Brotoro

OK, but remember, it's still experimental. I only just now remembered to put on a ladder for the pilot (it requires a little jog around the canard with the "a" and "d" keys while climbing). BirdDog1.craft

So, I built my first airplane. I'd like to send it along with my Laythe expedition so they can explore more than one island in some detail. I can fly the thing fairly well...it lifts off quickly and I'm able to land it more or less where I want. You may have noticed the batteries and solar cells on top, and it has two rover wheels on the front. This is because I'd like it to also function as a rover (since driving around the other islands once I get there will allow for more detailed exploration that just buzzing along at low altitude, and I figure roving is safer than repeated take-offs and landings. To become a rover, I retract the front landing gear only, which lowers the two rover wheels to ground level, and then the plane can drive around on electric power. Seems to handle and corner well at 22 m/s with its wide spacing of its rear landing gear (which are used in rover mode). The plane masses about 7 tons fully fueled. So I have questions for you plane experts (since I am certainly not a plane expert): Is this design completely goofy for Laythe? Are there any special considerations to take into account when flying around on Laythe? Is a TurboJet the best engine for Laythe, or would a standard jet engine be better? Are the two radial air scoops sufficient for this ship at Laythe air pressures? How does one typically mount the avionics package? It looks like something that should go on the front, but there didn't seem to be a way to do that, so I mounted it in the vertical tail (with a cubic strut and clipping on). This isn't meant to be a spaceplane, but I will need to drop it into Laythe from orbit. Will I need to add RCS to control it during entry, or will the cockpit torque be sufficient to keep it pointed prograde on into the atmosphere to the point where aerodynamic surfaces can control it? Can I add a probe body to fly the plane? Does it need to be oriented in a certain direction or placed in a certain location in order for the Avionics package to play well with it? Thank you for your input.

There currently is (what I believe is) a bug that keeps the separation force from decouplers from working if you have struts connecting the parts. In lieu of the decoupler force working, you will need to use Sepatron motors to push the jettisoned parts away. Be sure to position the motors so their exhaust flames don't cause damage to the remaining parts of your rocket. I place mine a little ahead of the dropped booster's center of gravity so I get mostly push with a little peel-away rotation.

No, I don't have deadly reentry installed. I just include the plate heat shields as a placeholder for a real heatshield until those become available and necessary. For now I live happily without reentry heat...I expect it will greatly limit our designs when it is implemented. But I would be interested in seeing the results of your experiment.

Ah! Capsules have fuel crossfeed capability...I neve noticed that. Thank you, sir. You are a fount of useful information.

Where do they get their fuel?

Soyuz ...Sort-of I took a break from preparing my armada for its assault on Laythe (lots of docking, refueling, and whatnot) by building a pseudo Soyuz for giggles. The ship is all stock, so it doesn't look all that much like a Soyuz, but I wanted it to at least WORK like a Soyuz. Below are pictures of the rocket on the pad and lifting off. It uses four side boosters, a central sustainer core, and an upper stage like the real Soyuz launcher. The nose cones on the side boosters are tilted inward by mounting them on tilted cubic struts with part clipping enabled. Not pretty, but it works. The real fun of the booster is the engines, of course. The sustainer core and side boosters each have four LV-T45 engines (since the more scale-like LV-909s would not lift the beastie). The sustainer core has four Ant engines placed where the vernier engines go, and the side boosters each have two Ant engines as verniers. Below we see the dropping of the side boosters. The side boosters to not feed fuel into the sustainer core (since that would be unlike the Soyuz launcher), but the sustainer core is longer than the side boosters, so it burns longer. I don't know that the side boosters of the Soyuz launcher use separation rocket motors, but I needed sepratrons to be sure rear end of the sustainer did not go up in a ball of flame at booster separation. The sustainer core burned out, and then the upper stage with one poodleski engine took the spacecraft the rest of the way to orbit. The upper stage placed the Soyuz in a 200 km orbit with fuel to spare. Spasebo, upper stage! You are now orbital debris. Deploy the solar panels, and the Soyuz is ready for orbital operations. Like any self-respecting Soyuz, mine has three components: The Orbital Module in front (with docking port) that provides extra space for the kerbal kosmonauts to do experiments... or to just get away from Jebediah when he's been eating too much borscht; the Reentry Module that can hold two to three kerbals, preferably wearing pressure suits; and the Service Module that has the propulsion systems, solar panels, and other equipment. At the end of our mission, the Soyuz begins reentry by jettisoning the orbital module. Some versions of the Soyuz separated the orbital module before retro firing...other visions retained it until after retro firing. I dumped it so that I'd need less fuel for the retro firing...but it does become another piece of space debris. And...oops... I noticed that I forgot to put on the two 24-77 radial engines I was going to use as for the retro rocket burn. So I brought along that fuel tank for nothing. But fear not, comrades, because the RCS is plenty strong to deorbit this Soyuz. It did take a few minutes of firing and used a third of the RCS fuel, but a reentry trajectory was achieved. Ka-DOOSH! The service module is separated from the reentry module. Reentry flames! The capsule was a bit off balance because I had a parachute on only one side. Like any proper Soyuz, this one came down on land. Ochen horosho! I decided not to use sepatrons as braking motors before touchdown because I figured they'd just make the capsule flop around and potentially kill my brave kosmonauts right at the end of a successful mission.

Sure. Just build your Munar Module rocket starting with a probe body. It will appear on the pad unmanned.

But it says Bill has a dumbness rating of 80%. Why would we want a dumb mayor?

Until the game interface gets fixed, I must have these to keep from going nuts: 1) Maneuver Node Improvement (to reopen those pesky maneuver nodes that collapse) 2) Haystack (to select the ship I really WANT as my target) 3) Subassembly Saver/Loader (to re-use peices parts of ships). PAYLOADER was good for this, too. All the rest are icing.

I am sad that I no longer live in a space-faring nation (we're just a bunch of hitchhikers for now). But the Space Shuttle program went on longer than it should have once it was clear that it was not going to live up to its promises. A follow-on program should have been in the works a couple decades ago... we shouldn't be doing this in fits and starts and delays and confusion. But the Space Shuttle was an impressive technological feat. Just not what we needed to keep using.

Lately I've been trying to make sure everything reenters or crashes, just because that adds to the challenge. And I've been trying to make things as completely reusable as possible, just because it makes things harder as well. But I'm not OCD about it. If something accidentally gets left in orbit, I don't mount major missions to remove it (and then mount major missions to remove the debris accidentally created in THAT mission). That way lies madness. I have no compunction about just removing debris by ending its flight or editing it out of existence. If I smash up a rocket during a test flight and spread debris all over, I just make sure to Restart the flight before Ending it so that its debris never happened. You just imagined it. I do have my debris count set fairly high because I have left various pieces of hardware as "historical markers" at my various landing sites around the Kerbol system, and I don't want those to go away.

I'd show you some of mine, but they occasionally do weird things that I don't understand, like begin to spin near staging, or be strangely uncontrollable during the start of gravity turn, all for no discernible reason. And I say "for no discernible reason" because I can't get the weirdness to repeat reliably. On many flights the behavior is minor or nonexistent...and on other flights the exact same rocket will deviate into weirdness. It makes my brain hurt.

I 've built space stations to be pretty before, with all sorts of solar panels and escape pods and whatnot. But my working station is shown below. I just need: 1) A place to refuel 2) A place to transfer or temporarily hold kerbals 3) A place to temporarily store some vehicle hardware on orbit. The station itself consists of the tank farm of Big Orange Tanks and RCS fuel tanks. There are two kerbal containers. The docking ports are mounted far out to give me plenty of clearance when docking. The station originally had no lights (to save on part count), but when 0.19 came out I added the small lighting rig that is on the end of the far Big Orange Tank (so that at least half of the station is lit up and docking can be done at night if I'm in a hurry). Still connected to the lighting rig is the Mini Tug that moves things around using RCS power. The docking port on the middle left has Clamp-o-tron Junior ports (which I don't intend to use too much anymore) and port adapters that can be grabbed by the Mini Tug or other ships so that their full-size docking ports could be used to dock to Juniors if needed. Three RTGs supply the station's power needs (which are very minimal). There are two ships docked there that aren't part of the station proper. On top is the 7-kerbal Crew Carrier SSTO that transfers crew up and down from Kerbin. On the right is a standard Nuclear Tug that currently has a crew module attached to the front (and is used to transfer kerbels six at a time to the Mün or Minmus where they can transfer to landers or such). Reusable Refueler ships would typically dock at the underside port to resupply the station.

I wasn't intending to take time hunting easter eggs. It was just an endurance test of the equipment that I wanted to finish as fast as possible. A lot of the time I wasn't even paying much attention to the scenery as the rover was driving along (I was reading a book or doing other things)... I could have driven right past several easter eggs and not noticed them.

The Maneuver Node Improvement mod (mentioned above) and the Haystack mod (which helps you select the ship you WANT as your target) have saved me from lots of frustration.

I'm sure it will be fixed eventually (it needs to be), but in the meantime to prevent you from pulling out all your hair, I highly recommend the Maneuver Node Improvement mod. I've seen a couple people mention this mod in YouTube videos, but they seem to have missed one of its most important features: Pressing the "o" key will open a maneuver node back up after it just collapsed. And, I love the ease with which you can switch conic draw modes on the fly with this mod.

A disadvantage of the aerospike is that it is not a thrust-vectoring motor.

You mean little rocket engines? Sure, that could do it.

Yes. In general you get better handling at higher gravity. I originally designed this particular rover for use on Eve (so that I could move a kerbal from the lakeshore lowlands to a highland area for lander ascent), and it works great there. The rover tends to spin its wheels a lot on Minmus and get poor traction, but some downward-thrusting RCS was very helpful in getting the rover to go uphill on Minmus by providing improved traction...but that's not a great solution because the RCS fuel is a limited consumable. A full set of RCS thrusters was also very helpful to me on Minmus when this rover really got airborne once... But the thrusters are pretty much useless by the time gravity gets as strong as Duna's.

Oh... I removed the MechJeb parts from those ship files so they would be stock... but I always use MechJeb to target those ships in for a landing at KSC, which would be a real pain otherwise. I have not figured out a way to get MechJeb to fly those ships on boost. It keeps wanting to fire all the motors all the time.

Here is the link to the craft file for the Single Kerbal version. But it is the version that has probe body control...since it's safer to try learning how to fly it without kerbals on board. And here is the craft file for the 3-kerbal Crew Carrier. Again, this is the probe body controlled version. I'm mostly a vanilla sort of guy, using few mod parts (except to try out cool features that wouldn't otherwise be possible, like using the Damed Robotics hinges for my folding rover). The little bit of extra oxidizer that ends up in these SSTOs is more of a nuisance than a real problem.

Fairing Factory A couple people (such as ThatBum above) have suggested that I try out Fairing Factory to make an aerodynamic shroud to cover my Folding Fido... so I gave it a try. The interface of the Web page for making the fairings was pretty straightforward, but it took me a couple iterations to get the fairing the correct size (and even then it wasn't perfect because I had to mount it a little lower than I intended, since the base piece had to go BELOW the coupler for the second stage...otherwise it produces no thrust; I found this out the embarrassing hard way). Also, the fairing is a bit larger than necessary (and covers the heat shield that is also a bit larger than necessary... but that was lucky since everything was able to still fit after I needed to position the fairing a bit lower. There weren't any instructions available (since the instructions were just a link to a KSP Forum thread that had evaporated in the recent Great Forum Wipeout). I dropped the .dll file and parts folders for the fairing in the appropriate KSP folders and the parts showed up in my Structural tab... but couldn't figure out how to mount the fairings on the rocket. After several stumbles, I finally noticed the 2-meter base piece that was also now in with the Structural parts, and I was able to connect everything. Below is the rocket on the launch pad as it first appears. You'll notice that the Fido's wheels (which have not been folded yet) stick out through the thankfully insubstantial fairing. I used the 7 and 9 keys to fold up the wheels. I could zoom in a get a clipped view inside the fairing to see that the wheels were folded in the correct position. Below is a picture of the liftoff. The rocket looks a lot like a Rocket Propelled Grenade...but it DOES look more aerodynamic. I guess I should have added nose cones to the tops of the boosters instead of leaving them embarrassingly flat. Of course, the fairing is there for aesthetic reasons only; it does not reduce drag in the current version of the program (and it does add weight). But it's there to be pretty. Admire it. Go ahead and complement it on its looks; fairings like to have their self confidence bolstered, too, you know. The rocket I'm using is my Reusable Rocket that has all of its parts recovered at the KSC. Below we see the side boosters dropping off at 18,000 meters, and then the sustainer can start a belated gravity turn. This is not an efficient trajectory, but fuel is cheap compared to rocket hardware. (Yes, I know those boosters will despawn before they land, but if you were to follow them down they do indeed land safely on KSC property). Once the initial turnover was complete and the rocket was above most of the atmosphere (at around 45,000 meters), I jettisoned the fairing. As you can see in the image sequence below, the separation leaves a bit to be desired. The fairing halves don't blow away far enough, and they go scraping down the side of the rocket. Luckily the interaction with these ghostly parts has no negative effect on the rocket (other than maybe sending a chill down its spine). The departure of the fairing also reveals the upper stage that will boost the Fido to the Mün, which was covered by the lower part of the fairing. Below, the rocket has achieved a stable 120-km orbit and the sustainer separates. (The sustainer will go on to retro fire and return to a landing at the KSC; this mission has left plenty of fuel in the sustainer's tanks that it will be able to do a landing on its rocket flame and not need its parachutes.) Meanwhile, the Poodle engine of the upper stage will push the Fido off to the Mün. Here we see the upper stage firing again to put the Fido into Münar orbit ("Münar orbit insertion? Moi?"). I did the burn somewhat early just for the photo op of having Kerbin in the background. I presume NASA does not necessarily time their orbital burns specifically to allow for good pictures. Because the far side of the Mün was illuminated, I decided to land near the mouth of the big canyon that juts off the large Mare on that side. The upper stage engine was fired one last time to do the initial deorbit burn (so that it would crash), and then the Fido and sky crane separated. Below we see the Fido coming in along the canyon. The heat shield (useless over the airless Mün) has been jettisoned and can be seen heading off for its own impact. The next picture shows the Fido just after touchdown as the separated sky crane heads back up under very low thrust. And the Fido is off to explore the canyon! Driving is certainly easier on the Mün than on Minmus. I was surprised at how hilly the terrain was outside the entrance of the canyon (I couldn't even see the mouth of the canyon from the landing site because of intervening ridges). Note that this version of the Folding Fido has two single-kerbal capsules, but this was an unkerballed mission. After I was driving along for a few minutes, I heard the (rather obnoxious) noise of the little 24-77 engines of the sky crane. Uh oh...it was coming back in for impact, and was close enough to hear (not that you should be able to hear it on the airless Mün... but there's no uses screaming about that, since nobody will hear that in Space either). I zoomed out and panned around, and I was able to snap the picture below of the sky crane impacting over half a kilometer away. The Fido is the little thing in the center of the picture. I was generally driving along at about 22 m/s... slower uphill, faster downhill. I jacked up the chassis a little so that I could safely use 2x time warp while driving. Note that you aren't offered the option of using physical time warp on the Mün as you are on Kerbin or Eve, but you can force physical time warp by pressing the Alt and > keys. After several minutes of driving, I topped the last ridge and got a clear view of the canyon. I was a bit disappointed that I didn't see Scott Manley's Mün truck coming along hauling his moonbase structures to their new location...but you can't have everything. Brotoro's KSP Web Pages.

Perhaps you saw the base of the Neil Armstrong monument?

FRANK is one bad-ass robot. I like the original video where he gets revealed a little at a time.