capi3101

What kind of engine tech do you have available? That would help us give you better answers...for example, could you do the Mainsail/Skipper setup I suggested earlier today?

I was just throwing 1.2 out there as an example; most folks usually wind up in the 3-4 range for Munar landings. Nothing wrong with having it that high on Mun, since there's no atmospheric drag to bleed off your delta-V. Since you've got KER, toss up the Surface and Vehicle tabs when you go to make your Mun landing (be sure to add one of the KER flight computer parts to your craft before you launch). On the Vehicle tab, there'll be a stat telling you the distance to suicide burn - you want to begin a full power retrograde burn (Z-key) when that figure gets as close to zero as you can manage (try not to start your burn after it gets below zero; at that point a crash is pretty much inevitable). And, as with any time you go for a suicide burn, quicksave before you start...

I'd agree with General Contstruction, if for no other reason than that most of the early (pre-90) techs are generally useful. Beyond that, it's really a matter of where you want to focus your gameplay, but you can't go wrong leaning towards batteries/solar panels/more science instruments. I might recommend making a beeline for the Mobile Lab given its usefulness in 1.0.x, but others may feel differently.

Your picture's not showing up, just FYI. You're using FAR? What are your stability derivatives doing as you ascend? Check 0k/Mach 0.35, 5k/Mach 0.85, 10k/Mach 1, 20k/Mach 3 and 30k/Mach 4. If any of the numbers turn red, we need to check some things. I'd wager good money that your Nß parameter goes red at some point. Yaw issues usually warrant a bigger fin; shoot for one that's about 10-12% your total wing + tailplane area, with 25% of that area dedicated to rudder. There's also been issues between B9 Procedural Wings and FAR; are you using the latest development version of FAR? If not, you should get a hold of it; I know that among other things the latest release version of FAR doesn't account for the bottom half of Mk2 Cargo Bays. A new version of B9 Procedural Wings came out just today, incidentally.

That's a function of TWR, which did not change in version 1.0.x. Thrust-to-weight ratio (TWR) equals thrust divided by a quantity equal to the mass of the craft times the surface gravity of the world in question. Or, in short: TWR = T / mg. The wiki has the Mun's surface gravity data; it's 1.63 meters per second per second. Any engine you would use on Mun would produce its vacuum thrust, of course. A craft with a TWR value of greater than 1.0 can take off from the Mun; one with less than that won't be able to take off/will crash. So - example time. Let's say you've got a craft utilizing a single Terrier engine; in vacuum, its maximum thrust is 60 kN. Let's say you want a craft that has a 1.2 TWR on Mun. You just solve for mass and plug in the numbers you have: TWR = R (making a notation change here - nothing else) R = T / mg Rmg = T m = T / Rg = 60 / (1.2*1.63) = 30.6748 tonnes. So, your single Terrier would support a thirty tonne craft easily enough. You wouldn't want to go much heavier than that with a single Terrier, incidentally.

Sweet. I was getting a bit tired of the warning for CrossFeedEnabler, and putting fuel ducts on to compensate just looked wrong somehow...

I generally do the same; I've been setting the main wing/elevators/flaps/spoilers/ailerons to 0.5, canards to 0.4 (when I use them) and the fin/rudder to 0.3. Are those good values for general purposes? Under what circumstances would they need to be stronger or weaker?

Quick question - is there any case in which I'd want to set the control surfaces to higher than 0.5 strength? Last night I had a flight which prompted this question - I had a new tail-less delta/no canard plane design that I went ahead and ski-jumped off the Runway, and when I went to begin climbing my elevators would explode every time. Q was around 24 kPa at that point. Ultimately I got the plane to fly by throttling back to 2/3 before attempting to pitch up, then throttling back up after I pitched up. I think the design would benefit greatly from canards; wound up lighting the rockets at 19,500 because it was getting close to not being able to climb any further and I was getting temperature warnings in the yellow - made orbit with fuel to spare as it turned out, though. I worry about what will happen when it comes time to bring that plane back down, though...might be nose heavy (i.e. a lawn dart) with the way I set things up.

RevanCorana, you might try looking at my own shenanigans with FAR; the meaty stuff starts on page four and the recent stuff begins on page 29. I asked a lot of the same questions and got some good answers.

Yep. Very much this - let's see what we can do with '>Temstar's guidelines to help you out. 36 tonne paywad = 240 tonne rocket. 1.5 TWR on the pad = 3528 kN thrust. 22% thrust in the core = 776.16 kN (a Mainsail set to 56% thrust). Three booster pairs = 458.64 kn (Skippers set at 81% thrust). Mainsail weighs six tonnes, Skippers weigh three = 24 tonnes of engines. 240 tonnes total - 36 tonnes paywad - 24 tonnes engines = 180 tonnes remaining. Three tonnes (conservatively) for decouplers, FINS, and nosecones = 177 tonnes left, divide that into seven stacks for fuel = 25.28 tonnes per stack. You could do that with an X200-32 and partially drained X200-16 tank. Makes absolutely no lick of difference. Set your Mechjeb up such that you begin turning at 5 kilometers and you're at 45 degrees at 15,000 kilometers. If you've added fins and still have problems, try adding a Large ASAS module or two. And MOAR FINS. Finny finny fins...might suggest fins on the core too, not just the boosters; no telling where you'll be when Mechjeb decides to cut loose that last booster pair. If you're high enough, great; if not, you'll want them.

And looking at the dry screenie, it's easy to see why...the CoM shifts aft of the CoL - your plane becomes flip happy in that configuration. Definitely want to get a little more mass up towards the nose if you can. Barring that, you might try moving your wings back ever so slightly. A little dihedral (angling your wings upward 5 degrees or so) wouldn't hurt either. Same boat on the CPU - on the chip it says "Made in Byzantium". There's not much more to the flags trick than that. I usually use rovers instead of flags because my flags have a tendency to vanish or spontaneously combust on me - and once they're in place, I set the parking brake and re-label them as bases; this gives you the bonus of being able to see where they are A) from orbit and a hundred klicks out, which is reaaaaly handy when you want to get aligned well in advance. I usually also add one or two more rovers on the inland side of the runway (the west side) at 1 kilometer and 5 kilometers out; you can continue adding them at five kilometer increments if you like - the most I had at one time went out to 30 kilometers (that was in 0.21 or so and with the next version of the game the Runway shifted over, rendering my ILS useless for alignment - otherwise I might still be using that one). The more markers you've got, the more points you have to align, the more you can be assured that your alignment is good from further away. And then, if you label them judiciously, you can use the same ground markers to help you find a good glide slope (I did the math once and it came out to something like a 5.7 degree slope, a tad steep but it does help you avoid the mountains west of KSC pretty effectively). Here's how that works - label your ground markers (regardless of if it's a flag, rover, whatever) by the distance they are to the Runway (I label the ones on the Runway as KSC 09 and KSC 27, and the ones inland as "Meatball - 1 km", "Meatball - 5 km", etc.). When you're looking at your markers, note the distance you are from the marker, and add to that the distance the marker is from the Runway (for example, let's say I'm 4.7 kilometers from Meatball - 10 km; 4.7 + 10 = 14.7). You multiply that total by 100, and then add 100. The result is what you want your altimeter to read (so in the aforementioned example, (14.7 * 100) + 100 = 1570); if your altimeter reading is higher, you're too high and if it's lower, you're too low, simple as that. You have to be able to do the math in your head pretty quickly (or just hit pause frequently), but it's a pretty effective system. I used to use it before I installed NavUtilities, and even to this day I'll still set rover/bases on either end of the Runway pretty early on. Note that if you're trying to land on KSC 27, the system still works (you can still align with the inland ground markers), but you'll only be able to use the KSC 27 marker to judge your glide slope. No rover tech? No problem - you've already at least unlocked Aviation, otherwise you wouldn't be asking about planes in the first place. Unlock Basic Science (for 45 sci) if you haven't already so you've got the Stayputnik. Then build an assembly consisting of a Stayputnik, a battery pack or two, a Mk1 Fuselage, a Wheesley engine, a Radial Intake, and add a set of tricycle bush-plane landing gear. Add a radial chute for good measure. Limit the thrust of the Wheesley to about 10%. For the KSC 09 and inland markers, start off slowly - just enough thrust to get going, get turned around, and drive it just off the edge of the Runway. Kill the thrust, pop the chute, set the brake, relabel as needed. For the KSC 27 marker, you can open up the thrust a bit but pay attention to the piano keys - you don't want to be going too fast when you get to the end of the ski-jump ramp, otherwise your little pseudo-rover is probably going in the drink. Same as before - get off the raised green area, kill the thrust, pop the chute, set the brake, relabel. And of course, you can always use flags if your Kerbals can plant them; just because they commit random acts of magic for me doesn't mean they'll do the same for you. I hope that's helpful to you.

Stuck at VBS last night; took the time to crunch some numbers on a new FAR spaceplane design while I was there doing nothing. Design goal was a 27-tonne plane with 2000 delta-V of rocket included. Came up with a close solution for my current tech level - 28 tonnes and just shy of the 2000 mark. Built said plane - the Raven 7 - after I got home and launched it. Tail struck twice, then FAR had an annoying habit of tearing off the elevators when I tried to pitch up. Ultimately overcame this problem by ski-jumping off the end of the Runway, throttling back to 2/3, pitching up to 35 degrees and then throttling back up. Made it to orbit with about 500 m/s of delta-V to spare. Still going to ask about what I could do with those elevators and I'm somewhat concerned about the return flight. For good measure I may try to drop off my tourist passengers at the orbiting New Horizons station before attempting re-entry. That way if something goes wrong, I can still fulfill their contracts later.

That's good to know. Myself, I use newFAR, and I find with each passing day that I'm forgetting the tricks of the stock aero model. Not a good thing; I like to be able to help out spaceplane jockeys regardless of what air they try to fly in if I can. I would be careful when you come back down to do your best and try and control your rate of descent - too fast, and you'll burn something up. A.I.R.B.R.A.K.E.S. are your friends - I'd suggest getting them unlocked at the earliest opportunity - but so is having plenty of pitch authority. If you can control your pitch, you can control your temperature - just slow down your rate of descent if it looks like something's trying to overheat. Your CoM position will also have changed on account of your plane having used up its rocket fuel to get into orbit. Now, it looks to me like you've got more mass ahead of your tanks than behind them, so the CoM should shift towards the nose; your plane will probably be slightly less maneuverable than it was on the way up but still controllable, and that's good as long as it doesn't shift forward too far (and then you get lawn dart behavior - which is bad on entry since you can't effectively slow sown your descent if you need to). The CoM going forward is a damn sight better than the alternative - the CoM shifts aft and winds up aft of the CoL, which is bad since at that point you're dynamically unstable and if you overwork the controls in the slightest, you're going to head into a spin and likely a crash. If in the future you want to be sure which direction your CoM will go (or if you want to set things up so it doesn't move much at all), try out a mod called RCS Build Aid - among its useful features is a "dry center of mass" indicator, which will show you where the CoM will be when your plane is out of fuel. One other mod I'll throw out there is NavUtilities. It's an integrated ILS, which will make a Runway landing much easier to accomplish. Barring that, there's the old "flags on either end of the Runway" trick, which I'd be happy to elaborate on further if it's something you're interested in.

Lately I've taken a strategy like katateochi's, bringing tourists to their destinations in bulk in craft that make dedicated runs between Kerbin/Mun and Kerbin/Minmus. I generally drop off tourists at orbiting space stations if their itinerary includes a landing. Gives me a use for space stations after I've fulfilled contracts with them. My station over Kerbin is also where I offload tourists that have finished out their contracts; I pick them up at the station with a spaceplane, again dropping off any new tourists whose destinations take them beyond Kerbin's orbit. At least, that's the theory. In truth I haven't gotten that far yet - my Kerbin SSTO keeps coming up short on fuel. I also foresee fuel as a problem with this system, though I think I can get something going with mining on Mun and Minmus once my tech will allow it.

Yeah, I did the math on that one right after I posted it...came to the conclusion that the Isp of the Terriers/Poodles surpassed the Swivels when the atmospheric pressure got down to the neighborhood of 1/10th of an atmosphere. That happens in the stock atmo around 10k, so the whole Isp argument is moot. And then when it comes to thrust - the Poodle starts outdoing the Swivel at 0.3 atmospheres...right before 7500 m. I think I'd still recommend the Swivel, though, judging the OP's current tech level from their plane. At least until they get Advanced Aerodynamics (and the Mk2 to 2.5 meter adapter that comes with it); for now they could replace the tri-adapter with an emptied Mk2 to 1.25 adapter and mount the Swivel to that. Doing that would cut down the drag profile.

Me, I'd swap out that three LV-909 concoction you've got on the back with a single Swivel engine. It'd save you the 0.15 tonnes for the mass of the Tri-Adapter, you'd get 125 kN more thrust, and (the big ones) you'd see a huge boost to your delta-V - those Terriers have an atmo Isp of 85 while the Swivel's atmo Isp is 270 and you would lose a very drag-inducing part in the process (namely the Tri-Coupler again). Yes, the Terriers and the Poodle have better Isps than the Swivel once you're in space...but remember, you're going to be lighting the damn things while you're still in atmo. In the meantime, they're gas guzzlers. Your wing setup looks a little anemic to me. How does the plane handle?

I had the brilliant idea of making an SSTO spaceplane passenger ferry to take tourists up to my New Horizons space station in orbit of Kerbin, where they could board dedicated transport craft headed towards their final destinations. So, I designed the Condor 7, with a crew of 2, 4 passengers, and a small paywad bay. First problem I had - the New Horizons base had been launched with only a Clamp-o-tron Jr. installed, totally insufficient for docking and unloading tourists. But I use KIS, so my first payward is a KIS refrigerator loaded with a proper Clamp-O-Tron; Jeb and Bill are the Condor crew, and Bill is given the task of swapping out the dinky little Jr with a full-sized port. After working out how much gas it would take just to get the Condor to orbit, she flew. Made it to orbit with a 5% fuel reserve and only 90 units of monoprop...4.5 degrees off the plane of the station. I used monoprop to get that down to 2 degrees, but then I was low on monoprop. So, time for a refueling mission - which went okay; I refueled a short tank on the Condor. Forgot all about topping off its monoprop tanks. Long story short, after a protracted but ultimately successful EVA to place the proper-sized port on the station (once again had to RTFM - I really need to start working with KIS more), the Condor ran out of monoprop 10 meters shy of docking. I now get to run another refueling op to the bird while the station floats off. Lucky me...

Will give that a shot, thanks. Just spoilers on the recent designs; I've only recently unlocked the dedicated A.I.R.B.R.A.K.E. part and I've only got the Level 2 SPH at the moment, and I've found manually tweaking flaps in flight to be tedious. I'll keep the rest of what you wrote in mind when I go to design my next craft. Meantime, progress report. It was ugly - but I'll take it: You may notice that's not Jeb and Diissa's ship. There's a story there - last night I did the fourth attempt to bring the two of them home in the Night Hawk. The fourth re-entry went pretty much the same as the previous entries, where I tore the airbrakes off as the Q got too high. But, I managed to get the temperature under control and brought them into subsonic flight about a hundred klicks downrange from KSC. As I closed to fifty klicks, I did a quicksave and then tried to make an adjustment to my course to align with the Runway and the plane came apart, with the expected end results (it wasn't that violent of a maneuver either, just a quick little tap on the elevator to bring the nose up - at a Q of about 28 kPa). When I did a quickload, the Cockpit promptly exploded with the plane dangling in mid-air. Reload and this happened again - I did this three times before I finally said "screw it" and went to the space center. Naturally, I'd lost the money for Diissa's rescue contract, but I noted the Astronaut Facility listed her and Jeb as MIA - so I knew I had been hit by a Kraken, and I still had access to both of them. The game gave me a new rescue contract shortly thereafter - Pepe's contract - which gave me an chance to make some key fixes to the Night Hawk design (among them, adding struts to the inside of the cargo bay and adding a few cooling fins to the Nacelle). Pepe's contract only took two tries to get right; I promptly whacked the damn fins I'd added when I took off and still cooked the ladder off the side of the cockpit, but otherwise there were no mishaps in the ascent. Ripped off the spoilers on both re-entry attempts (the second time while trying to retract them at Q=9 kPa), and both times I got the plane subsonic and to the KSC Runway; the first time I botched the touchdown and destroyed the craft, the second time I was able to produce the screenie above. So I've got some testing and a few more tweaks to make to the design at this point; I'll take all your advice to heart and we'll see what happens.

I was, my bad (and my bad for not mentioning it!). The engine thrust levels are the same these days between FAR and stock aero so I made the (bad) assumption that you'd want similar TWRs; I didn't account for the differences in how drag is accounted for. Which is what FAR has always done, so I don't know why I didn't think about that before opening my trap...

No, I'm not.

* For RAPIERs, you want your total takeoff mass to be somewhere between 17-24 tonnes per engine; that'll give you between 0.55 and 0.75 TWR on the Runway, which is plenty. * One Intake per engine is plenty at this point; I've got a couple of designs that made it to orbit with Circular Intakes. * You won't be making it as high or as fast as you used to be able to do before switch-over in the pre-1.0 days; pack more rocket fuel. I'd say two FL-T800s worth per RAPIER at least, and then a little more if you want to come back down again. * Any payload fractions you're used to won't be as high either; plan for 15% if you use planes to deliver probes and the like. * You're going to have to do your speed-up lower and nowadays frictional heating is a thing. Level out to 10 degrees above the horizon at 10k and start speeding up. If you start seeing temperature markers on bits of your plane, steepen up not much past 20 degrees. At 20k, aim your nose up and keep going until your engine kicks over. * Pre-coolers, if you use them, should be down by your engines.

Bit late to add fins to the designs there, but I'll keep it mind for the next flight. I did keep my airbrakes open; popped them on as soon as I hit atmo. Though that does bring up another question: at what point should I retract the things? I ask because there have been incidents where they've ripped themselves off of the plane... I might have the airbrakes too sensitive - that could be part of my issue. They are set for full deflection at the moment... I'm also finding climbing to be a tricky proposition once the atmosphere gets thicker. Generally I'm lucky if I can hold the nose to 10 degrees once I'm back down to 30k or so. I'm usually going Mach 4 and trying to pull up at that point even a little usually rips my plane apart. I'm obviously doing something wrong - I just don't know what it is yet. I need to figure it out though; I tried to get Jeb and Diissa home three times last night and each attempt ended badly. First time, the Mk2 Cockpit overheated and blew up. Second and third times I had structural failures and smacked the water going too fast. I've reverted the flight again so I can make more attempts later. Just to be clear - at this point it's not necessarily the design, it's my flying that's giving me problems, right? The plane is the Night Hawk, which I launched to orbit on Monday (damn, it's been a long week...). Tail-less delta; aileron, spoiler, elevator on the back of the wing.

Watching your YouTube video, OP. So this is going to read like a running commentary. Just out of curiosity - is there any reason why you have your launch clamps in a stage other than the initial stage? You do know they'll work just as well if you let them loose at the same time you light your rockets up (and you won't blow up your launchpad in the process). Seriously - if you've never tried it before, put the launch clamps in the bottom stage. I guarantee you that you won't be disappointed. Unless for some reason you forget to throttle up first... The nosecones on the bottoms of the internal booster units are a complete waste of mass. Just saying. You should not be getting your gee meter that high that early in your flight. Too much thrust - you're losing delta-V to excessive drag. 100 m/s by 1000 meters was good enough even in the old soup. Floppy rocket beginning around 2500; you start fiddling with the gimbal controls. Struts between the boosters and the payload would help here. A fairing covering the entire payload would also not go amiss (I don't know if you can do that or not in 1.0.x, though - I use Procedural Fairings and haven't bothered with the new stock fairings at all, so I don't know how they work). It also looks to me like you're using a fairing to connect the payload to the booster; I'll go ahead and tell you that it doesn't really work - you still need good old-fashioned space tape to keep things steady when you're connecting things up around a narrow little point (like, for example, a Clamp-O-Tron). You should be starting your turn sooner, though given your stability issues I certainly understand why you'd want to hesitate... Floppy rocket stops around 15k. By 20k you're 50 seconds to Ap; I'd ordinarily be flying about 20 degrees above the horizon at that point trying to pick up horizontal velocity. You've definitely got enough vertical velocity to coast up for a bit. 27,000 you cut lose the second stage and light the twin boar. There's another source of instability there - you don't light a central engine up until that point. 35,000 and the video stops. ---- Okay, so summary then - a big part of your problem is bad asparagus, made worse by the changes to the aero model in 1.0.x. You can still go with an asparagus design, but you'll need to re-engineer it for your payload, which in my previous post I figured was somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 tonnes. If you go with Temstar's Guidelines for Asparagus (which are still valid for 1.0.x despite the vast number of changes to the game since they were written way back in 0.21), a 25 tonne payload can be lifted with a 166.67 tonne rocket. You need 1.5 TWR on the launchpad, so calculate that and you get 2450 kN of thrust - that's all you need on the pad. Now you put 22% of that in the core - 539 kN - and take the other 78% - 1911 kN - and distribute it among...let's go with three booster pairs...so six more engines - so that comes out to 318 kN a piece. Pick a set of engines capable of that level of thrust - Skippers all around - and now tune them to the appropriate thrust levels, about 83% for the core engine and 49% for the side boosters. Seven skippers weigh 21 tonnes total and your payload is 25 tonnes, which means out of your 166.67 tonne mass budget, you've still got 120.67 tonnes for fins, nosecones, decouplers and fuel. Let's say 6 Protective Nose Cones, 6 TT-78s, a Rockomax Decoupler, and six Tail Fins (which move nowadays and make excellent fins IMHO). That comes out to 2.68 tonnes, so let's just round up and say three tonnes for sundry junk. You've got 117.67 tonnes left for fuel - which you divide evenly into seven stacks. That comes out to 16.81 tonnes of fuel each...so let's look and see here......X200-32 tanks hold 18 tonnes of fuel. What you could do there is go ahead and use just one X200-32 tank per stack and then up the thrust on each engine to compensate for the slightly higher than needed fuel amount, or go ahead and drain down each tank to 1345 LF and 1644 LOX. Now, long rocket designs - why would one be better? Less overall drag for one. Less cost for another. Lower part count for yet another. If they're floppy, add more struts; there used to be an old trick where you could put Cubic Octagonal Struts out on the sides of a stack decoupler and a matching set above, and then connect them with space tape - you could try that to see if it'd shore up the connections and make the rocket sturdier. If you wont have them, you could go with Modular Girder Segments instead (though those would add mass so don't go nuts with them). First solution of the Calculator says - Rockomax Brand Decoupler, Rockomax X200-8 Fuel Tank, Rockomax X200-16 Fuel Tank, RE-I5 "Skipper" Liquid Fuel Engine; then TR-38-D, Kerbodyne S3-3600 Tank, Kerbodyne S3-14400 Tank, Kerbodyne KR-2L+ "Rhino" Liquid Fuel Engine. And that's it. 4,040 ms of delta-V, √46050, 16.4% payload fraction. Good design if you've got the tech. Add a few fins to the bottom stage to keep the rocket steady. As for keeping the mass of the rocket up higher, that goes back to the physics of levers. For the basics, I'll direct you to - and don't laugh at the haircuts, pay attention to what he's talking about. A rocket is a lever, and the CoM is its fulcrum point. The end of the rocket that's got the bulk of the mass - that's the one that takes more force to move around.

Made three attempts to de-orbit Diissa and Jeb's spaceplane. They didn't go so well...attempt number four is coming up this evening as likely as not.

Do me a quick favor - go back into the VAB and take another screenie with the CoM indicator turned on. Drag is indeed the issue. A big contributing factor is the position of the CoM. If I'm looking at your first screenie correctly, your payload (the station core) is about 25 tonnes all told, tops. So that means out of your 337 tonne tocket, the vast majority of it is in the rear. You've also got waaaaaay more thrust than you need at this point; 1.5 at launch is plenty. What's going on is the old "throw a dart backwards" problem - you need the majority of your mass up near the top. Failing that, you need fins down towards the bottom. Now, you have them, but look where they're attached - to those SRBs, which you're getting rid of toot-sweet. Fins on your LF tanks would help matters tremendously. I might suggest you look at the Optimal Rocket Calculator for KSP 1.0 site; it'll help you out with designing a more reliable booster better suited for the new drag conditions. As for flying - stay going straight to 5k, then slowly begin to pitch over; have your nose pointed at 45 degrees by 15k (instead of shooting over hard to 45 degrees at 10k - doing that's gonna kill ya in 1.0.x). After that, it should be the same as it was pre-1.0.