Psycix

The fairing itself will break, causing physics to enable, causing catastrophic failure the way you are used to. The weight of the fairing prevents you to Matryoshka doll everything. Every fairing will cause you to lose a certain percentage of your payload fraction. Perhaps fairings could scale their weight based on what is in it. Heavy payload - heavy fairing as to support this payload properly. So what if we have flimsy fairings that are more easily broken than strutpocalypse crafts? This way you can't use it as a "cheat". The old fashioned way is potentially sturdier - as long as your PC likes to simulate hundreds of parts supported by hundreds of struts. ANY flimsy payload can be launched conventionally by adding perpendicular beams on the craft that connect struts to everything, turning the ship in one giant girder with a rocket on the bottom. Not exactly realistic, fun to fly or fun to build. Wouldn't fairings be a better* alternative than having to do stuff like this: http://i.imgur.com/5phhGoQ.jpg Picture from google images. * Better in the sense of: -Better game performance -Better realism -Better allocation of time: building and flying rockets rather than having to go through endless trial-and-strutting cycles.

Or a simple rocket thruster under the nose that flips it up.

Although I failed to complete the challenge I'd still like to share my design for the sake of your entertainment. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: The Grappling Hook Catapult "It was worth a shot!" The middle winch contained a stackthing with a grappling hook on top of it, two connector ports on the side and one on the rear. The rear port was released with action group 1, and shortly after action group 2 is used to let the projectile go of the two side ports. The middle winch was completely unrolled, thus the projectile was capable of flying the full rope length. Sadly, this was only 50 meters. Although this device taps into the power of the kraken, the struts manage to contain the beast on most of the quicksave-loads. Craft file here.

SRB's are nothing but large scale pyrotechnic devices, which says enough about the required safety when handling them. Aside from the launch itself, things can also go wrong during production, assembly and transport. There can be dozens of people working around the solid propellant, in some cases much more people than one crew of astronauts. A few examples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_rocket_explosion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEPCON_disaster http://www.waff.com/Global/story.asp?S=12429371 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_disasters

Just constructed this. The 45* RCS thrusters can be turned on and off using 5 action groups in order to shift the center of RCS thrust back and forth as needed. Also contains lights, a big battery, a large reaction wheel and 4 KAS winches to stabilize or pull in payloads.

Personally I'm a big fan of this mod: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/rla-stockalike-0-1/ It offers 45* RCS ports. Instead of spewing RCS everywhere since most thrusters are partly aligned in SOME way to the translation, having 4 of these on exactly 45* makes everything perfectly aligned, and only those thrusters actually fire.

A possibility would be some sort of donut-shaped tug that holds the payload inside of it.

Place the RCS ports around the center of mass to avoid rotation when translating and reverse. If you have fuel tanks far away from it, keep in mind it may shift as they drain! If you need to maneuver using RCS both with and without a payload attached, then you could have two sets of RCS thrusters on the vehicle: One near the center of mass of the tug, the other set towards the center of mass when a payload is attached, and toggle them using action groups. (unless you have RCS on the payload as well) EDIT: A SAS module would help negating small rotations that occur during translating, and also give the option of rotating without using RCS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_reusable_rocket_launching_system Plenty of citation links. I know it's pretty, but don't drool!

It's pretty easy to dock purely on the navball if you know how: 1) Align the target docking port with either the north or the south pole* on the navball. (Make sure to use "control from here" on the docking port) *Why align with a pole: As you orbit around the planet the navball will move you will lose that relative attitude, however, the navball will only rotate along the roll axis while staying on the same point if you are aligned with the orbit normal. Then, your approaching craft aligns it's docking port with the orbit normal, and the pink marker basically tells you which way to translate. When the target marker is on the orbit normal, you're on the docking axis and can move straight forward. I find this method much easier because it splits finding the alignment axis from finding the docking axis. It's very hard to both translate and rotate in three dimensions at the same time. 2) Another way is to have the two crafts sitting next to eachother, rotate them both to point their docking ports towards eachother and then approach. This completely eliminates the need for doing translations (and for reaction wheel crafts, RCS) However, this technique can not be applied when the docking target can't be easily rotated (like a huge space station) Last tip: 45degree RCS ports (a mod) will make your translations super clean. Instead of all ports firing mono-propellant everywhere, only the required thrusters fire straight into the desired direction of thrust. Extra last tip: The RCS ports need to be around the center of mass in order to prevent rotation as you're translating and vice verse.

So who said buzzing the tower was't realistic? I'm happy to see stuff like this. I love spaceX! Can't wait for the launch of the 5th of september where they will fly the F9 v1.1 stage with Merlin 1D engines for the first time and attempt to grasshopper land it over water before splashdown.

Ugh I just spent the entire afternoon building something like those uprighting missiles. Took ages to get it (sort of) right.

I love how you uprighted and launched the Duna ascent vehicle. Looked like ICBM technology.

I'm already using B9. Hmm well I'd like to use my SSTO's for more than crew transport, so how does this apply to heavy planes that need at least 4 jet engines? I only use RAM or the B9 ones. The landing gear thing seems like a good idea for tipping upward. The problem is that I always mount it as far back as possible in order to protect my engines from hitting the runway.

I'd like to suggest an idea to deal with the (IMO) main problem of this addon: you either need to fly over unpractically sized structures, or the structures unfold in an unrealistic manner. (though the new launchpad model covers most of this.) The solution: A self-constructing package that needs to be filled up with materials in order to deploy The structure (be it a launchpad, refinery, factory or whatever) is a medium sized package of medium weight. In order to build/deploy/unfold it however, it needs to be filled up with a certain amount of parts or metal. Filled up it is a lot heavier, but it effectively splits the structure up in multiple parts which can be launched separately. I'd say that deploying takes some time and a lot of energy as well. We could construct buildings of extreme size and mass without breaking feasibility or realism.

1) One way to do this is to kill ALL horizontal velocity and descent straight down. Another way to do this is to use mechjeb's landing guidance. You can have it land for you, or, if you want to land manually, have the landing guidance simply show your predicted landing location on the map. 2) There may be better methods, but aside from trial and error I would recommend to send an exploration probe down. EDIT: I encountered this in another thread. It contains a slope map as well! http://www.kerbalmaps.com/

My problem: I've spent hours designing SSTO's, and while I am capable of building a one-mane spaceplane that can reach orbit and land, anything bigger than that tends to run into problems. I generally keep going into circles like this: -Spaceplane is too slow -> add engines -Spaceplane won't lift off at 120+ m/s -> add wings -Spaceplane doesn't have enough intakes for high altitude -> add intakes -Spaceplane has too much drag on the front and becomes unstable -> add control surfaces -Spaceplane has too much drag in general and is too slow -> add engines, and the cycle starts over The question: All tutorials for SSTO's cover balancing of CoM and CoL, but none have given me basic figures of the amount of thrust, lift and intake one needs per unit of mass. Do any of you have any guidelines, ratios or "rules of thumb" that can help me select the right amount of lift, thrust (what about jet thrust vs rocket thrust?) and intakes for a certain size or weight aircraft.

If the problem is that the navball (so actually the mun itself) rotates under the station, have a equatorial orbit and point the docking port towards the north or south pole. This way it will only roll while staying on the same point. Your docking craft can then align along the same north-south axis and will (aside from roll) be aligned perfectly.

The engine doesn't gimbal, just the nozzle. It's used in a lot of modern jet fighters for extra maneuverability. A few links to thrust vectoring jet engines: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_%26_Whitney_F119 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sukhoi_Su-35S_07_RED_PAS_2013_07.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Iris_vectoring_nozzle.jpg

Patupi, having the CoM lower than the CoT does NOT automatically stabilize your rocket. It's a common fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendulum_rocket_fallacy Also note that with thrust vectoring, having your CoT close to your CoM gives them less authority, just like control surfaces far from the CoM are more effective. But it shouldn't be a big deal as long as your reaction wheels can stabilize the craft.

Electric propulsion. Real life electric propulsion systems can easily soak up 250 KW. This is the main reason they aren't used, you'd need a nuclear reactor to provide that sort of power.

I suggested a similar concept just recently. After a hefty debate we concluded that it is physically possible to have the fairing represent the mass, CoM and moment of inertia of all parts combined. Link to thread.

This has been suggested so many times that I can't understand how nobody made an addon for this, there seems to be a lot of interest. But no, this suggestion is on the "do not suggest list", and certainly shouldn't be part of the game.

There is very little reason to use any engine but a nuclear powered one for interplanetary missions in real life as well. The main reason we do not have a colony on Mars IRL is because people duck and cover when they hear the word nuclear. If NASA had permission to build nuclear engines we could travel to mars in The technology is there, it works; all that rests is to convince the world it is safe to do so. And it's not crazy at all compared to the Orion project, which aside from sounding like an apocalyptic concept, should actually work. Nuclear power beats conventional rockets for interplanetary travel, end of. I'd expect career mode to keep this engine locked until you have proven to build reliable and safe rockets, and generated enough interest in a Mars colony by sending a few rovers there. Crashing a single one would potentially revoke the license, so you could look into safety abort systems. Back on topic, I'd say I don't see any reason why they wouldn't generate electricity while other engines do. Thumbs up for the suggestion.

Hmm yes, it can also be used for steering. Throttling down an engine will allow you to obtain an off-center thrust, making for a powerful steering maneuver. A small addon could indeed tap into the different control groups and allow you to do attitude adjustments by throttling, much like a quadcopter. I think the game currently relies too heavily on thrust vectoring. It would also help a lot with oddly shaped crafts like a space shuttle.