mattihase

Trapped in the Sky! Disaster! The luxury SSTO space-liner Fireflash finds itself trapped in low kerbin orbit, unable to use it's landing gear without activating a bomb stowed aboard by the dastardly Hood Kerman. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to design and prove the most creative way you can think of to bring the 18 crew and passengers of the Fireflash back down to kerbin safely. Rules: 1: don't use the Fireflash's landing gear to land. 2: don't just ditch it in the ocean, while technically the most practical solution to the problem it is also the most boring. 3: don't just send shuttles up into LKO to dock and collect the passengers, again not a whole lot interesting. 4: do pretty much anything else that you need to do. want to use modded parts? go ahead! 5: success is nobody crashing into the planet and dying. The Ship: The Fireflash Prototype, a Hackenbacker Class Single-Stage to Orbit luxury Space-liner with a crew of 2 and 16 VIP passengers. Current Situation: in Low Kerbin Orbit with more enough oxidizer to deorbit and plenty liquid fuel for low altitude manoeuvring/powered glide on final approach. Action Groups: 1: toggle rapier engines 2: toggle engine mode (currently closed cycle) 3: open/close orbital components (solars, antenna) 4: deploy emergency radial drogue chutes 5: toggle in-line radiators between passive and active (currently active, can and should be indefinitely sustained with RTGs) Tips on landing the Fireflash: The Fireflash while able to glide will drop too fast to make an unpowered landing, or at least requires maintaining power till just before touchdown. it can survive high physics warp and is mostly stable both in and out of atmosphere as well as being easy to manoeuvre at subsonic speeds. when re-entering be careful as the front section has a habit of burning up, though losing it does not fatally detract from the stability of the craft. The Fireflash has a relatively short stopping distance with just the air/breaks compared to the length of the ksc runway. Link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3bAkbqjp8mGY1lsdGRPR3dmRXc contains a savefile with the Fireflash in orbit, there is also the Fireflash's craft accessible from the SPH list as a "Hackenbacker Spaceliner" in case you need a reference vessel to mess around with. Good luck.

working on that right now

great stuff guys.

yes go ahead. i'd say that mods are ok to use... as long as it isn't an engine edited to have a billion thrust and isp.

the N00by OP's attempt: Mass? 16.5 tons since i posted the challenge i've somewhat changed my design from the example, i haven't got round to giving it a name but i have taken off the chutes and top reaction wheel to save on weight. i originally wanted to parachute the drop tanks down a la the space shuttle boosters but gave up on that. how did i launch it? i take off from the launch pad at full throttle and at maybe 100m up slightly tilt the prograde vector to the east then point the craft straight up again. after the first drop tanks have... dropped, funnily enough, i tilt the craft over slowly so that it's about halfway to 45 degrees east when the tanks run out at hopefully 12 km up. for the next stage i continued thrusting towards the surface prograde vector till 18 km up when i switched to orbital mode and burned in the bottom of that prograde for a bit before just going for the centre. this got me to space with an Apoapsis of a bit over 80, i created a node and although the node read 16 seconds past experience has taught me that for some reason 7-8 hundred m/s delta v in this craft takes 12 seconds yet the prediction is always at 16 before i fire up the engine. i guess that that's a bug. anyway i get into orbit with a suprising amount of fuel left. so then i try to be all fancy and land at the KSC yeaaaahNOPE, some batteries explode but they're neither crew or the engine so i'm fine. and i bring the ship down under 4 drogue chutes, one small paracute and some help from the engine. as you can see it has splashed down intact sans batteries and with a little fuel left. and that was my attempt. it's probably not the best way to go about this (as i hope the rest of you will prove) but seeing as it inspired this challenge and took all day i'm sharing this with you anyway. Here is the craft file.

i don't see why they wouldn't be. go ahead!

SETO CHALLENGE! Challenge: create the lightest crewed craft capable of reaching low kerbin orbit you can using no more than one engine. Additional rules: no RCS thrusters the craft must be able to return safely to kerbin with it's engine intact. I am currently working on my own submission, pictured above. Current Leaderboard: 1st: Totalitor at 4.44 tons 2nd: Foxster at 4.46 tons 3rd: Triop at 8.23 tons 4th: Tomas H at 9.415 tons 5th: T3HJimmer at 9.46 tons 6th: Kagame at 10.68 tons 7th: Alberto de beni at 14.2 tons 8th: me (mattihase) at 16.5 tons

Condor light transport plane a transport plane, despite the name quite large having a hull about the size of 3 mk3 long fuel fuselages... fuselagi... whatever. seems to work fine in low altitude flight about 2km up and at around 90 m/s. needs to be on full throttle to pull up with cargo. it uses ~0.85 fuel a second and has a liquid fuel capacity of 9130 units. the test flights i've done in it has been with a B.O.T. in the hold (left in, lets say for reference purposes and definitely not because i forgot to remove it) so standard carrying capacity seems to be around 36 tons but feel free to try and push it. it uses infernal robotics and KAS to have the cargo door move and latch it on for flight respectively and tweakscale for some misc parts. action groups: action1: toggle jet engines action2: toggle Monoprop retro thrusters action3: toggle cockpit to floor ladders action4: toggle cockpit to top of plane ladders 9/0: keybound to the door hinge Download: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3bAkbqjp8mGOTRScHUxbF9ZVUU/view?usp=sharing enjoy.

thanks! (and enough of bracketed text to make this over 10 characters)

little sketch i did a while back. anyone else think this would be a awesome mod if it existed?

Hello and welcome to my sorta report thing where i tell you some of the things that i've done and are hopefully entertained i need to work on the title. so i guess you can work out the format of this: i fly a bunch of flights, pick out the highlights, pair that with a relevant screenshot and post em up here first things first a quick intro 0.90's been out for a few days (as of the time of writing) so i downloaded it and set up a game either yesterday or the day before, now i'm sure many people went and played around with the new parts and stuff in sandbox but i just dove in. here's some quick game info: i'm running a 32 bit install on a 64 bit pc in 1920x1080 and have KAC installed (but not really in use at the moment) since the second time i loaded up the game. and my career difficulty settings were pretty similar to hard but i messed around with them for the sake of messing. i have left revets and quicksaving/loading on for convenience sake. part 1: reaching for the skies, followed by some falling first thing i did was... well the first thing i did was check out the t1 space centre but after that i went and accepted the first 2 contracts (launch a vessel and break 5000m) i tend to start career modes by simply strapping a pod onto a SRB. since a while ago i tried playing with deadly re-entry i ended up tweaking the SRB down to both 50% fuel and thrust. which still managed to get jeb up to around 10k. the SRB sadly did not survive landing but the pod did so i went through the process of getting out and getting a surface sample from the space center and... huh no option for that. it turned out that scoops have to be unlocked by upgrading the labs. the pod and jeb were recovered and i had room for the next two contracts. i also had enough science for the first research node but another tradition of mine is making a liquid fuel rocket before getting that node so i made this thing (i forgot to screenshot it in flight so here it is in the VAB) this little rocket, still flown by jeb, managed to get me up past the 11KMs altitude my next contract asked for (and maybe the 22km one that i have but i'm not sure where from), so seeing progress was climbing at a steady rate i grabbed the node and created this: The space pioneer, coming in at 17.4 tons this vessel was a tight squeeze for the launch pad's then limit of 18t but as you'll see there has been some much tighter since. it got it into space first time but something happened on the landing and it was eaten by the ocean so i reverted and tried the landing again, with more success. the goo canisters and the pod survived and i was able to reap the reward of "flying at kerbin", "upper atmosphere" and "low orbit" science, even if i couldn't use the last goo as they had detached from the ship during landing. and the goo canister (or goo pod as i will now call them to save time) that was attached to the launch frame thing gave a few more sciences. finally from this mission i completed the contracts "use LV-T45 at pad" (the other reason for the launch frame) and "leave the atmo". next stop orbit!! or failure as it turned out. space attainer managed to not get into orbit. it also has a bunch of fuel tweaked out of it so i could launch it so that might be why. not deterred i built the mysterious "orbit attainer", which could have been shown in any of the following images but i have no idea because its VAB file has been reduced to a single capsule. either i didn't save it or there were some bugs. saying that i do know it managed to get above 240km for "in space far above kerbin" science because next i sent this "orbit conqueror" up to get material bay science from the above. actually the attainer probably looked like this but without the matbays and with goo pods special mention to the lawn dart plane. it may have been front heavy to the point of nosediving but it is my first (and currently only) plane design. next time: bigger launchpad and an orbital rescue leads to someone having to sleep on the couch. disclaimer: if you don't like this font: tough, i do.

in my early career i've been using them as no-return required science grabbers. i didn't notice the no tourqe thing as knowing probe cores i automatically shoved some reaction wheels on it. although the lack of SAS is annoying somehow i managed to get to the mun and minmus with them. time warp freeze may be OP but was really handy.

oh i just change the bit at the top "module =ctrlsfrs" (or something) to "module = Winglet", and wrote "now without infinispin, hopefully" in the part description.

or if you want to restart the space program then a 6 pack of coke and 6 tubes of mentoes.

i swapped out the module Controlsurface in the cfg for a module winglet and it seems to be working perfectly now, i even managed to land a plane with survivors. i'm gonna learn how to model/animate. thanks!

that thing's a control surface, result: infinispinner. maybe because the folding, i'll look into this...

is there any way we can have wing parts where there is a right click option to fold up the wing (or open holes in it) which, from a gameplay standpoint, would turn off the code that makes it a wing or sets the lift rating to 0. this kinda thing would be useful for launching planes on rockets both on top (so you don't have to put massive fins on the bottom) and radially (if i want to be able to send ie. a rover and a plane radially attached to one rocket). i don't really know how to do unity or ksp modding so does anyone want to try and make this?

and the clockwise planets?

i can't decide, so many good ideas!

is it possible/will you have support for making planets rotate at an angle (like earth) and/or clockwise (like venus) as opposed to the anticlockwise and flat to their plane that the stock planets seem to have? i know that making things rotate at different speeds is possible (planetfactory inaccessible) so is this a reasonable question?

Thanks, it's fixed. would this be happening because when i transferred the 0.24.2 save over 1) it had mods (fine print and debrefund) and 2) i changed the version of the save in the SFS?

my ksp is 0.25.0.642 32 bit and i manually downloaded the zip off the website. the game loads but does not show any save files when the resume game button is pressed, in fact the resume save button does nothing. the game has in it's saves directory a copied over 0.24.2 save and a save created by the game (which still works fine). why is this happening? thanks in advance.

are you sure danny2462 hasn't been at your save file?

I made you a TV tropes Page: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/LetsPlay/BrotoroKSP does anyone mind fleshing it out with content?

i can't get it to load one of my saves, it just crashes when it tries. would it be a problem that it's a Pre-kopernicus save? (although it could just be a bug with the save or having many ships in it). do you want me to email you the crash report folders?