Kerbal Space Program

I think the new Spaceplane plus thing that would be in the official release later would also have cargo door too...

Yes, spaceplanes+ adds cargo bays. There's also Shuttle Orbiter System (SOS), which adds some pretty cool-looking shuttles that actually work. A pity that they are kinda specialized. SP+ allows you to make a shuttle-type thing rather easily, and the air intakes are pretty nice. Since SP+ will be in the game soon, I recommend grabbing it so you can preview what's upcoming. I did that with KSPX way back when, and really liked that they picked her work for inclusion into the base game. (when was that, 0.20...?)

Another mod that works nice is ALCOR. Very immersive capsule. And I still like AIES, despite the fact that I think the creater moved on to other things... maybe someone who knows how to code can take it over, eventually. It adds some visual variety to the stock parts and isn't utterly OP like say, Novapunch or KW are.

edited 11th Sep '14 2:20:21 AM by pvtnum11

I've been trying to get a heavily-modded install to work for a few days now, to the point of madness. Finally found a possible answer:

Wasn't the whole point of the 64-bit build that it could use more memory = more mods?

As far as I can tell it's the most likely answer, since in isolation all of the mods work fine.

edited 13th Sep '14 6:18:17 PM by medicus

Yep, that was the whole point, and the instability was part of the reason we didn't get Windows 64-bit until the 'hack' sort of forced their hand.

That said, it's running alright-ish for me, some oddities aside (e.g. changing scenes at the space center will briefly show the Astronaut Complex background), and frankly now that I've tasted relentless modding without ATM or shoddy low-res textures, I don't want to go back. The one big disadvantage is staring at the load screen for 6 minutes+...

32 bit seems to do the trick! Got into the parts menu and launched a simple rocket with no problems.

Edit: Has crashed twice though. :(

Edit: Aaaaaand now is constantly crashing. >:(

edited 14th Sep '14 2:39:00 AM by medicus

I finally went the last mile and recovered my failed mission to Eve. I got all the Gilly data out of it, but as my lander couldn't survive atmospheric entry, I just transferred all my fuel to my main ship and went home. I needed almost all of that fuel too. It's disheartening to know that the mission would have failed anyway.

Anything you can walk away from and bring back something along with you is never a complete failure. At the very least, you can apply the lessons learned to future missions.

I had a plane stall, point towards the ground tail first and refuse to level out. Impact destroyed almost everything but the cockpit. Jeb rather enjoyed it.

I had fun installing NEAR. It's basically FAR-lite, even made by the same guy. Supposed to avoid having to worry about mach numbers, no more planes flying apart at speeds, but still have better aerodynamic modeling over stock.

Planes are finnicky, and I was able to yaw a plan into a dead-spin rather easily. It also appears that flywheel torque on planes doesn't do anything anymore. It's all about control surfaces.

NEAR also makes rockets easier to launch, as the thing no longer calculates drag on all parts, but only the ones that are directly in the path of air. I was able to boost quite a bit more into orbit with just this change.

Still, I might try FAR, see how different they are.

IN OTHER NEWS: It would appear that the community may be split on opinion in regards to B9 or Spaceplanes Plus. From what little I've seen, you either like one or the other. There was some butt-hurt about SP+ being included in the next update, while B9 was being left in the cold, and how B9 was hurr durr so much better and some other junk. I liked B9, but it was way too many parts. SP+ also looks more stock-like.

edited 17th Sep '14 2:01:45 PM by pvtnum11

Yeah, the roughly five billion parts is what mostly puts me off B9 as well (Plus, I'm not all that keen on the art style, a little too blocky). There is so many different fuselage systems and stuff, it's had to keep track of. SP+ is way more focused in that regard.

I've been playing with NEAR. It's very... odd. All my delta v numbers for reaching Kerbin orbit are wrong now. I think it's only about 4,000 m/s of delta v now (with proper nosecones and fairings).

Which is a good thing - used to be about 4500m/s. I can down-rate my launch vehicles, as they're massively OP now.

Decided to step it up a tad and installed FAR. Was still able to boost a rather large parallel-staged mess into orbit just fine... but I was eyeballing Q and Angle of Attack very closely.

Okay, follow along if you can as I paper up a no-frills Mun lander. Those with Kerbal Engineer (or Mechjeb) can go ahead and plug it all in and see if I did it right, those who can do this on paper can chime in and see if I did it right, too. Those who want to simply try it, feel free (I'll do up a .craft for it later). If you spot an error, feel free to point it out.

We'll start with the 1-man lander can. It's light. 0.66 tons, if my source document is to be trusted (the problem with papering up a build is that you need accurate documentation).

On top of that, we'll stick on a standard-sized docking port. That's 0.05 tons. We will need that to bolt the lander to our Mun Orbiter.

We'll place four RCS quad thrusters onto the top of the pod, along the outer edge so they look nice. That adds another 0.2 tons. No need for spare monopropellant, the can's internal supply will be sufficient for docking later.

On the sides of the can, we will place two of the small radial Batt-Man packs. 0.01 tons total.

We'll use an FLT-200 fuel tank. That's 1.125 tons full, and 0.125 tons empty. One ton of fuel/oxidizer total.

Grafted to the sides of the tank, are three of the tiny lander legs. 0.15 tons total.

To power this midget lander, we'll stick on a 48-7S engine. 0.1 tons. The Little Engine That Can, is what I like to call it. Things are awesome (except for their kinda low Specific Impulse).

Some basic addition, and I get an all-up mass of 2.295 tons, and an empty mass of 1.295 tons. We can go ahead and fudge that up to 2.3 and 1.3 respectively (so this will only be a second-order approximation at best, but it'll be enough). Okay, now that we have those two figures (assuming, again, that my reference data was accurate at all), we can start to do delta-v numbers. Take 2.3, divide it by 1.3, get about 1.77 as a result. Take the Natural Log of 1.77, and we get 0.57 as a result.

The 48-7S engine has a Specific Impulse of 350m which, if we multiply it by 9.806, gives us our Exhaust Velocity (Ve) of 3432... multiply that by 0.57 and we get our spacecraft's total delta-v value of...1956m/s. More than sufficient for a trip from Low Munar orbit, landing, and getting back up into Low Munar Orbit. From a 10kM Munar orbit, you need about 580m/s to land, and another 580m/s to get back into orbit. Meaning we have about 800m/s of spare delta-v.

Okay, but can this thing even manage to land and take off under Mun's gravity? Well, here's how we can figure that out. The 48-7S makes 30 kilonewtons (kN) of thrust. The spacecraft all-up weighs 2.3 metric tons. Mun gravity at the surface is about 1.7m/s squared (same as the Moon, IIRC).

So I'll simply take 30 and divide it by 2.3 and that tells me how fast I can change my velocity, in meters per second. 13.04m/s roughly. I could figure out how many Mun-gees that is by dividing that by 1.7, and I get 7.7-ish, meaning that my landing will probably be at only fractional power. Or, if we want it in Kerbin-gee equivalent, I divide that 13.04 by 9.806 and I get 1.32-something. So the pilot won't feel that much heavier under full thrust than if he was standing on the launchpad at KSC, basically.

We end up with an over-engine'd lander that has plenty of spare delta-v capacity. We could decide to increase not-fuel mass (science gear, solar panels, lights, heavier landing legs) to drop our delta-v number to something less overkill, plus the added mass would drive down our Thrust-to-Weight ratio to something less excessive... but I think it'll work pretty well. It's light enough that you could drag it along to Eeloo if you wanted to, and it do the misison - deorbit, land, and get back into orbit.

Great, now you've got me wanting to learn math.

So, I found this great anime that I thought some of you guys might like.

I became a programmer because I hated math and wanted computers to do it all for me. This sentiment hasn't changed for n years

Sounds good apart from one little thing, the radial batteries are physicsless, so 10 kilos saved there.

(x4) Not got my current copy of the game handy, but from my experience your logic seems sound. The 48-7S in particular is extremely useful for light landers, being quite lightweight with a good vacuum ISP for its size.

(x3) Seconding that recommendation. I'm about 2/3rds of the way through the series so far, and it hasn't let me down yet. Planetes is another great one, incidentally, though it's a bit further into the future than Space Brothers.

Correct, not all parts are actively treated as having mass, so I ended up with slightly better figures than the math would indicate. Guess that falls nicely into the Good-Bad Bugs area. Wonder if/when that'll get 'fixed'.

This means you can summon a Kraken on demand if you manage to make something out of no-mass parts. I did a rover on decouplers (so the root part was a for-real part) and it acted VERY STRANGE. But that might have been due to sticking the OV-10 engines on it and turning on infinite RCS fuel and letting the game engine spazz out trying to figure out what happened when I fired it up.

Jeeze louise. Why is it so hard to desining a lander for Eve? My base design is better this time around, I know it has enough delta-v to get into orbit and it'll actually stay stable during re-entry, plus it's quite a bit more elegant (not very hard), but that doesn't stop it from breaking up due to high dynamic pressure. I can't for the life of me figure out how to slow this thing down in the atmosphere because it's so massive. The problem is, it enters nose-first, and the drogue chutes are on the nose. When they deploy, it spins the lander around and tears it apart. I have figured out a way to attach a drogue to the rear, but I don't know if that'll be enough, plus I have to come up with a novel way to connect my interplanetary vehicle to it since that connection node is occupied. And holy hell, even getting this thing into Kerbin orbit... I'll have to launch the lander and interplanetary vehicle separate, connect them, and then re-fuel. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that I'd need another launch just to add a second stage to the interplanetary.

Edit: Planetes is indeed awesome. I should go back and re-watch it. Maybe I'll get some vehicle ideas.

edited 26th Sep '14 6:23:53 PM by CDRW

Alright, so I'm trying out asparagus staging for the first time, and I'm running into a big problem. When the first rockets burn out, the thrust is no longer balanced and I immediately lose control of the craft. Any advice?

Also, when looking at delta-v with engineer, it lists two numbers for each stage something like XXX/XXXX. I figure the second number is the delta-v that I'll have after jettisoning the dead weight. Do I add the numbers for each stage together in order to get total delta-v, or is total the number after the slash in the top stage?

Your center-of-thrust is no longer balanced with your center-of-mass. Check your staging: you always want to have the two line up.

The first number should refer to the delta v in the one stage, and the second your total delta v.

Cool, thanks.

It's been a while since I posted anything. I've integrated something like 80 mods and started another career save and I've been playing moderately realistically (for example, instead of sending ships start to the Mün, I'd test them first in Kerbin orbit, much as the Apollo and Soviet programs did).

Here is Odysseus VIII docked with Space Station One, several hours after the first component of the Kerbin Space Station was launched into orbit.◊

Am I thinking right that I want as much of my mass concentrated in the outer stages as possible along with the most consumptive engines with asparagus staging?