maccollo

Gonna attempt to go full score on this, using this craft: Bonus points for aesthetics =D? ... I finished the design over a week ago but I haven't had time to actually do the run the mission yet. I'm considering recording it and turning making a video series of it.

Even just those 3 control surfaces probably add more acceleration those ion engines. I realized this when I tried to make my own ion glider. No matter how few control surfaces I used they would always contribute a significant amount. So basically, you can't do this challenge unless you add control surfaces to the restrictions.

If you're looking for an engine to replace your turbofans the 48-7S is probably the best suited. It has terrific thrust to weight ratio, and it's small size allows you allows you to ditch excess weight very quickly with asparagus staging. If you use the command chair as the only part for the final stage besides fuel and engine you can get an assent craft that weights around 10 tons. Here's a craft I made. It weights 12 tons with the parachutes, 11 tons without.

The only way to get a symmetrical burnout is to have one engine lined up with the Com. If you put that one on first it will always be the first to go. If you can't have an engine at the center the best you can do is to have action groups ready to respond. However the first thing you should do is not to turn of the engines. Jet engines will still produce power a few seconds after you turn them off, so if you try to do that in order to recover quickly from a potential spin out you're basically boned. Instead, set up an action group to toggle the air intakes. At altitudes where you can suffer from burnouts this will kill the thrust instantly, making it possible to recover.

You could probably write a script for maya or max that could read the craft files, import the correct model into the scene and then position and parent it correctly. It shouldn't be to hard if you're decent at scripting.

I did this once, but since I prefer to play vanilla I wanted to come up with a stock solution. So I built a simple nuclear powered craft with a giant scoop at the front consisting of those flat panels. Then I would rendezvous with the debris, catch it with the scoop and kill the orbit. Once the periapsis was under 16 km I would back away from the debris, turn around, and raise it again.

I would suggest having wheels instead of landing legs. That way you can simply land somewhere close to the area where the highest peak is (7540 meters above sea level) and drive your lander up the hill until you reach the top. You then detach the wheels at liftoff. The buggy wheels works really well for this.

Are you using aerospikes?

Completely wrong. You want to burn as close to the sun as possible to exploit it's oberth effect. You will get a substantial delta-v penalty for encountering Moho at it's apoptosis. You can think of it like this: Ideally, when would you want to burn from Moho to Kirbin? The answer is when Moho is at it's periapsis. This means that you also want to encounter it at the periapsis, because the lawls of physics work the same in reverse. The velocity of Moho at apoapsis is be 12 186, yours will be about 15 550 if you're coming from Kirbin. That's a difference of almost 3400. At Moho's periapsis it's velocity will be 18 279, and yours will 19 850. That's only a difference of roughly 1500, less than half compared to an apoapsis encounter.

Went to Mún and back in under 9 minutes as an entry for Scott Manley's cheat challenge. (Get a Kerbal to Mún, place a flag and return safely to Kirbin, using Stock parts and the infinite fuel cheat) http://youtu.be/4VV2sD0ZDr8 Took quite a few tries to get it right, timing was ridiculously sensitive XD

Stick some RTGs on your rovers and they can go so fast they will flip over if you turn to rapidly. I don't see how ICEs could offer any advantage that would outweigh the downsides without seriously nerfing the electric wheels.

I believe this happens because of the single gravity body simulation in KSP. If you orbit counter clock wise and your escape vector lines up with the prograde vetor of Tylo your alltitude above Jool will be relatively high compared to Tylo at the point of escape . At the same time your velocity will be higher aswell. The solution is to point the escape vector like 45-90 degrees away from the prograde vector of Tylo.

I'm curious about one thing. How can an engine deliver a payload lighter than itself? Anyway, these are very useful. I thought the Rockomax 48-7S was a really good engine, but these graphs really shows how versatile it is.

I finished designing my rocket for the single launch mission to land Jebediah on every planet and moon in the Kerbal system (except Jool of course), plant a flag, and then return to Kirbin.

It's not about learning the basics of how an orbit works in school. It's about experiencing how they work, how orbits can be affected by accelerating the object in different directions and what these velocities look like on a human scale. It becomes clear very quickly when you are exposed to it on a regular basis. Most people however are not, and they therefor can't read the intent of a spacecraft maneuver like they can read a plane or a ship. If you can't read it, it's crazy gibberish, and I would assume that is the reason spacecraft tend to move the way they do in movies.

I made an eve landing and assent craft, however it can only get into orbit from a minimum altitude of 6000 meters above sea level. Are there any larger areas on the new Eve in 0.21 that exceed this? I know of one, however it's tiny and I would probably have to retry like 50 times to hit it :/

You should try to keep your speed below terminal velocity for any given altitude. The ksp wiki has a list of these. http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Kerbin If you go faster the atmosphere will slow you down a lot faster. So you will waste a lot of fuel. If you go much slower than terminal speed you will waste fuel fighting gravity instead. Basically, when you launch you should try to reach terminal speed as fast as possible, then slowly accelerate as you climb until you start your gravity turn at around 10 000 meters. At that point you can usually go full throttle and just focus on your assent profile.

Isn't acceleration "change in velocity per unit of time" or something like that.

Well, I tried to mess with the persistence file, but it sort of blew up in my face, so I decided instead to take that part of the rocket, put a mainsail on it and then I used the infinite fuel hack to manually move it into position =P

I always go for a tylo intercept instead of aerobraking on Jool, since doing so correctly can send you anywhere within the Jool system with far more retained energy than an aerocapture. It take a little more preparation to intercept on the right side of Jool than doing an aerobrake, but once you got that set you have absolute control over where you want to go with almost no additional delta V needed, and with no uncertainty like you get with an aerocapture. At this point you can detach everything and no micro adjustments to get them wherever you want them to go.

So I'm in the middle of this very, very, very long mission. Everything was going super smooth, then suddenly the lander legs on my lander just magically disappeared, and I am absolutely certain it was no fault of my own. Anyway, it would be a giant pain to relaunch this mission, so I'm wondering it perhaps could be possible to edit the save file to put the landing legs back?

To maximize lifting capacity there are only 3 things I can think of that are important. 1: Asparagus stage all the way to orbit. 2: Use only mainsails for your assent stage. That will give you maximum lifting capacity to lag ratio (large lifter setups tend to end up with fairly high part counts since you need lots of struts). 3: Make sure you maintain a good thrust to weight ration throughout the accent. I usually do it by having one mainsail with the smallest 2.5 meter fuel tank under the payload. That way the other stacks mostly have to just provide the thrust to lift their own fuel. I made an example craft for you. It can almost take the 150 ton payload to the moon. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/22015656/Heavy%20Lifter.craft

My objection would be to the mass of the reaction wheels. One of the regular probe bodies+one reaction wheel unit has the same mass as 1 man lander can (0.6). How does this make any sense? you might as well put lander cans on your crafts instead of reaction wheels.

Having aerospikes in an atmosphere is suicide, get rid of them. Since they have a drag value of 0.1 instead of 0.2, the rest of the rocket acts a giant sail. As soon as you deviate just a little from the motion vector your rocket will allays flip out, and recovery is impossible. It's sort of ironic that they are absolutely useless for their intended purpose. Just swap them out for the Lv-t30 and your rocket will fly just fine.

I have, altho mine accelerates to 2400 m/s and then cruises to 100-200 km before releasing the payload. Still, same concept. The maximum payload mass is somewhere around 12 tons. In the video example it's a single stage moon lander with enough delta V to do a targeted landing on the way back. It's efficiency almost makes it a one size fits all lifter. I've used this plane to launch everything from probes to land and return missions to Duna. The only problem is that the payload size is fairly limited. This could be solved by placing the engines further apart, but that makes flameouts much more difficult to handle.