SanderB

In the spirit of norcalplanner's SRB 1st stage LFO 2nd stage I've made this thing that launches to orbit at about 842$ / ton to LKO. The 1st and 2nd stages together cost 3,802.8 + 1,590 = 5,392.8 Divided by 6.4t of payload, comes out to about 843$ / t. On a minor note, I did use tweakscale to enlarge the fins at the bottom... but that is the only part that's modded and the extra cost is added into the equation. I've also relaunched the rocket with 8 stock basic fins and that even shaves off 15m/s of dV.

when getting from Kerbin's launchpad to orbit I primarily think in terms of what takes the least time and secondly funds. For aerodynamic payloads this usually means making a 1st stage with a TWR of ~0.9 (before SRBs) and several solid boosters on the side. The solid boosters usually provide enough thrust to give my vessel 300-400m/s of vertical velocity before staging. When I need the mammoth or rhino engines, I leave the SRBs and go with a more conventional ~1.5 TWR. (My formula of $ / t to LKO is (hangar cost - recovered funds) / tonnage to orbit.) In terms of $ / payload(t) ie. cost per ton of payload to orbit I get about 1,300-1,500$ / ton for every launch, as long as that payload is aerodynamic. If we go with conventional 1.5 TWR LFO 1st stages without solid boosters, you're paying about 25 to 50% extra per tonnage to orbit. The cost of launching If you add reuseability, the cost efficiency of getting to orbit massively increases. Non airbreathing vehicles can go as low as 500$ / t to LKO. Airbreathing launch vehicles usually don't cost as much but they cost a hell of a lot more time to re-use and they usually don't lift large or clumsy payloads. Reuseable LFO rockets are a bit harder to use (than expendables) but with some mod support (mechjeb's landing module or the trajectories mod) you can get >96% re-useability reliably. Reuseable rockets take way less time than spaceplanes and are a lot less of a headache. All they need is a flat landing site, airbrakes, parachutes and enough fuel to do a suicide burn if needed.

lets not get superstitious. Naturally the landing went ok. It must have, right?

I think you need a lv 3 engineer or better on board to continually run your mining rig (assuming you use the biggest mining drills and ISRU) on your patch of 6%. edit: maybe a better engineer than that, I'm not sure at last.

Well, getting spaceplanes and reueable rockets to space isn't necessarily a lot more time consuming, but getting them back is and that I hope is finally what I meant to say.

What I meant was how much personal time it takes from the player to achieve orbit. Spaceplanes and re-useable rockets usually take a lot more personal time than non-reuseable rockets.

Getting to orbit in a reasonable time frame might also be considered, which makes small launchers and slow launching spaceplanes especially inefficient in some cases.

Technically you *could" not be a jerk when being overly *technical*. Come on, get real here, playing with semantics hardly ever really does anything for anyone unless they're a damned politician. Anyway, Due to constructive criticism arguing the technical points of how to improve my attempt at low dV LKO, I've revised it. Also, a <2,800m/s dV attempt LKO for all the "technical" people :

75km LKO for 2,930 m/s. Considering the previous poster didn't specify any charity, I suggest this one: http://www.churchmilitant.com/donate

you can in the tracking center select the planet and view the escape velocity under attributes. If the planet has no atmosphere the dV to orbit and back is escape velocity & 70.7% plus maybe 5-10% depending on the TWR of the vessel used. If there is an atmosphere, the calculation gets more complicated.

I'm trying to make the plane fly straight at a constant heading on trim alone without me at the keyboard for hrs on end. Craft file: http://www.filedropper.com/01dihedraltest SAS doesn't allow a stable AFK flight. even with moderate dihedral angle it doesn't stay upright. I'm not sure I can put a vertical stabilizer any further back.

I'm trying to use the dihedral effect on my airplanes but no matter in which way I try to make planes with dihedral wings, they will always roll out of control starting from a SAS-off level flight using trim that keeps altitude and heading but can not maintain roll at 0 because for some reason the dihedral setup doesn't have the desired effect of neutralizing roll. In the video my plane after take off starts rolling right away. It is symmetrical, the trim is neutral to start, but it still rolls and will continue to roll in spite of extreme dihedral configuration. I try to adjust the roll-trim but nevertheless it will remain unstable. The same things happen on less than 10° dihedral wing configuration. What am I doing wrong?

I don't remember the exact statistics, but a lv 4 engineer and 4% concentration should be enough. The wiki entry on the harvester drill is here. The large array takes 0.04 units of LFO per 18 units of electricity, so it produces 450 units of charge for 1 unit of LFO. It takes 30 units of electrical charge to produce 1 LFO from Ore. So as long as your drill produces 0.05 or more units of ore a second (which would mean 300 units of electric charge per unit of ore plus 30 to convert it), you're okay and producing a more than you use. 0.036 units a second is the absolute minimum using a large fuel cell which means >4% concentration with a lv 4 engineer. To produce 0.05 units of ore a second from 1 harvester on a 4% site you'd need a lv 4 or 5 engineer and 2 fuel cell array's to feed 1 harvester. 1 Harvester feeding a converter at 0.05/s the would produce about 1.8t of fuel per hour of which 1.2t is used to keep the cycle going.

planetary mining vessels greatly benefit from engineers, which can boost their miners production rate by up to 25x at lv 5 or 20x or so at 4. At 20x and with a high concentration, you can even burn the fuel to produce your own electricity on far away planets too far away from kerbol to use solar panels. With a high level engineer and high ore concentration, mining/converter vessels using the big fuel cell can produce more fuel than they consume for their electricity. The same goes for asteroids, but there you only need 1 miner and 1 converter without an engineer because on asteroids the miner feeds the converter perfectly. On asteroids engineers are even inadviseable due to a glitch that causes ore to be wasted in the presence of an engineer.

I just make a maneuver node to the desired apoapsis, take the number of minutes to get there and take that as the exact number of degrees that my post-maneuver apoapsis needs to be to be ahead of KSC in order to be above it within a margin of 5 degrees.

Ideally 75km to save time, you can fast forward at 50x from 70km and up. If you go for 70.01km, you'll have to wait the full coast to apoapsis at 4x instead of 50x.

Hi Ikare, you might enjoy a horizontal landing. It can be done fairly efficiently at an initial TWR (when you start the burn) of 1.0 and up. I prefer to start out doing it from the map view, pitching up and down to keep the Periapsis near my vessel until I need to pitch up to keep my vertical velocity above minus 10-30m/s. I hope I've adequately got it demonstrated here: Horizontal landings are about being efficient with your fuel and funds, and its more of an advanced thing but it's not that hard to learn and I found it enjoyable. Slow horizontal landings give more time to precisely target your landings too.

I've already landed pretty close, and docked with something on the surface:

If you dont come in with more than 1km/s encounter velocity (ie. your orbital velocity at SOI change to jool's SOI) you should be able to go around tylo and/or laythe. For that matter, you could probably use Laythe to aerobrake better than jool and at least capture into Jool's SOI.

I'm having a similar issue, during ascent before circularizing my periapsis continually drops ~0.25m/s even after reaching above 70km.

There are mods that allow you to switch oxidizer for liquid fuel on stock fuel tanks.

Left clicking anywhere on the blue line in front of the vehicle from the map view should bring up the pop up menu with the maneuver node option.

I think that this falls within the rules: 1,437m/s based on one of the submissions that was already accepted

In all my experiments with low TWR engines horizontal landings are always best. Coming in to your target landing zone at any angle other than almost horizontally induces gravity losses. Burning the engines in any direction that is more than 30° away from the horizontal is going to waste your dV unless you have a TWR of a lot more than 10. The only way that prevents a lot of vertical burning as possible is circularizing first and then burning retrograde at a distance (to target) dictated by Velocity^2/(2*Acceleration).

I went and looked, the Rockomax X200-32 Fuel Tank costs 3,000 and the nose cone costs 450, which makes for 3,450 for the payload and 96*91.8 = 8,813 for the fuel for a grand total of 12,262.8 or 3.83 a unit.