Kerbal Space Program

[hobbsyoyo]

Hobbs, maybe you need to rethink your "build big" methodology. It's awesome when it works, but it seems like you run into so many issues trying to make it work that it'd just be easier to launch smaller missions, and dock them together in space or whatever.

I've thought about that and the problem I'm now having is that tried-and-true designs no longer work due to SAS problems and because they randomly break now either on the pad or in flight even when they didn't use to. I can't even lift 50 tons into LKO anymore; everything freaking breaks if I don't use the debug menu. In .21 I probably would have done as you suggest because I had rockets that could easily handle 50 tons to LKO but now I can't because of all the unplanned midflight dissasemblies.

Because of all the breaking on larger rockets, I'd have to break down even my landers into smaller parts and launch them seperately. I simply don't want to do that because I want to send 3 landers, which already require a seperate launch for the the cruise stage. So that's 6 launches and 3 dockings before I even head out to Jool and I don't want to add to that by breaking the lander and cruise stage down into even smaller components so that I can lift them without the booster blowing up.

I have been using the new landing legs but haven't had any issues with them. I always make sure to touch down reallllly slowly, @ 2-4m/s or so. I haven't tried saving a game with something landed and returning to it later though, not in 0.22

I saw that the landing legs are fixable via EVA though, so maybe they're supposed to break if you abuse them.

How heavy is your lander? The problem people are having isn't that they are being abused, it's that they don't work even with fairly small, 10 ton landers. What people have not checked (AFAIK) is whether or not the legs act better after an actual flight. People have been testing them by loading them directly onto the launch pad and then the legs fail. It has been suggested - and it seems that your experience possibly confirms this) that the legs behave better if you have actually flown the rocket and come in for a normal landing, instead of deploying them on the pad. Though I don't know why that would be the case....


I asked my Orbital Dynamics professor if there were an easy way to calculate deltaV for an asparagus-staged rocket. His response:

trollololololololol GTFO

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Ever notice how when you detach a stage from a large rocket, the stages just kind of slide off instead of popping off?

Turns out there's been a bug since forever where the presence of struts will cause a decoupler's kick force to be disabled. The part will decouple but it won't pop off the way it will if there are no struts on it. I didn't know this was a bug (I just assumed decouplers always sucked at decoupling) because I strut everything. It turns out that since career mode came out and people generally get decouplers before struts it made everyone at the KSP forums remember the bug this bug was never fixed. That's how long it's been a bug. :\

 

[Antilogic]

Ever notice how when you detach a stage from a large rocket, the stages just kind of slide off instead of popping off?

Turns out there's been a bug since forever where the presence of struts will cause a decoupler's kick force to be disabled. The part will decouple but it won't pop off the way it will if there are no struts on it. I didn't know this was a bug (I just assumed decouplers always sucked at decoupling) because I strut everything. It turns out that since career mode came out and people generally get decouplers before struts it made everyone at the KSP forums remember the bug this bug was never fixed. That's how long it's been a bug. :\

...that could actually be really useful for my quad engines, I need them to slide off. Time to start strutting the engine canisters!

 

[ls612]

Ever notice how when you detach a stage from a large rocket, the stages just kind of slide off instead of popping off?

Turns out there's been a bug since forever where the presence of struts will cause a decoupler's kick force to be disabled. The part will decouple but it won't pop off the way it will if there are no struts on it. I didn't know this was a bug (I just assumed decouplers always sucked at decoupling) because I strut everything. It turns out that since career mode came out and people generally get decouplers before struts it made everyone at the KSP forums remember the bug this bug was never fixed. That's how long it's been a bug. :\

It is apparently such a hard bug to fix that they added sepratrons to allow you to push away large strap-on boosters.

 

[warpus]

I've thought about that and the problem I'm now having is that tried-and-true designs no longer work due to SAS problems and because they randomly break now either on the pad or in flight even when they didn't use to. I can't even lift 50 tons into LKO anymore; everything freaking breaks if I don't use the debug menu. In .21 I probably would have done as you suggest because I had rockets that could easily handle 50 tons to LKO but now I can't because of all the unplanned midflight dissasemblies.

Hmm I have a crazy looking rocket that gets me into orbit every single time, but to be honest I have no idea how heavy it is. I will say though that it was designed piece by piece in career mode - I upgraded it each time I researched a new technology. So it's a completely different design than what I would usually do - but maybe because I built it up step by step I'm not running into your issues? Or it's just that much smaller maybe.. That's entirely possible. I will post a photo of what it looks like later.

How heavy is your lander? The problem people are having isn't that they are being abused, it's that they don't work even with fairly small, 10 ton landers. What people have not checked (AFAIK) is whether or not the legs act better after an actual flight. People have been testing them by loading them directly onto the launch pad and then the legs fail. It has been suggested - and it seems that your experience possibly confirms this) that the legs behave better if you have actually flown the rocket and come in for a normal landing, instead of deploying them on the pad. Though I don't know why that would be the case....

Yeah, maybe that's the thing? Maybe they're designed to crap out if you violently slam them against the ground? My lander was relatively small although I couldn't tell you how much it weighs. I beefed it up recently so I can have more fuel for a Duna return mission and haven't had any issues landing that either.

Ever notice how when you detach a stage from a large rocket, the stages just kind of slide off instead of popping off?

You know, I never actually noticed this until I used a TT37 (or 38?) radial decoupler in my latest design, just because I didn't want the interplanetary part of my vessel to stick out that much. When I decoupled my empty interplanetary tanks using that decoupler, I "slid out" through it, which I thought looked a bit fishy.. I noticed it for that reason. I usually use the TT70 decouplers, because it gives me a lot of wiggle room. It's very possible I never noticed the decouplers not pushing whatever they're decoupling back - because of this wiggle room - it means I can decouple things in the middle of a gravity turn.. usually. So I've stopped paying attention to the way things decouple, I just press space and focus my attention elsewhere.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

The landing leg issue is screwing with a lot of people but it's not entirely repeatable. I haven't even attempted to use the new landing legs yet - I just started using non-retractable landing legs from NovaPunch to get around it. There are pictures of landers on the KSP forums of people with very small landers leaning over like crazy - even when they add 16 landing legs!

________

I just joined the KSP forums today to get help from some of the really awesome players there. My large rockets still break even with 'unbreakable joints' turned on.

Anywho, I think I'm going to have to replan my entire plan yet again. It's extremely frustrating in that most of my old designs don't work anymore and they will fail at random places at random times during flight so I can't figure out what the exact issue is.

 

[Antilogic]

Are there any differences between how the different stack decouplers work, or is it all cosmetic? It would be nice if we had slide-off decouplers and explosive decouplers so we could pick the most appropriate one.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Sum are supposed to eject harder (they all have different ejection forces) but if you use any struts on parts connected to decouplers then the ejection force becomes zero - they will all just slide off.

 

[Antilogic]

Sum are supposed to eject harder (they all have different ejection forces) but if you use any struts on parts connected to decouplers then the ejection force becomes zero - they will all just slide off.

Is that listed in the game (and I've never seen it) or just in the program files?

 

[hobbsyoyo]

The ejection force is listed in the VAB itself in the part menu. The bit about decouplers not working right is just a well-known bug that I found out about today at the KSP forums. In fact, sepatrons were originally created to overcome this bug as the bug itself was hard to fix. So hard that they haven't fixed it yet.... Yet another reason why I wish struts would go die in a fire. I hate them and I wish you could just weld parts together and make joints stiffer. Struts suck and are immersion breaking.



Also found out what's going on with my big rockets: The physics engine basically breaks down when the game slows below 10fps. So it may calculate the added strength of your struts, or it may not. Which perfectly explains my inexplicable, unrepeatable, unplanned disassembly events. The physics engine just can't handle my awesomeness and walks off the job, leaving my rockets to break.

Back to the drawing board. Again.

 

[Antilogic]

I guess I'll have to check out the VAB again, I don't remember seeing the ejection force lifted. That is good to know for my future rocket planning.

 

[ls612]

Are there any differences between how the different stack decouplers work, or is it all cosmetic? It would be nice if we had slide-off decouplers and explosive decouplers so we could pick the most appropriate one.

The stack decouplers remain attached to the lower stage they are decoupling, where as the stack seps become their own piece of debris, in addition to severing the connection to the lower stage.

 

[cardgame]

Sounds like I'll be waiting for a hotfix or .23 because there are a lot of issues here.

 

[warpus]

I wouldn't say so - a lot of the ones we're talking about go wayyyyy back. Hobbs is just having issues with his mega launchers because he's stubborn and refuses to adopt NASA's "smaller, cheaper, faster" philosophy

 

[Civ'ed]

Hobbs is just having issues with his mega launchers because he's stubborn and refuses to adopt NASA's "smaller, cheaper, faster" philosophy

Glorious Soviet Kerbal Rocketry best Rocketry!
Been playing a bit. Still no orbit level, but long range troop movement level comes really close, especially for a game with no troop movement whatsever.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I wouldn't say so - a lot of the ones we're talking about go wayyyyy back. Hobbs is just having issues with his mega launchers because he's stubborn and refuses to adopt NASA's "smaller, cheaper, faster" philosophy

To be fair to me though, I've been pushing the line of absurd rockets since I got the game. And up until this project I can literally only think of a single time I wasn't able to launch a mega-payload with my uber-designs and if I were trying to launch that same payload now, I could easily launch it as I now lift bigger things routinely with new tricks I've learned.

The difference is I'm trying to step things up to the Nth degree. Taking a 60ton payload to Laythe without refueling, without docking or orbital assembly is a huge accomplishment. It's one that I've even pulled off twice now and I even completed a landing with subsequent Laythe SSTO in a full-up mission test simulation - but in my quest for better fuel margins, I stepped over the line of what the game will allow.

The frustrating thing(s) for me were that I refused to use math for so long, which kept me from reaching optimal designs and created much more trial and error than necessary. The other thing is that I had no idea the physics engine stops working correctly when the fps drops below 10. That was a revelation to me and explains a ton of the unexplainable issues I was having. But now that I know about it, I can avoid it.


I have this whole weekend to make up for my past mistakes and finally get something done. Hopefully my next post here won't be to complain, it will be to showcase some frakking progress. I've been quite obsessed with this mission, I think about it all damn day and I think I've worked out the kinks.



Edit:

What I don't know is why I decided to redesign my lander yet again when it was able to get to Laythe, land and SSTO. Sure, the fuel margin was too tight for comfort but I also had a very crappy landing that wasted a ton of fuel. Why did I just abandon it and get mods?

 

[cardgame]

Science is so borky

 

[hobbsyoyo]

What does borky mean?

 

[Fr8monkey]

What does borky mean?

Borky = AWESOME!!!1!

 

[cardgame]

so broken it broke the word broke, it's borked or borky

still fun but totally borky.