aeris 4a upgrade?

[deepspacecreeper]

hello, how should i upgrade the spaceplane so...

i have enough fuel for getting into geostationary orbit and back, or

send 4 kerbal passengers to a space station at 122km

(p.s. sorry for the noob question. does the aeris 4a have an inline clamp-o-tron?)

[Spyritdragon]

With sufficient piloting skill, you won't need much additions for a Keostationary orbit. Try replacing the inline clamp-o-tron (which is indeed present) with a LT-200 tank if you don't need it.

Getting 4 passengers up with the Aeris will be hard though. It's only meant to fly one really, you'd have to attach three more spaces for Kerbals, and passenger seats are usually quite heavy.

Unless you use the Jebediah seat. Just plunk three of those on top and you should be good to go :-).

[deepspacecreeper]

With sufficient piloting skill, you won't need much additions for a Keostationary orbit. Try replacing the inline clamp-o-tron (which is indeed present) with a LT-200 tank if you don't need it.

Getting 4 passengers up with the Aeris will be hard though. It's only meant to fly one really, you'd have to attach three more spaces for Kerbals, and passenger seats are usually quite heavy.

Unless you use the Jebediah seat. Just plunk three of those on top and you should be good to go :-).

what's the "jebediah" seat?

[andrewas]

AKA the External Command Seat.

[deepspacecreeper]

AKA the External Command Seat.

i'm afraid that the kerbals will be crushed in the heat of reentry. will they r.i.p. if they sit on the outside? and how do i fill the seats?

[Spacewalking on Sunshine]

Re-entry can't damage anything except solar panels at this stage in development, and the you can't pre-seat your kerbals so you have to stick a command pod on a decoupler, fill that with crew, EVA them and place them into the seats and then you decouple and fly away.

It'll look sillier than a clown car, so I'd just make a new Spaceplane from scratch. You can put a small box in front of intake which gives you an attachment point for another intake and so, with no loss of intake. You can spam this as much as you like to get ridiculously efficient jet engines. It's to spaceplanes as asparagus staging is to rockets, don't leave home without it.

I'm currently working on making a fleet of "Super Shuttles" that are supposed to be able to haul space station modules and reach munar orbit in one stage, You can do crazy things with spaceplanes if you try hard enough and cram in enough intakes.

[Panzerbeard]

You can put a small box in front of intake which gives you an attachment point for another intake and so, with no loss of intake. You can spam this as much as you like to get ridiculously efficient jet engines. It's to spaceplanes as asparagus staging is to rockets, don't leave home without it.

I'm just wondering how long it'll be before that's fixed, though. It's clearly not intended behaviour and feels almost cheat-ey to me, personally. I'm fine with it, but it'll be interesting to see how many people have to rethink spaceplane design when it's changed.

[Spacewalking on Sunshine]

If they do I hope they add a SABRE-esque engine to compensate, there's probably a mod for that already.

In the meantime, we can enjoy oddities like this monster.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMOzbtZAfWM

[Murph]

I'm just wondering how long it'll be before that's fixed, though. It's clearly not intended behaviour and feels almost cheat-ey to me, personally. I'm fine with it, but it'll be interesting to see how many people have to rethink spaceplane design when it's changed.

Almost cheaty?!? To me, you might as well just debug yourself infinite fuel, hack the numbers in part.cfg for the intakes and engines, or edit your stuff into orbit, if you're going to just stack or hide absurd numbers of intakes in completely unrealistic ways.

Each to their own, though, and KSP is very much a sandbox where you get to make up the rules as you go along, so go right ahead and cheat intakes all you like, just please don't pretend that it's anything other than a hack or cheat in terms of realism, particularly physics. Have fun too, by all means, such as figuring out what combination of SRBs best achieves a one way ticket to orbit for an intrepid Kerbal sat in the chair-o-doom on top of them, it doesn't all have to be realistic. ;-)

As for the original topic of upgrading the Aeris 4A, it's really just a case of increasing the area (i.e. length and width) of the wings, adding more fuel+engine tubes as you go, keeping an eye on the CoM and CoL, until it can do what you need it to do. There's plenty of trial and error, which is half the fun of KSP for me, figuring out all the ways to create smoking holes beside the runway, prior to achieving a "perfect" design which just works. Aside from some relatively minor irritations with it, it's not such a bad basic design, can be made to be a very easy runway to circular 100km orbit design with only some very minor tweaks (it can do 100km with ease as supplied, just needs some tweaks to make it completely easy).

Thinking of the supplied craft as a trainer is probably best, as it's pretty good for that, both in terms of training you to fly up to orbit and back, and how to fix or tweak a basically ok design from mildly irritating to good, and beyond.

[Panzerbeard]

Almost cheaty?!? To me, you might as well just debug yourself infinite fuel, hack the numbers in part.cfg for the intakes and engines, or edit your stuff into orbit, if you're going to just stack or hide absurd numbers of intakes in completely unrealistic ways.

Each to their own, though, and KSP is very much a sandbox where you get to make up the rules as you go along, so go right ahead and cheat intakes all you like, just please don't pretend that it's anything other than a hack or cheat in terms of realism, particularly physics. Have fun too, by all means, such as figuring out what combination of SRBs best achieves a one way ticket to orbit for an intrepid Kerbal sat in the chair-o-doom on top of them, it doesn't all have to be realistic. ;-)

Hey, I agree, I've never used it myself. The reason I said "almost" is that it's a result of a bug/design flaw in the game itself, you don't need to go breaking the game or using obscure hidden methods to do it, you just add parts onto a node. Clearly this isn't realistic, but then if we condemn that for being incredibly cheatey and bad, then half the ships we make should be deleted, right? If we had a fully modelled, realistic aerodynamic system most of the craft that we're so accustomed to using would be hideously inefficient or downright broken. We also ignore the fact that we occasionally hit G-forces that would smear Jeb all over the cockpit, and we pay no attention to things like re-entry heat. We don't design our ships to accommodate the food and water required for the years a kerbal may be in space, either. It's an exploit, sure, but the game allows it, from the unmodified SPH, without bringing a cheat console up, so if people want to use it, fine. It's certainly not on the same level as "editing your stuff into orbit", at least.

[Rulare]

Almost cheaty?!? To me, you might as well just debug yourself infinite fuel, hack the numbers in part.cfg for the intakes and engines, or edit your stuff into orbit, if you're going to just stack or hide absurd numbers of intakes in completely unrealistic ways.

Yeah, pretty much. I'm positive the jets aren't intended to be running at 40k.

Isn't the point of spaceplanes to be a greater challenge than a rocket? If you're stacking intakes, why even bother? Just strap more engines and intakes to a wingless rocket, it'll still get to orbit; With intake spam it doesn't much matter how your aircraft is designed. It will go to space, because having (I've seen up to) 56 TIMES the amount of intended intake air for the same intake surface area makes that almost impossible to mess up. With only a small amount of intake clipping I saw some guy make an aircraft that can SSTO... seven times. On one supply of fuel.

It's just such a crutch. With the right flight profile you can SSTO with one engine and one or two reasonably placed intakes and still bring a satellite with you into orbit.

Yeah, it's a sandbox game, and what other players do doesn't affect me, until they come on the forums or wherever and I get to see the fourth intake spam SSTO for the day from someone trying to score themselves some easy validation from the internets.

[Murph]

then half the ships we make should be deleted, right?

No, not really, they should just honestly acknowledge when a ship uses a cheat and/or hack. That's my way of looking at it, that there's nothing fundamentally wrong with cheating/hacking in KSP, if you openly acknowledge that you're doing so.

As for other areas where the game is currently less than fully realistic when it comes to physics, etc, I feel there's a major difference between that and stacking intakes. The game doesn't really allow stacking them as an obviously intended mechanic, it requires a specific exploit of putting something very unrealistic onto the existing intake's front, and/or hiding them with clipping. In time, there's a good chance that the KSP physics model will gain more realism, and it's understandable that the devs have omitted certain things from it at this stage, preferring a simpler working system for now, then adding more realism to it as and when they can.

There is one circumstance where I'd feel that it's much less cheaty, and that's if you are using it to actually model something real. E.g. the supplied turbojet isn't actually that far away from the RR Olympus performance in terms of thrust, but requires 2 ram intakes to achieve that to roughly the same service altitude, where RR managed it in a single tube (RR Olympus 593 in Concorde was 169kN with a service ceiling of 60,000' / 18,300m). If there's some case-specific rationale for limited stacking along those lines, to simulate a real world component without the effort of creating a completely new part, I can get behind that thinking, considering it more of a justified hack rather than cheat. I could quite easily get behind the idea that KSP actually needs a ram intake which has significantly higher performance than the current one.

Spamming them with impunity, however, I'll always see that as cheating. As I said earlier, however, go right ahead, KSP rules are whatever you want them to be, more or less. For me, most of the time, I get much more satisfaction from KSP by trying to stay as close to realistic physics as I can.