Also, never had too much success with planes--I'm getting a lot of unintentional somersaulting. I'm pretty sure it's a weight imbalance from watching the Youtubez, but I can't figure out whether it's better to put fuselage up front without fuel so the weight doesn't disappear, or if mixing rocket fuel tanks and jet fuel tanks is a good idea because their filled and dry masses are different, and so on.
Yeah I've never built a spaceplane that didn't explode on the pad. From what I've read at this point, they really benefit from incomplete implementation and stuff to the point that any current working design is only slightly better than a straight-up hack. In other words, the game isn't very realistic with respect to spaceplanes because they haven't been fully coded or something. I expect they are going to get even harder to build as the game nears completion - there's a lot of reasons they don't really exist IRL!
I could be wrong about everything I said though, but that's the impression I get from youtube and the KSP forums on the subject.
So I got this game yesterday after watching some LPs.
Enjoying my crashing and exploding rockets.
So far I managed to design a simple high-altitude jet for planetary travel and brought a rocket into Kerbin orbit. Landing was not so successful, unfortunately, since my parachutes keep ripping off due to high speed. Later found out that my landing gear is an excellent air brake.
Anyway, looking forward to visit the moon, but I guess I will have to read the wiki first. 14€ well spend so far.
Hey if you need any tips on getting to the Mun or Minmus, just ask!
So you are the Soviets in this analogy?
You laugh now, but you forget who put up the first space station irl (and soon to be released in .18).
The gravity (or as I insist on calling it in KSP, grabity) on Eve is apparently stronger--my Kerbals can't even jump without immediately falling over. Overheating is probably going to be more of a problem because I think KSP models temperature effects on engines (hence all the recommendations not to use the easily-overheated nuclear engines for a Moho landing).
Are you kidding? Higher gravity and denser atmosphere? That sucks hard...
I thought asparagus staging only made sense for liquid-fueled rockets to try and minimize the weight of the attached liquid fuel tanks. The trash bins are a gutsy call--I was trying to figure out another way, but my lander tests on Kerbin are coming up short with alternative engine schemes.
No it pretty much always makes sense.
I honestly can't think of a scenario where it isn't useful. For one, you do drop off empty tanks, which lowers the weight of the rocket. But it also leaves all of the tanks remaining with
full fuel tanks upon separation, which is awesome.
But the main advantages it would bring to an SRB-based Eve takeoff are thus:
-It would allow just 2 or 4 engines to do all of the work of getting above the thick atmosphere. If you lit off all of them at once, then you are wasting quite a bit of thrust due to drag. This method will kick you up in the stratosphere and then let the rest of the engines burn more efficiently.
-You can drop the dead weight of the empty SRB's as they burn out, thus increasing the lifting efficiency of the remaining engines even higher
-Course corrections will be easier to manage between burns than it would be during one massive 8-engine burn.
My lander had no problem aligning itself so long as I disabled the SAS during the landing procedure when the parachutes were deployed--otherwise, it would wobble because the control would be fighting to return to the previous set point. I'd suspect that the weight of the SRBs would necessitate your additional parachutes.
Yeah, that extra weight is going to be a killer both on launch and on Eve descent. I'd probably put a parachute on each one to be safe. You will probably also need a good RCS system to control a lander with 8 SRB's in space because it's going to be heavy.
Your Duna transit experience sounds a lot like mine, although it looks like your lawn-dart strategy didn't work too well. I find that the straight drop works best for moons and the long atmospheric air brake works better for planets. I'm starting to feel bad for all your stranded kerbals.
The straight drop was a terrible idea and I even knew it going in. I just ran out of patience as I had tried and missed about 6 or 7 Duna injection burns and I had already wasted enough fuel that I knew I wasn't coming home so I just wanted to put the fat bastad down. I also forgot the 'optimal velocity' part that the online calculator computed for me. Because of this, I wasted a bunch of fuel on course corrections that would've required a lot less fuel if I had been at optimum velocity to begin with.
I'm still refining my methods. I had an epiphany in the shower this morning: before I set out for Duna, I would make sure my rocket was about about 600km in Kerbin orbit so that I could time warp till the planets were aligned.
What a massive waste of fuel getting into a big orbit! I realized that if I just sit on the pad, I can timewarp out to the proper alignment and then take off. I can completely skip the whole orbital phase and go straight from the ground to a Duna injection.
Not only will I save time and fuel, but this will actually allow my booster to do most of the work for the Duna injection (as opposed to the lander) because of all the fuel savings. This means I'll have more fuel left to play with @ Duna! Very excite XD !
Thanks for the tip on separator rockets, I'm going to incorporate some of those into my next design to try and deorbit my middle stage. I'm getting a lot of junk around Kerbin that is not deorbiting or even decelerating despite passing under 40k m.
Sepatrons are absurdly powerful. People use them for all kinds of stuff, like taking off from the Mun and such - that's how much thrust they have. I've considered adding them to a lander as a way to rapidly slown down right before landing, kind of like a skycrane that just stops all velocity a few hundred meters up and lets me have a slow, controlled descent from there instead of using a lot of fuel trying to slow down with your main engine.
Also, don't over do it. Two pairs of them (one pari facing toward the central core and the other one facing straight up) are all you need for any stage separation/debris deorbit. Adding more will only create lag and make it more likely that you will damage critical systems (I've destroyed many an RCS thruster with sepatrons) with their massive blast.
Oops, thought I put the link in my prior post. It's at
ksp.olex.biz.
Thanks!
It'd still be an issue on the descent, but that poodle has pretty good thrust so I think you would be fine. I was trying to put 3 nukes and 3 aerospikes on a total of 6 exterior tanks, but for some reason the game won't let me put more than 2 aerospikes per rocket. That sucks.
Yeah that's too bad about the nukes and aerospikes. I've ditched the poodle for interplanetary missions. It's great for Mun/Minmus but too inefficient for Duna and such. I'm using four NERVA's now but may cut that down to 3 or even 2 if I can find that 2 are enough to get back off Duna or if I use some SRB's to help.
It has 7 mainsails and 18 SRBs, and a crazy number of struts to hold it together. Wayyy too much power.
Don't forget to throttle down in the lower atmosphere!
Below 10km, if you are burning at full thrust with your mainsails, then you are wasting a lot of thrust due to drag and lower ISP in the thick atmosphere. Cut them to as low as you can while still just barely accelerating. Then, above 10km or so, throw the throttle wide open. The only downside to this ascent method is that it will change your ascent profile so you are going to have to mess around with your timing for the gravity turn and such to make it all work. But it should work and leave you with either a higher orbit or more fuel left when orbit is reached, you just have to play with the timing a bit.
Speaking of massive SRB stacks, I have a launcher with enough SRB's on the first stage that it kicks me up to 10km before the main liquid engines are even activated. I don't use it much because the main stages aren't optimized with all the new tricks I've learned and because that kick up to 10km happens in about 10 laggy frames because there are so many parts and the lag is very frustrating.
I end up saving after each modification that went well, and reloading if I mess it up. Haven't gone to asparagus myself yet, still doing the onion launcher.
Asparagus staging will give you maybe a 10-15% performance boost, even more on smaller rockets. The big ones don't get as big of a boost but it's still there and on interplanetary missions, every little bit helps.
Sounds like you had a space kraken damage your ship, or the stage that you fired didn't have the parachutes (i.e. they were all above the lander stage). You have a living kerbal on Eve, though, that's a first. I'm on my way there with my refit lander (side note: my rocket tends to explode on the pad if the RCS is relocated down).
I've had the same problem with older designs when I tried to follow my own advice and move the RCS system down to the launcher and off the lander. For some reason, doing this makes the RCS system a weak point that breaks on the pad. I don't know why, it makes no sense.
I don't have any clue what happend to the parachute, but it was staged correctly. It was a stock Munar lander that only has one parachute for Kerbin return, and it's never had any issues.
Fair warning: be prepped to fire those engines. Parachutes are nice, but the atmosphere is still thin enough on Duna I was descending fast, and the slow down from 0 to 3 chutes doesn't lead me to believe my lander would be perfectly fine with 6 (although it would have been easier).
Oh man were you right. I wish I had seen this before I went splat on Duna about 7 times.
Yeah 7 parachutes do not help you more than 3. Plus, the atmosphere is so thin that it alone will not decelerate you to a safe velocity before they deploy, so when they do the lander rips itself apart from the G force. So yeah a big slow-down burn is unavoidable.
I'm just leaving my kerbals on Duna for now. My last mission was a 20-day trip circling the Mun with the big lander lander looking for arches and munoliths, but I haven't found any yet.
There are coordinates for them on the KSP forums, though it takes the fun out of the search.