pincushionman

If you have Making History, you can use the Gemini-style 1.875m capsule with a matching short tube underneath. Stuff a Science Jr. on the inside (the tube is hollow and you can still access the node on the bottom of the capsule). Put a 1.875m heat shield on to the bottom of the tube so the SJ is still isolated from the heat. This setup is juuust too heavy for a single starter ‘chute to slow the craft below the safe impact speed of the heat shield, but that’s okay because when the shield pops it bleeds off the rest of the energy and you end up on the rim of the tube, the rest of the ship intact.

I'm a little sad these aren't already on the list. The advantages of both are that we know they work; we already understand how they could be built; and we already understand their limitations well.

when I click the link for www.kerbaltek.com in the OP I get:

@Ezriilc as of 2019/9/14 there seems to be an issue with your file hosting. While that gets sorted out, do you have a mirror?

Do you mean you didn’t rotate the camera to be under the water too, or that the splashdown destroyed the engine and you didn’t know it?

As the others have said, it's not really necessary to know the reference direction. But I know we're a curious lot here - and you're not the first to ask - so I put a tutorial together as an Imgur album to help you make an estimate of where the reference direction is: https://imgur.com/gallery/7Ttn8Rz

Thanks, guys! I’ll take a look at those. This community is the best.

Is there a way to log orbital events (specifically, captures and escapes from SOIs) of a vessel? I know I can use HyperEdit to extract the current orbital elements, but I need to be able to get the times of various events to compare the in-game simulation and what I'm calculating in KOMET (right now, there are differences I need to diagnose). I tried letting the game run and screenshotting when captures/escapes occur, but that only gives me time down to within a second or two, and with ships and planets moving at hundreds or thousands of meters per second, I believe I need more precision than that. Is there a mod that will let me export such a log? Thanks much!

Since everything is modular, I would be shocked if we wouldn’t be able to hack up a converter to do the job once the new format is made available. Whether said crafts would be useable with whatever new systems are used is a whole ‘nother issue, and we’ll have to wait and see.

This does not mean it is a single-stage-to-reentry. Do you mean to say you’re trying to make a re-useable rocket or a spaceplane? Let’s get on the same page here.

You have a contracts mod going, @Geonovast? I don’t see either CooperativeCompetetiveCorporateConglomerateEasyGoing nor Kerbal Standard in the listed agencies on the wiki; Methinks this is all mod bug.

So why would such a craft ever have to return to Kerbin? That sounds like a perfect type of utility vessel to leave in space with the station while crew is returned by other, simpler means.

Posting a screenshot of your craft (just the re-entry portion) would help us help you determine where you could or could not easily place engines, or where parts could be moved to re-balance. Though to be fair, if you have a full top tank on re-entry - and having it empty would help - that sounds to me like you packed too much fuel. What’s your mission profile and the stats (read: more screenies) of your vessel?

Yes. There is a message up top saying “Entering <such-and-such area>” and a similar one when leaving. Selecting the waypoint on the map view and “Activate Navigation” before you start will both give a marker on the navball and show distance to target; this will help immensely. But you’ll need to be johnny-on-the-spot with your action (have the PAW locked open or use an action group for speed). The areas are sized for planes, in my experience, and are difficult to hit at rocket speeds.

Autostrut. Everything, including between stages. I’ve been fighting such roll whenever I try to pitch or yaw over on liftoff since forever, and only recently discovered how well Grandparent autostrut on everything does at eliminating such troubles. Using the longer tanks also helps with this, as it reduces the number of joints and thus the flexibility of the craft.

This sounds wrong to me. Isn’t fuel consumption controlled only by throttle, with thrust/power and efficiency being what changes with altitude and speed? Rockets used to also vary fuel flow with pressure, but that was changed because the pumps and injectors don’t care what the pressure is.

This is weird. By the navball it looks like the craft thinks “forward” is what’s actually to the right or left ( if you’re looking south in the bottom pic, then it’s to the left). Is your cockpit the root part? Is there another control point that accidentally is root instead? If you select “control from here” on the cockpit does the situation resolve itself? You don’t, by chance, have a Probe core at the cener of that monstrosity, do you?

If you’re in the SPH, make sure you slew the camera around so you’re looking at the side of the already-placed girder. Looking from the end seems to not work at all for any parts.. (it happens in the VAB too, but you have to go out of your way to look at the end in that building)

The only time normal time warp is available to you is when your vessel is either under no load, is Splashed Down, or is Landed - and a driving rover is in none of those states. So you’re in physics warp. This works by doubling, tripling, or quadrupling the time step between frames. Thus parts are allowed to displace up to four times their normal distance before the next frame is evaluated - and since internal forces are proportional to displacement, you get up to 4x the reaction force next frame. And then things go badly.

Given that you can set it as a “control from here” point, you’re not exactly wrong…

Can’t help with robotics stuff (didn’t buy it yet), but I can help with the pictures…kinda. You’re right, you only have an “insert image from URL.” The forum doesn’t host anything other than the BBcode of the messages themselves; all other files you share must be linked from elsewhere. Imgur works pretty well and is free; try posting your images there and use the linking tools.

So you want the wing to stay fixed to the fuselage, and the engine to rotate? It sounds to me like the solution is to attach the wing to the fuselage instead of the engine, and create space for the engine by offsetting the wing along the beam.

If you don’t know then you haven’t switched it.

Building-upgrade or cash-flow constraints?

*snorts milk out nose*