capi3101

That's a nice tool right there...shouldn't be any major differences between 1.0.0 and 1.0.2 that would affect its operation. Going to have to add it to my own little toolbox set.

Screenshot procedure - let's hijack the thread for a moment to address that one real quick. Anywhere when you're in the game, hit F1 on your keyboard. That's all you've got to do: the game will automatically take a screenshot and put it in a folder under your main KSP directory (titled, conveniently enough, "screenshots"), saving it as "screenshot(x).png", where x is a number. The game will automatically check for the next available screenshot number so it'll always save screenies in the sequence in which you take them. Once you've located your screenie in your file system, you can do whatever you like with it within the bounds of your home OS (copy it, delete it, load it into GIMP and draw fake moustaches on Jeb, etc.). The next step from there is to get it up to the forums. Support for images on the forums was one thing that got permanently borked during the Great Coffee Spill of '13, so you'll need put the image on a photo sharing site such as Photobucket or Imgur; I use Imgur my own self. Once it's up there, these sites will usually give you a direct link to the image you want to post. Then it's just a matter of putting the image in between [ img ] and [ /img ] tags (remove the spaces) and it'll pop up after you post. For example [ img ] http://i.imgur.com/vfslOe6.png [ /img ] without the spaces gives you this particular bad idea from a challenge long ago: I prefer to center my images up, so I also use [ center ] and [ /center ], wrapping those tags around the image information. So hopefully that's useful information to you. Now back to your regularly scheduled thread about SSTD designs...

Not much you can do there besides cut loose with an annoyed grunt, hit "Revert to VAB" and fix it... Been there. I think there are very few here that haven't been at one point or another...

I had to tweak the design of the Ballista 7 after porting it from my litterbox over to my career game, owing to not having all the parts I needed unlocked yet. That effort was successful, though, and last night I made my first operational launch of a Ballista probe for a contract mission. (The probe actually was fully fueled in that screenie; I had turned the thrust limiter on the Spark down to zero and had forgot to re-set it prior to launch, hence the 0 m/s delta-V reading). The suggestion to use put fuel in the Procedural Wings helped, I think; if anything I think the plane now has too much fuel (not that I'm complaining, mind you). I was able to get it up without running out of gas, without anything 'sploding, and with more than enough in the tanks to de-orbit. Got the Engine Nacelles too hot and they 'sploded...and all of my engines were attached to the Nacelles. I was dead-stick over the sea to the east of KSC - not a speck of land anywhere in sight, and then the plane's battery died and at that point she went into the drink. So obviously I need to work on re-entry procedure. I did have the airbrakes going in the uppper atmosphere (for all the more good they were doing me that far up), both sets of flaps fully extended and my nose was up to about 10 degrees above the horizon. I wasn't trying to perform S-turns, which is one of the things that I suspect did me in here. How do you keep the temperature down when you're heading for re-entry? Did notice Q was pretty low throughout the re-entry procedure; I think it was something like 27 kPa maximum. The plane got up to 50 kPa or so during the ramp-up portion of the flight. I'm kinda concerned about this...I have a similar engine setup (Whiplash and Twitch engines attached to a Nacelle) on the Night Hawk, which is the manned plane I sent up with Jeb in it to snatch Diissa out of orbit; I haven't tried to land them yet. I don't want a repeat to happen when the time comes, though I know from experience that in a pinch a Mk2 Cockpit makes for a reasonable boat if you land it going slowly enough...

It can summon the Kraken for sure. Launch clamps usually help with that, as does putting moving your rocket up and down in the VAB such that the engines are slightly buried in the floor; the game will automatically set the bottom of them directly on the pad when you go out there.

So lemme get this straight - you're wanting a four Kerbal, eighty-tonnes-maximum spaceplane that can fly to Duna, land, drop off and re-load a three tonne rover, then head back to Kerbin for a landing at KSC, all without refueling in space. That's a damn tall order. A damn tall one. And yet, part of me is sitting here going "challenge accepted"... I'd have to do the math to see if anything of the sort would be possible, of course. Let me echo the mighty YourEverydayWaffle: can you show us some screenies of what you've got going on so far? The rover design is of particular interest, given its mass. I'm also curious to know which mods you're playing with, if any - the aerodynamic model you're using may prove crucial to your goals - and, if this is your career game, which techs you've unlocked (if it's sandbox, say so). My initial thought is a three-sequence engine setup - 3 Turbojets, 6 Thuds, 1 Nerv; if you've got RAPIERS, you could change that up to 4 RAPIERs instead of the Turbojets and Thuds. Takeoff and land from Kerbin with the jets, switch to the Thuds when you're in atmo/taking off from Duna, switch to the Nerv for the interplanetary portion of the flight. The tricky bit would be Duna takeoff...there's air on Duna, but not a whole lot, so I wouldn't expect the wings to be of much use. At least your Thuds/RAPIERs would give you sufficient TWR for the job. 4 Kerbals...since you're going to be pressed for mass, I might suggest a command module area consisting of 4 Mk1 Lander Cans in series with a nosecone up front and the rest of the plane in the rear. The mass of 4 Mk1 cans is 2.64 tonnes, a 1.26 tonne savings over a Mk3 Cockpit. You also say nothing about refueling on Duna...how would you feel about docking your plane up to a refueling rig you've sent down to the planet ahead of time?

Spent most of my evening refitting the Ballista 7 after porting it from my litterbox to my career game; the changes were necessary given that I didn't have certain technologies unlocked in my career game. Was dismayed to discover that the craft, which flew into orbit in the litterbox, suffered total structural collapse in my career game. I only had thirty minutes to play yesterday, so I'm hoping to get the bugs ironed out this evening.

^^ This. Though if you wanted to keep it at two booster pairs (five engines total), you'd be able to do the job with an X200-32 in each of the five stacks; change it to three booster pairs (seven engines total) and you could get that down to an X200-16/X200-8 combo easily enough. Plus nosecones and fins and whatnot. --Asparagus-- Five engines (all Skippers): set the center to 68% thrust and the side engines to 60%. An x200-32 in each stack. Seven engines (all Skippers): set the center to 68% and the side engines to 40%. An x200-16 and x200-8 in each stack. Nine engines: The center is still a Skipper set at 68%, but the side engines become Swivels (LV-T45s) set at 100%. The center stack remains an x200-16 and x200-8; the side stacks become two FL-T800s, an FL-T400 and an FL-T100 each. Couldn't tell you which is the least expensive option... Then here's a two-stage serial option: Upper stage: Rockomax Decoupler, X200-32, X200-16, Skipper Engine - 1751.837 m/s, 1.33 TWR Lower Stage: Rockomax Decoupler, Jumbo64, X200-32, X200-16, Mainsail Engine - 1752.212, 1.30 TWR Takeoff Mass: 118.2925 tonnes You'd need fins on the lower stage to keep the rocket steady on course as you approached first stage seperation, which would cut into the TWR a little bit more than what I've calculated here. The TWRs of the design are sub-optimal, but not so low that you wouldn't make orbit. Beauty of the serial design - it's simple, and you wouldn't need nosecones.

Most I ever did with a spaceplane was in the neighborhood of 170 tonnes; put a full orange tank into orbit. Of course, this was pre-1.0 and prior to my switchover to FAR. Coolest thing I ever did with a spaceplane in those days though was the launch and recovery of a Geschosskopf Munar lander - twenty tonnes of not-fitting-into-a-Mk3-Cargo-Bay... Since 1.0.x and FAR, the best I've done with a spaceplane is about six tonnes...

Vanamonde called it - for the size of the booster, you don't have nearly enough drag-producing parts in the rear. Your CoM shifts towards the rocket in flight, and it becomes a dart thrown backwards; aerodynamic forces spin the wrong end towards space. Moar fins if you want to keep this design. Especially on that core stage... The booster is definitely over-engineered as well; you don't need five mainsails and a 415 tonne rocket to lift twenty tonnes (unless you're trying to do it SSTO, in which case more power to you; keep adjusting your throttle down in flight once you've made your turn so that your G meter is at the top of the green and you're golden). A good asparagus design would get that up into orbit - the rocket would have a mass of just over 130 tonnes and it'd require 1960 kN of thrust at launch. Though they're quite old now, '>Temstar's guidelines for asparagus are still largely valid; the main differences these days are that you want to shoot for a launchpad TWR of 1.5 in stock (1.2 in FAR) and that nosecones and fins are no longer just a good suggestion. And of course, there's nothing wrong with a serial-staged rocket either, depending on how far up the tech tree you are (the serial staged rocket would almost definitely reduce any problems you have with tumble, as by their very nature the mass of serial rockets stays up towards the nose).

I'd be willing to take a look at it for you; I've sent an access request. Meantime, let's talk about your setup. What aerodynamics are you using? Are you using stock fairings, procedural fairings, or sitting there wondering "what's a fairing"? (Just trying to eliminate that as a potential source of your problems there; not trying to be a wise-ass...). I'm assuming your booster is attached to your payload in your craft file; I'll know more about it when I can get access. Could be something as simple as insufficient nose-cones or fins on the booster, or it could be that the mass of the booster is greater than the mass of your payload...you are trying to lift a payload in the vicinity of twenty tonnes, after all, just from the description. Not sure if it's entirely necessary, but if I understand your grand master plan here, you might want to be sure to include some lander legs for your core. That way the completed structure is fully supported once it's on the ground.

Had another evening wheere I only had one hour to play. Spent it getting a new FAR plane design up into orbit and making a rendezvous (on RCS thrust alone) for a rescue contract. Tonight I'll try my hand at re-entry (something I've yet to do with 1.0.x) and landing, hopefully without blowing up Jeb and his damsel-in-distress in the process...

So, success with the Night Hawk to report to you guys this morning. Makes me wonder how many more of the problems I've been having of late have been due to that bug with the Mk2 Cargo Bays... I got to say - I've only used Kerbal Flight Data just this once, but I likes it... Any suggestions for what I could do with the tail? I've still got a pretty big dip in the yellow curve going on there. Also, I'm finding it hard to pitch up during the speed-up part of the flight - you know, the part where I'm trying to get to Mach 4 (which is finally happening!) before 20k and stuff starts to overheat. Last night I blew a Pegasus ladder off the side of that same plane because I started getting temperature warnings and couldn't steepen my rate of climb sufficiently. At least it wasn't anything critical, but it did make getting Diissa into the ship harder. Ship made orbit but it still took almost all the juice it had available to do it; I had something like a 4% oxidizer reserve after orbital insertion. Made the rendezvous on RCS thrust alone, which was further complicated since I switched out the mid-line rocket fuel tank with a full-size Mk2 rocket fuselage and forgot that I'd mounted the forward firing RCS ports to the thing (so I couldn't do any RCS reverse thrusting; good thing I wasn't actually doing any docking with this plane). Something I'll fix before the next flight of the craft... Next up is re-entry to landing. I'm hoping I'm not too out of practice with that bit. Meantime I need to get a couple of other designs ported into my career game from the litterbox...

It does; it's called Paintbrush. Look for it in your Finder under Applications. AlexinTokyo is right though - you'll want to save your file in Firealpaca's native format if you think you might want to make changes to it later, but go ahead and ignore any warnings about layering when you go to save the png.

Most image manipulation programs these days will have an export function that will let you make an image in whatever file format you need it to be in. I myself use GIMP when I need to do something fancier than what I can do with MS Paint (I use Windows, obviously). Push comes to shove, you oughta be able to take a screenshot with whatever native OS you're utilizing; for Windows, it's Alt-PrtScn, for Mac it's Command-Shift-3. You can then crop the image to the correct size in the native Paint program (MS Paint or Paintbrush) as needed and save it as a .png from there. Saving in the PNG format almost always merges layers into one.

Much obliged, thanks. I'll get this installed and then see what all that does; won't happen until later tonight, though (Monday, so probably not until well into the evening, around 0230Z probably). ...just don't leave it extended in actual flight, right? Kinda like "check your drag curves with your wheels up, but don't forget to put them back down before you try to fly". No way I did that over the weekend with this very plane. Nope. Never. Never ever. No.

I was hoping it was something as simple as that. Okay then - the dev build is on GitHub, right? What should I be looking for, file-wise?

This past weekend I was able to unlock enough technology in my career game to start seriously utilizing spaceplanes in it. Just a quick status update there. So I figured the first thing I'd try to do in career was build a manned rescue plane, the Night Hawk 7 - just a simple little two-seater design. Here's its drag profile: What the crap is going on there around the cargo bay? Is that a known bug? It's like it's treating the bay as being non-existent - I've got a Reaction Stabilizer, a couple of batteries, some solar panels, two roundified RCS tanks (it's a rescue craft so it does have RCS capabilities) and a quad of linear RCS ports in there (two forward, two back, don't know why it took me this long to come up with that particular idea - and it works, BTW). Anyway, I had some serious problems with this design. First, FAR borked; gave me NaNs on lift and drag and try as I might it went into the drink. I would've reported that one to ferram but it hasn't happened since and I don't know how to get the error log he needs to fix these sorts of things anyway. After restarting KSP, it was pretty obvious the CoL was too far forward; it see-sawed up and down until parts started flying off. No problem - I moved the wings back a bit. Then I started experiencing parts breaking off at low altitudes, by which I mean the elevators. I repurposed the flaps to serve as an auxiliary pair, which worked on a relatively successful flight; it tells me I need to tone down the pitch control of the main elevators. Got it up around Mach 3.8 at 20k. Lit the rockets...and failed to make orbit. I made orbital altitude but didn't have enough juice to circularize. Post-mordem then - What's wrong with the design? FAR gives my Max Cross Section as 3.59 square meters and the wave drag area as 3.25 square meters, critical mach is 0.768, if that's at all helpful. Only other thing I did to the design after making those screenies was to put a small antenna on the nose (which incidentally overheated and exploded during the flight - so I guess I might need to work a bit more on my flight profile). I suppose I could fill in the little gap there between the fuselage and the wing towards the tail. The fin probably needs to be redesigned to a more traditional fin-and-rudder; I don't really have a reason to have an all-moving fin (I was being lazy again there).

Busy weekend - the big thing I did was use KIS to save Valentina and a group of tourists that were coming home from the Mun and had run out of gas with their Pe at 700,000 kilometers. Berris was flying and Bill was in the jump seat awaiting an EVA; this after the two of them had ran to the Mun real fast to collect enough science to unlock CoT Jrs. Stuffing a wrench and a Jr in a container, Berris made a tricky HKO rendezvous and then Bill got out to attach the port to Val's ship. It was a touchy EVA; on account of Bill not taking the time to RTFM at first, he dropped the port instead of attaching it and watched it begin to float off. He was able to grab it again, though, and after a quick moment to reference the instructions (i.e. I paused the game) he was able to get the port installed and back into his pod before he ran out of jetpack fuel. Berris then performed a pretty straight forward docking maneuver between the two craft and transferred half of the remaining fuel in her craft to Val's, leaving both craft with enough fuel to make the necessary de-orbit burns. Job done, both ships came home and reputation was collected for finishing up a few of the tourist contracts. Val was promptly sent up again with a new bunch of tourists headed to Minmus, from which Jeb and Bill had just came home, bringing enough science to unlock spaceplane parts to start giving that aspect of my space program serious consideration. I spent the rest of my weekend watching planes that should've been perfectly viable explode spectacularly...

Okay. So at 24 tonnes, you need 39.12 kN of thrust for a 1.0 Munar TWR, 58.68 kN for a 1.5 Munar TWR. That's really all the more thrust you need this thing to have. At the moment, you've got a Mun TWR of 9.202...far above what you really need. You'd benefit in many, many, MANY different ways by swapping out those Thuds for something else. Hell, a Terrier would give you the thrust you need easily. Scale it down from 24 tonnes with 3 Thuds to a single Terrier; your new mass becomes 21.8 tonnes, your Isp increases to 345, your Mun TWR is 1.689 - and you suddenly have 2700 m/s of delta-V. Your cross section decreases in the process - and you're a lot less draggy as a result. 2700 is a bit low for a Mun transfer, landing, launch and return but it is doable. Did the math on a trio of Sparks; the mass savings isn't worth it in this case on account of the lower Isp of Sparks. So then you go through Temstar's asparagus design process for 21.8 tonnes; 15% payload fraction, so assume your rocket will have a final mass of around 145 tonnes. 1.5 launch TWR these days - you want in the ballpark of 2131.5 kN of thrust at launch. 22% of that in the core = 468.93 kN; you want a Skipper in the core. The rest distributed to six boosters = 277.095 kN - Skippers, or to eight boosters = 207.82 - Reliants. Let's say you go with eight Reliants and a Skipper - you have 13 tonnes of engines and 21.8 tonnes of payload... leaving 110.2 tonnes, which works out to a little over 12 tonnes per stack. In the center, use a X200-16 and X200-8 tank with the Skipper. For the boosters, try two FL-T800s and one FL-T400 per stack. Adjust the thrust of the boosters as necessary to give you your ~1.5 with each stage. Take any mass saved by my rounding errors here and use it for nosecones, fins, adapters and decouplers. Yes, Temstar's method was for KSP 0.20, and produced a rocket with 4500 m/s of delta-V as a rule. I've found that the addition of the nosecones and fins usually lowers things down to the 3500 regime though, so it's still a valid method of building good asparagus. The only problems with 1.0.x asparagus is A) asparagus staging is generally more costly unless you play with a mod like StageRecovery (which is awesome, BTW) and you have to be careful to keep things to where most of the mass stays closer to the nose, or you're going to tumble out of control. I usually achieve this these days by keeping the core stage up higher than the boosters as much as I possibly can; that way by the time you're flying on the core alone the drag is too low to flip you around. Start with those design changes and see what happens to your craft. Out of curiosity, what all do you have in your Service Bay?

Hmm...a screenie of your actual lander would be nice. Perhaps one from the VAB with KER active. I'll have to guesstimate based on the screenie provided. From the description, it sounds like you're running with a lander of around twenty tonnes and its delta-V is about 1500 m/s or so, right? And then you've got a Mainsail engine underneath that with a J64 tank which acts as a transfer stage providing the remaining 1500 m/s or so of delta-V, right? I'd start by changing out the booster rockets with Skippers - you don't need quite as much oomph as you did pre-1.0. That's assuming I'm anywhere in the ballpark of where your current mass is. The other thing I'd think about is "do you really need to send to send seven Kerbals to the Mun all at once, along with all the science gear"? If so, more power to you; I might suggest combining your lander and transfer stage into one big package, so that you could get away with using a lower-thrust/higher efficiency rocket (say, a quad of Terriers or Sparks) once you're up there.

I'd also say they're good for delivering satellites to LKO for cheap. A 25-30 tonne plane can easily lift a probe with enough juice of its own to make orbit around Mun or Minmus, possibly further. Hell, Wanderfound built a sci probe that was slightly over half a tonne and delivered it to orbit in a Service Bay (OKTO 2, 4 OX-STAT panels, a Reaction Wheel, a small antenna and Thermometers; it was something like 685 kg IIRC); that's definitely good enough for "Science around Kerbin" contracts.

One turbojet and about 15% payload fraction (i.e. not much better than asparagus staging used to be, but at least with a spaceplane you're getting most of the cash for all your parts back). I am using FAR these days, but I played in the new stock aero while ferram was still building Euler and I can definitely say that there's not as wide of a gulf between stock aero and FAR these days as there used to be. A Turbojet engine in FAR still produces 166.77 kN of thrust on the Runway, so at 25 tonnes you've got a TWR of 0.71 and with thirty tonnes you're at 0.57. The wiki puts the figure for a single Turbojet at a nice, even 180 kN, and that would be for the stock game, so the TWRs there would be even higher. Half your mass in rocket fuel gives you somewhere in the neighborhood of 1800 m/s of delta-V (with the Twitch engine's 290 Isp), which is what I've seen folks recommending lately. EDIT: Told you guys wrong in that first post - it's not eight Twitches; it's sixteen. You can get the same amount of thrust from a pair of Thud (Mk55 Radial) engines if part count is an issue - they have higher Isp but the increased mass will offset that.

I've taken one one of NASA's later philosophies - you don't need to risk the lives of seven astronauts just to deliver a communications satellite when a disposable drone rocket can do the same job (usually for cheaper, too...). Don't worry, I've got passenger craft on my radar. I've been paying attention to y'all's advice; I definitely appreciate all the help y'all have given me to date. Whoa - you can do that now? Didn't realize that - I'll have to give it a shot. Ah - okay, I'll try that and see what that does. I'd been wondering about that, actually...

It's definitely doable. Try a combination Turbojet with eight Twitch engines (what used to be called 24-77s) for every 25-30 tonnes of plane you've got at takeoff. And make sure that roughly half your plane's mass is dedicated rocket fuel. When you takeoff, head to 10k as fast as your plane will manage, then level out to about 10 degrees above the horizon and start picking up speed. If you start seeing heat indicators, increase your pitch angle. At 25k light the Twitches and pull up as hard as you dare. Start with that and see where it gets you.