capi3101

Elemental mercury comes to mind given the temperature and pressure conditions, though the conditions under which mercury would be present in quantities great enough to fill a planet's oceans would be......unique, I'll say. Plus the color is all wrong...

Silverfox has approached me before on helping with the mod; I've got a few too many commitments at the moment to get involved with another project but I'd definitely be willing to consult with y'all. I'll give the simulation of initial dewpoint values some thought...that one should only be an issue on Kerbin and Laythe, right? Maybe Eve?

Last night I was watching the finale of ANW, so I got to KSP late. Redesigned the Mourning Dove 7 rescue capsule into the Project Peacock 7, basically by adding a fairing, an antenna and a pair of Clamp-O-Tron docking ports to the side; loaded up some KAS tools into the cockpit of the thing and shot Bill in the direction of Minmus on a mission to fix the Sojourner 7 probe currently in polar Minmus orbit. Realized pretty early on that the Peacock won't have enough delta-V to ensure a successful rendezvous - to say nothing about getting Bill home again - and so Mikaliea was loaded up into a Station Hub rocket and Minmusport 7 is now in the process of being established. Bill will arrive at Minmus in nine days, about a day ahead of the station. I plan on putting him in a loose orbit and having him rendezvous with the station first before setting out to rendezvous with the probe. I would certainly hope that 1,300 m/s would be enough to affect a successful rendezvous. Jeb and company are about a day from Kerbin's atmo, and Bob's final Minmus science mission is scheduled to arrive back at Kerbin in another three days. Took at look at which techs I might want to unlock next...RAPIER engines are on my short list, as are RTGs. Between the two they'll definitely wipe out the 3000+ science I expect Bob to be hauling back with him...

Naw, I certainly understand the amount of math involved; I spent five years earning a degree in the subject. I'm still trying to think of any methods that could be employed to simplify matters while keeping things realistic; blanking, unfortunately. This is probably a grotesquely stupid thought, but could the cell data be calculated ahead of time and then accessed at runtime? How is the model handling the planet's initial conditions right now?

Hey guys, I came across an article from 2008 on Gamasutra earlier today, on the topic of practical fluid dynamics in video games. I haven't had the time to read through it thoroughly, so I don't know if it could be of some use to the mod or not, but I figured I'd pass it along anyway. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1615/practical_fluid_dynamics_part_2.php

Spent the weekend largely hanging with Bob aboard Fireball 7b doing gravioli tests in the vicinity of Minmus. Got a hab module added to the Kerbinport 7 space station so it's ready to go when Jeb and his batch of tourists return from Minmus; they hit Kerbin's atmo in three days. It occurs to me that Jeb's Stratofortress 7 craft needs a permanent name; it wasn't given one because I just intended it as a one-time use craft when I launched it, but since launch my infrastructure has grown to where I could (and should) be using it as a reusable passenger ferry. My mining infrastructure is in orbit of Mun and Minmus now; unfortunately, since I forgot to pack an antenna on the Sojourner scanner probes now in polar orbit of the respective moons, I can't conduct the initial orbital scan. Repair missions are being planned. Meantime, Bob's mission was successful and he's now on his way back to Kerbin; he'll be home in eleven days at the end of a 31-day mission. Due to some expert piloting, he was able to tap Minmus out, getting gravioli readings in high orbit, in low orbit, and on the surface in all nine of Minmus's biomes in a single flight - his craft had 37 m/s left in the landing tanks and about 550 in the return stage prior to the final liftoff. He also got seismic readings while he was at it. At 50 science points per gravioli reading in high orbit, 80 in low orbit, and 100 on the surface as well as 100 per seismic reading, I expect the flight to net no less than 3000 science points upon his return (prior to heading out there, he got a similar set of gravioli readings for Kerbin). Not enough to finish unlocking the rest of the tech tree, but certainly enough to unlock five or six of the 550-point tier techs. Tonight, with any luck at all, I go to fix some surveyor satellites. I've got a contract to extract 2100 ore from Minmus that I'd like to get started on if at all possible...

Last night was spent mostly with Bob, who finally arrived high over Minmus in an 88-degree inclined orbit aboard Fireball 7b. He arrived so high up in Minmus's SOI that after the orbital insertion burn - which put his periapsis at 31k above Minmus - it'll be three more days before he gets down there. I was able to get gravioli readings high over five of Minmus's biomes before the night was out and I fully intend to grab the other four as soon as I can manage them. Low orbital graviolis will be next, and then finally surface gravioli and seismometer readings will commence. Other noteworthy events were the establishment of the probably-to-be-abandoned-completely Kerbolport 7 space station (for somewhere around √250,000) as well as Jeb's Stratofortress 7 flyby of Minmus with a bunch of tourists; he'll return to Kerbin in a week and the current plan is for him to dock at the Kerbinport 7 station upon return, but in the interim I need to get a hab module attached to the station. The Munar Sojourner 7 probe also arrived and established a polar orbit; of course, this was one of the early designs, so a repair mission will be in order before prospecting ops can commence on Mun. Plans for this evening: continue working with Bob, and maybe get that hab module up. The completion of the Kerbolport mission has brought me up to where I have more than two coins to rub together at this point.

1 lift per 10 tonnes is the recommended amount for stock aero these days. For FAR, I have my own set of formulas that I use, and they aren't straightforward ones (there's a square root involved and everything)... Mod? I'd suggest RCS Build Aid; if you're going to get serious about planes, I'd almost consider it essential. While the primary function of that mod is to help you set up RCS blocks so that your craft doesn't torque all over the place when you're docking, one of its features is a "Dry Center of Mass" marker, which shows you where your plane's CoM will be once it's out of gas - which in turn allows you to infer which direction your CoM will shift as the plane's fuel drains. You can use it to set things up so that either A) you can place your wings to where your plane will never lose longitudinal stability or not shift its CoM in flight appreciably. Of course, that mod doesn't estimate how much lift you need. But it is a suggestion that might help out in this case.

How far along are you on the tech tree? I agree with the other two posters - a separate lander approach is not necessary, and may complicate your mission more than you'd think (I'm assuming you haven't got RCS parts unlocked at the moment). That said, a Scientist is capable of harvesting science results from sci parts in the manner you describe. I'll need to find the thread, but there was some good suggestions about how to go about getting through the science grind not too long ago; Geschosskopf (the mighty king of KSP science since 0.21) in particular had a method that would get you most of the way through the tech tree with two to three trips out to Minmus, easily doable with low tech. I'll find it again and post a link when I get an opportunity. EDIT: Here we go - assuming you're beginning absolutely from square one, go with Streetwind's suggestions for early science here and then transition into Geschosskopf's strategy. These strategies work - I can tell you that from firsthand experience. Only thing I'd add is that you do need to upgrade the Astronaut Complex before going ahead with the last of Streetwind's suggested missions (so EVA is possible).

Hazarding a guess, you may be downloading craft from the pre-1.0 era, when the aero model was vastly different. Look at post date of the craft you're downloading - if the date is prior to April 27, 2015, the craft is probably no good. Unless you're using an older version of KSP, of course. And if the plane is newer, then you need to look at your ascent profile. These days, the standard flight profile is to get to 10,000 meters as fast as possible, level out in the 10-15k regime and pick up as much speed as you can without 'sploding, then pitch up once you're going no slower than 1000 m/s, lighting the rockets somewhere in the 15-25k regime (with speed the primary consideration). Typically a plane needs 1,800 m/s during the rocket phase to reach orbit, fart around a bit up there, and return safely with stock air.

Decided to launch a Sojourner probe around Kerbin to scan for ore to get some practice with how that all works. Discovered I'd forgotten to add a communications antenna to the design. This is after I'd already launched identical probes to Mun and Minmus. <facepalm_so_hard_it_breaks_the_laws_of_physics /> Cheesed me off enough that I shut the game down...

Gonna echo what everybody else has said so far; from the look of things, you've got too much mass aft, to the point where your center of mass is behind your center of lift. You need the opposite to be true. Lengthening the fuselage would help to an extent (try a piece of structural fuselage if you have it), as would sticking a full fuel tank ahead of the cockpit. I would also say that p1t1o is correct about the rocket engine - unless the purpose of your flight is to test that engine, ditch it. He's also right about the pitch authority issues that typically come with a tail-less plane design (i.e. no aft horizontal stabilizers); you might try canards (a pair of AV-R8s would do just fine; you don't need the "dedicated" canard parts) if that issue crops up. Though, I would advise against the canards until you've got your initial stability issues under control... And if you are just doing the rocket as a test, it doesn't need fuel - you can deny it fuel, set its thrust limiter to zero, activate it through staging and it'll still count. If you don't need a rocket, consider changing the setup to a single engine - you don't need a lot of engine for a plane that small. One final note about the Wheesley engines - if you're wanting to go much past Mach 1 (300 m/s, give or take), forget it. Those things top out around that speed.

A FAR ascent profile these days is pretty much the same as this - you get up to 10k as fast as you can manage, then level your flight out to 5-10 degrees above the horizon and begin accelerating; if you get heat warnings, you steepen up the rate of climb if you can. Turbojet engines will start losing significant power by 20,000 and will flame out in the neighborhood of 26,000; I typically switch over to rockets at 25k. Speed's still more important than altitude - case in point, the other day I launched a plane that got up to 25k but only going about 800 m/s; it ran out of fuel before making orbit. On the second attempt, I got it up to 1050 m/s at 19k and lit the rockets early - she made orbit with fuel to spare. Big thing I've noticed between the two (stock and FAR) aero models is that FAR's actually kinder these days; the recommended maximum launch weight per engine these days for stock (as per the other thread) is about ten tonnes. With FAR, you can easily do 24-30 tonnes per jet engine. Plus you have all those nice, somewhat-more-than-mildly intimidating stability tools that tell you if your plane is gonna wig out on you or not...

Which aero are you using these days? Presuming you're talking about designing a spaceplane, you want to design it so that you've got roughly 1,800 m/s of delta-V during the rocket phase. This translates to roughly half the mass of your plane (or more) in fuel dedicated to that phase of the flight, depending on the efficiency of the rocket you're using. You're still good to go with a single Mk1 tank per Turbojet or RAPIER for the air-breathing portion of the flight (in fact, it was still good before it was redesigned to haul three times as much LF). Intake hogging is a thing of the past now - a single intake per engine will do just nicely, and there's really not much functional difference between the various intakes you might choose to work with. There was a thread that went over guidelines just today; lemme put up a link. It'll help if you use stock air. If you use FAR, we can talk some more about guidelines - I fly FAR these days, but I like to keep abreast of what the stock fliers are going with. EDIT: Starhawk beat me to posting the link by a good fifteen minutes. So in that regard...elderly ninja'd? Maybe? No?

Had a pretty busy weekend; not a lot of time to play KSP. Did some "haul random crap straight outta orbit" contracts, launched a couple of space stations for contracts, and got started gearing up for Munar mining operations, again for contracts. The Kerbin-orbiting space station was loaded up full of tourists, so the time has come for me to begin a space tourism circuit like the one I had going in my original career save. Bob's still on his way out to what I hope will be the final science mission to Minmus and my mining rigs there are also en route still. Got a lot of money tied up in ongoing contracts at the moment; probably could stand to cash those out soon. No, not really anything particularly interesting going on right now.

If you're not adverse to mods (and I'm assuming you're not since you're already using a parts mod), I'd suggest two of them - first, TAC Fuel Balancer: it would allow you to set your fuel tanks to balance automatically, so they'd drain evenly. Second, RCS Build Aid - I would say that one is a mod worth serious consideration if you plan on doing anything more than just tinkering around with spaceplanes. Its key useful feature - a marker that shows you where your plane's CoM will be when its fuel tanks have drained, allowing you to predict if your plane will become flip-happy in flight (more to the point, allowing you to design your plane so that it most definitely won't get that way regardless of flight conditions). Stock option is going to be a manual pumping of fuel forward. That'll work up to a point, but your CoM will still shift just as far aft as that final tank drains out. It's better to try to correct the issue while you're still in the SPH; lengthening your fuselage and trying to pull some dead mass forward is the standard diagnostic process for this particular problem.

Last night was the first night I'd had all week to play KSP for any decent length of time. It saw the semi-successful landings of the two Raven 7 flights I had active, Val's (with her group of tourists for contracts) and Cerxie's (to ferry the necessary fuel to Val to land). Cerxie came down first; she botched her re-entry point rather badly and wound up out of fuel in atmo over the Highlands to the east of KSC by a good five to six hundred kilometers. She was, however, able to maneuver over a relatively low-grade patch of Grassland and made a successful emergency landing without breaking anything. Val's re-entry point was spot on and she was able to get her plane close enough to KSC to glide most of the rest of the way in. With not enough fuel left and her batteries dying, she went for the landing instead of going around despite being off-center and too-low. The plane lost too much speed on final, it stalled and the the tail struck; Val cracked her engine off at 20 m/s, but was able to save the rest of the plane and was able to taxi onto the Runway from there. Any landing you can walk away from, right? Anyway, I've replaced the tourist contracts with a space-station contract for Kerbin and an object retrieval mission from Kerbin orbit; haven't done one of the latter yet and I'm thinking about how to go about doing it. I can do space station missions in my sleep at this point, so I'll probably deal with it tonight and hopefully make some easy bux.

Had another of those fifteen minute days - that's two in a row now. But it was enough time to send up Cerxie in a second Raven plane (with a much better ascent profile) to rendezvous with Val and company in the first Raven and transfer the fuel they needed to get them out of orbit. Whether it will be enough to get them back to KSC is another story, of course...one problem at a time, right?

I had a grand total of fifteen minutes to play yesterday. It was still enough time for Val to strand yet another group of tourists in Kerbin's orbit... Valuable lesson there, kiddos: don't switch to rockets if your plane is only going 800 m/s; if it is, that's the time to dive and try again.

This weekend was reasonably busy. First was the successful rescue of Val, Neglas and two tourists aboard Superfortress 7 from the surface of Mun by Bill in Hound Dog 7. Since I forgot to bring a KAS winch, I had to get the two ships unreasonably close to one another - putting Bill down within twenty meters of the target craft in an area with a fifteen percent grade. Needless to say, I didn't make that on the first try. But I did eventually get him in position and from there it was a simple matter for him to screw on the two connector ports he was carrying - one on each ship - and then link them together with a pipe. Connection made, tourists piped out, science piped out and the Hound Dog cannibalized most of the Superfortress's remaining fuel for the trip home prior to disconnect. Val had also collected a few science experiments while she was stranded; those were transferred out as well. The ships were disconnected and Hound Dog made its way back to Kerbin while the Superfortress was set to self-destruct. Recovery was successful and the few science points the Superfortress's crew brought back was sufficient for me to unlock Turbojets, something I neglected to do after Nina returned from her successful mission to Minmus the day before. Then yesterday was spent doing a nice, leisurely flight over Kerbin's north pole back down to the equator and then around the planet back to KSC with House Martin 7, a drone plane. Naturally, this flight was for contracts - a pair of them, one to do temperature scans and the other to do pressure scans. Good way to kill a Sunday afternoon. Had a fully successful flight. Nothing broke, though the internal probe core overheated more than once - I really should install that stock bug fix mod, methinks... At this point I've got a set of tourist contracts for Kerbin orbit to do, and a group of tourists that want to head out towards Minmus to do, so I'ma thinking those are on the agenda for this evening. I need to unlock Aerospikes before I can utilize the same planes I was flying with in my previous career save (which were good designs all told); I'm there but I need 550 science to unlock them at this point. Bob's making another run to Minmus to do gravioli tests and tap it out, though; he should arrive in four days, and so I should be able to unlock them when he gets back. Meantime, I need to see if I have any Thud-powered spaceplanes so I have something I can use to send up tourists in the meantime.

My thirty minutes of game time yesterday were spent getting Nina down to the surface of Minmus to collect science from the Flats and Poles, the two biomes that Bob was unable to get to on his previous trip to the surface of Minmus. That'd be crew reports, EVA reports, surface samples, material bay readings, goo readings, temperature and pressure tests. She's headed back to Kerbin now and should return in four days - I plan on getting Whiplash engines unlocked with the science I expect her to bring back from the trip. She got a fair amount of science from Kerbin before heading out there; I don't quite remember what all she collected. Meanwhile, Bob is headed back that way for gravioli and seismometer tests; he'll arrive in seven days. Bill, meantime, has arrived in orbit of Mun to begin rescuing the crew and passengers of Superfortress 7. Rescue operations to commence this evening; going to be liquefying some tourists to pump them on out...

Be my guest. If you set a third one another kilometer or two inland, it really helps with getting your planes aligned with the Runway from further out. Reclass teach of them as a base and you can see it from a hundred klicks out. You can even use them to guesstimate a good glide slope - that bit takes some explaining but I'll fill in the details if you're curious. Another thing you can do with Stayputniks in the SPH - slap an empty fuel tank on them and turn them so they'll sit upright. Put hunk of crap on Runway; reclass as base. Instant, cheap-as-almost-free KSP target marker for those in the early going who want to try and practice precision de-orbiting. Gives you something to do with that part of KSC until you've got the parts to build Stayputnik End-of-Runway-Devices. If you go to build them, make sure you park them off the raised Runway area (the "ski jump") on both ends. Otherwise the game will try to clear them off when you go to try to launch a plane.

As soon as I have the other parts, I slap a fuel tank, a Wheesley engine and a set of bush-plane gears to the end of a Stayputnik, maybe a battery/solar panel if I have them. Set a couple of them out on either end of the Runway to act as the visual component of an ILS (for when I have the parts down the road to start doing more serious things within the confines of the SPH). Other than that, I don't touch Stayputniks at all.

Most of the delta-V maps you'll come across (like these) will have arrows on them indicating "aerobraking possible". Where those exist, you can essentially discount any delta-V requirement for the return trip entirely. For example, a Mun orbit takes 1,170 delta-V - 860 to get the intercept from LKO, then 310 to get from the intercept to LMO. The return trip, however, only requires the 310 to escape the Mun's SOI; 860 for the return flight isn't necessary because you can aerobrake back down to LKO (and beyond). For planning purposes, until you get the hang of it, you might put a little margin in for where aerobraking maneuvers are indicated. Even then, you don't need much - 50 m/s tops. A small supply of RCS fuel and a few blocks might cover it as well. When I was first starting out I'd plan for the various phases of my missions with 125% of the indicated delta-V requirement (to have a little safety margin in case of screw up) and in almost every case it worked well (the exception being Moho, because there are special guidelines to follow when you're shooting for Moho's orbit...).

Spent my 45 minutes last night designing Wildcat 7, which is basically the bulk ore tank storage and delivery unit for my nascent Minmus mining operation. It'll hook up to the Mosquito 7 drilling unit with KAS parts, using data gathered from the Sojourner 7 orbital probe to find a good spot for drilling. Launched two white-suit engineers up with Wildcat and it's now on its way to Minmus; it should arrive in 15 days. The craft was originally going to include a converter, but I was dismayed to discover that things won't attach to a converter radially. I also figured that if I really needed a converter at all, it should be part of an orbital space station assembly - so plans are commencing to rebuild the Minmusport space station in this career save. Minmus will probably be completely tapped out of science by the time I get the thing up and running, so I'll probably would just replace the lab module with the converter module. Boom - floating Exxon station. That's kinda what I wanted to do with my other career save; just never got the necessary tech unlocked.