Beeburgers

I made another trip out to Ike. Mostly I just wanted to see if I could do it. I also Tested out the ejection system for a VTSL. Here's Bob, on the roof of one of the science buildings instead of scattered across the lawn.

Another day, another Jet. I tried a double swoop for the wings for the whole stability vs not stable thing. I call it the Gull. Also: Swapped some Kerblenaughts out of the KOSS (Kerbal Orbital Space Station) Jeb popping a wheelie just before take-off Jeb "Drifting,"... Still not sure why we decided to do this right next to the space center A completely planned test of the Gull's ejection system. The KOSS. That's the shuttle on the bottom, and the little tug center right. Whelp, I'm going back to flying the Gull in eccentric circles until I have to test the ejection system again.

When you try to calculate the Delta-V your car has instead of how many miles are left in the gas tank. Alternatively, when you attempt to figure out how many Orange Tanks it would take to get said car into a 100 km orbit. ... Also, when you start to wonder if your car has a descent lifting body or if it would need wings or if you should just install Ferram Aerospace already and start playing around with the fairings.

Created the most crap Jet in the long, sad history of sad jets. Even with three reactions wheels and thrust vectoring it just spun to the right, or up, or, really, just any direction that wasn't the direction I wanted it to go. I'm thinking about putting the engines on backward and seeing if flies better that way. I went on to try to build an SSTO that ended its pitiful flight by slamming into the ocean at half the speed of smell. Finally, I created Brutus. It's an Ion Probe with a parachute and landing legs I plan to send to some little moon when something gets to the proper transfer window. What I like about it: the entire first two stages are solid rocket fuel that pushes its Apoapsis out to 200 km. Then I turn on a tiny liquid fuel engine to get it into a proper orbit. Also the Ion probe has no solar cells. It's slow as hell but I can burn it at full power even on the dark side of a planet. Normally this is where I would put the things I was saying as this happened... But that would just be a pile of expletives. After those explosions, it was light enough to fly... Except we'd lost the wings. The Brutus It occurs to me that taking a picture showing off this thing working in the dark... is really dark. Yeah... so that little blue ring is the Ion engine, and that shadow is the probe... yeah.

Whelp, I tried to change the inclination of my new little asteroid base. I have learned my lessons: 1.) If you want to build a space tug, you need a probe core at either end in order execute maneuver nodes. 2.) When orienting the ship make sure you are pointing directly away from the center of mass or terrible things will happen. 3.) It doesn't matter how many NERV engines you toss on there, you don't have enough to make a soft asteroid landing. 4.) No matter what, I must never be allowed into the real NASA Asteroid program. Pictures! Stop flexing you oversized space spud! "Oops?! What do you mean oops?" Brakes!

I finally managed to get my 'ittle D class asteroid into an equatorial orbit. (One Rendezvous, three tugs, and a crap ton of fuel) I've decided to build a base there, only to discover that it's orbiting in the wrong firggen direction. That's okay though. I've begun work on a super tug. If six clusters of NERV engines don't do the trick, I'm reloading the quick save and leaving that thing in it's backwards orbit.

I accidentally added a few to Vall and Pol Crew Reports Surface Landing in the add on biomes when I meant them to be in vanilla KSP. How would I go about fixing that?

Yup, that's a bit of concept art for the UK's Skylon space plane. If you're like me, the first thing you're probably asking yourself is: where are the air intakes?! The science for the pair of SABRE engines strapped to either side seems to defy Kerbal logic, mainly because it has a problem with overheating when it's going at Mach 5 at 28 km above the earth. Apparently air gets kind of hot when you're brushing past it at five thousand plus km per hour... who knew? And at those speeds it's really more important to cool the air down enough for it to be used than it is to get more air into the hybrid rocket/jet engine. Basically there are a series of heat sinks sitting next to some pipes all full of liquid helium. The air passing into the engine goes from somewhere around "OW! Damn it that's hot!" to "OW damn it that's cold!" (or 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit to about minus 238 for those who don't speak Angry-Man-anese) Once the air is cooled, it gets sucked into a turbo compressor, mixed with liquid hydrogen and then set on fire... And by that I mean it acts like a regular rocket. Once the Skylon gets to it's max air breathing altitude of some 28,000 meters above the earth it shuts the air intake and switches to a reserve of liquid oxygen kept on the spacecraft. This supped up hybrid engine, the SABRE, is one of those ground breaking type things that could actually make traveling to the other side of the planet a four hour trip, or cut the cost of putting a satellite into low orbit by a factor of ten. Now that's all well and good, but I have only one thing that I can think of after reading these articles: "I want one!" Whatcha think? LINKS! SABRE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SABRE_(rocket_engine) Skylon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft) What the SABRE looks like inside and out: (I got most of this info from the great and mighty wiki, and the rest from Popular Science... thought I should mention that)

Dude, ambitious does not even come close to describing this. I admit it: I was drooling just a bit. This is truly one heck of a thing. I can't wait to see it all finished and inhabited. Good luck NGTOne!

I just dropped a probe into Jool's atmosphere and all I got were these lousy pictures: Laythe, Jool and the probe A Laythe-set as the probe went over the horizon That's the sun as the probe entered Jool's upper atmosphere. Just off to the right of the sun, you can see Vall as a little dot... Actually looking at these pictures, I guess they aren't so lousy.

The fuel issue is in the last stages, and I think it has to do with a missing fuel line somewhere. (The complexity of this launcher makes every change an intensive process) I am thinking about making the tanks act more like the asparagus (that being dropping off in pairs, rather than all at once) to improve the MPG of this little beast, but that's probably a ways off. The RCS was initially just there to help with the whole "wobbling around like a hamster on a marble" thing. After that was solved, I just left it there for ballast. Because there's weight bellow the rockets, removing weight at the top can make it unstable all over again. Plus it gave me an excuse to have Jebbidiah go back and try to rendezvous with destitute craft. Also: I feel I should take some of the blame for that. I told the guys in engineering to start crafting the joints from Paper Mache to save on cost and weight and I feel this may be the result... oops. Thanks for all your help, and no the SAS wasn't the problem, it was the weight. Even with the SAS off, this thing just meandered across the Gimbal like a drunk on New Years Eve, whilst riding a unicycle, during an earthquake... with a blindfold over his eyes.

Okay, I've made some adjustments, primarily involving shifting the weight higher, and Now we have this: I've been informed by our top sciencey team that this constitutes a 98% decrease in explosions and unwanted ground/craft rendezvous compared to the previous design. Good job boys! That's what we like to hear. Now... make it bigger! The trick to this design is as follows: as you add weight to the bottom set of fuel tanks, you have to add equal or greater weight to the ring of tanks around the engines. Other than a few minor problems with fuel flow the Mk II has also been a success. Primarily we've had an issue with one engine running out of gas before the others. The good news is that the fuel tanks can be dropped early with no detriment to thrust, nor do we need to flip the engines off for the dump. (this makes these catastrophic problems slightly less catastrophic.) And look what happened: Maybe next time we'll remember to do a gravity turn... Also, we had another issue: That's one of the RCS tanks splitting from the others for what seems to be no apparent reason. In fact, "No apparent reason..." were the exact words used by our sciencey team and they seem pretty on the ball. Jeb was quoted at saying "Betcha I can catch back up with it!" "HA! Told ya!" Reverse Asparagus Lifter MkI New and improved! Reverse Asparagus Lifter MkII I'm not sure if either of these are any more efficient than a standard asparagus model lifter, and with Mech Jeb still on the outs with my computer, I don't really have ay way of testing it, but if it helps you toss some Kerbals into space then that's got to count for something...

I've been working on a way to make a more efficient launch module, and, after a lot of trial and error, I've come up with this: I've been calling it a reverse or inverted asparagus launcher. Basically, instead of the outside dropping away, it stays and the inner tanks drop. The central idea is to lose the heavy fuel tanks without losing the engines that would otherwise be attached. In theory, it seems pretty sound. In practice: And: And then I got desperate and just started slapping engines and struts to it... So yeah... Even with a bunch of RCS, extra thrust vectoring and fins, it as an attitude problem. And by that I mean it won't fly straight until you ditch most of the tanks, and that kind of defeats the purpose. If anyone knows what I'm doing wrong, or, and this is more important mind you, why it won't fly straight! I'd greatly appreciate it. Craftfile.

I just found this... I feel a little silly even posting it, as probably everyone already knows but... Has anyone noticed the quick launch thing? Click on the tower or the run way and you can pick any of your spaceships/space planes to launch without going through the VAB or SPH.

So we know resources are on the way, and with the devs focusing on career mode, there's no doubt that we'll soon see the start of resources in-game. We already know that money will be a factor concerning building space craft. So how will we get this money? Will it be strictly on the merits of scientific discovery? Or is it going to include using space to create something of a business... Say building several solar stations in high orbit to beam heaping tons of electricity back to Kerbin to solve the energy crisis? (if they have that.) Mining asteroids? Sifting Helium3 from the Mun's surface? Pumping fuel from the oceans of Eve and shipping it back home? Scooping heavy ions from Kerbol's chromosphere? ... Okay, I've run out of ideas. What do you think? Will it be strictly a plant a mining probe for fuel here, or will there be dozens of resources to gather and exploit? Add your resource ideas and economies! Edit: I feel I should make a note: Not just what you predict will be in the game but what you'd like to see.