What did you do in KSP2 today?

[Whackjob]

Today I learned that the reason my first Arkingthaad tower lander in KSP2 kept insta-gibbing itself on the pad wasn't due to shoddy construction or too much mass.

Literally, it was big enough that the launch tower was inside the rocket when it was placed.  So it'd break immediately.  Now, a water launch seems to be where I'm gonna be doing my heavy lifting!

I have literally not pressed spacebar yet.  I let the game run out of pause for a little while.  She's not breakin'!

EDIT:  I pressed spacebar.

Aside from some minor outfitting, the Munar lander's done.

Aside from aforementioned outfitting, the next step is to build the rocket that'll get it into orbit.

EDIT2:  Ok, I hit spacebar.  I found out a couple of things.  One, have a sea level thrust of 133,409.511-ish kn.  And at full thrust, my rocket lost altitude and accelerated down.  I don't have anywhere near enough thrust!  I'm going to have to double, maybe triple it.

Edited April 10, 2023 by Whackjob

[Whackjob]

Now we're talking business.   New engine cluster; unnamed.  310,884 kn.  You might notice my previous test had 133,409 kn.  So almost three times the thrust.  Here's the kicker, though;  This is one engine cluster.  The Arkingthaad traditionally has six clusters, so I should be working with 1,865,304 kn.   That's just for the Munar lander portion.  I doubt it'll work out to be an SSTO, which means probably boosters.  Lots of boosters...

I don't think the game engine can take this, yet, now, but I think we'll get there.  I promised that if I could find the time, I'd stress test things, so.  Here's some stress.

EDIT:

I wish to call attention to the fact that I achieved 0.0334399 frames per second, or one frame every TWO MINUTES.  But more importantly, on launch, the motor group didn't shred apart.

 

Edited April 10, 2023 by Whackjob

[Syvwlch]

Still learning my way around minimizing drag but latest mini-breakthru was realizing giving each Whiplash its own nosecone was way worse than using a couple four-way coupler pieces behind a shock-cone and the methane tanks. SAS responded with an irritating but not lethal small yaw oscillation, but my dV at LKO jumped from 5.3 to 5.9 km/s.

Also found that the game doesn't seem to care about the wings' planform much, so I placed the resulting jet-pods where I needed to keep CoG in the middle of the hydrogen tanks and shaped the wings to plausibly hold them. The negative dihedral helps to tweak the CoG and CoL's vertical position so they both align with the CoT. As tanks drain (either type) the CoG creeps forward a little and doesn't move vertically.

The Whiplash is worth it, but the need to use methane rather than methalox tanks is rather limiting in what shapes you get to play with!

Result is a docile craft that handles well full or empty, taking off full easily at 100m/s and landing empty at 80m/s. It ascends to orbit with only throttle adjustments once initial pitch is set (15 to 20 degrees seems to work fine). Switch to SWERV happens at 15-20km altitude at ~1.2km/s where full thrust keeps apoapsis at 1 minute for a nice smooth efficient upper-atmosphere phase.

As stated above, I circularized at 80km with 5.9km/s dV left. A trip to the orbital fuel depot to top up (about 6tons of hydrogen) would get us up to 7.5km/s according to the VAB but I have not tried that yet.

Edited April 10, 2023 by Syvwlch

[Syvwlch]

Got curious about what I could make with a single-seat cockpit and a single Rapier engine, and whether it could fit inside an XL cargo bay... so I made an SSSTO: a Stowable SSTO.

Lembree Kerman took her up for a test-flight...

Makes it to LKO with enough dV left to RDV with something but not much else... but it reaches 1.5km/s on 3/4 throttle so I think there's room in the thrust budget to bring some more fuel and/or suffer a bit more drag.

Edited April 12, 2023 by Syvwlch
Misspelled the pilot's name!

[GalileOh-No]

I assembled an Eeloo exploration craft in orbit, heavily-inspired by @Syvwlch's design:  Forum Post.  I was originally going to check out Dres, but I just so happened to be near an Eeloo window and we had the fuel, so why not?  I'm sure missions have been done for less compelling reasons...Mission pics below. Landing and return will have to wait for another day.

Spoiler

 

 

 

Bugs, kinda:

Spoiler

I'm not sure if I've just had bad luck so far or if setting the "docking acquire force" on the docking ports to 0 has fixed my previous issues of craft launching away at relativistic speeds and/or outright imploding.  Great to finally get back to modular orbital assembly!

 

 

Edited April 10, 2023 by GalileOh-No

[Whackjob]

Man, everyone has such beautiful looking designs.  Mine just look like a welder given an IRS audit and an amphetamine.

[AtomicTech]

Holy cow! The @Whackjob is back and better than ever!

[TheBlackJackal]

I fought the Kraken and the Kraken won, numerous times.

I tried to get it to separate multiple times, and every time, the lander's lower half would shake itself until failure.

(P.S. - I cannot figure out how to post pictures)

Edited April 11, 2023 by TheBlackJackal

[Syvwlch]

6 hours ago, TheBlackJackal said:

(P.S. - I cannot figure out how to post pictures)

I could not either until I read the pinned post in the Craft Exchange forum which includes instructions on how to use Imgur. Give that a try?

[Syvwlch]

14 hours ago, GalileOh-No said:

I was originally going to check out Dres, but I just so happened to be near an Eeloo window and we had the fuel, so why not?  I'm sure missions have been done for less compelling reasons...

That happens to me all the time. I'm in LKO with X amount of dV and it's only then I wonder where I could go today. 

Your space station looks amazing, btw!

[TheBlackJackal]

Here we go, a look at what the kraken did to me yesterday.  It was a very Apollo 13-esque mission. 

Spoiler

Edited April 11, 2023 by TheBlackJackal

[Syvwlch]

Explored a few different ways to add more tankage in the right CH4/Methalox ratios on the Stowable SSTO, and the only efficient way was to move the small tanks further outboard so I could move them back up to the CoG without blocking EVAs. Medium inline tanks were too much for this layout.

Some mild residual clipping with Elbas' helmet here but it works.

Bit of a Star Wars look to it now, somehow?

So it still fits in the XL cargo bay, weighs in under 8t wet, and gets into LKO with 500m/s left, which feels like a decent safety margin. (Previous version only had 150m/s left in LKO.)

Edited April 11, 2023 by Syvwlch

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

17 hours ago, Syvwlch said:

Explored a few different ways to add more tankage in the right CH4/Methalox ratios on the Stowable SSTO, and the only efficient way was to move the small tanks further outboard so I could move them back up to the CoG without blocking EVAs. Medium inline tanks were too much for this layout.

Some mild residual clipping with Elbas' helmet here but it works.

Bit of a Star Wars look to it now, somehow?

So it still fits in the XL cargo bay, weighs in under 8t wet, and gets into LKO with 500m/s left, which feels like a decent safety margin. (Previous version only had 150m/s left in LKO.)

When you build something like that... What are your outboard tanks attached to? 

 

Also do you have rigidity problems?   Or are there cleverly hidden struts? 

[Syvwlch]

57 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

When you build something like that...

The outboard tanks start out radially attached to the cockpit, and then I move them outwards. They look like they’re hanging in mid-air until I shape the wings/canards to meet them.

I almost never use struts except for the top of SRBs on first stages. Even the 80t SWERV+Whiplash doesn’t have any.

What I do is avoid chains of attachments: the landing gear, the wings, the outboard tanks, and any other parts that aren’t in-line with the fuselage are attached directly to it, and then moved into position.

This seems much more rigid and solid than having gear attached to outboard tank attached to wing attached to fuselage, and often makes it easier to tweak placement to align the three centers of mass, lift, and thrust.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

6 minutes ago, Syvwlch said:

any other parts that aren’t in-line with the fuselage are attached directly to it, and then moved into position

... Wait - you did that on the on the big behemoth up page?  The landing gear is on the central fuselage and just moved to where it looks like they're attached to the outboard tanks? 

[Syvwlch]

4 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

you did that on the on the big behemoth up page?

Yup!

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

OK.  Ima have to play with that today after the patch comes out. 

Thanks! 

[Little 908]

Downloaded patch 2

[Scarecrow71]

2 hours ago, Little 908 said:

Downloaded patch 2

Ditto.  I will have to wait until tomorrow to check performance on my machine (although I personally didn't experience any performance issues in the past).

[Syvwlch]

Downloaded patch 2 and then talked Lembree Kerman, our trusty SSTO test pilot into trying to get in and out of the Stowable SSTO without a ladder. She was, at first, skeptical but came around in the end. Turns out you can retract the gear and then get in and out at ground level even in Kerbin's gravity. You can also step up onto the canard which was lowered and from there clamber up onto the nose and over the cockpit.

Why were our engineers so keen to get rid of the ladder? On this tiny craft a retracted ladder on the port side was enough to pull the nose northwards on ascent requiring pilot input to maintain zero inclination*. Two ladders made the thing fly straight, but at some significant cost to dV in LKO. Subsequent testing showed that doubling up on the air intakes was worth the drag penalty, as the rapier delivered more thrust in the final moments before mode switch. This version is much easier to fly & has better performance: consistently reaching LKO with 550m/s with some extra methane for landing.

Lembree was quick to agree that not everyone who'd get to sit in this scorching hot seat would have her skills, and gave this design two thumbs up.

* Altho inspection of mission photographs indicate those test were run with the starboard wing mounted upside down. No one at the VAB has stepped forward to claim credit for that particular SNAFU.

[Whackjob]

I just gave patch two a quick test:

Still about 1 frame per 2 minutes.   That being said, I think it's fair to say that my gameplay is *an extreme outlier*.  Your performance will absolutely vary.

On 4/10/2023 at 10:40 PM, AtomicTech said:

Holy cow! The @Whackjob is back and better than ever!

Eh, super-duper kinda-sorta.  I'm doing five college classes this semester, on top of work, got four this summer (on a shorter schedule, so that's MORE work, not less!), and then six in the fall.  Frankly, I'm being run pretty ragged, and it's gonna be an awful year, but I make myself take a break now and then, and KSP2's a great break now and then.

One day, when I'm making the big money, I'm gonna build a big ol' rig, the way I want to, and then it'll be time to put together some serious madness!  That, and data analytics will definitely be part of my field, and in the very near future that'll be A.I. dominated, so I need to be greedy about tensor cores.  I'm already dabbling lightly with graphical AI, but can't do too much with 8GB VRAM.   But, there will be time, in the future.  And the means, hopefully.

[whatsEJstandfor]

51 minutes ago, Whackjob said:

I just gave patch two a quick test:

I thought the AeroGUI had been removed to make Steam screenshots work better. Did you find a way to open it in this patch?

[ArmchairGravy]

I downloaded 0.1.2, launched a Mun rocket, and found my Kerbin orbit did not show in map view or the tracking station. I then quit and resumed the wait for a playable game.

[Whackjob]

3 hours ago, whatsEJstandfor said:

I thought the AeroGUI had been removed to make Steam screenshots work better. Did you find a way to open it in this patch?

That's the picture from my hard drive, uploaded to Imgur.  I was trying to copy-and-paste the path from steam screenshots, but the game crashed, so I had to hunt down it's source.  Steam overlay works for me.  Although!  That does suggest the hypothesis, does disabling steam features improve performance?  Let's find out.

EDIT:  Disabled steam stuff, but also noticed that I did NOT have the most recent version of KSP2!  Checked under Betas.  Nope, was 0.1.0.0.  Correcting that now.  Stand by for a better test two!

EDIT2:  Ok, ~10-11fps in the VAB with the engine cluster I was working on in it.  Going to launch.

0.15 fps.  That's a 5x improvement!!!  Now, I don't know if that's the patch, or me suspending the steam integrations, and I'll test for that later, but hey!  This is almost actually launchable!

Edited April 13, 2023 by Whackjob

[Wheehaw Kerman]

Today I found out that a small capsule with heatshield, XS battery, XS reaction wheel, parachute, and 4x single solar panels sinks at about .25 meters per second when splashed down. Off to see if Bill has hit bottom yet…