Virindi

I actually think SABRE engines are overpowered for long range vessels as well. The key to SABREs is that they have a huge amount of thrust in jet mode, which lets you not even bother with making high speed in the upper atmosphere. You can get a ridiculous amount of fuel into space by just using jet mode to punch upwards then circularizing with a small number of LV-Ns. That is, using SABREs in rocket mode should be limited as much as possible in favor of some sort of more efficient secondary engine. Adding an LV-N or two to the back also lets almost any plane reach interplanetary space with a refuel. Ideally you will only run your SABREs in rocket mode for a couple seconds as you leave the atmosphere.

When viewing my space station, if I enable the 'vessel' display in Engineer, it locks up the game. I am using 0.6.1.4 on 0.22, with FAR, B9, KW, KAS and pwings. Should I send someone a save file, or is this a known issue?

Jebediah wanted something huge he could ride in with all his friends. Something refuelable... The main issue is that it is hard to stop the reverse engine right when you are stopped, so you start moving backwards.

Tested this out with a little extra weight for the heck of it. How much can you carry? Answer: not much. Oh, and the game crashed on the way down. It was running at about 0.5fps during the whole ascent, and it was really hard to click on anything. I lost altitude because I had to click a tank like 4 times before it would pull it up. I think this 'challenge' is more just an exercise in causing one's self pain.

It does. Just barely. It may not at sea level. I realized after landing my first craft there that I forgot to add ladders...

I honestly have trouble building large lifters using my rules without LVNs to do the 28km to orbit push. I did make one design that used aerospikes, but maneuvering once in orbit was pretty limited. It barely had enough delta-v to rendezvous with a station or other plane while carrying any cargo. And that's not with wasteful orbital maneuvering; if I were to use mechjeb, it would run out of fuel halfway to the target. By the way, how do you find the balance of the B9 intakes? I started off using some of the large ones, and they seemed pretty ineffective. Even if I put a bunch of them on and shut down jets as I got higher, I didn't get much about 26km. Using a 4 or 5 to 1 intake to jet ratio the stock ram intakes can easily get me above 28km, and the difference in top speed between those two altitudes is quite significant.

That looks a lot like my first lifter. I kept having problems with pwings not making enough lift when I made them that big though. They seem to be inefficient in a delta configuration?

Spaceplanes in KSP are fun. Farram Aerospace makes them harder, except that people always seem to use the SABRE engines when building spaceplanes with mods. I have personally found that building planes without SABREs but with FAR is quite a difficult (and fun) challenge. It may sound easy, but launching (and returning!) cargo in this manner is tricky. Rather than just slapping some engines on whatever (or spamming a ton of wings and intakes in stock KSP), you have to carefully balance lift, jet thrust, rocket thrust, and pitch surfaces. So I decided to create a game with the following rules: -Farram Aerospace plugin installed. -Spaceplanes only. No staging of expended parts. Everything must be completely reusable: all parts that go up, must come back down for a nice landing. Spaceplanes can separate into multiple smaller spaceplanes as long as they all make it home and land aircraft-style on Kerbin. -No parachutes for descent. It would be fine to use them to slow down once you have landed though. -Only stock engines and intakes. -No unrealistically placed intakes. No piles of intakes clipped inside each other, intakes facing backwards, or intakes inside an enclosed craft. -I'm using the B9 fuselage parts and wings, anything other than engines and intakes are fine. Or airships. Airships would ruin it. -If you are doing interplanetary missions, kethane might make it more fun. Or, you can just 'stage' by having a series of different sized planes stacked on top of each other, as long as each one can safely return home. Or, you could send a bunch of missions to refuel one large spaceplane. To get this started, Thompdan Kerman lands and returns from the Mun aboard the Mosquito spaceplane lander:

I don't know if your spontaneous explosions are caused by the rotation or not. I have only had my stuff explode for no reason a couple times. One time, I was moving a shuttle with two other shuttles strutted to the side of it to Laythe and it started spinning when I came out of time warp and parts flew off. The other time, I had a shuttle in Kerbin orbit around 100km and had had the game on for awhile and when I switched to the shuttle from the tracking station it exploded into a million pieces instantly. I didn't get a chance to see any rotation, but it could have been there. If you're testing it out, be sure to use a ton of struts

Hardly. It only freezes other vessels, as in, completely prevents them from rotating, similar to being in time warp. It does not alter the current vessel. Also, the results can be hilariously bad if you impact one of these frozen vessels at high speed, since they will explode rather than rotate. Thus, it is a toggle

I'll try to get a video of it. The amount of phantom rotational acceleration applied appears to depend on several factors, from number of struts on the craft to how long the game has been running, to how far out the craft is in the orbit. If I leave the game on for 12 hours with a craft in solar orbit that has 50 struts on it, the rotational acceleration will cause it to spin so fast the craft explodes. Obviously before it gets to that point I would typically restart the game. Depending on the situation though, it is possible to have enough of this rotational acceleration at game start that it is impossible to dock two craft. It could have something to do with the fact that my computer is very slow, or you just aren't building things as complicated as I am. Dunno.

It does not cancel rotation with respect to you, it stops it with respect to the reference frame (I believe this is the object you are in orbit of). So for instance, if your target is in an equatorial orbit and pointed at the ground, as it orbits it will no longer be pointed there. This is how you would expect things to work with an object in space that is not experiencing any rotational acceleration. As long as you dock at a speed faster than ridiculously slow you shouldn't have much problem with this sort of rotation, unless your orbital period is very small. The problem that is solved is instead a 'bug' in the game which causes objects to experience phantom rotational acceleration, something which would not happen to a real object unless it was acted on by some force. This only occurs in the game when your orbital period is large.

Ever try to create a space station around Minmus? Have a ship run out of fuel in orbit of the sun and need to refuel it? If so then you might have encountered the spontaneous rotation problem. In high orbits, floating point inaccuracy causes craft to experience spontaneous rotational acceleration (even after stopping everything by turning on and off time acceleration). Normally this is not a huge problem, since small rotations can be easily corrected by the use of SAS. However, when you are docking it can end up making docking impossible because the target craft will be rotating no matter what you do, and there is no way to tell it to hold attitude. Enter RotationFreeze: a plugin which adds a simple toggle button which locks the rotation of nearby craft. Now, docking in orbit of the sun is just as easy as it is in low Kerbin orbit. Source code is included in the zip file. MIT license. http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/0-21-rotationfreeze/