I started with a clean slate last night, and I’ve already been to space once. The second biggest solid rocket booster with its burn rate modified to around 70% is sufficient to get a one Kerbal capsule above 80,000 meters. If you want a really cheap and simple way to get someone on a suborbital trajectory, that looks like a good one.
Dude, if their not impressed by your charts detailing orbital maneuvers on route to Minmus, then nothing will impress them!
Wait, you can change the burn rate on solid rocket boosters??
mind blown
You mean there’s an “easy” way to figure out where to leave Kerbin orbit for a Minmus flyby/landing? I have enough trouble trying to get my craft into a circular (as opposed to > 75,000 km at one end and < 120,000 km at the other) orbit around Kerbin as it is - adding a maneuver at the apoapsis doesn’t seem to work, probably because the apoapsis keeps changing even after I cut all thrust.
In the hangar, right-click on the booster rocket, and you’ll see the option to set the maximum thrust. I’m fairly certain it still works, but I haven’t done a side by side comparison in 1.0.
It does.
I needed to do that for some early simple rockets in career mode to keep them from hitting the sound barrier way too soon.
I’ve got a basic passenger rocket worked out now, with one version for suborbital flights and one for orbital flights. In three flights I completed five tourism missions and got the starting four Kerbals their first level.
Nice! I’ve a moon mission planned for this evening after I get off work. I haven’t done any of the tourism missions, yet, because I’ve not unlocked any command modules with more than one seat, although that will happen soon.
Want more time for Kerbal Space Program!
Er, I meant “Mün mission.”
You can do it with a probe core, though (they unlock pretty early). I’ve done a few tourism/rescue missions now with a basic capsule and probe core on top. Only trouble is that you lose SAS, so launches are a bit wobbly.
Did a Munar flyby but no landings yet. Science points seem much harder to come by now! Probably a Minmus landing is in order.
I’m finding that reentry is much harder with the new aerodynamics. I couldn’t even do a basic reentry from the Mun without some braking–the capsule overheated and exploded otherwise. I probably need to slap on a better heat shield. I also can’t stack science stuff on the bottom of the capsule–it changes the aerodynamics enough that it’s unstable and flips over. They should really have an option for ballast–wasteful but sometimes you need it to get the center of mass ahead of the aerodynamic center.
It seems that the parts are more powerful. For example, under the right conditions, the jet engine will have a thrust of 954 kN which gives it a thrust to weight ratio of 54.
When I try to go fast horizontally with a craft, the back dips a bit which exposes it to heating (the heat shield being on the front). Is there a way to protect the belly of craft?
My goal is to get into orbit. We’re not exploding on the launch pad anymore, though, which is good.
The new heating model is going to be my nemesis. I just barely (after trying like 10 variations) did a return mission from Jool. Burning off ~7 km/s of delta-V in Kerbin’s atmosphere is not trivial! I had an ablative shield, but it wasn’t enough unless I got the reentry profile juuuust right (and this was basically just luck). And on this last one, I could see the ablative shield thickness ticking down to 0… which it hit, but by then I was going slow enough that it didn’t matter. I get the feeling that an Eve mission is going to be way more difficult than anticipated…
I just got my first load of tourists back from a Mun flyby. I wouldn’t really call it a success, though, as the launch resulted in the orbiter spinning out of control for a while and the return required way too many orbits to decelerate after running out of fuel. So I’m probably going to hold off on another one for a while, until I’ve got some better parts.
If you ever play with the Real Solar System mod, that’s what a simple return from LEO is like. You have to pretty much nail the re-entry profile to survive. Also tilting the capsule to use lifting body effects to lift your trajectory just as you enter the portion of the atmosphere thick enough to brake significantly but before heating gets too intense is helpful.
I waited to do this until I had the Probodobodyne OKTO (which has SAS.) AND…discovered a bit of a problem. Even though it’s on top, and the parachute on top of it, the probe core can explode from re-entry heating well before the capsule is in any real danger. This effectively separates the capsule from the parachute, with resulting lithobraking. The latter turned out to be not survivable. Poor tourist.
ETA: I’ve been enjoying the new aero model, and the re-entry heating concerns. They’re forcing my piloting in-game to be more skillful, which honestly is very fun. I do start to wonder about the learning curve for newbies. Is it harder because I was ingrained in old habits, which I now need to break? Or is it genuinely harder? Not sure, myself.
Hmmm… I never had that particular problem. The top of the capsule seemed to be fairly well-protected behind the plasma stream. Solar panels do tend to explode if they’re too close to the edge, but I haven’t had problems beyond that.
Rescued a guy from Duna tonight. Forgot to collect science when I was there. Oops. But he did survive the ride home. He rode in a tin can but it had a fat 2.5 m ablative shield beneath him. No problems this time.
What difficulty level are you on (and which mode, for that matter)? I’m doing a “moderate” career mode. I initially tried hard, but discovered that it disables revert, so that was a big fat nope. Moderate seems like a decent challenge to me–I’m not able to fly through the career path in a handful of launches like I was before.
Need some science, though. Time to explore Jool, I think.
I’m finding that I get a bit of a tilt whether I want it or not–I haven’t figured out why yet. I don’t think I have an offset center of mass, but it seems like I must. Unless the ablative shield itself has a slight tilt to it? I has some minor downsides but I suppose it works better as it is.
I would have thought so, but even though I kept the thing butt-down and used a shallow re-entry angle, the probe core still exploded. (I tried several reloads but always had the same result, except for one time when the capsule did.) I put on a heat shield for subsequent launches and it stopped happening.
Mini-patch today: 1.0.1. Lots of welcome bug fixes & tweaks.
ETA: There’s one I do not understand at all:
- Fix for bug in FI dealing with unpacking vessels at analytic warp (>=1000) rates.
???