 attRot = 0,0,0,1 mir = 1,1,1 istg = 0 dstg = 0 sidx = -1 sqor = -1 attm = 1 srfN = srfAttach,roverBody_4293269820 EVENTS { } ACTIONS { } } @line 3557: PART { part = ladder1_4293267666 partName = Strut pos = 0.7557905,1.034293,0.4762356 rot = 0.7071069,0.7071069,-6.141288E-08,-1.808227E-09 attRot = 0,0,0,1 mir = 1,1,1 istg = 0 dstg = 0 sidx = -1 sqor = -1 attm = 1 srfN = srfAttach,roverBody_4293269820 EVENTS { } ACTIONS { } } @line 3827: PART { part = telescopicLadderBay_4293267442 partName = Part pos = 0.4363301,1.61723,-0.7030039 rot = -2.528811E-07,-0.7071066,1.264406E-07,0.7071069 attRot = 0,0,0.7071067,-0.7071067 mir = 1,1,1 istg = 0 dstg = 0 sidx = -1 sqor = -1 attm = 1 srfN = srfAttach,structuralPanel2_4293269878 EVENTS { } ACTIONS { } MODULE { name = RetractableLadder isEnabled = True StateName = Retracted EVENTS { Extend { active = True guiActive = True guiIcon = Extend Ladder guiName = Extend Ladder category = Extend Ladder guiActiveUnfocused = True unfocusedRange = 4 externalToEVAOnly = True } Retract { active = True guiActive = True guiIcon = Retract Ladder guiName = Retract Ladder category = Retract Ladder guiActiveUnfocused = True unfocusedRange = 4 externalToEVAOnly = True } } ACTIONS { ToggleAction { actionGroup = None } ExtendAction { actionGroup = None } RetractAction { actionGroup = None } } } }

After some random web browsing i found something quite interesting. http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/falcon9.html At the bottom of the page there's a data sheet of the falcon 9 rocket. Not sure if this is the real numbers (lots of "?") but still. The Isp of the stage 1 thrusterblock seems a bit low compared to KSPs numbers (275s - 304s "vac"). ? Slightly lower than the mainsail engine. Is that due to the use of RP-1 (C12H24?), instead of other fuels like pure hydrogen H2? Cheaper overall in large quantities maybe? or just easier to handle? Anyway i found it interesting and thought i'd share it here in this kerbin vs earth thread.

I totally suck at making 3d modeling however i do like custom parts, so today i've been making some custom textures for some stock parts. After some hex editing and a lot of guesswork and a super old version of paint shop pro 5 (1998-ish). I managed to come up with this. "stronger carbon struts" and "a bit stretchier and not so yellow fuel line." Necessity is the mother of all inventions i guess