thorfinn

I actually did, during high school Our computer science professor was a punched-card-era old chap. After the two years of curricular classes we had, he started an afterschool CS club for those interested. It amounted to us few members meeting on Fridays 4:30 PM, sitting around a fire the CS lab control console and saying 'OK, professor, what neat trick are you going to teach us this time'? It was the only computers club I ever heard of that had only hot girls amongst its members. I still can\'t understand how it could fail in the end. :-\ Someday he brought an old DOS Forth compiler that he had used when he wrote some embedded code with a friend, and did some classes with that. I wouldn\'t really like to work with such a language, but it was so alien that wrapping my mind around reverse-polish notation and all its other quirks was really fun. I even posted a Forth entry in a 'write this program in every possible language' thread one time...

EXACTLY. And since you too know Miyazaki and play KSP, you should really, really watch Kurenai no Buta ('Porco Rosso') and read Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. (That plane\'s engine has 'Ghibli' stamped on it )

Just came back after 217 days I wasn\'t trying to make records, but since I saw that booly likes keeping scores, I thought he\'d like to know This required the biggest in my LV 'family', the Ghibli 444L: If anyone is wondering where the names come from, think about the variants of the Ariane 4... It\'s even overpowered for Moon missions: the lower stages have 1600 m/s C3 performance, the upper stage has about 3000 m/s delta vee; so I could fly out and fly back at more or less the same speed. Unless the special legs that jgiscool said would make for it weigh a ton, landing on the Moon and launching back will probably take no more than half the fuel, if I can pilot well. I will probably try to land the 2nd stage intact on Kerbin After the get-home burn, I tried to select an orbital plane that would take me over KSC with the RCS, because I\'m against cannonball landings... not in the sense 'they are bad and you shouldn\'t do them', obviously, it\'s just that I don\'t want to get accustomed to those and then regret it when realistic reentry heat will make them impossible. Anyway, I managed to screw the trajectory up while doing aerobraking somehow... or maybe the plane was never really what I wanted and the map view fooled me. Nevertheless, after about three high orbits, I saw that I wasn\'t going to make it to KSC without wings, so I said 'sod it' and headed for Kanada.

You want to take your first step into a larger world, I see.

Well, if you don\'t use RCS it\'s really a mess. I don\'t know how Booly manages that (more patience than I have, I suppose.)

The farther you are, the easier it is. If you can see the periapsis marker in the map, you can judge what effect your velocity changes are having. I used translational RCS (much more controllable than rotating the whole craft) to get a perigee in the hundreds of km while still in the solar neighborhood (at 13-14 million km).

Foamy, I just wanted to say that your aircraft is beautiful. I would put it as a game balancing requirement, that your plane must still be able to fly well in the future aerodynamic models (even if not flying on fumes, like it does now )

Careful not to enable the wrong ones, though:

Check the M/AM intermix and divert power to structural integrity then... ....uh, sorry, wrong mythology

Booly, a question for you. In your attempts, did you go to escape by flying directly upwards? Suddenly I realized that going to a low parking orbit and then burning to escape from there is more fuel efficient. Should have known that, but I was never interested in straight-up velocity contests so I never thought about it. Flown this way, the same rocket I used previously cut the round trip time to a little less than a year. Aiming is quite tricky, for now I settled to going in an elliptical orbit and then finishing the acceleration when I was in the 'straight' section pointing to the Sun. (This is suboptimal). Trimmed a bit by eye with RCS on the outbound leg, final error a little more than 2 degrees (I flew half a million km to the side).

Glad to see new folks get a hand at this game. Believe me, you can do it with a smaller rocket

THRUST VECTORING OWNS THE SKI... Uh, no. Wrong forum. Vectored how, could you tell us? Also, I have two more words for you. Jet vanes.

We should have some homage to Dr. Heinrich Dorfmann in this game...

Spaceplane will be a PAIN to optimize and balance. (Something NASA knows very well...) But, for now, do you really NEED all that fuel then?

Great looking plane, but how come it\'s not burning any fuel, basically?

If the numbers quote by Harv are definitive, the Kerbal year will be 106 days and a few hours long, and the orbital speed of Kerbin will be about 9,3 km/s. Which means that future solar probes will require about 14 km/s of delta-V, right now we have had it reeeeeally easy

We have new data from Harv: Mass: 1.756567e+28 Radius: 6.54e+07m Gravity at surface: 27.94G Distance from Kerbin: 13,559,014,750m See also this thread

I did it, with a smaller rocket, a bit more slowly (1,7 Earth years total... ??? ). Closest approach was probably about 1.5 million km. I confirm that the radius of Kerbin\'s 'orbit' is about 13,5 million km. Is this enough proof? Click to enlarge Will post an image/craft file of my trusty Ghibli 346LP very soon. Mostly standard parts. It requires Wobbly Rockets for the upper stage engine (K2-X) and decouplers, and the G-Parts to make the small liquid boosters. The rest is vanilla. I don\'t know if it was just luck or not, but I could see the periapsis marker on the map immediately after the return-home burn, and with the RCS i could trim it down to a few thousands of kilometers while I was still 15 Gm out. The last midcourse correction was done at about 1 million km, and set periapsis to 21,7 km (direct reentry). I used half a tank of RCS fuel in the whole trip.

So, one Kerbal AU is 13.5 million Km? Well, it\'s consistent with the scale factor... Great find! I didn\'t think to try this, nor would I have had the patience. I should try while I can, when Kerbin will be in a true orbit the delta V required will become much greater Damn, that ship is unflyable on my computer.

Perfect. By the way, I have tried the 0.11.3 ASAS and it\'s shaping up to be a decent flight computer. I tried placing the RCS quads intentionally quite far from CG, and it handled maneuvers pretty well anyway. We just need a bit more flexibility for the future. Are you experimenting with the PID values?

Are you going to make engines and decouplers proportionally lighter than they are now? (And fuel heavier?) That would make staging much more useful...

I wouldn\'t be so negative... a two stage rocket with 6 SRBs has enough dV to do a circumlunar mission. If the moon parameters are in proportion to our own, I bet that a 2-tank second stage with Sunday Punch\'s light SAS and decouplers (launched by a 3-tank tri-stack) will do Apollo 8 easily. Add a third stage, and I believe that nothing more will be needed for a direct ascent lunar mission. Actually, with the laaaarge mass penalties of the current stock engines and decouplers, direct ascent will probably be EASIER than LOR....

Very interesting. I\'ll be watching this space

Are you taking a page out of the 'realistic fuel mod' of nivvydaskrl, maybe?

Why? If you can survive lunar return, you can survive return from any Earth orbit. The entry angle is adjustable in both cases, though the corridor will become narrower the higher you start from. In the real world, it\'s true that some aerodynamic lift is needed to keep a vehicle inside a lunar return corridor; in KSP, only Harvester knows for now... (though I suspect that he will make things so that it\'s the case here too)