DocSnuggles

The Challenge provides way too much fuel. Reducing the thrust to the absolut minimum results in more than 52 hours of flight time. In addition you have another long descent time. So... i present the most boring vid in kerbal history... i´m joking... i stopped the capture at 1h20m because i can´t wait 2 and a half day to finish the recording without being able to use my pc. At the end of the vid you see some data. The approximatly flight data would be: (if my math is right) -Flight time: 52 hours + x -Distance: 1300000 + x -max altitude: 350m + x As you see in the vid. the crappy design tends to not fly straight and ends up with an circle at the ksc ( i had some other tries with an nice circle around the ksc in close distance). The good thing is that it would probably land save. I will not finish the challenge and try to get an entry at the ladderboard but i am amazed to see where this challenge will go to. The secret will be to create a plane that can lift off with the minimum thrust the engine can be adjusted. The plane has also to climb up permanently in order to get more altitude and speed (i´m lagging at that point). The normal landing gears are extremly heavy but when i tried to remove them with lighter rover wheels these rover wheels seem to work a bit like an aero brake (but i can be wrong). I oracle that someone here will build a plane that can fly around kerbal Just my 2 cents

I love it. Great work. And I am still laughing by typing.

I don´t know if my post is already common knowledge but by searching for hangglider´s in KSP i didn´t found any Kerbal controlled crafts. All Gliders seem to be based on more or less hidden control probes. So here is a concept that is working in KSP for an Kerbal controlled Hangglider. Moving on a ladder towards a barrier creates a force in direction of your movement that is affecting the whole craft. It´s absolutely not physical correct but ... ok ... thats KSP. As you see by the first glider, i attached a bunch of ladders in order to change the flight direction by moving the kerbal on the plane so the center of weight would change... But Kerbals seem to have no weight when climbing on ladders. By accident i realised that colliding with one of the blades has an effect on my flight direction. > http://youtu.be/fGusqo3QHnI&fmt=22 (craft files in video description) First one in the video is the base glider which was first build for testing controlls by changing the center of weight. For reasons i dont understand it´s descending extremly slow. The second one has additional controlls for up and down but is descending much faster. Getting more airspeed by moving forward seems not to work but isn´t tested that intense. Have fun.

I got 306 m/s > http://youtu.be/VdGWcOvTc1s

Yes ... I could try to dock all seperate vessels together before quicksaving but then i could often just restart the mission by the time it takes . I read about doing a "savestate" by older console games. You copy the whole game data of the ram. So you get the exact same conditions when you restore this game state. But i didn´t find a tool to do it with actual games.

It bothers me that loading a quicksave or switching to a vessel causes an shock to the whole structure. For example: If you have one plane on top of another seperate plane (or a rover... whatever) and you reload this scene both ships get a shake by the game-engine and in most cases the top one will fall of the lower one. I think its getting enforced by wheels for example. The game just saves the position of parts but not the force they deal to each other. A compressed landing gear isn´t compressed when the save game is loaded so it will do some force to the structure when the game realises that there is some weight on top of it. So the wheels get you in trouble but when there are 2 seperate vessels that deal force to each other by theire weight (see first example) a reload of an quicksave will nearly always do the mission fail. So.. is there any way in the options or a trick to stop this annoying behavior? It wouldn´t be the best solution but if i could get the game to slowly calculate the forces of the vessels to each other when loading a quicksave, i think the vessels wouldn´t behave like compressed springs to each other.

There is no reason for manned space travel. If you take a look at the progression that automation has taken and will take, why should you send an human to space. The only thing that can´t be explored by machines is the influence of space to humans . And being prepared for the day to encounter the overpopulation isn´t an argument in my opinion. I think there could live many more billions of humans on this planet well feedet by using all possibilities we have (aqua cultures, greenhouses in the desert by desalted water, reducing/cutting meat production and using alternatives.... ). At the end it´s only limited by the energy we have. And before we have to send out mankind to other planets because of the overpopulation there will be some cruel methods to safe fuel. Cut of the head and freeze it... send it to the mars colony and put it on an artificial body and reanimate it. But then human space travel also became an automated cargo operation and there´s no good reason to exercise manned space travel these days. But damn... I also want to have the manned space programm alive. It´s like the "no speed limit on the autobahn". No good arguments for having it but if I had to decide to cut it... I wouldn´t do it. Back to the main topic. I would start the shuttles near the equator. There are some mountains that could be used for a kind of maglev system to accelerate the shuttle before using liquid fuel. Being 4000 to 6000 meters over sea level at 1000km/h before starting liquid engines should be a huge deal. From this point on a 2 stage system would take place with an shuttle/capsule mounted on the top. The command module would be more like an lifting body and the landing would be done by an controlled parachute (paraglider). If it would be possible to build and descending airfield with a kind of gliding surface the landing gears could also be dropped. A human wouldn´t be able to do this maneuver but a computer will imo.

Finally I got some G´s . I had to decouple a probe a the outside of the centrifuge. Then switching to this probe and then i got some results. But it´s sad that the game is crashing my pc by calculating all the parts interacting to each other and on the other hand it fails at simple logics.

Ok... the diameter of the construction is about ~250m and one complete rotation takes about 38 seconds. If i do the math right there should be an acceleration of ~3m/s² = 0,3g at the side points. Not enough to say that the accelerometer isn´t working. So i tried another construction with an smaller diameter but able to rotate faster. The diameter now is about 100m and one rotation takes about 6 seconds. And again... if my copy and paste math´s are right there should be an acceleration of more than 5g to meassure. But nothing more is showen than the 1g of kerbal. > http://youtu.be/KF5gK7M8do0

I made a test vehicle in order to get a giant centrifuge based on the rocket start table. As you see in the video clip I mounted an accelerometer at the outside probe of the vehicle but when i start rotating the thing, the accelerometer only measures the kerbin acceleration itself. So it seems that the accelerometer isnt working. I also tried mech-jeb to get some proper information but this isn´t working too. Eva the Kerbal and switching to an outside probe changes nothing. Any ideas how to get acceleration date of the outside probes? video > craft file > http://www./?eq92yp90n64ota4

http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Key_Bindings

The Plane looks a bit like the Nazis won WW2 and they are now building JU52 style space planes .... but i like it. The Problem about big VTOL planes is that the thrust vector of the enginges don´t have the impact on the controls as they have on small VTOL. Another point is that the torque, the command modules provide, does not scale with your plane size. You can add some hidden command modules in order to get more force on your controls. This could be enough to keep your plane in air but it isn´t that big effect and it can´t compensate a defective design. I also like to angle the engines counterwhise for some degrees so that some % of the thrust is directed to the front and to the back. If the Plane starts to turn forward for example, the front engines provide more thrust in direction to the ground. It helps to lift the front up and get back control of the plane. The engines at the backside lose downforce what´s also helping to get back in position. Negative aspect of this placement is that the backside engines provide thrust in forward direction so that the plane is starting to move forward ....but its better than losing total control. It´s also clear that some thrust is wasted by placing the engines not directly in direction of the ground. This is a vid to show what i am talking about > http://youtu.be/nNZnQDAtSiA To stop the roll of your craft you could do the same by directing the engines to the left and right but in this case it could be more efficient to work with adding some comand pods (unmaned) because they provide some good roll force. One last point. Your pictures show the plane turning backwards. If you cannot balance the plane perfectly, try to tune it in that way that it´s turning forward. The aerodynamic surfaces of the game like planes flying in the right direction and it helps getting back control .

I recommend this vid -> The guy did an excellent job balancing the thing and angling the engines. This should be the way it can be done by adjusting the shuttle angle in order to fit the center of mass problem in combination with the right angle of the shuttle main engines.

My attempt http://youtu.be/Ekyj39QkUfo

I used to make an action groupe that toggles all air intakes in order to keep an altitude. You adjust the throttle a little bit higher than the thrust you need. By turning the intakes off and imidiatly turning them on you lose about 10m till you start gaining height again. The advantage of this method is that you dont have to deal with the long reaktion time of the engines to reach theire final max power at an certain throttle. The throttle control in KSP is just crap. Its calculated by the duration auf pressing a button but still then it isnt working properly to me. You reduce the throttle more by short pressing a butten than increasing throttle by short pressing it. Even with this handicap you can improve your thrust control by a makro in order to press a throttle command pot always for a certain duration. This helps a lot but isnt perfect. An better workaround is to create an virtual throttle to enable fine step adjustments. I hope to do finish an extra thread about that tomorrow in which i explain it. Best Solution would be to have an add on for fine throttle adjustments in 1% steps or 0,1% steps but i couldnt find one.

I did it... All rings (Ring 2 twice by accident), in cockpit view and a plane with 7 parts. Time was 4:21. There were two flight events i forgot to record in this vid ("Truss Piece 3x was damaged by engine exhaust from small radial engine") at min 0:23 and at min 2:03. So if touching or damaging by the exhaust counts... there were 2 collisions. http://youtu.be/ev2nOALDrkU (in the background you hear a friend of me raging during league of legends gaming ) the idea behind this challenge is great but the limitations of ksp are awful. My fps dropped to a point were it isnt fun to play... not talking about the short complete stops of the game when it is loading one of the rings. Perhaps it would be better to do custom single part rings in order to deal with the limitations of the ksp enging. I wonder where this challenge will be in some weeks... micro solid booster attached to a small probe and 2 micro control surfaces as wings doing the course in some seconds by fine tuned control makros.