so broken it broke the word broke, it's borked or borky
still fun but totally borky.
I don't even know what it is about science, I just don't like it.
I know it will get much better so I'm not really concerned. I do wish they would at least allow the text boxes that pop up when you do science to be shown in sandbox mode. I get that there's no point to having science in sandbox, but if we have the science parts, we should at least get the science messages for roleplaying.
Career mode and my laziness and refusal to alter the fundamental design decisions I've made ever since acquiring struts and SRBs has resulted in this:
What is really awful is when you are completely wedded to a design that
almost works. It's one thing to stick to a design that is completely functional, it's quite another to stick to a design that you can't actually get to fly though you come close. I have that problem big-time.
It's a cool rocket. Have you ironed out the kinks?
I, too, love SRBs. But they don't have to be ugly to be functional.
Mine run out at 42km, leaving my ship with a velocity of over 900m/s in the vertical – haven't tried steering it on ascent, since non-gimballed thrust vectors don't much appreciate that. As it is, it's very stable. The first stage is empty at 6800m, the second at 20,000, and the third at 42,000. Liquid remains off until this last stage of SRBs is dry. The payload it lifts to orbit can achieve any planet. I'm sure there's a ton of room for efficiency improvements in my ascent method, if you're a min/maxer.
Also, one time when I detached the radial-mounted tail sections, it decoupled the central fuel tanks as well, despite the separator being on another stage. Just ripped them out because of clipping. Totally awesome and the fuel was empty anyway, since they share.
Dude, those are some freaking sweet rocketships cardgame!
What made you think to angle the SRB stacks like that? Do you find it helps with stability or structural integrity? Or is it just there to look cool (and it certainly does).
Anyway, some of you might find
this useful – welds parts together to be one for purposes of part count, physics, and FPS. Different from StretchyTanks in that this works on almost everything, especially structural parts like trusses and grey covers, allowing you to build cosmetic pieces without killing fps.
Awesome! I took a look at it but I'm a little leery of the 'known bugs' section. I'll definitely install it when they iron out those bugs.
Thankfully, at least for the moment, I don't need it
:
So this is my new launcher. I downloaded the KWRocketry parts pack and it had some extremely useful (and well-balanced) tanks. The big orange tanks are just awesome, they are large enough that I don't have to use a ton of them and not so large as to break the rocket. With these new parts, I was able to NOT use the 'unbreakable joints' cheat. The engines are neat too, they have a lot of thrust (4800 IIRC) but they weigh a ton and have an atrocious Isp (from 200 up to a whopping 305 in vacuum).
This is the first MEGA launcher I have built that doesn't have any significant flaws - it worked perfectly on the first launch! I did end up shrinking my lander down quite a bit with some newer, smaller tanks from the KW pack. It now weighs 28 tons, which is 1/2 to 3/5 as big as my other lander designs. Without the KW pack, the smallest I could get with a reasonable deltaV budget was 55tons. There was no way around it with the stock parts, so I'm glad I got the KW pack. It doesn't have as much deltaV as I'd like (it has a bit over 4000 in vacuum and I would like 5000) but that was a sacrifice I had to make to get it down to that size.
The cruise stage is interesting. You can see that I run fuel lines up the side. That's because each tank in the ICS has it's own decoupler, so I manually shift the fuel up to the top tank where the engines are in-flight. Then, whenever a tank is empty, I decouple it which greatly increases my overall deltaV. There is also a docking port on the last stage of the ICS so I can use it as an ersatz tanker. I'm glad I added that as I got to Laythe with a ton of fuel left over. In fact, when I'm launching, I get my apoapsis up to 80km, then switch off the main engine. Then I turn on the NERVAs and use them to boost my peroapsis up to 80km, draining fuel out of the core stage. I have enough fuel left over in the core stage that with the more efficient NERVAs burning its fuel, I can burn enough to nearly break out of Kerbin orbit before the core stage is empty. I could put a decoupler on the main engine and dump it, but the meager savings I'd get from that (the engine weighs just a tiny fraction of the ICS/core stage combo) that it's not worth the complexity and part count.
So like I said before, I went ahead and sent all four landers (one is a test lander to verify the design) at once. They went out as a convoy and it was kind of fun to manage them all.
It turns out that you can aerobrake at Jool to save a lot of fuel but you have to do it carefully. What you want is to aerobrake enough that your apoapsis is at Laythe's orbit. Then, when you are at apoapsis, raise your peroapsis enough to keep out of Jool's atmosphere and then loop around several times until you get an encounter. Finally, I aerobrake at Laythe to get an orbit. That last picture is when I aerobraked too deep at Laythe and had to burn to get back out of the atmosphere.
So I forgot to do plane-change maneuvers, so all of my landers came in on polar trajectories. You can see that they all have funky polar or highly inclined orbits. I do have enough fuel in my ICS's to change that and I probably will at some point. It's extremely difficult to do a precision landing from a polar orbit on a world with atmosphere. You have to account for the planet's rotation (east to west) and your own aerobraking (north to south). Needless to say, it's a freaking chore to get it right, so I'll change these orbits after I send over the space station. Also, they are all at roughly the same altitude so I'm very worried about collisions.
I decided to put down the Hydra lander to verify the design. Now deorbiting the thing was very interesting, to say the least. I have my landers in ~65km orbits, which I chose because there will be much less drift between the time you do your deorbit burn and when you set down.
The problem is that I want to keep the ICS in orbit and also not use up the landers fuel to deorbit. So I use the ICS to deorbit the lander, and then have to decouple it, swing it around and then burn like hell to get back into orbit. Because I am so low above the atmosphere, I only have about a minute and a half to do this correctly before my lander hits the ground while I'm fiddling with the ICS. So it's tricky, but doable. I'll probably move the landers up to a higher orbit in the future and I'm going to send over some orbital tugs that will be small and expendable (in case I screw up) to deorbit the landers during subsequent landings (I'll use the ICS for the first de-orbit). The ICS still has a ton of fuel left over after the de-orbit/re-orbit maneuver. So much fuel in fact that there is still some left in the second to last tank, which blocks the docking port. But when I adjust the orbits of the landers, that last tank should drain completely so it won't be an issue.
The landers have some flaws, but they are still workable. For one thing, I didn't use radial decouplers or other attachment devices on the side tanks to save weight. They are just stuck on there with some struts. Well this creates serious wobbling on touch down, so I have to put them down just perfectly or disaster strikes. The other thing is that the engine they use says it has thrust vectoring, but it has a vectoring value of 0 degrees. Which sucks, because this thing is pretty difficult to fly without vectoring. I wasted some fuel on the way back up just trying to keep it flying on a set heading. Anywho, it got back to orbit with fuel to spare, so I'm happy to report that my project is back on track!
