LameLefty

The shuttle was DESIGNED to reenter gently - in fact, it rarely if ever exceeded about 1.4g at any point in the re-entry profile. It had a wing design, aspect ratio, and wing-loading specified to give a gentle reentry, long cross range and extended glide capability. It had a flight deck design and position on the airframe to minimize crew loads and maximize crew comfort while still affording good visibility for final approach and landing. KSP makes some of this stuff look easy - hey, just plug this cockpit module at the front, stick on some wing panels and bingo: spaceplane! In reality, it's quite a bit harder than that.

Every winged vehicle design has different internal ride characteristics. In fact, it's quite possible to have a winged vehicle with a much rougher ride than the shuttle. Do you want to do the dynamic analysis of each spaceplane design to simulate that accurately? No? Then just enjoy KerbQuake for what it is, or remove it if you don't like it.

That's specific to the U.S. space shuttle system; every other crewed spacecraft that has ever entered the atmosphere has been a ballistic capsule. Although capsules generate some lift and can, to a small degree, adjust their trajectories by rolling around their center of mass during entry, they're basically just falling objects. The ride down is, by all accounts, a lot rougher than it was on a shuttle orbiter.

I'm pretty sure RAPIER engines dV are calculated presuming open-cycle (air-breathing). If you use them with enough intake air in air-breathing mode, the calculations are fine.

You should read the sentence below the big word "DOWNLOAD" - there's good info there. Like this: https://github.com/Mihara/RasterPropMonitor/releases/download/v0.16/RasterPropMonitor.0.16.zip

Considering I finished my junior year in Aerospace Engineering a full quarter century ago this week, I think you're the most qualified person for the job! **** (And considering that until two days ago, I had no idea that there were FAR analysis tools available in the VAB at all, and considering that I've been able to build a number of reasonably functional SSTO spaceplanes already, I think my design intuition is still pretty good )

You're orbiting far too high for your sensors to be effective.

Great to see you still actively developing this awesome mod and adding features. Version 0.4 has become an uber-cool, completely indispensable addition to all my IVA play sessions. Time to upgrade!

Have you tried -90º?

That has been my general approach so far too. What I'm finding, however, is that if i come in belly-up my spaceplanes end up descending to about 35 km or so, then begin to increase altitude again and skip back up to over 40 km ... If I come in steeply, I lose altitude faster than I lose speed and risk structural failure due to aerodynamic loads. I gotta figure out a good happy medium here. Maybe install some B9 spoliers so I can drop altitude and speed faster when i get to that 35 km range ...

I don't think Mihara has to do anything currently. I have the first "fixed" version of MJ (dev v.255) and v.6 of SCANsat and both are working fine with the 0.16 release of RPM.

I used to be an aerospace engineer (it's my undergrad degree). That's basically how I feel, and true to a large extent. Remember, the first planetary missions and even the Voyager Grand Tour trajectories, were all calculated in the 60's and 70's. Yet aerodynamics design was, in most cases, still done using derived constants and tables, verified with wind tunnel data and instrumented flight test. My college senior design project aerodynamics analysis was done with NACA airfoil tables, aircraft performance equations and educated (conservative) estimates. It wasn't until the 80's that supercomputers got fast enough to do decent aerothermal CFD. Being able to do FAR stuff, in more or less real-time, with an excellent approximation of "reality" is still kind of shocking to this 70's/80's kid.

Installed FAR on Friday night and spent all day yesterday trying to fly spaceplanes. Turns out I VASTLY under-estimated the difficulty of landing back at KSC. After re-entry I had overrun KSC by something like 550 km. I managed an unpowered Mach 5+ 180º turn at 35,000 meter (that took almost 70 km) and got myself headed back towards home. I cruised back, bleeding off speed and altitude until I was within about 50 km of KSC, quick saved and began trying to land. It took me about four tries and once I finally managed it, I overran the runway but hey, nothing exploded or broke off so I'm counting it as a win.

Well, with stock aerodynamics, MJ does give pretty good accuracy for parachute landings these days (thanks in no small part to the efforts of contributors like codepoet who worked with Sarbian to fix some long-standing problems). And the current Spaceplane Guidance module does a nice job giving a navball indicator for a simulated ILS glideslope, which is the only way I managed to land on the runway at all.

After finally managing to get a spaceplane into orbit yesterday using stock aerodynamics, I decided to try FAR for the first time. Before I go beat my head into a wall with a new learning curve, are there any tips and tricks to using FAR with the flight controls in MJ? Any settings I can change in MJ itself to improve landing accuracy for ballistic capsules, for instance? Thanks in advance.

Indeed they are. But if you read through the entirety of the ATM thread and his contributions to it, for some of us at least, using the config file he provided causes gray screens in RPM. When I removed his JSI and ASET config files (for RPM and the ALCOR lander module), the gray screens went away. It's probably an OS/graphic card/driver quirk but there you go.

That happened to me whenever I used GreenSkull's RPM config files for ATM. When I removed them, things worked fine.

Ditto. I use the DPAI display and pretty much ignore everything else except my Resources panel if I'm worried about monoprop quantities or electrical charge levels. I fly almost the entire rendezvous with the DPAI. All you really need is right there.

Oh dear Baby Jebus, make this happen gentlemen, please. The future of the Kerbal race depends on it.

Yeah, that's all well and good but as I said earlier, Majiir and the other folks working on Kethane set it up this way for their own definitions of "balance." You can argue about it all you like (this topic comes up about once a month, I'd guess, sometimes more often). But I have yet seen anyone change Majiir's mind about it. So my personal advice to anyone unhappy about it is to tweak their config files to make themselves happy; just don't expect a lot of changes to Kethane any time soon as a result.

Yeah, that's what I said.

The video is impressive. I seriously need to try this - for a guy with a B.S. in aerospace engineering (with a concentration in aerodynamics), the fact that I've never successfully flown a plane in KSP for more than about 10 minutes - and never landed one - is a mite embarrassing. Maybe this will help.

If you add any mod to an existing Career mode save, any new parts show up in the VAB as "grayed out" and unavailable until you go into the R&D Center and unlock them. You will see little numbers over nodes you've already unlocked indicating the number of newly-available parts available in each. Click on those nodes, click on each new part in the list and you'll get a little pop-up asking if you want to research it. Click yes and it will become available. Lather, rinse, repeat ...

Yes, Kethane works in Career mode and all of the parts have been assigned to nodes on the tech tree. No, there are no Science!â„¢ points to be gained from using it (unlike SCANsat, for instance, and a few other scientific part add-on mods).

NVM, found it. In OS X the detailed log file you want is called Player.log and is located in ~/Library/Unity in the user's home directory. Recent versions of OS X make the user's home Library directory invisible, so to access it either use launch Console and access it there, or navigate to it by holding down the Option key and selecting Go from the Finder drop-down menu. Holding down Option will reveal the Library file in the list. Releasing Option will remove it from the list. Anyway, I hope this helps any other Mac players trying to gain insight or who need to supply the log to mod developers looking for quash bugs.