Deddly

Valentina smiled as she took the controls of the Finstrosity 1.2. She felt comfortable here. Although the plane had been stripped down to its basics for a complete overhaul (to make use of "enabling technologies and breakthrough engineering", Bill had informed her), it still felt like the good old Finstrosity that had taken the world by storm with its amazing ability to fly horizontally. Since Ascent had performed the incredible and actually managed to fire a man out of the atmosphere, the Deddly-Ascent collaboration had been inundated with unusual requests. Finstrosity 1.2 had been designed and dragged onto the runway to perform a very special task for C7 Aerospace. They had offered to pay Deddly Design handsomely to test a new kind of technology. Deddly Design was, of course, more than happy to put its valuable personnel in danger for the sake of science and the good of Kerbalkind. It was absolutely nothing to do with the money and how dare the media assume such a thing. C7 Aerospace called this experimental engine the "Wheesley" jet engine, and it was touted as a breakthrough in science and technology, although most people knew it was just a ventilation fan forced to run at hundreds of times its design capacity. Bill had taken the opportunity to install some groundbreaking technology of his own. Ever since mastering the art of forming the mystery goo into elongated canisters, he had been keeping the bits that had spilled onto the floor in his box of odds and ends. He had recently noticed that many rusty old pieces of ... (well he didn't quite remember what they were, but they looked important and they would probably be useful one day)... had fused together and reacted with the goo in interesting ways. He expertly shoved these trinkets into a suitable container and thereby invented what he called a "Science Jool Return" because it was decidedly sciencey and because Bill had calculated that, when exposed to the atmosphere, the device would power the craft to Jool and Return it safely to Kerbin whilst using only 35 units of the "liquid fuel" left over from Ascent's party that they had the other day. With great anticipation, then, Valentina hit the throttle - the only control on the craft. Much to everyone's dismay, however, the Wheeseley engine simply fizzed and, well, wheezed. C7 Aerospace were greatly disappointed but were more than happy to transfer the promised funds to Deddly Design's offshore bank account after a friendly visit by one of their suspiciously strong-looking lawyers. Fed up with this incompetence, Bill tore off the malfunctioning piece of scrap and replaced it with a special version of the liquid fuel engine that Ascent had recently tested over on the launchpad. This was a special favour to Jebediah, whose side business (Jebediah Kerman's Junkyard and Spacecraft Parts Co) had made a new version with what is in technical terms referred to as a twisty-turney nozzle. With this engine in place, the Finstrocity 1.2 took off at such a rate that the camera man couldn't keep up with it. It was glorious. It was FAST! Valentina was grinning ear to ear as she expertly shifted her weight around in the cockpit and aimed the craft for the middle of the space centre to impress the bosses. As she carefully eased the plane towards the gently-sloping grass, an urgent voice crackled accross the radio link. It was Bill Kerman. "Val, you're coming in too fast! Pull up!" "It's fine you big sissy" "Val, I really think you should lift the nose" <sigh> "OK fine... it doesn't lift very quickly, does it?" "Val! You're barely above the ground, you must lift the nose." A sudden realisation sent a chill down Bill's spine; "You haven't activated the goo!" he cried. Alas, without the goo activated, Bill knew that the craft would be unable to sustain level flight for long. Time seemed to slow down and all he could do was watch in horror as Valentina fumbled for the goo controls. She was only a fraction of a second from the ground and Bill knew the canisers would never open in time. Valentina leaned back as far as she could and the nose was laboriously rising, but it wasn't enough. At almost level flight, the Finstrocity brushed the ground at over 72 m/s. In the blink of an eye she was gone. A somber mood hung over the Deddly-Ascent complex as the very first flag-planting ceremony was conducted. It seemed fitting that the bravest Kerbal who ever died in a spaceplane should be honoured with a permanent flag, as a solemn reminder of the dangers faced by these heroes every day. This episode is dedicated to Valentina Kerman

The thing is, when you see what a strut looks like, it does intuitatively look like it should have a lot of drag. I think the main problem is that it's presumably the same amount of drag independant of how long the strut is, and the drag only affects the parent part, not the attached part. But in my opinion, it does make sense that they should add drag in some way.

As I suspected. Well done for confirming it with some solid testing!

You have a strut connecting the two rockets at the top. Please could you post the results without the strut?

Is it possible that the craft with the engines offset is more stable and so uses less thrust vectoring? Try it without SAS, maybe?

Thanks TheKutKu and UFO Researcher, we hope you're enjoying it as much as we are!

That's great to hear! As much as there can be a bit too much negativity from time to time, it is a very helpful community. And like you say, it's not often you come accross comments mocking newbie questions.

Part 3 "What do you do with the goo, anyway?" Asked Valentina Kerman as she delivered the latest case of the mysterious material to Deddly Design. Bill was signing the delivery note and looked up in surprise. "You haven't heard about my thesis on the hypothetical levitation properties of viscous semiliquiform deposits?" he asked, increduously. "It was published on my blog only days ago!" Valentina was trying to find a polite answer, which was evading her rather successfully, when just in the nick of time, what sounded like an explosion went off behind her. Spinning around to look, she saw a flimsy conical container soaring into the atmosphere. She had no idea what had just happened - all she knew was that someone had just hurtled himself high into the air on top of a trashcan full of boom, and she wanted in on it. With Bill's assurance that "boom" plus "goo" would be even more exciting, Valentina gleefully signed up for the first flight of what Bill affectionally called the "Finstrosity" Bill assured Valentina that the specially reconfigured canisters of goo would, according to his calculations, cause the craft to instantaneously reach 1400 m/s, which - according to his calculations - would be easily enough to reach the moon within five minutes. The trashcan filled with Bob's special mixture that had kindly been lent to him from Ascent accross the field was mainly to aid in stability at low speeds. Sitting in the shiny new cockpit of this very special craft, Valentina optimistically set her speed display to show orbital velocity and pressed an inviting-looking red button. WOOSH went the trashcan in the back, shooting the Finstrosity forward with impressive force She was in the air! She was flying! Valentina grinned with delight. This was at least 12% more fun than delivering goo, though an argument could be made for 15%. By jiggling her weight around inside the cockpit, Valentina found that she could change the direction the Finstrosity was facing, which made things even more fun: ...and so she actually managed to come in for a very smooth landing: ...at which point the management at Deddly Design quickly cancelled it's recruitment process for new pilots. Bill was disappointed that the goo didn't seem to add all that much speed to the design, but he was convinced that this wonder material would definitely work as intended with a little reconfiguration (according to his calculations, that is).

Jumpster and Moarpower, thank you for the encouragement! It's good to have you along for the ride. Best fasten your seatbelts, it's likely to be a bumpy one...

Brotoro, you know how I love your reports. The narration is fantastic and your attention to detail is truly impressive. Have you considered splitting your missions into shorter, more "bite-sized" installments? I recognise that each installment represents a huge amount of time in designing, testing, flying, recording and then writing these reports, but some of these also take a very long time to read and personally, I don't often have that amount of time free in a single sitting but I would love to keep up more!

Part 1 (this post) Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 "For Valentina" Part 6 "Health and Safety" Part 7 "a real, working flighty-type thing with wings!" It all started one hot summer day, when two rival companies decided to pool resources in order to accomplish the impossible: To make something fly! Many laughed at the ridiculous proposition. The idea of an object heavier than air levitating was simply preposterous. Nevertheless, Deddly Design began hiring the brightest and least terrified people who happened to walk in the door and marked out a large area on the ground where they would attempt to not blow things up. They termed this area the "runway" because hopefully everyone would be able to run away from debris quickly enough to avoid getting hit by it. Only days before, an exotic kind of goo had been invented - the latest "wonder material" that everyone hoped would solve most of the world's problems. The brightest and only engineer on the team - Bill Kerman - came up with the theory that perhaps this exotic material could be collected in canisters and be used to levitate a simple capsule into the air. His calculations showed that, if controlled carefully, the capsule should easily get to Duna and back within three hours. Amongst great excitement, Bill personally rolled his design onto the "runway" and climbed in. The mysterious goo was protected by specially-designed fins that Bill said would protect them from damage on landing. Everything went just as planned, until Bill activated the goo canisters. First there was a pause, then a longer one. A short waiting period came next, which was followed by a moment of hesitation. After a few minutes, there was a time where nothing happened, then all fell silent. Although he was somewhat disappointed by the results, Bill managed to find 13 pieces of science just lying there in the dirt! He put them to good use right away, with the hopes that new materials and ideas would make the dream a reality. Meanwhile, Bill could see accross the grass (which, incidentally, appeared greener on the other side) that Ascent were busy making a roundish slab of concrete on the ground. He wondered how on earth they thought they would get that in the air. Fools.

I feel like this could almost be merged into the Positive Forum Movement thread

This is off topic but I see this coming up all the time. HarvesteR announced and released the first publicly-available alpha of KSP by starting a thread on the Orbiter forums before KSP had its own forum. That thread in the Orbiter forum is every bit as official as this entire forum is.

Tase, I understand your frustration, but why immediately assume a bad motive? Squad are nice guys who have gone out of their way to make consessions for us (like the "all future updates for free" misunderstanding), seems a bit unfair to accuse them of not caring.

Just curious as to whether any of you who are critisizing their marketing strategy have any experience of marketing yourselves? Personally I do not have experience in that field, but it seems that most companies these days make frequent use of social media and do not always include the same information on their own web site. For the record, I dislike social media and use none of them, but I can see that they can be used very skillfully in marketing. Squad stands to benefit if they can get you to post on Facebook or Twitter instead of the forums. How? Because when you post something about KSP, all of your "friends" or "followers" are automatically linked in, which is free advertising. This, in my opinion, is why the Kerbal Countdown competition is not open to forum entries, and allowing some news to be released via social networks only encorages everyone to follow them and draw even more attention to what is said there. Whether we like it or not, I can't fault their marketing

I thought 3 down could be constellation, but that would be NASA

Hmm, there is no 16 horizontal clue

Am I the only one who has a sneaking suspicion that HarvesteR is trolling us with another not-quite-April-the-first joke, to get everyone talking about something other than how they think 1.0 is premature? If so, it's worked beautifully. If he was serious, I still love the humerous spirit everyone is taking in response to this henious anti-doughnut policy.

A very well-thought-out post, Fel. I can certainly understand your point of view and your comparison with a smart phone was pretty logical, I think. If you want a more "apples to apples" comparison, Merinsan, there are a lot of apps out there that provide core functionality but support plugins for extended functions. In the other hand, Fel, there's something this post doesn't bear in mind. KSP is a single-player game right now, but will be multiplayer in the future. Having a completely-functional game that doesn't require a specific list of mods in order to connect to a server is very important. I'm a stock player myself, but there is functionality in several mods that I would like to see in the game, such as clouds, FAR, KAS, robotics hinges and some kind of life support, but I don't think I would have voted to have them stock because I don't have any experience using them (apart from a short stint with clouds and city lights, which did add depth to the game) and videos I have seen show some bugs in some of these mods as well.

It was all worth it just for that explosion

What I appreciate most about the moderator team is that they manage to strike a good balance between keeping things constructive and being heavy-handed. They do very well, which is especially good to see when we bear in mind that they are unpaid volunteers.

I think it's a shame. There's nothing like it, aesthetically speaking.

All threads can be rated. Give it a try

SpaceExplorer, if you would like to support the idea and post in line with it, you are naturally very welcome to add the link in your signature too. Oh, and Upsilon, thanks for posting an example template for those who don't know how to do it

Nice to see that, TGN! Would look even better if you fit the hyperlink into some text (like I've done in mine) but of course it's your sig and you are free to set it as you like