Raptor9

With the 1.5 update coming soon, I feel the KSP bug crawling on the back of my neck. At this time, I will say that the project I've been working on intermittently in recent weeks is a craft file revamp for the SPH side of the catalog. A lot of the SPH craft were showing their age, and were long overdue for a revision. The majority of the craft have already been rebuilt and re-tested (I'm holding off on updating graphics until I see the full suite of re-vamped parts in the 1.5 update). The main goal of the revamp was to make each craft more stable and fly better for players without joysticks; the secondary goal to make the craft look more "BadS". The existing list of aircraft will of course receive varying levels of redesign, with most of the craft being completely rebuilt from nose to tail. But with around a dozen brand new designs, the stable of atmospheric steeds will grow. The list of new aircraft includes a variety of airframes from a P-80 "Shooting Star" analogue to the F-14 "Tomcat" (non-swiveling wings unfortunately), from conventional aircraft like the de Havilland "Dash-8" to a heavy VTOL inspired by the CH-47 "Chinook". Unfortunately, this update also brings a re-ordering of the craft list in the X-planes, KSA Fleet, and C7 Aerospace models. An example for this would be the F-15 analogue is renamed from X-5 High-Speed Flight Test to X-12 High Performance Flight Test. A full list of naming conversions will be provided when I am close to finalizing and publishing the craft updates. _______________________________ On the VAB side of the house, I've been dabbing back into some work there too. A new Duna lander and some more probes. And this EV-7 'Skipjack' is proving to be an elusive craft to narrow down. I love the craft to death, but I just can't seem to get satisfied with it to the point of publishing. But I am at least thankful to be drawn back into KSP like I have been in recent weeks.

I've come to expect some jaw-dropping moments from @Cupcake...'s videos, but at 0:26 I said out load "Oh. My. God." followed by laughter at 2:30. Then at 3:00 minutes I was thinking "Nooo....he's not gonna land his aircraft carrier on another aircraft carrier....?" Love the bloopers at the end. At 7:00 I was like "Come back left, no come back right, no no no NONONO!!!"

He was referring to the LV-1 'Frog' landers, which have no such hinges. These are built with tight propellant margins to be sure, but so were the real-life Apollo landers. Not sure what descent profile you have used, but try this one: 1) Start from a parking orbit of 15km that passes directly over the target landing site 2) On the opposite side of the Mun from the landing site, perform a small retro burn to lower your periapsis to around 6,000 meters over the landing site (keep in mind in particularly high terrain in your way) 3) Create a maneuver node over the landing site which cancels out almost all of your horizontal velocity 4) Start the burn when the burn duration straddles the node countdown timer (ie: 30 second burn is started 15 seconds to the node; or a 1 minute burn is started 30 seconds to the node; etc) 5) By the time you have cancelled out most of your horizontal velocity, you will have just enough time to rotate vertical and start arresting your vertical velocity and perform the final approach to your landing site. This landing technique reduces the amount of gravity losses you incur by minimizing the amount of time you are using your engine to fight the downward pull of gravity. This also gives you an easier "abort-to-orbit" capability if you decide to abort the descent during your initial retroburn over the landing site. For an example of this type of approach, go to 12:50 in my CisMunar Propellant Economy tutorial video. An example of how the real-life Apollo landers had tight propellant margins is the fact that during later Apollo landings the CSM performed the retro-thrust to drop the periapsis over the landing site prior to undocking the LEM. After undocking the CSM returned to it's normal orbital altitudes. This technique was developed to save propellant on the LEM so it could land with more onboard payload mass, which included the lunar rover as well as more consumables for longer surface stays.

If you are referring to filters on KerbalX, I've grouped them into hangers for downloading similar craft types, or craft by mission architecture, like early Mun missions, etc. If you are referring to filters in the VAB/SPH itself in-game, there are none. You will either need to know what craft you are looking for, or keep a list somewhere for reference. But for the most part, my craft list has followed a consistent naming convention to help me keep my own list straight. There are several mods out there however that do allow you to sort through craft file lists. KSP Craft Organizer is one such mod. There are some designs with minimal propellant margins, but others with quite a large excess. It depends on your skill level, play style, and if you are using the craft as intended. I'll point out that I have been playing KSP for a very long time, so if you are relatively new to the game, you may find my performance margins unsatisfactory. What craft are you having trouble with specifically? By SAS I assume you mean Reaction Wheel torque. That being the case, let me clarify some things. 1) Reaction wheels in KSP do not behave anywhere close to how real reaction wheels and control moment gyros (CMG) work. Essentially, KSP reaction wheels are "free" attitude control with ridiculous torque values that rely solely on electric charge, and do not build up any heat or ever become "saturated". In real life, reaction wheels only provide small amounts of attitude control, and do so relatively slowly. The amount of torque that KSP reaction wheels provide is very overpowered and not true to real life physics. (Yes I know this is a game with fictional little green men in a fake star system, but still) 2) Real rockets and most large spacecraft do NOT use reaction wheels; only satellites, probes, and space stations use reaction wheels and CMG's. And even then, due to the limitations that I explained above, reaction wheels are only used to supplement propellant-based RCS systems, such as hydrazine or ion thrusters. This helps conserve RCS fuel, or provide extremely fine attitude control. (You may notice that most of my satellites, probes and space stations do in fact use reaction wheel torque for attitude control) 3) Planning enough RCS propellant for the duration of any mission is a challenge I enjoy, as well as the proper placement of RCS thrusters to ensure accurate, balanced and continuous attitude control throughout the flight. I've never run out of RCS fuel on any of my missions. In fact quite a lot I end up with excess at the end of a mission. Two things that lead to over-use of RCS fuel is improper RCS design (which could include improper mounting location or angle of RCS thrusters, improper thruster axis assignments, or unbalanced/excess thruster limiter settings) or aggressively/over-controlling the spacecraft. Spacecraft are not fighter jets. Movements should be done methodically and deliberately. Remember, for every unit of monoprop you use to rotate/translate your spacecraft, an equal number of monoprop units are needed to arrest that movement. Yes.

Per the graphics, press Action Group [6]. It deploys the rover.

Uh....thanks I guess?

@Jester Darrak, bug hit me again...sort of. After 2.5 months of not touching KSP, I'm (temporarily) back to the drawing boards. A couple days ago I started a new project. I know I have a lot of open and existing projects that are still languishing on my hard drive, not to mention I never finished updating all of my legacy craft files for 1.4.x. However, I'll take inspiration wherever I can get it. I use the term "sort of" because when this project is finished and released, I'll probably take another break from KSP until 1.5 is released.

The theory behind it was to do the opposite of the stereotypical space shuttle configuration. Instead of having the high-gimbal Vector engines on the spaceplane, I put a single Vector on the booster rocket, with fixed-nozzle aerospike engines on the SVR-23 which rode piggyback on the booster. However, this configuration never really achieved a satisfactory level of controllability during ascent to orbit. I never was particularly adept at SSTO spaceplanes, so the SVR-23's were my attempt to get around that by just launching them vertically in a partially-reusable configuration. In the end, the SVR-23 was probably better described as a proof-of-concept prototype than a spacecraft with practical use. Not my best work by any metric.

@SiriusRocketry, I'm afraid not. I learned to hate the SVR-23's so much I just deleted them from my KSP folder, and when I did my 1.4 update with all the new brochure graphics, I deleted all the outdated ones. Not that they take a lot of hard drive space, but with so many it was becoming a headache to keep them organized.

I wouldn't call that an accurate explanation. The main reason they move at a snails pace is because of the transmission delay. If you move at 0.5 m/s (1.1 mph/2.4 kmh), with anywhere from 4 to over 20 minutes of communications delay between Earth and Mars, your rover will have traveled 120 to 600 meters by the time you get the video feed of an approaching obstacle. Not to mention that a steering input takes just as long to be sent back to Mars, meaning the rover will have traveled a total of 240 meters to 1.2 km by the time the steering command actually takes effect to avoid that obstacle. The resources and money invested into the mission is also an important factor to take it slow, but even if you had an unlimited budget and time, the comms delay would still restrict your operational pace. With Curiosity on Mars, JPL plans the day's movements by analyzing the rovers immediate surroundings using it's many cameras, planning the sequence of actions, sends the commands to the rover, and then monitors via the much-delayed telemetry feed. Of course, this leads to some levels of required autonomy on the rovers part. If you want something similar, check out the Bon Voyage mod that lets you give rovers a destination; and they drive there on their own (even in the background, like how you leave ISRU operations running and come back to it a few Kerbin days later). If you're looking for a stock solution for your real-time, hands-on driving mission, then it comes down to a mix of engineering problems to solve, and deliberate/reasonable driving. 1) As others have said, try to design a rover with a low center of gravity and a wide wheel base. A wide wheel base is important in the longitudinal axis as well as the lateral. It does you no good if your rover does forward flips if you need to slam on the brakes suddenly. As @Gargamel mentioned, if you need a higher clearance for the anticipated terrain, you will need to take that into account with how wide your "footprint" needs to be. Keep your heaviest parts as low as you can, like RTG's or LFO tanks if you plan to run fuel cells. 2) Adjust the suspension and friction settings in the wheels' part action window for your target celestial body, and then test, tweak, re-test. If you want to test a Mun rover, bring up the Alt-F12 menu and hack gravity to 0.16, and then drive the rover around the KSC. For Duna, put it at 0.30; for Eve use 1.7, etc. 3) I personally turn down the wheel friction fairly low so that the rover tends to slide a lot. It can be fun for sure to do power slides on the Mun, but more importantly it keeps it from flipping over if you over-steer. This can also lead to the rover sliding across the surface when parked, so I just max out the friction setting of one or two of the wheels when I stop, like setting the parking brake. A good rover can be just as difficult to design IMO as a well-balanced aircraft. You're trying to design something that has to take into account multiple physics effects, while maintaining a reasonable mass and keeping it small enough to be packaged and transported somewhere "out there". Lastly, while I agree on the blandness of the terrain, especially Duna, rovers definitely can play an important part in certain hard-to-reach locales like Eve or Tylo. The more biomes you can reach per surface expedition, the easier it is. I know a lot of people try to bypass the thick sea-level Eve atmosphere by taking a rover down to research sites at lower elevations, and then driving it to the peak of a high mountain to launch back to orbit.

@Jester Darrak, unfortunately not. I've tinkered with a few projects here and there over the past month or two, but that's about it. It has, however, given me time to gather some more ideas, so that's good.

@Just Jim, I'll hop on the dog-pile and say Congratulations. "You were supposed to bring balance to the force, not join the dark side!" (For all those Star Wars fans out there, I paraphrased on purpose. Don't set me on fire)

I'm going to abstain, because my building style is different and I don't want to influence yours. I would say for lack of outside opinions, choose which ever makes you feel more inspired or brings more fun. Those are the factors that are important to me in KSP: inspiration and fun.

That final shot was amazing, and I'm not even talking about the reverse takeoff. The rocket launch and the Immelman pull-off, awesome!

@Jestersage, I generally keep the small docking clamps as grappling ports as a way of attaching smaller pieces of equipment to a spacecraft, as resource transfer "plug-ins", or used in groups to attach trusses for space stations (or my EV-5 truss). The regular 1.25m clamps are my standard crew passage and transfer docking ports, and the large 2.5m clamps are for attaching large orbital assembly modules/spacecraft together.

I just thought it looked better with the 1x6 versus the 3x2. If you look around on the internet, you will find some MOL concept proposals that did include solar arrays.

Still looks like a fun exercise to use those R-7 style booster tanks as main fuselages. Interesting idea for sure.

@Jester Darrak, I was in the process of designing dedicated interplanetary comms satellites, starting with Duna and Eve, when I went on my KSP hiatus.

After you separate from the 'Thunder 2' upper stage, stage the engines on the cruise module, then cycle action group 3 by double tapping it.. It not only toggles the LV-1R engines, but also ensures the proper "Control From Here" axis is aligned with the thrust vector. Also, since the SAS system is rather retarded, when I'm flying with a craft that has sufficient gimbaling on the engines, as soon as I start my burn I turn RCS off and let the gimbals keep the craft aligned. Keeping RCS enabled when drifting, coasting, or burning with gimbals just wastes RCS needlessly in KSP IMO. Couldn't comment on MJ since I'm unfamiliar with it's function or use.

I forget which parts I connected them with when placing them, because I really wasn't too concerned since I was about to move them anyway to their final positions. However, it sounds like you are hitting the initial limit of the offset tool. If you hold down the Shift key while using the offset tool, it doubles or triples the distance you can move the parts using offsetting. I'm running 1.4.4, but the current version of the Gilly Logistics Kit (with those fixed struts) was built in 1.4.3.

I've been trying to develop* a variant of the SR-21 for Laythe for some time now. Specifically, with features such as VTOL or very short takeoff/landing rolls. For a spaceplane-style SSTO, the ideal way of getting it to the Jool SOI would be launching it to low Kerbin orbit, topping it off on propellant, and then sending it on it's way on rocket fuel only. After arriving in the Joolian system, the plane would again be topped off with propellant, to include the liquid fuel-only tanks; and it would start performing it's mission and refueled between sorties either on the surface or in Laythe orbit (depending on each player's ISRU strategy). However, SSTO's/spaceplanes are not my strong suite at all; @Rune probably has several models of such craft that would be beneficial to you. *pre v0.90 I had a working VTOL SR-21 variant, as well as an even larger cargo VTOL spaceplane, but that was before they nerfed the "Wheesley", re-sized it, and when it was still able to operate at zero airspeed without putting 30 air intakes on it. Both vertical- and spaceplane-style SSTO's have pro's and con's, but I would like to get to a vertical-style SSTO for no other reason than to simplify the capability to land anywhere on Laythe, to include floating sea platforms. I actually just typed a three paragraph rant about the various design considerations of both, but I deleted it to answer your question concisely: yes, I have plans.

I really like the graphic template, with the parchment-like background and the handwritten font. It reminds me of sketched engineering designs that Leonardo da Vinci drew up. EDIT: Question, is "JS航天" essentially JesterSage Aerospace in Chinese?

No doubt. Of course, I still like to conceptualize and discuss KSP and aerospace-related stuff.

The only responsibility I feel is making sure I release a craft that is thoroughly tested with sufficiently detailed graphics to describe it. But the craft themselves have always been built for my personal use in my career, which is where my frustration has been coming from.

In order to manage expectations, I'm taking a break from KSP. Besides real-life work being very busy the past few weeks, I've gotten kinda burned out on KSP. After going non-stop with revisions and updates since 1.4 was released, I gotta take a break. Right now my biggest frustration is this bug with the new structural tubes. Everything was fine in 1.4.1 when I started using them, and since 1.4.2 the structural tubes produce abnormal amounts of drag (even when empty), severely handicapping my 'Thunder' rocket family, which is my primary lifter series. I haven't seen this bug mentioned as being worked on yet (which I know doesn't mean it's not being worked on), and the tracker has had it listed as "Investigating" for 3 months. I don't want to be just another player complaining about bugs, but even I have to admit the last few versions have been a little shaky on the stability. When I'm not feeling inspired, I make crappy craft. So I'm going to step back from KSP until I get my creativity back.