Meltro
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Posts posted by Meltro
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I crowned a King
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After two solid months of work and hundreds of failed launch attempts, engineers gave one last shot at a 17 tank fuel truck. Instead of treating the assemblage as a single rocket, they attempted to bolt multiple sets of self-sufficient stages together to be launched as one piece
Each section worked flawlessly and had a large reserve of power
...as can be seen here. Wanting to finally go home to their spouses and future Kerbalnauts, the decision was made to simply throw together a 12 tank variant and make extra launches.
Engineers are now beginning cleanup of the Kerbin Sea, which is now primarily composed of strut material, orange tank debris, and rocket fuel.
Oh, and another White Dwarf engine stage was launched.
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"Who's this guy?"
"Dunno, some engineering dropout, went to the Military. He just showed up at the door this morning."
"Sounds Qualified! Get him into the VAB!"
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Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Although you could, in theory, do this with two intercept calculations it would end up looking something like a rotosketch drawing. What is really needed to do this is a frame of reference between the two bodies to be orbited that has zero angular velocity between the two. To my knowledge, such a frame of reference is unavailable.
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This is my standard tug. I used to have 12, and I deorbited all but 2
I regret that very much
As you can see, this one is around Jool. They make ideal intermediate stages from interplanetary craft from high to low orbit without burning a ton of fuel. Plus, there's always assembly to be done. I can't count how many times in the last few days I thought to myself "Alright, I'll just use a tug to....45#@^"
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Continued work on a fueler for my toys
Stability issues corrected
We're a little short on power (failed to achieve orbit)
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I continued work on a fuel-to-orbit system capable of refueling my big boys without a dozen launches
This design showed quite a bit of promise
...up to around 5,000 meters
*sigh*
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Well, I've been sidetracked on doing to get Jeb from Duna for days now, so I guess it's finally time to go get-
...nope, another megaton monster interplanetary ship.
34 big tanks without mission payload, 48 nuclear engines, launched in three stages.
And now I REALLY need a fueler, because my bitty little 4.5 tank fueler ain't gonna cut it.
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In preparation for my Duna Refuel mission, I needed to practice my long-range maneuvering skills. To Minmus!
I docked at my low-orbit station, switched out Newsey Kerman who'd been there for two years, and I decided to bring him along as repayment. He was so sick of being stuck in a ship that upon entering Minmus orbit, he jumped out and landed on his own. Gilfry took the lander down after and they posed for some shots:
Was then able to return using Mun as both an arresting slingshot and inclination correction, feeling very confident about this refuel operation now.
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PRESS RELEASE....PRESS RELEASE....PRESS RELEASE
The Kerbin Space Program has today launch the first of three high-gain, direction finding and communications relay satellites into orbit today. The program commenced after an embarrassing incident with the botched mission of Jebediah's Manhood to Jool. After receiving grainy, distorted video of Jebediah and Mac Kermin landing on what mission control thought was the Jool moon Laythe, mission control specialists spent over an hour adjusting the contrast of their rebroadcast to reduce the 'red wash' which had come over the video. It was only later discovered that the Manhood had not in fact encountered Laythe, but Duna. This was, of course, already known among Kerbin society as even amateur astronomers (and some kerbals with their naked eyes) managed to encounter the 100-fold increase in intensity from Duna the previous evening, which was today confirmed as a 3 kilometer-per-second decelaration maneuver of the 500-ton Manhood.
PRESS RELEASE....PRESS RELEASE....PRESS RELEASE
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I think rotorwashed has it on the nose. I have been playing since just after .21 came out, and in that short time, the game went from feeling funky and clunky to feeling more like how historical videos show the early days of NASA to me. Still feel growing pains, but over all more smoothed out as I get used to how the game works. It still feels very very kerbal to me as some of the crap I come up with would so not work IRL. I think its more of how you are progressing as a player honestly
I think this. I'm in a similar boat (started at .20), and I've found my skill level has drastically changed my play. Six weeks ago it was an effort to get things into orbit. I was so terrible at docking and rendevous that my first manned Mun mission was repeatedly pushed back. Today I aerobraked a 500 ton interplanetary craft (from Jool!) into a stable orbit. It took me weeks to build that thing and get it into orbit with tons of extra crap pieces still attached to it. I built its 1,000 ton successor in one day to go refuel it, with half the part count.
Things have changed for sure. The terror of a maneuver that leaves your fuel tanks below 1% never gets old.
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Lots and lots of unmanned missions. I generally will not send a Kerbal on any platform that hasn't at least been tried once. Everything in the inventory is also pilotable remotely. All missions require sufficient fuel to return with the exception of unmanned probes or rovers.
That being said....Jebediah has been known to push the envelope on occasion against the advice of mission control:
(Craft is safely in Duna orbit, lander achieved touchdown safely, craft is currently awaiting refueling)
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After the Kerbin Star's completion, Jebediah informed mission control that he was having none of this sit-around-and-wait-for-rescue crap
And plotted a course
Close encounters with Ike
With fuel supplies nearly exhausted, Captain Jebediah utilizes the nearby planet to reduce speed
Via aerobraking...
...into orbit. He then took the last of his fuel and a lander out on the next pass
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You've got an interstellar craft that's about 2,000m/s short of being able to get into orbit. How do you do it?
Aerobraking
Into orbit
That is all
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Sweet mother of lag! If that isn't a slideshow producer I don't know what is...
The Manhood is for sure, ~5 FPS at 619 parts. It was my first interplanetary, orbitally-constructed craft with many inefficiencies
The Kerbin Star utilized all the lessons learned from the Manhood. 329 parts, ~12 fps
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The Jebediah's Manhood, complete with landers and auxillary craft, leaving for it's ill-fated Jool mission
The Kerbin Star, hastily fast-tracked from design to orbit in a matter of hours due to the sudden need for a Jool rescue mission.
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Fueled Manhood's and fit landers/auxillary craft. Onward to Jool!
Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you, the most impossibly useless Jool orbit imagineable:
I'll not link the events that led up to this, my day spent attempting to get an octogonal heavy lifter working, my ill-advised foray into winged flight, the aborted landing attempt, the rushed construction of the Kerbin Star now that it's first mission will apparently be to rescue my 16 Kerbal Jool expedition. So here's the album. New stuff starts on image 17
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I built this.
That second picture is one of the greatest things I've seen in my entire life.
Well done, sir.
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Final assembly of the Jebediah's Manhood. As I now have a proper appreciation of what part count does to my framerate, the engine pods have no stabilization or remote control ability. Thus, I must use the ship that DOES have those things to come to the pods.
Thrusters on!
And half of my monopropellant later...it docked. Ok, it worked but it's not the best idea. Let's try something else. The launcher sucks for maneuverability, so I shall employ one of my tugs:
...and just throw the thing at the ship.
...c'mon....
Boom. Wash, rinse, repeat. Last one....
And presenting...
Onward to shakedown!
There would be half a dozen landers and two tugs attached, but we're just checking out the engines at this point. Simple orbit to Mun, and back to Kerbin. Mission report to follow, but my next ship is already on the drawing board. Here's a sneak peek:
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My own observations of the current 2.0.9 version of MJ:
I find it does the following things extremely well:
- Launch and ascent, whether you do it on autopilot or just have MJ project a target mark on the navball for you to follow the carefully tweaked ascent profile you've developed. If your rocket wobbles around, it's probably because it's unstable or improperly balanced to begin with. For instance, I see no tail feathers on the rocket used in the tests. I would blame that before I blamed MJ. But you MUST have MJ's antenna parallel with the long axis of your rocket and pointed at the nose. Otherwise, Bad Things happen.
- Doing standard orbit tweaks (circularize, adjust Ap and/or Pe, change inclination, etc.). Results are accurate to more significant digits with MJ than with manual burns, which can be important if you have to place a satellite JUST SO. Otherwise, just a time-saver for easy but repetitive tasks.
- Docking. This version of MJ, unlike the previous versions, is EXCELLENT at docking, getting it done safely, smoothly, and with minimal RCS usage. HOWEVER, you have to remember to turn on the RCS Balancer function for it, it doesn't do so itself (and remember to turn it off again after docking). If you don't, then MJ's docking is no better than before. Also, be sure you've selected "control here" on some centrally located part, like the docking port you're going to use. Otherwise, it defaults to the MJ part stuck on the side of the rocket, so it will line that up with the center of the target port so you'll be half a diameter off.
- Executing LLLOOONNNNNGGGGGG burns common with nuclear and ion engines. Having to suffer through these manually is the exact opposite of fun. Just be sure to blip the throttle for a split second before giving MJ the go-ahead or else the burn time calculator will be screwed up and MJ will do an inaccurate burn.
I'm not sure what I could do different to counter wobble during the ascent. The rocket is about as stable as a rocket can be and can be piloted manually without SAS. If you were to simply launch it with nothing on it would get into the third stage before moving past 45 degrees off vertical due to the imbalance between the docking port and MJ mod. I've eschewed tail fins long ago as unecessary weight, and once you reach 40-50k the craft changes control dynamics rapidly, so the rocket would have to be relatively controllable without them anyway. They also had a habit of tearing my rockets apart from control stresses. These days, I keep my aerodynamic surfaces to my spaceplanes.
As far as doing orbital tweaks 'Just So', I can see that yes, but at this point in the game my burns are all fleshed out afterwords with lateral RCS translation. I get within 1 m/s of my goal (sometimes more), remove the maneuver, then use RCS translation to pinpoint my target. In docking this gets me to 0.1km every time (One should never attempt 0.0, for obvious reasons) and in interplanetary travel it gets to the point where I can plan a slingshot past two orbital bodies before having to wait to refine. Unless I'm aiming outside of Kerbin/Mun/Minmus I never even use the standard maneuver tool.
I was not aware of a thruster balancing feature, I'll give it a shot.
- Launch and ascent, whether you do it on autopilot or just have MJ project a target mark on the navball for you to follow the carefully tweaked ascent profile you've developed. If your rocket wobbles around, it's probably because it's unstable or improperly balanced to begin with. For instance, I see no tail feathers on the rocket used in the tests. I would blame that before I blamed MJ. But you MUST have MJ's antenna parallel with the long axis of your rocket and pointed at the nose. Otherwise, Bad Things happen.
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Can you share the staging? A few of your comments indicate yours is non-traditional -- for example, why would MechJeb stage when you expected it to stage? And what does it mean to oscillate between ignition and separation?
For ascent, both 10km and 5km are suboptimal turn starts; 8km seems better on most spacecraft. And you should end at about 40km or maybe a tiny bit lower, and don't allow MechJeb to accelerate quite as much as it likes to do.
MechJeb definitely has an issue with roll: it tries very very hard to keep a certain roll angle, even when you're flying a symmetric rocket. This can make it do stupid things. It also sometimes does weird things when you tell it to slew a lot (say from prograde to antinormal) -- it doesn't go along a great circle route but along something else, I'm not sure what.
The staging on the test platform is as you'd likely guess from the picture, all three on plus boosters, release boosters, drop outboards, stage to upper. I was more referring to some other playing around I had done with some mid-stage boosters and drop-tanks. I'm not sure if it's merely a setup MJ can understand or if it just gets it right as long as you put the staging in the proper order for human useage.
The oscillation on separation and ignition was referring to the default delay in how staging was set, the 0.5 seconds between stage and engine ignition. When the two outboards dropped on my early ascent, the ship would lose attitude control for a moment before the engine ignited and the outboards had dropped free. since the craft was slightly skewed, when the throttle came up it gave it a slight lateral push into the dropped outboard tanks, resulting in Rapid Unplanned Dissassembly.
You remained pretty objective in your analysis and gave both the control and experimental group equal weighting. You had a clear goal in mind and a set of parameters you stuck with. The tests performed were more than fair and are indicative of typical day-to-day actions for KSP players - about my only nitpick is you didn't test how it finds escape vectors, but that nit to pick off is frankly really tiny. And I'll be honest, I've found your experiment here particularly enlightening, so definitely bonus points for your concise conclusions.Heh, wow, I hadn't really planned it to be like that. Personally I felt the sample size was small, and the testing hardly rigorous. Thank you, though.
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Intro:
I've been playing KSP for about a month now, and have gone from 'oh please oh please just get into orbit any orbit' to deorbiting fuel tanks that are near full and planning grand tours of the whole system. I usually have a distinct distaste for plugins, and I felt with autopilots available I had best learn how to do things myself before giving up control to a machine. I am comfortable docking, intercepting, matching orbits, transferring, and landing (at last). I felt it was time to see how I measured up, and see if I had some gaping holes in my game.
NOTE: WHILE FRAMED AS A COMPETITION, I AM NOT DENIGRATING THE HARD WORK THAT HAS BEEN PUT INTO MECHJEB! I have never written an autopilot myself, and have no idea how difficult it is or what it entails. These are merely my observations from using the system for the first time.
THE CONTESTANTS:
[table=width: 500, align: left]
[tr]
[td]
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
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[tr]
[td]
MechJeb2 2.0.9.0
[/td]
[td]
Jebediah Kerman
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[/table]
THE SHIP:
ROUND ONE: ASCENT
MechJeb loses points right off the bat for causing the testing rig to explode. As I had no intention of making major modifications to my fleet designs to accommodate the plugin, the remaining option was to modify the plugin. A few launches later, I had my answer: MJ likes to oscillate. At staging, it would continue it's oscillation between separation and ignition, causing a strike with the falling tanks. Setting the separation delay settings to zero corrected the issue, however the oscillation issue would rear its ugly head later on in testing. Aside from that, MJ was able to figure out staging times and priorities without difficulty.
Of note was how quickly MJ began the lateral translation, almost half the altitude I typically use. Upon seeing this, I though 'man, I'm screwed, this thing is gonna have so much fuel left'. Incredibly, my much less aggressive launch profile produced almost the same efficiency to 100km: 2070dV remaining to MechJeb's 2156. The human gets an efficiency rating of 96% versus the machine, and with none of that oscillatory wall-to-wall crap. And before you ask, orbital declination < 0.1 degrees.
Winner: TIE
ROUND TWO: RENDEZVOUS
Setup consisted of two identical iterations of the testing platform, both in identical 100k orbits and slight declination difference, at approximately 90 degrees phase difference. Given the problem, Mechjeb chooses a high (>200k!) orbit to match phase. While I understand that it is possible to set one's own orbit to match phase, I cannot comprehend why it would by default burn so much delta-v. The amount of time saved doesn't justify the use of consumables. After arriving near the target, MJ reduced relative to 0 and then approach the target via main engine, albeit slowly and wobbly. Disconcerting, however unimportant in the final scheme. I would like to see an option to use RCS at this point but hey, it works.
Winner: MECHJEB (just remember to set your own orbit)
ROUND THREE: DOCKING
What began as a minor annoyance has become a killer. The oscillation with RCS at this point becomes incredible. While the docking was successful, it was a long and tedious process, regardless of how I adjusted the maximum speed allowed. It would have been downright graceful had my poor ships not been shaking like an epileptic watching anime. Small though it was, I was just waiting for those solar panels to get thrown off.
Winner: JEBEDIAH KERMAN
ROUND FOUR: LANDING
Possibly MJs best event, a precision atmospheric landing. This is difficult to eyeball properly but with some practice can be done with a steep descent angle and some cautious RCS use. As expected, MJ ended up at KSC with no intervention on my part, passing through 5000m and dead-on to hit just off the launchpad
4000m
3000m
Check, yup, autostage is on
2000m
Um, any time now...
1500m
?!?!?!?
1000m
SPACEBAR SPACEBAR SPACEBAR
Well, perhaps there's an option I missed somewhere. Craft landed successfully, albeit with quite a bit of screaming from the Kerbin B-team. Alas, Jebediah was also able to land on the complex, less than 1km away from his Cylon counterpart.
Winner: TIE
ROUND 5: BONUS ROUND
He's Jebediah Kerman. He's got the most awesome smile of any video game character created. He reminds you that, even when things are going badly, you're still riding on top of 100 tons of high-explosive awesome.
That being said, if you ask him exactly how MUCH explosive tonnage, what that means in delta-v, where it is right now, where it's going, what it's made of, or anything else of the like, he will have naught to offer.
Winner: MECHJEB, although not by much
Conclusions:
MechJeb is quite neat, mature, and certainly capable of some amazing feats. Especially interesting was how much of my intent it was able to accomplish without me actually putting an option in anywhere. Most of the steps it took to an open-ended problem were quite sound. That being said, it suffers enormously from oscillation relating to how it 'looks for zero', and doesn't seem to capitalize on all resources available. At a minimum, I would hope that it would make more use of gyros for attitude control instead of wall to wall thrustering, but it seems to be able to accomplish the goal most of the time.
That being said, I do NOT recommend MechJeb for a new player. The skills that I have picked up in the last four weeks have been invaluable to understanding the game overall. While I could certainly see utilizing such a utility for mundane, repetitive tasks that I have done before, I would strongly recommend never doing anything with MechJeb that you aren't already able to accomplish with a reasonable degree of efficiency.
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Holy lag, Batman. What is the FPS on that thing?!
About 5, it actually has more parts attached right now than will be in the final (or not, haven't designed the probes yet but they should be simple-ish). Still useable, but annoying.
Also, vote for sticky
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The fuel can on the left was especially dicey, as combined with the tug it amounted to six (full!) tanks on one standard-sized clamp-o-tron port with a TON of torque on the joint. The whole reason I had to use the tug in such a horrible manner was because I forgot to put RCS on the fuel can, so I couldn't use the nice, large clamp-o-tron sr. docking port it had *facepalm*
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King me