Venusian I : A Eve-faring 3-man rocket ( hopefully ) [0.16/0.16 + MechJeb]

[r_rolo1]

This ship is the natural complement of my other Eve rocket, the Eve I: this is a 3-man capsule rocket designed to go to Eve orbit, maybe do some aerobraking, rescue any stranded Kerman that is there and go back to Kerbin:

The instructions are roughly the same than the ones for Eve I ( also has a mechjeb and a stock version ): fly it to a 70x70 km orbit, wait until +/- 40º after the sunrise line and burn prograde until the Kerbol orbit has a Pe that matches the Eve one. I also must add that launching it ASAP ( that is, as soon as the physics kicks in ) is highly advisable and that sometimes the ship collapses under its own weight ( it happened a couple of times in restarts for some reason ). Here is my test run:

I'm quite confident that this is enough to come back from Eve ( not sure if it is enough to brake inside of Eve SoI to enter orbit and come back but I'm counting in aerobraking a bit. If needed I'll scale up the design but so far this is pretty much the limit of this design without getting Krakened )

Craft of both Mechjeb and stock versions here

Edited August 23, 2012 by r_rolo1

[Koschei]

The Kraken is dead in 0.17, it took moving the entire universe to kill it.

[r_rolo1]

True, but I can't make tests on bigger ships of this model without being Krakenized in 0.16

[Koschei]

You're right about that. For this kind of mission profile, MechJeb's orbit after aerobraking stats would be quite useful.

[Clouds]

I'm sorry to say, based on the screenshot, I think you're running afoul of one of the .16 fuel use bugs that would make your Aerospike engines run with 1/2 the proper fuel use. This design will probably use more fuel when .17 (hopefully!) fixes those bugs.

[r_rolo1]

Really? Can you give a link for more details ? I only knew the more popular non-full burn one ... now I'll have to redo all of my aerospike rockets

[Clouds]

Yeah, there's a bug report thread about it, though the explanation there is somewhat lacking...I'm trusting the complete overhaul of the fuel programming in .17 will have caught it. It's not to do with aerospikes specifically.

The setup is complex to explain but simple (and common) to build: if fuel is coming from tanks which are at least one part away from an engine, and that part which has the engine directly attached also has a fuel line coming from it to ANOTHER part or tank which is itself at least one part away from an engine, that "further" engine's fuel use is cut by half. This bonus can be stacked.

It pretty much means the "feed inward, jettison stacks with their own engines" configuration is getting an erroneous improvement.

[r_rolo1]

*cry* Really?

So basically of my rockets in .16 are useless in .17

[Commander Zoom]

Not quite. Their performance may (and probably will) change significantly once these fuel bugs are patched, but at least we're not required to toss them all out and start over due to format changes, as has been the case for a couple of previous updates.

[Koschei]

Is the bug present when the lowermost tanks are only connected and not lowermost-to-uppermost? If so, all of my rockets are absolutely useless.

[Clouds]

Is the bug present when the lowermost tanks are only connected and not lowermost-to-uppermost? If so, all of my rockets are absolutely useless.

I'm not sure of your design, from that description. So, I couldn't say. You could check by looking at what fuel consumption all your engines report by right-clicking, and seeing if that much fuel is really draining.