Eve One - Soliciting advice for an Eve Ascent Vehicle

[capi3101]

Yep - just the Can, two OX-STATS, a Clamp-O-Tron, a small decoupler, FL-T100 and a 48-7S. I wouldn't take the clamp-o-tron down there with me except that I can't attach one with KAS and I'd like to use it to return to Kerbin (I can attach radial chutes, of which the return stage will be carrying two).

[jBeta]

Yeah... Mine didn't make the ascent from a 233m altitude. I'm sure it would work a little higher though. I think adding fuel to my upper stage kind of ruined everything. However, the landing structure, and everything else worked great. My parachutes had me down to about 21-25 m/s I think, and I used the central engine to get it down to 17m/s, and it just bounced down nicely (to my surprise.) I had 32 drogues and only 8 radial parachutes, so maybe a few more of those would have helped (maybe in place of some of the drogues.) NOTE: when I restored a quicksave, the landing structure was suddenly underground. This was a problem when trying to ascend because things started exploding that shouldn't. I hacked the quicksave to add 4 meters height because, well, I was correcting a bug in my opinion.

I think I was close, but got a little to overconfident with adding the 3-man pod and fuel without considering the lower stages. I didn't think that small percentage of extra weight would make a huge difference, but it did.

Anyway, It seems that you put more thought into yours and it has a bit more delta-v so I think you are on the right track. Good luck!

[capi3101]

Thanks.

I had some issues with the Eve Two last night that I'd like to talk about with y'all; I need to get to work though, so I'll post again here after a bit.

[capi3101]

Alrighty. So, I haven't had hardly any time to play KSP since the 0.23.5 update came out but last night I was able to get in some time and I used it to work on Eve Two, with the goal of making it prepped for its journey to Eve. So, that meant adding ladders, chutes, lander legs and so forth, and last night I did all that and began testing to see how the equipment would hold up. Usual test battery - infinite fuel on, launch, burn to 25000 ASL, engines off, infinite fuel off, deploy chutes, land (checking characteristics of chute openings), pop off the chutes, take off, pop off the lander legs, try and make orbit.

The lander legs held the weight of rocket and I was able to land safely. The ladders reached all the way to the ground, though I noted Jeb clipping through struts at more than one point (he still made it up and down okay, but had problems going anywhere once he was on the ground, like there were problems with collision meshes or something). Chutes deployed without ripping off though they didn't slow me down sufficiently for a safe landing on Kerbin. All in all, a generally successful array of tests.

Where I encountered an issue was with ejecting the chutes. I built an improved version of my earlier chute pack for the new parts; each pack contains six large chutes, six drogues and eight radials on top of one of the new very large decouplers, with six seperatrons to push it up and away from the stack. Testing of the pack on a single stack went very well - they performed even better than the original packs in terms of getting clear of the rocket. On Eve Two, I set the decouplers for all six packs to fire in the same stage and for their seperatrons to all ignite at the same time, same as the planned ejection sequence for Eve One.

My impression was that everything in a stage activates when you hit the space bar to activate that stage. That's been the way things have been in KSP from the beginning. And yet last night when I got to the stage to eject my packs...

1) They didn't eject all at once

2) The seperatrons didn't ignite all at once

3) When they did finally go, they blew up the upper fuel tank on which they were resting.

I'm hoping this was just a fluke, something going on with my local instance of KSP last night. But to be sure, I figured I'd share the Craft file with y'all to see if it does it to you guys too. And if it does, maybe we can all figure out what's going on together.

Still need to figure out how best to launch a new resupply stage...

[jBeta]

My impression was that everything in a stage activates when you hit the space bar to activate that stage. That's been the way things have been in KSP from the beginning. And yet last night when I got to the stage to eject my packs...

1) They didn't eject all at once

2) The seperatrons didn't ignite all at once

3) When they did finally go, they blew up the upper fuel tank on which they were resting.

It's not just you. I have also been noticing that the new decouplers don't like to fire simultaneously always... yet sometimes they do. It seems like more of them make it worse, but maybe not. I have Eve-8 sitting here with 6 that go off perfectly, yet Eve-7 had 5 (4+1) and I had to mash the space bar repeatedly plus the engines didn't all fire at once. I'm not sure if it has something to do with how you assemble them, like using symmetry versus individual, or even copying a whole assembly. I was just stopping by the forum to check for bug reports on that actually.

[capi3101]

Fixed the chute problem by sticking rockomax decouplers underneath the big decouplers. Not an optimal solution by any means, but it's a working solution.

At this point, Eve Two's ready to fly. I wonder if I should add some RCS to the design for the flight to Eve; thing's pretty hard to steer as is. Added RTGs tonight; put them with the lander leg clusters on the external tanks so they should eject off right after take off at Eve. Power needs are set. Still need to get the whole thing into Kerbin orbit to see if my overall plan is going to work or not.