Gaming The Kerbal Space Program - Version 1.2.x

[Jarvitä]

So did you actually enter a stable orbit, or was that just a very high parabolic trajectory?

 

[Face]

The later. Although it would have been possible to make a stable orbit if there were a restartable upper stage. As you can see in the picture, the whole beast consists of solid state boosters.

 

[Stevodoran]

I asked my brother to register in the forum for me and it seems he spelt my name Stevoodran :facepalm:

 

[Fabri91]

Ask the admins to correct the issue.

I asked my brother to register in the forum for me and it seems he spelt my name Stevoodran :facepalm:

After having shamelessly copied Face's craft, more or less, I've launched it, let's see how high it gets.

Do liquids have any advantage on solids here, at least when used as upper stages?

 

[Jarvitä]

After having shamelessly copied Face's craft, more or less, I've launched it, let's see how high it gets.

I've tried the same, but the first stage keeps spinning out of control and overheating, and on separation, the whole stack blows up.

 

[Fabri91]

I've attached the outermost boosters on the vertices of the "triangle" formed by the first stage, instead of on the side of the edges. And I've put more SAS stages on it, one layer above every booster stage.

I doubt I'm going to beat his record, 155km and climbing at 0.5km/s approximately.

About the issue of the jittering world at high altitude: the capsule shakes the same way, so I suppose it's an issue with the camera position, rather than an error in the crafts position like in orbiter far away enough from the sun.

 

[Face]

I've tried the same, but the first stage keeps spinning out of control and overheating, and on separation, the whole stack blows up.

Hehe, well, I never said it is easy to build or fly that rocket :lol: . The trick is to place the extra boosters in the lower stages precisely. My setup is having a slight rotation with the first stage, but it even helps to stabilize the stack in the end.

While launching, you have to keep the nose very close in the up-right position, otherwise you'll end up nose down very fast. Keep this position until the tri-stage connector is gone. Then - at approx. 30-35km height - slowly lower the nose to about 50°. Now you should be able to follow a smooth ascent while staging up to the capsule.

On staging, you have to wait with the ignition of the next stage until the boosters cleared the nozzles, otherwise you'll blow up.

 

[jangofett287]

Boosters can be stuck to the sides of things, so you can strap more onto a single stage, but then you get reliability and stability issues. Liquid cores have to be stacked, they can't be strapped on the sides, but you can increase the side of their fuel tanks. I don't know about thrust values. Just remember that each stage has to be able to lift its self, and every stage above it. I've also noticed parts are defined through .cfg files, so I will take a look, see if I can find weight and thrust values.

---------- Post added at 04:11 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:02 PM ----------

Right, here we are:
Liquid Engine:
Thrust: 200;
Mass: 2;
Fuel consumption :8;

Liquid Engine (With fuel tank):
Thrust: 200;
Mass: 4.5 (Dry mass 2.3);
fuel = 500;
Fuel consumption: 8;
Approx burn time (Fuel/Fuel comp): 62 sec.

Solid Booster:
Thrust: 130;
Mass: 1.8 (Dry mass: Unknown);
Fuel: 100
Fuel consumption: 2;
Approx. burn time: 50 sec.

Burn time calc assumes fuel comp is in fuel 'points' per second. They seem about right to me. So, combined with my above post on the pros and cons of each engine, we now have all the facts.

 

[HarvesteR]

I am a very happy guy right now! 5 pages in less than 24 hours! :yes:

@Steveodoran: Fixed your name down in the KSP forum. Thanks for joining!! (I love being admin of a forum! :lol


Gravity is correctly modelled. It IS possible to enter a stable orbit, although it takes careful planning and building.

The planet (as of now) is 600km in radius. It's about 11x smaller than Earth. And the atmosphere is more or less proportional to that. So at about 40km up, you should be clear for an orbit insertion burn.

But mind though, there is no instrumentation to help you get into orbit as of yet. You have to do it by the seat of your pants. It is possible, I can tell you. It takes some experimenting though

Again, there's no telling how happy I am to see people having fun with the game!

Stay tuned for the next update! it should have a number of really needed features.

Cheers

 

[Face]

After a slight modification of the launcher, Bill, Jeb and Bob did it again! This time - full stable orbit around the kerbal planet.

Apoapsis:


View from orbit on launch site:


Periapsis:


While the Kerman brothers celebrated this tremendous achievement, they realized that there are no retro-thrusters on bord :facepalm:. That's why Bill and Bob look so frightened in that last picture. Jeb's high as usual .

So there you have a 634x74.5 orbit... the velocities look far to low for earth orbit, if you ask me. The kerbal planet must be smaller than earth.

EDIT::ninja:'ed by HarvesteR

EDIT2: For documentation: the mission summary after 1 and a half orbit - check the ground distance traveled:

 

[Turbinator]

Yaay, I made orbit as well, as far as I can tell the math looks good.
Approaching apoapsis right now. We'll see how it goes.

You should see the multi-stage monster I built. love the side ejecting stages, and how you can control when they go off.

 

[HarvesteR]

Ahh I can offer some insight on why Jeb seems to be high all the time.

He is the pilot!

The crew AI is the same for all of them, but they have different personalities. Their personalities are defined by 3 attributes: Courage, Stupidity, and whether or not they're the pilot.

Jeb is 0.5f brave and 0.5f stupid, but he's the pilot, so what the others would find terrifying, he finds entertaining.

Bill is 0.5f brave and 0.8f stupid, and he's not a pilot. So he gets scared, but being dense as he is, he doesn't realize the danger as much.

And Bob is 0.1f brave and only 0.3f stupid, so being by far the least stupid in the bunch, he quickly realizes how near they are to being blown up, and panics really fast.

There are other factors that make the crew panic as well... nearby explosions being one of them. They are already traumatized enough so that hearing a nearby explosion will make them all have bladder control problems.


Later on I'm planning on adding a Nausea Tolerance parameter to their AI, and have them become nauseated under high angular velocities and possibly space sick as well, when under microgravity conditions... They could visually turn green also, if they weren't green already.... hmm, maybe they should turn yellow :lol:

Also, I plan to add different types of Kerbal crew... right now all we have is the generic, Orange suit wearing, crewmembers. Later, the idea is to have Pilots (in orange), Engineers (in blue), and Mission Specialists (or scientists, in white)... each of those would have different personalities... for example, pilots are braver and have a high nausea tolerance, but they're stupid; scientists are smart, but cowards and get sick really easily; engineers... not sure yet... maybe they're somewhere in between, or something else.

Cheers

 

[Wishbone]

This sounds really interesting... I'll download the sim next week, even though I don't think the whole "buy-in" business model to be profitable, and always make my own hobby projects as free as can be. I take it you have already put your hands on NASA's SP-2010-3407 pub since there are loads of data on human tolerances...

 

[HarvesteR]

This sounds really interesting... I'll download the sim next week, even though I don't think the whole "buy-in" business model to be profitable, and always make my own hobby projects as free as can be. I take it you have already put your hands on NASA's SP-2010-3407 pub since there are loads of data on human tolerances...

If this were a hobby project of mine, it would surely be free... but it's work actually, so we have to make money eventually

And no, I hadn't seen that paper... really interesting stuff, I'll definitely check it out. Might get some ideas out of it :stirpot:

Cheers

 

[Eli13]

HarvestR is there any chance of getting some fairings over the capsule?

 

[iamwearingpants]

The capsule just passed 1337 km! :bananadance:
It still has a velocity of 1500 m/s, don't think it's coming down anytime soon, or ever, really :rofl:

I'm loving it. Even my little brother built a rocket and got it up to 20 km!


UPDATE: Oops, the planet is out of view now. I guess I had a little too much power

 

[kevin580]

That's ultimative fun!!!!!!!!!! :lol: I love it!!

And now I got...12G maximal, 10496km!

 

[spacekid1998]

How 2 Orbiter?

 

[iamwearingpants]

How 2 Orbiter?

How to get in orbit? I dunno, just do the same as you would in orbiter.

And please use correct grammar and spelling.

 

[spacekid1998]

i want to no how to make it fly in circles without rockets ?? "orbit"