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[Kerbal Space Program] Shiny new thread! Desperately seeking pictures of rockets
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No, I got RealChutes working.
I guess that's certainly possible, though what mod I'll have a hell of a time figuring out--a lot of them are, by design, not testing with 64-bit unity.
I doubt it'd be any of my parts mods, which helps, but that doesn't narrow it down too much. Of the game mechanic mods I have running in the back grounds, I'm mostly thinking of Deadly Reentry, IFI Life Support, and the Radio Communications mod--it might be one of those. Could also be the multi-function display screen mod (I'm at work or I'd check). I've heard FAR can cause rampant crashing in conjunction with other mods, but I don't have that installed presently. Hmmm...oh well.
Also, still got the empty parts bin mod, but that's fixable just by going back to the spaceport screen and reentering your facility of choice.
But clipping the top of the building behind the walkway led to this
[edit]
Conversely, if you pull up a tad too early it's bad for the pilot. Real bad.
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Thats the new KSPRC. As you can see, it looks really good.
Time to go back to flying space ships. I guess.
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I toyed with the idea of landing, briefly, but decided that I should maybe send an un-kerbed probe first, rather than risk the lives of my brave kerbalnauts.
So far I've been playing vanilla and I like just doing seat of the pants engineering and trying things out but if I'm going to be returning to Duna maybe I should try to be a bit more systematic than build -- launch -- revert -- repeat as necessary. I think that on one of the GB videos Vinny had Kerbal Engineer. Seems like that would provide some acceleration and delta v info. Is that the mod to use? And what texture mod would people recommend?
Also, has anyone else taken to using combo solid fuel rockets/ drop tanks like so? Is it a terrible idea?
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Metzger, go for a Minmus landing first. It's harder to get to with the inclination, but the low gravity makes landing and return take almost no fuel and the flat parts are perfectly flat. Just be careful on reentry as you're gonna get real hot. F5 saves and F9 loads.
Personally I prefer Mechjeb for info as it has more information overall and is more customizable, you can just ignore it's other functions. But if you just want some simple facts Kerbal Engineer is fine.
If you do use the solid boosters, adjust their thrust in the VAB so they do burn longer. If you have a mod to see the ΔVs, the sweet spot for a launch is a Thrust to Weight Ratio (TWR) of ~2.0
Edit: And yeah, I prefer mechjeb as well, but this mod is essential for either http://www.curse.com/ksp-mods/kerbal/221500-mechjeb-and-engineer-for-all
The reason I like mechjeb isn't for the autopilot stuff (To be fair, that stuff does make it the best mod of all), but the customizable windows you can also have up. It will let you know EVERYTHING you could possible want to know while in the flight screen. All the ship, orbit, surface, target/rendezvous information you could ever want, and more.
True, but I have a tendency to Jeb it up and take a more aggressive turn than I probably should which the extra power helps me from Jebing it too much.
Sticking drop tanks atop the solids is extremely tricky to balance so they empty out just before separation. Empty too early, you're lugging empty tanks around, too late, the fuel is wasted. And then you're back to having a core stage with minimal TWR at booster sep.
Basically I run my main liquid fuel engine at 100% at launch till say 100m/s and then throttle down so that the tanks empty at the same time the boosters burn out but the engine still provides a bit of steering.
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I don't know about stock aero, but with FAR there's basically no chance of hitting terminal velocity without a crazy TWR. People vastly overestimate the impact of going fast during launch.
As DBZ notes, an engine running at less than 100% for a substantial length of time is, in essence, partially dead weight. You could use a smaller engine, carry more fuel, or use the higher TWR to make orbit faster (especially on vacuum bodies).
Bear in mind that dV isn't everything - the longer you spend firing rocket exhaust downwards instead of sideways, the more fuel you waste.
Not difficult at all with mechjeb. Now, you could do a liquid fuel engine here and just do an onion/asparagus design, but sometimes you just don't feel like doing it the easy way. Assuming the booster will burn through it's fuel before the fuel tank it's attached to empties, the trick then is to find the highest thrust percentage on the boosters that keeps stage 1 and 2 at their default burn times. Also, this trick only works if you keep the liquid engine running at 100% through the full stage 1 burn.
Take a Central tank and two tanks connected radially, with a solid booster underneath and connected to the central tank with fuel lines. Stage it so the solid engines and the liquid engine ignite in stage one, and stage 2 will be the radial sepratrons. Looking at the mechjeb ΔV display, stage 1 will be the readout for both solid and liquid engines while stage 2 is just the liquid engine after the liquid tank the booster is connected to empties. Right click the solid booster and adjust the thrust level, and as you do so look at the burn time readings. As you adjust the thrust you shouldn't see any change in the stage 1 burn time until you have the thrust too low so the solid engine continues to burn after the liquid tank it's attached to runs out. At this point you'll also see the stage 2 burn time decrease.
Alternatively, just use an inline sepratron to remove the solid booster after it's done. Assuming it won't fall into something below it, of course.
Unless I was talking about a certain John Elias Bush
This hasn't been an issue since they redid the aero.
Maybe for my next next lifter, I'll try to balance the liquid fuel capacity and SRB burn to be equal with the main engine at 100%. Seems like just the kind of nonsense that would keep me occupied for a bit.
Thanks for the insight, everyone.
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Still can't determine the cause of my crashes, but I have the absurd number of mods. Is there any way to bring up a crash event log after a hard freeze?
Top tank is fuel reserves, and for whatever reason, the toroidal fuel tank was priority. So in order to ensure that there was enough fuel at landing, I had to regularly transfer fuel from the reserve to the toroidal during the descent burn.
Here you can see one of the instruments I'm bringing along: A small surface camera. On the backside is a surface composition scanner. The sepatrons will ensure that once the reserve tanks are empty to lift away from the rest of the lander.
Reserve empty and gone. Here's the lander in the final stages of descent.
Can't screw this up now...
Bingo!
There is still enough reserve fuel for at least an attempt to ascend, re-position, and land at another location; albeit, a very nearby location.
If you want to do an efficient gravity turn on a body with atmosphere, yeah, you may need to keep your TWR from getting too high. (It depends on the aerodynamics of your craft and the characteristics of the atmosphere in question, but on Kerbin it seems like a TWR of 2 is typically as high as you want to be starting out with.) In our scenario above, then, you could add fuel or use smaller engines rather than run an overly-large engine at less than full throttle.
Poodle is a pretty sexy third-stage engine though, giving you good gimbal, excellent fuel efficiency and more thrust than 4 Terriers.
I love it for powering my Soyuz spacecraft equivalents (station docking and Object Grabbing) or various large load landers (mobile labs, miner/refueler craft).
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
One thing that annoys me is that the 2.5m parts seem less efficient than the smaller ones, at least in the vanilla game. The weight per kerbal in pods, especially so.
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The whole point of subassemblies, I always felt, was to encourage people to design a few launch vehicles for multiple jobs, and use them over and over again (you can do that stock, but K&W is particularly good for this). Use your 1.25-m launch vehicle for tiny satellites in low orbit, your 2.5-m for large payloads in low orbit or small satellites around Mun or Minmas, etc.
The main concern is to keep the center of mass ahead of the center of drag. Put a bunch of tail fins on the bottom of the rocket and keep as much weight towards the top as possible.
I wish working with subassemblies wasn't such a giant pain in the dick. The UI sucks and it seems like they never keep an attachment node where I actually want it.
I've "mastered" it to the point where my only complaint is how sub-assemblies invariably fuck up their own staging order with your existing vehicle design, but I don't know how you'd fix that otherwise.
The mission plan here is to send three separate craft in a sort of convoy to Duna: the base and the lander both are getting a one-way, unmanned trip, and the crew vehicle will do a round trip. The lander and crew vehicle will rendezvous in Dunian orbit, crew will transfer to the lander and then land at the base. This is vaguely similar to how the NASA Copernicus concept was supposed to work.
The base modules and lander module each get boring, cheap chemical engines that I'll dispose of at Duna. For the crew vehicle, I'm using two VASIMR engines, powered by some gigantic solar panels. I considered using a nuclear reactor instead, but they're just so damned expensive! So I'll need to make do with less thrust; the solar panels are only netting me 200 EC/s total.
The crew vehicle is launched unmanned, of course, since there's no way to abort a failed launch. The mission crew of 4 is sent to Kerbin orbit separately by a well-tested reusable crew launcher:
Departure! I didn't bother taking pictures of the base or lander as they left Kerbin. The base is staying inside fairings for the whole flight, so there's not much to see.
Base arrival at Duna. Turns out I didn't bring very much fuel, so I need to do some pretty aggressive aerobraking. Don't worry, the contents are IN-flammable!
The base parachuted down successfully! There are two separate modules: a habitat and a science lab. The science lab has a small greenhouse, both for plant growth experiments and to stretch out the food supply a bit.
(whoops, forgot to turn the GUI off on that one)
Unfortunately it landed on the side of a mountain, so I had to sit there playing Duna Desert Bus driving each module over to a flat area. But whatever, they both got there, linked up, and deployed.
Lander arrival at Duna. I put it in a parking orbit to wait for the crew vehicle.
Crew vehicle arrives at Duna. It brought along a couple of survey probes. (What the hell, I've got the VASIMR, right? Might as well use it.) The survey probes detach while we're still a couple days away from Duna, because they need to enter polar orbits whereas the crew vehicle is aiming for an equatorial orbit. This means I had to do a circularization burn of all three spacecraft at basically the same time, which was a little dicey but worked out in the end. The VASIMR takes like twenty minutes to circularize, whereas the probes only take a few seconds, so it wasn't too big a deal switching away from it for a bit. (Edit: Note that solar panels produce half as much EC at Duna as they do at Kerbin, so the thrust to weight ratio got even worse as I couldn't throttle the engines past 50%. Maybe the nuclear reactors are worth the money...)
Crew vehicle rendezvous with lander. Three Kerbals get to land, one stays in orbit on Collins duty.
Landing at base. More accurate than I expected! I was dreading having to walk three kerbals each a few kilometers or so.
Start of 1 year long ground mission. We've got a science lab, a big habitat, a small greenhouse, and a lot of prepackaged snacks.
No, I actually launched two Eve probes--Kerbabl-Eve (a lander) and Eve-1 (and orbital probe). The former was supposed to land, and probably could have (if it survived reentry) if it wasn't lost due to "technical failure" (basically I installed the satellite control mod, and the antenna it did have wasn't compatible), so I watched it burn to cinders in Eve. Eve-1 made a proper orbit, and I'm hoping to use the last bit of fuel it has to eventually intercept Eve's asteroid capture for more data at some point.
What is the mod with the Hab ring on your station? I forgot what it was called and I really want it back. The base mod looks really cool too, I made need to pick that up as well.
64bit cannot come fast enough.
Another trick for rockets that only lose stability above 10km: manually pump fuel to the top of the lifter stage to keep that CoM up high.