Dangerous_Beans

reminds me of getting one to test a sepratron at 22-24km, and 200-300m/s. finally did it by putting a jet plane into a completely vertical climb, and cutting the engines at the right point. it was some pretty impressive flying, until Jeb messed up the landing

off topic but.. a Kerbal can use the jet pack to fly in up to 3.2m/s gravity, the Moon's gravity is 1.6 m/s, so if Neil Armstrong had jetpack 1/10th as powerful, he would be wishing for a more powerful jetpack

it's a singe player game, you don't need to force people to wait through everything in real time. the fact that they could time-warp through the gravity mapping or go fly a different ship while doing a goo experiment sounds like a good thing. i like this suggestion, more science experiments that take place over time would be good. it would give a greater differentiation between establishing orbits and doing fly-bys, while currently there is often no reason to orbit if you won't land.

the orbit i imagine: test part just needs high/low orbit, satellite delivery orbit of x periapsis, y apoapsis, z inclination.

from what i have read, the usual approach is to split the burn over two orbits; burn to establish a high apoapsis eccentric orbit, then do the injection burn at the periapsis of the next orbit. you then probably need to do a correction burn midway there. my approach is to just leave from a high orbit and just use a bit more fuel. however i use mods like Kethane or Interstellar, so if i am doing things with low T/W nuke craft i usually have refuelling stations on Minimus so i don't really care.

oh yes, "it" will be worth it. but i can't tell you what "it" is. you'll find out. on topic; if you are tired of Kerbal then take a break. you can stop playing for 6 or 12 months, and come back in a couple of versions when things have changed. go shoot things in space and come back for .25

i don't know, IRL they are quite practical as you can just turn them on and go have a nap. that approach is just a pain in the arse for a computer game. which is pretty much what KSP has taught me; most space flight is just waiting. burn engines for 10 minutes, wait 3 months. there is a reason the hitch-hiker module includes a locker labelled "Games".

all these warp drives, fusion reactors, and beamed power systems. i think this thread needs some low tech, dirt burning rockets. my Mun Hopper, currently parked in the Mun's Polar Crater with the crew Bill, Bob and Wehrney. three aluminium/oxidiser rockets, a basic molten salt reactor, space for 8 kerbals if needed, and capable of hopping around the moon for years. one crater left, then i am going to ship the crew, data and samples home. edit; totally got the idea from Scott Manley, but it works really well.

@DeepOdyssey are you doing something with the power? reactors only run a 100% when there is somewhere for the energy to go, and it sounds like it's just automatically throttling.

yeah. i have built long range space probes using 0.625m parts only, giant fuel tankers that only use 5m parts other than the probe core, and weird contraptions that use all of them. all parts are useful, except the radial mk55 engine

i'm not sure if this would work in KSP, but it's a pretty cool idea. for the actual orbital airship idea, KSP unloads vehicles in the atmosphere so you couldn't do the floating base. though i think there is a mod that can fix that? i think one issue is that the hooligan labs airships are designed for low atmosphere flight, and are similar to the ascent stage of the JP Aerospace plan. according to their wiki and some excel maths, the cirrus envelope should be able to lift ~25 ton to 12km, where atmospheric pressure is 0.09. i'm not sure that is high enough for it to start going quick on ion engines. maybe give it a test? the big issue is that ion engines are slow. the JP people are planning several days for the orbiter stage to reach orbit: even if it only takes a few hours in KSP, that is far more time than i am willing to dedicate. my beamed power thermal turbojet rockets can do an apoapsis of 40km with no fuel usage in <2 minutes. far less efficient, but far faster. something similar that might be practical in KSP would be a rockoon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockoon). use the airship envelopes to haul the rocket up to 12-15km, then burn to space on high isp engines (possibly nukes?). still, it may work and would make a cool mission report.

you could roleplay it: attach an empty Jumbo tank or two, and consider them living space. ship them up full of fuel and call it a wet workshop (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_workshop) you could use mods, i think there is an inflatable habitation part in one of the mods. you could just add more hitchhikers: my current mothership that i'm building has 5 hitchhikers, 2 science labs, and a mk2 lander can, and will probably only carry a crew of 8-12. my Duna mission went with a crew of 4, but had space for 9.

for 1 - you will need at least one dish per planet/moon. on the Kerbin side of the link you can point the dish at the planet and it will connect with all things around that SOI that are pointing back at it. so a simple Duna relay would be 3 satellites in geosynchrounous orbit, each with a dish pointed at Duna, and 3 in orbit of Duna with a dish pointing back at Kerbin. you do need to worry about the angles of the dish, as the dish is pointing at the centre of the body, so may not cover the outer reaches of the SOI: the target's SOI occupies x degrees of the sky from the satellite, and the dish has a cone of y degrees, then if x>y you wont be able to connect via that dish from the outer reaches of the target's SOI. dish range and angle have an inverse relationship, so just use the shortest range dish you can. 2 - you might be able to use omni antennas. what will the maximum distance between the satellites be? it's pretty simple to work out if you know the altitude. just include some margin for error, as it's pretty hard to get the aligned exactly (unless you are a better pilot than me). Edit: i think there is a remote tech wiki around that has a bunch of this info in it, having a look at that may help you.

in my experience, the point of SSTOs is when you need to stick a 3.75/5m stage under a payload fairing to stop it flipping over, and the only way to make it fly is to stick enough fuel into it to make it reach space in one stage. the point of space planes it to kill <s>kerbals</s> time while waiting for your current mission to reach where ever it's going.

I've seen them throttle automatically. What sort of power are you using from it, and in what sort of situation? with the resources, is there a limited quantity? or is it just high concentration/low concentration?

I think this is right: dV = isp * g0 * ln(Mi / Me) dV being our change in velocity: we know that you went from 0 to 350m/s, so dV is 350. we can ignore the mass of the launching contraption, as we are interested in the fuel efficiency of using it to fire payloads into orbit. so the final mass is Bill on his own, so 0.09375 according to Yasmy above (sounds about right to me), and the initial mass is Bill + the xenon used to accelerate him. so that give us 350 = Isp * 9.81 * ln (0.18375/0.09375). reorganise: Isp = 350/(9.81*ln(0.18375/0.09375)) = 53.0s so bugger all. sadly mass drivers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver) don't seem to work in kerbal at the moment. edit: think my calculation was slightly off

for a single stage it's about 36km/s. with an OKTO2, 1 ion engine, and 2 OX4L 1x6 panels (which is about the lightest probe i could think of), 1 fuel tank will give you ~7km/s. 10 tanks give you ~25km/s, 100 ~34km/s, 1,000 ~35.9km/s, 10,000 36.055km/s. of course it's worth pointing out that xenon tanks have a crappy mass fraction of .58 (a jumbo has .888). it's only the ISP of the ion engine that allows it to get that high.

i mostly land on Minimus, gravity wells scare me (don't mention the purple one). though i do refer to the Mun, rather than just Mun. which is weird now i think about it.

turn off SAS or Smart ASS just before you dock. SAS/Smart ASS is trying to keep the ship still, but because the ship is so long the torque causes it to bend, and the SAS/Smart ASS reacts by applying more SAS torque. if you hit the right length, weight, and SAS/RCS/control surface distribution you get ships that just wobble themselves apart. for long, micro gravity ships i suggest you design them so each part has RCS thrusters, and use them to move it around. also make sure you take your time, taking a minute to turn 180 degrees is entirely reasonable.

what are you using for the final stage? strip that down to the absolute minimum; FAR probably restricts you from using a command seat, so maybe a mk1 pod, fuel tank and engine. what are your goals for the launcher? to get into LEO, or to return to Kerbin? building something to get to Kerbin is going to be much harder than building something to get to a 97km Eve orbit. can you post a pic of what you have built?

ooh, i really want to make a Minmus inspired dessert. i'm thinking a ball of mint icecream with little chocolate chips (Minmus can't be all ice, there should be small bits of rock in it), and then coat it with white chocolate sorbet. or maybe serve it with a white chocolate fudge sauce? wish i could think of something to do for the Mun inspired one, though Kerbin could be a mixture of mint and berry sorbets. my head cannon is that Bill and Bob are in love, i have them write crappy love poems to each other when ever they plant flags, and that Jeb feels their behaviour detracts from the majesty of space exploration.

i know i am a bit late, but i wanted to answer this: so our target is ~2,400m/s, based on your first post, which using the rocket equation and the isp of RCS thrusters (and some trial and error cause my maths isn't that good) gives us a mass ratio of slightly over 2:1. if we use a big RCS tank (though the tiny ones would also work, same mass ratio), one seat, a kerbal, and four blocks we get a full mass of 3.74, empty of 0.74, T/W of 0.1, and a dV of 4,126. you could use that to return from low Moho orbit. if we add more RCS blocks (say, 10) we have dV of 3457.9, and a T/W of 0.25, which should be plenty to land and return from the Mun. going for faster than a jetpack, we need over 12 RCS blocks. at 16 rcs blocks we get 3.6m/s, and still have nearly 3km dV. hell, at 96 rcs blocks (if they fit) we have >1km dV and a T/W > 1 on Kerbin. (unless i have messed up my maths somewhere. that has been known to happen ) so depending on how you define "outperform", it's pretty easy to do.

+1 i'll also add that probe bombs result in very complex ships that can be a pain to launch. i remember building a 5 part probe bomb to fire a Jool, and every time i would try to launch it, it would break. i pulled it apart and launched them as 5 separate probes, and had no issues getting the damn things into space. so as a general guide; launch multiple simpler ships, rather than one large ship.

katateochi already has a thin atmosphere, rocket powered glider. so send that into Jool!

from memory, and i could be way off here, ISP for a craft with multiple different engines firing at the same time is: ([iSP engine 1]*[engine 1 thrust] + [iSP engine 2]*[engine 2 thrust] + ect) / total thrust. good luck with Moho!