capi3101

I use Kerbal Engineer Redux; folks also use MechJeb. Before KER, I did stuff by hand, and still do when I'm bored at work. Aerobraking tips: quicksave when you enter your target world's SOI. You will probably screw it up the first time in. Aerobraking is largely a guessing game; too high and you fly out into interplanetary space, too low and you're liable to go lithobraking. I don't have a comprehensive chart in front of me at the moment for good aerobraking altitudes......IIRC (and this is off of memory, mind you), Eve's about 72,000 for aerobraking and Duna is just 15k. Basic principle is the same though; just get your periapsis down to that height and let the atmosphere do the rest. If you have to burn at all to get captured, you've done it wrong...whole reason why my first two Duna missions failed.

For Mun and Minmus, look straight down at Kerbin (i.e. have the north pole facing you). Then rotate the camera so your target world is at about 100 degrees from the top of the screen (about 3:30-ish). You want to set your maneuver node at Kerbin's six-o-clock position, then plan a prograde thrust until you get an orbit. For Minmus in particular, you may have to plan a correction burn at the ascending/descending node to get an intercept. For the other worlds, try http://ksp.olex.biz/

No new screenshots for y'all today but I figured I'd give a quick update. Last night I got the Mission board with the Location Cards and Action Card Deck implemented; it works as intended. I also added the first of the player hands in the game and made several essential tweaks. At this point, I need to get the stat trackers into the VAB, add the "Whack" button to the interface, duplicate the VABs and Hands add then add player sides to the hands (so that other players can't look at their opponent's hand). At that point, the mod will be ready to go. I'll just need to finish typing up the rules and it'll be ready for playtesting.

Really? I'll have to try that...I've been deliberately avoiding sticking anything under an LV-N for fear of the fairings... There's also some way to shut off the fairings in their configuration file; I forget how.

Had a good day in KSP. Redesigned the booster for my Barn Burner Superheavy 7 and was finally able to get it up without UVDs or cannibalizing the payload's fuel. The booster had just enough fuel to get it into an 80k orbit, drop the payload, and burn to de-orbit (I ordinarily put stuff down to 1700 m/s for deorbit; she had just enough fuel to get down to 2100 m/s but that's enough of course). Went ahead and docked the Burner to Typhon 1a; the KER computer insists that by doing that it's available delta-V went down. My calculations suggest it went up by about 2,000 m/s. I do have to wonder where the design's "tipping point" is; I may not be using it to go to Moho after all. Might make a hell of a Jool refueling depot though. Finished setting up my ILS for the runway. I went ahead and modded the Hellhound rover I used to set out the first three markers to carry "dropboxes"; just QBE probes with solar panels on each side, attached by a small stack decoupler to BZ-52s hung off the back end. Used it to set out the 10k, 15k, 20k, and 25k marks (stopping to re-label each one as a base, then targeting the one I dropped when I moved on to the next mark). I included a KER flight computer to help keep things lined up within one ten-thousandth of a degree (latitude, of course, since it's an east-west runway). Went ahead and set the rover itself out at 30k and made it the 30k marker (if I hadn't already earned my ground transport instrument for Kerbin, I would've last night). Tried the system out with a Ravenspear Mk4 after I finished docking the Barn Burner (so I'd have some daylight for the trial run); it worked for the alignment. Unfortunately, I still need to learn how to pilot spaceplanes; lithobraked just short of the runway. At least I was aligned properly...and didn't take out the 0k marker in the process...... Today, I plan to finally launch the Castle Romeo mission. I should have a working booster at this point. Hopefully I also have a working lander...

Nukes (also called "LV-N" in the game; NERVA on the boards occasionally) are definitely how you want to go; they have over twice the Isp of any other engine in space (aside from ion thrusters, which, as Scott Manley puts it, have about as much thrust "as a mouse fart"). As far as how many, that's another matter altogether. It's going to be a matter of how massive your payload is. Nukes only put out 60 kN thrust at full power, so unless you're going with something light, you're probably going to want more than one. I've had success with a combination of ten X200-32 tanks and five nukes; the TWR is lousy, but efficiency counts more than thrust once you're in orbit. To define success, look at my salad bar. I don't reset it with every update...too much work. I do have a design with 25 nukes (LV-N efficiency, Mainsail-equivalent thrust); I haven't really tested it yet. The idea is to send that one to Moho, which is a world folks say is extraordinarily difficult to intercept (on account of the burn time for capture). It currently has the same fuel loadout as the five nuke design - and about 5,000 m/s less delta-V. So mass definitely counts. Five's a good balance - that ten -32/five nuke design? 12,000 m/s delta-V without a payload...

I suppose I could be having problems with Subassembly in particular...did they update it for 0.21? I'm still using the version they came out with for 0.20 with 0.21.

No problem. Keep in mind that ions take a great deal of power to function constantly.

Actually, it works best if they all feed from a single tank (or single set of tanks). I didn't explain that about the Thunderbolts; sorry. With the Heavy 7, all five engines feed off the central tank. The four outboard tanks use fuel lines to feed in, and so they all drain first. The 'bolts are meant to be reusable, so they have no provision for dumping off the empty tanks (which would help with thrust/acceleration). A better system than what I have would probably utilize radially mounted docking ports; dump off the side tanks when they're empty, put new ones on when you get back to Kerbin. Of course, that has it's own issues... Moar fuel does not necessarily equate to moar delta-V. Before the 'bolts, I had a design where each system had its own tank; it didn't give me nearly as much delta-V and it unnecessarily ramped up the part count drastically.

Okay...how about "plane pitches uncontrollably upward immediately on takeoff, loops over and then crashes into the ground?"

Probably explains why I fared better flying that Dralthi last night......my first time trying to fly a plane in 0.21. Had this very issue a lot in 0.19 and 0.20.

Yeah, people have done this; it's even one of those situations where folks have found ion engines useful. Me, I just build my rover heavier...

Yep. I described it backwards, didn't I? Also for some reason I thought it included struts...

Do you have batteries on that rover? If so and it still has power, you should be able to right it with probe torque. If not, try SCE to AUX...

With multiple copies of the same type of engine, 1) Your Isp does not change (it would only change if you had a mix of engines with varying Isps), 2) Your thrust does indeed go up, 3) Your delta-V goes down, on account of the additional constant mass you've added to your rocket. A good example is my Thunderbolt 7 tug series - I've got three sizes: Standard, Heavy and Superheavy. The Standard has five nukes and one X200-32 tank; it gets about 5,600 m/s without a payload. The Heavy has five nukes and five X200-32 tanks; unloaded, it gets over 12,000 m/s delta-V. The Superheavy is twenty-five nukes and five X200-32 tanks; unloaded, it gets about 6,000 m/s. In each case, the Isp is 800; the Superheavy has the greatest amount of available thrust (equal to a Mainsail; this is the one I intend to take to Moho, incidentally), but all that extra engine mass really cuts into the delta-V (exact same amount of fuel as the Heavy).

Got my B.S. in Meteorology a while back; I'm more than familiar with calculus. I had forgotten what a pain in the ass it was, though......

Confusing equation, though...Fd = q (essentially)*d*A, and for A I'm just supposed to use mass? Maybe it's supposed to be one square meter per kg in the conversion factor for A instead of one cubic meter...square meter would give a result in Newtons, cubic meter gives a result in Joules. Also looks circular. I have to know velocity to calculate drag, but to get my velocity, I have to know my acceleration rate and to know that I have to know the drag. Maybe V is Vo in this case...I'm going to treat it as such. Still don't know how to figure out where q is maximized mathematically, but it's a start. Of course, now I know that max-Q is the point where the drag is maximized... EDIT: Actually, I can't assume that, can I?

Plane has tendency to not want to pitch or turn. Solution: Turn off SAS. That may just be my problem; I suck at spaceplanes. Though switching the camera to Chase view does help.

Uh......50k still leaves you in atmo. If you want a stable orbit, you'll need to go to at least 70k. In practice I find that waiting until the target is about 450,000 kilometers downrange of KSC prior to launch will give you a rendezvous within an orbit or two. You can watch the nodes as you're making your ascent burn, and adjust your flight trajectory slightly north or south of 090 as necessary to minimize the degree of the nodes. I can usually get within .5 degrees or so this way... it's a tough thing to judge and I've never gotten it exactly correct.

Flags would've been my first choice as well, but mine have a tendency to sink into the ground and spontaneously explode in the vicinity of KSC for some reason. No kidding - one time I got Jeb out of a Port-A-John 7, had him walk off the launchpad (he immediately sank into the ground up to his waist) and attempt to plant a flag; it exploded in his hand like a Black Cat. That was a hell of a walk...and it was the last time I didn't set out a rover to go pick him up before I put the Port-A-John on the launchpad.

Long post ahead. Last night's progress: I finished seeding the cards into the Parts Deck; that means the bulk of the cards are now into the game. I also built a set of "chips" for each player to use as their own marker; I mainly had these designed for use with the VP chart, but they can also be used to keep track of whose cards are whose in the junkyards. VASSAL lets you zoom in on individual pieces by hovering over them with the mouse. You could also just zoom in, but you lose track of certain areas of the board that way. -- VP Board empty The VP chart is in and fully functional. You can see that it comes pre-seeded with all four markers and that they can be cloned, deleted and moved around at the discretion of the players. -- VP board in use An example of how it's meant to be used. Red completed the Kerbin mission, so there's a Red marker on the Kerbin symbol and Red claimed five points. Similarly, Yellow completed a seven point Mun mission. Those markers would move as the players accumulate more points; for example, if Red next completed a twelve point mission, he'd move his marker from 5 to 17. Simple math. If a player goes over fifty, they place a marker in the fifty circle and roll their markers back to zero or wherever it needs to be on the main point board. Each marker in the circle represents fifty points. Green for some reason is claiming 100 points despite no apparent reason to do so; I suppose he's just being a smartass. Blue's indicating zero points. -- VAB preliminary Work is also continuing on the VAB areas. Players will be able to build up to three rockets at a time, hence three "Rockets" on the board. It does look like I need to make that board bigger, though...otherwise there probably won't be enough space to contain all the cards in a rocket. I also intend to add tools for keeping track of the rocket's available delta-V. Overall, a productive day. I caught an error on the SRB cards (I'd forgotten to add a Thrust stat for them) and got it fixed before they were added to the Parts stack, and got an image built for the Missions board as well. I still need to get the VABs finished up and implement the Missions board, set the cards not to form stacks (they stack directly on top of one another right now instead of "fanning out" like I want them to), and I need to update the dice to output individual die rolls. I also need to re-map the die roll hotkeys...right now, they're just associated with number keys. As a test, I typed in "I got 99 problems but a bitch ain't 1" into the Message Box; as expected, the mod rolled 9d twice and 1d once... Still working on getting the rules typed up. I've got the card description and setup sections complete at this point; still need to finish the "how to use the mod" section and the actual gameplay rules.

Started building a rover-based ILS my own self last night. Just used my Hellhound rovers, a pre-existing design. Probably overkill to use my best rover for the job, but the 'hound has never flipped over on Kerbin before... Only got out to the five kilometer mark due to time constraints. I did go ahead and put an "End of Runway" marker on the east end of the runway; it helped me keep things aligned when I started hitting small unintended course-correcting bumps further out from KSC. Tried out what I had; I'm not a good spaceplane pilot, but at least the system got me aligned with the runway. Now to work on how to use it for the glide slope reference... Actually, I should probably finish putting out the markers before I try again. Occurs to me that I modded the 'Hound for an Apollo-style mission to drop science buoys. Makes me wish I'd used on those modded 'hounds...then I could've gotten the whole thing done in one go. Oh well.

You basically have two options: 1) Solar panels and batteries, or 2) RTGs. Personally, I like RTGs because I like the notion of being able to use my craft when I damn well please thank you very much, but they do have a lousy mass to power production ratio. Still, I find they attach radially to the sides of a rocket well enough. And then there was the guy who built a "power core" with Rockomax Adapter 02s and RTGs...basically he just stuck the narrow ends of two Adapters together and set the RTGS upright so they looked nice and secure on the bottom one and touched the upper one. Added some struts and all was groovy. Structural panels might've worked better, but sometimes you just gotta go for cool... The solar/battery option probably does give you more bank for your buck. It's a matter of adding enough battery packs. 4 Z-400 packs mounted radially weigh as much as a single RTG and coupled with a couple of decent size panels should give you more than enough juice to make it through the nighttime hours. You could also go with eight Z-100 packs; you won't have as much stored juice, but it should still be sufficient for a parked lander. Well, I say that. How many lights are we talking about, anyway? And what kind of command module are we talking about here?

Thanks...I thought I'd saw that on the wiki the other day, just couldn't find it again.

Worked on a new asparagus booster design for the Barn Burner Superheavy 7. Might've worked if I'd used BZ-52s instead of Tail Connectors to hook up the booster engines; damn things exploded every time I staged one of them, sometimes taking out an adjacent booster in the process. Had one just come apart through normal flight stress...didn't even make it to the first staging event. Needless to say I'll be reworking that design; the numbers say it should've worked. Checking the wiki this morning, it also looks like I would've saved a fair amount of weight in the process if I'd just used the -52s like I originally planned. No, I had to go for "cool-looking"... Started setting up an ILS system for the KSC's runway. Started by putting a Hellhound rover just off the west end of the runway, then followed it up by putting one just off the east end; both aligned with the center of the runway (it's 2.5 kilometers long, for those who were curious). Using those two initial rovers as reference points, I put another rover 1 kilometer away from the west end of the runway, and another one five kilometers from the west end. Redesignated each one as a base; called them "Meatball" followed by their distance to the runway. I have plans to add two more markers at a minimum, at ten and 25 kilometers. I did go ahead and try to use the system with pheesh's Dralthi-II design. I at least got the thing aligned with the runway...if I'd had the right glide slope, I might've done a proper landing in lieu of a proper lithobrake. Made substantial progress on KCP's design. Updates here.