Galane

Are those inverted shrouded solar panels on the body? Looks very nice. Why are people so obsessed with rules? Isn't it enough of a challenge just to make the jump and do it as clean as you can? Hitting a landing ramp without crashing is good. Hitting it straight without skidding sideways is better. The Chevrolet Sonic jump came pretty close to a crash, so did some of the times the jump was done at stunt shows in the 70's.

I just leave ascent profile set to auto and build my rockets to work with it. Some of my really old ones have launched fine just by sticking on nose cones and a few fins. I should try "Jeb's Dream" to see if it'll go up as-is since it's one I made before finding out that nosecones were useless back then.

Get rid of deadly reentry. Parts overheating and exploding is now in the stock game and it can be adjusted or turned off when you start a new game. (Or if you want to dig into the save and persistent files you can alter the settings there.) If you're using 1.0 or 1.0.1, update to 1.0.2.

New ramp design. Launch from SPH, drive anywhere. Set brakes, decouple, switch to mini-rover, unset brakes and drive out from under. Switch back to ramp and retract gear. Moving the ramp may be easier with the four forward gear's steering unlocked. The mini rover cannot get up to a high enough speed to spiral off the end of this ramp. It barely gets above 20 m/sec. The ramp can be pushed around with the rover. I thought about putting docking ports on but figured that was extra complication. http://pastebin.com/E8jQjU5N screenshot3 by g_alan_e, on Flickr

A paper on the ramp design by the company that designed it. http://www.mchenrysoftware.com/SpiralJump.pdf My ramp is way too spirally.

Someone needs to make a particle accelerator engine that uses really large particles. More like a mass driver type of thing.

They're good for the German version but the wrong color for the English version. Then there's this version. Tethered version = barrage balloons to protect KSC from low flying bombers.

Here's a ramp I've built. Dunno if it will work. Will need some way to get it off the runway so a landing ramp can be launched. screenshot2 by g_alan_e, on Flickr Download craft file here which also includes a ready to twist flat version, without the approach addition at the front the twisted one has.

Here's a bug. Enabling use RCS for small corrections in landing guidance turns off RCS when it uses the thrusters then doesn't turn RCS back on so it can use it to control pitch/yaw/roll during descent. Build 460 got a lander down on land for me tonight but way short of KSC because it kept shutting off RCS so the lander wobbled too much, causing too much drag to make it to the space center. Also still bugged is to set the target to KSC Pad or VAB the set button has to be clicked twice. The first time it displays Target: N/A Click a second time and it displays the target coordinates.

Bonus if the vehicle resembles a 70's AMC Hornet or Javelin?

I would say yes to Kerbin based. The idea is to rely on the launch ramp to impart an axial rotation to the vehicle so that when it comes to the landing ramp it's oriented properly to touch down on its wheels and drive off the ramp. No using reaction wheels or wings and fins or RCS. The idea is to do it with physics, just like the Earthly car jumpers. If you want to try it on Eve, go for it.

To add to the fun, whatever you use for the cargo, every piece thrown away imparts slightly more velocity to the ship than the previous one as the remaining mass of the ship+cargo decreases. You may want to alter the "burn" as the "fuel" amount drops. Do you want a steady velocity change or a steady thrust that imparts an ever increasing velocity change? If among the cargo are some bungee cords, a slingshot with a calibrated scale (marked THRUST! with arrows labeled MOAR! and LESS!) would serve as a "throttle".

If your cargo is golf balls... regulation USGA maximum weight is 1.62 ounces. Are the tons long, short or metric? Long = 1016.05 kilos or 2240 pounds = 22123.45679012346 golf balls Short = 907.185 kilos or 2000 pounds = 19753.08641975309 golf balls Metric = 1000 kilos or 2204.62 pounds = 21774.02469135802 golf balls x10 the number of balls for this exercise.

From September 2013. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/51115-Ship-to-ship-kinetic-energy-transfer-test-report Not a challenge entry, just showing what I did back then.

This! The jump was developed for a James Bond movie (The Man with the Golden Gun) with an AMC Hornet. For years after, the Joey Chitwood Thrill Show used AMC Javelins to do the jump.In 2011 Chevrolet did it with a Sonic, calling the jump a kickflip. https://youtu.be/esSRxB_xYCg?t=62 Note the lousy, nearly sideways, landing due to the back end dropping as the car left the ramp. The designers of the stunt either didn't study the original or figured they could do it better. The original had a way to ensure the car's roll axis would parallel the trajectory so that when the speed and launch were right it would set down smoothly on the other ramp. A couple of clips in the first video show over-rotation and/or jumping too far. Those all do just one rotation. Try for two or more.

Build 455 got a lander down safely, though offshore from KSC, after returning from Mun and circularizing into an equatorial 72KM orbit. I saved just before starting the landing so I can try build 458 from the same starting conditions. It appeared to be turning the lander slightly to affect the north/south deflection during the firey phase. I had use RCS for small corrections enabled. The landing site looked like it was pretty close in line with the pad, just a bit overshot. Perfectly upright and a gentle plopdown into the water. Valentina had something to say about her spacecraft, seaweed and something else that was either unintelligible or unfit for mixed company. Any landing you can swim away from...

YES! I want to be able to put a bunch of airbrakes up on the nose of a rocket and have them *not* drag the nose around to the rear when they're not deployed. In other words, airbrakes that work like airbrakes, not combination fin/spoileron/airbrake thinguses. So long as when deployed they will make large amounts of drag, like a similarly sized wing panel sticking out at the same angle. Alan Aerospace Recycling and Packaging only very reluctantly uses parachutes. Properly functioning airbrakes should help the company continue not relying on flimsy cloth. Another drag issue some have noted is that the "lego" wing pieces don't drag shield each other edge to edge so building a large wing from them produces far more drag than a single part wing of the same size.

The way the airbrakes work, they're unusable as drag adders for a lander because huge fins have to be added to the tail of a rocket to shift the center of lift back. When closed and direction control disabled, the airbrakes are being treated as if they are fixed fins instead of having no lift or drag effect. How do airbrakes work in parts mods that have them? I was looking forward to having these as an alternative to parachutes. Dissapointing.

That inflatable aerobrake/heat shield NASA has been testing would be excellent for this mod.

Very likely won't work. Try and see. Sarbian is working on taming the beast that is the new aero in 1.0.2.

As has been suggested, even with pleading and begging, most such questions would never be asked if in the first post the link to the current dev build was made much larger, more noticeable, perhaps with a bit of a note to USE THIS ONE, not the latest release version - especially when the latest release is very buggy. (Not like with .90 or .25 where the initial release versions were quite usable.)

Do I put the hotfix dll in along with the original or do I rename it and replace the original?

I forgot the built in fuel crossfeed. It was pulling from the center Kerbodyne tank along with the four radially mounted tanks. That's why it would be nice to give these a tweakable to toggle crossfeed. Fuel crossfeed overrides staging order with MechJeb. Since the center tank is connected to the radial tanks via these engine mounts, MechJeb treats them all as one tank to be drawn from until empty before triggering decouplers higher up in the staging.

Is this entry necessary or required for parts to work correctly? ReStock has several parts much larger than the size 3 Kerbodyne ones.

bulkheadProfiles = size3, srf That's in the Kerbodyne fuel tank CFG files. Are larger ones available? What is the srf for?