DMagic

Thanks for making this thread, I would add to your rep, but apparently I've given away too much:kiss:. I always like it when people go for simple and efficient crafts instead of needlessly complex vessels that make everything more difficult. This is my little one-Kerbal Minmus lander. It has more than enough to get there and back. I can't remember what the total mass is, but this is my 5-ton payload launcher. I think I can do better though, I made this to demonstrate to someone that their Minmus lander was way too big.

I'm excited to try out this controller when it comes out. I'm glad they didn't just release another 360 controller clone; those are great, but it's clear that some games just don't work with that kind of controller. I'm sure that this controller won't be perfect for every game, but what controller is? One of the best aspects of having built in controller support is the ability to easily change back and forth between different input types. There are quite a few games that are best played with the keyboard/mouse for some parts and a 360 controller for others (GTA, Just Cause, Far Cry 3). So as long as I can do that with this controller I'll be happy.

Oh I've been spreading it, too much apparently (all well deserved), since I've bumped up against the limit a few times. I think that with it being easier to increase our RepPower we should see people move up quite a bit faster.

Managing a lot of crafts from the tracking center would be a lot easier with keyboard shortcuts, especially when deleting several of them. Arrow keys could be used to move up or down the list Enter could default to the 'fly' button Delete could default to the 'recover' or 'end flight' button Both buttons should have confirmation box popups, and maybe those should be mouse only to prevent accidents. It's not exactly a big deal, but I think this would improve the tracking center.

You're killing me with all of these new worlds:(. How many moons does this planet have? I think I spotted at least three.

Detachable wheels and landing systems. If you look closely at the picture above you can still see the attachment points for the wheels and the landing engines. Here's a mid-construction picture.

Does that lander have four engines and four RCS tanks? That is a lot more than necessary for a Moho lander. Here is my Moho lander (the rover was launched separately): It has a single LV-909, a single, double-height fuel tank, and one of the small radial RCS tanks. That was plenty to get from a 100km orbit to the surface and back. If you aren't confident about docking you might need a bit more RCS fuel, but you definitely shouldn't need 400 units. And the 2-man lander can has plenty of torque, that additional reaction wheel probably won't help. The mothership should be fine as long as you can get the intercept setup up decently well. You can always switch to the NERVAs early if you think you are running low on fuel.

This is one is a little old, but it is one of my favorite creations. In fact, I think I might revisit this idea; there are several aspects that I don't like and think could really be improved. It was assembled with eight launches and docked together on the surface of Minmus.

I think the general consensus is that if you have enough control surfaces/reaction wheels you can overcome a mismatch between your CoL and CoM. I've seen shuttle-type design using twenty or so reaction wheels to keep the craft stable despite being very unbalanced. So you should be able to prevent drifting by adding more reaction wheels, but in general it's best to try and keep the CoL and CoM lined up together. From what I've heard it sounds like the SAS system will be tweaked a little in the 0.22 update, so the new version might be a bit better at accommodating unbalanced crafts, we'll have to wait and see.

According to one of C7's blog posts that's how it works. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/entries/612-C7-DevBlog-6-25-2013

Kethane refineries on the Mun or Minmus can be nice, but really I think they are mostly just cool to make. It's not like we have to pay anything, so in a lot of cases it might be easier to just send up more fuel from Kerbin. But mines on other planets can be really useful. Like on one of Jool's moons to act as a base for operations there. Or like I did in my Moho mission to support by stations and bases there. Sending fuel from Kerbin to Moho is a huge amount of trouble, so that Kethane refinery saved a lot of time and effort.

I believe he is referring to Diazo's touchscreen control mod. It's a work in progress, but it looks really interesting.

I agree with this. Engines and fuel are already in a section together, so why shouldn't RCS thrusters and mono fuel be in a section together. That's a good point about how few parts are in the control tab, too.

So did the reputation system change, or are you just explaining how it works here? I don't remember have +5 rep before (or as I like to think of it, the Kerman ring of Reputation; +5 RepPower, +2 Courage, -3 Stupidity), so I assume that something about that calculation has changed. And I kind of like that the green bars have such high requirements to add more. Sure, there are very few people that have more than two bars now, but that will change. And that should be a decent indicator of who really contributes and is involved in the forums.

Thanks. It's a bit weird, I've spent a ton of time going to some planets and almost none going to others. I've only been to Ike once for one of my ion engine landers, I hardly ever go to the Mun, I've sent maybe one orbiter to Dres, and amazingly, only one orbiter to Eve too. Thanks, this is the first time I've made really good use of a gravity assist. And the crawler, I forgot to put up more pictures of that. I only drove it once, from the pad to the VAB then I reversed the order of the pictures for the .gifs. I was going to drive it back to try and get more consistent shots, but KSP crashed just as I was driving it back onto the two raised tracks leading to the pad. I saved it when I drove to the VAB, but I discovered on loading that the weight of the rocket causes some glitch with the crawler. After loading (even after going to the space center and back) the extendable legs get shifted vertically up, which screws up trying to drive, so I had to do it all in one shot. Here's a picture of the underside while Jeb is fixing a broken wheel (this only happened a few times when first driving down the ramp). You can also see the glitch where the extendable pistons don't match up with the truss piece (just left of the broken wheel). And here's a few shots of the naked crawler. There are ten central wheels and twelve outer wheels, these are pushed out using a pair of the Infernal Robotics pistons. Another set of ten pistons are used to jack up the whole thing on the launch pad. The entire rocket/crawler is perfectly stable when these pistons are extended (I can save or timewarp). And, impressively, the entire thing survives being dropped onto the pad during the initial load. The lowest part of the craft gets pushed up so that it is level with the surface of the pad upon loading. This means that those extendable outer legs start out at the same height as the launch pad, so the whole thing, 270 ton rocket and all, just drops down a few meters upon loading. I think the jacks absorb most of the weight, so I never had any wheels or other parts break.

Very cool. I'm glad to see something come of Krag's planetary mod. Does this mean we'll actually get to see it released at some point (I guess that's what 'upcoming' implies)? I look forward to seeing more about this.

After a long night of reminiscing with Bill about all of the planets and moons they’d been to, Jeb went outside to squint really hard at the sky. After a few minutes he leaped up and sprinted back inside. “Bill, did you know there’s another planet up there? How come no one ever told me about this.†“It’s called Eeloo dummy; if you spent less time blowing stuff up you might have noticed it before†Bill replied. “Well, when can we go there? I’ve got some rockets out back ready to go.†Bill paused for a moment, “slow down there, it’s kind of far away, so maybe we should reconnoiter a bit first. You know, send some probes and stuff.†“Well, if we have to. I’ve got some ideas for a new type of probe that I want to try out.†Jeb got to work the next day perfecting his new probe design. But before they could launch anything he had to come up with an answer to that age-old question, how do they get stuff out to the launch pad? This is what he came up with. The crawler is made up of 519 parts and carries the 129 part, 270 ton ‘Discovery Eeloo’ rocket. It’s a little tricky to drive, but it gets the job done. The launcher went off without a hitch. The rocket is a stage-and-a-half design, using four solid rocket boosters with a central liquid fueled engine to take it up to a 250km orbit. Booster and fairing separation went as planned, releasing the interplanetary transfer stage before deorbiting the reusable central booster. After deorbiting, the booster floats down to land near the still-intact crawler. With the probe in a stable orbit it activates its servomotors and deploys its arms. The probe is made up of two primary parts, the lander on top, and the orbiter below that. Solar panels are out of the question because of the distance to the sun, so a few RTGs are used, one on an extendable arm, and two mini versions on the lander probe on top. A large, high-gain antenna on the orbiter is used for communications to Kerbin, there is also a low-gain backup. The MapSat dish will be used to create a surface map of the planet. The lander will use its antenna to relay information back to Kerbin through the orbiter. Here we can see the complex orbital maneuvers necessary to plot an Eeloo intercept. Two burns are planned to intercept Jool and use its gravity to boost the probe into a higher Kerbol orbit. After the Jool flyby another burn is plotted to setup the initial Eeloo intercept. A final burn will then put the probe into a stable orbit around Eeloo. You can see how long the final intercept will take, over five years, a little bit more than one full Eeloo orbit. After a few hundred days in interplanetary space the probe approaches Jool, passing just outside the orbit of Laythe before being flung back out to a more Eeloo-like orbit. After making one more course correction the probe spends five long years in Kerbal orbit before catching up with Eeloo on its next orbit. It makes its initial approach from the dark side of the planet, giving us a shadowy first look at its icy surface. Approaching periapsis the probe begins its complex orbital insertion maneuver. Since no one wanted to be responsible for an accident with the onboard nuclear reactor of the probe’s main engine a plan had to be devised to keep said engine out of Eeloo orbit. After completing the initial ~100m/s burn, the craft was in a nearly stable Eeloo orbit. The nuclear engine was then dropped so that it could escape from Eeloo’s gravitational influence and make a final burn, placing it in a stable Kerbol orbit. Before this the probe had to ignite its main engine to complete the orbital insertion burn, putting it in a 30km orbit at 60o inclination. The small lander was then released. Here the orbital relay makes a final burn, placing it in a 280km orbit where it can begin mapping the surface. After the relay completes its mapping of the planet between ~+/-65o, the lander begins preparations for its two-stage descent. The initial burn is a solid rocket powered kick providing a near-instantaneous 460m/s of delta-v (an acceleration of over 110m/s2!!). The remainder of the descent is undertaken using two small liquid fueled engines. This allows for a nice, gradual descent and a successful landing just south of the northern mountainous region. And that marks the end of the first Eeloo mission. Now maybe we’ll get to a manned mission, or maybe some more probes and stuff, probably a sample return mission. The Jool gravity assist worked amazingly well for this mission. For an ideal encounter with Eeloo around 2100m/s are needed for the transfer burn and another 2100m/s for the capture burn. For me it only required about 2800m/s to get from LKO to a 30km orbit around Eeloo. About 2000m/s were for the Jool intercept, another 500m/s for the Eeloo intercept, and a final 300m/s for the capture burn. Landing took another 900m/s or so, but that was a little bit inefficient because I used the SRBs first, and basically dropped almost straight down after that. And despite how well the crawler worked (I was literally clapping at the screen when the first launched test worked so well) I don’t think I’ll be trying that again. 550 parts makes things a bit sluggish, and I think I spent more time getting pictures for the crawler move than on anything else. The mods used are: Engineer, Procedural Fairings, MapSat, Maneuver Node Improvement, Subassembly Manager, Infernal Robotics, and KW Rocketry (thanks for the blank fuel tank textures). Stay tuned for more soon (or maybe not so soon, but eventually).

Wow, this is a great idea. I should be getting my Surface Pro 2 in a few weeks so I'll test this out on that as soon as I get it. I'm anxious to see how the VAB/SPH controls work when you get to them; in my mind that could be a better way to build than using the keyboard/mouse.

Well, one way of maintaining spin would be to drop the reaction wheels after you've started spinning. Then you wouldn't have to worry about dissipating the energy in the reaction wheels. Of course you also wouldn't be able to steer anymore. Or they could add a way to dump energy (other than balancing it with RCS) from the reaction wheels through either gravity or magnetic fields. But that's probably not a good idea, no one wants to deal with that.

Actually it's not really even close. Iridium flares can be extremely bright, with an apparent magnitude down to -9.5, this is brighter than pretty much anything in the sky except the sun and the moon. Venus can only get to -4.9 and Jupiter to -2.9, which (if I'm calculating this right) means that Iridium flares can be almost 70X brighter than Venus and 430X brighter than Jupiter. I've seen a few in the -5 to -6 range using Iridium tracking apps and they are really impressive, every one should keep an eye out for them. The ISS can get pretty bright too (around -5.6) and you can follow it across the entire sky, unlike the Iridium satellites which only flash for a few seconds.

Well, yeah, of course the moon is brighter than an artificial satellite; it's also a whole lot bigger. And, while you're right that a solar panel would be more efficient if it absorbed most light instead of reflecting so much, it's obvious that they don't do that. I'm guessing that whatever semiconductor layer (or combination of layers) is used has a limited absorption spectrum and so reflects most of the wavelengths that can't knock electrons out of their orbits. And given the low efficiency of most solar panels, they probably reflect most of the photons that do have the right wavelength, too.

To find your TWR (that's weight, not mass, which is an important distinction) you need to multiply the mass of your vessel in tons (from MJ, or the map view, or however else you want to add it up) by the surface gravity. For Kerbin that's 9.8m/s^2, but usually 10 is close enough, so leax256's estimate works fine. Of course, you also have air pressure to contend with, which is why most people try for a launch TWR of somewhere around 2. But anything over 1 will be enough to at least get you moving (just really inefficiently).

As long as you have the right kind of motherboard (Z87 chipset) I don't see why not. There is little risk in moderately overclocking Intel CPUs because all you can really change is the clockspeed multiplier. I guess if you cranked up the voltage too high without sufficient testing or cooling you could fry your CPU or MB, so don't do that. If you are really worried about it you could try increasing the multiplier without changing the voltage. You might be able to get a decent increase doing that, just go slowly and test between each step.

I think MSI Afterburner should work. It has a framerate monitoring function and a logging function, I've just never actually tried using them together. I use the onscreen overlay a lot to monitor framerates and GPU usage (I really only use FRAPS for collecting framerates from runs), I disable it when collecting FRAPS data though.

As far as I understand, the primary function of SAS (there is no ASAS anymore, it's just SAS) is not to kill rotation of a craft at rest (no thrust), but to maintain attitude under thrust. The only time I use it to kill rotation is when I'm docking, and with the improvements in 0.21 you don't have to worry so much about wasting RCS fuel. Sometimes I use timewarp to stop rotation, but that's usually only with really big or unbalanced crafts. I don't consider it cheating or an exploit, but I can see how others would.