HoY

There's another problem with the control surfaces. Take them off the outer boosters and install them in 6-way symmetry at the base of the center stack. Like the others said, not canards. With the outer boosters so far from the CoM, the location of those winglets gives them extra torque, and after your first stage is dropped you lose part of the control you had from those winglets. It also causes the remaining winglets to have non symmetrical control forces applied to the rest of the rocket. With them in the center you maintain the same control for your entire ascent until your above the thick atmosphere.

Climber, I'm not sure what you consider a lot of dV, but I don't consider a couple meters per second that much You must be referring to altering your orbital inclination after you've already circularized, in which case I agree with you on that. However, to use the word again, that is not a very efficient way to set an inclination at all. The best time to set an inclination in the game right now is as far away as possible. Using mechjeb that can be up to two soi changes away from your current location, at a cost of a mere meter per second of deltaV, however even if you wait until you enter it's SOI it is still magnitudes more efficient to change your inclination from here than while your actually in orbit. John, yes that is So much more streamlined! The one and only thing I can think of taking off by looking at the picture is this; (well its more than one thing) remove jets (all of them) Remove the mk2 adapter fuel can you have installed in the center and mount the engine back in the center directly to the stack decoupler. Next mount 2 engines under each of the 1.25m fuel tanks but with the cubic struts using the engine clustering technique. Bringing your total engine count to 5 instead of 7. Run a fuel line from each of the two 1.25m jet fuel tanks to the center engine. You'll need to just relocate those pylons with the intakes to attach to the outer jet tanks, not a big deal. Skorpychan: your description of the problem leads me to believe your doing a regular rocket only type ascent. With jet engines that's far from ideal.

Well, if you want to do a full scan of Any body you need to be in a near polar orbit. ISA mapsat and Kethane, and any other scanning satellite mods require this because unless you are in an orbit like that you literally will Not pass over most of the surface. You know inclination changes are extremely cheap from farther away right? You can even change from a pro-grade to retrograde orbit for just a meter per second or less if you do it from far enough away. All it takes is a little planning tho planning from that far away isn't as easy it is definitely worth the effort if you want anything other than an equatorial prograde orbit.

Ok your only scanning around the equator that's a completely different thing all together. Most people scan the entire planet. As for fuel used to get into a near polar orbit, it costs an extra 30-50m/s to adjust your target inclination when you first arrive in the SOI of the planet or moon, then after that you may need to spend a couple hundred more once your circular if you didn't line yourself up to be in full sunlight. Enough discussing orbits tho, we both use different styles and you use multi purpose crafts for scanning, not dedicated scanning satellites. That's much different. Yes, the scanners have been changed to not waste power on already scanned hexes, and up till 2 weeks ago the map was Much much different.

No I mean efficient. Efficient as in mass the RTG adds compared to the amount of power it puts out. Also efficient referring to the amount if extra fuel you save by using lighter power supply's. on a large craft it's not such a big deal but a satellite that is tight on fuel to start with you can gain or lose 100m/s worth of deltaV just by switching from an RTG to a single panel setup. Even more potentially if its small enough. Also, I think the RTG might work a little better now that the Kethane scanners work differently but I haven't tested that yet. And, like I said, there is no night when orbiting the planet along the terminator. Only dark during an eclipse, and its not hard to get an orbit here at all!

It WILL work , except the power will drain off at time warp and make little glitches in the scan resolution. With 2 RTG's it won't be as often, but its still not an ideal solution for an efficient build, as 2 RTG's weigh a whole lot more than even one solar panel that puts out 2.0 per second against the two RTG's 1.5 per second. Don't get me wrong I Love RTG's! But for ultralight builds or where every ounce of fuel counts they are simply too heavy, and don't give enough power to rely on a single one.

Power generation parts like RTG's would be extremely simple to add to something since all you need is the model of it stuck on, and to add full time electrical current of +45 per minute. Solar panels and other parts with animations would be extremely difficult I agree with you on that.

Climber an RTG won't power a small Kethane scanner properly. Both because the scanner uses more power than it puts out, And because the RTG doesn't work properly at time warp. John, you can ditch ALL of those batteries and use ONE z100 radially mounted battery and one RTG mounted on opposite sides from each other, and then 2 1x6 extending solar panels. This will save you SOO much mass you'll be able to drop a huge pile of fuel. The secret to running your scanner on the dark side of a planet or moon is this you don't!! Simply orbit the body near or on the day/night terminator. Now you have solar power full time. The RTG is just onboard in case you get eclipsed or have your panels closed when your batterie dies. You also have a command pod on the nose of this thing, would be more efficient as unmanned, and more humane lol.

Because the map interface has been completely revamped, Kethane deposits are shown on the actual game map view instead of its own window

You could try pressing V to change the camera's follow method, depending on which your using EVA can be extremely terrible.

SleepingDragon your using an old version of Kethane

You seem to be getting the 'less is more' thing down, you can shave off more mass by switching to all the 0.625m stack decouplers instead of the larger ones. I think you could also get away with moving your jets to directly under the lower most fl-t800's, similarly placed like mine are on thenhexagonal strut with the intakes mashed into it, on a little decoupler. Use 2 cubic struts to either place the two engines under a single fuel tank, or what I think would work even better is switching to a 3 engine setup with only 2 fuel tanks instead of 4 engines and 4 tanks. With the other mass you can potentially shave off up top (what exactly you need 12km/s of fuel for is your business) There are a few other things that would work, unless your satisfied with this design in which case all is well, and it seems to work for you nicely First and foremost, to can ditch Half of those intakes simply by using an action group to shut down 2 of the engines when you get into thinner air. When your already going horizontal you don't need a twr much higher than 1 to keep it going. My Firebat that I posted on page 1 shuts all but a single engine off to get the most use out of the intakes.

1 kerbal is 0.079t, the equivelant of 4x of the radially mounted z400 batteries. I place 4 of those batteries on the chair for calculating dV and it should work with balance calculations in a situation like this

Excellent! How much extra jet fuel do you have when you get circularized?

You can't knock it out of orbit from that altitude. It would need to have its PE down below 67km before drag would start to bleed some speed off. Even 67 km would stay stable for a long long time. You really start to bleed off speed down below 55km.

Those look amazing, but can I ask why you didn't just make them With the engine build in? A radially mounted LVN or dual LVN would be a nice single part Models look awesome!!

Ahh ok, so just copying the changes into the cfg for the smaller one, and changing the efficiency to be inline with the smaller part would be very simple.

It shouldn't be too hard to modify the converter to make the fuels you need. There's a manual I think linked in the first post on how to use this to make different resources, tho I don't think LOX would be one of the things kethane should convert into, not until the next update when you'll be able to 'mine' liquid water. Actually it might be a simple name change in the part.cfg for the converter, since that mod doesn't use most of these fuel types does it?

That Looks like what he means, what about another one that just has 4 points on it but not having them right at the edge. I mean, so that the 4 engines won't stick out past the 2.5m tank. Basically a 2.5m to 4x1.25m adapter plate. Kspx has one and it looks great its just a little large and they stick out past the 2.5m tank.

That sounds good and yeah, for every meter per second you pack on your upper stage it costs an extra 6 or 8 meters per second worth of fuel on the stsge below it, and that stage costs similarly extra on the stage below it. so on and so forth. and you lose more to gravity due to lower TWR. Is that 52t including all the jet engines and jet fuel? Or is that the craft after it sheds the jet stages completely? You should be able to lift that with half that number of jet engines, tho it will be slow for the first little bit. Half the engines, half the jet fuel, but keep the intakes if you have a place for them or don't mind part clipping. Could be off my tree here, but what I'm saying makes sense in my head. Not home to double check however. Will 896kn lift 50t off the pad? I don't know the math for that calculation but when I think about it in terms of rocket engines with the same thrust it seems to me that it should work just fine.

Ok after several hours of redesigning the launch platform for a very nice ascent, I somehow managed to circularize at the right time to just burn and intercept Jool, AND I got a 150m/s free kick towards it by our closest satellite, Mun. Unfortunately the kraken is also onboard, causing random explosions when reloading the mission, I suspect it might be the lazor plugin, so im going to try it after removing that. (No docking ports on this ship anyway) Mission will be live again at the same time tonight, 8pm pacific (13 hours from now)

Under the aerodynamic tab, install a Ram intake. It's black with little blue bits in the grill.

No reason to use regular jets whatsoever. They only get another 8kn of thrust on the pad than the turbojets and they only go down from there (they are 120kn aren't they? I'm not positive anymore as I never use them) If you don't want to watch the 5-10 min section of the stream I linked, here's the secret. For a non Reuseable hybrid. It's only slightly different for Reuseable but anyway. Intakes over engines. If you want to get into space as efficiently as possible your absolute best (cheaty) way is to have 40-45 intakes per engine that you want to use over 40km. In the build I ended up using I had 2 jets and nowhere to install a jet in the center stack that I would be able to drop, that means I needed 40 intakes Per engine. Launch vertically, perform a very shallow turn at about 13km and level out gradually at about 25km. Stay nearly horizontal from 25km and only lift your nose up a few degrees if your vertical speed starts to drop below 50m/s. remember the name of the game here is to build up Horizontal speed, and inside the atmosphere a craft with the right twr in jets alone wont need to activate a rocket till its out of the atmosphere. In my example I held this course (using mechjeb) until my apoapsis was at 80km, and periapsis was 10km. That's technically in orbit, tho not a stable one because it will come back into the atmosphere. With a little bit of extra flight tweaking its possibly to get the same apoapsis and a periapsis of around 30km, but as you can see by the time stamp on th video, this has already taken 3.5 hours of designing and failed launches so the extra 20m/s I could have saved was justly sacrificed. If you look closely you'll see that in using MechJeb's prevent jet flameout option as well, that will keep my engines throttled down just enough to not flameout as the air gets thin. This is doable by hand, but in all honestly I couldn't be bothered last night haha.

That auto stage thing is reportedly fixed in the last couple of dev builds. Look at the first post to get a link to the latest dev build (build 69) and there is now an ascent guidance specific autostage, as well as a global autostage and global autostage Once option, in the Utility window

here, watch this from time 3 hours 39 minutes onward for this launch. that was my most perfect launch with jets ever lol. http://www.twitch.tv/hoyin1600p/b/426419176 The first hour right before that time is all pretty much failed launches because I was still tweaking the launch stage, spent way too much time on it >.< everything after it was the trip to Tylo If you also note, the launch went so well for me that my burn for Jool was Directly following circularization, AND I got a free 150m/s kick in the Right direction from Mun