[crizza]

Yeah, are there usefull approaches while designing a rocket or a plane?
My planes are all deltawing with wing mounted engines.

[General Battuta]

Planes are universally terrible.

[BlueFlames]

The aerodynamic model in KSP is still in its early infancy, so planes are pretty rough right now.

Update on the station:  Still no fuel depot attached.  Every problem with the depot lift that I solve just reveals another problem.

First, I had the structural issues, described above.  Well, some finesse on the throttle kept the probe from getting terminally sandwiched, but after about four attempts to get into an orbit (ANY orbit), I was frustrated by having inadequate fuel to keep from returning to the surface.  Well, I had a great brainwave:  Instead of trying to push all of this fuel around, why not drain the depot into the lift stages, so that you can dock the empty tanks and send smaller supply craft to refill them later?  Brilliant!

...or not.  See, once the depot drains, you have a voluminous, lightweight object that's being subjected to massive drag forces, causing the whole rocket to tip over.  So, for my next attempt, I'm going to shut down fuel flow from the center tank in the depot to see if that will leave enough mass to provide some stability, until I've escaped the atmosphere and no longer need to worry about the drag, without leaving behind so much mass that I can't get the damn thing into orbit at all.

Incidentally, this thread has earned its title, yet again.

[edit] The empty tanks have reached orbit, with tons of fuel left in the final stage of the lift vehicle!  The chase is now on, with the depot orbiting about three kilometers lower than the station hub.  They're on clear opposite sides of Kerbin, so it's going to take time to catch up, but time expenditure aside, everything is in place for a rendezvous. [/edit]

[edit 2] I figured out the fuel transfer system and shifted the rest of the fuel from the lift stage back into the depot, so that I could drop the last of the lift vehicle, without wasting that fuel.  I think two-and-a-half Rockomax 32 tanks will be sufficient fuel for the rendezvous maneuver.    Still chasing the station, in the meantime, limited to 50x time compression.  Fun fact:  The camera centers on your ship's center of mass, not its geometric center.  Found that out, as the camera slid upward, with the excess fuel, during the transfer. [/edit 2]

[edit 3] After a two day chase and a harrowing adventure, finding out that I had placed no RCS thrusters properly for vertical translation, I finally docked the fuel module to the station hub, where it joins the two (empty) habitation modules.  Watching the docking ports make contact was actually a bit hilarious, since I've seen more than a few KSP docking videos, where the incoming module is pulled toward the station, while in my case, the fuel depot was so much more massive than the rest of the station that the incoming module pulled the station towards it.

My next trip will be with a supply ship, which will refill the depot and drop off a couple of Kerbonauts to manage the place, while the probes are away.  After that, I'm going to bring up a transfer module (basically a NERVA or three and the necessary bits to attach it to the station), so that I can move it about, should the 100km orbit get a little too densely packed.  That will leave two docking ports on the hub, which I'm reserving for incoming ships, and one on the back of the fuel depot, reserved for future expansion.

Screenshots to come. [/edit 3]

[crizza]

Since my game is repeatedly crashing...where should I send the reports to?

[BlueFlames]

[edit]

Since my game is repeatedly crashing...where should I send the reports to?

I'd suggest the great, big contact link, on the KSP website.

[/edit]

The promised screenshots:

First, the hub and habitation modules.  I sent them up pre-assembled because I had a big f'n lift vehicle, so why not?  On the top docking port, I've got a cap structure attached, because I didn't want to run the risk of the port being damaged on the way out through the atmosphere, during launch.



Now, the hub and habitation module assembly looks heavy and awkward to launch, but it's heavy and awkward in a very intuitive way, so this was actually a one-and-done launch.



By contrast, the fuel depot looks compact and simple, and even though you know it's heavy, you don't fully grasp how heavy it is, until you try to launch it.  Just to illustrate the point:



This was the cage of struts that I had to build around the control probe to keep the sheer weight of the depot from crushing the rocket on the launch pad and then keep the rocket from blasting through the depot upon launch.  Even with that, I could not raise the throttle above about 80% at any time, until the lift stage was completely jettisoned, or else it was an unstoppable force fighting against an immovable object, with the control probe caught between.  I did finally, after I don't even remember how many attempts, get the fuel depot into orbit, though.



While chasing the station hub, I had plenty of time to think.  It occurred to me that faffing around, trying to turn that stupid lift rocket, dangling off my back end was pretty stupid, but I was hesitant to eject it, because I had only used about two-thirds of one of those Rockomax 64 tanks.  That's a lot of fuel to just drop.  It hit me then that I had a lot of empty capacity on the other end of the ship.



Fuel transfer complete, it was time to part ways with the now-empty lift vehicle and return to the chase (which still had about another thirty-six hours to go).



I intercepted the station at night, which was a little unfortunate.  I had forgotten to turn the station lights on, prior to undocking the control probe that had put it in orbit, so the station was dark.  I did have the foresight to mount spotlights to the front of the fuel depot, but four proved to be too many, and my docking maneuver had to wait for daylight.  Fortunately, at this altitude, it only takes about an hour to orbit Kerbin, so by the time I was in a rough position to begin the docking maneuver, the sun was shining brightly.



The downside to the rapid orbit is that, by the time the docking ports finally mated, the sun was beginning to set again.



Its job nearly done (I remembered to turn on the lights, but forgot to rename the damn station this time), I undocked the control probe and sent him on his way home.  Splashdown was about 10km east of Kerbal Space Center.  I'm sure those sensitive electronics will be just fine, out in the salt water.



(For the record, no, I did not kick the station out of orbit with the probe's engine.  I just did a final visual inspection, with the probe's rear-facing lights, before turning the exhaust well away from the station and doing a short burn to get away.  I am going to duplicate the save file at some point, though, so that I can build something to properly blow the station up.)

Next time, a supply ship, with fuel and slaves political dissidents persons of interest Kerbonauts!

[Bob-san]

My personal solution to the "make a space station" issue is that I will carry a single large 1M fuel tank into orbit every time. My craft are pretty damn big, but going with a 1M tank does help things out a bit. For an initial construction, a crew depot (with two converter parts, two fuselages, and two large docking ports) is necessary. After that, a couple of missions to attach 6-way converters would be cool.

What I do find really cool now is that you can use WASDQE to rotate your parts--so you can put a stack decoupler together or build an Apollo-style launch vehicle. (I did that already--it was pretty challenging to maneuver the command pod and the lander so to dock again.)

Otherwise, the game still needs one thing: something to consume a lot of electricity.

[BlueFlames]

Sent an oiler up to the station and noticed the docking port on the fuel depot was misaligned.  After offloading the payload fuel, I undocked the oiler and hooked it up to the extra docking clamp on the back of the depot.  Upon undocking the depot from the hub, the game went a little crazy, and disintegrated both the depot and the oiler (oddly without having any noticeable effect on the hub/hab assembly).

Turns out, there's a known bug relating to modules docking with something and then having their core removed.  A hotfix is in the works, but if you're building a station, using similar methods to me (i.e. sending modules up with a probe or command pod that will be detached, after the module is added to the station), you'll want to hold off, until the patch.  Any docked objects that have been hit by this bug cannot be repaired, but 0.18.1 will prevent the problem from occurring again.

After the patch, I think I'll let the bug-addled fuel depot go, and if it doesn't disintegrate (which is a really big 'if', from what I've read), I'll send the oiler up to try a salvage op.  If it does disintegrate, let's be honest, I was probably going to relaunch the damn thing anyway, because my odds of recovering something that ridiculously massive from a screwed-up nonorbit are pretty minimal.

There also seems to be a bug, where habitation modules eat Kerbonauts, instead of housing them, but I'm not sure if that's an independent issue or something related to the docking bug.  That's not so troublesome, as long as you're going up with a two/three-person capsule, though.  (Also, recycle slave labor/Soviet Siberia/Guantanamo Bay joke.)

On the bright side, I'm pretty pleased with the little oiler.  Its lift stage is basically the heavy lift vehicle's initial ascent stage, sliced in half.  The payload container is a single Rockomax 32, isolated from the rest of the fuel system.  It's guided by the three-man command capsule and propelled by six LV-909's, each with its own FL-T400 tank.  Being meant for docking, it has an RCS system, with one of the big tanks to fuel it and replenish the station's RCS tanks, as necessary.  It's meant to return to Kerbin for a parachute-and-rocket-assisted soft landing, though, for aforementioned reasons, I haven't yet been able to test that capability.  Still, it's a plucky little ship, and even with the RCS turned off, it turns faster than anything that heavy has a right to.  Methinks, I'm going to make a version that replaces the main stage's engines with NERVAs and integrates the payload tank into the fuel system, so that it can go on a proper adventure.

Back to today's antics, though, the current version also has some lights attached, which means it also has a battery and (way too goddamn many) solar panels to charge it.  Well, when the oiler came round to the day side, whilst chasing down the station, I thought I ran into another bug.  I had the oiler facing north, so that plenty of the solar panels would receive daylight from sunrise to sunset, but the battery was still discharging, nearly an hour after sunrise.



It wasn't a bug.  It was just a phenomenon that's happened a million times, unnoticed, because we were all in the map screen, with nothing to call our attention to the event.

So, whilst I'm not happy about the high liklihood of having to relaunch the fuel module (have I mentioned what a pain in the ass it is to get into orbit?), I did get a new desktop image out of the deal.

[Colonol Dekker]

I thnk i need to buy this.........

AFTER FIRESPAWNS MATE FIXES MY DAMN PC 


I'd just love to create Confed SolSec HQ in orbit of that Gas gianty planet....
Maybe some sort of TCS Victory too.

[Sushi]

Do all those science-y parts for data collection and transmission actually do anything right now?

[BlueFlames]

Do all those science-y parts for data collection and transmission actually do anything right now?

The measurement devices do take measurements, which you can see by right-clicking on them, while they're turned on.  The communication devices are currently purely aesthetic.

[Bob-san]

Do all those science-y parts for data collection and transmission actually do anything right now?

I suppose they're for future-proofing. I did add some of those doodads to my space station but, so far as we all know, we can't do jack with them.

On a side-note, I now need to remember to either use real decouplers or to add those ejection rockets to my detachable parts. Otherwise, there seems to be no real way to clean up orbiting junk around your space station. And being at 400KM, it's not like their orbits will decay. The best bet would probably be to collide with the debris

[newman]

You can use the scientific equipment on probes to get basic information on a planet, such as how strong a gravity it has, see atmo pressure, temperature, etc. Not exactly data that will help you play the game in any way, but it's cool to have and once they put career mode in I imagine finding out stuff about planets will be in mission goals.

[newman]

Otherwise, there seems to be no real way to clean up orbiting junk around your space station. And being at 400KM, it's not like their orbits will decay. The best bet would probably be to collide with the debris

Or you could plan stuff ahead and put a docking port on parts that will get jettisoned in orbit. At one point I wanted to add an emergency escape vehicle to my space station without adding to it's crew complement already aboard. I still wanted to make this a manned mission, so I put a docking port on the stage that gets me from upper atmo to the station itself. The craft consisted of a small one man craft that had a small engine, RCS, one man pod, chute, and a docking port. That small craft was docked to the actual escape pod (larger vehicle based off the 3 man command pod). That was docked to a larger stage that had a big fuel tank, more engines and additional RCS fuel. This is the stage that got me from upper atmo to the station itself. This was all on a larger ascent stage.

Once parked some 100m off the station, orbit more or less matched, I ditched the big fuel stage, decoupled from the escape pod. Now there were three separate parts of the rocket floating off the station. I did an EVA to transfer my kerbonaut to the escape pod, and docked the pod to the station. Two parts left, did an EVA again, returned to the small one man craft, docked that to the discarded large stage still floating off the station, did a retrogade burn till the map showed I was on a collision course with Kerbin, detached again, and the rest is your classic chute splashdown. Result, escape pod delivered with no debris floating around my station.

tl;dr: Put docking ports somewhere on stages you suspect will get discarded someplace in orbit - this way you can dock and deorbit them later on.

[Bob-san]

I figured out another way to do it: to place a basic stack decoupler surrounded by Sepratrons. For light-weight ejections, it should result in a minimally changed orbit and, with luck, the part in question will aerobrake on Kerbin if not entirely plummet to the surface. The only question for my solution is how many Sepratrons to place on each part group.

0.18.1 is out--the patcher crashed several times on me so I had to delete everything & start again. I lost my in-progress space station and my unfueled Eve Lander/Return Vehicle ("eRV"). That vehicle has been my goal for some time now--so to land Jeb on every rocky surface and return him safely each time.

Anyways,

[BlueFlames]

0.18.1 is a go!  Huzzah!

...

So, I started this post two-and-a-half hours ago, as I was nearly ready to dock the oiler with the station.  That was a pretty routine docking operation.  I then shuffled fuel around to redistribute mass and hopefully minimize the inevitable chaos that would result from undocking the bugged fuel depot.

At this point, I will make an admission:  My inner save-scummer came out from this point on.  I was quicksaving whenever my situation looked like it had gotten slightly less bleak than the moment prior.  In my defense, I've only reloaded twice, so far.  That was when I tried repositioning the fuel depot by docking the oiler on the back and undocking all of that from the station.  The rest of the station was so light, though, that it went tumbling away, when the docking clamps released, and with no command module, attached to it, there was nothing I could do to recover it.

On attempt number two, I knew that one part of the station or the other was going to go flying, when I released the misaligned docking port, and I'd only be able to easily regain control of one.  Keeping the hub stable was more important, because anything else can be relaunched, but if the hub is lost, the station has to be abandoned as a lost cause.  So, I let the fuel depot go, and it got pushed away, in a spin.  I'd like to avoid that, if possible.

Attempt number three picked up with the oiler and fuel depot still docked to the hub.  This time, I tried activating the large SAS modules (one on the oiler and one on the fuel depot) to see if that could fight the spin, after undocking.  Unfortunately, SAS only stays active on vessels with a probe core or command capsule still attached, after undocking, so the depot got pushed away, in a spin, again.

Since this bleak picture was somehow still the best of all possible scenarios, I rolled with it.  I got the station hub & hab section stabilized, and undocked the oiler, before the fuel depot had traveled more than fifty meters from the hub.  I quickly gave chase, but was rather stumped about what to do, once I got close again.  I made several attempts to pick up either one of the docking ports, as they rotated past.  On one pass, I got close enough for the docking ports' magnets to just barely attract, but to no avail, as it just altered the depot's rotation.

At that point, I realized that there's more than one way to alter the depot's rotation.  No, I didn't fire up the main engines to get a running start and smash the thing into a million pieces on a decaying orbit.  I moved in and nudged the depot to counter its rotation.  After three gentle nudges (I didn't even break anything off of the nudger or nudgee!), the rotation had nearly stopped.  At that point, I backed off to about twenty meters, picked the back docking port (the one to which the control probe had originally been attached) and began to match the depot's spin.

Incidentally, if you ever want to confuse the **** out of yourself, look down at the planet, while trying to dock with a rotating body.  I accidentally did this a couple of times, and my eyes just could not pick a frame of reference to treat as stationary.

But, after two-and-a-half hours of effort, did I manage to dock with a rotating body?



Hell, yes, I did!  This humble oiler just got promoted to best f'n ship ever.  It was sent up for a routine supply run, and wound up pulling off an elaborate salvage operation that went way beyond its design scope.

All that's left now is the relatively simple task of re-attaching the fuel depot to the station, dropping off a couple of Kerbonauts, and finally testing the best f'n ship's landing capability.

[newman]

I figured out another way to do it: to place a basic stack decoupler surrounded by Sepratrons. For light-weight ejections, it should result in a minimally changed orbit and, with luck, the part in question will aerobrake on Kerbin if not entirely plummet to the surface. The only question for my solution is how many Sepratrons to place on each part group.

I'm not sure if they changed this in 0.18, but in previous versions physics was only applied to the player craft, the rest was "on rails" (as in, follow a pre-determined orbit without any physics calculations). This means it was actually possible to have a piece of debris fly through atmo without ever having it's orbit degraded, as long as it didn't go low enough for the game to auto-kill it. Also, docking to stuff is simply more fun

[crizza]

Funny, I can build a ship, launch it ONCe, return to the assembly, fuddle around and when I try a second launch, no matter if it is a new ship or a modified, the game crashes...well...

On another matter. I tried to bring a base module for a space station in orbit, but I guess the weight of the module and the rocket it is attached to are far too heavy for the radial decouplers, so the central missile tears free and crashes into the other rockets...big bang ensured.

[FireSpawn]

big bang ensured.

Kerbal rocket science at it's finest.

[Nuke]

idk about you all but im going to build a destroyer in kerbin orbit. one launch at a time.

[BlueFlames]

Update on the station:  The fuel depot is reattached and largely refilled, and I've got a Kerbonaut in each habitation module.  I have a drive module built, consisting of three NERVAs, a large command pod, and a few miscellaneous bits and bobs to aid with docking.  It carries no fuel of its own, but will have access to the fuel in the depot, during maneuvers.  I have it mounted to the same heavy lifter that took the other station components to orbit and which should have no trouble with this little section, as long as I'm judicious with the throttle.

Update on the most awesome f'n ship ever:  It can land on Kerbin, but my technique needs work.  First, I undershot the space center by about seventy kilometers, which means I'm out in the mountains, where the rescue rover is having a very hard time traveling, due to its long overhangs.  (I keep knocking the probe core off of the nose.)  Moreover, while the oiler was descending, I began my final burn just a bit too late, so that when the parachutes fully deployed, it broke the control linkages between the rocket motors and the rest of the ship.  I still managed to deploy the landing struts, but I couldn't throttle up, as I got closer to the ground, so the shock from touchdown popped the capsule off.

Prior to launching the station's drive section, I think I'll be building a STOL plane for rescue operations outside of the rover's effective area of operation.