capi3101

Kerbal Attachment System - and to make it work you also need the new Kerbal Inventory System as well (KIS is a requirement of KAS in 1.0.x, as the two mods now share the same inventory system) = Highly Recommended. I use it and I've done this kind of work in 1.0.x my own self recently (in my case I used it to remove a Clamp-O-Tron Jr. and replace it with a full sized Clamp-O-Tron on an orbiting space station). OP, you should check out those mods if you want to save your mission - just send up Bill or whatever engineer you've got available with the antenna part you want to attach, have him attach it, profit. BZ-52s were some of my favorite parts from the olden days - they were useful for building clusters of powerful engines (better than Mainsails) in the days before the Mk3 parts showed up, and they're still useful for that same purpose today (I built myself a craft just last night had an engine cluster in the core - career game without Mk3 rocket parts unlocked yet). Observe their usefulness (this album is OLD - back when nukes still required oxidizer - but it still demonstrates the point methinks): The reason why Cubic Octagonals are more popular - they have less of a footprint, and (according to the stats anyway) the BZ-52s add more mass to a craft. BZ-52s also have a higher price point. Me, I always thought they looked cleaner. Plus in the olden days the Cubic Octagonals were at the far end of the tech tree, so you got BZ-52s first.

Last night I did some more science farming around KSC with Bob's Wacky Sciencemobile 7. I realized that I had unlocked the Barometer since the last time I'd updated the design of the vehicle, and its addition gave me just enough science points to get KIS connector ports unlocked. And also big orange tanks. Same node, see. Anyways, I designed and launched a fuel module for the New Horizons space station orbiting Kerbin, and got it rendezvoused and docked up. I was then able to refuel the Raven 7 spaceplane also docked to the station at the time and then pull most of the remaining fuel out of the booster core still attached to the station, which was then jettisoned and sent plummeting back down to Kerbin. I hadn't put chutes on the thing and when I went to switch between the station and the Raven (which I'd undocked by then) the game put me in control of the damn booster, which at that point was in atmo - the game wouldn't let me switch back. So I got to ride the thing all the way down like Slim Pickens. Some of the parts actually survived the crash at 130 m/s and I did get a recovery... Anyway, after refueling the Raven, I looked at the station's compliment of visitors to see where their itineraries would take them. I had four of them whose destinations included Mun, so I went and ahead and loaded them into the Raven and had Jeb set a course. They'll head to Mun Port 7; there's a Mun Buggy 7 lander already docked to Mun Port, so the ones that are headed to the surface should be able to just head straight down once they're docked up. I'm debating as to whether or not I should have Jeb wait to take them back towards Kerbin or if I should have him head on; I'm leaning towards waiting, as I don't have a lot of other tourists heading towards Mun at the moment. And with the connector port finally unlocked, I designed a rescue craft for Valentina and her batch of tourists currently stranded on Minmus. I didn't have any available pilots left, so Bill's in a Mk2 Lander Can with an OKTO core piloting the thing, with (hopefully) the necessary parts to get the tourists into the rescue ship stowed in KIS containers. The plan is to attach a winch to the rescue lander once it arrives on Minmus, connect a docking port and antenna to Val's crashed craft (to fulfill a contract to put an orbital outpost on Minmus, knock on wood), then attach a connector port to the crashed ship and plug in the winch cable. If the plan works, the game will consider the two craft docked - and will allow a transfer between modules to take place. I've heard KIS folks talk about using pipes to "liquefy their Kerbals" and move them around places...this I think would be akin to "beaming" them. And if that plan fails, I've brought extra connector ports...

If you're not adverse to mods, I might recommend KIS in this case. Take an engineer out there with some connector ports, and connect a docking port somewhere on the craft. Have the engineer's craft up there with a number of winches equal to the number of connector ports. Hook up the winches and set them to a good length - five to ten meters, maybe. You oughta be able to take off then and haul it up to orbit that way, and then dock it to something that could take it back to Kerbin without having to futz too much about getting past re-entry heat. I'd say "go put a heat shield on it", but at 1.3 tonnes a 2.5 meter head shield would be a little more than a single Engineer would be able to handle. For the landing and approach, I might recommend Trajectories. And a craft with excess delta-V. You'd still have to have some precision with the winch approach, but they would afford you a little more in terms of margin for error.

Alright...so your payloads are somewhere in the 80 tonnes range then? No problem - we can calc the asparagus for that easily enough. First, let me point out Temstar's guide to good asparagus. Those guidelines were written for 0.20 but they're still good in the days of 1.0.x (the main differences being that you don't want your TWR to be quite as high as it needed to be in the old days - 1.5 is plenty - and that you actually need nosecones and fins these days). 0.20 was the days before thrust limiters, so you couldn't fine-tune your engine thrust; these days you can. So let's do the math based on those guidelines. Your payload is 80 tonnes; 15% payload fraction gives you a theoretical rocket mass of 533 tonnes. With a 1.5 TWR on the pad for that mass, you'll need 7840 kN of thrust on the pad. Putting 22% of that in the core - 1724.8 kN; a Twin Boar set at 92.5% could do the job. Alternatively, you could use a rocket cluster (like Temstar used to do). BZ-52s, Cubic Octagonal Struts or even Modular Girder Segments could easily be added to the bottom of a fuel tank, and the rockets attached to those. Say 4 Swivels and 6 Reliants - that would give you 1879.02 in the core, a little more than you need but nothing that can't adjusted (adjust the Reliants to 87% - you want the Swivels at full blast). So, let's say then you want three booster pairs. You have 78% of the 7840 kN left to allot, distributed among six engines - that comes out to 1019.2 kN each. That one's easy - use Mainsails set at 74% thrust. So, assuming you go with the rocket cluster and the Mainsails, you've got 49.5 tonnes worth of engines. Now to figure up fuel in each stack. Your theoretical mass is 533 tonnes - you've got 80 tonnes of payload and 49.5 tonnes of engine. I always say three tonnes for unexpected sundry crap like decouplers, nosecones and fins. So subtract all that from the theoretical mass - you have 400.5 tonnes of fuel left; dividing into seven stacks gives you just over 57 tonnes of fuel tanks per stack. Your options are partially drained S3-14400s, or a combination Jumbo64/X200-32/X200-8 - the second of which would give you 58.5 tonnes of fuel, which is close enough for jazz, and would keep your stacks to the 2.5 radial size (so you wouldn't have to waste mass on adapters and such). They'd also save you about √24,000 or so, if that's a consideration. You'd need a little more thrust to offset the extra seven tonnes of fuel but that shouldn't be a problem since we've got engines tuned down all over the place - they have room to go up a bit. If you did go with a Twin Boar in the core, you'd have 46 tonnes of engines plus 32 tonnes of fuel in the core already. The 3.5 tonnes of fuel saved for engines comes out to an extra 0.5 tonnes of fuel tanks per stack, so not much change over what you already have. You'd need to add 25.5 tonnes of fuel to the top of the Twin Boar - an X200-32/X200-16 combo could do the job, though you'd have to drain off 1.5 tonnes of fuel from one of those two tanks. Or just go with it and up the thrust. One other thing you might want to try is the Optimal Rocket Calculator site; it's a handy tool that will calculate the parts required to build a booster for specifications you define. It's a really handy tool when it comes to booster design. Other than that there's not much else I can suggest. I'll plug the Procedural Fairings mod again and call it a day at this point.

I was actually wondering if I could stick a connector port on the crashed ship and then connect it to the rescue ship with a winch (in docked mode), if that would work well enough to transfer out the tourists. The crashed ship has tipped over on its side and is firmly on the ground on Minmus, so docking it up would be challenging at best. Speaking of docking, I did a fair amount of that last night - no fewer than three orbital rendezvous and docking maneuvers. After putzing about KSC for a little more science to unlock said connector ports (still about 40 short), I decided to fulfill a contract to put a new orbital station around Kerbin. I'd recently designed a lab-equipped station core that I wanted to add to my existing New Horizons station in Kerbin orbit, so I just used that to fulfill the contract. Nothing quite like doing something you want to do and getting paid to do it, right? After I got it into orbit I had a successful rendevous and docking; the original station was pretty much just sent up to fulfill a contract and I hadn't really meant to do much with it at the time. Now it's one of the "modules" of the new station. Second docking mission of the night - I sent up Jeb in a redesigned Raven 7 (just added some canards for better pitch control) with a group of four tourists en-route to the recently updated New Horizons station, where they'd stay until other craft could ferry them on to their respective destinations. Owing to a bad ascent profile and miscalculation of the launch window, the Raven wound up in orbit without enough fuel to make the rendezvous. So I sent up a Dingleberry mission to give the plane enough juice to continue orbital ops. Rendezvous and docking went quite well. Then the third docking mission of the night was the Raven arriving at New Horizons. Jeb offloaded his passengers, and he offloaded Bob - who had been in the side seat and who I intend to send on to Minmus to run a lab there. I went ahead and sent him to work processing a little bit of science in New Horizons lab - and by "little bit" I really mean a miniscule amount; Jeb did a quick EVA and brought back in his EVA report for Bob to process; I think it's earning something like 0.017 data per day or some-such. I'll do a more proper sci analysis later, when Bob's on site. Meanwhile every little bit helps. Tonight I plan on sending up a fuel module to New Horizons. Jeb's got this 1800 m/s rocket plane there, see, which would be capable of doing a fly-by of one of Kerbin's moons and returning easily enough... Plus I should really plan on grabbing some science somewhere along the line so I can get Val and her can full of tourists back to Kerbin at some point.

If you're into mods at all, try Kerbal Inventory System - it gives you the ability to add or remove parts on the fly. You could use it to have an engineer (like Bill) go on a spacewalk to attach a chute or two to the original capsule. Of course, if you're in a career game, you'd still have to unlock the necessary techs, but most of the basic tools are pretty low down on the tech tree. Further up you get cool stuff like winches and magnets. By "low down" on the tech tree, I mean below the level of the AGU/Claw. 45 to 90 range.

Okay - so the question is how to launch a large payload. About what mass range are we talking about? Most I've ever gotten into space with a reliable booster was 450 tonnes on a dare - I'll have to search for the screenie. Meantime there's this one, which does 180: Granted, this was from an earlier version of KSP (so it probably could do more now; stock air recommended TWR on the pad for 1.0.x is 1.5 or thereabouts). My observation, though, has been that anything that worked in pre-1.0 KSP will work in the current game, provided you A) add fins, add nosecones and C) fly it carefully down towards the ground (don't start turning until 5k, then be gradual about it - try to be at 45 degrees by 15k but don't rush it and DEFINITELY don't turn all at once). As for attaching the payload, struts are still going to be necessary, even if you use a fairing. All the fairing does is protect the internal bits from thermal damage and reduce drag; it doesn't add much in terms of structural stability to the vehicle. They're expecially necessary if you've got a really narrow connection point (like say if you've got a docking port on the bottom of the payload and the booster uses large or extra-large radius parts right off. If you're having problems with parts coming apart from one another, you could try an old trick from the days where the connections weren't as strong - put cubic octagonals on the side and stitch those together with struts. Like this: Makes things a big stronger - less likely to come flying apart at the seams... BTW if you think stock fairings blow and aren't adverse to mods, try Procedural Fairings. Waaaay more user friendly, IMHO. The bit where the parts mesh to one another in the cargo bay - been there, and I agree it sucks. Had it happen to me the other day - I moved the payload around and thought I'd reattached it to the right spot, only to discover that I had dumped the probe core controlling the thing smack into the docking port that was supposedly holding it in place...

Had a pretty lousy night last night. I designed a FAR plane that didn't want to FAR, and then after my 6-year old conned me into playing a game of Utopia with him (yes, that one) I went back into playing KSP. Valentina and her bunch of tourists had finally arrived at Minmus and I had picked up a flag-planting and surface sci contract for Minmus since they launched. I figured "what the hell, they've got a ship that can land launch and make it back to Kerbin", so I decided to land the thing even though none of her tourists needed to land. Botched the suicide burn. Autosave revert - to find I'd put the last autosave point right at that spot where they couldn't abort the suicide burn. Crash. Crash. Crash. Crash. Facepalm. Val and her crew of worthless tourists are now stuck on Minmus. At least I got the damn flag-planting contract taken care of. So at this point I'm scratching my head trying to figure out how I'm going to get those tourists back to Kerbin. I use KIS/KAS and Ship Manifest so there is that - I need to see how pipes are working these days, or if hooking up a winch will count enough for purposes of having a craft "docked" for Ship Manifest to be able to transfer the tourists into a rescue ship (seeing as how I can't EVA them). Bill's probably got a job to do here in the very near future and at least this time it won't involve a spacewalk...

Hmm. Sounds like a bug then. Either that or the wiki is in need of updating. Tell you what: I've got some new folks lazing around KSC at the moment - when I get an opportunity later tonight, I'll take them on up for a joy ride and see if I get the same result or not. If I do, then it's likely the wiki's data just needs to be updated. Just a random thought - it's possible the "flight" requirement might have some level of minimum altitude. How high up have you gotten your plane going?

http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Experience Did your scientists already have one XP gained from a flight over Kerbin? If so, they won't be able to gain that same point over and over again. Try sending them to LKO if you haven't done so. If you have, on the other hand, sent them to orbit and they still haven't reached Level 1 (one-star), then there's an issue.

Had a fairly busy weekend fulfilling contracts. Wound up inadvertently launching a flotilla out towards the Mun - two probes for contracts, a space station core for a contract, and an up-and-down tourist lander for when it becomes a necessity. I've got tourists en route - they haven't arrived yet but they will be pretty damn fast at this point. Got the lander docked up to the station in the meantime. Also was finally able to accomplish a long-standing contract I had to do temperature scans up by Kerbin's north pole. My little surveyor plane worked reasonably well; landing took a few tries but in the end I managed to get it down mostly intact (could've stood to move the rear landing gear back ever so slightly - ripped a spoiler off on touchdown). Replacement contracts have me now hauling a tourist to Duna and rescuing a Kerbal from orbit of Minmus. Challenges accepted! My program has got about √1.1M at this point; still working towards unlocking the Level 3 R&D. I'm also hoping to get a space station up in orbit of Minmus soon to start reaping science from an orbital lab.

This. Though I might recommend using a rudimentary rover in lieu of flags and then relabeling the thing as a base once it's in position. Why do this? Because the visual range increases from 30 klicks to 100 klicks, giving you more time to get aligned. How rudimentary of a rover am I talking about? In career, take a Stayputnik, stick a fuel tank, a Wheesley engine, a pair of radial intakes and some bush-plane gear on it, plus a radial chute. That's all you need. Add a battery or solar panel if it makes you nervous. Set the thrust limited down low, and then just give it enough thrust to overcome the inertia. Hit the brakes and pop the chute when it's in position. If you find you need a third point to help with the alignment, put another one of these at 1 kilometer inland. Additional rovers can be added at five kilometer intervals inland for increased accuracy. You can even use them for a glide slope - take your distance to any given marker, add it to the distance that marker is from the Runway, multiply the result by 100 and add 100 - the result is roughly where you want your altimeter, and from there you can tell if you're high or low. Myself, I use NavUtilities. But even then, there are merits to having a visual system like this - not the least of which is being able to tell where KSC is from orbit and having a good guess as to where you want to do your de-orbit burn.

Busy night last night - the first in a while. Redesigned my Stratofortress 7 design with improved solar panels and docking capabilities. Sent Berris up with a group of KSC staff - a scientist and three engineers - to dock with the New Horizons space station, after first undocking the Condor 7 from the space station with three tourists headed back to Kerbin. I'm hoping to ultimately get my current KSC staff some experience, at least enough to get them up to the 2-star level. That all will depend on funding, of course. Meanwhile, the same Stratofortress craft, which I renamed "Straight Flush", offloaded the engineers on the station and picked up three tourist passengers; they're all now headed for a suborbital flight around Minmus. Meanwhile, I landed the Condor...400 klicks short of KSC and in the dead of night. Lost the main engine and two Twitches on touchdown but at least the whole damn thing didn't explode. I still need to re-examine my design process for spaceplanes, particularly when it comes to pitch authority; that's two planes in a row where the plane's pitch became nigh uncontrollable during re-entry - and two where I botched the re-entry point. Picked up a couple of new contracts to put satellites around Mun and Minmus; I'll be launching Ballistae missions this evening to get those underway (I need to add A.I.R.B.R.A.K.E.S to the Ballista 7 design - those seem to help a great deal with re-entry heat). And I finally fulfilled a contract to put a satellite in a very high polar orbit around Kerbin. Sitting up near √1M at the moment; hoping I can keep the momentum up and unlock the Level 3 R&D facility soon.

Glad we could be of help.

Okay...and everything looks hunky-dory from the screenie you posted (thanks for that, BTW). So here's what you need to do (I looked it up): 1) Open your persistent.sfs file for your save game in Notepad (TextEdit in Mac or your text editor of choice - but not MS Word). 2) Search for the string "state = Acquired". 3) If you come across this string, change it to read "state = Ready" 4) Save the file. 5) ??? 6) Profit. Hopefully that'll sort things out for you. I might suggest you go ahead and make a backup copy of your persistent.sfs file before you go hacking around in it, just as a precaution. If it doesn't work or if you don't find any instances of "state = Aqcuired", Try SCE to auxiliary (let us know so we can see what else might be happening). sal_vager has asked for your savegame file - that's the same persistent.sfs file, and posting it would help with any further diagnosis needed.

Usually issues with the docking happen either because A) one of the ports is attached backwards or one of the ports needs to be reset. The first can be fixed only with mods (such as KIS) that would allow you to re-orient the port on the fly via an EVA. The second requires you to exit the game, delve into your persistent save file and edit a little bit of text. I don't recall all the details of that process at the moment or I'd post the full instructions; hopefully somebody else remembers them and can help you out.

Didn't actually...well, dagnabbit. On the plus side - I got some more experience with KIS...

A lot of it does have to do with your cross-section; your velocity and atmospheric density play into it as well. One of the things that the FAR mod does is show you what kind of cross-sectional area you're dealing with for your current design and calculate your critical mach number for you; it'll also show you where you can expect to experience the greatest amount of drag as well. For the soup, there's the information available on atmospheric density with altitude on the wiki, and you could calculate various solutions for velocity and density using something like a spreadsheet for a given design. Of course, you'd still need to know what your cross-sectional area was; for that, you'd probably need a detailed analysis of the size and shape of the parts you're using. Kweller has given you a pretty good short answer - me, I've pretty much just told you to go do a hell of a lot of math. Or install FAR. Either way...that's probably not a direct answer to your question.

So two nights ago when I thought I'd lost Diissa and Berris forever, it turned out KSP had frozen up while their plane was in the process of exploding; I remembered this happening but was angry enough at the time not to think anything of it. Firing up KSP last night I discovered they were alive and their plane was intact...and still coming in for re-entry. The second attempt at landing the Raven 7 went more smoothly, though it still had sucky pitch authority and I will be redesigning its planform before I launch it again. So, I still have no casualties in my current career game, thank goodness. Meantime, I was able to dock the Condor 7 to the New Horizons space station at last and swap out its passengers; Jeb and Bill will be bringing home the three Raven passengers tonight, while the four original Condor passengers will be headed for various destinations from New Horizons. I'm a bit concerned about the Condor's ability to land; it should be able to do so without issue, but that plane is kinda low on gas...I certainly hope I don't have to try another dead-stick landing... Bill also relocated one of New Horizon's solar panels during an EVA; I should now be able to access its core and re-label it for what it is - a space station.

You can also use it as a re-usable transfer stage for certain destinations. Back in 0.21 or thereabouts, I used a system of nuclear tugs (the Thunderbolt 7 series) that would take landers launched from Kerbin and carry them on to places like Duna, Ike and Gilly. You do have to dock refueling missions to the tugs, but the price of a tank of gas or two is usually far less than that of such a system - especially if you can set things up to where you can deliver the fuel to the tug via an SSTO spaceplane (the fuel delivery in that case just costs you the fuel involved, provided you can land the plane back at KSC safely). The key thing with tugs - you have to be able to comfortable with the procedures of rendezvous and docking, and you have to make sure that the connection between the tug and the paywad is secure (otherwise it has a tendency to wobble). There are several mods that would help with both; off the top of my head, Docking Port Alignment Indicator is extremely useful. I think you can use Quantum Struts to make strut connections on the fly - I don't use that one myself - or perhaps KIS/KAS, which I do use (but haven't tried to use to make a strut connection). There's also the old multiple-docking-ports-at-once trick, with which DPAI is also useful.

I would say it's likely - K.Yeon mentions in the initial OPT thread that "I have not implemented the drag cubes for cargo bays because not much information was released about them, i have yet to figure it out. " What's the part you've got immediately aft of that cargo bay/fuel tank? I'm looking at the image with the fuel tank and I'm trying to figure out why it shows your cross-section area going down there. In the meantime, if you need a cargo bay there, you might try a mid-sized Mk3 bay; hopefully it wouldn't look like dreck...

Last night I resumed the flight of the Raven 7. Having learned something new about how FAR works and worried that I'd crash the thing on re-entry, I went ahead and offloaded my tourist passengers at the New Horizons space station, then did a rendezvous with the Condor 7 still stuck in orbit to offload some of the Raven's fuel - in particular, some monoprop. I'm confident that the Condor can now complete its originally intended mission (of ferrying passengers to New Horizons). Went ahead and de-orbited the Raven. As I feared, I didn't have sufficient pitch authority to keep the nose up at touchdown and she crashed with two white suits, Diissa and Berris, at the helm - the first two permanent casualties I've had in my career game so far. I'm particularly mad about losing Berris - she was a two-star pilot... Makes me glad I had the forethought to offload the passengers.

No...FAR would pick that up a CoP issue pretty easily; most of the longitudinal statistics would turn red if that were the case. It does look like the OP needs to switch over to the dev version of FAR, though. Make sure you're using the latest dev version; Ferri's got the aforementioned bug when it comes to cargo bays, and I'm seeing it in your cross-section curve (the green one). Now for the simulator tab - I came across this page regarding aircraft stability while researching a phenomenon called Dutch Roll. About a third a way down the page there are some sine wave graphs - the section header is "Dynamic Stability". Dynamic stability happens to be what the simulator tab will show you - it shows you the tendencies of your plane after the initial, static conditions. So what you do is pick an axis you want to test (you're curious about your yaw, so use "r") and put in an initial condition - I usually go with "5" - for that axis. Mash go and watch FAR generate the dynamic stability graph; the particulars of it aren't as important as the graph's shape. If the amplitude of the oscillations decreases from left to right across the graph, your plane will have a tendency to stabilize along that axis. If the amplitude stays the same, you've got neutral stability. If the oscillations increase in amplitude with time, you've got negative stability on that axis. And if things just fly off from the get-go, you have negative stability. With negative stability conditions, you want to re-design your plane. I have come across situations lately where the static stability was all cool and froody, but the plane wound up having negative dynamic stability. You can try to correct for it with SAS modules, but I wouldn't rely on SAS to be able to fix the problem.

Okay then...Munar landing. That being the case, the next three techs I'd go for (after General Construction; get that first) would be Electrics, Landing and Fuel Systems (in that order). Electrics gives you batteries, rudimentary solar panels and lights (which come in handy when you want to land on the Mun for judging how far it is to the deck). The OKTO probe is also a very nice "not a lousy Stayputnik" core if you want to do unmanned things. Landing will give you big chutes and lander legs - the second of which is nice to have - and then Fuel Systems will get you fuel ducts and some bigger tanks; the fuel ducts make asparagus and onion staging possibilities, which you may or may not prefer depending on how much cash you've managed to generate so far. Building-wise, I'd say getting the Tracking Station to Level 2 is probably your first priority, followed by Astronaut facility to level 2; the first upgrade gives you patched conics and maneuver nodes, while the second gives your Kerbals the ability to make EVAs and plant flags - both of which can produce money and/or science.

There is a known bug where the first engine you place on your craft will hog any air from intakes that are on the craft at that point; Intake Build Aid is designed to fix that bug at the push of a button. Not relevant to the OP's question - since he mentions that he's not getting up high enough to see flameouts - but that might be something for all y'all to look at if it's something with which you're experiencing problems. I'll have to take a closer look at these when I get an opportunity; busy right now. At a glance all the derivatives look okay...makes me wonder what's going on. What happens with a stability analysis in the simulator? Do you need instructions on how to make the simulator tab work? (Not being facetious here - I know what that damn thing does).