capi3101

Alright - another day, another new design: I did intend to try out a cranked arrow design with a traditional wing and tail configuration. The V-tail, however, was a spur of the moment decision. This design was almost successful - it made it into orbit under its own power and launched a fully-loaded payload without issue. But, it didn't have enough Oxidizer afterwards to de-orbit. I'm guessing my flight profile had something to do with that, though (maybe I lit the rockets too low), so I'm going to try again tonight. The main thing I'm worried about at the moment is whether or not the plane will still be dynamically stable after fulfilling its mission (i.e. during descent and landing). It strikes me that the main wing may be a bit too far forward, and RCS Build Aid is telling me the CoM is going to shift back quite a little ways (the RCS you're seeing in the SPH screenies is for the probe; the plane itself has no RCS capability). Makes me wish I could rely on the CoL marker to be accurate. FAR green lit me up to 30k/M4, but that was with tanks full. I might see what it says with tanks empty before I try the next launch. Maybe put the wing a little further back (it's not like I don't have plenty of room to do that) and move the Mk1 Fuselage tanks forward. I am pretty sure something was borked with my instance of KSP last night - I had some weird behaviors going on later on when I switched over to my career game. The NaN readings I was getting from KER were not a good sign either. Couldn't tell if the voxels I was seeing with the Ballista's wings were good or not; I know there have been issues between B9 Procedural Wings and FAR.

Had a pretty rough night last night...first, I was working on a satellite contract. Got said craft into the perfect position, it was going the right way, I had all the required equipment, but the game didn't credit me for fulfilling the contract's conditions. Realized later that I'd missed the most basic requirement - it had to be a new craft. I'd sent a probe I'd launched previously... #facepalm. So I switched over to the Bad Idea 7e, a 4-passenger Mun lander hauling a group of tourists with Valentina at the helm. Got to Mun, landed, Val planted a flag to fulfill another contract, launched back to space, burned for home...and ran out of gas. Val and company are now stuck with a Pe of 600,000 meters. #doublefacepalm Got Val out to push. The moment she stepped out of the capsule, the ship started tumbling for no apparent reason. Couldn't hold its course, so pushing was not an option. I was lucky to get Val back into the cockpit before she ran out of jetpack thrust... No problem, sez I! I use KIS/KAS!! I'll send up Bill in a rescue ship (Ferris would have to pilot, since Jeb's out with Bob headed to Minmus) to plug in and transfer fuel! I don't have any docking ports, plugs or winches unlocked in my tech tree. #facepalm_trifecta But wait! There's a 90-science node that I haven't unlocked that has Clamp-O-Tron Jrs, which would be enough to dock on long enough to transfer a little bit of fuel! So all I need to do is go get some science, unlock the node and the rescue mission is on! So I load Ferris and Bill into a Bad Idea 7d, a science Mun lander, and send them to the Mun. Got them into orbit, landed them in the East Crater...to remember as soon as I saw the results of the sci bomb explosion - no science collected - that the East Crater is where I'd sent Jeb and Bob on the Munar first landing mission and they'd already tapped out that area. It was before they could plant flags. Not enough delta-V to takeoff, reach another biome and expect to make it back to Kerbin. #mega_facepalm Luckily, I found a spot on the way home (in high orbit around the Mun) where I hadn't already plumbed out all the science, and I was able to get about 80 points worth from what was left out of that area. I might've preferred to pick up a soil sample or two, but oh well. I got that science back home and was able to unlock the Clamp-O-Trons. In the process I was able to level up Bill. Now the challenge will be to get the rescue ship up there and everything in place before the Bad Idea 7e's trajectory is thrown off by another Mun encounter. Couldn't tell you when that would happen. Hoping to pull off the rescue this evening. Meanwhile, I need to find some aspirin...I facepalmed a bit much last night......

Last night I had a thought. I'm not quite sure what FAR is using voxels for - my understanding is that they're measuring drag on certain parts of a craft. All I know is that you want to try to keep the green line as smooth as possible and the yellow line as flat as you can manage. That brought me to the notion of sticking a pair of Thuds on either side of a Turbojet; it seemed to me that sort of setup would generate a fair amount of drag near the engine. Right before I made the switch to FAR, my stock Turbojet engine setup used 24-77 engines for rocket thrust, which y'all talked me out of using because they were "draggy parts". Given the new wave drag model of new FAR, I wanted to investigate if that setup was still a bad idea. So I built a testing rig - a Ram Intake, Probe core with battery, fuel supply, and Engine Nacelle and whatever engine combos I wanted to put with it. I tested a RAPIER by itself, the Turbojet/pair of Thuds (Mk-55s) setup, and a setup for Turbojet/Twitches (24-77s) that produced a comparable amount of thrust as the combined Thuds (240 kN). Since they've been reduced to 16 kN each, that works out to 15 Twitch engines - 16 was easier to build (just stick the SPH into Radial mode, set it for 8x symmetry and put two sets on). Here are the results: The Twitch setup produced more thrust, more delta-V, less mass and less overall drag; the tradeoff is higher part count and higher expense. I decided to try it out on yet another transporter spaceplane: Crummy screenies - I know - but they were the only ones I had that were any good at all. I didn't like this design much. Static wing loading was around 0.6 (on purpose) and TWR on the Runway was 0.51 (I was shooting for 0.55). In flight, it didn't want to do much past Mach 3 at 20k - and I had to dive from a higher altitude to get it to go that fast in the first place. I suspect it would've done better as a dual-engine plane. I also didn't optimize the craft's wave drag curves - a horrible thing to neglect when you know you haven't got a lot of excess thrust in the first place. Finally (and this is embarassing) I didn't add a dedicated liquid fuel load. The plane made orbit but it ran out of its own fuel in the process and I had to cannibalize the payload to make it work. I do think the design has potential, though. I just need to make some serious tweaks - like smoothing out the fuel fuselage, removing the gap between the wing and the engine or filling it in, maybe shuffling the canards around a bit, adding some damn liquid fuel, replacing the Engine Nacelle with a Pre-cooler, and so on. It has an all-moving fin; that was laziness/lack of time on my part and something I should take some time to correct. This one also has a support unicycle wheel to curtail the risk of tail strike; I'll try replacing it with a pair of wheels and see what that does (if anything; I wasn't convinced that kind of setup was strictly necessary with this particular plane). Should also take some SPH screenies too.

Tried finding a less-draggy Turbojet/Rocket combo for a transporter spaceplane. Wound up going with an oldie but goodie - a couple of rings of 24-77s. Used said configuration to deliver a six tonne probe to orbit; can't say the mission was successful because I wound up burning all the plane's fuel and some of the payload's fuel to get into orbit. Didn't have time for much else last night.

What you're describing sounds a bit like Dutch Roll. I'd have to do more research to figure out ways to counter it - meantime, does that article accurately describe what your plane is doing?

You should be able to dock if the shield was open (that'd be one way you could then attach a module that could then provide power - only way to do that sort of thing in stock.); what I'm pretty sure you can't do is toggle the shield's status without power. It may or may not be the root of the OP's issues, but it's one of those basic "is your computer plugged in", potentially facepalm-inducing sort of things that could easily be checked.

Okay...so here's what I did: I missed where the air intakes were on your plane and the wings aren't quite as far back, but other than that I think it's a faithful replica. I did notice the same kind of behavior you were describing with the design, a catastrophic loss of yaw control around Mach 3 at 10k. Also noticed the same behavior around 20k in the Mach 3-4 regime, this with the game green-lighting the stability derivatives at my usual benchmark levels. So I went into the simulator and ran it at 10k/3 with the initial r parameter set to 5 - and I got a graph with increasing oscillations with time. Same occurred at 20k/3. At 30k/4 the graphs were flying out the window. The crapper of it is that ordinarily I wouldn't hit the simulators unless I had a red light (you know, a bonafide reason to go to the graphs), and at all of the benchmarks the numbers stayed green... I thought I'd taken screenies - could've sworn I'd taken a bunch of them - with the graphs open. For some reason I don't have them. Didn't do anything else spaceplane wise last night, though it turns out I did take a screenie of my little do-nothing plane: Caveat on the design: I wasn't expecting to make orbital altitude ...which is why it ran out of electrical power before I could make the insertion burn. Last thing I'll post this morning is the Javelin, an experimental design I was playing around with: I'll admit that this one was me solely going by formulas again and forgetting the lessons of the past, though I think if I change the design from where the jets are slung under the wings to where they're more flush with the fuselage it has a fair amount of promise. Six tonne probe lifter, made Mach 3.5 by 25k, failed due to insufficient pitch authority after I lit the rocket. Haven't adjusted the design at all since the initial flight; I'm thinking canards and strakes; the root of the wings is not as long as I'd have liked. I was shooting for a takeoff TWR of 0.75 (which has since been established as "a bit much), a wing loading of 0.6 (comparable to the Shuttle), a wing aspect ratio of 2:1 (again, comparable to the Shuttle) and ~1,350 in rocket delta-V (assuming I'd get the design up to 1000 m/s before I had to switch over). Those are B9 procedural wings I'm using there, and that was before yesterday's patch was released. (The "backwards command module" in the screenie, incidentally, is being caused by the payload - all I had in there was an NRAP test module set to six tonnes, which was indeed pointed aft.)

One quick thing - just something to check. What's the Electric Charge reading on the craft at the moment?

After fiddling around with a FAR plane design in the litterbox, I sent Valentina up with a couple of tour groups while Jeb and Bill are still on their way to Minmus in my career game; Val's current tour group is currently headed for a Munar landing, though I'm not convinced she won't have to get out and push when the time comes to head home. Didn't have a great deal of time to play on account of the sucky-suck weather in my part of the world right now.

Cool. I'll give it a go and see what happens with it when I get an opportunity (probably after 00Z at the earliest, and that's if the missus/childern don't have anything to say about it) As best I can tell, the units are dimensionless. That's an assumption; I'd have to do more research to say one way or the other. Generally though, I just plug in a value of 5 into the parameter I want to test and and let the simulator go; with the default setting, this puts the initial starting point of the parameter about halfway up the positive side of the vertical axis. FAR then draws the graph for that parameter based on the initial set of conditions fed to it. Okay. The W is all green - I can do that.

Hey Wanderfound, saw your question about the simulations over on the FAR thread - basically, all you have to do with the simulations is to plug in an initial value for a given parameter, run the sim and look at what the graph does (the actual details are unimportant). If it oscillates but either holds the same amplitude or damps down from left to right, your plane is stable on that axis. If the oscillations increase or if they immediately fly off to who knows where, it's unstable on that axis. I usually run a sim on a parameter only when I've got a red number; the sim lets me know whether or not it's something I can live with or if I have to fix. Don't know what the crap is going on with your plane, though. I could try replicating it and see if I get the same behavior. What all do you have in the Service Bay? Is that a Mk1 tank ahead of the FL-T800? The tail is a pair of AV-R8s, right? What about the gear? I have noted that the new FAR doesn't always put the CoL marker in the right spot, which is a bite. I did run a new sandbox design last night; I was using B9 procedural wings with it though, and I didn't see the updated .dll until this morning, so I might try again with the design before I ask more about it. She got up to Mach 3.2 at 20k before I lit the rocket; wouldn't pitch up with the rocket lit, though, so she failed to make orbit. Also ran an empirical test of the engines - Basic Jets now provide 106.35 kN on the Runway, Turbojets provide 166.77 kN on the Runway, and RAPIERs provide 129.34 kN on the Runway. My testing rig was a Ram Air Intake, small RGU core, Mk1 Fuel Tank, Tri-Adapter and one of each engine type, held to the Runway by a pair of launch clamps. In playing around with that data, I'd agree that 0.75 TWR is a bit much these days (though that still jives with the notion of excess thrust covering a lot of sins, something that I've found is still applicable as long as you don't blow anything up in the process). Did manage to get a little do-nothing single RAPIER spaceplane into orbit after I grabbed this data. My first successful 1.0.2 FAR plane orbital flight. Still working on getting six-tonne probe transporters into orbit.

Picked up my career game after fiddling around a bit with a FAR plane in the litterbox (damn thing didn't have sufficient pitch authority once I lit the rocket). Sent a group of tourists to Munar sub-orbit, then back to Kerbin. Had a disaster on entry - the craft wouldn't hold the retrograde orientation on account of the service module still being attached; I decoupled the thing and promptly struck an adapter against the side of the service module debris, blowing the command pod with Val in it from the Hitchhikers with the tourists in them. Luckily the Hitchhiker module had chutes and I play with StageRecovery, so nobody actually died, but the game did kill those contracts toot-sweet (for which I'm annoyed - loss of rep aside, some of those were some high-paying contracts that I won't get to finish up now). Aside from that, I mostly fiddled around with probe contracts. I've also got Jeb and Bob headed out to Minmus at the moment.

I would suggest building a rover in the SPH (generally the SPH makes it easier to put tires on evenly), saving it as a sub-assembly with whatever bit you want to attach to the delivery vehicle as the root, then build the delivery vehicle in the VAB and attaching the rover when it's ready to go. That's just the general order I'd go in. A decoupler would work just as well as a docking port, BTW. The main difference is that the decoupler would give it some oomph as it separated from the delivery vehicle. If you don't want that oomph, go with the docking port. I might point out that you don't need a corresponding docking port on the rover itself to attach it to a docking port, its just that if you don't you wouldn't be able to pick up the rover and take it somewhere else if you needed to. Something to consider. If you're not adverse to mods, I might suggest you investigate KIS/KAS. There's a neat demo video out there where somebody builds the rover on-site. True, it used the little shopping cart wheels, but it was a fully functional rover capable of hauling a Kerbal around the Mun a bit. General rover guidelines - build it low, build it wide, include a Reaction Wheel or Stabilizer, drive it around in docking mode (that last one may not be applicable anymore; haven't designed a new rover in 1.0.x yet). Encase the critical bits in parts with high impact tolerance (like Modular Girder Segments and Structural Panels).

Myself, I'm still using an old makeshift ILS trick until NavUtilities is updated. You put a rover out on the runway, then drive it off the ocean side of the runway, set the parking brake, re-label it as a base and call it KSC 27. Put a second one on the landward side of the runway, set the parking brake, relabel it as a base and call it KSC 09. Drive a third one one kilometer inland from where you parked KSC 09, set the parking brake, relabel it as a base and call it "Meatball - 1 km". That's all you need; the three points will show you if you're properly aligned for as long as you can keep them in sight, and then you can use either KSC 09 or KSC 27 as your "inner marker"; you compare your distance to the marker to your altimeter reading to see if you're too high or too low (the formula is altimeter = 100 +(100*distance); this would give you something like a 5.7 degree glide slope). You can set up additional markers on the landward end of the Runway at five kilometer intervals to assist with the determination of lateral alignment. If you identify how far each marker is to KSC 09, you can use any one of them to determine your ideal altimeter reading; you just add that distance to the distance to the marker (for example, if you're 2 kilometers from the 10 kilometer marker, you want to be at roughly 100 + (100 * (2+10)) = 1300 meters. The system works reasonably well; the time consuming part is setting it up and making sure the markers are in the right spots. You could do this with flags too, though I find that flags have an annoying tendency to disappear spontaneously. Another advantage of classifying the markers as bases is that they can be seen from orbit; if you have a mod like Trajectories, this gives you a place to put your bullseye prior to re-entry.

Ah, okay; that definitely explains the behavior I saw on the Runway with the Tylenol. I'll have to run the same engine test I did a while back to see just how much the engine thrust has changed. 0.75 still a good TWR to shoot for on the Runway? I had been told in the past that I should shoot for a static wing loading of about 0.3 tonnes per square meter; is that figure still good or should I adjust it to something a little higher? It strikes me that 0.3 would produce a wing that has a fair amount of potential for wave drag if you don't stick everything in the right spot. I dunno.

20k? Oof. I had trouble enough making orbit with planes going Mach 4 and 30k in the old FAR... I'm playing on an ultra-low end box and I've got the visual heating effects largely shut off to save a bit on memory. So, being able to tell when my plane is starting to overheat is going to be a little problematic; any way to guess if/when I need to start steepening up the climb (other than waiting until I've got parts exploding)? How about fuel - are you all able to get away with the same fuel requirements as you used to be able to do in pre-1.0 FAR? Or have you had to add more? With the Tylenol I was doing Mach 2.7 at 25k before I lit the rockets, so I'm assuming my failure to get into orbit was due to a crummy flight profile at that point.

Tourist contracts mainly last night. Had a contract to send two tourists on a Munar flyby; took three tries but I finally got the ascent correct enough to have the delta-V to pull it off. Returned to Kerbin with 7 m/s of delta-V left. Figured out the problems I'd been having with StageRecovery and FAR were due to me having an older version of StageRecovery installed - I got most of my cash back last night. Had √500,000 before the night was out so I uprated the Launchpad to Level 3 - that's now two of my KSC buildings fully upgraded in my 1.0.2 career game. Still trying to launch a Geschosskopf Munar Sci lander successfully with 1.0.2 and FAR...damn things are too wide, you put them under a fairing and the drag is still pretty substantial...

Gotcha; thanks y'all. My bad for not checking this again myself recently.

Do you mean to say that the Intake Air bug is still in the game? To my knowledge, the guy who was maintaining Intake Build Aid didn't update that mod for 1.0.x because it was supposed to have gone away... Anybody know if Intake Build Aid still works in 1.0.x?

So, it looks like I need to learn how to fly once again... Last night I went ahead and ported my craft from my 0.90 litterbox into my 1.0.2 litterbox. I had to go ahead and port over the Large Gear Bay part as well in order to get those craft to load up properly, so I have that now even though it's no longer necessary given the new larger wheels and I'll switch the craft that were utilizing the Large Gear Bay over to stock 1.0.2 gear if/when I plan on using any of those craft on a regular basis again. After that I decided to have a go with a craft that made orbit successfully in 0.90 FAR. The first one I chose was the Tylenol 7, the same plane I got into orbit in this post on page 25 of this thread. Here's a pic of the trans-sonic wavy-lines graph thingie: Pretty sure that hump in the green line is being caused by the under-slung engine nacelle assemblies. I should take a screenie with the numeric trans-sonic properties of the plane and voxels on just to see what all it's doing. The problem I've got now is the new characteristics of air-breathing engines in atmosphere. This was a plane that was able to get up to Mach 4 and 30k prior to 1.0; last night she struggled to get past Mach 2.7 and 25k, while simultaneously if I started the engines up at full throttle I'd have far too much thrust at takeoff and rip things off the wings (last night it was one of the flaps that went). Can any of y'all give me a quick lowdown of the new limits I can expect from air-breathing engines as well as what is now a reasonable spaceplane ascent profile? Got the Tylenol to its new limits three times before I decided to just go for it. I got the plane's Ap up to 70k but circularization would've required 800 m/s of delta-V, and it simply didn't have that much fuel left at that point - not even close. I'm assuming the underslung nacelle design is out at this point given the new wave drag generation feature. An overview of rocket flight would also be nice as well; I've been following the guidelines for new stock aero rocket launches for 1.0 and those have worked out...okay. My rockets want to oscillate as I make my way towards 45 degrees at 15k but once I get there it smooths out as a rule. I'd like to figure out how to make the flight nice and smooth the entire way, though. I've also had issues between FAR and StageRecovery - they appear to not be playing nice with one another after I started using Fanno, despite having something like 24 side chutes and a powered probe core on the stages (i.e. something I could recover - and occasionally have recovered - were I to do so manually.)

Sent Jeb and Bob to do a Munar flyby, first time in 1.0.2. Had them collect a boat-load of science; would've been even more had I realized that I hadn't set up the action group properly to activate 4 Sci Jrs all at once. Still came back with enough science to unlock two techs on the 90-point tier. Hoping to send more Munar missions soon and finish out the basic Mun exploration contract. Meantime I've got a few tourists that want to head that way.

Ah, okay. Like I said, I haven't really taken the time to look at all the redesigned parts. I really oughta if I can get more than one hour per day to play... Alright - revised design of the Screwup 7 (this would be the Screwup 7a, of course): I'm guessing from the voxels that the extra wave drag (the amount over the max cross section, I mean) is coming from up there at the girder holding the LES rocket to the nose. I'd dump the whole thing and replace it with a proper nose cone (nothing else to put there that'd be useful at the moment, not even a Circular Intake), but of course the point of the craft is to test the LES in atmosphere, so...at least I got the wave drag area down. Critical Mach number changed in the wrong direction... I take it the spikes in the yellow line come from the bush plane landing gear, and then in the way back it's the combination of the tail and the Thuds? I probably oughta take some sci to invest in some proper retractable gears in the near future...maybe go for Landing next up after Aerodynamics. I recall somebody on the main FAR thread saying something about the new FAR not placing the position of the CoL ball correctly - I'm forced to wonder if that's affecting me with this plane. I'd say something except A) it's already been said, at least I think so, and I don't have a flight log to report so anything I could say wouldn't be helpful. All I know is that I had the main wing down first, then added the Tail Fins forward, then the AV-R1s forward of those, and the CoL marker didn't budge. The plane still had pitch-up tendencies as it was, which probably could be fixed by moving the main wing aft. I did do the test run last night and everything was ok up until the test was successfully completed and the rockets were switched off. The jet had flamed out from lack of air and the plane slowed to subsonic speeds, and then proceeded to pitch up and enter a spin. Tore the main wings off in the attempt to recover, leaving me without roll authority...though I damn near was able to recover enough control to return to level flight (at least I thought I was about to a couple of times). Comments? I'm pretty sure there's not much else I can do with this particular plane that y'all haven't already told me to do (move the CoM forward, move the wing back, etc.) or that I can do at the present time. Maybe move the LES to the back. I don't know. Fueling the LES would bring the CoM forward; at the moment it's empty.

Intercoolers? Never heard of thems - are they one of the new stock parts? The wiki hasn't been updated yet and I haven't played around too much in the litterbox with 1.0.2.

I'll give the Mk-55s a shot. Any suggestions for how to counter the added mass aft? The CoM is already further back than I'd like for it to be. I guess if I switch to Thuds that'll free up four parts (the two side tanks and the two nose cones) - I could just add an additional FL-T400 up in the front or something, lengthen the fuselage and maybe give myself some more pitch authority in the process. I should mention I've got those Tail Fin canards set as static wing surfaces (i.e. an attempt to thicken the fuselage up there by the front of the wing). I might not need them at all if I switch over to a single fuselage design. I thought that having the wave drag area higher than the cross-section area was unusual...

Alright then - first steps in 1.0.2. New design. First time I tried to build a plane totally from stock parts. Not trying to make orbit with this one - just trying to design a supersonic craft capable of reaching ~Mach 2 at 19k. FAR gave me greens up to 20k/Mach 2 - which is what I was going for - except for pitch-up tendencies (unstable Mw) in the subsonic range below 5,000 meters; I had a reaction wheel installed (in the aft Service Bay) which helped to keep the craft under control in that regime. Total listed wing area was a little over 28 square meters, so wing loading was somewhere around ~0.4 tonnes/square meter or thereabouts. It did struggle to get above Mach 0.8 under the jet's power alone; in the flight I lit the rockets at 15k to bring it up to the target speed range and help lift it to the target altitude. As I mention in the album, the plane actually did accomplish its mission but I was also running a test for the guy who runs the NavUtilities mod to see if it would work with blizzy78's toolbar (it's totally borked otherwise), and when I went to activate that mod's UI to bring up an ILS interface, it completely blanked my flight UI in Staging View (kinda like hitting F2, but no way to reverse it - I couldn't even bring up the game options menu with the ESC key). I was finally able to revert but I had to go to Map View to do it. That's beside the point... I should probably mention that this was a career craft and I'm still very far down on the tech tree; I've got the entire 45-point tier unlocked but the only two 90-point techs I've got unlocked are Electrics and Fuel Systems (i.e. Solar Panels, the OKTO probe core - which this design utilizes in the forward Service Bay - Fuel Ducts and Large Fuel Tanks). Aerodynamics (Circular Intakes and Delta Wings) is next on my to-do list. The Runway is Level 2, the SPH is still Level 1 - so I've got the thirty part limit at work. Not far enough along to have B9 Procedural Wings unlocked...which is a drag (pun intended) as I know I could reduce the wave drag area by using a thinner wing. Ways to improve this particular plane design, given my goals and current design limitations? Were I to have a less restrictive part number limitation, I'd want something up there towards the area where the fueslage meets the wing to smooth that out, right? And what do y'all think is going on aft - is what I'm seeing there just the rockets sticking further aft of the jet, is that what's causing that?