immelman
-
Posts
143 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Developer Articles
KSP2 Release Notes
Bug Reports
Posts posted by immelman
-
-
I'm looking at a "what might have been" involving no Apollo cancellation and this using them to explore the Solar system.
Here is a two man crew lander and return for 50 days on Mars. Pretty happy with it, since the module will fit on top of an S-II.
-
I would like to update the conical heat shield pack by oblivion aerospace to work with RSS/RO. Would anyone be able to point me in the right direction where to start doing this? Probably going to have to make sure it works properly with FAR as well to ensure it works as a lifting body in addition to ensuring it works with the heating model.
-
Its been a long while since I played Kerbal!
With the clear instructions I had, RSS, RO and RSSVE, were all installed and ready to go in a fraction of the time it took last time I did this manually
I've just taken the included FASA Saturn 5 on a trip to the Moon and had a real blast, thank you to all the people who have worked on this awesome group of mods! My return looked so gorgeous that I had to take a screen shot and share it, thanks again!
-
Eve sea level and back, no ISRU.
Hardest thing was getting the fuel tankers into Eve orbit without too much fuel loss:
-
There's not too much detail to be honest. I talked to farram (who has done a lot of digging into the KSP source code with Squad's permission) and he walked me through the atmospheric model. I then copied the same math into KSP TOT Mission Architect.
Now I'm even more interested
Applying kOS automation has changed how I approach mission planning, especially since it encourages you to dive deeper into the math involved. I'd like to work out a model for the in game aerodynamic forces. Could you able to describe anything about these?
-
Hi everyone!
I'm happy to announce the release of KSP Trajectory Optimization Tool v1.5.0!Here's the change log:
- Added the KSP v1.0 atmospheric model to KSP TOT Mission Architect.
This is awesome, thank you!
Would you be able to go into more detail about the atmospheric modelling? Would this be anything that could be applied to FAR as well?
-
I'm finding that the amount of electric charge does not seem to be correct. With only 64k and remote tech installed as mods (and Kopenicus updated to the latest version via CKAN), the charge at Kerbin is 1/3 the expected. I suppose I could just boost the charge received by the panels by 300% to compensate. But wondered if anyone had a more elegant solution to something that seems to be related to solar emission curves?
Ed. Sorry I take this all back, I've just tried without any mods and got the same behavior. I'm re-installing, since I must have borked my install in some way.
-
More results from testsing with the FASA Saturn:
- The APS unit is not able to ullage the S-IVB. I needed to attach 4 (burn time of 5 minutes) and then add RCS thrust from the SM in order to be able to restart the S-IVB. From what I can tell the Saturn had 2 APS units and the ullage time was ~80 seconds
- There is no fuel cell included in the lunar module any more, and this is (note that I am not using TACLS) causing me to exhaust the batteries before reaching the moon. I have tried to place a stock fuel cell array in the service compartment on the SM but this did not appear to work, bu I am still concerned with the ability of the LEM to retain battery power throughout the landing and return to CSM
Seen this as well, a Kerbal solution is to use the APS to rotate the spacecraft before the ullage burn, this coupled with the very low thrust is enough to ullage. Otherwise make an modified J-2 for the final stage that does not need ullage.
-
Thank you for the latest update in the marvelous mod! The plume expansions look fantastic and integrating engine ignitor was a very good idea!
-
This is a fascinating and informative mission. I've read Steven Baxter's Voyage, which includes a Venus flyby, looking at your data this is primarily to reduce mission time?
This also really brings home just how hard this would be, getting parachutes to work at such high velocities or using rockets (with the weight penalties and having them fire in a supersonic jetstream).
Regarding high velocity Mars EDL, here is a very interesting paper on the subject you may want to check out:
http://www.4frontierscorp.com/dev/assets/Braun_Paper_on_Mars_EDL.pdf
It pointed me into using an adapted conical heat shield for a lifting body re-entry.
Real life has curtailed my RO Mars mission (as well as all my Kerballing), reading this has really encouraged me to get it going again!
-
Since Realism Overhaul will not be updated for a while, I'm going to fly my Mars mission in 0.9
Anyway here is my Saturn C8 craft file if its is any use to you. Procedural fairings and FASA should be the only prerequisites:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/gbomoesc63m2sot/Saturn%20C8.craft?dl=0
First step: Launching a Skylab using a Saturn 5 and then an Apollo on a Saturn 1B to dock (going to use this to fuel up the transfer stages).
With it being such a long time before the transfer window the trickiest thing is going to get the inclination right.
-
I think we should open up the challenge / make it clear it's open for vanilla 1.0 - cause that's where heaps of people will be right now waiting on mods etc. Including putting Duna in the name of the challenge, e.g. "Stock Duna through Mars Realism Challenge"
I've not yet played with it, but it sounds like 1.0 now overlaps some of the Hardmode mods. I think we should make a Stock 1.0 option/division based on yr stock hardmode but 'optionalizing' as many mods as possible to reduce the 'uptake' hurdle as far as possible. Here is my proposal and queries:
Stock 1.0 Option:
Mandatory:
Recommended:
- TAC Life Support (TACLS) - Actually very easy to use. [fall back to DPOMAC scheme which is heavier and less convenient that TACLS. Maybe mandatory? Mandatory but you can get a note from your doctor?]
- Ambient Light Adjustment - It's nice for everyone to appreciate your work.
- RealChutes - Simple - make chutes MORE useful, MORE flexible, and LESS destructive. [i've not used it but that's how it sounds]
- TweakScale - Just handy, and realistic - if NASA needs the tank a bit larger it makes it so.
- FASA - Beautiful useful NASA replicas - put a Lunar Module on Duna! ( see Capricorn One http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077294/ ) [i've not used but sounds like this]
- SCANSat - You want to eye-ball the slope? stick to the flattest part of the planet? go ahead! or suss out a unique landing site.
Suggested:
Maybe? is it better (enough) than Stock 1.0
- Deadly Reentry [it's better? more parts? harder? more realistic?]
- Kerbal Joint Reinforcement [ Is this only really necessary to cope with larger scale vehicles required by RO? ]
Waiting on 1.0 mod stuff to settle down:
- EngineIgniter (repack) (Currently broken in 1.0)
- Remote Tech (RT2) (Currently broken in 1.0)
- Ferram Aerospace Research (FAR) (Currently broken in 1.0)
- Better Bouyancy (Currently broken in 1.0)
- RealFuels (Currently broken in 1.0)
- Procedural Parts (Currently broken in 1.0)
- Bobcat's Soviet Engine Pack (Currently broken in 1.0)
For continuity and 'something to go on with now' I'd suggest using the same launcher schedule / rules as DPOMAC. Also if we values a vanilla 1.0 we could use the DPOMAC LS dynamic - it's heavier and more anoying to figure than TACLS - so people would be better of going with the mod.
What do you all think?
For "Hard Mode" my thoughts:
Deadly Reentry should be harder, since in stock you can reenter just using an engine bell, unprotected ships should explode
Kerbal joint reinforcement really helps with wobbly rocket syndrome, recommended.
FAR allows lifting body aerodynamics, very useful for a Duna landing and for Kerbin reentry with Deadly reentry.
Universal storage, this has configs for TAC life support as well as config entries for Methane if you want to try a Zubrin type mission.
- TAC Life Support (TACLS) - Actually very easy to use. [fall back to DPOMAC scheme which is heavier and less convenient that TACLS. Maybe mandatory? Mandatory but you can get a note from your doctor?]
-
I tried the 8K D** but the game would 'out of memory'. So we reverted to 2k and just pasted 8k mars over it. The game still had v high memeory usage, so not sure how it will go with more mods etc. Is Active Texture Management and/or the D** stuff something that compresses textures fairly loss-less-ly?
A few nice landmarks from looking at NASA topo as rendered in game at the 2 resolutions. For me the summary is 'looks great from orbit' and 'some will look ok as a large scale landscape'. Finding scenic spots and/or interesting traverses ("Up and out of Valles Marineris", "Olympus Ho" ) and "precision required landing spots" could make a 'land grab mechanic' - but inevitably there would be hyper edit finding so it would make sense to separate 'finding a site' and 'landing rank'.
There was a weird 'anomaly' you can see in the pics of Olympus - it was looking great from km up - drop a few 100 m and it rezzes down!
I know it's a high art building terrain engines, but I wonder what it would take to do better, just doubling the rez would not do it, it needs non uniform data - widely spaces heights in the boring flat parts and lots in the crinkly interesting parts.
In the end I went to making a linux partition to play Realism Overhaul in KSP, it was the only way to manage the memory usage of all the mods needed.
The DTSloader sure makes the game start much quicker and saves some RAM. In addition I delete almost all the fairings and fuel tanks (since I use proceedural).
Regarding landing sites, I've wondered about making a "featureless" Mars with only a small section in great detail using NASA topo to generate a height map. Specifically for the landing area, not only save RAM but also to make it more interesting, should be possible? Thats going to have to wait a couple of weeks though
-
Outstanding!
Since that ship is already publicly available, if you endeavor to find a credit I'd love to mark you down as the first winner of one of the challenges. I think it'd be appropriate to share the credit with the person who originally made the craft for RO, but you deserve credit for doing the obvious thing and using what is already available!
The heavy launch vehicle is all my own work, I got the proposed dimensions from Encyclopedia Astronomica:
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/saturnc8.htm
If you haven't take a look, its fascinating seeing what might have been using the Saturn platform!
-
So tonight I'm going to try the 8k terrain textures, with ground scatter turned up to 11, and I'm going to land between a couple mountains. I'll let you know how it goes.
If you want to save your RAM go for 8k textures for just and Earth and Mars and lowest for all the other bodies. I like your Apollo, but to save time you can use the FASA Apollo, it looks great!
Putting together a Mars mission on RO really brings home just how hard this all will be. For fun I'm using mostly Apollo era tech, if you have ever read Baxter's Voyage then ChrisPBacon's Ares mission shows just how huge these can get to...
Can I enter into this? Not having the patience to use eight Saturn 5 launches to orbit and fuel my mission I am going with the proposed Saturn C-8 variant, can get 200T to a 200k orbit, even then I will need at least four of them.
And Here is the orbital stack so far, why yes that is a Saturn SII and two Saturn IVB's for TMI, Mars insertion and Mars escape
Hardest thing is a realistic MEV, interesting paper in the challenges:http://www.4frontierscorp.com/dev/assets/Braun_Paper_on_Mars_EDL.pdf
You can break this down into three problems:
1. Slowing down in Mars atmosphere, using rockets lower down means being able to ignite then in a Mach4+ jetstream.
2. Parachutes, for a lander mass of 20-40 T it's not very likely you can just use parachutes at more than Mach 1, in reality they would be ripped off.
3. If you want to use a lifting body, the heatshield/ aeroshield needs to be more than 20m...
-
I've finished my Mars journey:
Now that is a very well planned mission! Very nice.
-
Nice, how much was the total mission mass compared to what you landed?
-
RSS Space Shuttle. Needs a bit of refining, but I will have a DL up later for those that are interested.
That looks gorgeous, can I ask, how long did you take putting that together?
-
What an excellent lander! I'm also glad that that it can fly so good!
What is the diameter of the heat shield?
And I've got a little request, could you flip it over in the VAB(heatshield up) and post the results of FAR static analysis at supersonic speed(~20 mach is fine) with AoA varying up to 90 degree? Thanks!
Heat shield is 10m, I wish I had the skills to make a folding heat shield! For the lander mass from what I have read this should really be 20m or more.
Sure:
-
After reading through a paper on Mars EDL (http://www.4frontierscorp.com/dev/assets/Braun_Paper_on_Mars_EDL.pdf) I thought I should revisit using an aeroshell for re-entry.
I also have adapted LostOblivion's conical heat shields for RO so I can create a lifting body
My lander is at the upper end of what is possible (at 30 T) But it sure does work!
Here is the lander starting re-entry, using a mass offset it has a V*L/D of 600+
After using S turns velocity is under 500 m/s or MACH 2 before the Drogue is deployed (and about MACH 1.25 for main chute)
And slows down to 75 m/s before the main parachute is ditched:
And the lander has enough fuel to get back to orbit!
-
The FASA F-1 Works well with real plume, so the launches are spectacular. I like the Soviet engine pack for first stage engines, there are some great choices.
-
As I see not only I had problems with landing huge things on Mars...
My first design for a lander+ascent vehicle was this:
http://i.imgur.com/QYF8Pul.png?1
But the 10m heat shield couldn't decelerate this 80-ton thing good enough before it crashed into the surface. Attempts to create some lift by shifting center of mass were also unsuccessful, because FAR didn't like the fairings. Anyway i think that this classical design would work in real life if it could fly with some angle of attack.
Landing on Mars is hard! Great NASA talk about it:
Problems:
- Purely using engines for descent will result in a huge payload to initially lift to orbit.
- Slowing down in Mars before deploying parachutes using engines probably wont work in reality since you have to light your motors in a MACH 3+ jet stream.
- Got to keep peak G forces down since the crew will have spent almost a year in low G.
- Supersonic parachutes on large masses.
I like your lifting body I lot, especially the ability to control your pitch!
-
Someone should get the Seadragon mod RO compatible:
http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/91043-Seadragon-for-24-2-official-release
That would solve large masses to orbit, It would have to be an ocean launch to be realistic though...
-
Mars mission is good! I am also making one. What is your mars ascent vehicle?
I've gone with parachute assists, the lander uses it's engines to slow down more than a 1000 m/s before deploying the parachutes and then takes over again for the last 500m. I used the Apollo LEM descent engines for the landing stage, which also acts as the the first ascent stage.
The Official Realism Overhaul Craft Repository.
in KSP1 The Spacecraft Exchange
Posted · Edited by immelman
Here is the return vehicle for my landing craft, its a modified Gemini capsule using a Apollo LM descent engine