๐ The Kerbal Thread - Share Your Kerbal Creations
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From your screenshots you still had a lot of lateral velocity, that's why you crashed. Your first picture is actually a much better landing trajectory than the last one.
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The rule of thumb I go by is when you hit 20,000m, retro-burn to about 100 m/s. When you hit about 8,000m, retro-burn to about 20 m/s. When your navball hits "surface" mode (which BTW frequently doesn't happen on Minmus at all), cancel all non-vertical motion. When you see the ship's shadow, slow to about 10-15m/s, from there you just pay attention to the visual and manage the throttle as best you can.
EDIT: if your ship is overpowered such that it's hard to maintain a specific descent rate, you can set a thrust limiter on your engine(s), which gives your throttle "higher resolution". If your ship is underpowered so that slowing from 600m/s to 100m/s or so takes more than about 5000m of altitude, well, you're kind of screwed. You can make it work but you're gonna burn a lot more fuel.
EDIT: Oh also note that the visual on tiny motors at low throttle shows them "puffing" at intervals (basically switching on/off) but the thrust provided to the physics engine is constant. (Similarly, turbojets below about 10% throttle appear visually off, but are still providing thrust.) The visuals in Kerbal don't always match what the physics engine sees.
Kerbal has a quirk where the shadow switches from low-detail mode to high-detail mode, it disappears then fades back in. Just FYI, don't panic if your shadow disappears and it looks like you're still 200 meters away, that's normal.
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Your first picture is actually a much better landing trajectory than the last one.
Yeah, I forgot about the whole "no atmosphere" thing for a moment. And yeah, that vertical path would probably be better, but I was doing the tutorial and wanted to go for orbit. Also, I'm assuming that I'll have to in the future anyway due to fuel constraints, so better learn the proper procedure.
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Delta-v is delta-v. Doesn't matter what your landing trajectory is, you're going to pretty much need the same amount of fuel unless you're doing something really weird. So opt for whatever method seems easiest, along with what gets you to your location if you have specific landing sites in mind.
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Can you even land this thing "properly"? I don't care, survivors, I'm busting out the cigars and whisky!
http://i.imgur.com/6COdNqb.jpg
And then it caught my Shift key as I was trying to open the overlay and exploded...
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Is that from the tutorial? I'll give it a go. I assume the game wouldn't lie to you, but a quick eyeball shows it might be questionable in a lot of ways.
EDIT: is that one of the To The Mun tutorial missions, or the Mun scenario?
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Is that from the tutorial? I'll give it a go. I assume the game wouldn't lie to you, but a quick eyeball shows it might be questionable in a lot of ways.
Yes, but the goal is just to get into the transfer orbit and then into orbit around Mun. It says you can give landing a go but it's not required. I just wanted to do it for fun.
The actual landing tutorial is missing. As I said, no idea if it's just missing in the demo or not in the game.
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The actual landing tutorial is missing. As I said, no idea if it's just missing in the demo or not in the game.
It's actually missing. The full game gives you "To The Mun Part 1" which is what you did, and ends with "Try to land if you want but we'll show you how in the next tutorial." Then there's "To The Mun Part 2" which starts with you landed on the Mun and has you returning to Kerbin. It seems they're missing a "To The Mun Part 1.5".
Also reminds me of my CCNA courses in college. Naturally all the missing stuff was on the actual certification exam...
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It's actually a pretty damned good simulation of an Apollo moon lander in Kerbal. Looking at it, I think that lander's fine. Probably way overpowered though.
EDIT: actually the funny thing is their command module is actually the part that's under-powered. In real life, they'd waste tons of CM fuel to get the LEM to an ideal position, because the CM had tons of fuel to waste. With this Kerbal build, I'd be lucky to get it back to Kerbin after a Mun landing.
ANOTHER EDIT: their staging on the LEM is wrong; if you aren't careful to activate the right motors (if you just hit Space), you could easily burn your ascent fuel on landing. I wonder how many newbies get bit by that.
A THIRD EDIT OH MY GOD: yeah it's got at least twice the fuel it needs to land and take off again. Which is good, since you need to save a bunch for the CM to get back home, haha:
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Sadly, that is missing from the demo as well. I'll have to go shell out some money it seems...
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Struts can be used between stages and break when you activate the new stage! This changes EVERYTHING!
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Yeah, fuel hoses too. FYI.
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And I totally botched my first Duna intercept because I can't read. I thought my closest approach was 150,000 meters, definitely close enough to capture. But it was 150,000 km instead.
And the atomic thruster officially sucks. 9 minute burns for interplanetary travel? No thank you.
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The Duna mission was a complete failure. Made it there, did some science, forgot to equip antennas and couldn't transmit any of it. Made it most of the way back to Kerbin, then I wasn't paying attention during the 30-minute orbital insertion burn (5,000 m/s!!! WTF did I do wrong?) and the atomic engine exploded.
Jebediah dies again. He already splatted into the Mun. I'm really unsure how he ended up on the Duna mission too, I launched and he was aboard...?
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Jebediah dies again. He already splatted into the Mun. I'm really unsure how he ended up on the Duna mission too, I launched and he was aboard...?
IIRC the default 3 respawn periodically by default.
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And the atomic thruster officially sucks. 9 minute burns for interplanetary travel? No thank you.
You'll note I always use like 16 of them. I think the absolute minimum I've used is 6.
Even then you easily can get 12-15 minute burns to Eelou or Moho. You can't beat the fuel economy. Just make sure you have enough SAS so you can go make a sandwich or something and not have to babysit the burn.
Jebediah dies again. He already splatted into the Mun. I'm really unsure how he ended up on the Duna mission too, I launched and he was aboard...?
What mode are you playing? Jeb resurrects in the sandbox modes, definitely. I assume he doesn't on career, but who knows.
Like I said like 200 posts ago, Kerbals are cartoons. Dafft Duck doesn't die when he gets shot, he just turns black and makes a funny face.
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I assume he doesn't on career, but who knows.
Easy/normal have them respawn by default as well. above normal that's turned off or you can turn it off in custom.
it's off in my custom game now (50% everything and no quicksave/load/respawn) and i've only cheated once. i force respawned Bob wehn he crashed into the VAB and died at an altitude of 30km. obviously a glitch loading the collision mesh.
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I'm on career mode, and I didn't realize there were difficulty levels.
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It has a big ugly dialog when you start a game, it's probably in there somewhere. No, I didn't read it either.
Kerbal BADLY needs a UI designer.
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I'm on career mode, and I didn't realize there were difficulty levels.
it's easy to miss. i usually play science mode so i don't have to worry about cash, but i've been doing more and more of career mode.
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And the atomic thruster officially sucks. 9 minute burns for interplanetary travel? No thank you.
4x physics warp makes that about two and a half minutes.
If you think that's bad, just wait until you try ion thrusters. They have MUCH longer burn times (given their pathetic TWR) and each thruster requires a single Gigantor XL solar array to meet its power requirements.
Yep, I don't use ion thrusters.
Easy/normal have them respawn by default as well. above normal that's turned off or you can turn it off in custom.
it's off in my custom game now (50% everything and no quicksave/load/respawn) and i've only cheated once. i force respawned Bob wehn he crashed into the VAB and died at an altitude of 30km. obviously a glitch loading the collision mesh.
My current save is Moderate difficulty, because I'm not going to give up revert and quickload when any number of timewarp/physics bugs can cause my craft to disappear. It's especially frustrating when you have 3 or 4 simultaneous missions to a planet and then one of them blackscreens.
it's easy to miss. i usually play science mode so i don't have to worry about cash, but i've been doing more and more of career mode.
I'm starting to agree with @blakeyrat that career mode is tedious. It's more challenging at the start, but once enough of the tech tree is unlocked and you have several permanent orbital stations, it's pretty easy to get money and the challenge of managing your finances becomes nonexistent.
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Physics warp isn't available if you have thrusters firing.
I did try the ion engine, I'm not sure what the point was. I tried to use it as the final burn stage to put a tiny probe in low Kerbin orbit and it couldn't even manage that given the time constraint, and it crashed and burned. Granted that was only a single ion engine, maybe if I had a ton I could do something interesting with them.
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Physics warp isn't available if you have thrusters firing.
Normal timewarp isn't. Physics warp is.
Timewarp doesn't run any physics code, so it can't handle things like firing motors. Physics warp can in theory but in reality it's likely to tear your ship apart if it's even slightly complicated, so I avoid it.
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I had no idea there were two ways to warp. Which one is , and . and how do you do the other one then?
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I think it's still just , and ., isn't it? I dunno; I never use the feature, I've had it blow-up too many ships. I just go make a sandwich.
EDIT: http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Time_warp
According to the wiki, you hold a modifier while hitting , or .
I think "mod" is Alt on Windows.
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Just did a couple of 20 minute Jool burns. At that point, multiple passes are necessary.
Started the second burn a little late here, but you can't go too early or else your trajectory may intersect the planet.
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Remotech is hard.
Or, actually, my lame-brained idea of putting up a bunch of uber CommSats that will cover the entire system first was a stupid idea. Mostly because the CommSats needed to go up in pieces and be docked together (massive amounts of solar power required).
Didn't even think about the fact that I only had a 23 degree arc of orbit in which I could actually control the thing. Of course, my rendevous occured on the opposite side of the planet.
Baby steps. I think I'll put up a small local network first, then try to play with the big boys.
First though, have to get the game stable. Running in OpenGL really reduced the RAM use (almost a gig and a half lower), but FPS went to... 8. Need to figure out which Mod I have installed is causing the excessive texture load. I think it's KW Rocketry.
No epic pics from me!
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Dafft Duck doesn't die when he gets shot, he just turns black and makes a funny face.
Racist!
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QFT
it's extremely hard, but also well worth the effort (so sayeth @accalia)
Yeah, I'm really liking it's 'Flight Computer' feature, where you can plot a maneuver node to occur when the craft is out of communication (say, the far side of the moon), then tell it to automatically perform that maneuver.
It's a bit nail biting to see if it does it correctly and if things go as planned.
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also, wit until you build a satellite constellation out around kerbostationary orbit (about 2.9Mm)
Unless you want their orbits to drift you need to precisely allign their semi major axis, otherwise the satellites will precess in their orbits over time and you will eventually end up with all of then on one side of the planet.
How precise do you have to be to properly align SMA? less than 1m variation, in order for the constellation to last about 10 kerbal years (includes time while under time warp) before noticable precession occurs, and about 90 kerbal years before it progresses to the point you have blindspots.
unfortunately the stock game doesn't give you your SMA directly, you need to use a mod (kerbal engineer is good) or calculate it yourself from apoapsis/periapsis.
and the worst thing about that? switching to the vessel (to add solar panels or something) changes the SMA! not much, but it doesn't have to be much...
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so i needed some kinetic impactors delivered to the mun for science.... because i carelessly forgot to fit antennas onto the various things already in orbit...
This should give me some nice impact data...
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Mission control wants another Tylo flagging. I want a permanent base.
No fear with 4x physics warp because I have struts (although I do put it back to 1x during staging)!
These two remaining stages need to get to Tylo AND land on it. Takeoff is not a requirement this time (and I'm not sure a single-stage landing and takeoff craft is possible on Tylo, unless someone can cram > 7km/s into a single stage while maintaining at least 0.8 TWR).
Decent amount of fuel left in orbit. Let's see how well it does.
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Time for some close calls. I'd forgotten that my Eeloo lander didn't have chutes or a TWR > 1.0, so I figured I'd start the burn early to shed enough weight to see if I could get near 1.0 before touchdown. That didn't work out so well...
Touchdown velocity was around 50 m/s. MIRACULOUSLY, this happened. While the first fuel tank and landing gear couldn't stand the impact, the girder could and spared the rest of the craft. I am okay with this.
Meanwhile, my Tylo roverbase needs landing. It's got almost 5km/s in the stage, which should be more than enough to land, so I thought, eh, let's do the deorbit burn high (~40km). What could go wrong?
It's amusing to place a deorbit node for Tylo and have it be almost as big as a Kerbin->Jool transfer.
I'm beginning to regret not having a radar altimeter on this craft.
Fortunately, there's the "wait until you see your lights or shadow on the ground" method. Almost down, but we're very low on fuel...
Then the fuel ran out, and it dropped the last ~20m or so. Broke the wheels, but everything else survived. The wheels can be fixed, anyhow.
Note to self: do not start a Tylo deorbit burn high.
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Holy smokes I made a plane that flies!!!
Time to fly somewhere, land, and do soil samples for science.
Added more fuel and some sciency-stuff, going to go land at Kerbin's north pole for fun. It's easy to fly, point it, enable SAS, and cruise the web while it goes.
Mission successful! Even did a proper landing and didn't need to use the parachutes. Only 7/190 units of liquid fuel left too.
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Mission successful! Even did a proper landing and didn't need to use the parachutes. Only 7/190 units of liquid fuel left too.
I've stopped using parachutes on planes because the parachute mass needed to make a smooth < 10m/s touchdown is a big penalty where every ton counts. Although, you can pull off precision landings with them.
The cost of changing an equatorial orbit to polar is pretty steep, so why not have a fuel depot at each pole?
Then get one of these...
And one of these...
And join them all together!
Docking this way is tricky because your steering has to be precise, but it gets easier to line up with practice:
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And here's my first spaceplane, it made it to orbit pretty much entirely on the turbojet engine. I needed the liquid fuel engines only for the final 200 m/s or so.
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I decided to try FAR. As much as I've heard about how drag kills asparagus staging, it let me get away with this:
The delta-V requirements seem to be a lot lower with FAR, so I decided to do a Mรผn landing with the second stage's fuel.
On re-entry, the craft kept pointing prograde, even after I turned it around. Maybe it's the path of least resistance?
Then this disassembly happened... But that's okay.
Now let's see how well it works with spaceplanes! Testing the ol' Megalon...
Identifying the root cause... usually that number's around 110 at sea level. The mod must have tweaked with turbojet performance numbers...
Well crap. That entails having twice as much engine mass, and is going to hamstring all my nuclear spaceplane designs. UNINSTALL TIME.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUOlH2qK4oE
I love the total "SQUIRREL!" moment in that video....
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Finally broke down and tried the KSP demo -- and managed to brute-force my way into a [s]low-ish Kerbin orbit[/s]not-quite-Kerbin-orbit after running through the tutorials and having a previous suborbital flight land fine, but then fail because I had somehow managed to block the capsule escape hatch with a RCS thruster -- which then proceeded to be welded to the escape hatch in such a way that I couldn't get it off in the VAB.
After a redesign, I got this (basically):
which managed to get into a not-quite-orbit (the periapsis was too low):
and then proceeded to land safely on Kerbin, despite a slightly premature jettisoning of the final engine stage:
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With the same rocket as last time, but better throttle management and a better gravity turn:
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You can carry a lot more fuel in your lower stage. LV-T30's and T45's can each lift three FL-T800 tanks. Adding boosters increases that amount.
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You can carry a lot more fuel in your lower stage. LV-T30's and T45's can each lift three FL-T800 tanks. Adding boosters increases that amount.
Yeah, fuel plumbing and staging are on my TODO still. I'm just trying to get basic orbital flight going at the moment -- my first one went fine until Jeb prematurely ejected from the command module, and my second orbital flight left Jeb stranded in solar orbit; the third is going quite nicely though...
And -- successful splashdown!
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I really ought to start capturing shots of some of my flights. I think I'll rescue that one occupied pod I have stranded in orbit first, though. I forgot to keep an eye on my fuel consumption.
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Hey new parts. Here they are smeared across a runway:
Also they improved the construction UI quite a bit, which is nice.
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Barely flying space shuttle:
Finding the new Mark 3 aircraft fuselage parts hard to build around. Those cargo bay doors in particular, ugh.
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Stubbs the Spaceship:
EDIT: Stubbs v.2:
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I'd really like to see 2.5m intakes and jet engines before jumping into the Mk3 parts. That's a lot of mass to push around on so many smaller engines, and managing air becomes a pain.
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What was really pissing me off is those 180 degree opening doors meaning you have to put all your wing mass at the bottom (or the doors clip through them), and due to Kerbal's physics you need a lot of wing for these parts.
The tiny stubby plane is the most successful Mark 3 plane I've built so far.
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January 2, 2015 19:22 EST
About High Noon Kerbin STIJIJ-Family Cosmonautics regrets to announce the catastrophic explosion of it's largest-ever space vehicle, the Spider-2.
The resulting shock wave launched Hero of the People Bill Kerman out of Kerbal's atmosphere and towards Kerbal's mighty Sun.
Kerman had managed to evacuate from his capsule just after the initial detonation and was sent into space unprotected, save for his space suit.
After ten Kerbal-days, the posthumously promoted Gen. Kerman was finally lost to the IFC Tracking Facility, having reached a velocity of over 30 Mm/sec.
Hero of the People Gen. Bill Kerman
RIP
2015-2015
if I'm not mistaken that's about .1c
yea, I know people are blowing up all the time, but no one's mentioned actually ejecting a Kerbalnaut into space!
Two new computers for Christmas and I still can't get my hands on one. I have gotten as far as flying Kerbel-1...
