Northstar1989

I believe I've finally got my broadcasting software working correctly! (the problem before was that it was encoding in the wrong file format) Follow my next launch (the "Space Taxi") on Twitch! http://www.twitch.tv/northstar1989 Regards, Northstar

Last night (technically this morning) I launched my Reusable Lander LIVE on Twitch (unfortunately the hour was weird and I was having some issue with my streaming, so I'm not sure how many people actually stuck around to watch it. The recording also got corrupted, so I can't post that now...) Here are some screenshots I took during the process: Unfortunately, as some of you might have noticed from the lack of re-entry images on the lower stage, I forgot to load the lower stage back up so it could land in the bay east of KSC on parachutes and be recovered; and I also forgot to open the shielded docking port on the topmost fuel tank (which was meant to serve as an orbital fuel depot) before deploying it... Thus are the vagaries of playing KSP at 2:00 in the morning... Still, the reusable lander is now in orbit; and I can always de-orbit the mostly-empty fuel tank in the future (I have plans for a small tug that de-orbits debris using the "Claw" while remaining in orbit itself...) If I have KAS installed by then, I can even slap a parachute on it to ensure recovery! Those of you watching my twitch stream might have also seen my launch of a "Space Taxi" that I messed up the deployment of the fuel depot on (by forgetting to open the shielding on another Shielded Clamp-O-Tron), and thus reverted before logging off. I *will* have the screenshots from a fresh attempt of that launch up soon, though- and perhaps even a recording of my playthrough! Regards, Northstar

I apologize in advance if this is the wrong sub-forum for this question... But, what would I have to do to get a stream of Kerbal Space Program to Twitch featured on KSP-TV as one of the "Featured Streams"? (visible on the upper-right hand corner of the main forum page) Is this status only reserved for players who have been streaming for a while, and have a large following (in which case, isn't that chicken-and-egg: how does one get NOTICED by KSP players if there's no link to their stream on the forum besides in the little-viewed "Events Calendar"?) Or is there a way for any player to add their KSP stream to this list? I tried streaming my KSP gameplay to Twitch for the first time last night (technically early this morning), and even added my streaming event to the forum "Events Calendar" with all the other streams- but it wasn't showing up on the "Featured Streams" on the main forum page (in fact, even while I was actively streaming, it said that "No featured streamer is broadcasting at this time. Check the streaming calendar for more livestreams.") Any help with this matter would be greatly appreciated. Regards, Northstar

Good progress is being made towards my manned Mun landings... Earlier this week, I launched three crew capsules to LKO: The first was manned. It carries Bob Kerman as a replacement crew member for the Mobile Science Lab (needs 2 Kerbals to operate), as I decided that I would quickly finish my active Rescue Contract by returning that Kerbal to Kerbin instead of delaying it by sending him on my Mun mission... The second and third were unmanned- they are return vehicles for my Kerbals on the Mun mission. I figured it would be a good idea to have the return capabilities successfully deployed BEFORE launching my Munar lander or transferring the Mobile Science Lab to Munar orbit. It never hurts to play it safe... With each launch, I refined the design a bit further- the second launch was the first to implement recovery of the lower stage Solid Rocket Booster (profitable, but not by much), and the third launch eliminated the reaction wheel after I discovered the built-in SAS on the probe core (or command pod for manned launches) was perfectly sufficient to meet my needs. By the end, I had narrowed it to an extremely efficient and cheap design that I would have a VERY difficult time refining further, even with new technology (excluding mods, of course). The current design should be even cheaper than the fuel cost of most spaceplane designs- roughly 900 Funds (after recovery returns) to put a little over 1 ton in the form of a 1-man crew capsule+ docking port + probe core + Mk16 parachute in orbit (just barely). The payload capacity doesn't include the half-ton dry mass of the spent SRB, of course. However, the capsule can't necessarily be expected to return to the KSC (as opposed to elsewhere on the planet) during re-entry, so the total cost comes out to even higher than that. The only cheaper (per-Kerbal) design I could imagine would be a spaceplane design with many rows of command seats shielded from drag by an enclosure of stock structural panels or a cheap mod "cargo bay"... (and designs like that tend to be very laggy) Besides, I rarely NEED that many Kerbals in orbit- usually 1 or 2 will do the trick, with capacity for a third on the occasion of needing to recover a stranded Kerbal... Anyways, I'm attempting a new project! I'm going to try and stream my Munar Mission live to KSP-TV, if I can figure out how to do that using OBS and Twitch. We'll see how it works out- expect a link here if I can get it working. Regards, Northstar

I need to make this VERY clear- BEAMED POWER DOES NOT REQUIRE MAGNETIC CONFINEMENT. Therefore, the cost of the nozzle is trivial. Apparently, several of you missed this point when I made it before. Beamed Power systems reach a MAXIMUM temperature of around 2400-2500K. They increase fuel flow to increase thrust further. It's only reactors directly hooked to a fusion or antimatter reactor that would technically require magnetic confinement. Even if you run an antimatter reactor and then beam the power, the temperature in the Thermal Receiver still only reaches 2400-2500K, you just have a LOT of fuel-flow and very high thrust. For higher ISP and temperatures, magnetic confinement in electrothermal propulsion systems could be used (a technology which I SUGGESTED, but is not currently in KSP Interstellar)- basically highly similar to plasma thrusters, but the internal mechanics resemble those of a Thermal Receiver more, and since it heats the propellant by different methods, the propellent is not as limited, and propellents like methane, ammonia, and water can be used as well as hydrogen... Regards, Northstar

Today I took a look at the Experimental Version of KSP Interstellar, which is currently out (note that it is NOT considered a "Release"), having been developed by the current maintainer of the mod (WaveFunctionP) while FractalUK is out... However, just taking a look at the configs without installing the mod, my jaw nearly dropped- currently a simple, dumb exhaust nozzle- little more than a glorified cone for the heated exhaust of a reactor or Microwave Thermal Receiver to push against, costs 25000 funds (that's 25k-no I didn't miss a zero). For reference, my low-cost SRB-based rockets (the tri-rocket design used earlier to launch a Mun-orbiter) cost about 12k each, FOR THE WHOLE ROCKET+PAYLOAD ON THE LAUNCHPAD. That simple, dumb little exhaust nozzle would be cheaper if it were made of solid silver. So no, I won't be installing that mod anytime soon- at least not until the costs are worked out and made reasonable (based on real-world publications on the subject, the entire propulsion system of a Microwave Thermal Rocket, which operates at lower temperatures than a chemical rocket, with a peak temperature of just 2400-2500K, and is made mainly out of thin layers of Silicon Carbide; should actually be CHEAPER than a comparable-sized chemical thruster, not more expensive than an entire chemical rocket just for the exhaust nozzle) See my discussion of this on the KSP Interstellar thread for more information: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/43839-0-23-5-KSP-Interstellar-%28Toolbar-Integration-New-Models-New-Tech%29-Version-0-11?p=1294634&viewfull=1#post1294634 Regards, Northstar

Some of those seem like reasonable prices, but I have to make a point about Microwave Thermal Rockets: Microwave Thermal Rockets, as they are implemented in KSP Interstellar, are composed of two parts- the Thermal Rocket Nozzle itself, and the Microwave Thermal Receiver. Of the two, the nozzle is dirt-cheap in real life. This is because the temperatures it has to put up with aren't very high: less that 2400-2500K for a basic Microwave Thermal Rocket using LH2 (that's SIGNIFICANTLY lower than the +3500K the Space Shuttle Main Engines had to tolerate). The part should also be dirt-cheap, on the order of pricing of a structural part- 100 to 150 at the most for a 1.25 meter nozzle part. The Thermal Receiver is where the REAL costs come into play with a Microwave Thermal Rocket. Though still comparably cheap, additional reading on the subject only makes in marginally cheaper than a comparable chemical rocket. Thus, a reasonable cost for a 1.25 meter receiver would be 600-700, which when combined with the 100-200 cost of the Thermal Rocket Nozzle, should add up to a cost of approximately 800-900 for a 1.25 meter Microwave Thermal Rocket propulsion system- placing its price at jsut less than the LV-T30 (costs 850), which is an example of a medium-cost (between the LV-T45 and the LV-909) stock-game chemical rocket... Keep in mind that the Microwave Thermal Rocket won't operate in the same thrust range without a jaw-droppingly expensive external power source, however. Currently the 1.25 meter version of this dirt-cheap nozzle, THAT DOES NOTHING BUT PROVIDE A DUMB SURFACE FOR A LOW-TEMPERATURE STREAM OF HYDROGEN TO PUSH AGAINST is a jaw-droppingly expensive 25,000 Funds to purchase. If funds are equivalent to dollars, it would be cheaper if it were made of solid silver. (400 kg in silver would only cost about $2685) This is saying nothing of the cost of the Microwave Thermal Receiver (which receives the power, and should be modestly-priced), the Microwave Transceiver (which beams the power, and should be expensive), or the power source (which should be exorbitantly expensive). This is just the one, cheapest, component of the whole setup that costs more than TWO of my current low-cost (heavily SRB-based) Career-game 1.25 meter launch vehicles at the KSC, WITH PAYLOAD (each about 12K- keep in mind that's for 5K Delta-V, vs. 10K to orbit IRL), and more than a half-dozen low-end Contracts. A single, small, low-temperature exhaust nozzle with no thrust vectoring shouldn't cost more than an entire rocket. EVER. Regards, Northstar

Proposed designs for higher-temperature thermal rockets in real life (those that could operate off antimatter of fusion reactors, or off electrothermal propulsion- the latter of which is notably missing in KSP Interstallar, despite my proposal to add it not too long ago) operate off of magnetic fields to contain high-temperature plasma streams generated by the reactors, so they don't come in contact with the actual nozzles; rather than off of materials that could withstand those temperatures directly. That being said, the same thermal rocket nozzle part is used for a cheap Heat-Exchanger based Microwave Thermal Rockets (which actually operate at LOWER temperatures than traditional LH2/LOX rockets- but obtain their superior ISP through use of just Hydrogen as propellant- which has MUCH lower molecular mass than the the water produced by LH2/LOX combustion, and thus higher molecular velocity and ISP) as for a wildly-expensive and futuristic Antimatter Thermal Rocket. Therefore, the best solution would be to incorporate the cost of the advanced plasma-control systems needed for high-temperature reactors in the reactor part rather than in the thermal rocket nozzle. Regards, Northstar

Let me first start off by saying that I respect and immensely value what you are doing to maintain this mod, and FractalUK did to create it. So please don't let anything I say next strike you as abrasive, disrespectful, or harsh. I am trying to give constructive criticism here. Going on... Real-world value is the MAIN thing that should be of interest to you. Keep in mind that KSP is meant to mimic reality, after all. It doesn't have to be a perfect mirror of reality, but the costs should be believably similar to their real-world values, and have some of the same tradeoffs. For instance, Microwave Beamed Power thermal rocketry is a pain in the a$$ to learn and use for most casual players (and even some experienced players such as myself who have very low-end computers), and therefore the rewards should be comparable to reality. One of the main advantages of the technology is lower cost of the rockets themselves (at the expense of high-cost ground infrastructure, but which can be amortized over many launches), and since there's no way to reflect things like the lower cost of the overall rocket due to the looser safety margins that are feasible with thermal rockets, the thermal rocket itself certainly should at least be cheaper than its chemical counterparts... Except that it takes most players a LONG time to unlock the tech nodes for those parts- and even longer to reach the point of progress in their Career saves where they are ready to send rockets to the more distant locations like Jool and Eeloo, where KSP Interstellar can REALLY shine... Most players aren't like Scott Manley or yourself- we don't unlock most of the tech tree by the end of our third mission. I hate to be telling you your job, but your job as a mod-maintainer or mod-author is not to determine for other players how they should play the game, it is to create something that is fun and enjoyable and that people will want to actually USE. If you create unrealistically-inflated part-costs, you will not only upset realism-freaks like myself, who want to actually use better technologies than chemical rockets to obtain realistically superior performance and costs, and for whom the game is more about what CAN be done with space technology rather than what IS being done; you will also upset casual players who see no reason to ever use the parts, because they're so expensive. Propulsion systems aren't an end in themselves for most players- they're a means to an end. If the technology is too expensive, or too low-performance, NOBODY will ever see a reason to use it- and the mod will be worthless. Players want to launch rockets to get places- not grind contracts forever just so they can afford an overpriced rocket that is supposed to be, in itself, a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Keep perspective on the actual reason for using a rocket's propulsion system before making it an end in itself- it's easy for mod authors/maintainers who spend most of their time designing/balancing engines to forget that the engine is only a means to an end for most players. When in doubt about the correct balance, reality and realistic values should always be your best guide... Ahem. Excess funds? Clearly you and I aren't playing the same game at all- to me every single dollar has a purpose. And I'm not going to waste a cent of game "Funds" if there's a cheaper way to accomplish the mission. Call me a cheapskate, but that's how I am- and one of the biggest draw of KSP Interstellar technologies for me is the Microwave Beamed Power system- which could save NASA money in real life, and could save me money on my launches as well (with sufficient, as I said extremely expensive, infrastructure investment) well simultaneously guaranteeing superior performance. But missions like that aren't using fission-based Microwave Beamed Power. They're using (to abstract to this type of mission overall) OP'd technologies like Antimatter and DT-Vista. Stuff that's decades (or centuries) away in real life, and I have absolutely no issue with you making prohibitively expensive. Microwave Beamed Power for thermal rockets based on a reasonable-sized array of fission reactors, on the other hand, only slightly outperforms traditional chemical rocketry. I've said this before- let reality be your guide. The best solution is always the one that follows real life- otherwise you're not creating a game about rocketry, you're creating some obscure alternate universe that follows only rules you create in your head. Take that with a grain of salt- this is coming from a player who uses FAR and will never go back, who desperately wants to see planet-scale brought up to a more realistic 20% or 30% size rather than its current 1:11 scale, and who thinks better aerodynamics and re-entry heat should be on the top of the priority list for Squad; followed by bigger solar panels and the VASIMR engine (because it's the most promising propulsion technology that exists today- they're already putting one on the International Space Station) Regards, Northstar

Awesome. You should really try to get out by Jool more, especially now that Contracts are implemented in 0.24- I bet you could get some really lucrative contracts to plant a flag on Laythe, for instance. Regards, Northstar

First of all, sorry for the slow response- I took a break from KSP for a while, and then when I came back jumped right into 0.24. Additionally, even though I kept checking the forum in the meantime, I have a LOT of threads I've started on the forum, or are involved in discussions on... Good job of keeping mass low on both the payload and rocket. I bet that would even be affordable in 0.24! You're pushing the limits between a spaceplane and a rocket a little bit, though I'll allow it. And there is no rule against using radial decouplers for reusable drop-tanks or boosters. HOWEVER, in the challenge as it currently stands, you are not allowed to have any part of your rocket be destroyed for any reason- including due to falling below 23 km in altitude. I am considering allowing use of the new DebrisRefund mod for 0.24, provided that players only drop stages *over the ocean*, as it's completely unreasonable to expect that a stage dropped onto the side of a mountain or even a steep hill would necessarily survive unscathed. It would also be a little unfair to players who made previous submissions to this challenge, so I'm really unsure over whether I should actually allow it- maybe I'll start a new challenge that also includes Cost in the scoring guidelines... Your rocket/plane would fly a LOT better with FAR installed. In particular, it replaces the standard "pea-soup" atmosphere, so you probably wouldn't see your rocket decelerate from 200 m/s down to 79 m/s quite so quickly, as drag is simulated much more accurately/realistically. A nice entry, all-in-all, but under the current Challenge requirements, it wouldn't qualify due to the separation of those boosters at 11.5 km, and their subsequent disappearance in the atmosphere... A general rule-of-thumb is that, to avoid debris disappearing, you shouldn't detach any lower than about 42 km- by which point they could conceivably have enough upward velocity to not fall below 23 km before the rest of your rocket circularizes... Regards, Northstar

Just, so much nope. KSP was originally a little 2D game with very little in the way of many of its current features or complexity. The path of its evolution has been towards realism and complexity. And, it's actually picked up MORE fans/players as it's underwent a lot of this. Additionally, a lot of realism features actually make the game easier, or other realism features more acceptable/d=fun- for instance docking and better joints made the game easier (as would In Situ Resource Utilization), and realistic aerodynamics would make more realistic-sized planets more fun/interesting since rockets would ascend through the atmosphere a LOT quicker... Regards, Northstar

Beamed Power Thermal Rocketry is far from a "solved problem" in the same way as any other rocket propulsion technology (including chemical rockets)- it's a continuing "Area of Active Research", to borrow a term biologists like to use with still-unsolved problems... But, it's not for lack of data, expertise, or understanding- only the actual willingness to invest large amounts of money building an entire rocket design on the concept (and this would likely be with a new start-up company, which is always risky no matter how good the idea: consider the example of the electric car company "Project Better Place", for instance- which had a GREAT idea, but crashed-and-burned due to terrible management). In fact, people have written countless reports, presentations, and even a Doctoral Thesis or two on the subject. See this page (and the thread at large) for additional reading on beamed power thermal rocketry: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/81147-Next-Generation-launch-technologies-achievable-with-CURRENT-technology?p=1210983&viewfull=1#post1210983 Of course, to get back to the subject of Big Dumb Boosters- since BDB's don't have to have a high success-rate, it enables you to utilize new, experimental technologies in them. The chance of failure of the experimental system factors into the overall chance of failure of the rocket, and if the cost of the experimental system is low to begin with (as with Microwave Thermal Rocketry- if you built an entire line of Big Dumb Booster off of them), then you can much more easily build a Big Dumb Booster with the experimental tech than you can a modern "smart booster" with the technology... My other sub-point is that we should be utilizing Big Dumb Boosters built off cheaply-made experimental technologies to test out new propulsive systems, rather than smart boosters. If the cost of the payload is low and easily replaced (as with fuel.consumables), and the rocket is made to looser engineering standards to begin with (and thus has a high chance of failure WITHOUT the experimental tech not working), then it's much less of a big deal if the prototypes crash-and-burn. Especially if the experimental tech was also built to relatively loose engineering standards (and thus was built cheaply). The capacitors/batteries are due to the fact that the power usage is intermittent- you only run the transmitters when you're actively launching a rocket, and spend the rest of the time charging up for the next launch- meaning you don't have to be able to produce at 10 or 20 or 100 MW continuously- a 2 MW plant charging 200 MW of capacitors will work just as well... Which is also why the costs *ARE* accurate for the power plant- you're talking about building a power plant at the nominal capacity, I'm talking about build a cheap (probably Natural Gas) power plant at a much lower nominal capacity and charging up capacitors for intermittent usage... When's the last time we've had "newer tech" in rocketry in any meaningful sense since the 1970's? Aside from incremental advances in composites and materials, the only company that has built anything that can in any sense of the word be called "innovative" in Space-X, with their work on low-cost reusable rockets. And they actually went back to OLDER Kerosene-LOX technology for that, due to its lower cost and greater simplicity than LH2/LOX (they're also looking at Meth/LOX for interplanetary stages, which is more expensive than both, but doesn't have any of the coking problems of Kerosene, or boil-off problems of LH2...) Sometimes it does. KSP is designed to mimic real life rocket science, after all. Most of us wouldn't know half of what we do, or be having this discussion right now, if not for KSP. There are times when it's best to perform ground-tests, and times where you really need to test a propulsive system in orbit. For the latter of those, it's better to strap a risky experimental technology to a Big Dumb Booster carrying a cheap payload than to a Smart Booster carrying an expensive payload (and, as the whole point of this thread goes- there's no reason to ever launch a cheap payload on a Smart Booster, when you could launch it on a Big Dumb Booster instead...) Regards, Northstar

Some feedback specifically on the Thermal Rocket Nozzles. First of all, so everybody else knows what I am talking about, their current costs from the experimental version linked to in your signature: 3.75m = 675000 2.5m = 125000 1.25m = 25000 0.625m = 5000 Those costs are, as you warned they might be, WILDLY INFLATED. You see, in real life, one of the greatest advantages of thermal rockets is that they are cheaper than chemical rockets. You read that right- CHEAPER, *not* more expensive. Thermal rockets have fewer moving parts than chemical rockets, and require less complex engineering. The materials costs are also lower. The vast majority of the cost of thermal rocketry is in the power source, not in the heat exchangers themselves. For instance, a nuclear thermal rocket is composed of a wildly expensive nuclear reactor coupled with a relatively cheap heat exchanger and nozzle. The real-life costs are so wildly divergent between chemical and thermal rocketry that, even with Microwave Beamed Power, the cost of the heat exchanger + microwave receiver is significantly LOWER than that of a comparably-sized chemical rocket. A 1.25 meter Thermal Rocket Nozzle (currently priced at 25000) plus a 1.25 meter Thermal Receiver (haven't checked the price for that yet) should cost LESS than a LV-T30 (currently priced at 850), for instance. What makes thermal rocketry expensive in real life, as well as in the game, is the cost of the power source. I.E. take the following cost-analysis of Microwave Beamed Power thermal rocketry: - Solar panels are heavy (for their power production) and expensive for the amount of power they produce- and even more expensive to beam that power to a Thermal Rocket (Microwave Transceivers, unlike Thermal Receivers, should be expensive). More expensive STILL to build a rocket to launch a solar panel to near-solar orbit, though with a cheap enough launch system this should be capable of bringing down the overall price-per-watt. - Nuclear reactors are heavy (those much less mass per watt produced, compared to solar panels at 1 AU), and wildly expensive for the amount of power they produce (though comparable on the ground with solar, overall, reactors are cheaper in orbit in the short run, due to the lower mass-per-watt and associated launch costs). Nuclear reactors capable of operating in zero-gravity are especially expensive (though the Russians built and launched several for their low-altitude military satellites during the Cold War- so not inconceivably so). Transmitting the power to thermal rockets is still expensive (once again, due to the cost of the transmitters- the Thermal Receivers are dirt-cheap by comparison), and nuclear reactors have recurring fuel/maintenance costs (especially for a space-based reactor, which is going to require regular visits to remove Actinide build-up, or a lot of heavy radiation-shielding to build in into a manned craft) that solar panels don't, making them even more expensive in the long run... I choose to analyze Microwave Beamed Power thermal rockets here, because they are BY FAR the cheaper alternative to attaching a nuclear reactor to each and every thermal rocket- since the same reactor can power an entire fleet of Microwave-Powered thermal rockets with beamed power, instead of just one rocket (and also adding its mass to that rocket, drastically increasing launch costs) for placing those reactors on the rockets using them. With enough launches to amortize the cost of a nuclear reactor over, the cost of beamed-power thermal rockets falls well BELOW the cost of chemical rockets, due to the lower cost of the thermal rockets themselves... I suggest reading up on the economics of Beamed Power Thermal Rocketry a bit in this simple presentation (uses visible light lasers instead of microwaves- which are actually more expensive, but have lower transmission losses in space- making lasers more useful for boosting payloads to geosynchronous and higher orbits in a real solar system, instead of one Kerbal-sized) Note particularly the bullet-point on the second page: "Very Low Marginal Cost to Orbit" (the cost of the rockets themselves, vs. the ground infrastructure) http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/library/meetings/fellows/mar04/897Kare.pdf And in this Doctoral Thesis, if you have the time: http://thesis.library.caltech.edu/2405/1/Parkin-Thesis.pdf And in some of the additional links in my forum thread about Next-Generation launch technologies: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/81147-Next-Generation-launch-technologies-achievable-with-CURRENT-technology?p=1210983&viewfull=1#post1210983 Regards, Northstar P.S. Also, I noticed that the configs for the Thermal Rocket Nozzles all still have the phrase "LV-T30 Liquid Fuel Engine" commented out at the top. My guess is that this is due to the configs originally being derived from those for the LT-T30 in some manner. However it is obviously inaccurate. The comments should either be changed to describe the *CORRECT* parts (the respective thermal rocket nozzles), or deleted altogether to make the configs a little shorter and easier to understand.

Won't this eventually lead to inevitable bankruptcy if the rewards for contracts are not eventually increased by some factor as well? Very early on, it's no problem to stay ahead of the contract rewards for the cost of your launches. But as the contracts become more expensive/further out, it QUICKLY becomes harder and harder to cut it even. It eventually reaches a point where a 6:1 profit margin (that is, costs are only 1/6th of the rewards) is absolutely impossible with disposable rockets (though you can still make it work with spaceplanes), even if you rely heavily on (relatively cheap) SRB's. So if you increase the costs by a factor of 6x, but the rewards remain unchanged, you'll eventually lead most players to inevitable bankruptcy... I would suggest a 3-4x increase in cost, instead of a 6x increase, if you don't want most players to eventually go bankrupt. Simple enough to implement- just replace the 6 in that simple MM line of code with a 3 or a 4. You could also release separate versions of this "mod"- one for 3x, one for 6x, etc. Oh, and by the way, you need a (simple) license for your mod or the thread will get locked by a moderator and the download link removed. Regards, Northstar

Another lucrative contract opened up- though I'm worried about the debris this is guaranteed to leave in orbit. I've got a few ideas bouncing around my head about how I might de-orbit, and even recover the decoupler ring after detachment though... (spoiler: one of the more promising ideas follows a sort of "ring on a stick" principle) Additionally, I recovered the upper stage used to launch my Mobile Munar Lab. While FAR does make it extremely difficult to predict re-entry trajectories, and causes them to vary significantly due to heading (as a result of body-lift and shielding), I feel that I got this one pretty darn close. Probably just about as close as I'm ever going to come in KSP since I said goodbye to lousy, inaccurate, stock aerodynamics... Now to launch a reusable Mun Lander- and maybe complete a contract or two in the process... Regards, Northstar

Finally, my first 2.5 meter launch- the Mobile Munar Lab: It successfully launched to orbit- dropping its boosters along the way (I was hoping to load those up and follow them down to the ground, in the hopes the parachutes would at least save the tri-couplers; but the boosters dropped below 23 km before my Mobile Lab even made orbit), and picking up a stranded Kerbal- Pomeroy Kerman- for completion of a contract. The vessel is designed to service the Mystery Goo containers and Materials Bay of my reusable Mun lander (not yet launched). It also contains a 2.5 meter fuel tank large enough to refuel the lander- and serve as a minor fuel depot until I eventually install an updated version of KAS, and can rig parachutes onto it in LKO to return it to the surface (failing that, use of the "Claw" and a sufficiently large ship should suffice) of Kerbin for recovery of a portion of its value... The laboratory module alone is worth 8000 Funds- as much as a small disposable rocket- so I'm *definitely* not going to leave it in space... Next, the Mobile Lab rendezvoused, and successfully initiated hard-dock with, the LV-T45 transfer stage I launched earlier. Currently, I'm just trying to figure out how much fuel I need to safely de-orbit the upper stage- which is equipped with parachutes for landing-stability, but designed to make a powered soft-landing due to the much lower cost (and mass) of the extra fuel than the additional 'chutes... (there is an effect of diminishing return with parachutes- a craft with 4 'chutes won't fall at half the speed of a craft with 2) I miss TAC Fuel Balancer- it would make the task of precise fuel transfers much easier- but alas, it's not updated for 0.24 yet... Regards, Northstar

Yeah! Bigger SRB's would be amazing! Seriously, they're WAY more cost-effective than liquid rockets, and with FAR are simply amazing because they're so much denser that liquid rockets as well (the difference between pushing an SRB past the atmosphere and pushing a liquid rocket past the atmosphere is like the difference between pushing a bullet and pushing a feather...) Regards, Northstar

Now give it a realistic price (scale it based on lifting capacity vs. other rockets, it should be a lot cheaper per ton than normal rockets), and let's watch players PROFIT! Regards, Northstar

Time for a little science- airplane style. Meet the new Experimental Jet Plane. Taking advantage of the fact that FAR blends overlapping wings into one continuous wing (which performs better than either wing separately) for lift purposes, I managed to piece together a Delta Wing for her out of a Delta-Deluxe Winglet and a Swept Wing rotated into the fuselage so as to actually be swept (see the second image for a diagram of what actually constitutes a *swept* wing- credit to NASA) She flies beautifully- a little touchy on the runway with some payloads (such as the engine I used here), but she's amazing once she actually gets off the ground. Her controls are rather powerful though, and KSP doesn't have a way to dampen control inputs (and I can't just limit MaxControlAngle, as I need a greater range of movement for things like pulling out of dives), so I mostly end up flying her with MechJeb ASAS- which is a shame considering her capabilities. Anyways, here's the rest of the mission: This mission pushed my design to its very limits (it ran out of fuel towards the end, as you can see), but allowed me to fulfill three contracts- a Rockomax 24-77 engine test at high altitude, a high-altitude Mk16 parachute test, and a test of the gear bays (provided as "experimental parts" specifically for this contract) when splashed down. The end was a little nerve-wracking, what with the unpowered spin and nothing but a parachute standing between my Kerbal and oblivion, but it all worked out fairly well- the plane even managed to splash down without losing a single part. However I got cocky, and tried to flip the plane over so my gear bays would be in the water (for a contract where I needed to test them splashed down- which apparently wouldn't work while the plane was sitting on its tail)- which didn't end well, and ended up destroying a couple of cheap parts on the nose of the plane... Loading the quicksave (taken right after the plane was sitting stable on its tail) didn't work either, as small fluctuations in the movement of the plane when quickloading caused it to flip over immediately... Nevertheless, I opened up some VERY lucrative and useful contracts with this mission, and another Science Node: The new Science Node (Landing) should open up some lighter (and cheaper) landing legs for my probe to Duna... And the Poodle Engine should prove useful for my Munar mission. All Controllers standing by to watch the firewor- erhm, the launch. Regards, Northstar

Yeah- I should have known... Actually, I'm planning on attempting again in my Career save- but doing it all in one sitting (i.e. time warp with no other missions going on at the same time). What really got me before was that the missions dragged out over a longer period in real life, than actually would have elapsed in-game... Regards, Northstar

A little launchpad/runway science got me the last few points I needed to finish developing Specialized Control for the lander cans: After that, I went about the business of recovering the two boosters I began on de-orbit trajectories earlier: By chance (based on which direction the boosters were facing when entering the atmosphere), the boosters both ended up in nose-first re-entry trajectories though. So when the parachutes deployed in drogue mode (they were "pre-deployed", as I was having trouble selecting the parachutes with the right-click context menu, and didn't want to risk the parachutes no deploying during re-entry...) the aerodynamics forces proved too much for the joints with the SRB's, and those portions of the boosters were in both cases lost (the joints actually broke when the parachutes were deployed in drogue mode, but aerodynamic forces held the pieces of the boosters together roughly until the parachutes fully-deployed...) The recovery revenue wasn't very high in either case (approx. 1107 and 1294 Funds)- but in both cases more than the marginal cost of 870 Funds for the MechJeb2 unit (700 Funds) plus the cost of using a Mk16XL parachute (850 Funds) instead of a nosecone (680 Funds), meaning I turned a slight profit... Less when you consider that a MK16XL parachute is a bit heavier than a nosecone, and thus the Drive Section ended up with less leftover fuel than it otherwise would have. In truth, probably not worth the effort, except that I had to de-orbit the boosters anyways, and it allowed me to profitably complete a contract to test a radial decoupler in orbit. Might have been more worthwhile if the booster had managed a tail-first re-entry trajectory, though, as I would have then also been able to recover the depleted Solid Rocket Booster and attached decoupler. By the way, boy are the lander cans expensive! I'll definitely be trying to amortize that cost over multiple landings with a reusable lander... Regards, Northstar

OK, so basically you're saying that the wings are already so OP'd it wouldn't make sense to give thick wings a further advantage, since all wings currently perform at the limits of what can be accomplished with tings, period? I was planning on going with large, thick wings. But it looks like I'll just be going with large wings- and making the wings as thin as possible/ I feel comfortable with to save on mass... Since gravity is so low on Duna, it doesn't make sense to go with high AR though- I'd rather have 4 or 5 times the total wing area in a low-AR "flying wing" design than in a high-AR design. Wing mass is less penalized in the 30% gravity, and drag is less of an issue since the flight speeds can safely be much lower due to the lower gravity. Instead, I'm planning to make wing-load as low as possible by building a plane with the largest possible wing area- probably even a biplane design for the 20-25% extra lift... (this will also help stabilize the extremely thin wings I plan on going with). Additionally, I can't have *too high* of a wing-span on Duna: the bumpy terrain makes it extremely difficult to find a good landing spot for a high-AR, large-span, low-chord plane... Regards, Northstar

The LVT-45 Drive Section detached its boosters (in the target range for one of my contracts) and boosted itself to a higher orbit (just under 200 km) to make it easier for future missions to rendezvous, and the boosters began the process of de-orbiting by moving into unstable orbits: I'd already have the boosters on the ground by now, but right-clicking isn't working in the game at the moment, and I need to tweak a few things (namely, put the probe cores into "sleep mode" by deactivating the ElectricCharge draw, and configure the parachutes for their eventual deployment), so that will have to wait a bit longer... Also, the completion of the decoupler-test contract caused several companies to offer me some *extremely* useful contracts (the ground decoupler test is particularly lucrative science-wise, Science Data from around Kerbin was already on my to-do list, and exploring Minmus should be easy and quite lucrative). I also recovered the launch clamps from before: I'm really liking 0.24 so far, *despite* all its bugs. Regards, Northstar

Like much of the more advanced stuff to do with aerodynamics, your response just left me scratching my head. I may be a genius (that's a tested fact, according to IQ tests as a child, not my opinion), but I'm a biologist- not an aerospace engineer, and it's 2 AM here... What exactly are you saying? That thick wings actually have some benefit for low subsonic flight in FAR? Because as far as I was aware, they don't- and are strictly inferior to thin wings at all speeds in FAR, which was precisely my issue (since I want to build aircraft with VERY LOW cruising speeds- due to their reliance on electric propellers, which have terrible velocity curves- and have very high altitude ceilings, so they can also fly on Duna- and large, thick wings is the main way I could see to realistically accomplish that, especially since gravity is lower on Duna, thus penalizing the additional mass of thick wings less...) Regards, Northstar P.S. I'm not complaining. I love this mod already. How else could I do something like THIS, all-stock (except MechJeb2 and FAR), by exploiting body-lift? (That's a rocket of three 1.25 meter fuselages in a row, by the way. Note that the ASAS is only set to a pitch angle of 84 to cause it to pull up at maximum-torque: the rocket had very little SAS torque, and the aerodynamics kept trying to shove the nose into the ground...) And yeah, that easily made it to orbit, with all remaining stages attached, and fuel to spare... (The increase in Delta-V is due to shutting off the most inefficient engines- which were attached mainly to give those boosters fly-back recovery capabilities, as this is 0.24, *IF* they can survive the aerodynamic loads of re-entry...)