Silverchain

Stars Are Right Ahead!

One can hope that some future version of Unity will support multihreading.

Dilsen Kerman poses in front of Skurj I Model Wd Hey For Cockalorum!, freshly landed on Laythe and driven to a first rendezvous with the Call It A Holy Fight. Based on these two flights, Laythe feels easier to fly on than Kerbin, and the rolling dunes are forgiving for landing on. I've lost count of the number of spaceplanes I've crashed on Kerbin recently. The disposable (I abandoned it during Laythe aerobrake at 19km) transfer vessel which was attached to the HFC wasn't very good, it only just managed to get here. I've got another plane in transit on an even creakier transfer ship, really must work on that.

(citation needed) The focus of KSP is on little green men and their rockets. It happens to be easily and frequently modded and it happens that there are various modders involved with Squad, but that doesn't make it a game focused on modding; I'm not sure what would make a game focused on modding. I've heard of games where modifying the ruleset is an intrinsic part of gameplay, maybe that would count, but that isn't the case with KSP; it's just a thing you can do, not something you're obliged to do.

Spaceplanes is working for me. I never really got the hang of them before.

Skurj I Model Td ALIEN DIE* after its second return to Kerbin: Note the missing main engine and missing jet engine. After the planes first return from orbit, I broke the main rocket engine in a bad landing at KSC. For giggles I launched again using only the auxiliary rocket engines (edit: hehe, once it had made it back up to altitude on jets!) and was surprised to find they easily got it back into orbit (which is why the next model Skurj has only a single Aerospike instead of a T-30 and six 48s!), then mistimed the second landing, overshot KSC, diverted to the second runway island, missed the second runway and landed on a hill, trashing the jet engine... but hey, it's still mostly intact. *Exile.

Since getting back into KSP I've been working on my spaceplanes, because I never really mastered them before and because I have my sights set on the cliffs of Laythe. This is the current iteration of the Skurj series spaceplane; it can easily reach LKO, flies tolerably well (don't yoik it around the sky too much, keep the nose reasonably close to the velocity vector!) and is fairly tolerant of bad landings. On the ground it has a full set of rugged rover wheels and can go for a fair distance before needing to recharge its on-board batteries. In space it has a docking port and effective RCS with a small supply of monoprop; the Aerospike engine gives it fair delta-v. Propulsion is via a single Aerospike rocket and two Turbojet engines. Start the jets (staging or hotkey 1 for subsequent launches) and ascend with a steady ~45 degree climb to 15,000 metres, then slowly taper down to level flight, reducing the throttle slowly as air intake drops below 0.20; ceiling is roughly 30,000 metres doing about 1400-1500 ms-1 depending on fuel load and whether there's an 'R' in the month. On reaching the ceiling, switch to the rocket engine (staging or hotkey 2), whack the throttle to full and point at ~30 degrees; get your desired orbit height plus a little for air resistance, throttle down then circularise. Simples. To switch to rover operation, raise the landing gear and the plane will drop down onto its rover wheels. Hotkey 1: Toggle jet engines and air intakes. Hotkey 2: Toggle rocket engine. Hotkey 3: Toggle wheel motors. Hotkey 4: Toggle ladder. Hotkey 5: Toggle science package. Hotkey 6: Raise rear centre landing gear only. Skurj I Model U Sandy Don in LKO. (The Ub linked differs only in that it has an additional pair of outboard wheels.) Sandy Don refueling in orbit. The craft is stock and uses no deliberate part clipping. I'm not entirely sure it needs all those intakes, they may be slightly redundant, but what the heck. I will work on a good transfer NERVA rocket to shift it to Laythe - I took an earlier model spaceplane there and the wobble was ridiculous. Craft File: Skurj I Model Ub Spaceplane/Rover

Pol would be a better match to Ceres than Dres is.

Ok, if the important thing is to get it to space, here's a launcher that will: linky. Launcher in the VAB: The launcher is wobbly (there's 3 outer boosters that could do with MOAR STRUTS) but I don't care. Hitchhiker Medium Mk 2 E3 Ãœber den Wolken sitting happily in LKO: There's a little command pod thing docked with the top docking port, I switched ship command to it at launch because I don't like flying upside down, detach and deorbit it at your leisure. (edit) LOL doh, could have just controlled it from the docking port. ...not sure what I'm gonna do with that ship now, but it might make a good refueling station for spaceplanes.

I don't really understand the problem from your description but I shall fire up the craft and have a go.

This week, I have been mostly crashing spaceplanes.

Skurj I Model K Coronium Dog sitting on the runway after a successful first flight. I think I'm getting the hang of this! (just ignore the various crashed, smashed and broken planes littered around KSC...) I'm working on the principle that anything which can SSTO Kerbin can SSTO Laythe after having expended a little fuel looking for a landing site. I don't know if it's a valid principle, but it seems like it should be. In any case, this design has considerably more jet fuel than it needs, so there's plenty of loitering potential. Coronium Dog refueled, repositioned and ready to launch. The performance isn't anything special, it doesn't fly very fast and it doesn't have much spare after reaching orbit, but it doesn't stack intakes or clip engines or any of that malarkey so I'm happy.

Debris: 58 Assigned Kerbals: ~20 Screenshots: 38 ...from all versions: Rather more.

Revelation Ixb Call It A Holy Fight - and my very first Kerbal boots on Laythe, skilfully worn here by Malton Kerman. The ship was launched from Kerbin then ferried over to Laythe and refueled. It needs a lot of refinement! I was aiming for a sightseeing flight alongside the big cliffs, but seriously messed up the approach and had to divert to this place. There should be enough left in the tanks to make orbit here so long as I don't mess up... I'm a bad pilot.

Revelation Ix If I Name It, I Must Land It in LKO.

But why, Sax, why?

Brigantia Id Addicted To Bad Ideas in orbit above Kerbin. The latest in a very long line of similar models. Ship mass at this point is ~270 tons and the top lander can reach, land and return from all the low-gravity worlds, though I usually add extra chutes and whatnot if I'm sending them to Duna. These were my absolute staple ship first time round, and now that I'm playing KSP again I'm trying to work with some fresh ideas... but I keep coming back to them.

Thrust does not usually matter as much on interplanetary missions. You need thrust for: Carrying out any manoeuvre in a reasonable amount of time. This matters in KSP much more than it does in real life because watching a two hour engine burn as your single LV-N boosts a giant stack of Jumbo tanks to Eeloo is boring! Carrying out any manoeuvre near planets that is time critical.... ...an important subset of which is making best use of the Oberth effect by carrying out burns at the right time. (Ideally you want an instantaneous burn at the point in your orbit where your speed is highest.) Once you start flying missions to Jool having a reasonably nimble ship is very useful.

Torpedoes? Haven't seen any on Kerbin. Perhaps they live in the oceans of Laythe?

Manual crewed Tylo landing and return, stock, no quickloads.

Loverboy I Thistleup in orbit above KSC. It's not a very good SSTO, in point of fact it's a rubbish SSTO, has barely any fuel left after making LKO and it's a pig to fly in air... but it is stock and without any clipping.

I tend to notice ways in which my ships could be improved during the launch period or the moment they reach LKO, then leave them in orbit, go back to the VAB and design a new iteration of the design. The upshot of this is that I often have a swarm of fully fueled but already obsolete ships sitting in LKO standing by as fueling stations.

More places to visit. More gas giants, more moons, asteroids... trans-Joolian objects. I don't much care about resource extraction, careers, r&d, just want new places to visit, 'specially if they've got cool scenery to check out. I seem to remember someone mentioning ice volcanoes a while back, would really like to see those.

By my back-of-the-hand calculations the limiting deltav for an ion engine is about 36,000ms-1, which is way higher than you'll get with anything else.

I've not done much with Laythe at all except for a few uncrewed rover drops and some very naff planes, so it's one of my new priority targets. There were some lovely looking cliffs I saw on one of (I think) Xeroignite's maps, I really want to get some Kerbal boots down there!