numerobis

@Archgeek: "In my defense, they have the best ratio of lift to mass of any aero part." 20% better than the others! But it looks like you're carrying fuel tanks. The Big-S strake has the normal lift to mass, but carries fuel. If you compare the strake to equivalent lift from fins, the strake is only 17 kg heavier, which is a lot less than any fuel tank that carries 100 units.

An ionizing air filter actually does blow ions -- of course, they don't stay ions for long. But one disadvantage of them over HEPA filters is that they put out ozone (an advantage is that you don't need to replace the filter). As for SIP, let me google that for you: structural insulated panel. It's foam sandwiched between plywood boards. That composite has structural strength, and is highly insulated. And it comes in panels. Those construction industry people are no poets, but they do make good materials.

I don't understand what's wrong about any of those... 1. My first permanent job as a researcher was at NASA Ames, which is an airbase. 2. I use an ionizing air filter as a fan (and to clean up the air). 3. A friend build her house out of Structural Insulated Panels. 4. I land at the island to test whether my plane can land in a tricky spot, without having to fly halfway around the globe to find out that my stall speed is too high or landing gear is poorly place. 5. I've climbed on old structures plenty. 6. Fighter jets with no weapons would make for a better world. 7. Stuffing kerbals in service bays... well... ok, yes, that's a bit wrong

The surface distance traveled seems not to factor out orbital velocity correctly, somehow. I have a save where there's a plane that splashed down after just over 7,000 km of flight. Flying slightly slower (200 m/s rather than a variable rate slowly accelerating from 200 to 250 m/s over a period of hours), when I cross that spot my plane has over 10,000 km of flight.

I've built a nice reliable tourist bus that costs $5050 to launch, takes two tourist to LKO every time. Round-trip time: about 30 minutes, in part because I set the chutes to open quite low: 1km for the little chute on the nose to get me to not die, but 600m and 400m for the two radial chutes so I don't just linger in the air forever. On the maiden flight, I wanted to see how far I could make it glide on re-entry. It was dark. At about 2500m I chickened out and decided to throw open the chutes. They opened fully. Even the 400m chute. Then I took a crew report and noticed I was in the mountains...

I decided to play cavekerbal mode, as @GoSlash27 mentioned a while back: no building updates until your R&D is maxed out. The most significant effects: • Rather harder to plot a path to Mun when you don't even know if you've got an intercept (because you can't upgrade the tracking center). • Rather less science is available in space when you can't EVA (because you can't upgrade the astronaut center). • So much money piles up when you can't sink it into real estate! It's worth getting the Juno and wheels ASAP so you can milk all the science around KSC. There's about 300 science to pick up like that on normal settings: 8 biomes for the buildings and crawl way (not counting the launch sites), plus five situations a short roll from base (grassland, tundra, shore landed, shore splashed, water splashed). And then you can grew crew and thermometer flying over the local biomes, fly to the island airfield for another couple bonus science, and land on the hill above it to get highlands. Bob is particularly useful on these early runs to be able to get everything in one trip, reusing the goo and materials bay.

Paid copies is one thing; active players is another, and they're not precisely connected. Some people buy games and never install them (particularly on Steam). Some people play games they never bought. Some very dedicated people play games actively for a while and then drop them -- for a game that's been around for five years that's going to be a lot of people. And with the KerbalEDU program, that makes it even harder to evaluate how many individuals were touched by the game versus how many seats were sold.

I've done it manually, eyeballing it, without the upgraded flight control facilities. But that was a fluke. I usually don't succeed in sandbox unless I'm really trying (with mechjeb or precisenode and so on)

In the VAB, lift is calculated as if wind were coming down from above, and very slightly (less than a degree) from the East. In the SPH, it's from what by default is forwards, and very slightly from below. Where you root part is doesn't matter for that.

You're talking about the body lift? I get that frequently. I assume it's a display bug, because my planes fly fine -- whereas they should be entirely uncontrollable according to the displayed forces.

I presume I'm just a bad interface to google, but I'm not finding release notes for 1.2? I mean, other than this old thread, but it seems like the development priorities have changed in the year and a half since.

I accelerated at 3.6 mm/s. Yes, seriously, *milli*meters per second. I have 26.9 kN of thrust to 26.8 kN of drag, and 27t of mass to accelerate. TWR of about 0.1 doesn't translate to big accelerations, especially in the atmosphere. This is based on my most ridiculous plane yet: a single Wheesley pushing up three pairs of Fat-55 wings, plus two Mk1 fuel tanks and two Big-S strakes. I have a single canard-style elevon up front for pitch control, because I didn't quite balance everything perfectly (after burning off 200 units I was able to get things balanced better with some fuel transfers). For roll and yaw I use the cockpit's control wheels.

Best of luck! I just hope you don't get stuck in an air-conditioned room in Tampa bombing Yemeni civilians -- for which I hear video game skills are particularly needed. Those pilots apparently suffer PTSD a lot more than pilots who actually end up in theatre.

Heading off on a 3.5 year mission in a normal KSP spacecraft is kind of like going to university, except you only have a tiny cramped pod to live in.

These are smaller resolution than what I usually send up without issue; and converting to jpg or half-size png doesn't help. Mystery. I'm sure it'll be fixed tomorrow.

I built a plane that will soon shatter my distance record on jets. I'm matched with my record right now, and I have 650 units of fuel left -- more than half what I took off with. Unfortunately I can't show you this ridiculous beast because imgur doesn't let me post for some reason ("failed", not sure why). Anyway: cockpit, pre-cooler, wheesley, a pair of Fat-55, and minimal control surfaces. No landing gear. Landing gear is for chumps -- I ditched them on takeoff.

@Sandworm will you be flying helicopters, jet fighters, or transport planes? Or do you know that yet?

Step 1: DONT PANIC. If I have time to react at all, I have time to think. Typically I have 30+ seconds before I'd hit the ground. Step 2: figure out how to isolate the passengers, and do that. Step 3: try to fly towards home -- gotta recover as much as possible.

I wrote an autopilot that took off, climbed to cruising altitude, cruised over 11,000 km and landed (nearly) autonomously. I forgot to write the code to lower the landing gear so I did that bit by hand. The plane looks pretty mean when it's out of fuel and gliding:

I have improved on the autopilot. Now it takes off automatically, throttles back to avoid flying too fast (about 200 m/s is just about right), and can pretty much land automatically (if I lower the gear manually). Bit of a rough landing, but hey, nothing broke. 11,263km -- nearly 3,000 km farther on the same amount of fuel, just with a better autopilot. Also, here's a better picture of the bird, gliding at dawn, with Minmus in the background: The code to go with that flight:

Indeed, I see nothing in your code that should cause this. You set the mainThrottle like any normal autopilot would, to a value that makes sense (after 300 ticks it should still be a normalized number, about 10^-15). And when I load from a save where the speed is such that I should hit this bug if it were your fault, I don't hit the bug. Must be something deeper.

Replicable indeed. It takes a while though, from the saves I've got -- about 15 minutes of game time. I have a quick save where the phantom force had just started; mainThrottle is about 1e-14, and I'm multiplying by about 0.97 at a frequency of about 10Hz ("wait 0.1"). I seem to need to be in 2x physics timewarp; at 1x it converges. Unfortunately, reloading the quick save doesn't reproduce the problem; you're back at needing to wait 15 minutes of game time. I'm trying to simplify it...

I just hit a hilarious bug. I'm controlling the throttle as such on my plane: lock throttle to targetThrottle. until false { ... (calculate v_desired^2 and v^2) set targetThrottle to max(min(targetThrottle * v_desired2 / v2, 1), 0). } This is, of course, a horrible method: it oscillates ridiculously, particularly combined with the spool up/spool down time of a jet. I was about to hook it up to a PIDLoop to do better. But then my thrust went to something that printed as zero. And then it got weird. My speed started increasing. I verified in-game that the thrust output was zero, and fuel flow was zero -- but my speed was increasing. At first it was slow, but then it crept up and up, my plane broke the sound barrier. This is a plane with a single juno as the power plant, and thrust is zero as per every display. At that point, then the speed *really* increased -- until in a matter of less than a second it went from 500 m/s to 2386m/s. In that second there were structural failures, parts splashing down hard (at 9700m altitude?) and finally the cockpit overheated. So clearly, setting the throttle to values very, very close to zero confuses KSP. Seems like a bug...

Playing around with the Juno: I let it fly overnight with a kOS script and topped 10,000 km of range. And crashed; my script doesn't handle landing -- it would need to know to lower the flaps and gear, and then it would be a fairly gentle landing. The Juno is a remarkably useful engine for this kind of long-distance runs. I'm fairly confident I could increase that range a lot by adding more Big-S wings to get both more lift and more fuel. I think flying slower might help too; I'm pushing Mach 0.9 at the end of powered flight.

This post is for aircraft lovers only! I'm trying to push the limits of what planes can do in KSP. I had a pair of contracts in early career mode that required me crew reports below X meters in six or seven far-away locations. I had the first planes, so I inspired myself from the Rutan Voyager: I had done a first contract with the pair of Junos on small pods, with big control surfaces for elevators and a rudder. From that success, I extrapolated that if I put on a lot more fuel on the pods a bit more wing, and then saved some weight on the tail by cutting it down to a tail fin - no rudder - and a single elevon, I'd be OK. Then I noticed that three rocket fins were lighter but had the same area as one tail fin (in retrospect, I really only needed one tail fin). That plane, flown manually, made it a bit over 5,000 km. This plane is nearly half fuel on liftoff. Next I decided to see what I could do in sandbox with the Juno. This plane has nearly the same amount of fuel (just 10 units more): I chose to make it a single-engine plane. It still has 2t of fuel -- actually, 2.05t -- so it's supposed to take off with half the thrust and almost all the weight. I cut all the dry mass I could, and some of the drag: Replace the cockpit (1.25t) with an inline cockpit (1t), save 250kg and also allow placing an intake up front. Replace the tail connector with front and back adapters. Same mass (200kg) but they carry 160 fuel between them and allow putting an intake in front and juno in back. That fuel means we can spare three Mk0 tanks, saving 75kg -- and still have extra fuel on board. Drop down to just one juno and intake from two, saving 109 kg and reducing drag substantially. Replace two pairs of structural wing E with a pair of Big-S strakes. Same mass, but they carry 200 fuel between them, so we can remove four Mk0 tanks, saving 100kg. Replace the fixed wheels with retractable wheels. Lower drag, just 20kg extra mass. Remove two of the tail pieces, leaving just one rocket fin as my vertical stabilizer. Save 20kg mass, offsetting the wheels exactly, and reducing drag. All in all I saved 250 + 75 + 109 + 100 = 534kg on my airframe, and was able to carry an extra 50kg fuel with that, so my launch mass is 484kg lighter. Bonus, it looks like some scifi movie fighter. But how did I do? Way better than a mere 5,000km! This little thing is only a bit lighter, but has half the thrust of the Voyager-styled plane, so I was surprised to even see it take off, and I was worried I wouldn't be able to climb efficiently. For both planes, the flight plan is simple: fly prograde, but don't let yourself pitch up so high that you slow down, and don't let yourself pitch down. That way you'll climb nicely out of the airport, then when your lift is only barely sufficient, you will naturally level out. As you burn fuel, you'll slowly climb, naturally, because you're lighter but have the same lift. And you'll speed up a bit, and burn less fuel per time unit -- which is a double-whammy for fuel per distance unit. For my single-engine plane I wrote a kOS script. I've since improved it, so that it can glide much further and splash the plane down without losing the intake. The tiny single-engine plane is remarkable: I was able to splash down nearly with full fuel, then lift off from the water. I'm testing it now on the twin-engine Voyager-style plane. Feel free to copy it for your own purposes: