G'th

Okay interesting. So essentially it adjusts your CS' deflection to account for different situations then, which if I understand it means that you won't have too much control in any particular situation?

Have a question and I haven't really seen it anywhere, but what exactly does the "DPCR" button do? The other toggles are pretty intuitive as to what they help you with, but DPCR isn't and I haven't been able to find anywhere that specifically explains what it is. I imagine it has something to do with Dynamic Pressure but I'm still not sure. (and just to clarify, I don't even need the toggles as the planes I have fly well without them. I'm just curious)

So, I've been working on a shuttle like plane, and naturally the point of such a vehicle is the downmass capability provided by the cargo bay. And to do this, I've been using the B9 HL parts because they look better and give me that classic heat shield under belly. However, what I've found is that depending on my reentry trajectory (Be it higher, or lower, short or long, etc etc) sometimes what I have in the cargo bay will explode. Thus far I haven't actually brought anything down yet, but my docking and airlock apparatus (built with CX's space station bits, which obviously aren't meant to survive unshielded reentry) is exploding. Now, while I can reenter in such ways that it doesn't explode, it still kind of defeats the point as then I'll be doing extra maneuvers to get into position for the right reentry just to avoid something that shouldn't be happening anyway. And it definitely doesn't make sense seeing as the rest of the vehicle isn't even affected when everything in the cargo bay starts exploding and rattling around. (which is awesome, but still) So my question is, what is there that I can do to fix this? Once the game loads back up for me I'm going to try unclipping the docking apparatus (I had clipped it into the cockpit for looks, but I think that might be why the cargo bay isn't working, as it not all of the apparatus is actually in the cargo bay) and see if it works better, but if it doesn't, is there something in the cargo bay cfg I can change or fix to make this work? Some notes: I am using FAR but not DR or Real Heat. I do realize that B9 isn't fully updated for 1.04, but I also can't imagine that a fix for this would be so involved that I'd be better off waiting for an official update. It seems to just be the HL parts that are problematic, as I made a smaller shuttle type craft using the S2 parts and had even more parts clipped in the S2 cargo bay/cockpit and that craft works perfectly no matter what kind of reentry I do (aside from anything stronger than a Mun reentry anyway).

Today, I woke up at 9am. At 10am, on a whim, I decided to go to the Space Center. At 12, by complete coincidence, I got to see my first live rocket launch since I watched the Ares I-X go up all those years ago. Suffice to say it was awesome.

If atmospheres scaled with this I would be awash with glee.

While I can't help with how to make it, I can vouch for the total usefulness of such a feature. And not just for power either. I'd love to designate fuel reserves as well.

True, but it is an option and you don't even have to do a high suborbit. A basic low altitude hop can get the same job done. Just a matter of aiming it just right.

It can be recreated, though the only way to do it reliably is via Hyperedit. Put the debris bomb in a retrograde orbit, put your shuttle in a prograde orbit at the exact same height and inclination. Provided the debris is compacted together enough (I recommend making the decouple force as low as possible) it'll collide with your shuttle. Presumably. I'm just guessing that would do it because thats the only way such a debris field would actually work in the way it does in the movie. If the debris field was in a prograde orbit relative to the shuttle, ISS, etc then it could only have collided once with may be a couple bits flying by on the next orbit (as it would then be an elliptical orbit. It would never get to the shuttle if it was still circular as the movie portrays). And thats if the debris field gets created in such a way that closest approach hits zero.

Could also just do a high orbit dive. Get up into a very high, almost vertical suborbital trajectory (IE, burn straight up until like, 900km up) and adjust it so that your reentry point is to the north west of your target. After that just ride the trajectory and get ready for one hell of a ride. You'll still probably want some way to traverse the terrain though as unless you get lucky it still won't be accurate enough to get right on the target. And it will require some extensive heat shielding. Another thing if you're not opposed to mods is to get the Trajectories mod which displays approximately where you're going to land after reentry. Highly useful for getting it into the ballpark so you can adjust after you're nearby the target. But the efficient thing to do is to take a plane up to your target.

Hm, interesting. The stability derivatives screen doesn't give me any red flags at pretty much any situation I could think of (outside of impossible ones, like M6.9 at .5km up) so that does explain why my plane flies so well despite that yellow line. The cross-section is listed at 9.65m/s2. Not sure if thats good or bad lol.

Just to give an update on the nights progress and to get even more advice. I eventually gave up on the shuttle bit as the SRB/ET combos I had available just wouldn't mesh with the orbiter as I had it. I'd need super fine tweakables in order to make it work. (as the closest I could get to zeroing the torque was 2ish, and even with that flight was still a nightmare even with heavy SAS) So, I decided to step back a bit and approach it from a different way. I decided to start off with a Dreamchaser inspired vehicle that covers the large crew capicity of the previous vehicle, and then once I get a solid design with that I'll work on a larger cargo version. And so far I've done pretty well and have a good design that I'm just working out the low speed kinks on (mostly just finetuning the controls so a tap of a key doesn't send me over my max AOA). But something I'm curious about even though it doesn't seem to be affecting anything is this rather large unexpected dip in drag just before the expected drop when you hit the engines. I'm wondering if you guys see anything that might be causing it. I had a feeling it might be the Tail (as I made it rather thick) but removing it doesn't kill the first dip and its presence is necessary anyway to keep green numbers across the board.

I'm imagining you've tried the UI size change via the Settings menu? Beyond that I can't imagine how you'd get a bigger UI.

Well, that's why I have the Space Shuttle Engines mod. And besides, if I was worried about what was efficient or even simple then I wouldn't have bothered with any of this lol. I'll give Build Aid a try and see if it can help me narrow it down. Problem I've been having is that it was impossible to really tell if my engines were angled properly as the COT is affected too much by the SRB's. I wish there was a way where the COT snaps up close to the COM so you can actually tell where its pointed.

^ Ooh, definitely gonna bookmark that one. Kudos! Right now I'm working on integrating this thing into a STS like system. Been having trouble though figuring out how to get the thrust offset zeroed out without affecting vehicle performance and without a payload. And of course the other option is to have the COT fire through the CM, but I'm having trouble nailing that down. Its really hard to tell what the proper angle is and with the engines I have not being strong enough to really affect the thrust direction its even harder.

I like TAC because its not too simplistic but not so complex that it makes certain designs impossible. It is true though that its default settings makes it so you basically don't have to worry about it (because one small tube of AIO LS gets you like, 300 days for a single kerbal) so it does require tweaking the consumption, but even so.

^ ill definitely check those mods out, however my initial ideas proved to be right on point. I made my first landing from orbit just a few minutes ago. Ended up on the side other side of the mountain by KSC, but i still landed safely despite the rough terrain. Almost have the deorbit position nailed.

Okay now that i know what im looking I was able to fix the wings very nicely and even managed to get along withot going dihedral. In getting everything balanced and getting my CM movement minimized i even made the thing lighter which is nice. However, my last issue is that im getting some major SAS type wobble at subsonic speeds. It bobs up and down like crazy. Turning off SAS and going manual solves it, but keyboard flying is less than stellar and it makes landing harder because i cant hold a specific AOA. Any tips for fixing this? Im going to try reducing torque but i also dont want the torque to be so weak that on orbit becomes problematic. Another option may be to reduce the CS' deflection, but im unsure how much i could reduce it before its too weak. Presuming everything is at 100% and the plane flies super well at all speeds (aside from the bobbing) how much do you guys think i could reduce? Id post some pics but my internets down atm so im posting from my phone.

So I recently got the itch to do spaceplanes again, and because in my current game I wanted a high capacity crew vehicle, I decided to do a B9 based shuttle. Currently I'm at the stage where I'm working on making sure it will fly well and I've hit a bit of a road block, as the way FAR appears to work now is a lot different from the last time I played the game, and at this point I"m not sure what I'm looking at when I generate the information via FAR. So this is what I have right now. Its no where near a finished state and is mostly just where I'm at right now. In order to go farther, I really need some help on what I'm looking at what I need to fix. I've already test flown this (For reentry) and while it stays stable it rolls for some reason. Then once I come out of reentry and start coming down below Mach 1 stability almost goes out the window. Some notes: 1. The engines are just there for mass atm. I haven't worked at aligning them yet. Same thing with the RCS pods. 2. The odd shape of the wings and CS' is just due to this being a WIP. My first stab at it didn't work at all and looked a lot more like actual wings. 3. I re-scaled the B9 parts so that they can be used to transport 2.5m parts.

Welp, I can clear up some of this. The disconnect between VAB stats and on the Pad is because of how engines work in the post 1.0 world. What shows in the VAB (If you're using KER/VOID/MechJeb) for DV and TWR stats is based on what it would be in a vaccum, ie, Space. Unless you set those mods to calculate the stats for the atmosphere, the stats won't tell you how it'll perform until you are already in orbit. As for the stuff that directly pertains to KSPI-E, someone who plays it more will have to clear that up.

Oh this is a goldmine! Apollo 12 is my favorite Apollo mission (in part because of how it was portrayed in From the Earth to the Moon) so this was an excellent read.

^^ Haha. Thats where I would have taken the opportunity to explain why you can't see stars in most photos on the Moon or even in LEO. My friend didn't really take issue with that though, he knew that no simulator was going to be 100% true to life and definitely not in a visual sense. But at any rate, I sort of repeated the experience. This time on youtube of all places. The video in question was the view of one of the SRB's during a shuttle launch, and the person was skeptical because when the booster was jettisoned it kept the other booster almost dead center of the camera for almost 3 minutes after jettison. And he obviously was skeptical that that was even possible. But I explained why that was possible (and more importantly why it was caught on camera, as I imagined he may have thought it was too coincidental that this phenomenon was caught on camera) and he actually responded well and was more or less convinced. Hooray!

Wanted to chime in and say I absolutely love these parts, and especially the new science parts which I think deserve some CSS treatment. Its always nice to see more high quality stockalike mods. Oh, and I also wanted to ask if you planned on doing more parts for the Explorer-like probe in the mod? It'd be nice to have some solid way of pairing it with a 1.25m booster.

Those fairings are delicious

Oh yipee! Hopefully you actually get through all the stock pods.

Well technically with that kind of dV that craft could go almost anywhere and back if piloted perfectly. The problem I see with it is that its a really inefficient design. You could design a Duna flyby mission with at least half that weight with stock parts. 75% of the weight if you want to land. And thats before I get into the fact that its not exactly aerodynamic, what with the top of your rocket being almost flat. Another thing to consider is that if you want to progress farther in the tech tree, you don't necessarily need to go to Duna to do it. A polar orbit of Mun or Minmus can easily net you over 5-800 science if you manage to nab EVA reports from every biome.