capi3101

Going to save a link here for the DoubleDouble mod; looks like another mod like KSS that adds a bunch of binary systems. Haven't got time to crunch the numbers for it today. On another note, does anybody know who all is/was responsible for the development of the community delta-v maps for the Kerbol system? I've been trying to grok the number crunching that goes on with those for years now; I figure it's about time I went to the source. @Kowgan, @CuriousMetaphor and @JellyCubes are the names I've seen on those maps to date - are there any more? I'd wager the developers of the same mods for which I crunched the Alcubierre figures would appreciate having delta-v maps as well and I'm certainly willing to do the work.

Okay. 5,000 tonnes and 4,360 square meters of wing area gives you a wing loading of 1.147 tonnes per square meter. That's a very high number; usually I make my designs so that they have at most 0.7 tonnes per square meter; more often, I shoot for 0.5 tonnes per square meter (comparable to the Concorde or Space Shuttle orbiter). High wing loading is going to give you better high speed performance, but it also gives you high takeoff and landing speeds; with a wing loading that high, it wouldn't surprise me if your stall speed is above 200 m/s. It may be what I'm seeing in your stability screenie there isn't inherent pitch up tendencies, it may be that FAR can't calculate reasonable stability figures because Mach 0.35 at zero meters altitude isn't producing enough lift. Try bumping the mach speed up and see what happens. @kcs123's advice is sound in this case, regardless.

Okay...let me try grasping at straws then. You've got 4,360 square meters of wing area. KER is reporting the craft has a mass of four tonnes. I'ma gonna guess that's bogus as all hell - what's the real mass? Better still, since your issues are coming up at landing, what's the dry mass of the craft? And at what speed are you attempting to land as a rule?

Okay...let me make sure I've got this right - your plane is nosing downward when it's low on fuel? I ask because the stability numbers you've got in that screenie would suggest nose up behavior. Typically, a plane that noses downward uncontrollably - "lawn dart" behavior, as keptin puts it - is a sign that the center of mass is too far forward of the center of pressure. I'm guessing you've got a huge swing forward in the position of the CoM as your fuel drains. You could confirm if this is the case with the RCS Build Aid mod; among other things, it adds a "dry center of mass" marker that will show you where your center of mass will be when you're out of gas. Not sure if the mod for 0.25 is around anywhere, unfortunately. Next best thing is to manually drain your tanks in the VAB and check to see what that does to your stability figures. Without changing anything else about the design, about the only thing I could suggest is to increase the deflection on your pitching control surfaces, increasing the area of your pitch surfaces with parts from a mod like Procedural Wings, and/or add more pitching control surfaces (especially if you can do so on that upper wing pylon you've got going on there).

(1.3.0) Yesterday was a designing day. One of the things about the Alcubierre Drive mod is that it does burn through Xenon. It's at a relatively slow rate, but it happens nonetheless, and eventually a warp-driven ship will need its Xenon supply restocked. Gave me an excuse to design the Auk X HKO Xenon tanker plane: Auk X initial prototype. The shakedown flight of the initial prototype shown in the screenie above revealed several crucial flaws in the design, namely crappy area ruling and the use Mk-2 LF tanks instead of Mk-2 Rocket fuel tanks. The inital prototype did rendezvous, dock and "deliver" its load to the heighliner Little Boy in a 600km Kerbin orbit, but it did not have sufficient fuel to return to Kerbin. After reverting the flight, several changes were made; The Mk-2 tanks were replaced with the correct model, some FL-T400 tanks were added to the inboard set of air intakes, pushing those forward, a pair of Mk-1 fuselages were added to the outboard set of engines, pushing those back and the horizontal stabilizers were moved onto them (putting them further back). The flaps were also set to deflect in the opposite direction; they were moving the wrong way during the initial shakedown. I completed the second rehearsal flight this morning, orbiting Kerbin, rendezvousing with Little Boy, TAC dumping xenon, returning to LKO and deorbiting for a successful landing at KSC 09. The bird is now operational, and available for when I need it in both my career and litterbox saves. Speaking of the litterbox, plans are continuing for my mock Jool-5 run. Tylo's got me concerned; estimates put the flight in the neighborhood of 10,000 m/s of delta-V to travel from warp fail-safe altitude to low orbit, land, return to low orbit, and then return to fail-safe. If I can build a craft that can do all that, it might be time to consider a run at Eve too. I'm investigating ways to reduce the delta-V requirement. In my career save, the Old Bessie 7 tanker lander at the Munport space station landed near the Piper Alpha refinery to gas up. Lander was out of direct winching range of the refinery so the rover Indecision has moved over to bridge the gap...or at least, that was the plan. I can't seem to find the rover's winch...

(1.3.0) Yesterday began with the arrival of Laggin' Dragon at Mun. The ferry ship docked with the Munport space station, refueled and swapped crews with Necessary Evil already docked at the station. Upon the craft's departure, the conditions were finally satisfied for a "new space station" contract in orbit of the Mun. Pilot Agamore Kerman and tourist Hanby Kerman departed the station shortly after Laggin' Dragon's departure: Spamcan 7b lander departing Munport, with Laggin' Dragon in the background. Visible craft docked at the station are the Old Bessie 7 (upper left, back), Spamcan 7 (upper left, fore), Necessary Evil (upper right) and Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout 7 (lower right). The Spamcan 7b lander reached the surface of Mun safely and after Agamore planted a flag the lander returned successfully to the station. The two kerbals boarded Necessary Evil at that point and were joined by tourist Herhat Kerman and pilot Catfrey Kerman. The ship was refueled and departed the station bound for Minmus, where it will arrive in twelve days. Meanwhile, Laggin' Dragon set a course back to Kerbin, where it will arrive in about five hours. Meanwhile in my litterbox save, an Auk III tanker plane was launched to rendezvous with an Auk Ia 2-passenger plane in a 500km orbit over Kerbin with Jeb and Val aboard; the plane had ran out of gas after a botched rendezvous attempt with the heighliner Little Boy in a 600 km failsafe orbit. I wasn't sure sending the tanker was a great idea - first, none of the Auk series are really designed to go much past 150km LKO, and second I wasn't sure I'd be able to get their respective docking ports to connect due to their respective designs. The rendezvous went off without a hitch and I was able to get the ports to mate up, though, and Jeb and Val were able to complete their trip out to Little Boy. Meanwhile, the Auk III successfully returned to KSC 27 - the plane was on vapors, but it did make it (and I've been able to make KSC before with completely dry tanks with that design, so that's not a personal record). Little Boy will be hauling the Auk Ia along on its planned exploration journey to the moons of Jool, which will take place once I can get some more Jool-bound infrastructure up and docked. I've never flown a plane over Laythe before...looking forward to trying it out.

The only time I ever see Xu go in the red is when Mw is in the red as a rule, and usually taking care of the Mw will take care of the Xu. You really only need to file a bug report if it's just the Xu that's gone red, because you're right (cue the Chewbacca defense - THAT DOES NOT MAKE SENSE!!). 750 tonnes at takeoff / 659 m2 wing reference area = wing loading of 1.138 tonnes per square meter at takeoff (and 0.53 at landing). I'd wager the plane handles better at landing than at takeoff, am I right? Planes with high wing loading will have very good supersonic/hypersonic flight characteristics but lousy low-speed flight characteristics, including higher stall speeds. Increasing your wing area might help there; I'm not entirely sure that it wouldn't help with the Mw issue either.

Naw, it's not endless. It just happens to take up the better part of four pages (i.e. about 25% of the document)... I was happy to do it, too. And ifwhen y'all add more systems, I'll be happy to do those too. Saw your post about the Galactic Neighborhood mod this morning...I'll have to begin following the development of that one, I think. Been trying to gain the knowledge I need to do delta-V maps too...and I've been considering what additions might need to be made to delta-V maps if you're using the Alcubierre mod (i.e. calculating a data point for low-orbit to failsafe orbit).

(1.3.0) In my litterbox save yesterday, I launched my first Heighliner 7 craft, an Alcubierre Drive-powered ferry (a mothership, for lack of a better term): Little Boy in HKO. The ship was dubbed Little Boy upon reaching the drive's operational failsafe orbit. The first intended mission of the ship will be to haul some infrastructure out to Jool and put Kerbals on each of the moons out there. Rules of the challenge prevent warp drives, otherwise I'd be using this as a Jool 5 run. I still needed to get Jeb and Val back from LKO, so I went up an Auk Ia rescue spaceplane to rendezvous with their Missing Link 7 craft, deorbit it and then transfer the two of them and whatever fuel the craft had left to the plane. The plane was then sent on a course to rendezvous with Little Boy, but owing to a foul up with the rendezvous, the plane ran out of gas in HKO. I'll now have to send a refueling tanker to rendezvous with them so they can get the rest of the way there. All in all, I'd say this was a reasonable rehearsal run for when I anticipate doing these same kinds of things later on in my career save, when I can start using the same craft for similar purposes. Also spent some time over the weekend trying to grok the underlying mathematics of delta-v maps; I kept on getting numbers that didn't completely jive with the published maps out there. Wondering what I'm doing wrong exactly...

The red Mw is what jumps out at me; you've got static pitch instability, i.e. a tendency to nose up and be flip-happy. Usually happens when your CoM is aft of your CoL, but the same thing can happen if the CoL is below the CoM along the vertical axis. Try raising the position of the main wing on the fuselage. Barring that, add some dihedral. What's the takeoff weight of your plane? Not that it has any bearing whatsoever on the plane's glaring main issue (the aforementioned instability); I'm just curious. Also, what kinda job are you intending to do with it?

Nope. Excessive hosted screenshots was a contributing factor to a pair of forum crashes in the last few years. Imgur's not the only picture sharing option out there, but for the KSP forums it's the most popular choice. I use it.

(1.3.0) Yesterday I posted a YouTube tutorial for the Alcubierre Drive mod and made a navigational document for the mod available for download. The document includes figures for the Kerbol system as well as nine of the more popular planet packs - lots of sifting through config files for the data I needed to crunch the numbers, and then crunching said numbers. Happy to be at a stopping place with that for the time being. Other than that, it was a plane-flying day. Decided to land all three of the Auk II 8-passenger spaceplanes docked at the Kerbinport space station; aside from breaking off the ventral airbrakes on the second plane at landing, all three planes returned safely and intact to KSC 09. I then flew up an Auk VII 16-passenger spaceplane to the station, and for good measure I followed that up with an Auk VIII heavy fuel tanker spaceplane. Crunched the numbers and determined that I would have exactly 16 tourists to send back to the surface once all four of my ferry craft returned to Kerbin, so that's all the more I need parked at Kerbinport at the moment. Saving on part count and all that. And that was it for yesterday. Shortly before the Auk VIII docked, Laggin' Dragon made it to Mun; I'll likely be dealing with docking operations for that craft in the very near future.

Let's see a screenie. Guessing asymmetric thrust along one axis or another.

Decreasing your wing loading will have a measurable effect on decreasing takeoff speed - you either need to reduce the takeoff weight of your plane or increase the size of your wing area. All things being equal, wing sweep affects performance at high speeds; the higher the degree of sweep, the better the craft performs at high speeds. If I understand it correctly, sweep shouldn't have the kind of effect you're looking for.

Alright, y'all. I'm not 100% happy with how these turned out, but they're ready for general use. My original post on the topic of navigation with this mod is here, and my full orbital velocities guide is now available for download here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sW5Yi2aNeZY My apologies for the quality of the video - my rig isn't the best in the world. It's serviceable, though. Bear in mind that all of this is for linear velocity mode. While the orbital velocities guide data is applicable for both modes, the techniques I use in the video assume linear velocity mode. Still haven't tried to grok angular momentum mode just yet.

(1.3.0) Not much of note happened yesterday. In the wake of the recent expeditions of Strange Cargo and Next Objective to the Minmusport space station, I decided to take an administrative day and double-checked the resources at my space stations and refineries in Kerbin's SOI. I wound up doing two fuel resupply runs with the Old Bessie 7 fuel lander at the Munport space station to the Piper Alpha refinery and a nearly identical run with an identical craft from Minmusport to the Deepwater Horizon refinery. Only noteworthy thing about those runs is that I finally learned the true power of the Trajectories mod - it was nice to be able to set both landers down within KAS winch range of the refineries, without any necessary finagling at the last second. Refueled the refineries after the landers left, so at this point my remote bases at Mun and Minmus are ready for the next set of expeditions. And that was it for yesterday... In other news, I spent a good chunk of the day working on Alcubierre Drive calculations for a navigational aid I'm building. I'm hoping to have that out and ready for general download later today. Plus I posted a KSP tutorial on YouTube that is in dire need of annotation...

Yes, please. I was going to say "Good timing on the release of the Kelnis system"... I did download the mod and go through the .cfg files and I was able to find most of the data I was lacking. At this point, most of the data I'm still missing is for the Kerolon/Kerilim system. Specific worlds are Uk, Jes, Rix, Phal, Iave, Nisc, Nisc's Submoon, and Velar. Radii and geeASL are the figures I need. I'd also ask for a geeASL value for The All, but a) if I was reading the lore correctly, it wouldn't have one in the conventional sense, and b) lack of information there might make it all the more interesting to get to. YouTube video is finally up but I've hit another snag - apparently the eggheads at Google have removed the ability to add annotations to videos. This is a problem because the video has some points in it that I wanted to clarify through text, and there were other spots where I was really wanting to make fun of myself. Has anybody made a YouTube video since March that might be able to give me some guidance on what I might want to do instead? Links will be up when I'm ready to share them with y'all. Soon. Seriously, soon...

Hmm...the KSS wiki data is incomplete; there are 24 worlds that don't have sufficient information available for me to make the calculations for the jump to light sp.....sorry, was having a bit of a Star Wars moment there. Probably going to have to download the mod and crack the .cfg files open. Might take longer than I'd hoped.

Boy, @JadeOfMaar, you weren't kidding around about KSS, were you? Good news is that the figures are ready for the others; I'm hoping to have the whole thing released to y'all later today.

(1.3.0) Another triumph for my litterbox save, comrades: Log for my career save is backed up by almost a week at this point, so I might as well tell y'all about that too. No screenies there, though. Last Friday I picked up some garbage from LKO with a Bill Clinton 7b grabber probe, returning with the paywad about 40 klicks from KSC. Ordinarily I wouldn't use a BC7b for LKO; I don't recall what the garbage was other than that I felt it was large enough and heavy enough to warrant the design's enlarged heat shield. Next up was a set of quick contracts, some orbital Kerbin science, a satellite adjustment and a parts test. I also launched a pair of tourists on an LKO contract aboard a Kerbal Tour Bus 7d orbiter. Six more tourists - Mitry, Sidly, Jaoly, Katsen, Joedon and Obtrey Kerman - were also sent up to the Kerbinport space station aboard an Auk II passenger spaceplane. Took the weekend off. On Monday, tourists Organ, Frandous, Lemski, Mitrey, Sidly, Jaoly, Katsen, Joedon and Obtrey Kerman boarded Strange Cargo, with Jeb giving up his pilot's seat for Obtrey, putting the ship on automatic for a journey to Minmus. The ship departed Kerbinport and got the single best burn I've ever had for a Minmus transfer - an arrival of only three days. After doing some planning for an upcoming Duna expedition, I picked up a new space station contract fulfill-able with the specifications of one of my Superfortress 7 ferry craft. Forgetting the requirement that it be a new craft, I loaded up Jeb, Val, Bill, pilot Lazor Kerman, engineer Eriemy Kerman and tourist Hanby Kermin aboard Necessary Evil and launched the craft to Mun, which meant for the first time in a while my entire ferry fleet was in flight. After moving a satellite for contract, I picked up a contract to rescue pilot Agamore Kerman from LKO and dispatched an Auk Va engineering plane to conduct the rescue. I remembered belatedly why I don't use the Auk V for much (it's a tail-less delta with lousy pitch authority), but still completed the mission successfully. Tuesday began with the dispatch of the Spamcan 7b lander from the Munport space station, picking up pilot Catfrey Kerman from the surface for contract. After planting a flag, Catfrey boarded the lander and returned to the station, punching the clock when she got there. I then conducted a four-point seismice survey with the rover Bad Juju at the southern Highlands near Mun. Next Objective then arrived at Minmus and was put on a course to arrive with the Minmusport space station. Necessary Evil burned for Munar orbit and rendezvous with Munport at the same time Next Objective was approaching Minmusport for docking, so I had to do some juggling there. The first batch of Next Objective's tourists went down and landed at the Deepwater Horizon refinery, with refinery engineer Leedorf conducting a quick refit on their Spamcan 7a lander before the group returned to the station. Scientists Paley and Bobkin Kerman along with pilot Phildan Kerman went down next, landing safely in the Greater Flats 1.6 kilometers from where Bob had previously planted the region's marker flag, and the trio conducted their own flag-planting training mission before returning to the station. Day ended with yet another satellite adjustment. Yesterday began with the return of the three KSC staffmembers to Minmusport; they punched their tickets and reboarded Next Objective. After the ferry was refueled and final departure checks were made, the ship departed and burned for Mun, where it will arrive in eleven days. Strange Cargo arrived in Minmus's SOI shortly thereafter and docked with Minmusport successfully, while Necessary Evil finally arrived at Munport. With the need for a new craft to fulfill the aforementioned space station contract, Agamore and tourist Herhat were loaded aboard a new Superfortress 7 passenger ferry, which was dubbed Laggin' Dragon upon reaching LKO, the fourth and final planned craft of my ferry fleet. The craft departed for Mun, where it will arrive in two days. I also had a contract to build a new space station over Minmus, so I designed and launched Moneybux 7; the module burned for Minmus upon reaching LKO and the plan there is to dock it to Minmusport once its contract has been fulfilled - I really just don't need two orbiting Minmus space stations. Tourists Organ, Jaoly and Joedon were sent down from Strange Cargo to the surface of Minmus, arriving safely. The trio were returned to Minmusport this morning, and after refueling and final departure checks were made, Strange Cargo departed Minmusport bound for Mun, where it will arrive in ten days. So yeah, not much in terms of excitement going on in my career save right now. Litterbox is waaaaay more interesting. Can't wait to be able to afford an Alcubierre Drive engine in my career save so I can start replicating some of those accomplishments. I probably should see about updating my ribbons at this point...

Alright, thanks.

Hey @Tynton, do you happen to have a change log for this mod laying about somewhere? In recent days I've been working on a set of calculations for the Alcubierre Drive mod for various planet packs, and Suthe was brought to my attention. Went through the mod's configuration files earlier this morning and couldn't find any data for Abpion; curious if/when you might've removed/renamed it. I was also unable to find the geeASL data on Kitt; since it's based on Gilly, should I assume the same value? Any help you could provide would be greatly appreciated.

Yay...another one to throw onto the pile... Those calculations are what I've been up to for the past couple of days. The figures for Suthe Planet Pack are giving me headaches as we speak; guessing it was coded on a UNIX-based machine (I say that because the .cfg files don't play nice with Notepad on Windows 10...). Three (now four) more sets to go at this point.

Alright, thanks. Glad to know I wasn't losing my mind there...

Hey @AndrewDrawsPrettyPictures, out of curiosity, did Hauna and Vedre disappear with the latest version of this mod? I didn't see if/where they had in the release notes. I've been working on a navigational aid over on the Alcubierre Drive thread and I wanted to come up with some data for various planet packs, and this one was suggested to me. I found the data I needed after combing through the .cfg files for all of the extant planets/moons in the mod except for those two, thus prompting the question. If they do still exist, I need to know their radii and geeASL parameters.