Andrew Hansen

VTOL SSTO Looks Like a Dragonfly

Try out the BetterTimeWarp mod, allowing you to speed up physical time to millions of times normal speed! That means a 2-hour ion burn can be a 2-pico-second burn if you want it to be (warning: universe has a 99% chance of disintegrating with such high timewarp values). But seriously! The BetterTimeWarp mod is one of my favorite mods.

If someone wants to win this challenge, all they need is to build a small, minimalistic rocket, then put a pile of asparagus-staged jet fuel and jet engines under it (to last as long as possible). Then, set MechJeb to hover the rocket for as long as possible, and once all the jet fuel is gone, decouple them and head off into orbit at normal speeds. I'm sure you could make it take several hours to get to orbit. I've never used MechJeb though, so I'm not really the guy to be doing these kinds of things.

Yes, you can have both of them, and it doesn't matter what order they're in. Just write -force-opengl -popupwindow at the end of KSP.exe. The hyphens are not included. This is how it should look in your case (or KSP_x64): KSP.exe" -force-opengl -popupwindow Anyway, just thought I'd clarify something that I wondered myself when seeing this thread - the benefit to having full screen windowed mode over regular full screen is that you can easily switch applications, and recording softwares can record windowed mode much easier. So you get the best of both worlds, as the OP said. +Rep for you, Moach!

Today I posted a tutorial video which covers all aspects of KSP (pretty much), from construction and flying basics to complex things like docking, travelling to other planets, and building vertical-takeoff-and-landing single-stage-to-orbit spaceplanes!

This guide will teach you how to fly rockets, do interplanetary maneuvers, install mods, dock, and even make VTOL SSTOs. -From video description. There's lots of KSP tutorials around, but I wanted to do something different. Instead of making a single tutorial for building rockets in the VAB, then another one for launching them, then another for putting them into orbit, I decided I would make one, 15-minute-ish tutorial that covered pretty much everything you'd ever need to know about KSP. I would do lots of cuts and editing to make it short, and full of information. I even made an animated infographic explaining how asparagus staging works, and some complex editing to show how ships in different orbits move relative to each other over time. This guide is the finished result. I hope you find it helpful! Below are the time codes for all the different topics covered in the video. 0:20 - VAB construction basics 1:22 - How to fly into orbit and return 3:12 - Landing on Minmus and returning 6:01 - Flying to a moon of Jool and returning 7:10 - Installing mods 8:43 - Docking 10:17 - Returning to Kerbin from Jool 11:04 - Building and flying a VTOL SSTO

Yes, if I could, I would delete those posts. They were all my old videos, which follow a very different style than my current ones. Anway, I'm here with... Ultimate Kerbal Space Program Guide (v0.24)

You have a progress thread? Oh wait, in the "alternate history?" What does that mean? I assume it means you actually don't have a progress thread. I may be misunderstanding this.

I love this. I will be phasing out Maximum Warp with this mod now. I tested Time Control and this mod to see how they performed (obviously separately), and I like this mod better because the Cheaty Warp works way better than Time Control's HyperWarp. The GUI is also nicer. I have one request though - please make HyperWarp active by default so the average person doesn't have to change the settings and activate them. In case anyone's interested, the warp values I found that I liked were: Physics Warp: 5x, 25x, 125x, 625x Rails Warp (stolen from the MaximumWarp plugin): 10x, 100x, 1,000x, 10,000x, 100,000x, 1,000,000x, 10,000,000x I assume that it's impossible to allow for more than four physics warp values, so how about making a keyboard shortcut (maybe Y) for switching between standard physics warp and speedy physics warp?

This makes sense to me. While it's true that boosters may sometimes fall over after landing and explode in KSP, this isn't really realistic, since in real life stuff doesn't just vaporize into thin air like in KSP. So then this idea could actually work. EDIT: Some numbers I'd be happy with are: If landing velocity is calculated to be at <6 m/s, the part will be recovered. The recovery percentage could be like 15% or 20% of your money back. 5% seems a bit overkill.

Yes, I didn't think about this before.... *thinking* *more thinking* Having the boosters load all the way to the ground is really the only way to accurately recover them when they should be recovered. The problem that then arises is lag caused by high part counts. Normally the part count decreases on ascent in a rocket that decouples boosters on the way up, but lag wouldn't reduce if the physics range was extended for boosters.

Looking at Scott Manley's about recovery mechanics in 0.24, I saw an idea in the comments that made a lot of sense.Let's say you launch a rocket that uses boosters attached to the side that are decoupled while the main craft continues into space. If those boosters have parachutes on them, they should be recovered. The problem is that with the 2.5 km physics range limitation, they will be deleted before they land on the ground and won't be recovered. What if, instead, when a booster has enough parachutes on it, it will be counted as "recovered" when it passes the 2.5 km range? The question that might then be asked is, "What is 'enough' parachutes?" Well, it's easy to figure out the landing speed of something by doing some calculations with its mass and the number of parachutes, so if the landing speed is calculated to be under a certain speed (like 6 m/s), it could be recovered.

That's completely right. I know I don't want any more challenges involving high part counts for a long time!

Come on all ye reviewers, tell us what you think of the entries! I'm dying to hear what everyone thinks.

Some of those pictures look REALLY suspicious! Voting is going to be tough here.

That's incredible! Here, have some reputation. But if you say you recorded a real landing, you should have definitely put that in there! (Not that the explosions weren't funny.) Anyway, it's amazing to see a one-man entry that looks like it was done by a whole group of people! On a different note, the thread is usually updated by now, right? *waiting*

Wondering the same thing here!

Added. But where's the xenon?

Well, for one thing, it took so long to assemble the craft that flying it somewhere was done just a few days before the deadline. This was mainly a creativity, docking, and construction challenge.

I like the way that the Maximum Warp plugin does it - each warp increment increases by the speed by a factor of 10: 10: 10x 100: 10x 1,000: 10x 10,000: 10x 100,000: 10x 1,000,000: 10x 10,000,000: 10x

Team "I Think We Broke It" is locking in their submission. Time to wait.

That's the next challenge I want, please. Rescue a Kerbal from Tylo without ladders, but with some mass constraint or something. Or maybe in an SSTO. EDIT: Any of the following challenges would be heartily accepted by our team: , , getting a Kerbal to Tylo and back in an SSTO, , , , , .Totally not advertising anything here. Anyway, this time, I'm not like, "Can't wait for the next challenge!" I'm like, "Give me a few weeks to recover."

Yes, definitely. But I think you could have kept the vast scale of the thing and still have fewer parts - one RTG instead of solar panels and batteries, less struts, no lights, etc. The lag actually wasn't too bad while driving around KSC with the parts on the ground, but it was quite laggy when the whole thing was put together and flying through space or the air.

Here's a better attempt for the same challenge mentioned above.

Thanks Kasuha, I will be sure to try that. I have a lot to learn about gravity assists! I've learned that the Arkingthaad Super Lite (the giant vessel for the challenge, if you're not following) is a hard practice vessel though, so I decided to try an easier target. I learned a lot about gravity assists from this video by allmhuram: