Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[BFEL]

Wow I see where you guys were coming from on the whole "rovers are crazy hard to control" thing.
I made a INCREDIBLY simple one for the purpose of retrieving kerbals who crashed on kerbin (because REALISM) and it flipped CONSTANTLY. At first it was cuz I put rockets on it and was generally dicking around, but later when I took it back down to a AI, four wheels, solar panels and the rest of the frame made of those octagon struts it was STILL flippy.
Oh I also had a ladder on the back and a external seat up top, so that the kerbal could actually get in.

[Descan]

You might want to play around with the Centers of Lift/Mass/Thrust to find something less prone to flip. What you want those to look like, though? No idea.

EXPERIMENTATION!

[Rakonas]

yeah solar panel shadow detection isn't the best.

I had a probe orbiting the sun further away from kerbin, and at one point stopped producing electricity because the sun was "blocked by kerbin". Not even a dot of kerbin was visible, just sun.

[nogoodnames]

For rovers, you want to keep the centre of mass low and give it a wide base. Remember that kerbals have mass too, so having a chair high up on a rover might be fine in the hangar, but will become unbalanced when someone is sitting in it. You might also try going into docking mode. It disables the probe's rotation so it won't be trying to flip itself around while you're driving.

[BFEL]

So has anyone here gotten a full-on mun base? Like multiple parts all docked together?
If so SCREENSHOTS PLOX

[Girlinhat]

So has anyone here gotten a full-on mun base? Like multiple parts all docked together?
If so SCREENSHOTS PLOX

Define "base" because there's not much purpose for a structure just yet.

I think between Kethane, Near-Future, and KAS, you could build a functional refueling depot worth a lot of utility though...

[Anvilfolk]

Yeah, I think the main problem is really making structures/bases that have usable docking ports. That was my problem last time I tried to make a Kethane fuel base.

Also, still waiting for that spacestation/tourism mod. So many ideas, so little time...

[Culise]

Just for fun, I decided to install FAR and Deadly Reentry, and give career mode another go around from scratch.

Wow. O.o I knew it'd be harder, but I at least expected to get out of the atmosphere before everything started exploding.  Turns out that not everything is as resistant to g-forces as I thought. 

EDIT: Gosh, though, it makes it so much more rewarding when you succeed.  Just managed my first suborbital and reentry without torching the poor kerbalnaut.  Didn't pick up much science due to various compression-induced heating circumstances which were totally not unexpected in degree *cough*, but I'll have to redouble my efforts. :3

[LoSboccacc]

I don't know if you already found this:

Spoiler: transfer to and from angle map (click to show/hide)

but here I post it anyway.

[Glloyd]

That beautiful moment when the Mun and Minmus line up...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Eric Blank]

I just got into this game, and after throwing kerbals at the mun with acceptable success/failure ratios in the demo, I bought it, and certainly regret nothing. I puttered around in the sandbox mode for a while, and actually got a 26-ton rover, transporting three kerbals and two smaller rovers, on the mun, 87 km form its intended target, and completely spent on fuel and monopropellent, then took four hours to drive it over there. The terrain was scary as hell, because this thing couldn't drive down anything more than a 20-degree slope without deciding it can fly whether unfueled or not, and I ended up crossing a mountain range.

Flipped it dozens of times, but the landing was the most terrifying part: I ran out of fuel well above gorund while still travelling 30m/s, and crashed into the terrain at 50m/s. The rover only survived because it landed on the rear wheels first, then the front wheels, then rebounded, rolled a few times mid-air, bounced off its wheels again, before finally remaining on the ground and rolling, at which point I braked. Nothing else besides the 8 primary wheels and 7/8ths of the mini-rovers' wheels were damaged. And I'm not sure how the mini-rovers wheels popped since they're suspended about 2 meters above the ground. Maybe they absorbed some of the impact as well and it happened too fast for me to notice it.

Here's what it looks like on Kerbin:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Now I'm playing around in career mode, and that's kept me entertained quite thoroughly. I've so far been returning most of my samples rather than transmitting them, and designed a probe with nuclear engines just for a sun-orbiting mission, the science modules detachable with their own subsystems to return to kerbin and land. I got the first such module home, and promptly landed on a mountainside, resulting in it rolling down the slope and exploding. Yet to kill anybody, luckily.

[Chattox]

So I can land on the Mun in one piece pretty reliably now, my problem is getting back. I can't seem to build a lander with enough fuel to both land and set a course back home.. How do?

[Sean Mirrsen]

One and a half standard tanks on a LV-909 can pretty soundly land and return a capsule and some goo pods from the Mun.

This is assuming that the lander didn't make it all the way from Kerbin on that fuel, and had at least some help getting on a Munar intercept trajectory. Refer to my Kerbal SCIENCE Program mission for an example.

[Facekillz058]

Is it bad that with only Basic Rocketry researched I've gotten farther than I ever had on Sandbox?

[da_nang]

I don't know if you already found this:

Spoiler: transfer to and from angle map (click to show/hide)

but here I post it anyway.

Spoiler: I wish I could do beautiful diagrams. All I can do are pixelated MATLAB semilog-plots. (click to show/hide)

NB: The "Pseudo-Lagrange" points are basically the points that share the same orbital angular velocity as the target body with a constant phase angle, similar to real Lagrange points but with different mechanics. The phase angle matches that of the real Lagrange point. Consequently, the corresponding L1 and L2 points don't exist as that would require the target body to be more massive than the parent body (e.g. Kerbin needs to be more massive than Kerbol for L1 and L2 to exist in the Kerbol-Kerbin system). In other words, those points are outside SOI (assuming circular orbits).

NB2: These are only the diagrams for bodies with orbit eccentricity <= 0.1