Has anyone tried balast solutions?!

[Arugela]

Has anyone tried using balast to make new types of rockets? Have dead weight in the rocket that can be adjusted to move weight to allow new rocket designs.

[linuxgurugamer]

10 minutes ago, Arugela said:

Has anyone tried using balast to make new types of rockets? Have dead weight in the rocket that can be adjusted to move weight to allow new rocket designs.

Why bother with useless dead weight when you can move fuel around?

[KerikBalm]

I briefly tried that for the purposes of balancing a VTOL (not a conventional rocket) during hover, using the new robotic parts.

It didn't work so well.

What worked better was a moveable counterweight for a mobile crane

[moogoob]

There's not much use on spacecraft. AIRcraft, now there's a use (moving centre of mass forward and back), but as others have said, you're already carrying a heavy substance that can be shifted between tanks - liquid fuel.

[kerbiloid]

I was widely using additional fuel tanks as a ballast instead of a payload.
The advantage is: you connect the ballast tank to a stage (usually the upper one) and see how much fuel has been spent from it when the rocket is in LKO.
Then you extend corresponding stage with this amount of fuel and decrease the ballast fuel tank.
So, you optimize your rocket.

[magnemoe]

Has used a fuel tank on an grinder as balast some time to compensate for off balance stuff like an heat shield mounted on the side. 

Moving fuel around to balance planes are pretty common in KSP and in real world. 
In real world its pretty common to move some stuff inside an capsule to change the angle of attack during reentry, I guess its batteries or other heavy stuff.
 

[Arugela]

I want a 600-1000 part aricraft to have little to no lag! 8)

Wrong thread.

I meant the pulley thing. I figured there might be some interesting things you could do with it that you couldn't otherwise.

Edited September 15, 2019 by Arugela

[Guest]

18 hours ago, magnemoe said:

In real world its pretty common to move some stuff inside an capsule to change the angle of attack during reentry, I guess its batteries or other heavy stuff.

That isn't true. Nothing is moved, the COM of the capsule is offset from the start.

[Guest]

I fairly routinely pump any remaining fuel back and forth when re-entering spaceplanes.

I've also made submarines with ore tanks for ballast. 

I haven't used robotics for this purpose; it doesn't make sense of spacecraft because of the extra dry mass and I haven't seen a need for it elsewhere.

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, Dragon01 said:

That isn't true. Nothing is moved, the COM of the capsule is offset from the start.

I assumed they could change the lift during decent. 

[Guest]

Not in that way. They changed lift by rolling the capsule. This was used on both Apollo and Soyuz. Reentry isn't exactly a good time to move heavy stuff around the capsule.

[Arugela]

6 hours ago, Brikoleur said:

I fairly routinely pump any remaining fuel back and forth when re-entering spaceplanes.

I've also made submarines with ore tanks for ballast. 

I haven't used robotics for this purpose; it doesn't make sense of spacecraft because of the extra dry mass and I haven't seen a need for it elsewhere.

How about an extremely large cargo ssto that may want to adjust the cargo. I can guarantee there are lots of use cases for this. It's not that simple.

Edited September 16, 2019 by Arugela

[Guest]

47 minutes ago, Arugela said:

How about an extremely large cargo ssto that may want to adjust the cargo. I can guarantee there are lots of use cases for this. It's not that simple.

I usually design the payload to fit the SSTO's CoM. 

[DStaal]

About the only place I use pure ballast is when I'm using the Kerbal Flying Saucers mod.  They have a built-in ballast tanks to allow you to keep the saucers balanced despite using different sections, and basically need them unless you're flying a purely symmetrical craft.

The next closest I've come is balancing vertical-landing rovers - but I almost always can use fuel or another meaningful resources to do that.

[Arugela]

One point would be if you could control aerodymics balance at different states.The fuel would only go until it's used up. But if you had balast, even a little bit, you could control it to different parameters even on empty for dead reentries or landings. You could change it to different COMs also. And the more balanced the plane the lighter the weights could be. But you could maintain perfect balance with the right program. You could use fuel also but it might help and give room on empty to adjust still.

[EveMaster]

I used lead ballast behind the heat shield when playing with realism overhaul. That kept the ship more stable during reentry. It's more difficult to get it stable then in the stock game because the SAS is much weaker.