arq

If this happens, remove the wheels and put them back with angle-locking disabled. This fixes most of the weird effects that happen when attaching wheels to wings or other awkward surfaces.

Building an SSTO to get to orbit is one thing. Getting one that can go all the way to Jool is much tougher. However, it can be done. Your ship will need to be reasonably big, because it needs to lift at least one LV-N into orbit along with it, and a lot of fuel. Small ships have a hard time doing this, because the LV-N is so darned heavy. I recommend you try the Procedural Wings mod. They are stock-balanced and make it much easier to make large aircraft. I wanted to try to build an SSTO around a mainsail transfer stage, because of the mainsail's very high TWR. Really I might have done better with a handful of LV-T30s (or maybe not?), but that didn't sound like as much fun. This is the Atlas 2 SSTO: It masses 144t at launch and can reach LKO with over 44t of rocket fuel remaining, even without babying the throttle back on the jets. This leaves it with over 5100m/s of dV. It still has around 1/4 of its jetfuel left for landing shenanigans. The intake ratio is 31/10 intakes/turbojets and it uses a mainsail and two LV-N's to reach orbit. When I get a window I'm going to try to send one to see if it can do a Laythe landing and return. Though it also makes a decent tanker, 44t is a decent bit of fuel.

LV-N ISP is fine on Kerbin anywhere except the bottom few km. The low TWR is more the issue. Still, if I'm in an asparagus vessel I'll try to get the LV-N's firing fairly early for a slight boost to thrust and ISP (though it's pretty insignificant next to a few mainsails).

I missed this thread.

<dV> = <ISP>*log(<WetMass>/<DryMass>) The wet/dry ratio is always less than 9 (because of the parameters of fuel tanks). For example, if we have a wet/dry mass of 8 (which is quite high) with a LV-909 (or any other 390-ISP engine), we would be able to achieve the same results with a 2.76=exp(390/800*log(8)) wet/dry mass ratio with an LV-N. However, note that the LV-N is heavier, which increases dry mass and thus hurts the ratio. Another interesting statistic is asymptotic single-stage delta-V, which just assumes a wet/dry ratio of 9 (so we have one engine and a near-infinite fuel stock. In this case, range is directly proportional to ISP, so for very heavy loads the LV-N can achieve double the dV of any other (rocket) engine.

I was messing around with this exact thing earlier. With 5 intakes and 1 turbojet, I could fly a plane up to 47km and over 2100m/s. Bear in mind that aircraft in these situations are absurdly unmaneuverable. Still, with less than 400 fuel (and some very sloppy flying) I circumnavigated Kerbin twice in 78 minutes, and could have been a touch faster yet. I did a few things I did to help this along. I mounted vertical stabilizers well-behind the CoM. to keep it stable. I angled up both the wings and horizontal stabilizer 30deg, so that they would provide maximum lift when I was flying straight-and-level (air intakes lose air as they spin away from forward). However, this made it fly very awkwardly in thick air (it would point about 20deg below the horizon, which meant landing needed to be very slow), so that was a little bit of a challenge. The trick is to keep backing off the throttle as then engine flames out (this is why it is good to have just a single engine, or at least have an odd number and make sure that the center one will be the one to flame out). When I was up above 45km, I was at maybe 4% thrust. Note, however, that you aren't missing much above 25km. 'Planes' up there act more like rockets (and certainly can't maneuver) because of the high speed necessary to keep air going through the engine. Less is often more, in this case. My ship was under 4t after I had burned out all the fuel. The main thing that determines max altitude is your intake/mass ratio. In air-starved environments, air is thrust and (as always) mass is drag. If it still won't go high enough, try bigger wings. At 45km, my engine was delivering maybe 6kN of thrust. More engines would just add drag, which would slow it down.

Findings for planes: -Too many intakes in the front will cause your craft to spin uncontrollably in some cases, or make them try to fly backwards, due to CoD issues. -Taildraggers are much less prone to tail-strikes on takeoff. -Although all the stock parts seem to prefer 'canard'-style planes (main wing in the back), conventional planes tend to be more stable (they are less prone to spins and more likely to point prograde). Also, vertical stabilizers mounted far aft can greatly help with this. -Arranging your fuel tanks so that they drain back-to-front will help to keep your craft stable at all fuel levels because... - CoL in front of CoM is almost always death. It shouldn't be as bad as it is, but I find that the game really handles this case poorly and that my planes tend to backflip and explode right off the runway.

As others suggested, if you drop timewarp near SOI boundaries this will help immensely.

Even at 100000x warp, it still takes a decent while for a Kerbin->Eeloo transfer. But higher warps cause further complications with SOI transfers and other aspects, so spacing planets on a Solar scale would be either tricky (make higher warps) or slow. The other side is the size of celestial bodies. As others have said, getting to orbit would be much more tedious with a larger Kerbin. A convenient side-effect is the dramatically smaller surface area that must be generated and maintained. Also, LKO is a just over 30mins per orbit. LEO is a bit longer. So generally, KSP would involve a lot more waiting if everything were scaled to Solar sizes.

The LV-N has very high ISP. However, it is also very heavy. Thanks to our dear friend the rocket equation, an engine is only 'efficient' if its mass is 'small' compared to the mass of the ship. If you use a single OSCAR-B tank, you will get the best mileage out of an Ant engine. If you use a Rockomax x32 tank (or really anything bigger than a T400, IIRC), no engine will get you further than a LV-N. The issue is that the LV-N has such low TWR that it can't move enough fuel up to orbit (by itself) to make it efficient, hence its application as an interplanetary (or smaller-than-Kerbin body) engine. It works beautifully for Duna or especially Moho missions, for example, where you need a goodly bit of fuel even after you hit LKO.

Even from the highest mountains, the usual number people throw around is 7km/s to get into Eve orbit.

I put flags at either end of the runway with labels Runway 09/Runway 27. However, since 0.21 they will sometimes explode when I fly close to them (maybe 100m).

You could extend the drawdistance out a bit more. I know Lazor mod can do this out to 99km and for Gilly you'd really only need about 30km. The station would be roughly 85km in circumference, so would involve assembling hundreds of pieces in orbit, but could possibly be done. People discuss this all the time, but so far it seems no one has ever really tried.

I am also a proponent of integer/fixed point where possible. Int64s would allow the entire Kerbol system to be represented to sub-micron accuracy. However, performing math on ints can be tricky, at best, and would be a terrible hassle for KSP. The problem is this: suppose that we want to calculate the gravitational force on an object, which scales with r^2. Let us suppose that our number requires almost all of our 64 bits to represent. The issue is that squaring that number requires 127 bits to maintain full precision. This means that we would need to drop precision, so essentially we would only have had 32 bits worth of usable precision in the first place. 32 bits is *not* enough to represent the Kerbol system with decent accuracy (if it were scaled to fit eeloo, it would be at 100m resolution). Now, since this only applies to secondary calculations it may be possible to work with this, but it would be messy at least. Also, what about stuff on Kerbol escape? Eventually it will hit the limit of ints and would require special treatment at that point. Though this may not happen until 1000 times further than eeloo's orbit, with doubles it wouldn't happen until roughly 10^300 times eeloo's orbit. A determined user could reach the first limit with infinite fuel and a lot of timewarp, but the only way to overflow the double here within several years would involve cfg edits. Of course, there would be 'farlands' effects much sooner, but it still allows much more flexibility than ints. Also, integer computation is not noticeably faster than floating point (single/double) arithmetic. Floats are used so often in PC's nowadays that special hardware is used to crank these calculations, such that they are roughly on par with integer operations (and hence why nobody talks about 'flops' for anything except supercomputers and GPUs any more). I like fixed-point, but there are a lot of issues here that could cause problems. That is why most developers shy away from such approaches (plus, it requires much more care on the part of the programmer when writing mathematical expressions).

A mainsail under 5-6 x32 tanks should SSTO all by itself. Smaller designs are also possible, but the mainsail is good because it has the highest TWR (meaning it can carry more fuel than any other engine, though the lower ISP will probably hurt you more than this helps). The main place where SSTO's are inferior is in payload fraction - so getting something heavy up will be challenging. Still, bundling enough of these mainsail stacks you should be able SSTO whatever you want without excessive suffering.

Only way is to back off a few meters and go back. I don't know the exact minimum distance required to reset.

I agree that a more gender-neutral approach to this game would be appropriate. However, I would not call Squad 'incompetent' or 'sexist' or many of the other words that have been thrown around in this thread. It is simply an oversight and I'm sure that they will address it sooner or later. As mentioned above, Kerbals have changed negligibly since 0.7 and back then the userbase was so small and the content so slim that it really wasn't worth spending time on. I hate to use the 'in alpha' card, but I feel that some of the comments here slightly more hostile towards Squad than is warranted given the 'alpha' state of the game. At this point, anything and everything could be a placeholder, especially models and textures. They are mostly concerned with adding gameplay content and mechanics (like science). If the game hits 'release' without attention to this matter I will be disappointed in Squad. Until then, I'm very excited to see career mode, science, and many of the other features that this small team has been working very hard on. In the meantime, I believe that some new additions to the name generator would make a reasonable first step.

Even with multiple passes, once you hit Kerbin escape that is your last chance to use Oberth. For places like Duna or Eve, which lie just a sneeze past escape, that's fine. However, for the 2000m/s to the outer planets, only half of that can be performed using periapsis kicks. You will lose efficiency on the second half if your TWR is low because of lost Oberth effect.

Just since it hasn't been mentioned yet, a stock launch requires right about 4500m/s for most profiles. I haven't done much with FAR, except for a few basic planes, but using the above 3300dV figure we can make some bounding statements about efficiency. Let's say LKO is 80km. A circular orbit at this altitude is right about 2279m/s. For simplicity, let us assume a uniform gravitational field at 8.5m/s^2 (really it goes from 9.81m/s^2 at 0km to 7.6m/s^2 at 80km). So let's say that 2279m/s of our dV goes to our orbital velocity and the rest is getting there. Suppose we did two impulsive forces in a vacuum. We would need 1166m/s to blast up to 80km and then 2279m/s to circularize, minus the 175m/s we get from Kerbin's rotation. Thus the orbital insertion can be done for 3270m/s in this two-step process, which is the least efficient 'nontrivial' (where you actively work against yourself) profile. Of course, we know that the most efficient strategy in this vacuum scenario is a Hohmann transfer. A 0x80km orbit at Kerbin requires 2500m/s at the periapsis and 2206m/s at apoapsis. To circularize would then require an additional 73m/s at apoapsis. So we need 2500+73-175=2398m/s in a vacuum with infinite TWR and no atmosphere. Unfortunately, the atmosphere greatly complicates both of these matters by inducing drag losses (and thereby incurring additional gravity losses too), meaning that even the Hohmann is not an ideal profile. We could not get away with these impulsive transfers in the presence of an atmosphere because the drag losses would be incredible. But we do know that the gravity, drag, and path inefficiency losses together do not add up to more than 2100m/s in stock and 900m/s in FAR, so we can certainly bound any of those three sources to be below 47% in stock and 20% in FAR (for an 'efficient' rocket). Now, the curious mind might just ask: how fast one would need to be going horizontally near sea level to coast out to 80km through the atmosphere? It must be hundreds of km/s, at least...

Yes, but they all fit in the same category. Otherwise, one would also need to point out that they are accessed differently from the menu (one by selecting the 'career' mode and one by 'sandbox')

Celestial bodies really need to be on rails. If not, sooner or later something will go horribly amiss and the Kerbol system will find itself short a few moons. Plus, the effect of ships on these bodies is completely negligible.

If something like this were implemented, I think a 'stationkeeping' button would make sense to toggle patched conics/newtonian physics. For a number of reasons, it might also make sense to only enable newtonian physics on the active vessel. Such a system would allow an interested player to toy with manuevers in newtonian physics than then toggle to patched conics when we just want something to stay put. This also means we wouldn't need to draw arbitrary boundaries between patched conic and newtonian space. Of course, this system could easily be exploited to perform 'cheat' maneuvers in which, by toggling physics modes, could be exploited for infinite delta-v. But that's the player's issue (and it would probably make for a fun way to burn a few afternoons). Heck, you can still infiniglide, so it's not even without precedent.

I will conduct lots of !!SCIENCE!! And answer one of the most important scientific questions of our age: Will it blend?

As the above post suggests, manuever nodes assume instantaneous course changes. An LKO orbit takes around 31 minutes. For burns more than 4-6 minutes, you can't do it cleanly in one burn. Splitting a 23 minute burn into maybe 13 before/10 after would mean you start out burning when you are nearly on the opposite side of the planet. Anything you do there will be a complete waste in terms of an efficient transfer. You really shouldn't burn more than 20-30deg from a maneuver node (the further off you are, the worse the difference). What you should do is make one burn from 20-30deg before to 20-30deg after the node, then coast the remaining part of your orbit. This is called a 'periapsis kick' (once your orbit becomes elliptical, you will always be burning near your periapsis). After repeating this process a few times, you will break into an escape trajectory, at which point you should (in Scott Manley's words) burn "hell for leather" until you get the transfer to the other body lined up.

Title says it all. The confirmation dialog seems unnecessary for 'debris' objects since the debris tab must be deliberately selected. After some orbital construction projects, I am looking to remove a large chunk of debris from orbit. The extra mouse clicks add up. It's a trivial point, yes, but it's a quality-of-life thing and would be a relatively simple adjustment. I'd rather not use the max debris slider, since I'm only after some specific bits.