On April 30 2015 07:57 stenole wrote: I think it is odd how in career mode, things start off relatively hard and then gets much easier. Not until you have struggled through the Kerbin system do you get your manouver node abilities, less restrictions on how big you can build, a runway that is actually flat, ability to asparagus stage, bunches more celestial bodies filled with cheap science and parts that are progressively much better than the ones your start out with.
I was a little dissapointed today after spending lots of time creating the ultimate air breathing recoverable single stage launch booster. It was tricky to get into orbit with the payload I had chosen, but I did it. After getting it to work, I tested it against a haphazardly put together liquid-oxi engine with a single tank which was done in less than 10 seconds with no planning or testing. The liquid-oxi booster beat my complicated air powered booster by 600 m/s of deltaV which not only gets the payload into orbit but almost sends it all the way to the Mun.
The point is supposed to be that you should be aiming for a higher challenge. At first getting into orbit or building an efficient rocket to land a probe on the moon may be a challenge, but making that step easier when you are trying to land in another planet or trying something harder is fine, they are quality of life improvements for things you should already know how to do.
It's not like the lategame is easier than the early game, multiplanetary missions or making a return trip from eve are far more complicated than anything you do early on. It also makes sense, if you are able to send people to mars you should have a much easier time sending people to the moon than you did when you started the space program.
As technology gets better things get easier, it's hard to design around that. And for people that don't want to deal with tech progress, there is always the sanbox mode.
So, I wound up landing my copycat from the forum into the ocean. RIP Valentina. So then I thought about it, and did some reworking on my more beefy space plane. It is now in orbit, although I'm really low on fuel. Should be able to de-orbit burn and then land it. The only part lost to overheating was sadly my strake/elevon tail. I think I can compensate however, and I have enough airbrakes to slow down on the way back into atmosphere. Hopefully. I don't want to lose two more Kerbals, but testing continues.
Flight profile was take off, ascent at 45 degrees, tail strake blows off as Sabre engines transition to rocket power, gentle down angle to just above horizontal. I think the plane could use some refinements still.
I recently bought this game and am enjoying it quite a bit. Yesterday I got Jeb stuck on the moon, so I sent Valentine to trade places with him, and she died due to an unfortunate EVA incident. So I sent another kerbal there to get him, and.. long story short, I restarted my career game.
@felis do you mean Rapier? my friend mentioned Sabre's quite a bit but i thought that was a mod part.
@Jeeve nice :D
I think Jebediah and Valentina respawn, maybe a few others too.
In other news i actually hit EVA on my valentina while at 20km doing ~1.5km/s, slowed her down with air resistance and EVA fuel (but ran out before hitting the ground) and dropped her into the ocean at terminal velocity. She actually bounced and was fine
i've killed kerbals with far less, maybe it has to do with having a horizontal velocity of effectively 0 and landing feet first. It was like 50m/s straight down
Sorry, yes, I meant Rapiers. (It's confusing, because the same engine concept being developed in actual aerospace engineering is called a Sabre engine - basically a hybrid engine that can function as both an open cycle and closed cycle system. I don't think the Sabre engine has ever actually been flown, but it's been test fired a few times.)
Kerbals are tough. One of the KSPTV streamers during the launch marathon somehow didn't kill Bob a few times after having him jump out of an aircraft at 20km+ and landing in the ocean. Meanwhile, I've killed a Kerbal on the Mun during extended EVA of about 5km because he came in with too high of a horizontal velocity after a long jump. Also, I think Kerbal heads are some kind of insanely resistant material.
Meanwhile, I've killed a Kerbal on the Mun during extended EVA of about 5km because he came in with too high of a horizontal velocity after a long jump.
I've done that, but i was doing >20km EVA travels. If you go UP and then accelerate in one direction continuously, you can actually get to exteme velocities (in the hundreds of meters per second IIRC) - gotta save two thirds of the fuel to cancel that out though and land safely with a big margin for error (if it takes you 90 seconds to reach that speed, it'll probably take you 80-85 seconds of decelerating to not go splat when you arrive)
Getting used to the new physics and different launches / gravity turns. Fun to re-experience the game again. Trying to do some challenging career contracts for a while before grabbing MechJeb and building more wild stuff. I'm actually eager to mess around with planes again too, with the aerodynamics changes.
Meanwhile, I've killed a Kerbal on the Mun during extended EVA of about 5km because he came in with too high of a horizontal velocity after a long jump.
I've done that, but i was doing >20km EVA travels. If you go UP and then accelerate in one direction continuously, you can actually get to exteme velocities (in the hundreds of meters per second IIRC) - gotta save two thirds of the fuel to cancel that out though and land safely with a big margin for error (if it takes you 90 seconds to reach that speed, it'll probably take you 80-85 seconds of decelerating to not go splat when you arrive)
I think, last I checked, if you are on the right part of the Mun's mountains, you can EVA a Kerbal to orbit around the Mun. It was a forum challenge awhile back.
Also, general update - even without my vertical stabilizer, I was able to safely land my spaceplane at Kedwards (aka, the desert). The airbrakes may be overkill - never once got any aerodynamic heating or mach effects on descent back into the atmosphere.
On May 01 2015 13:44 felisconcolori wrote: I think, last I checked, if you are on the right part of the Mun's mountains, you can EVA a Kerbal to orbit around the Mun. It was a forum challenge awhile back.
The EVA pack barely doesn't have enough delta v to achieve orbit, but you can try to get a boost from an engine on the surface.
On May 01 2015 13:41 Duka08 wrote: Getting used to the new physics and different launches / gravity turns. Fun to re-experience the game again. Trying to do some challenging career contracts for a while before grabbing MechJeb and building more wild stuff. I'm actually eager to mess around with planes again too, with the aerodynamics changes.
I did some testing just now with a thin rocket going straight up
1.31 TWR = 70.9km apoapsis
1.62 TWR = 90.5km apoapsis, peak 78% of terminal velocity
2.02 TWR = 104.8km apoapsis, peak ~85% of terminal velocity
2.51 TWR = 113.9km apoapsis, peak ~91% of terminal velocity
3.0 TWR = 118.2km apoapsis, peak ~98.5% of terminal velocity
3.49 TWR = 119.8km apoapsis, was higher than terminal velocity for part of lower atmosphere
4.01 TWR = 119.8km apoapsis
It's obvious that low TWR was bad. The rockets at high TWR (>3) tended to hit terminal velocity around 2km and drop below it again around 15km - with manual control, they could throttle to full for takeoff, throttle down and then throttle back up at a bit higher altitude to stay slightly below terminal velocity for longer and get higher than the 3.0 TWR rocket.
Terminal velocity is extremely different depending on the cross sectional surface area of your ship as seen from the prograde vector (that decides your drag, maybe with other factors too) - some engines sticking out of the side of your ship and creating drag can cut your terminal velocity in half.
I'd say overall it's best to stay very close to your terminal velocity (>90% if possible but not passing ~98% for safety) and it's very hard to do that without a mod - IMO grab kerbal engineer and stare at the atmospheric efficiency stat. Throttle up to full 24/7 unless you're gonna hit >98% on that number, in which case pull back on throttle until you can apply more thrust higher in the atmosphere. With a thin ship, you can easily benefit from >2.5 TWR - comments talking about using a TWR in the ~1.3 - 1.8 range are simply uninformed or flying pancakes.
If you want a simple and easy number to play with without worrying about it, i'd say 2 is good because 1.5 is too low and 2.5 is a bit harder to control and not necessarily efficient if your rocket is fat but light.
Remember that this is also surface TWR. The actual TWR increases during flight.
Also generally if two stages get you to X amount of km (and is below terminal velocity) but at different speeds when you decouple them, you'd want to go with the faster one - especially if your rocket drags less after staging (most probably do)
So, just for completeness' sake, this is what it is supposed to look like in orbit. It made it up, and made it back okay. Only a slight tail strike on landing took out the lower brakes (top/bottom symmetrical airbrakes on engines). It's got TWR to spare, but it has very little dV once it's in orbit. Enough to deorbit, as long as it's not a really high orbit. May need a station to go to, and a docking port with a little RCS.
They just increased drag by 1/3'rd and lift by 1.44x. My first impression of this is... hm, it helps low speed planes (which were already extremely powerful) and fucks over everything else, probably fucking over SSTO spaceplane designs the hardest.
They don't really use that lift that much. If they can't accelerate in the low atmosphere and they can't thrust past 15km, how are they supposed to carry a payload to orbit? I don't understand.. I can strap a payload to some solid rocket boosters or asparagus engines and get it up there no problem (it only takes ~3km/s of delta V if you have a thin ship and perfect trajectory) but it takes 15x longer to design a plane to carry 1/5'th of the weight up there. IDK, just feels wrong/imbalanced
Cool design, are those pre-coolers? Why would you use those over ramjet intakes?*
*after some thought, pre-coolers don't tend to explode as much at aggressive supersonic speeds
I think maybe in order to make space planes work, you need to build BIG. Since the new aero checks for the drag profile of your craft instead of mass, big vessels take more advantage of this. With larger vessels, a smaller percentage of your craft needs to be non-fuel/engine parts which further increases efficiency. As a test, I made the biggest monster of a plane I've ever made.
I expected it to make the game run slower than it ever has before, but because the plane consisted mostly of large parts, the frame rate held up surprisingly well on my laptop. Reentry was not possible with the plane, but with some few adjustments like drogues and brakes, it should be possible. With all the fuel drained, the mass balance was not ideal which helped destroy the plane. I also expect landings to be difficult without aiding the process with vertical thrust. Large landing gear can handle a lot, but they have their limits. Taking off horizontally drained a lot of fuel. So possibly a vertical takeoff would be more reasonable. It should be noted that there were no heating effects during reentry, so perhaps all it needs is more struts.
More struts, and possibly you tried to turn it. The amount of stress applied to the frame if you're not heading into the atmosphere straight on is very high. Even a little twitch the wrong way, maybe boom. I dunno.
And those are Shock cone intakes and pre-coolers, because pre-coolers really seem to help dissipate heat. Still doesn't help my vertical stabilizers, though - that one is fine, but it seems like strakes like to burn off.
Use airbrakes from outside of the atmosphere, that way when you start to hit the thinnest air they'll slow you down slowly and have less chance of ripping stuff in half. They're more versatile and fun than parachutes i think
airbrakes behind the center of mass should leave you pointing prograde. I think. Maybe.
Just raising more questions lol - why shock cones instead of ramjets?
The brakes are fully deployed for re-entry, keeps me slow and I don't get any heating/mach effects. They do tend to pull me slightly prograde, but that helps to keep me leveled out on my descent.
Shock cones, for reasons I don't fully understand (maybe their profile? A lot more blunt than shock cones) seem to deal with heat on ascent without exploding whereas the ramjets pretty much go straight to yellow and boom.
Always the earthshattering kabooms. Rarely lose the entire hull though, usually just the vertical stabilizer goes during re-entry.
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