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[10ebbor10]

It's in the Full game.

[Skyrunner]

It's in the Full game.

Drogue chutes are awesome

[Leonon]

So I've been playing with space planes again and managed to make something that assists an ion powered probe to space. It uses the nesting intake on struts exploit to use 14 intakes for 1 engine.

Here's a picture of the probe in its stable orbit. The orbit is 70km-90km. I ran out of daylight partway through circularizing and figured as long as it's out of the atmosphere I can fix it later.

[forsaken1111]

So I've been playing with space planes again and managed to make something that assists an ion powered probe to space. It uses the nesting intake on struts exploit to use 14 intakes for 1 engine.

Here's a picture of the probe in its stable orbit. The orbit is 70km-90km. I ran out of daylight partway through circularizing and figured as long as it's out of the atmosphere I can fix it later.

Should have tossed at least one battery pack on there.

[Mageziya]

One thing I had never really managed to do was to land on the Mün. A task, the first goal of many, I had failed over and over. I had given up after innumerable failures. But I decided to rise up, and try again, with  the codenamed "Project Interjection", a sister craft to the many crafts of the  failed Interception series.

After some mucking around with handling the craft, I decided to try the stupid method of getting to the moon. No orbit, no space station refueling, nothing fancy like that. I decided to just fly up. This was my old strategy of trying to get to the Mün before I became more informed on how KSP worked. However, my new strategies were plagued by a lack of fuel, and the flying up strategy used a lot of guess work and often ended in frustration. The introduction of control nodes and the target system, however, changed everything. There was no more guess work, I could finally make massive, random paths towards the Mün and make them work!

So I did just that. The craft turned out to be a one way trip, due to lack of fuel, but I didn't care. The craft crashed onto the Münar surface, leaving a trail of fire that destroyed all of the scientific equipment, but I didn't care. I have finally landed on the Mün!

Picture time!

Spoiler: The Kerbals say hello to KSC. (click to show/hide)

Spoiler:  An uncanny resemblance. (Warning: 3 large images.) (click to show/hide)

Spoiler:  Excuse me sir, but may I ask why you are doing that? (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Also, I had a Kerbal fall through the floor. He is now part of the Mün, forever. (click to show/hide)

And that sums up the Mün trip in a nutshell.

Now, I need to redesign the probe the craft had been carrying, and make the trip two way to the Mün and possibly one way to Minmus.

Quick bit of trivia: ü=ue. As such, another, technically correct, way to spell 'Mün' is 'Muen', and that the pronunciation of 'Mün' is very similar to the pronunciation of 'Moon'.

[Putnam]

When I want to get to the mun, I do one of two things:

A: Just kinda... start prograde accelerating in orbit once the mun shows up on the horizon in an orbit that's nice and inclined with it. It works!

B: Use the nodes cause those things are mondo wicked cray.

[sneakey pete]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xXh5pwvY20

[Nelia Hawk]

http://www.twitch.tv/kerbalsp

the devs are showing stuff they work on again right now like on every monday.

[olemars]

Currently my favourite Kerbal video.

edit: Video was reuploaded for some reason. New URL.

[Sean Mirrsen]

I can't wait for 0.19 to break the aerodynamics model (or at least craft file compatibility) so that I stop upgrading this SSTO.



It does look pretty, but this is the 9th revision of the 4th iteration of it. I can't force myself to leave it alone!

[Skyrunner]

How people make sstos work is a mystery.

[DrPoo]

How people make sstos work is a mystery.

Its like a really shallow gravity turn.

[Skyrunner]

No, my problem is I usually spin out of control in aerospike altitudes, or I run out of fuel long short of the required 2200 m/s. Sometimes I flip out of control when I shut my jet engines off.

[Sean Mirrsen]

You must not treat your air-breathing engines as a rocket stage. My, rather poorly built in comparison to others since I focus on looks over function, SSTO, flies up to 22000m and to a horizontal speed over 1100m/s, on turbojets alone. From there, the rockets engage and push it a little further until the jets start failing, at which point you shut them off and close all intakes, and tilt the whole thing up, so it gains altitude instead of more horizontal speed. Ideally you'll get a 70-80km apoapsis going at over half the required orbital speed, and you should have enough fuel to go from there.

One of the key points is having enough thrust. Efficiency isn't everything. Don't use aerospikes for SSTOs unless they use nothing BUT aerospikes for flying, since the aerospikes' primary advantage is in the lower atmosphere. Up high, the higher thrust and vectoring capability of the T30 engines will serve you much better. Vectoring is especially important so that you don't flip out when you switch to pure rockets.

Once you know the basics, it's just the matter of having enough fuel and enough lift to fly. It's just fine tuning from there.

[Skyrunner]

... But my jet engines die at 12000 :/

Why do you have to close off the intakes?
Aaand my ship flips out when I angle it up even with rocket engines Dx