Porspeler

Whoever would have expected that? I like your idea of flying from within the cockpit. Your aircraft design is... uh, "innovative", as well. Congratulations on your achievement with a novel approach that looks like it was a lot of fun!

Thank you. I'm honored.

Here's Jeb Kerman posing for the media after completing his around-the-globe trip in the "“Kirbenweltumseglergebilden“. (Hey... long trip, long name.) As you can see, it's a simple design with no frills. I generally avoid canards, but I was dissatisfied with the pitch rate during test flights and so I reluctantly included them. I used the Mk II fuselage series because they hold more fuel for the same mass as the standard jet fuel tanks. A single RAM scoop was sufficient to meet my airflow needs, poking along at 20% throttle at a cruising altitude of between 20 and 23 km. High Altitude + Low Throttle = Speed + Fuel Economy The flight was leisurely and trouble free. My greatest challenge for the entire journey was landing safely, once I’d returned to KSP. Runway landings are a weak point for me, and so I ended up overflying the runway a half dozen times. 12.5% of my starting fuel was used after I returned, buzzing the runway and then circling around again. Notice the time and fuel remaining as I approach the runway at the end of the trip... ...and the elapsed time and remaining fuel, once I finally managed to get it all right. Here's the report. This has been a great experience! I've learned a lot about design and technical issues, as well as becoming a much better pilot.

Here is my entry. I'm forbidden from posting attachments for some reason, so here are links to Imageshack pngs of the flight record and an in-flight shot. Flight record: http://img266.imageshack.us/img266/4906/1e7s.png In-flight screenshot: http://img12.imageshack.us/img12/6227/qlsl.png This was a wonderful challenge. I've been trying to design efficient long range recon aircraft so that I can find anomalies on Kerbin. This was a new (and untested!) design, and I owe a nod of thanks to ZeroIgnite for the idea of putting air intakes on pylons on the wingtips. She used fuel tanks; I used vanilla fuselage because of weight considerations, given the wingspan of my design. The final third of the trip was nerve wracking, since fuel balancing became an issue. If you look closely at the "ground distance" on the report, it's probably a bit longer than the norm for circumnavigation. The reason is that the vessel became extremely difficult to control once the forward fuel tanks were empty, both in heading and altitude. At one point, I was both way off course and well above an altitude where I would have expected flameout. Thanks to the added air intakes, though, I never flamed out, to my vast surprise. I drifted above the ceiling for the challenge at that point, so that may disqualify me. I hope not. I'm a "purist", so the only mod I have is Kerbal Alarm clock. I tried F.A.R. for awhile, but I'm no aerospace engineer, and I quit having fun while I was trying to make sense of how to manipulate the numbers so that my aircraft would quit flipping like autumn leaves at takeoff. I gave up on that after I realized that I was learning nothing except how limited my vocabulary of four letter words were for expressing my frustration. There just weren't enough to do the job. Anyway, the fuel balancing issue remains a problem, since I can't figure out how to keep my tanks from running out without manually transferring fuel in-flight. Any tips on this would be appreciated. Here's a link to ZeroIgnite's elegant design which inspired my attempt. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/25884-Kerbin-Circumnavigation-Challenge-Reloaded-New-Rules-Once-More?p=576576&viewfull=1#post576576 EDIT: Almost forgot to point out the "primary feature" of the design. As I said, this is intended to be a recon craft, and it's based on another smaller design that has served me well. In both designs, I use three engines: a basic jet engine, and two Turbojet Engines. I group the Turbos together in an action group that I can toggle on and off, and also have the Basic engine similarly configured in a separate action group. Most of the time that I'm exploring, I have the Turbos off to conserve fuel. Whenever I'm ready to move long distance, I'm able to flip on the Turbos and cover distance quickly, with the Basic engine off.

I completely agree: the real science is with probes. Manned missions are, for the most part, for publicity and geo-political prestige. The Messenger mission to Mercury has massively increased our knowledge of that world; and the Cassini mission to Saturn is possibly my favorite mission of all, for its combination of stunning imagery combined with profoundly advancing our knowledge of Saturn and its moons. And as for the New Horizons mission that's speeding toward Pluto... 2015 can't get here soon enough, for me. The Kuiper Belt and Oort cloud have long held a special fascination, for me. If you haven't seen it, check out Seven Minutes of Terror. It's the video that NASA created to explain what they were up against, landing Curiosity. It is beyond cool! It looks like something out of a SciFi movie... but it's real. http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/index.php?id=1090

Blizzy78's tutorial vid/page was the resource that helped me the most. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/35988-Launch-rendezvous-and-docking I had a similar experience on my first approach, but it was only beginner's luck that enabled me to avoid a collision. I saw that the separation was going to be only 0.1 km, which got me stoked. I kept fooling around and adding thrust so that I could close the gap more quickly, not paying attention to my velocity in relation to the target. Oops. My target did approach within 100 meters... as it blazed by at nearly 200 m/s. I'm glad it happened that way, though. It made my eventual success more sweet, because when I finally got my act together and ended up floating motionless a dozen meters away from the target, it seemed almost magical.

I'm sorry that you lost your work. If it's any consolation, I strongly suspect that it has happened to us all, at some point or another. With me, it was my first non-lithobraked Mun landing. After crashing my lander a dozen times or more, I finally successfully landed softly, and upright. Triumphantly, I quickly jabbed my finger on the key to quicksave it. But unfortunately, I'd inadvertently conditioned myself to hitting "F9" so many times in that first attempt that I did it one... more... time. ...and found myself back in orbit, right back where I'd started. Needless to say, I wasn't particularly happy. Our little medals that we have in our signatures have a black band for indicating the sad loss of a Kerbal, during a mission. Perhaps they should also have a blue band for each ribbon... to denote us swearing a blue streak whenever we've pushed the wrong button and lost a milestone achievement, or hours of time.

I don't want to know where they are, but... are there any on Minimus? I found my first one by chance while doing a low orbit at the Mun, and got excited and sent a probe to Minimus. I then spent a couple of hours doing low orbit visual scans, changing my inclination by 5° each orbit. I didn't find anything, but at least I got the Minimus "polar orbit" merit badge.

This is excellent! Thanks, Tavert. This will undoubtedly be one of the first mods that I implement, after I'm comfortable with my understanding of the vanilla game. Wow, this just keeps getting better and better! The tutorial videos look like just the thing to give me "the big picture" on creating a plug-in. I greatly appreciate the link, Mr Shifty. *** To all: I have to say that I'm impressed by how responsive and helpful the members of these forums are. I expected perhaps one or two responses to my requests, and hoped that they'd at least point me in the right direction. The comments and links which have been posted have far exceeded my expectations. Thanks so much, gentlemen.

I'm a veteran of the US Army Infantry, which gave me an appreciation for precision and attention to detail; and my profession is Land Surveying, which deals with spatial relationships. There's also the aspect of the nature of the game: it's rocket science! Truth be told, in most cases I eyeball stuff. But it's nice to know how to be precise, when you feel like challenging yourself. It's gratifying, at least to me, to be able to work something out mathematically, and then have it turn out just like the number crunching predicted it would. Thanks for the editing tip.

Thanks, Pizzaoverhead! You've given me exactly what I was searching for, but was unable to find. I hope I can return the favor, someday. One final question for anyone who knows: how do I change this thread's category from "Unanswered" to "Answered"?

How is the API accessed? What tools and skills do I need, and where do I find them? I'd like to learn to Mod, but I can't seem to find anything on these forums (or anywhere else online) that explains the various elements of what's involved. Everything that I've found is either extremely basic, or assumes that the reader has previous experience in intermediate and advanced mods. I'd like to eventually acquire the skills so that I can create a mod that deals with using different rocket fuels, complete with differently textured fuel tanks for distinguishing between the fuels. What I have in mind is fairly involved, but what I lack are the skills. I can already do simple mods like rescaling parts by editing the "part" file, but beyond that, I'm clueless. Anyway, thanks for the responses. EDIT: I just found the source code for Kerbal Alarm Clock. That will give me a starting point for seeing what's under the hood of a good mod.

"Lithobraking"...? That's great! If there's one thing at which I excel in KSP, it's Lithobraking. Thanks for the pinpoint landing tips, folks.

How can I determine the latitude and longitude of a position in orbit or on the ground, without the use of plug-ins and mods? I know that Mechjeb and some of the telemetry mods use positional data, so if the data isn't directly accessible for users within the game, where does positional data come from and how do the mods read it?

Thanks for your presentation! Very interesting, and a fun challenge. I'm curious about the math behind the chart that you presented. How did you derive your graph? What equations did you use? I'd like to be able to calculate reentries without relying upon a chart or mods.

Here's a reworking of the old NASA logo for KSP using the contemporary font which NASA uses. I did it with MSPaint.