Enigma179

Leaderboard updated, and I'm a bit iffy adammada, but I *guess* that's alright?

Worked just fine for me

So inspired by Thrfoot's automated mission challenge, which I also discovered kOS through, I came up with this little challenge. Simple enough, get a vessel of your design into a stable orbit around Kerbin, without using any input beyond typing out the execution command line at the beginning, and do it in the most (delta-v) efficient manner possible. It's not *quite* mechjeb, but it's a foundation! RULES: 1. No mods that directly affect gameplay aside from kOS itself. Alternatively, say which gameplay-affecting mods you used, and that'll be fine too. 1a. You're gonna want to have kOS, obviously (get it here), and another pretty-much-required mod for this is Kerbal Engineer, as you need to know your (vacuum) delta-v before you launch, and after you're in orbit. 2. No user input! The only thing you can do is at the beginning of the launch, when you open up the command line, copy the program to the ship, and run it. 3. Your final orbit must have an apoapsis and a periapsis around Kerbin, and both must be outside Kerbin's atmosphere (that is, 69,078 metres above sea level). 4. You must have screenshots that show your delta-v from inside the hangar (Engineer shows your in-atmosphere delta-v when in flight mode), and your delta-v after achieving orbit, as well as proof that at least your periapsis is outside the atmosphere. Aside from that I can't think of any other restrictions. Your ship can be as large as you like, as complex or simple as you like, and can operate whichever way you like. I'd be impressed to see a robotic spaceplane, myself. Your score is the difference between your hangar delta-v and your orbital delta-v at the end, so obviously the lower the better. Also while this isn't required, it'd be super nice for you to post your code alongside your screenshots, help other people figure out the basics of the language. Maybe I can learn a thing or two as well. And it wouldn't be a challenge if I didn't get in on it myself first, now would it? Starting delta-v: 4,855 m/s (I play it safe alright) Final delta-v: 282 m/s So I have a score of 4,573 m/s. And of course, here's my code. No comments because who needs good style right? lock STEERING to UP. lock THROTTLE to 1. declare TermVel. declare Speed. until APOAPSIS > 75000 { wait 0.01. if ALTITUDE < 10000 { set TermVel to 10 * ((1250 * 6.647 * (10^(-11)) * (5.292 * 10^(22))) / ( (1.2231 * 2.718^(-1 * ALTITUDE / 5000) * 101.33) * (600000 + ALTITUDE)^(2)))^0.5. if VERTICALSPEED > TermVel and THROTTLE > 0.8 { lock THROTTLE to THROTTLE - 0.01. }. if VERTICALSPEED < TermVel * 0.99 and THROTTLE != 1 { lock THROTTLE to THROTTLE + 0.01. }. }. if STAGE:LiquidFuel = 0 { stage. }. if ALTITUDE > 10000 and ALTITUDE < 15000 { lock THROTTLE to 1. lock STEERING to HEADING 90 by 60. }. if ALTITUDE > 15000 and ALTITUDE < 20000 { lock THROTTLE to 1. lock STEERING to HEADING 90 by 30. }. if ALTITUDE > 20000 { lock THROTTLE to 1. lock STEERING to HEADING 90 by 15. }. }. lock THROTTLE to 0. print "Apoapsis of 75km achieved". lock STEERING to HEADING 90 by 0. wait until ETA:APOAPSIS < 4. wait 0.01. lock THROTTLE to 1. until PERIAPSIS > 70000 { if STAGE:LiquidFuel = 0 { stage. } }. lock THROTTLE to 0. print "Launch Complete...". LEADERBOARD (1). adammada, -434 m/s (Maybe? Some staging shenanigans) 1. Bobnova, 4413 m/s 2. Enigma179: 4,573 m/s

You can change the conics so you can predict past the Ike encounter. Alternatively wait a couple of orbits then burn, so Ike is behind you as you leave. Alternatively do the math and figure out how to save a bit of fuel with a gravity assist through Ike.

I use kerbal attachment system and a small ship; pull out the electromagnets, winch the debris up, then fire into an orbit that will crash the debris, before releasing it and readjusting to the proper speed. If the debris is big it's super hard to control but for the most part it works just fine.

Aren't those canards? Doesn't that mean you just broke your own rules? EDIT: actually maybe they're tailfins never mind

Batteries are essentially extra electric charge storage, so that you can last longer in situations when you don't have power (or don't have sufficient power) being supplied. For example, when you've got solar panels your command pod is being charged up but once the body you're orbiting (or even the one you're not, as a kerbin eclipse once taught my mun orbiter) obscures the sun, you're running off whatever you've got stored until it's in view. For short-term craft (such as extensions to a space station which already has solar panels or generators) I can just strap on a battery instead of a few solar panels or generators, but for anything long term you can't just live with the batteries; they extend your life, they don't make it infinite like a generator or panel will.

Alright, maybe I haven't heard about the newest advances. If NASA found a clone of earth exactly fifty light years away with a perfect trajectory for us to fly to it, and they had to pack up a probe and launch it by the end of 2013, what's the most advanced technology (regardless of cost) that one: we know for sure will work, two: has a realistic fuel/energy requirement, and three: actually exists as a full sized working example or prototype? I'm not even being a jerk or anything I genuinely would like to know what you have in mind.

The fastest (I believe) spacecraft we've actually launched are the Helios probes, reaching a speed of 70.22 km/s because of the sun's gravitational pull. That's 0.000234c. That's pretty impressive. The calculation isn't difficult though; if there's a planet within 50 light years that can support life, IF we were to somehow get a craft to escape our solar system with that velocity (Voyager 1, fastest spacecraft to leave the solar system, is moving at around 17 km/s relative to the sun at the moment), it would still take about 213,675.2 years for the probe to show up, not to mention the other 50 years it takes for any signals to get back (okay that's a minor thing on the grand scale though). The Homo genus, the one which includes us, Homo Sapiens (but back in the past they would have looked pretty different, obviously) is 2.5 million years old. Modern humans are 500 thousand years old. The subspecies (that is, humans that look pretty much exactly like us without the differing structures and all), Homo Sapiens Sapiens is 200 thousand years old. Now I understand that there's some efficient high speed engine technology on the drawing board, in particular that warp drive that bends space time in a way I don't fully understand to travel faster than light, but until that stuff gets loaded up into a rocket and fired, I'd say we aren't going to send a probe out 50 light years away. 213,675 years is a long time for something unplanned (or even literally impossible to anticipate) to go wrong.

Bermuda triangle is a terrorist plot it's all to do with 9/11 and the earth is flat and time is a cube timecube time is four dimensional and the aliens are here to rescue us. Seriously though anything in favour of the bermuda triangle actually having a real influence is purely anecdotal evidence.

Honestly that's the only way that makes sense. I love KSP, but I'm likely to love it less if I'd have to sit through 30 minutes of empty space on full time warp to hit up new systems (or 30 minutes of grabbing a coffee and doing other less fun things). What would make the most sense to me is either an abstract way of doing it, where there's a hub, and once you escape the system you pick where you want to go (breaking realism a little bit there), or alternatively have the system be one of many other systems in a galaxy, where you still have to plan your trajectories to get to other galaxies! Once you reach the escape of a system it would zoom out, and you'd have all the normal options of timewarp plus a few extra high speeds; small burns would be enough to alter your trajectory hugely out in open space I'm guessing, so guestimating and then burning on the way out would probably work reasonably well. And then when the game gets bigger those galaxies could be part of the UNIVERSE where all the galaxies are rotating around and you can travel from system to galaxy to other galaxy and then you can go to the center of the universe if you want and fight the kraken and and and yeah.

Named my station the Artemis Space Station. Didn't realize the problem with that until three days later. There's a ship docked there at the moment, but this image is a bit out-dated; added an orange tank for re-fueling along with some other stuff recently.

Yeah, as stated in a different thread, the issue isn't computer load. Your computer could handle it just fine. The issue is that if it weren't on rails, gameplay would be significantly less fun; if you sent a probe out to Jool, you'd have to timewarp a year forward, only to find that over the thousand or so orbits that occurred with your LKO station in orbit, the Mun and Minmus managed to jerk it quite a ways around, possibly even de-orbiting it. This means you'd have to constantly be stationkeeping, instead of just hitting time warp and getting a coffee.

It'd be cool if there was a mod or something so that multiple people could watch the same game, or even better if one person could operate the map (maneuver nodes and such) while the other pilots. I can imagine one person in cockpit view while the rest look at the map and give him prograde/retrograde/maneuver directions to be quite entertaining. This sounds really cool though! I think I might just watch it.

Basically you're gonna want kerbal engineering or something to figure out delta-v numbers, and then you're gonna want to look at a delta-v map (search delta-v map KSP on images and it'll be the first one). Alarm clock is also useful so you can figure out exact transfer times. I believe the best bet for a Duna land and return is an apollo style thing, with LKO rendezvous; build a lander/ship combo in the VAB, then send up the lander on its own, and the ship on its own, use the ship to fly the lander to Duna orbit, use the lander to land (use chutes to cut down on delta-v requirement for landing) and return, ditch the lander and come home. With nukes, Duna is a pretty easy trip to make, especially if you just build the ship in orbit.

I downloaded KAS and started my Planetes rubbish disposal project! (thumbs up if you get the reference) Two winches with electromagnets, and a crew of 2 in my MK1-2 pod (I have ioncross crew support installed so gotta keep as much time on the oxygen as I can), one grabs the magnets and puts them next to the debris, the other hits the magnetize button, do it again with the other, pull 'em into an orbit with a low periapsis, drop the magnet, pull the ship back out! I've only lost two of my four solar panels to wildly swinging retracting cables, moral of the story is 1. retract solar panels first and 2. get the ones with heavier casing. EDIT: Also my joolian probe exploded because of my tricouplers in LKO so I think my cleanup crew has a long few days ahead of them...

When you press shift and one of the WASD keys or E and Q to rotate the ship, it will rotate by 5 degrees instead of 90. So shift+D nine times and you'll be at 45 degrees.

So I've been launching rockets around for quite a while, and now I have debris in various orbits around Kerbin. Thankfully for the most part it's all in eastward low inclination orbits, although some are pretty eccentric. I think terminating flights or setting max debris to 0 would be kinda lame, so instead I've decided I'm going to clean it all up! I need suggestions on how, though. Mods currently installed are flight engineer, alarm clock, FAR, deadly re-entry, procedural fairings and ioncross crew support. Any methods that can be done with just those mods+stock parts? Preferably something that doesn't require me to re-launch a rocket for every bit of debris. Failing that, any mods recommended to get the job done, either using my method (below) or some other one? My current plan is to build some kind of bucket out of platforms on top of decent fuel supplies and nuke engines, rendezvous and scoop up the debris, push it into an orbit that breaks the atmosphere (maybe not all the way down to debris-destruction height, but low enough that it can burn up on re-entry if I focus on it), then pull the platform out of the fall and rendezvous with the next bit of debris, perhaps refuelling at my space station every once in a while.

Launch a lifter, either something that can dock with the end with fuel and draw that fuel to control it, or which has it's own fuel (or if you like just launch a fuel tank and dock that with the engine-half). Burn prograde till your apoapsis is higher, see intercepts when other half of station is set as target. Play ring around the rosie a few times with timewarp until you get an intercept within 40 or 50 klicks or so, then burn either prograde or retrograde to get that intercept to within 5-10 klicks (use maneuver nodes if you can't figure out which burn to do from sight). Wait till you get within 5-10 klicks, then kill velocity relative to the target before burning towards it. The rest, I assume you know if you're trying to build a space station.

So I've been using Ferram Aerospace Research for a little while and designing a plane, but I'd just like to know, and not just for space plane, how do you know if your design works? For example, my plane will stall if I pitch too far up without reactivating ASAS, because it will generate too much lift and end up flipping end over end into a stall, but I can't tell if that's because the plane is poorly designed, or because I made a piloting mistake. After all, oversteering any rocket or plane will result in bad stuff happening no matter how well designed it is. Essentially I'm asking how do you tell whether the plane is good or not, whether you need to improve the design or the piloting, and if so how to improve the design? Example craft files would be nice, and here is my shockingly unoriginally named jet I talked about. It's all stock, for use with FAR.

Could always hold F while hitting V; holding F switches SAS to the opposite state while it's held down, so is faster than the double tap. If your SAS is off for a second just before you swap cockpits you won't lose your heading too badly

WAIT WHAT THAT WAS A THING? I've still been doing it the old way by swapping RCS on and off to dock for the whole time since the update and this is a thing now?! Maan...

That is a mis-spelling of Ferram Aerospace Research, a popular mod that makes the aerodynamics in KSP far more realistic than they currently are. Drag drops off as you get past Mach 1, the nosecones improve aerodynamics instead of looking pretty, orientation affects lift and drag of even individual parts... it's pretty nifty stuff and it makes re-entering (at least for me) a huge pain, but it's good fun ESPECIALLY if you want to fly planes. http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/ferram-aerospace-research/

That's weird because I've been using the mk 1-2 pod with DRE, and it's actually pretty flexible for me, anything from 25k to 30k safely lands. Now when I add in ferram aerospace it's another story, because even if I'm not steep enough to explode the aerodynamics make me move a lot faster when I approach the ground so my chutes commonly pop off. Think I've figured it out by now though. 30k is generally what you'll want to aim for I find; my burns are a bit longer than I think they need to be, because I find that by the time the shield is gone the temperature is already on its way down; stuff burns up at 1700 degrees (less for parachutes and the like) and after my shield runs out I get up to 1400 max. Also without ferram aerospace I never even burnt through the first shield on the Mk1 pod at 30k, so I don't really understand how your game could be doing that to you...

Essentially if you're planning on going interplanetary you're going to want it. The important stat on it is the ISP; the higher that value is for a rocket, the more total thrust it can produce with the same amount of fuel. Those giant mainsails can produce a lot of thrust, but to go the same distance as a nuclear engine they'd require a lot more fuel, it's just that the NERVA takes longer. But one of the shortest planetary transfers, to Duna takes 30 or so days so you have plenty of time and the efficiency is well worth it