ComradeGoat

Entering Duna in my little lander, steepish entry profile to try and target a landing site. Watching the height tick down, power the engines up just a tickle as we approach 2,500 metres to soften the blow of the drogue shoot opening fully... PFFT! Drogue ... um, is gone. Engines are still firing, but not very much. Try to increase throttle to bring us in on a fully powered landing. Throttle does not respond. Look more closely - not only is the drogue missing, but so is the lander can it was attached to. Press [ to see a lander can plummeting down at 30ish metres per second, under a fully deployed drogue chute. Apparently I needed more throttle on those engines to absorb the shock of the deployment, or pick a shallower entry angle. Lander can not expected to survive the 30 m/s impact with Duna's surface. Resign myself to losing my Kerbal. Then a bright idea strikes me - the jetpack! Jump out of the lander can, power the pack up and thrust upwards. The Kerbal hits the Duna surface at a teeth-jarring speed, but lives. He's landed next to the fully intact lander can. Grrr! Send the rescue lander (identical). Use full throttle for drogue deployment this time. It works. Lands 10km from the crash site (precision landings with atmospheric descents are so annoyingly fiddly). My Kerbal has to get there. Rather than walking, he decides to fly as far as he can with his jetpack, so sets off zooming over the surface... ...at 5km to go, he flies into a rock and dies instantly.

Don't want to make SSTOs too easy! Part of the fun of designing them is managing the tradeoffs involved in ceiling of jet operations.

Airhoggy, much?

And also not have them shake your ship apart towards the end of a stage when your nearly empty mainsail stage starts accelerating your ship at 5G.

Does the RAPIER use the existing intake system? (i.e. is it a drop in replacement for the existing jets in spaceplanes?)

Ok. Does that mean there's any point at all to the higher altitude jet engine any more? All my spaceplanes are getting these from now on!

Never used it.

Can't agree. Landing on Moho is really not very hard at all. It just needs a long burn with an LV-N to establish orbit.

I can, and have, but it is quite tedious, especially in low orbit round a small body, where tidal forces are significant.

It's a fun party trick, but TBH I don't find it that useful. For frugal missions, maybe only add RCS to one ship if you're doing mothership and lander. Docking without RCS to a large station, where it takes ages to reorient the station, is annoying.

I'm not a career mode person, but my drive to build light, efficient SSTO planes for Laythe has driven me to building them with only one roundified tank (40 RCS units), and docking using a round 1 unit. If there was a 20 unit tank, I'd be using it.

When you get within 1000m while still sub orbital, and the circularisation burn is your final docking manoeuvre.

No. True mastery is when you do that, with a docking port that is not inline with the COM.

Small, light, pretty solid and packs 3000 m/s of delta V as well.

So I went to Moho and put boots on the ground! yay! It's not all that hard really. I used drop tanks to get there, leaving me with loads of Delta Vs, or so I thought, to return, after docking with my mothership and discarding the lander: After burning for Kerbin and correcting the plane, I had a periapsis of about 38km with 500m/s of delta V left. Fine, I'll aerocapture, dock with my station, and ferry the brave kerbonauts down. This is where it went a bit wrong. As can be seen, the ship is coming in very fast and a periapsis of 38 km isn't enough to get it even close to under escape velocity, let alone into a decent orbit. In vain, I burned my remaining fuel trying desperately to stop, then used up all the mono prop, and was still hundreds of metres per second above escape velocity as I shot out of the atmosphere and back into an escape trajectory. Oops! Flight time to the Mün's orbit was merely 1 hour. If I was going to mount a rescue, it had to be fast! Thankfully I have a nuclear tug hanging around in LKO for ferrying supplies to my Mün base, and even better, it was currently close to the point at which the Moho mission hit periapsis. I gave chase. This is the point where I'm glad I've spent some time polishing my rendezvous skills. On an escape trajectory, with a considerable head start, I managed to catch and dock with my escaping Moho ship, and refuel it sufficiently to enter Kerbin orbit, and save the tug, before either of them reached the Mün's orbit, and I did all that without using a single manoeuvre node! After docking with my space station in LKO, the 3 kerbonauts are back home and relaxing in the astronaut complex. Next time, I'll aerocapture lower! Anyone else had to suddenly chase after a vehicle on a fast escape out of the system?

Hey, thanks! :-)

In addition to minimalist little spaceplanes, I also build "flat pack" station/exploratory vessels in Kerbin orbit and then ship them off to distant locations, where they are reassembled into space station/orbital bases. This one is en-route to establishing a permanent orbital station at Duna:

OMG! Y U hate framerate?

I'm 40. I'm a "form follows function" kinda girl. Here's my latest spaceplane, the Tristar Mk-1: The design goal is simple: a singe seat shuttle with as little mass dedicated to atmospheric flight as possible, which can have a decent range in space and land vertically on airless bodies. As a result, the wings are swept down and the tail is tall and rigid, so that each can take a landing leg at the tip. When landed it is angled slightly back so that the centre of mass sits inside the triangle of the legs. There are no jet fuel tanks so that once in space, and refuelled, all fuel storage space can be used by the rockets, giving it a mass of around 10 tonnes and a range of over 2000 m/s delta-v; more than enough to land on bodies like the Mün. It has a docking port at the front to which can be attached a drop tank for extended range (harder with an inline port, because that throws the centre of mass off when something is attached), and to dock with space stations. It has 4 wing mounted ram intakes and a scoop intake under the main engine, allowing it to get up to 1700 m/s on jets at around 30,000 metres, leaving about 1000 m/s once LKO is established to rendezvous for refuelling. However, I also like things to not look butt-ugly, and I do think this has a nice aesthetic to it.

I can understand the 909 not producing electricity. What I can't understand is why the NERVA doesn't, given that it's a nuclear reactor in an engine.

I sent a bunch of spaceplanes to Laythe... When they got there, the Kraken had eaten the landing gear. I kid you not. I currently have a bunch of planes I can't land docked at a station at Laythe, and a few very bored Kerbals waiting for a fresh delivery of planes.

Duna returns are relatively straightforward...

No. This is sandbox mode. Vessels that behaved perfectly well under SAS under 0.21.1 are hunting under 0.22. It works very nicely for planes, but for heavy lift rockets it is frustrating! It's not as bad as the 0.21.0 SAS, which was a show-stopper, but having to fight it all the time is not enjoyable.

Have to disagree with this - 0.21.0 was definitely broken, and we got a .1 release quickly to fix it. Some of us are seeing it work less well in 0.22.0 than it did in 0.21.1, in ways which are clearly detailed in this thread. It hunts, and wanders around a heading , even with the use of the F key to reset it.

Seems to affect larger vessels. In 0.21 you would apply a bit of course correction, let go, it would more or less hold it. Now what I'm seeing is that I apply a bit of course correction, let go, and then it oscillates back *past* where I started. Utterly perverse! The only way I've found to reliably counter it is to get the new heading, then apply opposite controls myself until the navball is stable, then press f to toggle SAS and lock in the new heading. Even then it still wanders a bit. This is basically doing SAS' job for it, manually, and it's a bit fiddly. Also noticing more monoprop being expended on docking because of this oscillation behaviour.