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I’ve put off buying this but you’ve all convinced me.
Post here when you have questions (notice I did not say “if”).
I’ve played 1.1 a little. It feels about the same as 1.0.5, exceptthe distribution of heat across parts feels a tiny bit trickier. I’m not sure if that’s because I’m rusty or if it’s because there’s been an actual change, but the effect seems to be that it’s very important to keep your heat shield facing the right way, and any part connected to it directly should have a higher tolerance.
Early attempts at building a space plane could be reasonably described as catastrophic.
Planes are pretty hard until you have good parts unlocked, and space planes are harder still. The main trick though, is to design the plane such that the center of lift just behind the center of gravity.
I just did my first shipment of ore from the Mun to Kerbin. The rocket I was using I had used many times without trouble. This time, I replaced one of the fuel tanks with an ore tank. Normally on re-entry, that tank would be empty. This time, it was full (ore, obviously). Now, I was re-entering somewhat faster than usual, but not that much faster. Alas, the pod was so massive it fell through the atmosphere so fast that, while it would survive re-entry if the heat shield was pointed down, it wouldn’t decelerate enough to blow the chutes before plowing into the ground at 300m/s. I accidentally found a solution. My batteries went out after re-entry, and the rocket spun around -the broader cross section slowed it down enough that I was able to blow the chutes with 600 meters to spare.
That’s a far better aerodynamic model than they used to have. Now, if they’d fix the flightstick support…
Seconding Joe, build a damn rocket first.
F both of you.
Really cool, Tom. KSP is a game I have heard a lot about but am afraid to buy for fear that it would consume all my free time.
I just listened to the Space Rocket History podcast episode covering MR-1 the other day. It contains a fascinating explanation (starting at 8:54) of the sequence of events leading to what you see in the video. I recommend listening to the podcast, but I will also summarize in the next comment.
The main engine ignited but immediately shut down, lifting the vehicle about 4 inches and letting it set back down on the pad, slightly denting it. The cause of the early shutdown was a pair of umbilical cables that separated 29 milliseconds out of sequence, which resulted in a momentary loss of electrical grounding and caused a stray 3 amps to flow through the main engine shutdown relay. That was the only malfunction. The rest of the events that followed involved a series of systems performing exactly as designed, but under unexpected conditions.
Engine shutdown is the end of powered flights, so the capsule escape rocket jettisoned itself because it was no longer needed. The next scheduled event was capsule separation, which is activated when the capsule detects near-zero g’s acceleration indicating engine cutoff and freefall through space. However, the vehicle was sitting on the launch pad at 1 g, which the separation system interpreted as a continuation of powered flight. It never reached 0 g so it disabled capsule separation.
Escape tower jettison also armed the reentry parachute system. The parachute system was designed to detect when the altitude fell below 10,000 ft to deploy the parachutes. The launch pad was near sea level so it deployed the drogue parachute immediately followed by the main chute in a timed sequence. The system determined the main chute had not opened properly because there was no load on the cords, so it deployed the backup parachute.
As the Space Rocket History podcaster Michael Annis put it:
I thought by coming to Ricochet I could escape the daily banter of the office…..sigh,
Welcome to my nerdom.
After the cutoff, somebody in the blockhouse suggested shooting holes in the propellant tanks with a rifle to allow the fuel and oxidiser to drain out. Flight director Chris Kraft vetoed this idea and opted to wait for the liquid oxygen to boil off, proclaiming, “That is the first rule of flight control. If you don’t know what to do, don’t do anything.”
If this had been a manned flight, the astronaut would have been bolted into a spacecraft sitting atop the fully-fueled and powered up booster with the escape tower gone. In later manned flights, there was a “cherry picker” available which could be positioned adjacent to the capsule to allow rescuing the astronaut in a similar circumstance. But until the introduction of the explosive hatch in Mercury-Redstone 4, a technician would have to go up in the cherry picker to unbolt the hatch. It was also possible for the astronaut to escape through the top of the capsule, but this would have been precarious atop a booster.
You must have a pretty cool office.
Interesting that I work at a large aerospace company that makes rockets and satellites and I don’t have first hand knowledge of a single employee who plays KSP.
Yup.
I tend to forget how unique in the arc of history the stuff I get to do on a daily basis is from what has come before. But then whenever I discuss with (normal) folks what I do, like at a party at my wife’s office (i.e. Accountants/Clerks), and get to watch their eyes roll into the back of their sockets.
My stuff is at the pointy end of the rocket, I rarely mesh in the design details of the flight dynamics crew. They just give me the bottom line for the orbits/trajectories so I can model the environments that the observatories are going to experience for energy impinging the external surfaces.
Aerothermal analysis? What do you mean by observatories?
Thermal analysis of the spacecraft and instruments (i.e. the payload, the point of the mission). So no aero heating since other than contained fluid systems (i.e. Heat Pipes, single phase pumped) there is no convection in space. It is all a balance of radiation out vs the heating flux from the sun, or a planet’s albedo and IR radiation in. All smoothed over by conducting heat dissipation via preferential paths so everything operates in acceptable temperature limits (or gradients), or cooled to very low temperatures for increased sensitivity to photons for remote sensing measurement. Easy to explain in a sentence, time consuming in the evaluation to make all of the requirements mesh.
Managed to get my space plane into orbit. Had enough fuel to get back to the planet at a time of my choosing, but the engines wouldn’t start for unknown reasons. Looked around online and couldn’t find an answers. As I said, I had enough fuel.
Had to wait for the orbit to decay and when I dropped low enough that my jet engines should have started working again, they too wouldn’t start. Wondering if time in space freezes the engines or something.
Everyone was killed upon crash landing.
Why yes, yes it does. How does he know that….. See Comment #49
When that happens to me, it’s usually that I’ve run out of electrical power. Unless you’ve added lots of batteries or have solar panels, you can quickly run out of the limited power capacity of the crew pods. Some of the engines generate electrical power when running and some don’t; you have to look at the specifications when you’re building to see. You can check electrical power in the consumables drop-down at the top right when flying. When you run out of power, almost nothing works.
That’s probably it. I did not check that. Thanks.
Including the heaters that keep the propellants @ 10C minimum (vs the 2C freezing point for some design buffer) for the de orbiting rockets.
I need some help:
I designed a large lander (gray, below) for the Mun and Minmus and planned to refuel it while in orbit around the moon with a refueling barge (red). Both are equipped with a clamp-o-tron jr: the lander with it mounted radially on the fuselage and the barge with it on the top of the robotic command module.
For the life of me, I cannot get the two to successfully dock. I’ve done the docking tutorial several times (though it’s been at least a few weeks) and I seemed to have that down pretty well. But here, the two vessels never become one and I cannot transfer the fuel.
I googled around and I saw that it was important to make sure that the clamps were facing opposite directions, but — unless I screwed it up again — I think I fixed that.
Is there anything I’m doing obviously wrong?
If you are playing in Career mode, I think you have to upgrade the Research & Development building to some level above the base before you can transfer fuel among docked spacecraft. When the R&D building is upgraded, fuel transfer is immediately enabled even for craft already in flight. I believe resource transfer is enabled when the R&D building is upgraded to level 2.
Another possibility is that the Clamp-O-Tron Jr. does not support fuel transfer. It is documented that it does not support crew transfer, but the Wiki seems to imply it does permit fuel transfer, if the R&D building has been upgraded.
I’m playing science mode, so all the buildings are unlocked.
I’ve never tried mounting any of the not-explictly-radial docking ports radially on a curved surface. Could that be it?
Also, what part is the port mounted on the lander? I can’t tell from the picture, but is it connected to that decoupler by any chance? Or any other weird part?
Have you tried docking in slightly different relative orientations? Sometimes I get a “hatch obstructed” when there’s no obvious obstruction, and roting the craft fixes it. Maybe that’s happening here too.
Standard mindless troubleshooting question: Did you try restarting the game to see if it goes away?
Docking has been a little finicky in the past. I’ve had vehicles with totally standard configuration and docking ports simply refuse to dock easily, and it could take a number of retries, wiggling around the ships, forcing them together with rocket power, or other tricks to finally get them to dock.
Did you right-click on the docking port and select ‘control from here’? You can also try switching to the other ship and try docking from it. Make sure both have electrical power as well.
Also, you could try installing MechJeb, which has an automated docking function. It will either dock for you, or it will yakk at you and give you a clue as to what the problem is.
One hint about your lander config – unless there’s a special reason it needs to be that tall, you’re making it really hard on yourself as it’s likely to tip over unless you land with zero lateral motion on a very flat piece of terrain. I would reconfigure that lander to put the upper tanks in a cluster around the lower tank. If you put three tanks around a center tank (use the grid snapping in the VAB to accurately position them), add fuel lines from each one to the main tank (make sure the direction arrows show fuel flowing into the center tank), then mount your landing gear on each outer tank, your lander will be way easier to deal with. Short stubby vehicles also have less moment arm, and therefore are easier to manoever. You can put a RCS module on each outside fuel tank above the landing gear and give your RCS more mechanical advantage that way, too.
After my space planes began achieving orbit, I have mostly just been building a wide assortment of planes. Trying to design the ultimate fighter jet is taking up huge amounts of my time.