ZenithRising

Success! All right geeky Kerbonauts, I have successfully launched a science mission to Laythe (and Duna and Eve), and I have data to share. It actually clears up the question of Laythe's salinity pretty well I think. Let's get started! The Mission: I built Pandora I, a deep space probe with 7 identical detachable probe landers. Each lander weighed less than a ton, was fitted with every scientific instrument available, a parachute, and about 1000 delta-v worth of thrust and fuel. The plan was to launch from Kerbin, do a fly-by of Duna where I could drop off the first pair of probes and then slingshot my way on to Jool. I reached Duna easily and detached the first pair of probes. Using their rockets, one was aligned for a temperate intercept path, and another a polar intercept path. It took a number of save reloads to get them landed on Duna with the thin atmosphere and those spindly probe struts, but eventually I did get them both down safely, and returning data. As a bonus I flew by some sort of crazy Mt. Doom on Duna's north pole. Now unfortunately my gravity slingshot was terrible, and I ran out of fuel trying to normalize my orbit around Jool. Mission aborted. Pandora II featured slightly more fuel, a slightly lighter payload and somewhat better flying. It got depressing close to Laythe, but due to an eccentric orbit around Jool was unable to actually reach her SoC. Mission aborted. Finally, Pandora III was launched, this time with twice the fuel. This mission attempted to slingshot around Eve, and dropped a couple of probes off on the way, which landed easily in the thick atmosphere. The slingshot was mediocre, basically just getting back the delta-v I lost going to Eve, but with the extra fuel I made it to Laythe, established a ~45° orbit, and began dropping off probes. The probe landings required some reloads, but were all successful. Shifting Pandora III's orbit from 45° all the way to a polar orbit allowed me to establish landing sites at a variety of latitudes and altitudes around Laythe, both on the shoreline, and far inland (or as inland as you can get on Laythe). Also, I got one probe right on the little island in the middle of that huge impact crater. Effing A. All of the exact data I collected can be found on a google spreadsheet here if people are interested: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AuvW-Ya0mDJDdFpXbHpweHhWd1o1azFiY3I3MXR5RlE#gid=0 General Things I Learned: 1. Time of year, time of day, and latitude do not matter at all for determining temperature in Kerbal Space Program. This was born out by all nine of my probes on three different bodies. For the purposes of crunching numbers and doing science on KSP celestial bodies, we should probably assume that the temperature readings then are a general average of all times of day, seasons, and latitudes. 2. Altitude and/or barometric pressure do matter for determining temperature in KSP. The higher and thinner the atmosphere, the lower the temperature. This was also confirmed by all nine probes. In fact, the correlation was strong enough across all three bodies that the formula "t = 48p - 34", where 't' is temperature, and 'p' is barometric pressure, will yield reasonably accurate answers on all bodies (within about %5). 3. There is a small glitch with the in-game thermometer when switching focus to a ship. For whatever reason, when you switch the thermometer always starts at 0°, and then begins to rise or fall to the actual temperature. The speed of the rise/fall is exponential, beginning fast, and slowing as it gets closer to the proper number. The time this takes seems to take about 60 seconds, regardless of whether the temp is 2° or 200°. So, when reading temperature data, make sure you always wait at least minute after switching craft focus to record the number. Things I Learned About Laythe: 1. It's warm there! Relatively at least. While the temperature does drop below freezing at higher altitudes, anything below about 600m is above freezing. In fact, my warmest reading (pictured below), taken from an altitude of just 10m and a barometric pressure of 0.7979, was a balmy 4.59°. That's jacket weather! Ironically, this reading came from atop Laythe's northern ice cap. Latitude definitely doesn't affect temperature in KSP! In Conclusion: Due to Laythe's relatively warm temperatures at sea level, I cannot conclude much definitively about the salinity levels of her oceans. I can however conclude that no exotic substances or compositions are necessary to explain Laythe's largely liquid surface. It could be fresh water and we would still expect it to be mostly liquid. Given that information, my assumption is, lacking evidence to contrary, that the salinity levels are similar to those on both Kerbin and Earth.

Actually, a chart with the highest landmass for bodies in a vacuum would be handy. Learned 5000m wasn't high enough above Mun the hard way.

It sounds like your craft is unbalanced, either in thrust or mass. Everytime SAS has failed to keep one of my rockets going straight up, there has been a balance issue. For control, use fins in atmo, A few RCS for large payloads in the vacuum, and a control wheel for smaller payloads. Loading up on everything isn't a solution to your problem. Balance is.

Ooof. Love what Unity has done for indie gaming, but that's pretty bad. Computers haven't seen much improvement in clock speed in years. If you aren't taking advantage of multiple cores you aren't taking advantage of modern computers. Anyone know if the Unity devs have plans to work on that?

Are you using the translation controls (IJKLNH on your keyboard)? Using those I managed docking without too much trouble on my first try.

True. But it kind of makes sense physics wise. I mean, in real life, how would you design a parachute that you could stack thing on top of and still have it function? I guess maybe it would be nice to be able to put a seperatron on top of a chute so that by the time you get to the final stage, there's nothing on top of it, but you'd have more freedom in how you design earlier stages. Or maybe just smaller radial chutes are the answer. I think the set up is more than workable right now though.

A few more lighting options would definitely be nice. At minimum, I would like to see two new options: 1) Colored non-illuminative signal light (i.e. LED light, possibly with toggle-able colors) 2) Low power omni-directional illumination

Did you clip through Jool or Kerbol in a glitchy physics breaking slingshot maneuver or something?

My guess is that the problem has to do with taking off vs. crashing. When you're crashing, you want the game to have realistic impact physics, with things flying apart as you'd expect. But when you are taking off your design is subjected to some fairly high forces as well. Frequently enough to shake it apart with the current physics. While it would be one thing if realistic stress testing were a part of rocket design, it isn't, at least not yet. Designs falling apart on take off is just an annoyance that you can only control for only through trail and error. There is no way to crunch the numbers or predict the phenomenon with any degree of accuracy. And so, we spam dem struts. In short, I totally agree. A mass cost is a fine idea if you feel a need to balance it, but if we're all spamming struts anyway, I don't see why we can't just make the darn things hold together better by default.

Seems like in order to launch anything of size you need to spam struts though, which is not particularly realistic. I think as long as spamming struts is necessary to battle wobble, you should be able to disable their remnants in your settings. Or alternatively, don't track them as debris, but leave the polygon behind.

If you use three in a symmetrical set up, you'll go down straight.

Magic. Clearly. It is the only scientific explanation.

I think if we're going to to try and seriously get a semi-conclusive answer, we'll need to assume that physics in KSP works as close to real world physics as possible. Otherwise we'll just be speculating endlessly. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but personally I'm really excited to gather some evidence, crunch some numbers, and come to some conclusions. I think our best bet for this purpose is to assume that all the elements involved are analogous to our own, but with 10x gravity (putting the problems that creates with star formation aside for now).

Science! Yes, that is what I meant, thank you. As I recall now, air is actually a pretty good insulator as far as they go. Since we only have access to atmospheric temperature readings, but we need the oceanic temperature to answer the salinity question, we need to come up with a good estimate for the oceanic temperature. To do that, we really need to know where the heat is coming from. Hrmmmm, I'm not sure at the moment how to check the numbers on this, but perhaps someone else could? That seems like a reasonable hypothesis. Perhaps I'll look it up when I have a moment.

Lots of videos and tutorials out there, but probably the biggest single tip I would give OP based on what he wrote: Thrust is overrated. Isp is (usually) king. Now, you will need a certain amount of thrust to get off the ground, or to perform maneuvers in any sort of reasonable time. But, the higher thrust engines tend to have lower Isp (fuel efficiency), so you'll need more fuel for more thrust, which means you'll be adding more mass, which means you'll need more thrust . . . . You see the problem. Add to that the fact that drag will hold you back while in atmosphere, getting exponentially worse as you approach terminal velocity, and past a certain point, more thrust will start to see seriously diminishing returns. So. For very light payloads, it's easy to get up there with rather small engines. Hell, if you just stack three solid boosters on top of each other and stage them, they'll hit escape velocity in a jiffy. For medium-large payloads I do use a number of Mainsail boosters, but I've dropped those by the time I'm through the thicker part of the atmosphere, and transitioned to something with better Isp like Skippers or Aerospikes.

That sounds like the answer to me.

Actually, lag is a function of polygons, not size, which is arbitrary to a computer. You could scale things up or down as much as you wanted, and assuming the polygon count stayed the same (which it would unless you built new 3D models), it wouldn't affect the processing requirements one bit. My understanding is that all of the celestial bodies are smaller to improve gameplay. It takes less time to drive or fly over their surface, and it takes considerably less delta-v to get into orbit. The interstellar distances are also much shorter, Kerbin orbits around 13,000,000 km, while Earth orbits around 150,000,000 km. Which actually brings up a worthwhile point. I enjoy this speculation quite a bit, and am starting to think of a science mission to send to Laythe to get us more information. It would be super cool if we came up with an explanation even if the devs never intended one. But, at what point do we need to take into account that Kerbin, Laythe, and the rest have bodies made up of something about 10x denser than iron? Something which doesn't seem to exist in our universe and which would have unknown properties.

Water is a much better insulator than air, so our atmospheric temperature measurements of Laythe are going to be largely useless for determining the temperature of the water. We could perhaps hypothesize that the water has a temperature somewhere around the atmospheric average (~-15°C), but that's still a huge assumption since the oceans might well be retaining a good amount of heat radiated from internal tidal forces. Ultimately, we don't have enough information at this time to make a strong conclusion. With the atmospheric temperature close to freezing, it's not unreasonable to think the oceans are either above (or below) any number of potential freezing points. Ammonia, salinity, tidal heating, or some combination, could all explain its liquid state. Though I like Brotor bringing up the ice caps. Clearly solar radiation at least contributes to water's surface temperature. Perhaps if we compared equitorial, polar, and borderline average temperatures we could start to build a model. And for the "water is transparent, you're seeing the sky reflected" folks, allow me to put that to rest. Water is blue. It absorbs longer red wavelengths of light slightly more than higher blue wavelengths. It doesn't absorb much light at all in small quantities, so a glass of water looks colorless to our eyes, but the effect is pretty clear at any sort of quantity. The reflected sky does contribute to the color of large bodies of water, but this is in addition to, not instead of, water's inherent blue color. Or does the earth look so blue from space because of the otherwise transparent atmosphere you're looking through? Impurities dissolved in the water may also affect the color. Wikipedia article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_of_water

You will, but you'll also have added 27 tons to the mass of your craft! Since you'll be using the nuclear engine for orbit to orbit transfers, the extra thrust won't actually get you anymore delta-v, it will just reduce the time of your burns. A longer burn at a proportionally lower thrust with the same Isp and the same mass will have the same delta-v. So if you get your thrust at a lower mass, you'll be able to get more delta-v out of it.

Just got my first rover to Mun! And yeah, I unfortunately discovered that all my Kerbin testing of the design was worthless in 1/4 gravity. I discovered that turning off the Reaction Wheels helped a lot. But still, it was very unstable, and had trouble with traction. Any faster than 10 m/s and the slightest vector change would send it tumbling. Hills were . . . challenging. Still, it drove around a bit and (with some reloaded saves), made it back to Kerbin. I've got a pic, and I'd love suggestions for my next version. I'd like something stable with as high a top speed as possible. I'm already figuring on getting the center of mass as low as I possibly can. And possibly making it heavier in general? Are four wheels more stable than six?

I'm not sure a GUI would add much dev time to this idea actually. It could be built off of the existing Action Group GUI, with a list of action "blocks" that you stack to create a sequence of actions. Actions would include, "Adjust Pitch", "Adjust Thrust", "Extend Landing Gear", "Wait for Altitude", etc. with input-able values for each. Creating a system like that would be no more complicated that creating a dev console you can type into, possibly less so. Unless perhaps they can backdoor into a text-based system they are already using to code the game. I don't think that's likely though. The biggest dev cost will be creating this system at all, and after that, adding new and more complex actions to it. Still, I think they should. Besides being really neat for dedicated players to mess with, it could double as a MechJeb-like system for precise burns/ascents, which I think a lot of players would use.

I believe what is discouraged is making the general suggestion "moar planets!", as opposed to suggesting specific celestial bodies. If I was under the wrong impression, I apologize to anyone I may have annoyed.

An SSTO would be neat and all, but what I'd really like to do is get a flying rover to Laythe and Eve. Drive on zero fuel, fly great distances on little fuel. Just finished my first rover though, and the motorized wheels seem to have plenty of their own problems, so we'll see.

Just completed my first docking maneuver on the dark side of Mun. It was definitely challenging, but doable. All of my lights were (embarrassingly) pointed in the wrong direction, so that didn't help, but what I could do was mouse over the other ship, which gave me a green outline of whichever part I was over. I was able to use that outline to make sure the ships were oriented (mostly) the same way. After that, it was pretty easy to use RCS with the navball and speed/distance numbers to get the rest of the way. It was sloppy, but once I was close and slow, the magnets took over.

So, this isn't a thread about "Space Station Sandbox Mode" (whatever that is), but about how the devs should totally use this super sweet model you made all by yourself? Perhaps you should label this forum "Hey Devs I've Got a Super Sweet Model For You", or better yet, send them ONE email, and be done with it. If they want it, they want it. If they don't, they don't. That's l'amoure. Or life I guess. What would that be, l'vita? Eh whatever, I'm gonna go play more KSP (regular Sandbox Mode).