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


Mister Dilsby

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1 hour ago, Kuzzter said:

What a load of kowmulch! Trying to make a quick & easy cargo SSTO to get the last parts and crew to Intrepid, and this happens:

 

I cannot space because of the drag of the stuff inside the cargo bay. Arrggh! I tried to construct a fairing inside the bay to see if that would get rid of the drag but there's not enough room. Rebuilt the ship with standard cargo bays only instead of bay + tail ramp, let's see if that makes the game see all these parts as inside and out of the airstream...

If that fails I suppose I can just strap everything to boosters, but I wanted just a little bit of elegance. :( 

ETA: On  further examination it looks like the vectors are coming from the bays themselves, not the parts inside them. Still annoying. Moar jets may solve the problem, I don't have @Rune-level patience for this :) 

I hear you, SSTOs take a lot of finicking to balance right. Three solutions:

-Increase TWR slightly. 0.6-0.7 should be more than enough, and if you add too much engine, then you need more fuel, and then you need more wing...

-Throw me a file, and I'll take a look at it. Might be a really simple fix, lots of drag-reducing techniques out there.

-Do the unthinkable, and have Mort draw up a very cheap lease agreement with R-SUV for a semi-new Claymore. That workhorse can space anything, as long as it fits the bay and total GLOW is not much over 180mT.

 

Rune. A lot of ratios fighting each other for prominence... the soul of an engineering problem.

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46 minutes ago, Rune said:

-Increase TWR slightly. 0.6-0.7 should be more than enough, and if you add too much engine, then you need more fuel, and then you need more wing...

Thanks Rune. Option 1 will do it; there was room for a 5th engine so I put on a 5th engine. No guarantees that engine will survive landing, but hey the important thing is to space. The ship looks like mulch but I am embracing it--we're calling it the "Derpstar" :) 

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12 minutes ago, RocketSquid said:

Yes. It's called MOAR ENGINES. It works like 45% of the time.

45% of the time it works all the time, yes. Just a little tuning and I'll be ready to fly--have to make a new uniform though, I decided I wanted a new Air Service 2nd Looty to pull ferry duty for Tedus, Kenlie and the hardware, and I hadn't made a yellow flightsuit with one gold bar on the chest yet :) 

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17 minutes ago, Kuzzter said:

Sorry it's so few slides today. Flight operations near Intrepid take a very long time, for obvious reasons. More tomorrow I hope :) 

Take your time.
What I'm working on now is taking a lot longer too, for more or less the same reasons I think (too many parts... :wink:)

Edited by Just Jim
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20 minutes ago, Kuzzter said:

All right, she's ready...

Sorry it's so few slides today. Flight operations near Intrepid take a very long time, for obvious reasons. More tomorrow I hope :) 

Lol, Mort would love the Stage Recovery mod.

Also, why do Tedus and Samantha have orange suits? That's supposed to be reserved for the main 4.

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They're not orange, they're yellow--same color as Kenlie's Fleet pilot uniform. Here's the Intrepid pre-launch group shot again:

R5jqQo7.png

Actually after the uniform code revision, Jeb (second from right) is the only orange suit left. Val is wearing green, and Bob and Bill also have tunics in their branch of service colors. [BTW at this moment I just got the notification that @Starhawk has ninja'd this explanation. I'm going to press on regardless :) ] Kenlie, a Fleet Service pilot, is wearing a yellow tunic and black pants, fourth from left. That's Tedus in the yellow flight suit next to him. Air Service pilots wear USAF-style insignia on their left breast: Samantha's single gold bar for 2nd Looty, Tedus's double silver bar for Kaptin, Jeb's silver oak kluster for Lt. Kernel. Fleet and other branches of course use ST-TNG style rank pips on the tunic closure, and a progressively more ornate system of braids for higher ranks. 

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1 hour ago, Starhawk said:

I think the ship looks very nice.  Are you still calling it the Derpstar?

Happy Concerned landings!

Yeah, that 5th engine clipped into the (empty) tank adapter... well. Not the way I would normally want to do it. I have not actually tested a landing yet--hopefully Samantha will at least be able to "walk away" from it, I'm already becoming attached :) 

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32 minutes ago, smjjames said:

And I guess Jeb keeps the orange suit just because he's Jeb. :)

Yeah, it made sense for me for the Air Service guys to always wear flightsuits, and if Jeb keeps his flightsuit then it stays orange. I thought about putting some orange in Val's, Bill's and Bob's uniforms somewhere, but it clashed terribly with everything but the blue one. Hopefully it won't be confusing in context,

The flightsuit thing for Air Service was influenced by conversations with a person I know at work who used to be USAF intelligence. He complained that his regular duty uniform (although it was cool camo and looked like battle dress) wasn't actually rated for combat. So whenever he went into the field he had two choices: wear an Army uniform with all the appropriate flame retardants etc, or a flightsuit. Naturally he picked the latter, despite the desert heat :) 

Posting a couple pages early, just for @Starhawk who has correctly pointed out a lack of gratuitous Intrepid softcore images in this thread :) 

6vrWb1R.png

bqAFRxS.png

I really hope this works. The scansats have no maneuver capability at all other than reaction wheels--no RCS, and I can't even fire the engines without an irreversible decoupling. It's all up to the Tugbot, and Mister Dilsby's supple wrist!

Edited by Kuzzter
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Just now, smjjames said:

I think you mean Air Force uniform, not Army.

No, I meant Army. Apparently the Air Force uniform he was issued at the time wasn't rated for the possibility of encountering hostile forces on the ground, improvised explosives, etc. Thus the quandary :)  

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Just now, Kuzzter said:

No, I meant Army. Apparently the Air Force uniform he was issued at the time wasn't rated for the possibility of encountering hostile forces on the ground, improvised explosives, etc. Thus the quandary :)  

Oh I get it now,

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Well, thanks!

An enormous amount of Kerbfleet's resources and skull-sweat (not to mention Kuzzter's) went into creating Intrepid.
She deserves to be shown off in all her awesomeness.

I have great confidence in Mister Dilsby.  I'm sure his wrist is at least as supple as Tommy's. :)

Docking is fun!

Happy Concerned landings!

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15 minutes ago, Kuzzter said:

I still think it's Derpy.

I faced the exact same predicament during my Jool-5 mission.  The spaceplane I was designing to carry a full orange tank to orbit wasn't quite enough with the four Rapiers, and I ended up adding a single Whiplash attached to an adapter tank at the back.  I believe I hated the look as much as you do.

Despite its esthetic flaws, it did work.  So there's that.  :)

The Derpstar is way nicer looking than that one was.

Happy Concerned landings!

p.s. Watch out for tailstrikes.

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Just now, Starhawk said:

p.s. Watch out for tailstrikes.

Oh, it's practically a certainty. I put a pair of radial drogues on the back to hold it up, but your guess is as good as mine whether that will be enough. Poor Samantha--she might not realize yet that her instructor will be staying in orbit. Welcome to the Air Service, Looty! :) 

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Cool as always! The Derpstar would be a really cool and elegant SSTO if only that tail section would be different. And I don't want to say your work is trash or anything, I like the Intrepid, but it looks slightly… derby (darn, autocorrect!) derby (again!) derby (shee-oot!) derpy (finally!). Altough, most of our KSP vehicles look derpy, including my own!

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41 minutes ago, Kuzzter said:

I really hope this works. The scansats have no maneuver capability at all other than reaction wheels--no RCS, and I can't even fire the engines without an irreversible decoupling. It's all up to the Tugbot, and Mister Dilsby's supple wrist!

Hey, that Derpstar is not a bad looker at all! And don't worry, with a bit of practice and some alignment indicator mod (the one for the navball is incredibly light and stock-esque, but I fell in love with the more RL-like docking alignment indicator mod), it actually becomes a breeze. And before you know it, you get the "lego'ing in space" bug, and... well, I might offer ideas for stuff to do after this thing, but it is perhaps better to do so a bit further along the road. We barely got started on this trip! ;)

 

Rune. I still think a bit of cheating ingenuity could have made it fly without the whiplash, though...

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23 minutes ago, ZentroCatson said:

 I like the Intrepid, but it looks slightly… derby (darn, autocorrect!) derby (again!) derby (shee-oot!) derpy (finally!). Altough, most of our KSP vehicles look derpy, including my own!

As Bill might say in his best Chief Engineer voice: "Don't you think you'd better.. rephrase that, laddie?" :D 

20 minutes ago, Rune said:

Hey, that Derpstar is not a bad looker at all! And don't worry, with a bit of practice and some alignment indicator mod (the one for the navball is incredibly light and stock-esque, but I fell in love with the more RL-like docking alignment indicator mod), it actually becomes a breeze. And before you know it [...]

Oh, it's not as though I haven't docked before... hundreds of times... simultaneous multiport... completely on visual because I pressed F2 for clearer screenshots... the trouble is that the Tugbot will be connected orthogonally to the probe, meaning that even when I "control from here" on the probe's port, bad thrust angles may give me rotations I don't want as I make translational maneuvers. Plus, the probes have to be rotationally oriented a certain way or the L and R-pod ramp doors won't close properly--so an alignment indicator might not help much in any case. In other words, it's a completely different kind of docking altogether (and you can just say it out loud, folks--no need to fill up the thread :) )

Ooh, but there may be an easier way--you know what they say, if you don't have enough control authority to dock Mohammed with the mountain, dock the mountain with Mohammed...next update, insh'Allah. :) 

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