Those Stupid Airborne Missions

[Corona688]

I am the OP.

How can I shut down the junos without action groups, or do I need money to upgrade the spaceplane hangar to get the money I need to upgrade the VAB?

Edited June 16, 2016 by Corona688

[mk1980]

frankly, if you're looking for easy money, the avionics tech is the wrong branch. you hardly make any money at all with those stupid survey missions. you should get the rocket techs. satellite (and later space station/outpost) contracts are easy money - big reward, very little effort.

[Stoney3K]

33 minutes ago, Corona688 said:

I am the OP.

How can I shut down the junos without action groups, or do I need money to upgrade the spaceplane hangar to get the money I need to upgrade the VAB?

Just stage the Terrier and let the Junos flame out by themselves?

[Corona688]

3 minutes ago, Stoney3K said:

Just stage the Terrier and let the Junos flame out by themselves?

Unless they flame out perfectly simultaneously, they will kick the aircraft into a vicious spin.  The same goes for disabling the engines one at a time.

Maybe if I can get them running off the same fuel bottle, I can right click and disable the fuel.

[Stoney3K]

Just now, Corona688 said:

Unless they flame out perfectly simultaneously, they will kick the aircraft into a vicious spin.  The same goes for disabling the engines one at a time.

Maybe if I can get them running off the same fuel bottle, I can right click and disable the fuel.

In the latest versions (post 1.1.0), the engines will flame out simultaneously. The jet engine thrust drops off proportional to altitude and speed, until it reaches zero. Jets will now also draw air from intakes together instead of each jet being linked to a specific intake.

[Corona688]

7 minutes ago, mk1980 said:

frankly, if you're looking for easy money, the avionics tech is the wrong branch. you hardly make any money at all with those stupid survey missions. you should get the rocket techs. satellite (and later space station/outpost) contracts are easy money - big reward, very little effort.

The RNG spat one at me that's worth $60K on completion with 10K bonuses for each point.  For that much I'll put up with it, especially since so little else is paying yet.

[Snark]

1 hour ago, Corona688 said:

How can I shut down the junos without action groups, or do I need money to upgrade the spaceplane hangar to get the money I need to upgrade the VAB?

Why bother even shutting them down?  They pretty much shut themselves down when they run out of air.  Just let 'em smother, they'll come back on when you drop down again where the air is.

Or you can use their right-click menus to toggle them, though obviously you don't want to do that while they're in full thrust since you can't do it simultaneously.

Or, if you happen to have the SPH upgraded one notch, you can use one of the "basic" action groups to do it.

[Corona688]

15 minutes ago, Snark said:

Why bother even shutting them down?  They pretty much shut themselves down when they run out of air.  Just let 'em smother, they'll come back on when you drop down again where the air is.

Thank you.  I was expecting the old flameout behavior, where flameout was linked to pressure and velocity, causing horrible chain flameouts-spinouts.

[bewing]

1 hour ago, Corona688 said:

Unless they flame out perfectly simultaneously, they will kick the aircraft into a vicious spin.  The same goes for disabling the engines one at a time.

Maybe if I can get them running off the same fuel bottle, I can right click and disable the fuel.

The junos flame out when they reach 18km, producing .005kN of thrust each (OK that last bit is an exaggeration). So even if they flame out asymetrically, it's not an issue. And by that point you have already taken your reading, hit X to shut down all the engines, and all you want to do is dive back down. To shut down the rocket, you click its fuel tank and turn off the oxidizer. And it's much harder to put planes into spins in version 1.1 than it was before.

Would you like to try a sample plane? I could easily post one.

 

[Corona688]

I'm tempted.  But I also really want to beat this XD  I bet I can do it.  I'll note you later if I get desperate >.>

[Corona688]

Sorry for the overexposure of the controls, this is a fly-by-night operation you see...

It's REALLY HARD to lift off without breaking the tail engine, but possible, until I get the terrier unlocked.

Flight ceiling is 7km, not 10km though, hopefully that doesn't make the terrier completely useless.

Edited June 17, 2016 by Corona688

[Champ]

1 hour ago, Corona688 said:

Sorry for the overexposure of the controls, this is a fly-by-night operation you see...

It's REALLY HARD to lift off without breaking the tail engine, but possible, until I get the terrier unlocked.

Flight ceiling is 7km, not 10km though, hopefully that doesn't make the terrier completely useless.

I really think this ship is too big for its purpose. If all you want to do is a science reading above 22km, you can make it really lighter.

[Corona688]

Probably.  Those struts, and two of those fins, are horrible workarounds for not having the right engine.

[Snark]

1 hour ago, Corona688 said:

REALLY HARD to lift off without breaking the tail engine

Yeah, I run into that problem myself.  Here's a handy little trick for the tail-banging problem:

Put another small landing gear (like the one you have on the nose) on the back of the plane.  Use the offset tool to move it upwards so it's snugged against the bottom of the craft, just barely poking out.

When the plane is sitting on the runway, this wheel isn't even touching the ground.

But when you rotate upwards to lift off the runway, at the point where your tail would have banged the ground, it bumps this wheel instead and you're fine.

Yes, it does add a little bit of mass and drag to your plane.  But it makes taking-off-without-clobbering-your-tail so much easier that I consider it well worth the cost.

Once you unlock the (much shorter) Terrier, it gets easier.  Also, once you unlock the 45-science construction node, you'll have the "structural fuselage" part, which will be a big step up from having those girders:  much lower mass, much better aerodynamics.

7 km isn't ideal, but it's not awful for a Terrier, and it'll kick you higher than that pretty quick.  You've done the lion's share of the work.

[Corona688]

Thanks.

Also, I noticed something about the landing-gear bug.  Sometimes if you delete your landing gear and re-add it, it goes away.

[Corona688]

First mission successful, and it gave me the 3 science i needed to research the lander engine.

One odd thing though:  Do wings automatically have fuel crossfeed these days?  Is there any way to turn that off?  The jets eat up the rocket fuel enroute.

[Raideur Ng]

The more frustrating airborne missions are measurement below an altitude ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE PLANET, which means you're either trying to land an ICBM directly on target or you're flying around the god-forsaken globe. These seem to have no easy solution short of a hypersonic jet or SSTO.

[bewing]

1 hour ago, Corona688 said:

One odd thing though:  Do wings automatically have fuel crossfeed these days?

Yes.

1 hour ago, Corona688 said:

Is there any way to turn that off?  The jets eat up the rocket fuel enroute.

Right click on the rocket fuel tank and disable the Lf. Then re-enable it just before you light the sucker. But the rocket can eat any Lf that's in the main stack, too. It is often useful to use that feature to balance the fuel from front to back, before you have manual fuel transfer capabilities.

[Corona688]

3 hours ago, Raideur Ng said:

The more frustrating airborne missions are measurement below an altitude ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE PLANET, which means you're either trying to land an ICBM directly on target or you're flying around the god-forsaken globe. These seem to have no easy solution short of a hypersonic jet or SSTO.

Or space station, with a fleet of little probes ready for launch.  If you already have a space station, equipping it with a few droppable probes might be useful.

[RizzoTheRat]

If you're struggling with engine choice, in the early game I do these kind of missions with a plane that has a solid booster as the fuselage.

Don't get hung up on making it look like a conventional aircraft either, quite often in the early game you need to a bit creative due to the lack of parts.  This one was built to test a Wheesley and Mk16-XL parachute at a really early tech level.

[swjr-swis]

On 6/17/2016 at 5:29 PM, Snark said:

Put another small landing gear (like the one you have on the nose) on the back of the plane.  Use the offset tool to move it upwards so it's snugged against the bottom of the craft, just barely poking out.

Alternatively, a linear RCS port works too. Tiny drag and weight, tiny part, and very high impact tolerance.

[Krog34]

On 6/16/2016 at 7:24 AM, Snark said:

Actually, it's pretty easy-- you just have to be careful with your design, and think small.

I usually don't do a lot of that sort of mission, other than maybe one or two in early career for an infusion of cash and reputation.  However, I've found that it's not too hard to build a small jet + rocket plane that can get pretty much anywhere it needs to.

Make a very small, light plane powered by a couple of Junos, and include a 2-ton tank of LFO with a Terrier.  Emphasis on "small".  You want to keep it as tiny and light as you can:  basically, just a Mk1 cockpit with the 2-tonner and Terrier behind it, a couple of Junos with Mk0 tanks on the sides, and then wings / gear; that's basically it.  If you're going over 5 tons or so, you're too heavy.

The Junos are so fuel-efficient that they can fly you a long distance from KSC with minimal fuel requirement.  When you get to the target site, you're flying at the Junos' operational ceiling, up around 10-12 km, which is high enough that the Terrier gets very close to its vacuum Isp (which is excellent).  So at that point, you just point your nose at the sky and kick the Terrier in the pants.

A Terrier pushing a small plane with 2 tons of propellant packs quite a lot of dV, and can pop your altitude pretty much as high as you like.  (For example, if your total plane mass is 5 tons, a Terrier with 2 tons of propellant will get you over 1700 m/s of dV, plenty enough to get to the top of the atmosphere.)  Loft up to the target altitude, snag the contract, fall back to where the Junos can kick in again; then fly back home.

(Also, moving to Gameplay Questions.)

I was gonna comment a similar explanation. Though, it becomes tedious when these contracts ask you to hit the high altitude checks many hundreds of kilometers from KSC. 

[Snark]

Just now, Krog34 said:

I was gonna comment a similar explanation. Though, it becomes tedious when these contracts ask you to hit the high altitude checks many hundreds of kilometers from KSC. 

Yup.  Though in my experience, the really early contracts like this seem to be fairly nearby to KSC, and get farther later on.  So I sometimes take some of the really early ones (they come at a particularly fortuitous time in early career, when I'm hungry for rep and cash).  By the time they get far enough away to become inconvenient, I've generally moved on to other contracts and stop bothering with them.

[kBob]

Thanks to everyone in this thread you inspired me build my first working jet and go after some of those missions in my new career and at tier four.  I did have one weird thing I could not for the life of me get a vertical stabilizer/rudder on properly for some reason it would cause the aerodynamic overlay to go off at an angle when the rudder was on straight, I finally resorted to a V (Bonanza type) rudder/stabilizer (taking the place of both vertical and horizontal stabilizers) and it worked fine. (And in a new version I didn't have the problem but the rudder was attached to a different part type not that long slanted tail connector A). 

The other thing though was it was a bit of a pain to trim out so I "cheated" and put in a reaction wheel and use the SAS to do my trim for me.  I really do need to get my joystick out, trying to coordinate a turn on the keyboard is annoying (so used to having auto coordination in flight simulators ) but doable.  Oh and I didn't even need flaps: stall speed was below 50m/s landed better than I thought just dropped onto a convenient field near the KSC which is better and smoother than that un-upgraded joke of a runway (had parachutes along just in case).

[ibanix]

Read thread, just posting to say I think the Terrier is a good candidate for "most useful engine in KSP".

(I'd also argue the NERVA, but people seem to hate the weight and size. Exceptionally useful for both long interplanetary missions and SSTOs, however)