Kerbfleet: A Jool Odyssey-END OF CHAPTER 21! (and hopefully not so many talking heads in 22!)

[Mister Dilsby]

Welcome back! Let's see if this works...

[SpaceplaneAddict]

Oh lol. How do I give rep?!~

[Guest]

1 minute ago, SpaceplaneAddict said:

Oh lol. How do I give rep?!~

 

Press the "<3 Like this" button on the bottom of the post.

[SpaceplaneAddict]

Lol have rep for correcting my stupidity

[Starhawk]

I'm liking the look of that Laythe X3.

I'm sure you won't give us any details until they're revealed in the story, so I won't ask.

Tylo sure is 'a difficult nutmeg to grate'.  In some ways ISRU is more challenging than hauling huge boatloads of fuel.

Happy landings!

eta: Love the looks on both their faces in the last panel!

Edited November 29, 2015 by Starhawk

[SpaceplaneAddict]

38 minutes ago, Starhawk said:

I'm liking the look of that Laythe X3.

I'm sure you won't give us any details until they're revealed in the story, so I won't ask.

Tylo sure is 'a difficult nutmeg to grate'.  In some ways ISRU is more challenging than hauling huge boatloads of fuel.

Happy landings!

eta: Love the looks on both their faces in the last panel!

And, exactly, how is ISRU harder?

[Starhawk]

On 2015-11-29, 12:45:41, SpaceplaneAddict said:

And, exactly, how is ISRU harder?

Physical configuration is trickier.  Heat and power must be managed.  The lighter drill requires a minimum concentration of ore.  Etc.

Happy Concerned landings!

Edited November 30, 2015 by Starhawk

[Mister Dilsby]

Hey all, good to be back after lots of fits and starts in the Great Forum Re-Foruming of 2015. I'm still figuring a lot of things out, like why some of the previous page images got un-embedded, how to do following, signatures, and why my profile pic now looks all fuzzy and squashed. Also just getting back to work after a holiday week in which I did not play nearly as much KSP as I though I was going to... so please bear with me--new content as new content comes  

[Starwhip]

Well, it's good to see that at least one thing won't change.
I, too, am terrified of water landings. XD Need some time to get a feel for them, too many bad memories of craft imploding with a single touch.

[Deddly]

I was looking at the X3 and thinking "surely in real life the pontoons would be bigger than that, otherwise they wouldn't provide enough bouyancy." Looks like KSP is closer to real life than I realised

Great work on the comic though, Kuzzter. As entertaining as always. I especially appreciate the work you put into the first panel to get the placement and gestures right.

 

 

...oh, and did you figure out what was wrong with the avatar?

Edited November 30, 2015 by Deddly
...and

[Geschosskopf]

7 hours ago, Starwhip said:

Well, it's good to see that at least one thing won't change.
I, too, am terrified of water landings. XD Need some time to get a feel for them, too many bad memories of craft imploding with a single touch.

Water landings are still a beeyotch.  They're considerably less likely to break the ship now, but there's now a very good chance of the ship flipping on 1st contact.  It's like landing with your brakes locked.  The trouble seems to be that while the water is "softer", it still produces WAY more drag than air, so whatever touches first gets loads of drag and slows down quickly.  Because this is always below the CoM, you get a big nose-down pitching moment.  This brings more of the ship into contact with the water, which means even more off-center drag, which means even more nose-down tendency.  And the faster your horizontal speed upon contact, the more the upper parts in the air want to overrun the lower parts in the water, so the more you nose over.  But as the nose drops and enters the water, its upwards buoyant force starts to create a nose-up pitching moment to counter the nose-down you're getting from the tail of the plane.  So the more buoyant the nose part, and the further ahead of the CoM it is, the more nose-up force you get and the sooner you get it (i.e., before the plane has stood too far on its nose) so the less likely you are to flip over.

These considerations argue in favor of always making sure your pontoons extend out ahead of the plane's nose some distance.  You also want fairly wide parts up front, so they create more buoyancy.  You want the whole plane to sit as low on the water as possible, so the initial drag from water contact has the shortest moment arm possible.  And you want enough wing and/or flaps to land at a very low speed, like 30-40m/s at most, to minimize the momentum from your forward motion that's trying to flip you.

All of this IMHO gives the advantage to flying boats instead of planes with pontoons.  A Mk2 fuselage sitting in the water is hard to flip at sane landing speeds.  It also has the advantage of needing fewer parts as it combines the main fuselage and pontoon into 1 unit.  Problem is, though, you want as little else touching the water as possible, which means keeping the wings and engines up, which gets you into asymmetrical lift/thrust/drag/CoM issues that can be dealt with for subsonic planes no big deal, but which are quite problematic for spaceplanes.

On a related note, does anybody know how impact tolerance of parts works with later landings?  Horizontal speed doesn't seem to matter.

 

 

[Mister Dilsby]

28 minutes ago, Geschosskopf said:

Water landings are still a beeyotch.  They're considerably less likely to break the ship now, but there's now a very good chance of the ship flipping on 1st contact. 

Funny you should mention that.

Well, time to roll out the X5! I`ll see what happens if I shift the pontoons forward. Also wondering if putting a drogue in the back will stabilize it and prevent the flip. Or, I could just land on the ?!!@# beach. 

[Mister Dilsby]

2 hours ago, Deddly said:

I was looking at the X3 and thinking "surely in real life the pontoons would be bigger than that, otherwise they wouldn't provide enough bouyancy." Looks like KSP is closer to real life than I realised ...oh, and did you figure out what was wrong with the avatar?

Yeah, as you can see I'm having a WONDERFUL time with the whole 'land a spacefloatplane from orbit and take off again' concept. The avatar just got squashed down for the square format, a re-crop fixed it.

[Starhawk]

8 minutes ago, Kuzzter said:

Yeah, as you can see I'm having a WONDERFUL time with the whole 'land a spacefloatplane from orbit and take off again' concept. The avatar just got squashed down for the square format, a re-crop fixed it.

Well, time to roll out the X5! I`ll see what happens if I shift the pontoons forward. Also wondering if putting a drogue in the back will stabilize it and prevent the flip. Or, I could just land on the ?!!@# beach.

I hear the beach is very nice this time of year.  Especially on Laythe!

Happy Concerned landings!

Edited November 30, 2015 by Starhawk
Almost forgot to be concerned!

[Geschosskopf]

43 minutes ago, Kuzzter said:

Funny you should mention that......

Well, time to roll out the X5! I`ll see what happens if I shift the pontoons forward. Also wondering if putting a drogue in the back will stabilize it and prevent the flip. Or, I could just land on the ?!!@# beach. 

I used to do seaplane SSTOs for Laythe but the drag since 1.0 kinda ruined that if using Firespitter pontoons (I always refused to use radial intakes).  So up until 1.05, I had a land-based spaceplane for a crew shuttle and Laythe-only seaplanes for flying between islands

IMHO, the best place to land a spaceplane on Laythe is the southern coastal strip of the big, squarish island somewhat west of the main archipelago that Brotoro used as his main base.  The equator runs across that patch of ground so no fuel wasted in plane changes, it's a big area that's reasonably smooth and flat (not perfect but certainly good enough), and it's a short drive up to the dunes that make up the bulk of the island and which have the most ore to refuel the spaceplane.

I'd show you a picture but the new forum doesn't like Flikr for some reason and I don't like Imgur, so we're at an impasse :/.  But it's about 110^E

The problem with Brotoro's spot is that it's a long way from decent ore--in fact, his whole base area, while dry ground, is actually part of the ocean biome which has zero ore, unless they've fixed that recently.  But he was using fuel trucked all the way from Kerbin, in the pre-stock mining days, so he really didn't care :).

But these days, it's possible to make SSTO seaplanes, it's just a challenge.  Folks have done it.  So I'm sure you'll get there eventually.

Edited November 30, 2015 by Geschosskopf
stupid new forum doesn't like pictures

[Farex]

hmmm, a new story. a new sub. I am curious to see what you are doing now, Kuzzter.

 

€dit: I know this doesn't belong here but this is the the first thread I'm looking at within the new forum.

html-code broken, Avatars are strangely resized? how do I give reputation? and the look and functionality.... does it really have to mimik windows 10 so much? I mean, this design even screwed up google maps.

 

Don't take this as an offense. For me this new look and design is just "eeeeww". What does everyone have with this bleached design that rids you of so many functionality and performance. seriously. geez. I'm glad I'm having a few Windows7 copys in storage.wow.

 

ANYWAY. Kuzzter, go for it! What will happen to Tedus, Kenlie and all the other kerbals. What will bring your crazy powerpointskills to life this time? 
 

Edited November 30, 2015 by Farex

[TaintedLion]

Can't wait for the main event!

[Willbl3pic]

1 hour ago, Farex said:

mimik windows 10 so much

afaik, ipboard v5 came before win10.

[Mad Rocket Scientist]

11 hours ago, Kuzzter said:

Hey all, good to be back after lots of fits and starts in the Great Forum Re-Foruming of 2015. I'm still figuring a lot of things out, like why some of the previous page images got un-embedded, how to do following, signatures, and why my profile pic now looks all fuzzy and squashed. Also just getting back to work after a holiday week in which I did not play nearly as much KSP as I though I was going to... so please bear with me--new content as new content comes  

You think you have it bad?  Look at this: http://i.imgur.com/C62vPcA.jpg
That's my new, migrated, craft showcase.

Also, the forum migration marks the end of "You have given to much rep to Kuzzter, you must spread it around."

 

[SaturnianBlue]

20 minutes ago, Mad Rocket Scientist said:

You think you have it bad?  Look at this: http://i.imgur.com/C62vPcA.jpg
That's my new, migrated, craft showcase.

Also, the forum migration marks the end of "You have given to much rep to Kuzzter, you must spread it around."

 

Ouch! Really bad, but Saturn Technical might have fared worse, all the images are reduced to BBcode, and my spoilers and text sizes have given up... 

Edit: Uhh, most of the thread got fixed when I updated it....

Still, the albums and many bits of text got ruined. It seems they've ended up all over the place, the testing section got moved above the torpedoes... Also bizarre, the probe bros pic ended up at the asteroid sentinels section...

In any case, excited to see what Kuzzter tests next, I probably won't have such a grand adventure for quite a while!

Edited December 1, 2015 by SaturnianBlue

[Mad Rocket Scientist]

3 minutes ago, SaturnianBlue said:

Ouch! Really bad, but Saturn Technical might have fared worse, all the images are reduced to BBcode, and my spoilers and text sizes have given up... 

In any case, excited to see what Kuzzter tests next, I probably won't have such a grand adventure for quite a while!

Yikes!  Actually, probably Zokesia had the worst time, most of the OP was a table, and now all tables are reduced to BBcode.

[Mister Dilsby]

4 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

[SSTO seaplanes are] just a challenge.  Folks have done it.  So I'm sure you'll get there eventually.

Oh yes, I think I will--X5 actually went pretty well, more on that later

4 hours ago, Farex said:

ANYWAY. Kuzzter, go for it! What will happen to Tedus, Kenlie and all the other kerbals. What will bring your crazy powerpointskills to life this time? 

Thanks, glad to have you along! Fortunately we do have a lot of pilots on the roster, there are a LOT of craft to test!

2 hours ago, Mad Rocket Scientist said:

Also, the forum migration marks the end of "You have given to much rep to Kuzzter, you must spread it around."

You're right! Well, I guess that makes up for only getting one point per like rep now.

[smjjames]

What is Clauselle saying in the second panel?

Also, I spotted this on Kerbalstuff: [removed link to defunct website]

Since your'e going for a Star Trekky theme, that might be cool to use.

[Mister Dilsby]

10 minutes ago, smjjames said:

What is Clauselle saying in the second panel?

Also, I spotted this on Kerbalstuff: https://kerbalstuff.com/mod/1322/Star%20Trek%20TOS%20Tunics

Since your'e going for a Star Trekky theme, that might be cool to use.

"Maybe". (Peut='may' etre='to be') Sorry, she tends to forget her Standard Kerblish when exasperated. 

Those excellent Trek tunics are of course by the great @GregroxMun, the creator of Admiral Shirley's badS uniform in Eve: Order Zero. I haven't used them because I do want to differentiate from Star Trek a little bit, if only to make it easier to slip in more references to other shows and movies. Though I do of course use TOS color schemes for the engineers', pilots' and scientists' speech balloons and other tags.   

[smjjames]

Also, while I haven't checked post 1.0.5, when I was doing the Eelcano Laythe challenge and I was using BB at the time, I noticed that my boat actually sunk LOWER into the water than on Kerbin, despite the lower gravity and the fact that Laythe water is supposed to be very salty. So, you might want to run some 'VR sims' via hyperedit to check how they'd behave in Laythe water.