KerikBalm

It is not single use. Using batteries results in higher part count, but nearly identical mass. Batteries have the advantage of being rechargeable after landing, to return to the launch site where it can refuel. Fuel cells would require putting away even more fuel to fly back. Anyway, I am really just interested in knowing if there is a practical way to fly with gigantors extended

Well, that's an entirely different beast. The designs that I showed were just for moving around Duna... getting to orbit of Duna was an entirely different proposition. Well, when attempting to get a non-SSTO plane to obit, I have a few options. (note: these are all on a 3x rescale Kerbin, so its easier and craft can be smaller in stock) #1, piggy back it on larger SSTO #2) Sling it under a spaceplane: #3) Stick it on top of a big rocket, put big fins on the big rocket to counteract the wing area up top, go higher before tipping over into the gravity turn( = less air, and CG shifts farther forward as lower stage fuel is burnt off) #4) If it has a rocket of its own (such as many of my cargo planes meant to be SSTOs on Duna, but not Kerbin), strap it on top of a big booster, Space-shuttle style, and have fun with differential throttling: Once in orbit, you can keep it attached to an booster rocket it may have had, use its own on board propulsion, use a tug, etc to get it to Duna. In the case of my electric prop cargoplanes, on option is to have a rocket stage in the cargo bay, that will be left in low duna orbit as a space tug. In this case, once the electric plane reaches duna (or Eve, or wherever it is meant to go with modded systems), it stays there, and just flies around, it doesn't come back. In stock systems, its fairly easy to make a "module" for the cargo bay that can turn it into an SSTO for its destination, and allow it to get back to space Such as way back when, with my Laythe plane that only had panthers:

So based on a thread about eve ascent vehicles, and questions about electric charge consumption, I did a quick spreadsheet to determine part count and mass needed ... Gigantors were by far the best option, but they can break off due to atmospheric pressure, unlike Ox-stat arrays. Ox-stat arrays require really high part counts though. Has anyone made a plane flying on Gigantor power? I was thinking that if I had them parallel to the direction of travel, they probably shouldn't break. My fear is that as soon as they have the slightest AoA, they will break off. Has anyone tried this with any success? I was hoping to be able to make a craft with these attached so that they extend along the length of the plane, to put some incidence into the plane's wings, and have the plane do a gentle climb at nearly 0 AoA thanks to wing incidence, my hope is that the panels won't break off like this. Once max altitude is reached, I'll retract the panels and engage rockets. Is this a viable option? has anyone built a plane that flies in the atmosphere of kerbin or eve with breakable parts extended?

This was sort of a standard thing back before BG... I had those working too. I don't know who "invented" them though, but it was a widely shared idea. Which is why I tend to make tilt rotors. Incidentally, just stopping the rotors in horizontal mode allows them to act like wings (a prototype helo did this in real life (the Sikorsky S-72) Most of my tilt-rotors use the ducted fan blades, like so: but to lift my desired payload on Duna (or was it a modded duna, with 1.2533x gravity modifier, for 0.376G like mars instead of 0.3G), I needed more surface area:

I mean... the craft I showed, about half the mass of his, had over double that, and was actively producing power with fuel cells, and nearly exhausted it's batteries after 7 minutes... He must have at least some power generator for the ISRU. I suppose his more massive craft can use less EC through drag exploits (note the visible fairing bases with no visible fairing, and a sub obviously using part clipping to alter buoyancy which is also a way to do an exploit to get less drag), but I am suspicious, as he never shows EC status in flight, and flies around on props for a while before landing, and still does his ascent. Even the fairing cargo is exploity (I work within constraints of the mk3 bay, or find a way to not need aero shielding, or accept single use fairings) Some more transparency about how that works would be nice, because I don't think it's a great example for players who wouldn't build things that way because they seem exploity

Yea, but no batteries are visible either. No power storage or supply parts are visible. The craft must refuel by doing its own isru, that takes power... How is he supplying the power for his 12-15 minutes ascent?

The Tomorrow War.... so many many issues.

This can go more places

"Is there a formula to calculate the minimum fuel to dead weight ratio for each stage in order to have a net delta-v gain for adding that stage?" Generally, every stage you add will increase net dV, assuming of course that you are adding that stage to a prexisting craft. It may be far from optimal though... It also depends on the configuration of the staging... are they serial stages (like a Saturn V), concurrent stages (Like the SRBs vs the SSMEs+ET on the STS), or crossfeeding designs. Is the stage simple drop tanks? If going with drop tanks, in KSP it is very very very advantageous to have many staging events, as long as decoupler mass << jettisoned tank mass. However, part count can be prohibitive there (and decouplers can be rather expensive). Not to mention that one may want to make re-usable/coverable craft. In the case of reusable, stages must be landed or in space in order to not be deleted. In my designs, I've done: A very high TWR, short burn boosters that jettison after a few seconds and can land on parachutes before they get outside of the active craft's physics bubble (wasn't vibale until the atmospheric physics bubble size was expanded) A suborbital booster stage, which hangs around apoapsis long enough for the next stage to get to orbit so I can switch back to the booster (I suppose I could have multiple such booster stages, with different apoapses (apoapsii?), but managing them all would be too much of a pain) A stage to put a payload at near escape velocity from kerbin. A capture into an elongated orbit stage... etc. Basically, when going reusable but maximizing efficiency, I aim to stage often, but leave the stages in stable orbits that don't cross SOI boundaries.

Generally speaking, you don't design 1 ship to go to from Kerbin, to Eve, back to Kerbin. It is much easier to break the mission down into different phases. Also, you should not design a ship to go from the surface of Eve back to kerbin. You should design a craft to go from the surface of Eve to orbit of Eve. That cuts about 1,440 m/s from your design requirement, which means what you lift to orbit is much smaller, which means your Eve Ascent vehicle is much smaller, which means what you need to launch your Eve ascent vehicle into orbit of Kerbin is much smaller. You get to eve orbit, and have another ship waiting to rendez-vous with it and either take your kerbals back to kerbin, or refuel the last stage of the eve ascent vehicle so that it can get back to kerbin. You will want to land at a high altitude, because sea level ascents from Eve are the hardest ascents. The map here may help (use the color relief eve map to find high altitude equatorial places): https://ksp.deringenieur.net/ Now, Eve has a thick atmosphere, you lose a lot of dV to reduced Isp, and to drag. You want lower stages with good Isp in thick atmospheres. The mainsail is useable, but the mammoth, vector, and aerospike do much better. Eve has a strong gravity, so you lose a lot to gravity, you want a high TWR, the aerospike isn't great here (its OK as a core stage of an asparagus rocket. The better engines are the vector and mammoth. A seldom considered stat is thrust to cros section area. To avoid lots of drag, you want a tall and skinny rocket, but those rockets tend to have poor TWR. The vector is the king here. If doing a standard rocket only veritcal launch, staging ascent, Vectors are great. My "standard" ascent rockets used a pair of vectors, some drop tanks, and an aerospike core stage. It seems like with your tech, the best bet is a Mainsail asparagus launcher with something smaller for the final stage that makes it to orbit. har har That looks rather exploity to me, and I wonder how he provides electrical power. The part count to supply power via RTGs would be enourmous. I wonder if he doesn't use the infinite EC cheat. There are certainly some shenanigans with part clipping and fairings. I have made reusable Eve cargo shuttles, but I do 2 stage reusables: I have tried SSTO designs using props, but I found 2 stages gave much better payload fractions: (oops, that seems to be my custom Eve config for my 3x rescale system)

What I see: https://support.privatedivision.com/hc/en-us/articles/4402747185683--Kerbal-Space-Program-Patch-Notes-1-12 Also here: https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/1.12 Where is this supposed reference specifying that the launch sites are all over the solar system?

Stock rescale 3x planet sizes and orbits, square root 3 rotation periods, 0.5x height modifier (for a net 1.5x terrain height), and 1.25x atmosphere modifier. That's what I use plus the addition of some of my own modded bodies and tweaks to stock bodies. 4x is good too, then the rotation period modifier is a nice even 2x ( I keep all the others at 0.5x height modifier, and 1.25x atmosphere height modifier). Getting much bigger than that makes getting to orbit quite tedious, and then you'll want part mods to get performance closer to real life rockets, and then your need to lean into the mods pretty heavy. Stock parts are pretty well balanced for a 3 or 4x rescale though

Yay, a sarcastic response... You are aware that the the vast majority of the heightmap of kerbin is procedurally generated, with some specific features (like that big crater) and features added in. This early version of kerbin had the entire heightmap procedurally generated, its pretty close to what it is now: It was generated by libnoise: http://libnoise.sourceforge.net/examples/complexplanet/ Using Kopernicus, you can procedurally generate addon planets in KSP 1, and many of them were and still are made that way IIRC: https://github.com/Kopernicus/pqsmods-standalone Val is, afaik, completely procedurally generated except for the east egg additions. IIRC, Gilly is too, I forget which ones are and are not, or to what degree they are. Mun may have had some craters specified, but aside from the very large ones, the rest are done through procedural generation. While Gurdamma does look pretty, I see no evidence that its not just the result of tweaking some procedural generation parameters...

Ksp 1 used quite a bit of procedural generation, it's likely that ksp 2 does as well, with parameters being tweaked to get the desired effect, or procedural details overlain on a rough manually made height map.

Even with just 1 water level, with all that water we should at least see drainage channels, the terrain could look very much like mars with an ocean... Lots of craters, but also some rivulets and canyons and deltas... Erosion happens fast with flowing and raining liquid... It needs some erosion features.

Looks great. @Nate Simpson I love the "feel" of blue skies, but I must ask... should the skies be blue without oxygen? Also, taking a page from early Earth, what about an Earth like planet with a rather thin atmosphere (roughly 0.5 atms), as Earth once had as well: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/earth-s-ancient-atmosphere-was-half-thick-it-today Even with the same bulk properties, things can vary a lot over time.

The mission that I linked doesn't, it only aims to go under the ice far enough that more complex organics wouldn't be broken down by radiation and such. Stuff is coming out of geysers, you just need to sample that while it is still in good condition.

Of course. It is for 2 reasons: 1) if there is life there, we don't want to destroy it (at least not before we have a change to learn more about it). Our bacteria and Archea may well cause an ecological collapse and destroy native life 2) If we do contaminate it, our own life could make identifying native life very difficult. In the case of Enceladus, I doubt there is any panspermia issue: if we find life like ours there, its not native. Even if there did happen to be life on Enceladus with a common origin with life on Earth, if we sent a small sequencing machine, the nucleic acid sequence should be able to tell us if it is alien or not. This mission concept seems pretty good to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enceladus_Explorer

Rocket launches a payload to Saturn intercept for about 7,700 m/s from LEO. Then you spend about another 3800 m/s to get an Enceledus intercept, and about another 4,600 to capture and land on Enceledus (landing from low orbit taking only about 160 m/s), total would be 16,000 m/s from LEO. You could probably shave a few thousand m/s using gravity assists from a moon such as Titan, and maybe from Jupiter if the launch window is right. I'm thinking the SpaceX spaceship would be a good candidate for the launch vehicle, since the probe will need multiple stages and a lot of dV. Gets there by rocket, from low Enceledus orbit is trivial (160 m/s needed, gravity is only 0.113 m/s2 at the surface) Getting into the ocean would be harder, likely you'd try to enter via a geyser. An RTF could provide the heat to melt through Trails a cable, send result by radio from an emitter on the surface Risks? spending a lot of money for no result. Contaminating a habitable environment. If we find that there is no life, and we bring microbes that could survive there (unlikely, the probe would need to be contaminated with microbes suited to hydrothermal vents on Earth), I consider that a bonus: we've made Earth life interplanetary and colonized a new world with life (again, only a bonus if Enceledus is actually sterile).

Venus has a pretty severe hydrogen defecit. What good is a relatively cool desert with a modest atmosphere?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-021-01372-6?utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=commission_junction&utm_campaign=3_nsn6445_deeplink_PID100052171&utm_content=deeplink#article-info We really need to determine if it has life

I launch 200 ton payloads enclosed by expanded 3.75 meter-base fairings with my spaceplanes... In a 3x rescaled system (orbital velocity at LKO is 4050 m/s)... When I tried my 100 ton class SSTO in a stock system, it could deliver 100 tons to a Jool intercept. I don't watch his videos... so I don't really know what you mean by this, but there are quite a few people using spaceplanes to deliver much more than small comsats

Yes, delete it. What you describe is "periapsis kicking" It's better to set multiple maneuvers, one for each kick

I wonder what would have caused that... Well... Not for all SSTO space plane guys... I don't really use MK2 parts... Nor do I dock much with my SSTO space planes. They get to orbit, uncouple their payloads, and go back to kerbin. I don't really use crew shuttles all that much, and for that purpose, Eva is fine. When I do wish to dock, as I don't use MK2 parts in general, I typically slap on a shielded docking port somewhere

Good to know that there will be another. I think there should still be a few stat tweaks for some of the parts. The Skiff used to be OP, then got hit too hard with the nerfbat, it needs a thrust or twr buff. There are some other minor tweaks that I would like too