DChurchill

Yeah, I need to start over with it. It does it's job, getting Kerbals to Mun and Minimus with a car for them to drive, but it's not very efficient or elegant. Too top-heavy. Even with all those struts, it flexes like crazy.

su-7? . . .

Minimalism.

Long video, but you can fast forward through it if you like.

Struts are your friend. Especially when you have a top-heavy monstrosity and don't feel like redesigning it.

Thanks. I was trying to see how minimalist I could get. I've got a bigger and faster rover waiting in the wings which will need descent engines. Might leave that for Eve, though. I think I want to do an Apollo style Duna landing for my first extra-Kerbin landing with live kerbals.

Made it, if anyone is interested. Touched down at about 4.8 m/s.

48 in September

My stock rover has RTGs so no worries on the energy. Just enough to have a very slow drain from lights and wheels, with a couple static solar cells. Kind of silly, really. Light side, I don't need lights, so the solar cells are redundant, dark side I need lights and the solar cells are useless. Might have to rethink that design. That's a really loooonnnnng drive, though. Dunno if I have the patience.

So far I'm the oldest guy here.

Old enough to remember Apollo 11 on TV. Barely.

Finally!

I've had some wierdness based on certain configurations. Others, not so much. Building a non-powered lander chassis for a rover for Duna. Basically an X with lander legs on the ends and a Mk16 chute in the center, rover on a stack separator underneath. I put the smaller chutes on the 4 corners of the X over each leg and it's fine until the lander touches down and I blow the stack separator. The lander then proceeds to shake itself apart and explodes. I redesign it a little so that it's basically the same, except that I put a "crossbar" of cubics through the center and mount chutes on the ends of those. Works fine. Except that I'm down 2 chutes, which I hope won't be a problem when I come down through Duna's atmosphere. If the chutes don't get it slow enough, it's going to be a smoking hole. If I had it to do over again, which honestly I do but I want to try this, I wouldn't use cubics at all.

ROFL. That's company motto material.

Put up a new station core which will someday become a spacedock. One end has a senior clamp-o-tron which will eventually get the dock part, there are 4 radial regular clap-o-trons in the center and the far end has 4 of the jumbo solar panels and two of the round batteries with a docking port on the end where I can continue to add more of these power modules as I need them. And launched a probe rover which will be off to Duna tonight. Trying an unpowered descent with parachutes only. The lander with rover is 1.64 tons and has 3 parachutes. We'll see if it has enough drag.

Originally, I kept it all around and pretty much left it where it was. Now, I just delete them from the Tracking Station, just keep clutter from affecting the game's performance. I keep a few around, mostly stuff on the surface of planets, to have something to visit later on. Since the new probe cores came with .2, I've taken to adding these to stages so I can de-orbit "spent" boosters and such. Putting a small fuel tank in the stack and turning it off before launch makes this pretty easy.

Entropy is a b****.

Doesn't work. The panels on my station produce no electricity even with a small amount of direct light from a ring of Mk1's on the dark side of Kerbin. In any case, it's perpetual motion again. Inefficiency in the system would require an external energy source to perpetuate itself. The guy on Youtube is scamming ya.

Yeah some of Newtonian physics is known to be broken in KSP. They'll fix it eventually, I expect. Edit: Meh, mk78123 beat me to it.

Still requires energy to power the electromagnet with the inevitable loss due to inefficiency in the wires, etc. You can't just hold two magnets apart by a rod and get motion without applying some other form of energy. Even in a full vacuum with no gravitational effect, that car from the OP isn't going anywhere. This, too. With no external force, conservation of momentum says it ain't going anywhere. "Linear momentum is also a conserved quantity, meaning that if a closed system is not affected by external forces, its total linear momentum cannot change. In classical mechanics, conservation of linear momentum is implied by Newton's laws; but it also holds in special relativity (with a modified formula) and, with appropriate definitions, a (generalized) linear momentum conservation law holds in electrodynamics, quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and general relativity." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momentum

Zero sum. The magnets would pull in opposite directions, cancelling each other. No such animal as perpetual motion.

MechJeb or KerbalEngineer both have delta-v functions in the VAB so you can see how much oomph your rocket has. How much fuel is very dependent on the mass of your lander.

Yeah 3.3.4 worked but wouldn't save any progress on the maps. Well, it would but it seemed to start with new .pngs every time I started the game. I switched to 4r1 and it works fine.

Steam had an "Early Release" deal for $19.95 a few months ago. Build your own space program? Heck yeah! Sign me up!

Sepratron I http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Sepratron_I