Ittiz

As soon as I started career mode I went to the vehicle assembly building, built this simple SSTO and launched it into orbit. Without studying anything

I found many rocket engines seem to have an SSTO sweet spot in the engine to fuel ratio. That is how many tanks you need per rocket to get your ship into orbit. I'm not talking about space planes here, just pure rockets. I checked it out for each engine and made a list: Main Sail: 4 & 64s per engine Skipper: 1 & 2/3rds 64s per engine LVT-30: 1 & 1/11ths 32s per engine LVT-45: 1 32 per engine Aerospike: 1 & 3/4ths 16s per engine LV-909: 1 800 per engine 48-72: 1 & 1/2 200s per engine The Poodle, 24-77, LV-1, LV-1R, 55-R and LV-N are all no good due to their poor ISP at ground level. That doesn't mean they're no good at all, just not good to be used alone for SSTO from Kerbin. For instance I have found ways using a combination of jet engines and LV-Ns to do SSTO. Also the LV-N is one of the best engines in low gravity fields. It needs the least fuel for a given delta V of any rocket engine in a vacuum. None of the solid boosters cut the mustard for SSTO. All of them have too much thrust to fuel.

This is just proof KSP is super easy compared to real life. Jool has almost exactly the same physical characteristics as Venus IRL and today we launch from a planet even bigger than that (Earth). Here are the stats: Jool | Venus Diameter: 6,000km | 6,051.8km Mass: 4.2332635×10^24 kg | 4.8676×10^24 kg Gravity: 7.85 m/s^2 | 8.87 m/s^2 Escape V: 9,704.43 m/s | 10,360 m/s Density: 4,678.7834 kg/m^3 | 5,243 kg/m^3 Surface P: 15 atm | 92 atm Sources are KSP wiki and Wikipedia. The bottom line is if you can't launch from Jool you couldn't launch from Earth either. Hence why getting into space is such a challenge.

Like other people mentioned "MOAR STRUTS" the first massive ship I built exploded on the pad. Then the next one broke at the staging seem, but I didn't know. So it became completely uncontrollable. I found the solution was MOAR STRUTS! Then I found I needed way more RCS and monopropellant to keep the big beasts going where I wanted them to.

Well yep my first Mun landing went quite well, until after I was landed anyway. The first ship I sent was rover which I had only tested on Kerbin. So after I landed I got my Kerbal into the first car wreck on the Mun too because I didn't realize you couldn't just gun it like I had done on Kerbin. I had to send another rover, with which I was able to finish the mission and return the Kerbal.

I've mentioned what we need is different systems that you can play depending on difficulty level. The Kerbol system would be the "Easy" setting. The way the game is set up right now is really for pure beginners in rocket science. There should be more advancement. With the current system there is tons of room to make fudges and correct them.

90km if I recall. I've done missions with a Laser Catalyzed Fusion drive I modded into the game, never with conventional stuff.

Due to the inclinations being 0 degrees eclipses are very common. The only eclipse I've seen so far was when I landed a lander on a peak of eternal light on the south pole of the Mun. Although the light wasn't quite eternal because Kerbin would eclipse the sun once a Mun day.

I did come up with a ship design I called the hanging fruit basket design that required no parachute no nothing to land as long as you were going 120kps or less. Too bad the thing was so unstable the design was used often to save the Kerbals upon a launch disaster. Usually the only part that came out intact was the pod holding the kerbals.

That one is cool, what's with all the RCS?

They do have lifting stats though. I'd be curious to see how well the rocket does without it. Also what the big white tank thing you have on top. A big cheat would be something that had a next to nil empty tank weight. Which is the main reason we don't have modern SSTOs. The tank weight is still too high when empty to work. Your craft also looks like it's just a lifter, my was supposed to be more of a lander design. This thing could take off from Laythe with ease for instance as long as it refuled before making the decsent. Now an SSTO would be a huge challenge from Eve.

Those "fins" (canards) generate lift. Once your going horizontal they probably help you a lot. I wanted no lifting structures what so ever besides the engines.

I noticed almost everyone on here who make SSTO's make planes. Well I decided to do a VTOL rocket that takes off from the pad as an SSTO since I didn't see any on here that had absolutely no lifting structure parts or didn't drop at least some weight. This is what I came up with. It does have one modded part on it but it's not magical or anything. Just modded some of the small rocket tanks to have only liquid fuel. They weigh the same and have the same amount of total fuel weight so it doesn't give an advantage. Just more convenient. First it uses jet engines to launch, which have an ISP of about 800 on the ground. At about 20k I use an action group to switch off the jets and turn on the NERVAs (which have a vacuum ISP of 800) simultaneously. If I'm just a few seconds too late the jet engines choking will cause the ships to tailspin. Because of the low trust to weight ratio of the NERVAs I trust all the way to orbit. No shutting down then doing an orbital burn. The ship in orbit, notice there is still enough fuel left to maneuver. Randevu with the space station. If it were going to go on an interplanetary mission I could fuel up and continue on. Since this was just a dry run I decided to land the ship after. Our favorite Kerbalnaught after a successful landing. I found that using the jet engines for a vertical landing was more weight efficient than parachutes, since the on orbit weight of this thing was so high that the number of parachutes needed to land it safely make it difficult to achieve orbit. Landing is a bit of challenge since since jet engines react a bit slowly in a VTOL situation.

Yeah using KAS is realistic if you're assuming the cables are nano tubes. However to make the game easier Squad increased all the planet densities by an order of magnitude. Making them much tinier and causing them to have a much smaller SOI. A good example of this is Jool is a gas planet in the game but has almost exactly the same size and density characteristics as the planet Venus IRL. So a space elevator could probably be built from the surface of Kerbin without using any fancy nano tubes. Also what I was doing was a test. If the test had succeeded what I was going to do was attach cables to the ground at the KSC. Then have two ships attached to the cable in space. A smaller one below geostationary and a larger one beyond it, maybe a third one geostationary. When something was going to be hauled into space, the smaller one closer to Kerbin would release a cable which would descend to Kerbin. There would be a few cables attaching the stations together. One of which would actually be two cables attached to some kind of carrier with two winches attached to each station. That way objects could be ferried from one to the other. So the load could be transferred to the ferry and pulled up the rest of the cable by the station beyond geostationary. If you wanted to release it at geostationary you would just have to stop the winch at that point and release the cargo. On the other hand my accidental sky hook did work around Minmus. Although I didn't use it to make any low energy orbital transfers. The gravity at Minmus is already so low anyway you could reach escape velocity with a sneeze just about.

Well I didn't use any hacks (per se, I only modded KAS to have a cable length as long as I wanted (Well I also turned down the springyness since the backlash on a 5km cable can tear a ship in two)). Some invincible tower that drops your ship right in to LKO is a little ridicules and unrealistic. I think the physics of the game are pretty solid (talking about orbital mechanics and not drag models), but loading and unloading of parts and ships from memory at a certain distance is the issue.

Ahh crap ok. I tried it at 30 km, but I waited half an hour for the cables to descend to the surface in Minmus' low gravity but when I got impatient and descended to check how long they were they only made it to 5km. Also it's was extremely difficult to maintain that position while it descends, requiring second by second manual adjustments to my elevation.

So I've been experimenting with creating a space elevator. I found with the way the game is currently programmed it seems that it's not possible to have one on the planet Kerbin. I modded the KAS mod to make a space elevator. Then I tied it to the ground and try to launch a rocket to geostationary orbit. It doesn't work so well. It seems once you get too far away from the ends of the cable (about 10km) it disconnects. So I decided to attempt the same thing on Minmus due to it's low gravity and speedy rotation. I've only had marginal success. I managed to create a sky hook (by accident when the cables disconnected and flew straight up into space) that could hold my ship in low orbit at slow speeds (the cable extended upwards 10 to 15 km). I can land on Minmus, attach the cables, but I don't know how high geostationary is for that moon. If it's past 10km or so it probably won't work so well. Does anyone know? It would help a lot and I don't have the time to look at the math at the moment. Has anyone else tried this sort of thing with success? It'd be cool if I could hoist cargo into orbit on a KAS grapple!

I've done it. The big issue is staging them correctly. Most of my push-pull rockets were SSTO attempts. The only successful one (not SSTO) I made had angled aerospike engines attached to the side of every stage and no engines on the bottoms of the stages. That design worked extremely well and allowed for extremely tall stable rockets since each stage was lifting at all times there was no stress on the joints between the stages. Except that caused by the payload on top anyway. Also all the stages were identical making designing the rocket and re-sizing it for any payload a breeze.

No one else cares about this? I want to make cool space stations dang it!

I noticed it seems on modern computers the cause of low frame rate isn't usually too much graphics. It's the physics calculations that the parts require. This would generally end up CPU limiting the game. Now it seems to me many physics operations may be able to be carried out by the GPU instead. This may not be best for all calculations or all computers of course but if it were a setting then people could activate it to see if it helps. If you use the correct kind of compiler you may not even have to reprogram all the calculations, just compile for GPU instead of CPU, then again I have no idea how you guys coded so, it may be a near impossibility at this point

A pet peeve of mine is that Kerbals can only walk on a deck or something like that when the ship is landed. If they try to walk around on a flying ship they just fall over like someone hit them with a stun gun. It'd be nice if they were pressed up against a flat object with g force in the green zone that they'd be able to walk on it. Then you could do things like spinning platforms to create artificial gravity or have a continuous thrust at one g to do the same. Also a part of that would be more tools for calculating trajectories assuming continuous acceleration.

Sounds like your staging it wrong to me. If your use to building rockets from the bottom up and the staging just worked in the correct order. Then you go to a rocket next to a rocket you have to play with the staging order because the game can't figure it out all on it's own.

I see a lot of people say "there should be no difficulty setting". Well compared to our system and planet KSP is a cake walk. Kerbin has parameters much like Mars. For Earth you need to be going at almost 10kps at 120km altitude to get in to orbit. Kerbin is only about 2 at 70km altitude. The moon is around 30 times the distance from Earth as the Mun is from Kerbin, even Minmus is 10 times closer than our moon. Even the Kerbin system is much smaller than ours, more like red dwarf sized system. Eloo the most distant planet in the Kerbin system has an orbit that would put it between Venus and Earth in our system. That being said I think difficulty should be set by these parameters. The current settings should be the "easy" mode. Kirbin is about as small as you can get for a living (natural) planet. Medium should be a Planet and system some where between Kirbin's and our's. Hard should be an Earth like system. Finally I think there should be an Ultra Hard with the largest possible (theoretically) living Planet at about twice Earth's size. Each setting the gravity of the home world should approximately double. It's worth noting that Earth has so much gravity that getting into space using a chemical rocket is just barely possible. So the only thing that could achieve orbit in Ultra Hard would be space planes (probably multistage) and nuclear rockets. I think that the harder the modes get the more interesting the systems should be. Alternatively they could just use the same system design and just increase the sizes, distances and gravities. That would be the most simplistic way of doing it.

You took the words right out of my keyboard.

The title pretty much sums it up. I think 1st person view for docking would make the docking so much easier! (and more realistic)