Anquietas314

You can solve that quite easily using struts and fuel lines from the other two tanks Just make sure the fuel lines feed from the tanks to the stack tricoupler. Obviously the struts don't matter so much, but you do need them otherwise the tanks will still bend like that. Personally I just never use the tricouplers for anything other than feeding 3 engines from one tank, but each to their own

Given how heavy the plane is, unless you have like 10 of them at the tip of the nose you'll probably be able to overcome their thrust using the control surfaces. Sepratrons really suck for moving heavy stuff (16 isn't enough to shift an empty orange tank with a skipper by more than 200m/s deltaV in orbit...)

Try strutting everything up to the part of the joint that rotates to the rest of the ship? It should prevent the wobbling. I'm not sure if it matters if you strut the bit that rotates though.

Yeah I was already aware of that. One thing that has occurred to me: If I let the asteroid smash into the ground at full speed, and then go and grab it.... what happens? Note to self: test thoroughly when asteroid shows up....

Well, I just checked CKAN again, and In-Flight Waypoints is still 1.2.0 only. It's been well over an hour two hours now. It doesn't matter too much to me though; it's 6 am here and I'm sure it'll be sorted by the time I wake up.

Hmm. Okay, in that case, perhaps the model's efficiency measure is perfectly fine and this is just a very unexpected result? If the ships have different ISPs then TVR is different anyway, which does affect efficiency.

The example that I saw (one 0.5 mass engine vs 2 smaller engines with 0.25 total mass) was perfectly adequate: same TVR, same start TWR, different DVR, different end TWRs after expending the same amount of deltaV. EDIT: The "edit" feature exists for a reason dude

What I do is try to keep my prograde vector just below the target marker on the navball, allowing of course for any mountains that may be in front of me. That has the effect of bringing me to the ground before I reach the marker, at which point I land, hit the brakes, and hopefully stop inside the target zone; if not, just taxi like DeMatt suggested.

Sean: Hmm okay. That made sense mostly. Your answer appears to have disappeared though (forum issue? deleted?), but it contained an example that demonstrated you could have different end TWRs for the two ships, with different DVRs. There was a part (which I can't quote - message missing) that mentioned that with the same fuel flow for both ships, the second ship would burn twice as much fuel in the same amount of time, which is obviously nonsense. The rest of it was fine though. arkie/Sean (mostly arkie): I had a look at the model in the PDF and decided to expand the terms in the efficiency calculation (in particular, tbar* and FMR). The result was that the efficiency did not depend on DVR whatsoever. I think that probably suggests the efficiency measure is inadequate though. // tbarstar used to avoid confusion with * for multiplication efficiency = 1 / (TVR*ln(1 / (1 - FMR * tbarstar)) DVR = TVR * ln(1 / (1 - FMR)) FMR = (m_wet - m_dry) / m_wet tbar = t / t0 t0 = (FMR * TVR * v0) / (g * TWR) tbar = t(g * TWR) / (FMR * TVR * v0) tbarstar = tstar(g * TWR) / (FMR * TVR * v0) efficiency = 1 / (TVR * ln(1 / (1 - FMR * tstar(g * TWR) / (FMR * TVR * v0)))) // No FMR or other mass-based terms present, besides TWR, hence DVR independent = 1 / (TVR * ln(1 / (1 - tstar(g * TWR) / (TVR * v0)))) It's of course entirely possible I've made an error somewhere

Given turbojets can get you out of the atmosphere entirely on their own, I wouldn't expect it to need much fuel. The tiny rockomax radial engines are probably enough to raise periapsis to a circular orbit for next to nothing. I actually considered making a design like that in my 0.90 career save (but currently don't have access to necessary spaceplane parts or action groups )

Okay, but is it not possible that the dry mass in the larger ship is simply a smaller portion of its total mass compared to the small rocket (e.g. due to engines etc being a smaller ratio of mass)?

Ok, thanks Given github's probably large enough to have multiple servers in different parts of the world by now, it might just be timing issues between server updates and so on (youtube has similar problems)

That doesn't change the fact we need screenshots! But if you're using FAR and this is new, check the change log of FAR - it probably added some new effect your plane can't handle.

At first I thought this made sense, but after some thought in order to hit a given TWR, your total amount of thrust from engines would depend on how much mass (fuel) you had in the first place. If it takes the same mass ratio for both rockets to get to orbit, then their end TWR should be exactly the same, which strongly suggests their TWR would be identical the whole way up. I haven't done any calculations to back this up though, this is purely my intuition based on playing the game for (at least) 3 years. EDIT: It's entirely possible I've misunderstood something. I do at least know this is wrong (emphasis mine): The deltaV calculation (assuming you mean the rocket equation) takes TWR throughout the flight into account, since it's based solely on wet and dry mass plus engine ISP.

CKAN currently only has 1.2.0. I realize it's only been out for probably less than 10 minutes, but do you know if that's something on your end or theirs, or if it's just that the repository doesn't get updated more than once every (couple) hour(s)?

We're going to need screenshots (showing CoM, CoL and CoT) to help you with specific spaceplane designs. It sounds like you might just be having backwards compatibility issues though; have you tried testing a fresh install and designing planes from scratch?

I've "landed" an asteroid on Kerbin before, back in oh... 0.23? It wasn't intentional; I just let it go while descending at >100m/s to see what would happen. It bounced lol I should add: I already have a class C asteroid on a collision course for Kerbin (it spawned like that), but it was found long before the contract showed up. If it's usable, then all I need to do is rendezvous with it (easy) with a whole bunch of parachutes to survive the landing

So this is one of my available contracts: Anyone happen to know the exact figure for "gently"? I was pretty disappointed with the payouts from these missions, but landing one should be straightforward While I'm at it, anyone know what counts as newly discovered? i.e. is it one you've not been to, or one that has to be brand new from the tracking station, or just any old asteroid?

If the rear wheels are too far back, you can't get the leverage to pull up, which prevents you from lifting off. If it doesn't work with the rear wheels very close to the center of mass, you need more lift or less weight. EDIT: You could need more thrust in that situation too, but going by your screenshots you have plenty engines

For safety, make sure it's slightly behind the center of mass. You really don't want to be landing empty and find you've got yourself a tail-scraper

I don't think it's quite 50-50, *1 sec while I tally it up* 2:12 with 2 including OP thinking it's useless and 12 mostly happy with it by the end of page 5 (by then I'm starting to lose track of who I've already counted), plus a few more-or-less neutral comments and a whole bunch of other stuff (fallacies bit). I thought it would be more like 40-60, but I guess not.

The problem (for the rocket in the screenshot) is that you're not using enough decimal places; the in-game mass figure rounds to 1 decimal place. The actual wet (start) mass of your rocket is 4.74, and the dry (end) mass is 2.74, which gives 1,720.53m/s at sea level and 1,989.36m/s in vacuum. It's worth mentioning that you should use the vacuum one in general because by about 15km your ISP is already more or less that of vacuum anyway (as long as you have about 5km/s - slightly less - of vacuum delta-V reserved for your launch and enough TWR you should make it to orbit no problem ) Note that for a multi-stage rocket you need to do the delta-V calculation per stage, not for the whole rocket Also as others have said drag in the atmosphere will significantly diminish your net speed gains

Landing at night is a pain, granted, but you know there are lamps integrated with the landing gears right? If you look at the map you'll know roughly which direction you should go before you launch, which makes that a non-issue in my experience.

I think it might be best if you posted your jet design - it sounds like you're probably doing something quite badly wrong if it's really much harder on Kerbin than Mun and Duna for you. Granted the atmospheric ones are time-consuming but they're not harder in stock, and although I don't currently use it, from what I gather FAR makes many aspects of the game easier not harder - I even saw someone post a plane design that could turn sharply at mach 5 with FAR - that's certainly not possible in stock.

As sal_vager said, you can add the target markers to your navball, which will lead you straight to them. The only complication really is that sometimes they're on the other side of the world, which puts them very near "down" on the navball. Obviously you can just use the map to guestimate until you get closer . To add the markers to your navball, click them in the map view, then click "activate navigation", and you should see a matching symbol in the same colour appear on your navball. It'll flash when you're within the required range to do the experiment. For EVAs there is of course the In-Flight Waypoints mod robopilot99 suggested as a workaround until(if?) squad sorts that out in stock (It seemed as though you felt your question had not been adequately answered...)