capi3101

From here it looks like you've got the ports on upside-down. EDIT: No. I'm wrong there...hmm. Have you tried quicksaving the game, getting back into the program and loading it back up? Sorry for the "is it plugged in" type question there; just making sure the bases are covered. Might try to see if SAS is on on both crafts too. And it'd be helpful if we could see the navball. Sometimes docking ports won't set reset themselves properly; fixing it requires some finagling of the persistence file. Hopefully it won't come to that, but...

Alright - finally got around to working on the challenges for December 6-10. I think I've finished up December 6th at this point; the rest are most decidedly not done yet. But I am working on them: Today's my birthday so I anticipate no work on finishing these up tonight. I plan to launch another unmanned lander and another unmanned capsule, dock them in Kerbin orbit and then send them on for the free-return trajectory requirement for December 7 (if I'm reading the challenges correctly, there's nothing in there about any of the flights being manned except for December 10, so I'm pretty sure I'm cool with that plan). The manned Mun landing will cover December 8 and the design incorporates rovers as is, so I hope to get December 9 done at the same time. Finally, I've sent a lander by itself out towards Minmus. I've got something special planned there, which y'all will have to wait for. Hoping to get caught up with the challenges soon; I've had a hard enough time doing so with the stuff in Kerbin's immediate vicinity. No telling how things will go once we get out into the greater Kerbol system.

Thanks; I was hoping that was what had happened there. I am noting that it wound up in the "manned" list though; the craft was unmanned. Just a point of order there.

Or - and this is just a thought - go ahead and let the plane use the whole runway to take off. It does pretty effectively end the risk of tail strike - so long as the plane doesn't fly right into the drink (which is often how flights in my own early spaceplane program usually wound up; it's amazing to me that I use the things for as much as I do these days). You might try that "kicker" design I mentioned in the edited post if it's really giving you fits. Use an action group to toggle that single wheel, and then on take-off raise it when your craft gets above 20 m/s or so. For landing, you'll want to lower your gear, use the action group to raise the kicker, land as normal and then lower the kicker once you're down. It does work, but it's definitely not an elegant solution by any means. The rear gear placement problem is one I still face an awful lot; definitely been there, done that my own self. Just to cover all the bases here - can you show us a pic of the craft/share the craft file you're having trouble with? If you can, we can give you better diagnostic information. In general: -15 tonnes maximum per turbojet, 13 per RAPIER and/or 10 per Basic Jet. -At least .03 intake area per engine (i.e. no less than three Ram Intakes or the equivalent) -combined sum of lift coefficients equal to the plane's mass (for example, an eight tonne plane should have a total lift coefficient of roughly 8, the amount provided by two Delta Wings and two Wing Connector A/Bs).

Nope - it's your back gear placement. Imagine your aircraft is a big lever. Your wheels are the focal point, your control surfaces are providing the force and your plane's mass is the load you're trying to move. Now, like most levers, the closer the fulcrum is to the load, the less force that needs to be provided to lift that load. Conversely, the further away the fulcrum is from the load, the more effort you're going to need to make the load move. Your plane works in the same way - the closer the wheels are to the center of mass, the easier it will be for your control surfaces to lift up the nose, and then it's simply a matter of providing enough thrust for the plane to get off the ground. You have two options here: 1) Move the rear gear forward (or turn them around) such that the wheels are positioned under the center of mass and slightly behind. This is the easiest option, but if you get them too far forward your plane will have a tendency to nose up while it's standing still with the end result being a tail strike. Gear placement is tricky business - too far forward and it tilts, too far back and it won't take off. I've occasionally combated this phenomenon with a "kicker" gear whose sole purpose is to hold the tail end of the plane up until the plane has picked up enough speed that it's no longer necessary. Those designs generally don't work too well as a rule though. 2) Add more pitching control surfaces - dedicated elevators and canards. This works, though you have to be careful about what their addition will do to your center of lift - you don't want it to shift ahead of the center of mass during flight unless you're in to unplanned aerobatics. Hopefully that's helpful.

Best of luck to you with this. It was hard enough to a little eight segment job... I get the distinct impression that yours, as a proper ring, will be way cooler than mine when it's finished; looking forward to seeing the finished product. Only advice I can offer is to be really precise when it comes to the roll angle of your docking maneuvers - it'd suck to try to add that last segment and not be able to because the final ends aren't aligned well enough with one another. If you're not using Docking Port Alignment Indicator, I'd highly recommend it, especially for this kind of work.

Err.....your rules up at the top of the thread say the Mach6 criterion is 2056 m/s and the criterion being judged is the Highest Speed Over Land in the Flight Log, which I provided in the second to last slide and clearly says 2246 m/s (as also indicated in my entry post). Last I checked 2246 > 2056, so..........how did the design NOT achieve Mach 6? My finger's hovering over the shenanigans button here. Fair warning.

My general advice here: leave your strategies set to default, or turn on the Fundraising Campaign in the Admin building and set it to a low commitment level (like 5-10%) at first. While you don't need a lot of rep, you do need some to get the money you need for the Mun and Minmus exploration contracts. Patents Licensing is another maybe if you're far along the tech tree; if not, I'd avoid it. The next thing I'd recommend is contracts, specifically parts testing contracts. Get one that requires "Testing while landed" and you don't even have to launch the thing - just stick it on the pad and activate it with staging controls. It's tedious but will definitely beef up your coffers to where you can afford more expensive missions. FinePrint is a mod that expands the number of types of available contracts and it'll become stock with 0.90, so that might be one you might be less adverse to using. The good news is that if you've got a Mun rocket, you can get to Minmus - Mun takes 7200 m/s of delta-V while Minmus takes 6800 or so; while the transfer burn requires more delta-V, getting into orbit and landing takes less and the balance works out the same. So your √200,000 Mun rocket should be capable of a Minmus mission. Would you mind sharing a screenshot of your rocket designs so far? There are folks here that are good at optimizing designs - myself included - and can help make suggestions on things you can do to save money given your current level of tech.

Tried to play catch-up on the Kadvent Kalendar Challenge - I'd missed all of the December 6-10 challenges, which involved Munar ops of various kinds. Redesiged the boosters from my Scorpio Block-II capsule and Katapuon lander from the Konstellation Program challenge to make them more reliable and started filling out the missing challenges. Got December 6 and 7 done - ran out of time to do 8-10. Still involved five separate launches, two re-entries (one of which was with a craft that was not designed to re-enter Kerbin's atmosphere though it could handle Duna alright), one hairy Minmus intercept and a docking maneuver over Kerbin (something I hadn't done in a while; I was out of practice but still got the job done).

Ah, most excellent. Okay, here was my late entry from the other thread: Stock, unmanned, no mods used (though plenty installed). Final speed 2246. Should've tried a little harder - could've got a True Machingbird with another 50 m/s. Maybe when I have some time - the Kadvent Kalendar's got me tied up pretty good at the moment. I think I could get more speed from the Rhea if I flattened out the ascent profile a bit.

I agree that calculating delta-V by hand is tedious - but only in as much as that you have to take the time to figure up the wet and dry masses; the actual calculation is only difficult if you don't have ready access to a calculator (I mean, can anybody tell me what ln(3.28864685689) is without punching that into a calculator/spreadsheet? Because that would be impressive). I do think that anybody genuinely interested in the math behind the game should try to do it by hand a time or two before installing KER or Mechjeb. If for no other reason, it heightens ones appreciation for piloting assistance mods like those two in particular. My two cents. Now back to your regularly scheduled thread...

Uh...I'm assuming from the question that you're having problems with symmetry mode. If that's the case, I've got no ideas. Otherwise , you're in the SPH - hit the X key on your keyboard. Or push that button with the big square on it just to the right of where the cost of your craft is indicated, there at the bottom on the lefthand side. For good measure, you can also push the button immediately to the right of that; the circle in the center will change into a hexagon and things will start "clicking" to certain angles and such. C-key on your keyboard does the same thing.

1. Wasteful. The game's default drag model is based on a number of factors: mass (the unrealistic bit), coefficient of drag, atmospheric density and velocity. The fast you go, the more drag you generate, and the formula uses the square of the velocity - the end result is that the increase in drag generated as your velocity goes up will more than counter the decrease in due to lowering atmospheric density. You start generating sufficient drag force to counter your rate of acceleration, which in turn means more energy is required to overcome the drag, which translates to delta-V lost. And speaking of... 2. Delta-V is a measure of your rocket's ability to make changes to its velocity (i.e. to change the speed and/or direction of its travel) under its own power. A rocket in space will travel forever, of course; this figure measures how much it can accelerate before it runs out of fuel. To determine the delta-V, you use the Tsiolkovsky Rocket Equation: dV = ln(M/Mo)*Isp*Go, where ln is the natural logarithm function (look for it on a calculator), M is the mass of the rocket when it's full of fuel, Mo is the mass of the rocket when it's out of fuel (i.e. its "dry mass"), Isp is the specific impulse of the engine (a measure of its efficiency, quantified in units of seconds) and Go is standard gravity (9.8 m/s^2 under ALL circumstances). The equation works for individual stages; for a multi-stage rocket, you determine the delta-V of each individual stage and then sum them all together to get the total delta-V of the rocket, treating any later stages along with the dry mass of the current stage. That may have been confusing; hopefully not. 3. 4500 is generally what you're shooting for to get all the way into orbit. Bulk of that should be during the ascent; if done properly the final circularization can be done for somewhere between 50-100 m/s or so.

Spent the evening building a booster that would do 250 tonnes - flew that one to orbit a couple of times - then turned around and did one that would do 20 tonnes. I really need to start finding more than an hour at a time to play...

Four days behind - at least I finally have a redesigned booster for the crew capsule now: Saved myself some parts - the design's LES used to be a 20-part assembly of girders and Sepratrons. Fewer struts too. Looking forward to flying it. Still need to re-do the lander's booster; that's all I need to do before I should be able to catch up.

My entry: a classic Temstar-esque asparagus design. Complete craft file Megatron Booster Subassembly √720612 total (including the 90k+ for the payload), with 5068 m/s of delta-V and 25.2 MN thrust at launch. By my calculations I actually over-engineered the thing; she does 250 tonnes easily but could do in the vicinity of 300 before she hits the 1.2 TWR in the core limit.

Hey there, AstroLuke, welcome to the KSP forums. I don't have time for an extensive posting right now, otherwise I'd get into your concerns in depth. For now, I'll point you to the KSP Wiki, specifically the Tutorial section marked Rocket and Probe Design. Start with the Basic Rocket Design and the article entitled "What's with all the math?", and maybe take a gander at the Cheat Sheet - the last of which, incidentally, contains the level of math you're asking about. I'll be back when I have more time to see what other advice you've received.

Finally finished up the Day 4 entry in its entirety: Both the Mun and Minmus sat constellations were supposed to be hexagonal. Still trying to figure out what the crap happened there, but as the challenge doesn't specify what all needs to be there, I'm satisfied enough with the final result. Maybe I'll ask the guys who gave me the advice for constellation building how I screwed that one up. In any event, I'm now three days behind; I've got December 1-5 completed but I need to do the December 6th and 7th entries and I have no doubt Dec 8 will be up before I can get to either of thems. I did pull the Scorpio 7 crew module and Katapugon 7 lander out of 0.23's mothballs last night; will be redesigning their boosters and getting to cracking on the tests/initial landings as soon as I can remember what their operational profiles looked like...

Had a satellite constellation mothership prepped prime and headed for Mun. Set up the insertion node, got it where I wanted it, hit timewarp...and forgot to set the damn KAC alarm that'd kill it on time. Naturally, I didn't hit a low warp speed - I cranked it to the max. Next thing I knew, it was ten days later and my carrier was ten seconds from Munar impact... At least it was in Sandbox.

How the heck did I miss THAT? Certainly explains a few things...one more to add to the list. Going to have to fix a couple of my designs, looks like.

Yeah, pretty much...

Launch profile definitely seems like the issue. Just to verify, can we take a look at some of the designs you've got so far? Pics or craft files, doesn't matter which.

Finally - FINALLY - finished up the challenge from December 2: Still working on Day 4's challenge...I was dismayed to discover you can't put stuff in synchronous orbit of Mun and KER was being stupid last night when it came to calculating how much Delta-V the Minmus mission had... I did have a thought about something mentioned in the Day 5 challenge. How exactly will anybody be able to tell if the game's being played in Hard Mode? That's not exactly something that can be easily determined from screenies... Day 6 sounds simple enough - I better get to crackin' on that one.

So basically the challenge is to put 250 tonnes into orbit as cheap as possible? Sounds interesting - I'll give it a crack later.

I'll have to remember this. Did a constellation myself just yesterday and it never occurred to me to lift the mothership up to geosynch orbit - I released them one at a time from a mothership in low orbit. Six in my case, and I definitely did not end up with a right hexagon. For step 2, what should the orbital period be if I did want to build another six-satellite constellation in the future?