Visari

It's from several months ago, patch 23.5 I believe. Didn't play much since and lost most of the good screenshots. Craft file if you're interested. Uses AJE, StretchySRB, pwings, FAR, probably B9 gears.

Lost the other screenshots, I'm afraid.

Has anyone at all tried this in RSS full realism mode with Advanced Jet Engines? A google search through the thread's 145 pages doesn't tell me much, unfortunately.

Back in .18 or .19 I believe, pic taken at the highest mountain of Tylo on the equator the station passes over in its stable, circular, extremely low orbit. Constructed using then maximum possible realism, including RT and TAC LS. Great view for the crew, relatively safe, minimum Dv required for mining operations. Best part was docking the parts together at that altitude.. nerve wracking crazy.

I have no experience with this, but sounds like IRC channel to me.

Typing so many FIXEDs must feel so satisfying! Keep up the good work and don't forget to enjoy it yourself. If this fix would have RPL feel playable to the common player, I would suggest using an alternative way, perhaps a custom mission in MCE to grant a major science boost, or a custom science probe hidden from general release (separate download?) to grant lots of science.

A good start, I can see you have experience building planes, and with 25 years of experience and such a setup, piloting them is a cakewalk for you. If you truly want the hardest of plane challenges, Dirt_Merchant and I often challenge each other with some miscellaneous things in Kerbal Live Feed. Feel free to drop in! Examples would be to get a plane to land the way you did it, but still allow the same plane to reach speeds of mach 3 and up. Another, and by far the one I learned from most, was building a helicopter using IR's free moving docking washer, with jet engines mounted on the Pwing rotors powering the thing. Had to actually get a swashplate working to steer the thing.

This I always imagined to be the biggest moodkiller for any mod author. I have deep respect for those patient people who continue through it all and even help out people whose posting attitudes appear negative in the first place. Not weird. Experienced or lucky to have good intuition, or limiting yourself to general planes. Many people have trouble just taking off without crashing at all. You got to mach 5.5, but could always optimize your plane. The more specific a task you need your plane to accomplish, the harder it gets to design it. The worse you design it, the harder it gets to fly it. If you want to challenge your plane building skills, try an STOL capable of horizontal landing on the VAB helipad without rocket assisted landing or vertical thrusters). Many things that can make designing and flying a plane much harder, even for the experienced engineer.

AIES is your best source of small engines, I recommend you install it.

About the planes: keep in mind that many people consider planes incredibly hard in ksp. That's because they are. While some may love the idea of planes (I support plane experiments fully), some may not like the idea. I would suggest keeping the plane experiments optional, especially if you choose to balance them with AJE (ever tried to merely reach mach 4 with just AJE's jet engines?). With MCE, it's fairly easy to keep the plane mission tree separate from the rest, while with custom experiments, it's hard to keep balance for all players due to some skilled pilots exploiting the science from the atmospheric flights, while others shun it and try to avoid any atmospheric level flight altogether.

Cryogenic fuels evaporate over time and need to be vented out to relieve the pressure, I think. When in the atmosphere, the tanks are affected by the surrounding air, slightly warming up despite insulation. Same with sun exposure (not sure whether this is simulated in-game). You could have the launchclamps top your rocket off by having them constantly generate resources, or consume negative resources. I think it was a fairly easy alteration in the cfg to get this effect. or make an MM file with @part[LaunchClamp1] { RESOURCE { name = LiquidOxidizer amount = 1000 maxAmount = 1000 } MODULE { name = ModuleGenerator isAlwaysActive = true OUTPUT_RESOURCE { name = LiquidOxidizer rate = 10 } } } Suppose you would need TAC fuel balancer to pump it out of the launchclamp to distribute it over the rocket, and add these lines for every desired resource. Also double check the code, I don't really do this sort of editing a lot..

http://speedy.sh/4PJmf/SSTO-v3.craft I was under the impression tweaking the maximum thrust of an engine would be unrealistic. With my very limited knowledge of rocket science, I would assume that an unthrottlable rocket engine could only have reduced thrust with reduced efficiency (lower Isp). Though this is purely guessing, so it's very possible NK will correct me here.

This is correct, some experiments require the ship to be at InSpaceLow location, which is by your mod's standards, I think, the previous RSS 105km(ish?) altitude. When the experiment is performed anywhere between 105km and 180km, the experiment will fail, telling the player that it is not available or can't be done right now, consuming the data gained in the process. Likewise, the data resource can be obtained while in that altitude range for InLowSpace data generation probes. Don't quote me on those numbers, they're out of the top of my head. Also gonna call it a night, so good luck!

He made it possible to make them so sexy himself by making stretchytanks so awesome. Those conic tanks really allow some creativity with different shapes, this is unfortunately the only and the least impressive design I have a screenshot of. btw, did anyone ever try an SSTO spaceplane in RSS, with AJE, FAR, DREC & RO? This design took me 12 hours from initial design to final touchdown on runway after full orbit to get right. Very nice challenge!

General note: may want to fiddle with PROCFAIRINGS_MINRAD in Keramzit\ProceduralFairings\common.cfg considering the small payloads we start with as opposed to stock tech trees.

@(1): that would be first to recover something from orbit, right? or were the corona/discoverer suborbital? Wouldn't the '46 US V2 rocket be the first object from space to have photograps recovered from, or other v2 rocket parts that survived explosion and impact on britain? @(2): first manned suborbital flight? wasn't that 2 years after vostok 1?

So, with MS19 released and semi-fixed, I guess I can get to playing it and meanwhile get back into writing some MCE missions for it. Although I understand MS19 isn't fully complete yet, and more importantly, some realism mods are still missing due to incompatibility and squad patches breaking them (kOS and RT2 mainly), I can keep them in mind when designing the missions. My goal is to simulate many of the major world firsts, using MS19 experiments where possible. This list may not be accurate or complete, so if anyone has suggestions for it, go ahead. # # # phase 1: '40s # rocket planes (X-1) # rocket control (Viking) # suborbital (V-2) # # phase 2: '50s # orbit (sputnik) # lunar flyby (luna 1) # lunar impact (luna 2) # circumlunar (luna 3) # # phase 3: '60s # manned orbit (vostok 1) # venus flyby (mariner 5) # mars flyby (mariner 4) # lunar landing (luna 9) # lunar orbit (luna 10) # docking (gemini 8) # venus atmospheric probe (venera 4) # manned lunar orbit (apollo 8) # manned lunar return lander (apollo 11) # # phase 4: '70s # unmanned lunar return lander (luna 16) # unmanned lunar rover (lunokhod 1) # space station (salyut 1, 24 days) # venus surface-landed probe (venera 7) # mars orbit (mariner 9) # mars lander (mars 3) # jupiter flyby (pioneer 10) # gravity assist (mariner 10) # (triple) mercury flyby (mariner 10) # venus orbit (venera 9) # venus lander (venera 9) # phobos flyby (viking orbiter 1) # deimos flyby (viking orbiter 2) # saturn flyby (pioneer 11) # # phase 5: '80s+ # space shuttle # ES L1 orbit (ISEE-3/ICE) # first EVA jetpack (STS-41- # uranus flyby (voyager 2) # phobos orbit (phobos 2) # jupiter impact (galileo) # jupiter moon flybies (galileo) # mars rover (pathfinder) # interstellar medium (voyager 1)

I think I understand now, you essentially gave every part in the entire game a base science value of 20, am I correct? You bad, bad man. shame on you. Anyway, confirmed fixed WAC now gives 35.71428 science.

What I do not understand, however, is how it's still 20, not 35.71428 Additionally, this should only alter the experiment with RPLprobeReport in it.. which so far is only some NovaPunch thing. -- edit: and 4 stock non-spherical probes. Also, do not take my word as fact. I am confused if anything, so double check things.

Not just harder, likely impossible. Best speed I've attained in FAR using stock and pwings in 23.5 is mach 1.75 at about 25-30km. If using all other realism mods, even taking off becomes impossible due to the power requirement and supply tweaks from RO, creating the need for more than 8000 fixed solar panels per ion engine.

Removing the following has altered the science gained from the WAC probe from 10 to 20. In RPL_Tweak_Pack\Tweaks\Remote_Tech_TransmissionCost_Tweaks\RPL_Tweaks_ScienceDefs_All.cfg : // RPLprobeReport 21 @EXPERIMENT_DEFINITION[*]:HAS[#id[RPLprobeReport] { @baseValue = 10 }

seeing as how this is essentially a plane challenge, would it make sense to allow FAR with a separate scoreboard?

Throwing a wing directly onto a fairing will negate its drag aswell, as can be seen with my previous proof of concept (huge fairing with big wings). But like throwing intakes under fairings, I would see this as breaking the rules. Otherwise, this is getting closer to the ideal craft design. Few points to be improved upon: weight reduction (unmanned, smaller fuel tank?), more engine to dead weight/drag ratio.

I remember having this issue when I first launched RSS v6 in combination with visual enhancements (clouds / city lights) or something. Been some time, can't remember fully, but I'm nearly certain my video card wasn't the issue when I got the red planet issue, more than likely a weird combination of visual enhancement config and/or planet config + RSS config for krag's planet factory.

B9 gear is actually extremely fragile in current state. It requires balance tweaks posted in the B9 thread and other places.