π The Kerbal Thread - Share Your Kerbal Creations
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The only way to make long-range ships now is to use aircraft fuselages, because of the lack of any rocket tubes with only liquid fuel. Dumb.
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Still not fixed? I've been abstaining from KSP until it is.
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Well there was a patch a couple days ago, to be honest, I didn't spend much time in the parts selection. (I doubt they've fixed it though because have liquid-only rocket fuselages would have added a LOT of parts and I didn't see many new ones.)
That pictured ship BTW, with it's approx. 14,000 units of fuel, went to Duna, landed, went to Ike, landed, returned to Kerbin with no problems. So you can still make pretty long-range missions. The rockets just look doofy because you have no choice but to use that Mk3 Shuttle Fuselage.
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I think I'm getting the hang of post-1.0 spaceplanes. They just require following some new guidelines:
- Use rapiers. Turbojets peak in thrust too soon, their service ceiling is much lower, and rockets are mandatory for the push out of atmosphere.
- Use 1 rapier per 10 tons of craft mass and 1.5 ram intakes per rapier.
- At a minimum, have at least 90/110 liquid fuel/ox per rapier, if you're using LV-Ns to circularize. Ideally you'll want 1.5 or 2x that amount. Having more makes the orbital insertion burn easier at the expense of mass fraction.
- Avoid unshielded parts with a max temperature less than 2000Β°.
- Try not to make your craft too wide, as the drag equation is (now, properly) based on area.
And as for the ascent profile:
- Point up 45 degrees until about 8-10km
- Gradually flatten out, you'll want to be going at least 600m/s by 15km. Don't go too fast at this stage or you will blow up.
- Around 20km, you should be going at least 1100-1200m/s and almost completely flat. If you have nuclear engines (like I do), activate them now to supplement the dwindling thrust from your rapiers.
- Once you hit at least 1300m/s and are at least 25-27km up, switch rapiers to closed cycle and point up 45 degrees, with your nuclear engines still running. Burn the rapiers until all oxidizer is used up, or the desired apoapsis is achieved. If you're using nukes to circularize, you'll want to be around 1600-1800m/s when you run out of oxidizer.
Most of my rapier/nuclear designs end up with 1500-2000m/s in orbit, which is far from the 4km/s possible in 0.90, but still useful if refueled from an ISRU station at Minmus.
And with 3700m/s at full tank, Jeb and Val are going to Laythe.
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Awesome, thanks for the tips.
Why do you have like 8 drills glommed onto your fueling station?
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It mines Minmus to refill itself.
Admittedly, eight might have been excessive.
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Are the black ore tanks optional? Or is yours hidden on the far side?
EDIT: also why is it manned? Goddamned, who'd want that job.
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Goddamned, who'd want that job.
Someone who really wants to get away from (nearly) it all.
People used to[1] want to man lighthouses and places like that hotel in The Shining.
[1] and still do...although admittedly this is a bit different.
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Are the black ore tanks optional? Or is yours hidden on the far side?
I'm not sure if they're optional, I always have at least one, even if it's the small one to save mass fraction. Here's a closer view of the craft - they're hidden behind one set of drills.
why is it manned? Goddamned, who'd want that job.
Mission contract. Needed to support 5 kerbals, although it's got remote control, of course. It's always best to have someone else pay for your projects.
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Ah yeah, I just couldn't see it from that camera angle.
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Interesting. According to the changelog, jet engines got nerfed EVEN MORE, but at the same time, they seem to have improved the heating model so that it's slightly more forgiving and gave us radiators to deal with it. I'm going to have to experiment some more.
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Tried to build a Gnat based on your rules, got this result:
Not too shabby for a first attempt. Obviously way too much fuel and way too little oxidizer.
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You might be able to fly lower longer. The game lets me get away with this now:
In 1.0.2, this craft would have exploded, and the thrust from airbreathing rapiers would have been insufficient to get to Mach 5 at this altitude.
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I'm back at the Kerbal thang. Doing a full on career with plenty of mods. To date, KerbX has buttered it's bread primarily on suborbital tourism with major sidelines in low atmosphere scientific observations (with instruments mounted on a particularly neat airframe inspired by early fighter jets) and parts testing (high atmosphere work hitches a ride on a tourist bird, low atmosphere gets carried on the jet).
Last night we broke out into orbital flight and tourism. This bird technically has enough delta v to make it to minmus, but I'm still working out the ascent profile (it's currently hypersonic from 2000m to 40000m and so wasting a lot of energy. There's barely enough fuel to circularize and burn for deorbit as is).
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I leave litter parked around the space center for eyecandy sometimes:
Yes, my bog standard jets have parachutes. They are landable, but it's kinda sketchy because they sit so low to the ground.
This is my primary commercial launch vehicle:
Pictured with a generic science payload. It has a metric fuckton of monopropellant, which has come in handy for some pretty radical delta-v changes after burnout.On one notable occasion, with an exceptionally heavy payload, I fell 600m/s short of orbit. I had an upper stage engine on hand, but didn't want to trigger it because I was being paid to test fire it on orbit, which the lawyers said I had not achieved.
So I burned RCS. To finish achieving orbit.
It's a good thing I had that engine on hand, because I didn't have enough RCS left to deorbit, and a rescue mission for that large a pax load would have sucked.
Here she is in early ascent, just after SRB burnout:
(I need to remove the chutes from my first set of SRBs, they just burn)
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This will be a suborbital jaunt to hit a few dumb contracts, so fuck the fuel reserves.
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While I was firing ze missile to carry out a contract, I apparently fucked my staging up and dumped my service module and booster. Fuck.
So now Jeb is on a dramatically steep reentry (I hadn't raised periapsis to change that, yet)
It's not the least-survivable reentry I've done (Hit the VAB from 150km earlier in this career - so dead vertical) but it'll be rough.At least I don't have any passengers, painful experience says that if this thing tumbles on a bad reentry, it'll ablate the passenger module, but the command module tends to survive.
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Reentry was fine, but too fucking short. Chutes deployed UNDER **100m**.
Jeb looks like he needs some new pants.
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Warning: Prolonged use of the A-2 Bizjet may result in unexplained redness and swelling:
I have flown a quarter of the way around the damned planet chasing these waypoints... And this plane isn't equipped to ditch in the sea safely. Getting to somewhere I can land is going to be booooring.
OMFG. THE NEXT (and presumably last) WAYPOINT IS 200 KM AWAY.
In the exact opposite direction of the nearest land.
THIS CONTRACT IS EVIL.
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Here she is in early ascent, just after SRB burnout:
(I need to remove the chutes from my first set of SRBs, they just burn)You need to stagger your engines into multiple stages. When you are getting burn like that on ascent, you're just wasting delta-v.
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Later iterations had all the SRBs burn slower for the full duration. Staging them is probably ultimately more efficient, however.
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Last night we broke out into orbital flight and tourism. This bird technically has enough delta v to make it to minmus, but I'm still working out the ascent profile (it's currently hypersonic from 2000m to 40000m and so wasting a lot of energy. There's barely enough fuel to circularize and burn for deorbit as is).
SSTO's have gotten harder since 1.0+. I have a few in the works that I'll get back to working on once I'm done with this current Fallout 4 break. I seem to remember maxing out at like 1500-1800m/s in orbit using LV-N's once the rapiers die out.
Yes, my bog standard jets have parachutes. They are landable, but it's kinda sketchy because they sit so low to the ground.
That's really handy for precision landings. I stopped using them on my SSTO's to save precious mass fraction, but for atmospheric-only craft, chutes are probably the better solution. If you have the chutes bound to an action group, you can land on top of the hangar or the helipad if your timing is good enough.
So I burned RCS. To finish achieving orbit.
I've seen some builds on the KSP forums that use this as a primary strategy.
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You need to stagger your engines into multiple stages. When you are getting burn like that on ascent, you're just wasting delta-v.
I think I'm normally only going about half that speed with rockets at that altitude. The tricky part is not tipping them over during the gravity turn.
