DaveSteadman
Members-
Posts
22 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Reputation
5 NeutralProfile Information
-
About me
Bottle Rocketeer
-
A few "low-hanging fruit" suggestions
DaveSteadman replied to Wyzard's topic in KSP1 Suggestions & Development Discussion
1 - +1 for the 5-way RCS port suggestion. 2 - Longer service bays parts; launching satellites from 1m and 2.5m rockets, or just hiding more science/battery/RCS items from the parts count. 3 - Incorporating the fuel-swap mod on tanks would make it easier to balance some space-planes parts where we have to have oxidizer. 4 - Tweak-scale on non-functional (i.e. tanks or engines) parts. 5 - The space-plane fuel tanks having the same capacity as the 1m tanks sucks. Should they be at least a little higher? 6 - Seeing the current day/night in the VAB would be a nice continuity touch. 7 - Putting a basic ladder at the start of the career tech tree, so Kerbals can climb back into early vehicles. 8 - Tweakable landing gear height, so we can line up landed base elements. 9 - Is asking for a gravity-well overlay in the solar-system view too much? -
Nice, thanks.
-
There's actually 6 structural intakes, and not much else underneath except two small ore tanks. The turbo-jets and rapiers are toggled with different hotkeys, as is the mode switch. I take off with just the jets, just to clear the ground under control, then flip on the rapiers and climb at 45degrees. I flip back and forth between tracking and the following the velocity-vector so the pitch slowly declines and I accelerate to around 1,000m/s as the atmosphere gets thin. When the air is thin enough that the rapiers get lower thrust than in closed-cycle mode, I flip them over and have some extra air to keep the turbo-jets going a bit longer. Above 40ish Km, I just keep it aiming down the velocity-vector and get a long shallow climb to orbit. The best I've done is around 800 fuel and 1000 oxygen left in a 90Km orbit, so I can raise it a bit, but its not going far!
-
Recently, I've been seeing if I can create a SSTA (Single Stage To Anywhere) using 4xRapier and 2xWhiplash. http://imgur.com/8yBVSQu For an SSTO plane encumbered with all the resource harvesting equipment, I can get this thing to a good 200Km orbit, but I need more ideas to get it landed and mining on Minimus.
-
I tried launching SSTOs as I had done previously, getting to the edge of breathable air and accelerating. Its not working any more. But messing around, I've just found I can effortlessly launch a small SSTO: - 2 x Rapier engines with pre-coolers, 1 x Whiplash air breather - Take off, pull up, max throttle - A few parts break off as you overheat, but the engines are so overpowered that you can blast your way to a 200km orbit easier than ever.
-
Odd Periapsis ETA Timings?
DaveSteadman replied to DaveSteadman's topic in KSP1 Technical Support (PC, unmodded installs)
That would answer it! Thanks. -
Here I have my Moho-Explorer probe braking towards the inner solar system. The ion drive is running and I have the mouse over the periapsis, watching the ETA reduce: In the screenshot the ETA has a value of four hours. When it reduces to zero, the day will decrement and the hours values will goes back to a sub-five hour value. At no point does a value above 5 hours get reported. Is this a known thing? Thanks. *Edit* Mac, no mods, v0.25:
-
Having just looked up wikipedia: - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerospike_engine - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_engine "A vehicle with an aerospike engine uses 25–30% less fuel at low altitudes, where most missions have the greatest need for thrust." The aerospike engine certainly isn't a compelling alternative during normal launches. Maybe it should be ramped up a bit to match its real-world advantage. "The disadvantages of aerospikes seem to be extra weight for the spike" I have no problem with the engine weighing more than a normal rocket engine, its just a number in a config file. The images in the wiki-pages show spikes are often a solid chunk of material, which is arguably less fragile than a rocket exhaust covered in cooling pipes. ie, I'd like to see them stackable. Wikipedia has no mention of vectoring an aerospike.
-
Tweaking The Pipes
DaveSteadman replied to DaveSteadman's topic in KSP1 Suggestions & Development Discussion
Regarding the Push-Pipe being the current pipe. I just did a test to be sure... The current pipe I would call a Draw-Pipe, in that it draws required fuel from source to destination. 1 - It doesn't actively push fuel when the engines aren't running and 2 - the destination tank is never topped up. If its not full, then it just won't get any emptier. Now off to read that tutorial... thanks. -
Hi, I'd like to suggest a revision of the pipes, making them more obvious in their function and useful in new areas: - Push-Pipe (Red): If there is any fuel in the source-tank and any fuel in the destination tank, a Push-Pipe will transfer it across. - Balance-Pipe (Green): If the percentage-full of the source-tank is greater than the percentage-full of the destination-tank, a Balance-Pipe will transfer it across. Push-Pipes will allow for more creative booster setups, with the builder having an obvious fuel flow pattern. Balance-Pipes will allow for larger sets of tanks to be used without the overhead of manually transferring to each one. Good for space stations and complex booster setups.
-
Conducting an entire mission in first-person mode
DaveSteadman replied to Masked Turk's topic in KSP1 Discussion
Squad should make this a tough mode to keep experienced players challenged.