capi3101

One for the road - Geschosskopf's got a good tutorial on planning for science, link's here. What techs exactly have you unlocked? We can work with that and help you build a better lander system; your original lander design would've been light on what it needed for a successful landing and return as it was, looking at your screenies. You can also build radially without adding decouplers - I should mention that. One of my early designs using demo-level tech. You can build a booster like this without necessarily having fuel lines (if you don't have those yet), though whether it'll get you into orbit is another matter. Concerns me a bit that you have orange tanks already but no solar panels...unless you were building that design in the sandbox; that would make sense (its not that you don't have panels, you just aren't using them).

I think I'll vote for mine on top. It looks like it could use the help... No, seriously - I'll abstain from the first round of voting. I've enjoyed the competition so far.

Alright - tonight I tried a test water landing on Kerbin. Chute deployment went well and I had a nice, cushioned landing at 3 m/s. No parts fell off at splashdown. Chute ejection went as normal. On take off, however, the rocket promptly did a couple of loops and went right into the drink. It was almost like I had lost an engine somewhere along the line. The new tweaks may have given me the delta-V I need, but I notice that it's now nearly impossible to steer. Common problem with the Aerospike, I know. Anybody have a suggestion on how to correct it?

Red Iron Crown's got it down - to improve delta-V, you want to either add more fuel, reduce the dead mass (by eliminating unnecessary parts and/or staging), or use more efficient engines. Which method you use is your choice, really. For asparagus: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/28248-Is-asparagus-the-best-staging-system-%28might-contain-science%29?p=346702&viewfull=1#post346702 That post is old, but asparagus remains the most efficient staging method in KSP and Temstar's principles still apply (mind you that some find his engine solutions overly complex; I am not one of those individuals). Delta-V is delta-V; TWR does not factor into it. Now, TWR does measure how well your rocket can lift itself, and you can lose delta-V to either gravity (if the TWR is too low) or drag if it's (too high), so TWR is of some importance when you're launching. Ideally you want your TWR in flight around 2.2 and in practice that means the stage's initial TWR should be somewhere around 1.6 or 1.7 (it'll get to that "sweet spot" as it flies). In general, bottom minimum TWR you want is 1.2; below that the gravity losses become substantial.

The water, eh? Didn't consider that...definitely something for tonight's tests. Might make it a bit difficult to plant a flag...

I figured the problem was not enough lander legs, though I was hopeful when the craft came up on the launchpad and the legs I had on it held up the ship without it breaking anything. Decoupling the chutes and legs is definitely part of the plan, along with anything else I don't absolutely absolutely hafta hafta need for the ascent. Since I use KAS, the notion occurred to me to just have Jeb grab the ladders and drop them off the ship as he went back up. I know he can do that with the smaller extendable ladder; don't know about the big one off the top of my head. Was disappointed to find docking ports not included in things that could be stowed in KAS containers. 500 tonne figure...the ascender is something like 395 tonnes or so and I've got twelve of those ejectable parachute packs I'm using on there; those come in at seven tonnes a pop, thus around 85 tonnes of parachuting equipment. I dunno how much the lander leg system is going to add to the mass of the ship yet; right now it's sitting at 24 LT-2 lander legs on the end of long I-Beams. I also have six of the long unboxed solar panels sitting on TT-38K decouplers for the flight from Kerbin to Eve; I should be able to ditch those during the descent. 500 tonnes is an estimate, but a close one. 500 tonnes on 24 legs...that works out to just short of 21 tonnes per leg. Seems a bit much, doesn't it? Maybe I oughta look into doubling it to 48 legs. Distribution will also be important, I imagine.

Five times the size of the shuttle, eh? Are you talking about in terms of mass, volume or both? A 342.5 tonne spaceplane would definitely be larger than anything I've ever seen in the game (largest spaceplane I've ever built that was successful was about seventy tonnes, ever so slightly more massive than the STS orbiter by itself). Constructing something like that might be possible - but to get it to haul whole stations into orbit, you'll need mods. There's the one that does include cargobays...I don't recall which one it is off the top of my head. I want to say B9 but don't quote me on that. Somebody along the line might also suggest FAR; I think with the mass you're talking about it might be a wise investment (stock KSP calculates drag based on mass instead of cross-section).

Well...I'm going with a Lander Can, so that's not particularly helpful, but thank you anyway.

Launched my Gilly mission for science. Docked up with the transfer stage and did the Eve transfer burn. Got an encounter but it's not as close as I'd like; will try the correction burn and Eve intercept tonight if possible.

Lander legs are starting to give me headaches - I've finally got the chute sequencing down to where they won't rip off, but landing at 3.5 m/s and still breaking stuff is getting on my nerves. Anybody got any suggestions for how handle that? My design oughta weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of five hundred tonnes when it reaches the surface unless I'm mistaken - I should pay attention to that in the next set of tests.

^^^ My first instinct is to suggest KAS - I'll have to look to see if docking ports are among the pieces that can be stored in containers. If so, you could rendezvous your return craft with the bit that was left, stick a docking port (and maybe a chute) on it, and fly it back to Kerbin. If docking ports can be stowed, that might be an adjustment I want to make to my own design. In any case, congrats on making the ascent; I hope to be able to report success myself in the near future.

^^^ I should mention that I tried to do that very thing last night - take a chute and stick it on a Kerbal's back - in order to do some base jumping off the VAB. Didn't work. Jeb had an annoying tendency to drop the chute. Probably had something to do with its mass or something. Might've worked for an orbital skydive, base jumping not necessarily so much.

My own mission plan goes something like this: 1) Launch a series of four Barn Burners and dock them to a Thunderbolt in orbit. A Barn Burner is 2.5 Jumbo 64s equivalent, while a Thunderbolt is essentially a nuclear thruster pack. Test it for delta-V before sending it on to Eve. Include a return stage adapter with the Barn Burner train; this will include a KAS container with a chute or two for the lander's command pod. 2) Using TAC to balance the tanks and override the fuel lines, launch the lander from Kerbin and send it on to Eve under its own power. Lock staging before I launch. 3) Rendezvous the lander and the Barn Burners in Eve orbit. Refuel and land. Unlock the staging before Eve entry. 4) Using Crew Manifest, transfer Jeb from the central stack command pod to another command pod closer to the bottom of the craft. Have him climb down from there. Plant a flag and do the usual business. 5) Have Jeb climb aboard, use Crew Manifest to transfer him to the central stack command pod. Make sure he's there before proceeding. 6) Ditch chutes, side command pods and solar panels. Take off and ditch lander legs. 7) Ascend to orbit. 8) Send return stage to rendezvous with the command pod once orbit is acheived. Jeb climbs out and affixes chutes. 9) Return to Kerbin.

^^^ You're going to come up short on TWR; it's the LV-909 stage that'll get you. Your TWR at that point with the load you've described on top of it, assuming an OKTO2 probe core, is 0.928. Design overall has 11,355 m/s as written. I'd humbly suggest that you replace the LV-909 with a combination of an 48-7S and a pair of 24-77s. It'd improve the TWR of that stage to 1.29 and give a small but noticeable boost to TWR to all downstream stages (your central stack is below 1.2), and it will only cost you 4 m/s of delta-V. Wiki says you need 11,282 to take off from the ocean, so you should have enough delta-V that you can spare that amount. Rest of the craft has TWR comfortably above 1.5.

Ouch. I don't suppose you're judging by "low score wins"... See my score above. I then kindly invite you to take a trip out to Lake Quicchabichin. No offense intended.

Day 4: Yesterday I had a thought - it was a pretty simple question I asked myself, actually. "Where do I need the most thrust?" Well, the answer to that is obvious to anybody who designs rockets; you need it at the bottom, right at launch. So, it occurred to me that where I needed the thrust my Skipjack cluster offered was at the beginning - in the outboard boosters. So I rebuild the ship entirely; I added Red Iron Crown's final stage suggestion, put the asparagus back together strictly with TT-70s, put aerospike clusters center and inboard and Skipjacks outboard, set KER to Eve Atmospheric and this happened: Looks like I'm finally there. The TWRs are a little low but as long as they're above 1.2 I should be golden. So now that I know I can get the ship up, it was time for me to worry about how to get it down intact. Impact and chute testing. Lots of this going on: I did learn a lot about how I should approach the final landing. I was ripping chutes off with the full load on Kerbin, so I can be pretty much guaranteed to need to be burning when the chutes open (drogues, then main chute sequence). Chute ejection went better today; reaiming in the Sepratrons did the trick. It did occur to me later that I probably should not stage the chutes in the same stage as the lander legs... Getting a good set of lander legs is also going to be a concern - here's what I have so far. That might hold, though it is a bit flimsy. I had a thought on how I was going to get Jeb out of the can when the time came - it'd involve mods so it's kinda cheatsy, but it would save me from having to build a convoluted ladder system that might or might not work. Yep. All so far is going exactly to plan...

My wife is encouraging me to abstain from the voting, on account of the sheer number of entrants and the fact that I haven't got time to test fly them all. Does seem a might fairer than selecting winners with a deck of cards...

Totally. Or see cantab's answer Today I tweaked my Laythe SSTO a bit so she'd hold her trim better. Still not getting better than 15 degrees AoA out of her, so I'm thinking more tweaks are going to be necessary. Tweaked my Eve lander to 12,000 m/s delta V and greater than 1.2 TWR through all stages. Began chute and impact testing.

^^^ There's the marvelous little mod out there called Kerbal Attachment System - among other things you can do with it, you can store small items (such as chutes) for Kerbals to grab in flight. It can then be activated in flight; the Kerbal will not let go of it. I have KAS, though I have yet to try any Kerbal base jumping yet.

That's Kerbal Engineer Redux if you're interested. In the stock game you are limited to having to manually calculate your weight as you go (actually, as you go along you can hold down your assembly with launch clamps and occasionally take it out to the runway to see how you're doing in mass - just go to the map and hit the knowledge tab to have it tell you your mass; not exactly an optimal solution but it should help).

Yeah - there were a lot of "damaged by" entries - a lot of them. I just kinda skimmed through them all, didn't notice the big one if it was there. I suppose it probably overheated and exploded. I might try having the inboard stacks shoot off an an angle that still gets them clear of the central stack without necessarily having the engine fire shooting right into the central stack.

Don't know if I did or not - I just pulled the last stage off the proofing payload by the decoupler, added the extra equipment and then stuck it back on. The game does have an annoying habit of jacking up asparagus when you go to make changes, so I'll give it another shot. An idea what might have happened with the chutes?

Last night's frivolities - I only had about twenty minutes in which to do anything, but I did get a few things done. First, for some reason I hadn't saved the changes from the night before, which was aggravating - the big loss being the outer tank TT-70s. I'll be fixing that one in the near future. Meantime I went ahead and did a launch with aerospike clusters centerline and outboard (and again, for some reason I don't have a screenie - the combination gave me slightly lower TWRs, about another 300 m/s of delta-V, and worse steering authority). Lost an engine again due to the reverting of the TT-70s to TT-38Ks. Somehow that configuration didn't perform as well as the initial one. I think it was due to some bad piloting on my part (on account of an engine getting knocked off, on account of TT-38Ks instead of TT-70s again). I'll replace the decouplers and try again when I can. I did go ahead and try adding a small final stage - on my proofing payload, I added an FL-T100 and a 48-7S, another .6 tonnes of mass or so. Knocked the total delta-V down to about 8,000. So no. Other big thing for the night was the testing of the parachute ejection system I'd worked up before on the actual ship: Worked well except for one slight detail... That would be the center stack disintegrating and the proofing payload falling to its doom. Some kind of collision going on with the central X200-32. Going to have to look into how that's happening. Meantime, what do you all thing of the chute setup? This is the same one for which I calculated my numbers yesterday. Still haven't begun approaching lander legs. Still leaning towards I-beams, honestly. Tonight I'll try a launch with just aerospikes. Going to have to figure out how to steer with that; I've had problems with the spikes on that score before.

First iteration of the plane... I didn't do a full ascent on account of there being other things I wanted to get accomplished in the game last night. I was just amazed it made it off the runway on the first go without careening off to one side or flying straight into the drink - empennage helps. The CoL is still too far back, though; had to sit there holding the S key the whole time. It never did do better than 20 degrees of AoA, either, which means I'll need to add either more wings and/or more thrust at some point. But it's a start. EDIT: I say it never did better than 20 degrees AoA - my screenie looks like I've got 15...

Hmm......was the design supposed to be able to dock? I don't necessarily remember that being a function of the Aeris. If so, that's pretty much it for the Auk then, isn't it?