🚀 The Kerbal Thread - Share Your Kerbal Creations
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my first spaceplane after a failed docking with the tanker.
Jeb is happy anyway
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You think it's ugly now, wait until you see the changes I have to make to make her flyable. (Hint: I'm trimming the weight with FT-T800 fuel tanks. Yes, really. It's that huge.)
I'm also nearly at the point in this bloated, runaway project, where 10 turbojets isn't enough.
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Not many people have travelled that fast without an enclosure and lived to tell the tale--a U2 pilot did, though, when his plane broke up around him at 70+ thousand feet.
Correction, that'd be a SR-71 pilot. And yes, his plane did literally break up all around him, dumping him and his seat out into space in a veritable un-ejection. (Unfortunately, the wild pre-breakup gyrations did the backseater in immediately, otherwise, he'd have lived to tell the tale too.)
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Is that a weird camera angle, or is it missing a wing?
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@Intercourse said:
Good thing I just got a nifty new video card.
It doesn't seem to be that demanding... I ran the demo on a VM.
I have absolutely no idea what to do there, but it seems fun.
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The better the machine, the higher the part-count you can simulate at once before it shits itself. That's really how it goes.
I did a Kerbin-Mun-Back mission on my ultrabook and it ran fine. But this space plane I'm working on now would probably cause self-shit.
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it is.
i was learning how to dock and it turns out that things broke if you aproach them at 15 m/sit's really better to do one big rocket? my designs tend to be like lego to build in orbit one big ship
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Yeah, learning to dock is a bitch.
it's really better to do one big rocket? my designs tend to be like lego to build in orbit one big ship
Play how you want.
I usually do big ships because docking is a PITA even if you're good at it.
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I don't play but I've got a question on @blakeyrat's gnat. How tough are the kerbalnaught's suits? Could you get into orbit in a gnat and then come back down or would reentry cause you to loose the pilot (and if so do you have remote control so that the craft is recoverable by itself)?
I mean it sounds like you got him back down, but that sounds like some wonky physics.
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Really though.
AFAIK the only way to kill a kerbal is by impact
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Kerbals are cartoons.
The makers of the game added that "external control seat" on purpose. (Although I guess the intended use is rovers, not Mach-5 jets...)
AFAIK the only way to kill a kerbal is by impact
You can dump one into Jool. They don't really "die" technically, but they become spaghettified monstrosities. And there's no way to get them back out. (Possibly same with Kerbol, but I've never tried that.)
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Good to know, but I just replaced a 7600GT card. Not exactly the speediest thing around. A modern i-series on chip GPU would probably trounce it.
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My wife will not be happy with blakeyrat. I feel like I can get in to this game and she has already told me that if I get any more hobbies she will boot me out. When I brought up learning to be a pilot a while back, she just gave me "the look".
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@Intercourse said:
When I brought up learning to be a pilot a while back, she just gave me "the look".
Just don't try to combine those two.
Especially that Blakey's Gnat thingy...
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Good call!
I would be happy with a used single engine plane to start, but I want a good twin turboprop eventually.
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The Gnat... The Bumblebee... The Spectre...
Seems like we're all making series of craft these days!
I'm assuming the 48-7S is due for a nerfing because DAMN.
Oh, it's about as broken as the LV-N and the KR-2L, just in different ways. I would be okay with a tiny nerf as long as they upped the TWR on some of the other engines to compensate.
@Intercourse said:
I think I am going to have to give this game a try, it looks like my kind of fun. Good thing I just got a nifty new video card.
That could help, but the main bottleneck in KSP is its godawful single-threaded ancient physics engine. The next machine I build (one of these days) is going to have a high clock CPU just to address that silliness.
Not many people have travelled that fast without an enclosure and lived to tell the tale--a U2 pilot did, though, when his plane broke up around him at 70+ thousand feet.
For some reason, people like chairs, probably because it saves around a ton of mass. I think they're silly on flying craft unless it's for an Eve ascent or a Jool ascent, and even then...
You can dump one into Jool. They don't really "die" technically, but they become spaghettified monstrosities. And there's no way to get them back out. (Possibly same with Kerbol, but I've never tried that.)
I miss the days when one could land on Jool instead of falling into a nearplane-clipped black abyss.
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That could help, but the main bottleneck in KSP is its godawful single-threaded ancient physics engine. The next machine I build (one of these days) is going to have a high clock CPU just to address that silliness.
4ghz AMD 8-core. I should be good there.
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Reentry effects are visual fluff....
unless you install deadly reentry, then reentry heat is a real issue and Kerbals will go splat from gforces and reentry
so will your rocket ships and space planes.
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As far as I'm concerned Deadly Reentry should be called One Way Trip.
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it does mean you have to be a lot more careful about how you come home...
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At twice the speed of sound, Orbas has become slightly more concerned about this whole arrangement.
All I had to was describe this to my kids and they laughed hysterically.
thank you! we are not worthy!
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I LLOLed loudly enough to make my wife wince.
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Following the demise of Pathat, the rebuilt Thunderbird 2B airframe (now with exclusive Even More Safety® technology), now captained by Chief Test Pilot Bobgar was dispatched on an additional mission - to deploy three small, experimental commsats (intended to give the Thunderbird mobile mission control center planetary-scale reach) into Kerbin orbit.
Some manner of error was made at some point during ascent (analysis does not reveal any single point of failure) and the flight ended up not having enough Delta-V to achieve orbit once it cleared the atmosphere. The decision was made to abort. However, due to an absence of useful abort airfields on Kerbin (this is a HUGE oversight) and the high velocities already achieved, a return to the KSC runway would not be possible the decision to abort to "anywhere that isn't water" was made.
Miraculously, the craft made a controlled reentry - though all remaining fuel had to be pumped forward with great haste when she threatened to tumble.
The search for a safe landing site commenced.
At first the most promising area appeared to be a bowl-like depression over a ridgeline near some small mountains.
However, it quickly became apparent that there wasn't enough fuel to reach that area.
After a quick turn southward, Bobgar was able to locate a promising looking plain.
However, worries about controllability with so little fuel left in the forward tank led to the use of a very shallow approach angle, with relatively high throttle requriements.
This led to the inevitable no-fuel flameout at about 1800m. The steepest dive Bobgar was willing to commit to was not enough to keep speeds up.
As the airframe began to plummet once altitude passed 1000m, Bobgar reached for the conveniently placed yellow handle labeled "OHFUCKMEGODDAMMIT" and pulled.
The craft's parachute distribution proved to still be somewhat suboptimal, and therefore it descended in an anomalous tail-first manner. However, it did stay together, which is a plus.
A quick thinking and highly environmentally conscious Bobgar (as well as conscious of the fact that damaged equipment comes out of his salary - Pathat's widow will be indebted to the Kerbal state for the remainder of her natural life), wanting to save the wildlife of the area he was parachuting into from radioactive doom should his LV-N powerplants be damaged, engaged the RCS systems and attempted to force the craft to a less steep angle.
Unfortunately.....
He was almost entirely successful. Thunderbird 2B touched down in an open field miles from any civilization.
Rescuers took this photo of Bobgar posing proudly on the tail of his craft .
Aside from some superficial scraping, the only damage to the airframe was the complete destruction of the centerline Turbojet. In thanks for Bobgar's quick thinking to save the payload from almost certain destruction:
he will only be charged 25% of the replacement cost of the engine.The Thunderbird airframe clearly weighs too much to achieve orbit reliably with only its onboard mass and onboard fuel.
Kerbal Skunkwerks engineers are laboring all day and all night to solve this problem.
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Bobgar: Uh. Guys. What are you doing?
Skunkwerks Engineer: This really cool guy named @blakeyrat came by and said "Biplanes are kewl". We didn't know what "kewl" meant, so we decided to try it out.
Bobgar: Kewl means "Spaceplane fucking a Saturn V?"
Jeb: I am so hard right now.
Bill: I'm pretty sure those jet engines will run in space!
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Parachutes are nice for precision landings, but all the extra parachute mass becomes quite a drag, so I've stopped using them in lieu of VTOL.
I will be most impressed if you can get that 300 ton monstrosity into orbit AND maintain a decent FPS all the way up.
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Let me put it to you this way: I loaded it into game without landing gear. Being dropped from two feet up was enough to lag the game into oblivion (nevermind what happened when the explosions started. Did you know you can destroy the RUNWAY?)
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Thats a new feature.
It is bloody annoyin in career mode where you have to pay to fix it.
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It's Tylo time. First order of business is to get our lander a bit more fuel before its descent because every bit counts (and because previous attempts to land said lander might have, shall we say, been slightly faster than desirable).
Here's our lander. That's three stages, one Poodle stage for landing, one Poodle stage for ascent, and one more to get back home.
I decided to land on the dark side for fun. I cut the periapsis a bit lower than in the picture, to about 15km
This is flying horizontally at 350m/s, in the dark, only a few hundred meters above the ground. While somewhat scary, as long as I keep my vertical in the 5-10 range, it's not too hard to recover.
Phew. Killed horizontal velocity, now it's time for final descent.
This is a pretty good executive summary.
This was too close. The next two stages can most certainly make orbit, but there are no landing legs on them, so descent in one stage was mandatory. I think future missions should budget about 4km/s each for landing and takeoff stages just to be safe.
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Yeah, that design is not going to space (it's WAY under-engined, but too damned laggy to do anything with)
Pieces flew a long way.
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(nevermind what happened when the explosions started. Did you know you can destroy the RUNWAY?)
You can in the latest patch. Also, the rocket launch pad. It's more annoying than anything, especially since 90% of the times it happens, it's due to physics bugs and not anything you did.
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Aw man. Reinstalling Steam also deleted my KSP save. I should have anticipated that...
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Ok I started a new game in Sandbox mode, so no flags.
But I rebuilt the Gnat:
CHALLENGE MODE:
Build a craft to get a single Kerbalnaut into a stable 90k orbit using 160 units of fuel OR LESS.
Otherwise, I unilaterally declare my Gnat as the most fuel-efficient Kerbalnaut-to-orbit vehicle ever.
EDIT: new goal, after revisions I got it down to 140 units of fuel:
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And look at how easy it is to land!
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Well, that's what I get for deleting the parachutes.
Seriously, though, it doesn't have nearly enough wing surface to land at anything resembling a "shallow angle". Sadly.
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Kinda diggin' just playing Kerbal as a shitty flight sim at the moment:
But Squad really needs to add more runways.
EDIT: BTW, at full-throttle, this baby can fly straight-and-level at 30k at 1900m/s. Before touching the rockets.
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Experiments in Jetocketry:
She ain't gonna work:
Needz more engines!
It has some control issues:
Nah, not gonna be any fuel savings with this approach. Gnat's still winning.
It makes a nice hexagon of ejected engines, though:
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Experiments in locomotion - The Leanmobile:
Well that didn't work, but it gave me an idea...
This one will surely work:
Yeaaaaaah, 15 m/s suckas!
It's almost kind of navigable a bit, I got it to the runway:
But then one of the "feet" broke off and it got stuck flat on the ground:
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But then one of the "feet" broke off and it got stuck flat on the ground:
Oh dear, he's so sick, he's begun hallucinating.
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Hey this is a successful line of scientific inquiry. Look at this perfected version:
ENTIRELY SAS POWERED!
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Remote Power Relay #1 pumping out 1.21 jiggawa... oh wait 5.2 Gigawatts of power~!
i shall meed to add more and better reactors and bet ridiculous amounts of power!
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And the rocket needed to get that sucker into an 80x80 orbit: it needed a separate pusher stage to lift it to a 4000k orbit.
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Which mod covers the radiators and such?
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several of them. the one i'm using is Interstellar mod:
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Launching the second space power station.....
this time with more struts!
easy does it on the gravity turn.....
in orbit. now to boost to 4000k
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Launching some power relays to make sure power can get wherever i need it.
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now that my relays are in place allow me to show you the power of beamed power!
I will take this tiny ship to SPAAAAAAACE using nothing but beamed power!!
AND WE'RE OFF! Look how low the throttle is on this guy!
we're getting some shock heating on the way to space!
9 minutes mission time: 300x300 orbit, started with 720 units of liquid fuel, ended with 24.42 units. BOOYEAH!
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BTW, at full-throttle, this baby can fly straight-and-level at 30k at 1900m/s. Before touching the rockets.
I find it's much easier to do that with light, single-engined craft than with anything larger. Probably drag or something.
Speaking of drag, Godzilla @ 65.3 tons. Almost three shock cones per engine, plus some nacelles/radial bodies/intakes.
65 tons is enough to warrant a Skipper for VTOL (which is a hell of a lot fewer parts than an array of 48-7Ses).
Air starts to be a problem around 36km, fortunately, we have multiple action groups for the jet engines to toggle them in pairs.
Still going at 45km on the last engine.
And 4.2km/s at orbit. Another keeper.
Now let's test landing...
We have visual on our target...
This glides pretty well when not entirely full.
Pitching up lets the VTOL engine kill horizontal AND vertical velocity!
Touchdown.
Meanwhile, Rodan and a fuel tanker have made it out to Laythe...
I'm debating making an even BIGGER plane, but Godzilla is over 200 parts and my FPS starts to get choppy after not much more...
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Nice! Loving it.
