In Progress Let's go to the Moon and do the other things (Kerbal Space)

[Ulminati]

You must be a female driver then. I uploaded the eclipse to the ksp forums spacecraft exchange and dozens of people praised it for being reliable and easy to fly.

 

[tindrli]

Burning Bridges

Well, I've managed to get my 40-ton lifter down from 409 to 370 tons total.

The idea is basically to build from the final stage and backwards. Making sure that every stage is able to provide enough deltaV for what it's intended for. Incidentially, there's a nice delta-v budget map here:

Spoiler

 

[Hellraiser]

How many FPS are you getting when trying to fly that? Maybe the rocket is too laggy on your PC and the physics bug out or the ASAS can't keep up?

 

[Ulminati]

If the mainsail is exploding, there is a good chance he left it on max throttle until it overheated.

That's a known feature of the mainsail. The ship should also be rigid enough to fly with SAS off. I've done so a couple of times.

 

[GarfunkeL]

How realistic is KSP now? I remember trying it out when getting to low-Kerbal-orbit was the only thing you could do and you had about a dozen parts.

 

[Burning Bridges]

It's true, I launched on full throttle, which the big engine can't do, my bad. It's an engine which I never use.

For me LVT-30 engines are showing more promise.

 

[Burning Bridges]

How realistic is KSP now? I remember trying it out when getting to low-Kerbal-orbit was the only thing you could do and you had about a dozen parts.

For me it's an exercise in frustration. Many new features / planets have made it more addictive than ever, but the problems were not solved, lag has become terrible, it crashes frequently when you go to the launch pad, and most of the time I'm just battling with the vehicle assembly. For some of it, Unity may be to blame, but imo several parts should be rewritten from scratch.

 

[Ulminati]

It's true, I launched on full throttle, which the big engine can't do, my bad. It's an engine which I never use.

For me LVT-30 engines are showing more promise.

For me it's an exercise in frustration. Many new features / planets have made it more addictive than ever, but the problems were not solved, lag has become terrible, it crashes frequently when you go to the launch pad, and most of the time I'm just battling with the vehicle assembly. For some of it, Unity may be to blame, but imo several parts should be rewritten from scratch.

A mainsail will give you better TWR than your 4-coupled LV30s. Also, it's 1 part instead of the 11 I count on your screenshot. Just switching the engine assemblies for mainsails would save you 70 parts, which should help with your lag.

Also, 18.4 is out, which uses unity 4. That'll allow it to start using multiple cores and has helped a bit with lag on large constructions.

As for the eclipse, give it 100% throttle at launch, then once the overheat bar is at 50 percent, nudge the throttle down ever so slightly until the temperature stops increasing. You should be able to run it at 95% throttle no problem. You could always slap a mechjeb on it and make some tea while it parks you in orbit.

 

[Hellraiser]

How realistic is KSP now? I remember trying it out when getting to low-Kerbal-orbit was the only thing you could do and you had about a dozen parts.

You have a solar system with 5 planets+2 dwarf ones (roughly analogues of our solar system planets but with some differences)+a bunch of moons around half of them including the Mun (like Luna) and Minmus (captured comet or something) around Kerbin. There's docking and spacecraft persistence (so you can meet up landers on the ground) along with orbital fuel transfer, I have like 40+ spacecraft on my main save file orbiting or landed at various places around the system. There's a ton of stock parts now, from batteries through lander legs, probe parts, scientific sensor and solar panels to NTR engines, RTGs, Ion Engines. You can make space planes (there are wings, jets, ailerons, intakes, landing gear and so on).

Next update is supposed to add resource extraction from the soil/ice, oceans and atmosphere of various bodies, stock rover parts, re-entry heat and probably a ton of new surface base/space station parts.

For realism though it's fairly decent though it's no orbiter. Orbital mechanics are based on patched conic approximation so there are no Lagrange points and stable "capture" trajectories are impossible. Planet sizes and orbits are to a 1/11th scale, gravity is unchanged though (but the R^2 of the formula for gravity force at a distance means it's easier to escape a SoI). The advantage is that it allows greater time warp with no risk of orbital changes due to floating point approximation which happens in a pure simulation. No re-entry heat yet (next update probably a month or two away) and the drag model/aerodynamics are very simplistic.

There's a new demo out, but it only has the Mun and Sun. You can try that to see how it looks/runs now as it did get a facelift (they hired one of their modders and he remade a lot of the parts and is making new ones as well), although the demo still has limited parts. You can land on the Mun with it though.

It runs pretty good for me now, you can time warp more in low orbit in 0.18.4 from what I noticed. I launched a huge ass 1000+ ton 400+ part rocket yesterday and got like 4 fps! That's at least double what I would have had on the previous version.

 

[Ulminati]

The atmospheric drag model is also simplified. It's not too noticable with rockets (barring the lack of reentry heat) but it does make spaceplanes hell to steer. There is a mod that fixes it, but chances are it'll end up getting incorporated into the main game in .19 or .20 anyway.

 

[Hellraiser]

Yeah, the next update is supposed to change the atmospheric model although that will be an early WIP implementation of what the devs aim for. They plan on expanding it in future updates.

 

[Hellraiser]

The 1000+ ton monster I launched yesterday. Gets its about 90 ton payload into a 200+ km circular orbit around Kerbin.

The payload is a fully fueled Eve lander prototype. Further testing (via quick-save editing) proved it was still far from what is needed to return to Orbit from that damn rock's surface.

 

[Ulminati]

I'm holding off on the eve landing until I can send a fuel refinery up there in .19 :3

 

[Hellraiser]

Even with that it won't do you much good. SSTO is impossible on Eve. Landers need asparagus staging and are at least 90 tons. Might as well accept it will be a one way trip if you want to mine Blutonium.


Unless they add balloons or you use the airship mod.

 

[Burning Bridges]

A mainsail will give you better TWR than your 4-coupled LV30s. Also, it's 1 part instead of the 11 I count on your screenshot. Just switching the engine assemblies for mainsails would save you 70 parts, which should help with your lag.

That is of course correct, perhaps I'm aiming a bit too much for fuel efficiency.

 

[Hellraiser]

I only use the LV cluster for the central stage assuming it has enough lift. Mainsails are more efficient for what they do than people think.

 

[Ulminati]

It's not fuel eficiency if you're wasting time in the atmosphere due to low thrust

 

[Burning Bridges]

A 1,500 thrust engine that must be run at 60% has only 900 thrust. Weight is also higher, 6t vs 5.2t, that makes 4 LV-30 about even if you factor in better efficiency.

 

[Ulminati]

You can run mainsail at 90% without overheating. 95% thrust will let you get into the upper atmosphere befor eyou have to reduce to 90%.

lrn2fly

 

[Burning Bridges]

Well, I had to try it and let the engine heat go into the red, and it's really true. At 85% throttle overheat climbs to 90% but then it unexplicably stays there. So the effective thrust of the mainsail is ca 1,350 and significantly better than 860 of the four LVT-30. That means I must accept that I will achieve better results when I use the mainsail.

I was able to build several rockets that can lift 40 tons into orbit, but they look and fly horribly, so I currently prefer a much more modest rocket, of only ca 140 tons, that flies very benign.

http://www.global-explorer.de/20121225/R-140.craft

The rocket itself is not spectacular, in this configuration it achieves 10,500 m/s. But I have optimized the micro propulsion probe. It weighs only 1.7 tons and is still good for ca 4,000 m/s deltaV on its own, so it could be launched with a much smaller rocket and still reach most, if not all planets. Burn time for that is also relatively short, ca 7 minutes.

 

[Ulminati]

For some reason, engines get hotter when mounted to an orange tank. you can squeeze and additional 5% thrust out of the mainsail if you mount it on a standard rockomax white tank

 

[Hellraiser]

You mean using double white tanks instead of one orange? That's probably because more parts aid heat dissipation, supposedly you can use all kinds of stuff as heat sinks, some people use ladders for example. Although I never really bothered checking how exactly that works.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Haha, ladders? There are many things I still need to learn ..

 

[TirantBacon]

Burning bridges, for the delta v probe what were the parts used (only for the probe, not the rocket)? I need to make a similar probe to yours but not exactly the same. Thanks!

 

[Burning Bridges]

completely missed your post, you should have used PM.
My probe was quite good at the time for the micro propuslion, which gave several km/s almost for free.
But with the new parts the micro propulsion is moot anyway, Ion engines can reach 20 km/s and more now.
Actually with the new parts I don't see the limit to deltaV any more, it's only a question of burn time. Although the best designs are those which reach a bit less but with reasonable burn time, lets say no more than 20-30 minutes.

one of the Ion ships I made recently, one engine is enough though