Gargamel

Moved to Mission Reports

Wut? Without wings, a ramp is 100% useless. Your craft doesn’t fly, it hovers. And if it can vtol from the ground, it can vtol straight into space. Your craft is fueled by magical unicorn farts, so it’s not a problem there. But let’s say we do try this ramp idea. The TL:DR of the scenario is that a heavy lift space elevator is a much simpler civil engineering project than your ramp and runway would be. Let’s say your launch speed will be a small yet not insignificant fraction of your eventual orbital velocity, so let’s say 3,000kph when you hit the ramp. Take a look at the wheels on the rocket cars vying for the land speed record today. They are huge aluminum discs with a tiny, TINY, contact patch And this is for a car that only weighs a few tons. Your craft would require TENS of thousands of wheels to not sink into the ground, with the engines turned off. Now let’s add exploding unicorn farts coming out the back of a craft the mass of a World War II light cruiser sitting on ten thousand pizza cutters. Then when this rolling death trap to tarmac reaches a few Mach, it runs into a ramp. There isn’t a structure or material imaginable able to withstand this device. Even if the craft did manage to survive yeeting itself airborne, the runway and ramp would be demolished and require a complete rebuild every launch. But all of that is still ignoring the fundamental problem with this idea: There is zero, Zero, ZERO benefit to horizontal motion on the ground for a craft that doesn’t have wings.

Very Nice! Thread has been moved over to The Exchange.

Moved to tech support

Moved to S&S.

This thread is about the hype of KSP2, not the political or military stances of various countries.

Then what’s the point of runway?? If we don’t have wings, why the heck are you going sideways? The only reason to go sideways is to generate lift using wings and slowly (relatively) gain speed as you gain altitude. You have a magical super heavy craft capable of vertical flight, just go up.

Moved to add-on discussion

As the mod is in development, it has been moved to Add-on Development.

My girl and I were day tripping around the Far East side of Cleveland this weekend. We’re jumping around the radio stations, seeing what’s what as we’re normally streamers of music. I’m upset because one of the local East side classic rock stations is being drowned out by a Hip Hop station on an adjacent frequency out of Detroit. I start hugging and puffing, just out of spite. Then we flip over to another “classic rock” station in the area, and the radio says “Chicago”, and I lose it. I start ranting about ionospheres and yadda yadda, there’s no way we should be picking up a Chicago radio station here. She just looks at me and says “You’re an idiot. The band is Chicago”.

Overlapping threads have been merged

Welcome to the forums @ao jun Your Question has been moved to Welcome Aboard. This stickies thread should answer your question:

Overlapping threads have been merged.

This is called a RGTO. Rube Goldberg to Orbit. Not saying it won’t work, just seems overly complicated.

Moved to PC Modded support

Most gaming sticks, even a lot of the simple ones, that don’t have pedals, use a twisting motion to control yaw. But why choose between a stick or yoke? Why not neither? Look at the evolution of each, and see what fits better. Sticks started first because they were simpler. The yokes came along later as the planes got bigger, and moving the control surfaces required more effort from the pilots, and the yokes made them easier to control. Sticks stayed in smaller planes as they took up less room and seemed to allow for faster reactions. When powered controls came along, the controls in newer generations of planes stayed the same, generally, as the older planes of the same types, as the pilots were used to those styles. And that continued on… Of course, that is making a lot of generalizations, and there’s a whole lot of “Well Actshullys” in there, but I think you get the concept. So consider the role your craft will have. Cargo hauler? Then you probably don’t need a stick/yoke at all. The vast majority of its movement will be computer controlled, with little input from a pilot. A small auxiliary stick should suffice. Is this a warship? Perhaps, but the notion of its range being measured in years says it’s not a small fighter/interceptor, but a capital ship or auxiliary, maybe even a high speed high capacity bomber. So this ship wouldn’t need a stick, and even a yoke on a capital ship wouldn’t make sense. Again most things would be computer controlled, and pilot inputs would most likely not be in the form of an analog stick, but a control panel. Again, a small auxiliary stick would suffice for slow speed finesse work. So for the specifications for this “magical” ship we have specified, it doesn’t make sense to me to have a control input system any different than what you’ve seen in Star Trek or The Expanse. As to the “magical” comment. You have described a ship that seems to be able to do anything, and do it well, without any drawbacks. I’m ok with the range and acceleration, some sort of fusion torch drive, gotcha. Atmospheric operations, meh, I’m more of the thought that a ship designed for mainly long term vacuum operations really shouldn’t be coming into atmo, but that’s a personal choice, so I’ll roll with it. But the maneuvers like an airplane is where I draw the line. You have a large ship that is capable of VTOL with a massive TWR and for the sake of discussion basically an infinite fuel source. That alone is a helicopter capable of interplanetary travel. Why do we need to add wings? Any function a wing would have in space is better done with something else. We have a ship capable of hovering with plenty of thrust left over. Let that be your basis for maneuverability. I’m fine with atmospheric operations, but let’s not add functionality that the ship already possesses. Look at the Serenity from Firefly. It does pretty much everything you’re describing , but it doesn’t have wings. You know what else Serenity has? A yoke for the pilot. Why does it have a yoke? Cause it looks dang cool. That’s my over riding point to this long winded post. If you want to grind out details, make sure they’re perfectly accurate. There’s nothing worse than fiction that tries to pass off partial truths as reality and does a bad job of it. If you want a feature just cause it’s cool, then add that feature and ignore the details completely. You’re much better off just handing the reader something and saying deal with it, than trying to explain it.

And if it’s accelerating at 3g for years, there shouldn’t be any flight controls, it should be automated. Along with atmospheric flight. Automated. It’s too big for any seat of the pants flying. If it does require manual control, it’ll be fly by wire, and a simple minimal joystick will suffice.

Well, it’s a few minutes past Pluto time ona cloudy day, and it’s surprisingly bright. I could read a book. Did not expect this.

That didn’t sit right with me, but I think the answer is actually “sort of”. As you said it varies, but there is an approximate analog here On earth: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/dwarf-planets/pluto/plutotime/ This tells you the next time your location under a clear sky will look like Pluto at noon.

Well…. I’ll throw Stargate Universe in there, it’s my personal favorite. But then you might need 12-15 seasons of SG1/SGA as background for SGU to make sense. And yes, I do think SG1 is better than Star Trek, so there’s some administration of sodium chloride involved here.

Oh my, you enjoyed caprica? Well then, you’re in for a very pleasant surprise. I couldn’t get through 3-4 episodes of it, as it couldn’t hold a candle to the BSG series it spun off from.

And that’s my point. It just felt right. I see your pic, I see the time stamp, I still dont believe you. Guess I’ll have to go look myself. Well dang. There it is. That blows my mind. Anyways, @JoeSchmuckatelli, the only novel/show that really made me feel similar was 2001.

What are you talking about? Nothing has been released yet, just dev videos. And every gamer knows what happens when you believe dev videos. To assume anybody out side of the studio knows what the game exactly looks like is ludicrous.