Rune's Slightly Used Vehicles

[Rune]

20 hours ago, PointySideUp said:

I have several of these bases deployed, and especially with something Orca-sized docked, they like to jitter or "rear up" and slam the base on load or approach.  I don't usually get the effect with my Mk2 based crew shuttles docked, but have a few times.  Another workaround is to enable Joints/Damage cheats from the cheat menu as you load the base or come within ~2km of it.  It stops things from exploding, then you just turn it back off.. no hassle.

None of mine have ever made a twisted mess of themselves like that though 

The problem with unbreakable joints is that it doesn't stop the jitter, it just stops you from breaking up... which can be worse, trust me. Anyhow, Here's hoping 1.2 will fix things.

In the meantime, the quest for a humongous ring in orbit continues:

Actually I think I've got the launch part covered with plenty of margin (that's ~80x80kms with 350m/s left over), but the boosters show a very unhealthy roll-related instability that can get you into a flat spin if you are not careful during reentry. Which I haven't been, because I've been testing.  I think it has something to do with the vertical stabilizer, insufficient roll authority to counteract it, and/or the sluggish response of the control surfaces (relative to the insane roll rates it can build up really quick).

Anyhow, with proper fuel balance (moving it forwards to the 3.75m tank), it is landable, but the low wing loading and that nagging tendency to completely lose it make hitting KSC difficult challenging . I have either overshot because I was careful with low AoAs, or I've lost it when I started braking hard and recovered with too much speed lost to reach KSP (the nice parts is, it is recoverable). I have managed to limp to the runway, tough, so maybe I'll just leave it as a challenge. If I make it too stable, you might not be able to recover from dives!

Oh, and there is one nice unintended feature of the design... the front wheel is pretty flimsy, but even in the harshest landing, well, all the important expensive gear is in the back, so this pic below? That counts as 'mostly recovered', fund-wise.

It is surprisingly easy to achieve, BTW, I've already blown the nose twice in three landings (the first one I had forgotten to install the wheel, so kind of my own fault really) but I've always recovered the back intact.

 

Rune. A million and something to put on the pad, BTW. Great way to get rid of excess funds!

Edited August 24, 2016 by Rune

[Fellow314]

Not sure what you're on about, that looks like a perfect landing to me...

[SingABrightSong]

The Quest for the Ring continues, I see. Glorious. Any idea on what you're going to name it? The Discus? The Chakram? I think Chakram sounds like a good name for it.

 

That booster almost needs a name of its own. If the station were to be the Chakram, would its RLV be the Chakri-dang?

Edited August 25, 2016 by SingABrightSong

[Rune]

1 hour ago, SingABrightSong said:

The Quest for the Ring continues, I see. Glorious. Any idea on what you're going to name it? The Discus? The Chakram? I think Chakram sounds like a good name for it.

 

That booster almost needs a name of its own. If the station were to be the Chakram, would its RLV be the Chakri-dang?

Well, so far the imaginative WiP name is 'Mk3 Ring', so yeah, open to suggestions. Chakram sounds more like something I would name on of my SSTOs, tough (not exactly a pointy object, but it kinda follows the theme).

And yes, the booster is an interesting 'little' subassembly. I'd have to credit @Temstar's Hurricane family for a bit of inspiration for the front section, tough. I used to have a two-vector SSTO, but when his thread resurfaced a couple days ago, I got the nose straight from him. Sorry, had to, it looked too good not to do it.

With that, the big booster for the Base-In-A-Box (~40mT), and a tiny single-vector one I also have lying around (~7.5mT to orbit), I might end up releasing a family of SSTO chemical boosters.

 

Rune. It is basically a 1:2 scale Hurricane, without the external tank.

Edited August 25, 2016 by Rune

[SingABrightSong]

Well, as far as theme naming goes, your smaller station is the Von Braun, so perhaps the Von Neumann? Puns aside, if your theme is "rocketry pioneers", NASA provides a brief history, with such tidbits as the first staged rockets being invented by one Johann Schmidlap back in the 16th century. The most fitting, it would seem, would be to name it after Goddard, Von Braun's colleague and fellow captured German scientist defector.

Edited August 25, 2016 by SingABrightSong
Apparently mentioning the NDSAP throws the forum censors

[Rune]

2 hours ago, SingABrightSong said:

Well, as far as theme naming goes, your smaller station is the Von Braun, so perhaps the Von Neumann? Puns aside, if your theme is "rocketry pioneers", NASA provides a brief history, with such tidbits as the first staged rockets being invented by one Johann Schmidlap back in the 16th century. The most fitting, it would seem, would be to name it after Goddard, Von Braun's colleague and fellow captured German scientist defector.

If I followed my own naming schemes to the letter, it should be the Von Braun Mk something, seeing as how I've reused the name or all my toroidal stations. Then again, I chose that name in the first place because for some reason toroidal space stations make me think of him on one of those old Disney films. I also kind of want to name something after Korolev, because after all I admire him quite a bit more, but a booster strikes me as more appropriate for him (and hence the SSTO family I think just got its name).

But thinking about it a bit more, wasn't Tsiolkovsky the first guy that proposed toroidal stations to provide artificial gravity? Now that guy was amazing, considering when he came up with his stuff. He is credited as having come up first with concepts such as multistage rockets, H2/LOX propulsion, and even the freaking space elevator, all circa 1900, way before everybody else started seriously thinking about space exploration.

 

Rune. An intellectual giant if there was ever one.

[Rune]

Well, ladies and gentlekerbs, since it's been a while since I uploaded anything, how about that ring station I've been showing off? It's pretty much done, and you can be my guinea pigs for the latest changes. Have a go at it!

https://kerbalx.com/Rune/Tsiolkovsky-Station

This stock version has some tankage inside the bays instead of the USI greenhouses, so it can do a bit of refueling... but really, you'll need extra tankage if you want it to hold anything significant. And as a plus, you can tell me if the Korolev SSTO boosters are landable by the average kerbal.

 

Rune. You get eight tries per launch.

Edited August 27, 2016 by Rune

[SingABrightSong]

Whee!

Try 1 - "Kobra" reentry at 25km Pe: Stalled and spun out, splashed down hard at 150 m/s.

Try 2: Control point error, boosted to 300km Ap

Try 3- Prograde reentry at 20km: Front half burned up, back half(minus Vectors) impacted at 45 m/s

Try 4 - ~10 degree AoA reentry with accidental 0km Pe: Overcompensated, spun out, lithobraked expensive-parts-first, fuel tanks survived.

Try 5 - 50km pe, 5 degree AoA: Skimmed off the upper atmosphere, front burned up in reentry and back splashed down hard at 200m/s on the second go.

Try 6 - Radial In, because why not?: Landed. Intact.

Try 7- 30km Pe, 90 degree AoA: Landed intact.

Try 8: 30km Pe. 90 degree AoA: Landed intact.

[Rune]

18 minutes ago, SingABrightSong said:

Whee!

Try 1 - "Kobra" reentry at 25km Pe: Stalled and spun out, splashed down hard at 150 m/s.

Try 2: Control point error, boosted to 300km Ap

Try 3- Prograde reentry at 20km: Front half burned up, back half(minus Vectors) impacted at 45 m/s

Try 4 - ~10 degree AoA reentry with accidental 0km Pe: Overcompensated, spun out, lithobraked expensive-parts-first, fuel tanks survived.

Try 5 - 50km pe, 5 degree AoA: Skimmed off the upper atmosphere, front burned up in reentry and back splashed down hard at 200m/s on the second go.

Try 6 - Radial In, because why not?: Landed. Intact.

Try 7- 30km Pe, 90 degree AoA: Landed intact.

Try 8: 30km Pe. 90 degree AoA: Landed intact.

That sounds as if you found the same instability problem I did at first, and tamed it (kudos for it, BTW! :)) ...or that actually raising the wings to the midsection did improve the stability as I had hoped. In any case, what seems clear is that that nosecone is not the most heat-resistant part in KSC. Could use the uglier nosecone but, you know, uglier.

Question: when you spun out, did you get the feeling that maybe when you were going subsonic you might have managed to recover it? Because I always manage to catch it, but by the time I stop fighting SAS and moving fuel and look at airspeed, it's reading 200m/s and the ground is awfully close.

Oh, and I LOL'ed pretty hard at #6. Just did it with an Orca, coming from an inclined trans-Minmus trajectory, to reach KSC in two aerobrakes instead of three. I reentered in, like, 30-45º of Kerbin's circumference.

 

Rune. Ballistic reentries FTW, it seems, Faget would be proud.

Edited August 27, 2016 by Rune

[SingABrightSong]

The 90 degree reentries were actually recovered spins. Well, questionably recovered, I never managed to return to aerodynamic flight, but I used the wings as parachutes and had the wheels touch down facing backwards.

[Rune]

1 minute ago, SingABrightSong said:

The 90 degree reentries were actually recovered spins. Well, questionably recovered, I never managed to return to aerodynamic flight, but I used the wings as parachutes and had the wheels touch down facing backwards.

Hum. Perhaps now is the time when I add that you should move all remaining fuel to the big kerbodyne tank closer to the front of the vehicle? In fact, if you move it to the nose, it'll become too nose-heavy to reach high AoA.

 

Rune. Might have forgotten to mention that anywhere.

[Alphasus]

Does the White Dart 1.0.5 work in 1.1.3 or is there an update in the works?

[Rune]

18 hours ago, Alphasus said:

Does the White Dart 1.0.5 work in 1.1.3 or is there an update in the works?

There's actually this:

Which is basically the new Dart. But frankly the old one works just as fine so, you know, whichever strikes your fancy.

 

Rune. You can ind it on my KerbalX page, which is also linked in the OP.

[SingABrightSong]

Speaking of your SSTO fleet, how goes work on the Espada? I trust you haven't fried your Kerbals on reentry. While your vehicles always have excellent launch profiles, I notice that there is rarely a recommended reentry profile for any published SSTO. The Espada, of course, is designed for reentry from solar orbit, but with other ships I often have to guess at how to reenter.

[Rune]

14 hours ago, SingABrightSong said:

Speaking of your SSTO fleet, how goes work on the Espada? I trust you haven't fried your Kerbals on reentry. While your vehicles always have excellent launch profiles, I notice that there is rarely a recommended reentry profile for any published SSTO. The Espada, of course, is designed for reentry from solar orbit, but with other ships I often have to guess at how to reenter.

Right, I almost forgot! And it was so exciting! See, it is definitely a bad idea to make a nuclear SSTO nuclear-powered. I blew the RTG.

So, since I am not crazy enough to try aerobraking from interplanetary +300m/s in one go, I actually did a whole orbit without any electricity generating stuff and without active pilots (the mission was over 15 days and I run USI LS). Thank Kod the nuke has an alternator to top up the batteries before reentries! On the plus side, the battery capacity is enough to handle the flight, and it's a good thing kerbals wake up when you go under ...25kms is it? Because I also tested whether you can do a dead-stick landing without reaction wheels:

And dingdingding! Six new lvl3's ready to throw into interplanetary missions:

And of course, while I'm at it, you can grab the thing at KerbalX... now equipped with heat-resistant solar panels.

 

Rune. Oh, the irony...

[SingABrightSong]

Hmm, I can't seem to get it to work. It has lots of delta-V, yes, but the oxidizer runs out at about 40km Ap, and the NERV doesn't have the thrust to make orbit. Should I be lighting the nuke while in the atmosphere at some point? The ship doesn't come with instructions, you see.

[Rune]

1 hour ago, SingABrightSong said:

Hmm, I can't seem to get it to work. It has lots of delta-V, yes, but the oxidizer runs out at about 40km Ap, and the NERV doesn't have the thrust to make orbit. Should I be lighting the nuke while in the atmosphere at some point? The ship doesn't come with instructions, you see.

Oh yeah, it's a bit tricky. Feel free to turn on the nuke as soon as you go into closed cycle, it already gets >790s and it will improve your TWR slightly, so there is really no downside. But I'm rather sure that it is possible to do it without the nuke on until you run the oxidizer tanks dry, if you just keep the SAS on a fixed heading and just let the AoA increase. Much more efficient (and easy!) to do it maximizing TWR, tough.

And yes, I should make manuals. But I'm lazy, and I always thought that a good post-sale customer service makes people forgive lots of things.

 

Rune. Flying SSTOs is also a thing that takes lots of practice. You gotta 'get a feeling' for the atmosphere and the engine curves to milk them.

[Rune]

Good news guys! I finally managed to make those recoverable boosters on Tsiolkovsky Station, well, recoverable.

The instability problems are now a thing of the past, and I think I was getting them mostly because the control surfaces were a bit bugged. In any case, the new Korolev reusable booster has been tested in a wide variety of flight conditions, form hypersonic to subsonic, and it seems to behave nicely even when it is completely empty of fuel.

Also, I set up the action groups booster-by-booster, so now the fuel cells do indeed turn on on liftoff, and the airbrakes work as intended on all boosters, not just one in eight. Plus, slightly cooler-looking profile, with the delta a bit further back, the canards noticeably smaller, and a new compound tail 100% for looks. Same DL link, tough.

 

Rune. Pretty much everything that has a tweak menu has been tweaked in there.

Edited September 3, 2016 by Rune

[Gilph]

Got the Tsiolkovsky Station in 150K orbit. It's beautiful.  Thanks so much.

I took out the ISRU and ore tanks, because it's my Kerbin station. Put some more fuel tanks in and put Vernor engines under all of the big docking ports. Also put a probe core in sideways.  It keeps the station stable and now I can adjust orbit. Since the core is sideways, had to figure out the orientation and what keys to use, but it works nice.

Edited September 19, 2016 by Gilph

[SingABrightSong]

So, Rune, have you gotten a chance to play around in 1.2 yet? Atmospheric parameters have been changed with the update, which may be harmful to your SSTO fleet, but what I'm wondering about is how you've tackled having a comms network. Making and launching a relay satellite is one thing, but I have yet to figure out how to make them look cool. As you are an expert in all things cool-looking, I'm rather curious how you would tackle the design challenge. 

[Majorjim!]

9 hours ago, SingABrightSong said:

may be harmful

SSTOs are even easier now! pointy things = less drag.

[Rune]

20 hours ago, SingABrightSong said:

So, Rune, have you gotten a chance to play around in 1.2 yet? Atmospheric parameters have been changed with the update, which may be harmful to your SSTO fleet, but what I'm wondering about is how you've tackled having a comms network. Making and launching a relay satellite is one thing, but I have yet to figure out how to make them look cool. As you are an expert in all things cool-looking, I'm rather curious how you would tackle the design challenge. 

Haha. Sure! I'm still working things out, but the basic relay package I think I have covered already:

Take a SimpleSat, strap some antennae to it, stack it as required inside a SSTO bay or on top of a reusable booster. They may look tiny (and they are), but both get around 2km/s of dV out of the single ant engine thanks to the minuscule size, and that is mostly for maneuvering in-system since they are meant to be launched to target (the big antenna has an extra oscar fuel tank, and the burn time of a RL probe). Those two are heading to the Kerbin-Mun "L4&5 points" (around the Mun with the same orbital period works pretty much like L4/5 in RL) to start my network and take care of the Mun's shadow, but for other planetary systems it's just a case of stacking the small ones until you have enough to cover all blindspots due to moons and rotation, and one of the big dishes on top to get back to Kerbin, ideally in a long-period inclined orbit that almost never gets occluded itself. Then you add a transfer stage, and the whole thing can go on top of your booster of choice.

10 hours ago, Majorjim! said:

SSTOs are even easier now! pointy things = less drag.

Yeah, so far my birds work just as fine now. Haven't checked all of them, but considering how I was brute-forcing my way past the occlusion bug, they should all break Mach without issues now that it is fixed.

 

Rune. And yeah, 1.2 is the best KSP yet.

Edited October 19, 2016 by Rune

[Majorjim!]

1 hour ago, Rune said:

1.2 is the best KSP yet.

Hmm, it's the most feature complete that's for sure. 0.90 is still the most stable, best performing version I've seen though.

[SingABrightSong]

Ooh, now that's cool looking. I especially like the angled solar panels on the large relay. The stashed Oscar-B is quite clever, as well. You have exceeded my already-high expectations.

[Rune]

'K, I have a cool thing to show you guys. My latest SSTA? Well, it's an old one actually:

I've been thinking about doing something like this for a long time. I always thought that it should be possible to turn an Orca into a SSTA with the addition of some bells and whistles, since it has that nice VTOL landing system and a spacious cargo bay to put all the things in. I first I toyed with Drive Pods and lots of little modules to get more dV out of the existing fuel, fit a rover or something like that that could be recovered, putting extra liquid fuel... long story short, I tried almost everything else, starting with the fancy stuff. But finally it dawned on me: the Orca has an awesome payload fraction, just use it to carry a boopload of fuel to orbit!

Presto, 30mT of Ore seems to be no trouble for the old girl to put up, even carrying all the big ISRU bits, and once that is properly transformed into LFO on low orbit, it is more than enough to go all the way to Duna in a single leap (1km/s to get there + 500m/s for a soft vertical landing). Power generation? We are efficient enough to just use part of the fuel for that. All in all, 13 parts are needed to turn one of my favorite workhorses into one of the most capable SSTA I've built, using puny 305s engines, and I can bolt it onto any of the already-deployed Orcas I have everywhere to turn them into one heck of an autonomous miner.

 

Rune. Sometimes ideas percolate for months, and then for no apparent reason they 'click' in the span of minutes.

Edited November 2, 2016 by Rune