CLOSED -- Flying Duna AGAIN (Thanks for Participating)

[1D-1()T]

No sweat. Figured I'd put the craft file up for anyone who wants it, you can find it here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bwc13keR5i17Tmw4ZDNPdko3bEk/edit?usp=sharing

I'm pretty sure the only mod parts used on it are pwings, KAS and firespitter, so it might work with just them. But all the mods I had running on the save were: FAR, Deadly Re-entry, Firespitter, KAS, Kethane and Procedural Fairings. Either way, I'd recommend backing up your game before trying the plane.

Edit: Also action groups are

1: opens/closes helicopter rotors

2: activates/deactivates helicopter rotors and tail rotor

3: opens/closes propellors

4: activates/deactivates propellors

6: lower hover height

7: toggle hover

8: increase hover height

0: toggles reverse propellors

If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask.

Edited April 11, 2014 by 1D-1()T

[Northstar1989]

OK, so the Raven Mk2 made its main burn at Kerbin periapse to head off in the general direction of Duna:

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Then I had the Medium LFO Tanker I mentioned earlier make a burn for rendezvous a couple hours later, burn to match velocity at closest approach, and then pull in a bit closer until I was able to refuel the Raven Mk2...

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However, I discovered that due to a bug, the Kerbal who got out to refuel the Raven Mk2 wasn't able to pull close enough to the cockpit to get back inside (he had refueled the Raven before around Minmus- so I know it wasn't an issue of craft design. But the game acted like there was an invisible wall around the Raven cockpits, preventing him from approaching even within 10 meters...)

So, after wasting mos of his EVA propellant trying to get closer, I decided to have him do the only possible thing to survive, and probably the most 'Kerbal' thing I've done in this game yet- I strapped him onto the front of the fuel tanker using nothing but the refueling hose, and had the tanker make its burn to intercept Duna (the Kerbal will transfer over an another spacecraft where he can be inside after the tanker circularizes near Duna). I went for a bit of a quicker intercept, so that the Kerbal wouldn't have to sit like this quite as long (and, a the tanker had thousands of m/s Delta-V onboard, I felt the extra expense justified to get its remaining fuel to Duna a bit quicker...)

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I kept trying to get a good screenshot with the Kerbal having a manaical grin on his face , but unfortunately I couldn't get a good close-up, and his expression was rather bland anyways...

Then I had the Raven Mk2 perform its own burn to get a Duna intercept:

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Based on how little it cost, it looks like I could have actually made Duna on its remaining fuel without refueling- even with enough fuel left over for a later adjustment to allow direct aerocapture (the burn I *did* make wasn't fully optimized- quite a bit less fuel could have been expended). But the margins were a little close for comfort, and I just didn't want to take any chances with the mission...

At this point, all my craft (the Eagle Mk2, 'Hornet', Blackhawk Mk6, and Raven Mk2) are en-route to Duna, and haven't broken any of the rules (though I still contend the Raven Mk2 should count as SSTDABK, as the in-flight refueling only turned out to be necessary to have a healthy safety margin on my burns, even with Duna so far away from ideal position...). My next posts *SHOULD* be about their actual arrival at Duna and attempts to complete various challenge requirements.

Regards,

Northstar

Edited April 16, 2014 by Northstar1989

[Geschosskopf]

My next posts *SHOULD* be about their actual arrival at Duna and attempts to complete various challenge requirements.

Well, fingers crossed, both for success and to read the story after so long a wait

[Northstar1989]

I'm sorry to disappoint, but it looks like the Eagle Mk2 will *NOT* be able to complete the challenge successfully in its current state... (there *might* be one way for me to save the mission- scroll down to the bottom to give your opinion on that)

Although it had no trouble getting to Duna, and reaching a semi-stable orbit (perfect for either a gradual re-entry or stabilization) despite an unplanned encounter with Ike:

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And can deploy/re-enter and reach stable flight in the atmosphere just fine, at a variety of altitudes (showing a superior non-ballistic altitude ceiling to any successful posted craft I've seen so far in this challenge- about 24k meters- sorry I've got no screenshots of the altitude ceiling, I was waiting on that until after a successful landing), although it took a couple tries to get a safe re-entry due to my own foolishness... (not to self: diving at orbital speeds to speed up re-entry is *NOT* a good idea)

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Ultimately, the Eagle Mk2 faced serious stability problems in the lower atmosphere (below about 8000 meters) due to the spontaneous, magical, and UNPLANNED re-appearance of a full reactor load of uranium in its KIWI Nuclear Reactor during the interplanetary transfer following an update to KSP-Interstellar. As a result, the nose could not be pulled more than about 7 degrees (6.8 was the most I could get without loss of control) off the horizon below about 5000 meters- making landing effectively impossible in Duna's hilly terrain (at least for a pilot as bad at landing as I am). All (30+) attempts ended rather like this:

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For those of you who don't understand (or didn't read my earlier posts on the Eagle Mk2), test flights of the Eagle on Kerbin revealed it faces *SERIOUS* stability problems (being far too tail-heavy) when equipped with a full load of reactor fuel and no cargo in any of its other fuselage modules. As such it was designed and launched (using either TAC fuel Balanced before liftoff, or tweakables- I can't remember if it was built before KSP-I reactor loadout became a tweakable...) with a PARTIAL load of uranium- only 10-15% of maximum. This served to reduce weight, raise altitude ceiling, and improve TWR of course- but its most important effect was to shift weight AWAY from the tail section of the ultra-lightweight fuselage design.

Perhaps, if I hadn't quicksaved after finding a successful re-entry pattern and deploying the Eagle Mk2 on it the second time around (it took me about 3 tries to re-enter, the first two times crashing due to impatience and stupid mistakes trying to speed the process up), I could have saved the mission by adding some LFO as cargo to the front service module (or Monopropellant, if I had saved some from the transfer vehicle rather than wasting it all during Duna capture) to balance the magical new uranium load in the rear. Even so, I'm not sure that would have weighed enough.

But now, I have no option to save the mission unless I want to try and intercept it to add front-loaded cargo during the extra-atmospheric portion of an unstable orbit, as it is designed with a high enough altitude ceiling (at least 24,000 meters, from my experiences on Duna) that its relatively weak Thermal Turbojet is capable of kicking it well out of the atmosphere on a ballistic trajectory...

Actually, that might be worth a try- although the only vessel with the KAS winch to refuel it currently in the Duna system (the Duna Science Module) is touched down at the site of my future Duna base, and doesn't have the fuel aboard to make it back to orbit...

Which means, cheaty as it sounds (and is), I would have to leave the Eagle on rails in an unstable orbit for at least 9 or 10 game days (until the arrival of the next vessel of the Duna Armada- despite all leaving in the same transfer window, the different ships all utilized very different ejection angles and transfer velocities...) I can't keep it loaded all this time, because the nuclear reactor would overheat and go into emergency shutdown (requiring about a month of in-game cool-down time before reactivation) without the atmosphere to convect heat away from its radiator over the majority of its unstable orbit, preventing me from counteracting drag without a means of thrust... (I could also leave it gliding for 9-10 days before leaving the atmosphere, with occasional bursts of engine power to counteract drag- it has enough endurance for roughly a year of that with the unplanned extra reactor fuel- but who wants to run a mission for 4-5 real life days at 2x physics-warp, having to quickload the mission from an atmospheric quicksave every time they play KSP?)

So what do you guys think? Should I give ballistic interception (to load cargo in the front sections to counteract the extra reactor weight) a try? Or would something else, like Hyper-Editing (although I've never used HyperEdit, as a matter of principle) out the excess reactor fuel that was never supposed to be there (and is throwing way off the CoM) be acceptable?

Regards,

Northstar

EDIT: OK, reading back over previous posts- maybe it's possible to land even with only 7 degrees of Angle of Attack flexibility... The Eagle Mk2 can get down to gliding at about 58 m/s at 3200 meters before I lose control or smash into a hill... I see that some landings were done at as much as 120 m/s- so maybe I just need to find a better landing spot... One with a LOT of flat space- since I can't imagine lining up a precision landing without being able to pull up/down the nose a lot further and quicker than I currently can!

Edited May 13, 2014 by Northstar1989

[Northstar1989]

Ahhh, frack it (BSG anyone?), I went ahead and gave re-orbiting the Eagle Mk2 a try. And, though it couldn't even get above 36k on Kerbin under its own power, Duna's low gravity and lower scale height were an absolute godsend for shoving the Eagle outside the clutches of the atmosphere:

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Now, I just need to decide what to do with it...

Do I Hyper-Edit out the extra reactor fuel that magically appeared in the rear? (surely an exception can be made for cases of things appearing in a vessel due to updates to a mod's units system, that weren't there on launch?)

Do I intercept it with a small fuel carrier probe with a KAS winch when the Duna Heavy Equipment Deployment Platform reaches the Duna system in approximately 30 game days- as can be seen in the Kerbal Alarm Clock potion on the screenshot below? (The DHEDP is a mobile orbital-construction platform, designed to carry all the supplies and construction equipment needed to establish a tiny self-sufficient Duna colony)

Do I engage in both activities if both are allowed? Or perhaps do I just bail the Kerbals out at apoapsis, circularize their orbits by EVA jetpack (the higher the apoapsis, the lower the orbital velocity- and a Kerbal jetpack carries roughly 600 m/s of fuel...) and leave the Eagle Mk2 to its (wasteful) fate crashing back into the surface after drag eventually destabilizes it, if neither action is allowed...

Regards,

Northstar

[Duna]

Quick question, how did you get 7 pictures in this thread whenever i try to do that it says that its too large is there a way to compress photos? or is there a certain way to post them on here that will make them smaller

[Northstar1989]

No sweat. Figured I'd put the craft file up for anyone who wants it, you can find it here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bwc13keR5i17Tmw4ZDNPdko3bEk/edit?usp=sharing

I'm pretty sure the only mod parts used on it are pwings, KAS and firespitter, so it might work with just them. But all the mods I had running on the save were: FAR, Deadly Re-entry, Firespitter, KAS, Kethane and Procedural Fairings. Either way, I'd recommend backing up your game before trying the plane.

Edit: Also action groups are

1: opens/closes helicopter rotors

2: activates/deactivates helicopter rotors and tail rotor

3: opens/closes propellors

4: activates/deactivates propellors

6: lower hover height

7: toggle hover

8: increase hover height

0: toggles reverse propellors

If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask.

(1) Did you make use of the Cargo Throttle function on the Firespitter propellers and helicopter rotors? If you didn't, you should load back up the craft (assuming it's still on Duna) and make use of the Cargo Throttle to push up the altitude ceiling (it would have been best if you assigned Cargo Throttle, Normal Throttle, and Hover Throttle for the propellers each to an action group- but you can also change them all to Cargo Throttle while landed if you think you can still safely take off with the extra thrust...) You might have to keep the throttle down to avoid over-draining your batteries at the lower altitudes with Cargo Throttle, though it shouldn't be an issue near altitude ceiling (as the air becomes thinner, the propellers use less electricity...)

(2) Have you considered redesigning the craft with the Multipanels mod? That's a LOT of solar panels on the wings- and you could definitely bring down the part-count that way, without altering the ration of Ec/s to tonnage *at all*... Alternatively, you could think about using a NearFuture nuclear reactor- which would allow you to fly just as well at night, for similar tonnage...

(3) You stole the name of *MY* Duna Biplane from before! Didn't you see the post earlier on this thread where I presented "The Hummingbird"- a test model that I still haven't yet sent to Duna? (http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/50619-Flying-Duna-AGAIN?p=803139&viewfull=1#post803139) Though, I guess you can take the name- my "Hummingbird" will probably never make it to Duna anyways (it's a bit fragile to strap to the side of a rocket, due to the way the biplane wings were built...)

Regards,

Northstar

Edited May 14, 2014 by Northstar1989

[Northstar1989]

Quick question, how did you get 7 pictures in this thread whenever i try to do that it says that its too large is there a way to compress photos? or is there a certain way to post them on here that will make them smaller

Nobody is posting their actual pictures to this thread. These are all links to Imgur, which displays the pictures here- but actually has them stored on the Imgur databases...

[sdj64]

Has anyone done tests with ion engines as of 23.5? The update has made it much easier to complete this challenge all stock now. I got a small ion plane flying at Duna, it only holds one kerbal but otherwise it meets the challenge requirements pretty well. I'll work on a larger design that can carry more kerbals but I wanted to ask first if anyone else has done it?

[Duna]

So how exactly do i do that?

- - - Updated - - -

Nobody is posting their actual pictures to this thread. These are all links to Imgur, which displays the pictures here- but actually has them stored on the Imgur databases...

How do i do that exactly?

[1D-1()T]

Hey Northstar. Sorry, I didn't realise I used your name. I shall re-dub the Hummingbird to *drumroll* the Lobachevsky. Love that song. Onto your questions.

1. I suppose the cargo throttle increases thrust? I shall try it out.

2. I guess I could reduce the part count with that, but I generally have my settings pretty low, so I haven't noticed much, if any lag. I might make a nuclear-version if I get some time, the increased usability would be good, although flying on Duna at night is not fun at all.

Also, good luck with your Raven Mk2, hope you come up with a solution. Also, if you can kick the apoapsis out of the atmosphere you might be able to push it into orbit on eva. Probably not, but worth a try. If you feel up for trying some more landings check kerbal maps(http://www.kerbalmaps.com). It has a setting that shows you the slope of an area, so you can look for relatively flat landing sites. Somewhere near to the south pole looks like a good bet, it looks relatively flat, gradually sloping from 1000 meters up to about 5000. Well, good luck.

@Duna- First you need and imgur account. Then, if you want to put an album here you copy the letters at the end of the url of the album, and put them between (there is no space between the bracket and the word, I just put that there so it didn't become an image) [ imgur] and [/imgur]. For example: [ imgur] (Those letters) [/imgur]. I'm not entirely sure what to do for single images though, it might be the same tags.

Edited May 14, 2014 by 1D-1()T

[blitz2190]

shouldn't you remove points for far as it makes flying easier, I mean you can go way faster and the lift tends to be alot more, maybe not remove but not award.

[Northstar1989]

shouldn't you remove points for far as it makes flying easier, I mean you can go way faster and the lift tends to be alot more, maybe not remove but not award.

FAR makes it possible to reach much higher speeds with hypersonic aircraft and rockets, but it's actually a profound disadvantage to subsonic aircraft like the propeller planes which have dominated this challenge so far- as it *increases* drag up until reaching Mach 1. Geschosskopf (the OP) made the right call in making it a bonus for this challenge- though for some other challenges (such as my own Heavy Lifter rocketry challenge) penalizing for FAR point-wise makes more sense...

Regards,

Northstar

[Northstar1989]

Has anyone done tests with ion engines as of 23.5? The update has made it much easier to complete this challenge all stock now. I got a small ion plane flying at Duna, it only holds one kerbal but otherwise it meets the challenge requirements pretty well. I'll work on a larger design that can carry more kerbals but I wanted to ask first if anyone else has done it?

Serene made an ion engine-only craft BEFORE the 0.23.5 update (see the Scoreboard). I highly recommend you check out her design to see how she did it...

Regards,

Northstar

[Northstar1989]

Hey Northstar. Sorry, I didn't realise I used your name. I shall re-dub the Hummingbird to *drumroll* the Lobachevsky. Love that song.

Awesome. Thanks. I ended up actually throwing out the "Hummingbird" design you saw earlier, due to its launch stability issues- but I should be replacing it with a closely-related "Hummingbird Mk2"- which really wouldn't have worked if your design was still called "Hummingbird" as well. Now you just need to make a note in your craft post about the re-name, and we need to make sure Gescosskopf re-names your craft on the Scoreboard as well...

1. I suppose the cargo throttle increases thrust? I shall try it out.

Absolutely. Cargo Throttle increases thrust by 50% (to 150% of Normal Throttle, the default) on all Firespitter propellers and helicopter rotors. It also increases electricity or fuel consumption by 50% as well- though due to the reduced thrust values propellers/rotors achieve at higher altitudes, they consume less fuel/electricity as your craft climbs, and thus Cargo Throttle shouldn't be a problem if your ElectricCharge budget is tight as long as you don't throttle up to maximum on Cargo Throttle at sea-level...

2. I guess I could reduce the part count with that, but I generally have my settings pretty low, so I haven't noticed much, if any lag. I might make a nuclear-version if I get some time, the increased usability would be good, although flying on Duna at night is not fun at all.

I can understand not wanting to attempt night-landings, but I can't see the purpose in not wanting to fly on Duna at night at all. It shouldn't be a problem as long as you are flying above the highest mountains, as there is no risk of colliding into anything, and if you use Cargo Throttle I would guess your craft should be capable of climbing to 8500 meters- at least long enough to make a temporary/unsustainable climb to cruise over the highest peaks...

Also, good luck with your Raven Mk2, hope you come up with a solution. Also, if you can kick the apoapsis out of the atmosphere you might be able to push it into orbit on eva. Probably not, but worth a try. If you feel up for trying some more landings check kerbal maps(http://www.kerbalmaps.com). It has a setting that shows you the slope of an area, so you can look for relatively flat landing sites. Somewhere near to the south pole looks like a good bet, it looks relatively flat, gradually sloping from 1000 meters up to about 5000. Well, good luck.

Thanks. I've never tried using maps to guide any of my missions before (I generally like to look at the facts on the ground below and in front of me, rather than a map), but after seeing how ridiculously easy it is for everything to just blend into one giant, red blur on Duna at midday or at night, I might want to give the maps a try to find a good landing spot...

I also hadn't thought of trying to get out and "push" on EVA- although I have realism qualms with that (real-life EVA packs can carry at most around 50 m/s Delta-V, in the case of NASA's retried MMU- *NOT* the 600 m/s of EVA packs in KSP...)

The only problem with landing is, I need to find a spot with a *LONG* approach vector at low altitude, due to the Eagle's current difficulties turning (as well as climbing/diving) with the magical extra reactor fuel weight at the back. Right now, it has an *ungodly* turning radius (in fact, I haven't even tried turning it more than 50 degrees off its re-entry heading yet), so I'm not sure of the feasibility of a South Pole landing...

I suspect I won't have nearly so many problems after I load some LFO mix, and possibly also some Hydrazine (Monopropellant) to the front service module. Although it might not perform as well as it was designed to, resulting from its increased weight and drag (since stock aerodynamics, unrealistically, make a full fuel tank have more drag than an empty one- if you repeated the famous/mythical experiment of dropping a wooden and an iron ball off the Leaning Tower, in KSP they would fall at the same rate...) it will still perform better than it's been doing so far...

Regards,

Northstar

Edited May 15, 2014 by Northstar1989

[blitz2190]

FAR makes it possible to reach much higher speeds with hypersonic aircraft and rockets, but it's actually a profound disadvantage to subsonic aircraft like the propeller planes which have dominated this challenge so far- as it *increases* drag up until reaching Mach 1. Geschosskopf (the OP) made the right call in making it a bonus for this challenge- though for some other challenges (such as my own Heavy Lifter rocketry challenge) penalizing for FAR point-wise makes more sense...

Regards,

Northstar

Ah gotcha that makes sense, I've never made anything with props but have used far with hypersonic crafts

[sdj64]

Update on my ion-powered design: I flew it to Duna and landed. It performs pretty well in testing so far, actually can SSTO on Duna. I attempted to fly about halfway around Duna but accidentally went sub-orbital and my trajectory landed me on the night side of Duna. Not wanting to attempt a landing in the dark, I banked around and started flying back towards the day. The plane has a large-ish reserve of monopropellant and plenty of RCS thrusters, but sadly it wasn't enough. My kerbals caught one hopeful glimpse of the sun, then crashed into the side of a mountain.

Here's a picture of the plane:

[Geschosskopf]

Now, I just need to decide what to do with it...

Do I Hyper-Edit out the extra reactor fuel that magically appeared in the rear? (surely an exception can be made for cases of things appearing in a vessel due to updates to a mod's units system, that weren't there on launch?)

Sorry for the lag. It's been busy at the fire department lately.

That's cool. Just return it to your best estimate of its original condition en route and give it another go. You have no control over mod updates and their ramifications. Because you insist on doing this in an on-going career game instead of in its own parallel universe, there's really no other choice.

Edited May 17, 2014 by Geschosskopf

[Northstar1989]

Sorry for the lag. It's been busy at the fire department lately.

That's cool. Just return it to your best estimate of its original condition en route and give it another go. You have no control over mod updates and their ramifications. Because you insist on doing this in an on-going career game instead of in its own parallel universe, there's really no other choice.

Not really an option to quickload at this point, if that's what you meant. And even with the extra reactor fuel, it was perfectly capable of atmospheric flight on Duna, and even suborbital hops like the one I used to place it into a holding pattern while I try and get it some front-end cargo to balance out the extra uranium. The problem is it can't land with the extra weight in uranium in the rear...

I decided a while back I'd just try getting it some cargo, and see if it could land safely then... But, if it can land with the cargo (I imagine it will still be a very difficult landing)- do I have permission to edit or dump out the extra uranium with TAC Fuel Balancer? (if it will let me when landed- it doesn't let me do either in-flight)

Regards,

Northstar

[Geschosskopf]

I decided a while back I'd just try getting it some cargo, and see if it could land safely then... But, if it can land with the cargo (I imagine it will still be a very difficult landing)- do I have permission to edit or dump out the extra uranium with TAC Fuel Balancer? (if it will let me when landed- it doesn't let me do either in-flight)

Dump the excess nuke fuel now, in flight, before trying to land. TAC Fuel Balancer allows dumping any resource at any time, which is perfectly fine as you'd think such a feature would be built into all rockets for safety, just as airliners can dump their fuel. It's adding resources, magically, without any external source, that requires you being on the ground and motionless.

[Northstar1989]

Dump the excess nuke fuel now, in flight, before trying to land. TAC Fuel Balancer allows dumping any resource at any time, which is perfectly fine as you'd think such a feature would be built into all rockets for safety, just as airliners can dump their fuel. It's adding resources, magically, without any external source, that requires you being on the ground and motionless.

Uranium is coded as a solid fuel- the same as SRB fuel- so it can't be dumped in-flight (interesting that TAC Fuel Balancer's author thought to add such details). The only way to remove it is to Edit it out when stationary on the ground- which I personally think of as the Kerbals getting in a radiation suit and quickly pulling out the extra fuel rods before taking off again, leaving whatever strange bacteria that might be found on Duna to soak up the radiation and mutate- or at least glow green like Kerbals...

So... I take it as a yes that doing that's OK?

Regards,

Northstar

[Geschosskopf]

Last time I checked, TAC Fuel Balancer allowed dumping solid fuel in flight. Or I could have just dreamed that.

But go ahead and return the fuel level to whatever it was before, prior to landing, if at all possible.

[sdj64]

Sorry it's been a while. Lots of real life things going on. Anyway I gave it another go with my ion plane, and successfully completed the flight. I had about 2/3 of the fuel left, and most of the monopropellant, so I might be able to circumnavigate if I flew slowly at low altitude, but I'm happy with the performance as is. I think it's even possible to make an ion plane powered by RTGs, though more difficult.

More about the plane itself:

I first got the idea to include RCS because the .625 meter RCS tank is one of the few radially attachable parts that size (as an alternative to cubic struts) and in testing, it proved to be helpful for takeoff, landing, and flipping the plane if it was upside down, though the latter was more important for the earlier single-kerbal design since it was much smaller and could be knocked over by a kerbal on EVA.

There are also parachutes. I included these since it's hard to find a flat place to land and they allow you to land anywhere by flying low, opening the chutes, and using the RCS to keep the landing gear facing the ground. However, in my challenge submission I avoided using these aids, to show that it could be done without them.

The rover is basically a 1k battery with a probe core and some wheels. It weighs 0.41 tons. I originally tried to see if I could get some cargo points, but it couldn't lift much more weight and still be able to take off and land. I decided to ditch it at the initial landing site.

As I said a couple of posts up, it can SSTO on Duna. Not sure how you want to score the altitude since it's hard to tell when it becomes sub-orbital. I have a screenshot at 14000 meters but flew in mostly level flight up to 17000 in my previous attempt, before its speed took over and it went sub-orbital.

It carries 6 kerbals, so that's +4 points

+1 for circumnavigation if landing and taking off again is allowed

? for altitude

Pictures!

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[Northstar1989]

Last time I checked, TAC Fuel Balancer allowed dumping solid fuel in flight. Or I could have just dreamed that.

Depends on the version. Earlier versions of TAC Fuel Balancer did, in fact, allow that- but newer version search for whether a resource is defined as "solid" or "liquid" based on the fuel-feed type (Monoprop, etc. count as "liquid"), and don't allow dumping of any solid fuel.

Since UF4 is defined as non-transferable so it can't be moved around in flight, it also counts as "solid" in TAC (if I remember correctly, in real life, UF4-based reactors usually have the UF4 as a liquid solution... But KSP-Interstellar uses the solid fuel crossfeed rules for them so that players can't freely pump uranium around their ship.)

But go ahead and return the fuel level to whatever it was before, prior to landing, if at all possible.

That would be a 5% load... (I originally used TAC Fuel Balanced to edit it to that before takeoff on Kerbin- this was before tweakables)

Regards,

Northstar

[Northstar1989]

Sorry it's been a while. Lots of real life things going on. Anyway I gave it another go with my ion plane, and successfully completed the flight. I had about 2/3 of the fuel left, and most of the monopropellant, so I might be able to circumnavigate if I flew slowly at low altitude, but I'm happy with the performance as is. I think it's even possible to make an ion plane powered by RTGs, though more difficult.

More about the plane itself:

I first got the idea to include RCS because the .625 meter RCS tank is one of the few radially attachable parts that size (as an alternative to cubic struts) and in testing, it proved to be helpful for takeoff, landing, and flipping the plane if it was upside down, though the latter was more important for the earlier single-kerbal design since it was much smaller and could be knocked over by a kerbal on EVA.

There are also parachutes. I included these since it's hard to find a flat place to land and they allow you to land anywhere by flying low, opening the chutes, and using the RCS to keep the landing gear facing the ground. However, in my challenge submission I avoided using these aids, to show that it could be done without them.

The rover is basically a 1k battery with a probe core and some wheels. It weighs 0.41 tons. I originally tried to see if I could get some cargo points, but it couldn't lift much more weight and still be able to take off and land. I decided to ditch it at the initial landing site.

As I said a couple of posts up, it can SSTO on Duna. Not sure how you want to score the altitude since it's hard to tell when it becomes sub-orbital. I have a screenshot at 14000 meters but flew in mostly level flight up to 17000 in my previous attempt, before its speed took over and it went sub-orbital.

It carries 6 kerbals, so that's +4 points

+1 for circumnavigation if landing and taking off again is allowed

? for altitude

Pictures!

http://imgur.com/a/LCC1v

Nice plane, by the way. Some good ideas there.

You could improve the design a bit by reducing the part-count if you installed the Multipanels mod (which basically gives you upsized versions of the Ox-STAT solar panel, though they look a bit ugly, as they are literally just resized OX-STAT panels, and the base is too tall for the scale). This might even allow you to throw on a few more wings and ion engines and build an even bigger version...

Alternatively, the NearFuture mod has nuclear reactors which, though not nearly as power-dense as real reactors (or the ones in KSP-Interstellar, which are modeled after real-life reactors), still produce more EC/ton than any of the solar panels except the OX-STAT panels facing directly towards the sun (and in a plane, most of the time they will be at a significant angle). This might reduce your weight for the same actual electricity production- as the reactors would produce more power than the solars except when flying around Dunar noon- and would allow you to have powered flight at night...

Finally, if you want to really optimize your design, install Procedural Dynamics (better known as "Procedural Wings" though the mod was never actually called this). It will allow you to basically create wings of any size and shape you desire, and the lift coefficient properly scales for large-sized wings (as well as based on other more subtle wing parameters like root-to-tip width ratio: it's basically halfway to FAR in terms of realistic lift equations), so your larger planes will produce slightly more lift compared to their wing area, like in real life... (lift increases exponentially with wing area in real life- though the curve is somewhat balanced by increased drag)

I play with all these mods myself (especially Procedural Dynamics, on Geschosskopf's suggestion- how else would I build giant flying wings like the Raven Mk2 without overwhelming my CPU with part-count and 50 separate lift equations for each wing section?) Procedural Dynamics will be especially helpful for you- since it most strongly benefits craft with large, thing wings like your ion-flyer/glider (like in real life, in Procedural Dynamics thicker wings produce more lift than thinner wings- but I believe their lift coefficient actually decreases, so it's less lift per ton of mass, making thin wings preferable on lightweight gliders...)

Regards,

Northstar

Edited May 26, 2014 by Northstar1989