[BlueFlames]

Anyone remember The Probulator?

Its great-great grandfather turns out to have been the Probulator 1000.



It still has the last part of the lift stage attached, but this is my first unmanned mission out to interplanetary space.  Since the intensity of light from the sun in KSP doesn't follow the inverse-squares law, like light does in the real world, Probulator 1000 will soon be on its way out to Jool and possibly Dres to see how well solar panels function at great distances from the sun.

In the planning phases are Probulator series 2000, 3000, and 4000, being (in no particular order) a probe carrier, a geological probe, and an orbital probe.

Further out, I'm considering manned missions to Gilly and Moho, now that you can land on them, instead of having your rockets eaten by defective meshes.  For something rather more ambitious, I want to do a land-on-and-return-from Eve mission.  Before that, though, I'll want an unmanned fuel depot in orbit of Eve, so that I can undertake the mission confident that, if the lander can get free of Eve's atmosphere, it won't have to worry about having too little fuel to get home.

One mission at a time, though.  More from Probulator 1000 to come.

[newman]

Solar panels produce less electricity at Jool distances, but I've found it's still enough to run the probe core and all the instruments aboard. I wouldn't count on them powering an ion drive at those distances though - pack RTGs if you're going far away from the sun on ion propulsion. Heck, pack RTGs if you're going anywhere on ion propulsion, solar panels are inadequate, and will likely force you to keep the throttle at 1/3 or so to prevent the batteries from draining, and you won't be doing any burns in a planet's shadow.

Ion drives are boring anyways. Burns take forever and they suck with orbital maneuvers, such as slowing yourself down into an orbit, where having more power and shorter burn durations helps.

Moho worked before, at least for me, though it had the overheating atmosphere problem that made landings very difficult (or easy, if you take a light, RCS only lander). In 0.18 Moho's atmosphere is gone and there's no overheating, you can land on it just like you would on the Mun. Gilly's collision mesh has been fixed since 0.17.1 so knock yourself out with that one

[BlueFlames]

The Best of Both Probes, Part 2
Think about it at your own peril.

Since we last left off, Kerbal Space Command demonstrated that they do care more for their expensive probes than their cheap Kerbonauts, by waiting for Jool to get into roughly the right position, before sending the Probulator 1000 chasing after it.  That chase began on the night side of Kerbin, beginning with the last of the lift stage's fuel.  Once that was expended, the probe dropped its lift stage and started its ion engines at low throttle to stretch its battery capacity, until morning.  When the sun did rise, the probe rolled to maximize solar exposure to its panels and throttled up.



Because the total thrust provided by the ion engines is so low, it's pretty easy to set up and tune close-encounters from half a year out, while still in Kerbin's sphere of influence.



About sixty days out from my Jool encounter, I set up a final correction maneuver, which would put me in an equatorial orbit over Jool, with a low periapsis, and promising a Laythe encounter, if I weren't planning to capture over Jool itself.

Ion drives are boring anyways. Burns take forever and they suck with orbital maneuvers, such as slowing yourself down into an orbit, where having more power and shorter burn durations helps.

4,200s specific impulse.  I've completed my Kerbin-Jool transfer "burn" (if it can be called such a thing) and fine-tuning maneuver to put me Jool's equatorial orbital plane, with a 175km periapsis, all while using less than a third of the Probulator 1000's xenon fuel.  Your impatience does not negate the unimpeachable efficiency of ion propulsion in KSP.  Their ability to suck through electricity also goes to the point of the experiment of seeing exactly how well solar panels work at ludicrous distances from the sun.  The sustainable throttle level, under solar exposure, will provide a practical measure of the panels' effectiveness.

Finally, leaving those ion engines fully dependent on solar power adds another layer of challenge to space flight, which I'm quite enjoying.  I've got to ration out battery power on night-side maneuvers and constantly consider the probe's orientation, relative to the sun, to maximize solar exposure.  Having to be more aware and plan around more obstacles is quite the opposite of boring.

[TwentyPercentCooler]

Yeah, I actually like the ion drives; the lack of thrust can actually work in your favor if you attach them to things that require extremely precise maneuvers. I wish there was a larger ion drive in stock parts (I'm aware there's at least one mod with bigger ones, but it's "re-balanced" and I can't be arsed to go into the mod files and change the consumption rates). Or just make it a bit more scalable in that the maximum thrust would be less of a hard limit and more limited by max power output - actual ion thrusters work that way, as far as I'm aware.

I'm finally getting the hang of docking things, after feeling like a total moron for a while because of failing pretty hard at it. Space stations ahoy!

[newman]

I'm not saying ion drives aren't efficient - it's just a matter of personal preference. Ion drives have their uses, but for the most part I've preferred to use the good old nuclear engines, which is pretty much the only way to go to Jool if you want to deliver a payload of 5 probes on a large interplanetary craft that you mean to use as a fuel depot for future missions. So it's not so much impatience as a matter of being practical for the task at hand - which is different with every player, and so are the solutions. I'd say there's no wrong way to do it in KSP as long as you achieve what you set out to do.

Also, check out the price of a single ion engine in the VAB - once we get a real career mode in where money's a factor I'd wager you'll want to be really careful what you use these for.

[Herra Tohtori]

And now for something completely different




Not sure if anything can be done with this at all... 

[newman]

A space dragon! It needs a small LFE in it's mouth to make it appear to breathe fire Is that yours or..?

[crizza]

Don't tell me this is possible without using a mod

[StarSlayer]

HT's successfully bridged the gap between KSP and MC and built a Kerbal Ender Dragon.

[pecenipicek]

And now for something completely different

[lolshot]http://i.imgur.com/4AP5x.gif[/lolshot]


Not sure if anything can be done with this at all... 

Damned Robotics/aerospace got an update?

[headdie]

what would happen if you mounted wing parts at an angle along the girders, does the game register the movement in a way to generate lift?

[Herra Tohtori]

Well, it's a useless lump of parts, it doesn't really fly and is really rather unstable during taxi... but these are not obstacles, merely speed bumps.










Claws also move and could be used (in theory) to grab things!

No, it does not fly, it flops hopelessly. And that GIF animation is sped up by about 60 times... The connections are too floppy for the mechanism to work properly as it is. We shall see what happens with it in the future...

[Nuke]

i did try my hand with rotating ship sections. they counter-rotate to keep the ship from spinning. its something a lot of sci-fi (points finger at b5) really missis on. if you have a rotating ship section you need another rotating section to counteract the first. from what i can tell both sections need the same angular momentum, so you can use a lower mass section spinning much faster, but you still have to have a counter rotating section.



it did register some gravity, then the ship got devoured by krackens. also the iva view is really disorienting.

[watsisname]

Sent a bigass cluster of interplanetary probes to Jool.  Predictably, I forgot to deploy the solar panels.  Now they're all at 0 power and useless, and the favorable launch window has passed.  Fuuuuuuck!

[pecenipicek]

RTG's man, RTG's.

In other news, 0.18.2 is out.

[Nuke]

dont get too excited. as usual they are having patcher trouble. the solution is to "wait a while".

[watsisname]

New Dwarf planet?  Yahoo!

[StarSlayer]

Well, it's a useless lump of parts, it doesn't really fly and is really rather unstable during taxi... but these are not obstacles, merely speed bumps.
Claws also move and could be used (in theory) to grab things!

No, it does not fly, it flops hopelessly. And that GIF animation is sped up by about 60 times... The connections are too floppy for the mechanism to work properly as it is. We shall see what happens with it in the future...

Well since you just built the white ninja falconzord and KSP supports docking any chance of a full megazord?

[newman]

A word of warning to anyone who hasn't tried 0.18.2 yet: they completely rebalanced the RCS system making ships burn through monopropellant at a significantly increased rate. You may find your old designs used to dock large parts to orbiting bodies now lack enough RCS fuel to complete their jobs.

A large RCS tank now carries 750 fuel (used to be 200) but it last significantly less than before. To compensate, you may want to bring more RCS fuel aboard and tweak those thrusters so they're aligned with the center of mass and kill any thrusters that aren't necessary.

Even with that I'm afraid small probes got the short end of the stick since they still use the same thrusters as the big stuff, and 8 thrusters will drain a small tank very fast now.

[Nuke]

i like that you can disable quads you dont need. 4 quads (or 2 quads and 2 linear thrusters) is all you need for steering. if you want good linear control 8 is usually the way to go. you can pull of docking maneuvers without lateral thrusters though. like when docking large fuel tanks attempting to translate causes a rotation. so what you do is do a slow pass in front of the docking port, come to a complete stop when your cg is directly in front, rotate and thrust in slightly. it takes practice but its doable. sometimes a load is way to big, so i like to install a couple small docking ports on the sides of big parts, and then dock small mooring probes to them. dock the part, and remove the probes (it helps to keep a few on station during a construction operation). if you have several ships docked together, disable as many thrusters as you can get away with. too many thrusters can work against eachother and cause violent oscillations.