Rocket Farmer

So as a forum browser I thought I would sum up what I have heard might be upgrades of 0.24. I'm sure I'm missing some so please let me know. 1. Contracts! 2. Currencies (yes the dev reference was strangely plural). 3. Reputation (no more mindless conversion of Kerbals to white smoke) 4. 2 new engines, one rcs powered 5. 64 bit support! 6. Work on the IVAs for airplanes (not sure if this will make the 0.24 cut) 7. New plane parts have been hinted at (again not definitively suggested for 0.24) 8. A reference to a "rope like" part in development 9. Named supplier companies Lastly about that release date. July 20 would be a nice historical fit wouldn't it devs?

No. It's not possible to get the TWR required with 8,000+ DV (up to 12,000 at sea level). TWR easy, 8,000 DV not too bad. Both together........

I play totally stock so no fancy parts or mechjeb for me. For my spaceplanes on airless bodies (SSTMun, SSTMinmas, SSTGilly, & SSTIke and back) I land them tail first and then flop over to land on the gear. I can now fairly easily land within 200m of my Laythe Flats base (most common destination after quick shots to my space stations around kerbal and the mum). For takeoffs I put 2 reaction nozzles near the front and when I take off I use them to get the nose up a bit as I gain speed. My SSTDuna however is still a work in progress (resd mothballed) as I have never managed to land it. I can get down under 2,000m and make it back to kerbal but that's the best I have managed. The world is a little hilly for landing and there isn't much lift or drag making it quite different to fly in.

I usually disable the front breaks. However I wonder at everybody disabling SAS. I always turn my probe body so its top faces the direction of the rover travel. That way it stabilizes the unit while driving and can be quickly used to counteract spin while airborne. Any times I have been up on 2 wheels and used SAS to right myself. On Duna I regularly cruise around at 45m/s+ and without SAS after every hill I would be landing sideways as you fly so far any minuscule imperfection at takeoff would be the end.

To be fair as the OP in my first sentence I did refer to SSTO planes which should dispel all doubt as to what I meant and Gould preclude any rockets being posted.......

Like most of you I dabbled in SSTO plane designs to see what I could do. I play totally stock (no, not even mechjeb) with no part clipping. First I learned construction for low level flying. Then it was sub-orbital jumps. Then I learned to build to allow rendezvous with my space station. Then I learned how to land and return from my mun and minmas bases without refueling. Lastly I even got a SSTO without refueling to Duna and back to the landing strip. I was only able to land on Ike as Duna's atmosphere was just plain too thin to use my lift in any meaningful manner. Recently that same SSTO has been useful for hauling smaller payloads to orbit in style. My question is what other things are people doing with their SSTOs? My Duna one was quite large and while I figured Gilly might be in range otherwise I'm kinda at a lack for options. I know with refueling Laythe is an option but I expect landing would be difficult as i have never mastered a large vertical lander SSTO so I need some space in atmosphere.

Had one just last week. My lander was ascending from dres and I was attempting to dock with the Kerbal return vessel that was in a standard 6x6km orbit. I'm still not sure how i managed it but while working to bring the 2 together I degraded both orbits to 6x3km. Dres has mountains up to 5.7km.... So on the dark side I was on final approach about 50m below the space station when I looked at the altimeter and saw is at 3,300 and decreasing! In a panic I quickly decided to EVA fly my kerbal up to the space base. 30 seconds later I was just over 1/2 way when I saw a ridgeline on the horizon. At 3/4s of the way (35m from the lander) I watched the lander hit the top of the ridge while my slightly higher kerbal and the space based sailed by clean. I have never been anywhere near that close to disaster before.

While all your Kerbal plans seem noble I would recommend getting a girlfriend instead. They are fun to play with too.

I agree with the above poster. In stock unless your center of gravity puts you in a death spin you should always survive. My test of this was hitting eve square on from a reverse orbit. Ie instead of catching the planet from behind with 1,000m/s differential I hit it head on with about a 20k+ differential (eve and i were each moving at 10k a second in opposite drections) just to see how high of deceleration I could hit in the extra heavy atmosphere. The chutes deployed just fine and the kerbal was fine after a lengthy 20g deceleration. Personally I have never ripped the chutes off as I deploy them in vacuum and never put too much mass to too little chutes and drogues really help as well.

Actually it sounds strange but I always deploy the parachutes while still in vacuum. I find this greatly stabilizes my landers decent after entering the atmosphere by putting my center of drag well behind my lander. Also it seems to increase drag even before it fully deploys so I slow down quicker and take lower g forces when my Chutes do fully deply. On the other hand ive never heard of anybody else doing this so maybe I'm wrong. Does anybody know if a deployed but not fully filled parachute does create drag?

For all those saying they have done all the possile anet types here are my thoughts on moons I would love to see around a GP2 1. They have talked about a planet with a low level atmosphere where the mountain tops extend into space vacuum. 2. A Titan analog the orbits backwards from other planets. 3. A Gilly sized moon just above the gas planets atmosphere. Imagine the views and usefulness. 4. Moonlets, lots of them. I have read that they originally planned 10+ little moonlets for Jool. Still hoping to see it. 5. This probably isn't doable but 2 planets closely orbiting each other around the gas planet. 6. Unrealistic: A planet with so much axial spin you can only only land at the poles as at the equator your required horizontal velocity to match the rotation would exceed the exit velocity needed on the planet. 7. An all liquid surface planet. Would require all new Landing equipment. 7. A planet with a highly irregular elliptical orbit and an atmosphere. Basically a space elevator for the entire GP2 system. 8. A cluster of a 1/2+ dozen Gilly or smaller sized planets all in close orbit representing a broken planet. Imagine the fun of hopping between them. It could be called the rock garden. I could go on all st but these 8 seemed best.

Would love to see mass and ISP for the new engines along with the thrust already provided. Also full and empty tank masses. That way I can have craft excel designed when the update drops.

Yes merendel I did get the name wrong. You are right sub .5 tonne is LV-1 territory but with the boost to the xenon engine even that's in danger. Now the LV-1 is only good for short range .5 tonne or less ships. Basically in this class it's a Duna (with its atmosphere) super light lander and not much else (the solar panels on a xenon won't do well on Duna.)

Taking it from 1.5kn to 4kn was a good start but it doesn't really change anything. This rocket is in tough against the 24-88. Even with a buff for a mere 0.07 tonnes more you still get 7.5x thrust and 20% more fuel efficiency in the 24-88. I actually do use it but only for sub 0.5 tonne craft which gave it a reasonable thrust of 3m/s already meaning the buff doesn't really change that. What it needed was an efficiency bump. At 290 in space it is one of the lowest rockets available. Couple that with the "heavy micro tanks" (smallest 2 tanks don't conform to the 8/9 fuel/tank rstiolike the rest of the tanks) and your craft will actually be pretty inefficient with this rocket. A low thrust (1.5kn) with a nice ISP (400ish) would have made it a solid competitor for the 24-88 from 0-1 tonnes (thrust traded off against efficiency). Instead we get a tiny bit of weight traded against efficiency and thrust. Give the LV-1 some more love.

Awesome Jart! Believe it or not but I still play it every once on awhile although I wouldn't consider it that old school. Now civilization on the other hand (ie before there was more than one).

It's a nice error message but not overly helpful on how to select a prefix. I get it when trying to post to some of the other forums on KSP. I do see the [unanswered] prefixes but no way to add them. A little help would be appreciated as I'm obviously too dense to figure it out on my iPhone.

Agreed Red Iron Crown 3x symmetry is fine and I have used it many times. I use 6x symmetry more often but the same theory applies. On each axis of the symmetry lines there is one rocket with the symmetry line running through the middle of the 3rd rocket thus ensuring your thrust is always balanced.

Personally I fire up excel usually design the rockets in there first. First I look up where I am going and what the various stage DV requirements will be. I add a bit of a margin for safety as I play without mods so no mech Jeb for me. Then I determine what science/capsules/rovers/satellites/return capsule etc are going. This becomes the 1st payload. I then calculate using ln(full weight / rocket without fuel) x 9.81 x ISP of the rocket. I also calculate acceleration as thrust / mass to determine if its enough. With excel in a couple of minutes I can quickly test all rockets ad fuel amounts to determine my optimum setup. For the transfer stage start with the lander as your payload and repeat the above calculations. With the lifter I figure out the combined lander and transfer star mass and divide it by 2.5. That forms the number I skippers I will need (1 skipper with 54 tonnes of fuel can comfortably put 2.5 tonnes of payload in orbit so a pancake of power with 49 skippers can lift 123.5 tonnes. For safety sake at this size strap on some boosters....

You guys enjoy getting that asteroid back to kerbal. I'm planning on giving some atmosphereless body it's own super close orbit moon. Just contemplating sitting on a highpoint on the mun watching it orbit past 20m overhead brings a giant smile to my face.

7. When docking together parts for an early mission where sending only 1 kerbal is possible how else would you control all the pieces in space before assembly when only 1 part carries a kerbal?

Use them a fair bit. 1. When landing on mun or minmas I EVA a kerbal around the Landin site to look for other biomes (once found a different one by having the kerbal jump off the lander ladder). When I find one I use a probe to bring the lander to te kerbal. 2. Rover controls so I don't need the weight of a cockpit on my lighter rovers. 3. Most of my vessels carry emergency kerbin return vessels. For 1 ton I can have a probe core, seat, couple flat solar panels, a parachute and enough fuel for 2500 DV and thrust to clear any gravity. A 1.5 tonne variant gets 3500 DV. 4. Super light missions with Kerbals in chairs (here is looking at you eve return mission). 5. Biome hunting on minmas. I could fly the entire ship around or hunt with a little probe ship before bringing in the mothership. 6 biomes with one lander on minmas and 5 on the mun due to this. I could go on. I rarely send a ship without a probe core.

By far my best ever was: I was landing a pancake like lander with 5 parachutes. 1 in the middle and one at each corner. I was coming in from eeloo and had an almost vertical entry. Anyways at 68k I went to hit te parachutes and realized I had had a break in the frame and they wouldn't open. Jeb fearlessly EVA'd and first opened the top parachute. Then he went to a corner and opened it causing the entire platform to shift. He almost went over the side. He made it to the opposite corner and hit the parachute. The end snapped up and I had 2 seconds of terror as Jeb flew above the lander before he finally landed back on it. He managed the other two corners and ran back to his module. He jumped in at less than 1,000m altitude and a speed of 200m/s still. At 500m the parachutes snapped open and there was rapid disassembly of the entire aircraft. The center stack with the module crashed hard into the ground and further disassembled but the more survived. Jeb crawled out in victory. But it wasn't over. As I was enjoying the moment I saw a shadow pass over Jeb. The next minute saw Jeb frantically running a zigzag pattern as various other pieces of the ship crashed into the ground all around him.

Thank-you for all the replys. 1. To answer a couple of questions I play totally stock. 2. Recently when doing a Duna encounter when I was already out of kerbins SOI it was bouncing between around 390,000 and 480,000km periapsis around Duna. This is after absolutely all ship movement had been cancelled with a little time warp and my course goes deep into Duna's SOI (ie not grazing). 3. When I time warp the number actually stops bouncing but starts as soon as I stop. 4. Even mid course corrections are jittery and tough. Basically I usually have to wait till 80-90% of the way there and as somebody above said eyeball it before then. 5. It only happens sometimes. Recently went to Eeloo without a single digit shake.

Is it just me or does everybody get the shakey numbers issue when flying. Basically when trying to do an intercept sometimes the perapsis numbers jump about wildly. This is even after I have turned off my SAS/ASAS, turned off the RCS and even time warped a little to stop all rotation. I get bouncing numbers. Sometimes they bounce so bad that you can't read any number under 100,000 which makes it difficult to plan burns and even determine if a burn is helping or not. Other times they stay perfectly still the entire time. I even get this just going out to Minmas sometimes (in that case usually the 10,000 numbers and less aren't readable. Is this a floating point issue, my own personal computer hating me or something else that is fixable?

My mun base leader is..... Munwise Kerman Leader of my laythe voyage to seek out new life and go where no kerbal has gone before. Kirke Kerman