Flat Out Gameplay

[Arabella Kochanski]

Iwant to know the order the game uses to calculate cooldown reduction on skills. Does the game calculate first the %CDR from items and then apply the flat CDR from mods? Or is it the other way around? If flat CDR applies first then it will make %CDR less effective, right?

Mechjeb has problems landing on Gilly because gravity is idiotic low. You can see some of this on Minmus with an high TWR lander.

Your lander is a bit high for the distance between legs but it should be plenty of flat enough places.

My tips is to use mechjeb to show landing spot, you can also mark the spot you want to land on.

Now burn towards the spot so you downward speed in 10 m/s, you will need to do sideways burns to get the landing spot correctly, if you want you can increase downward speed to 20 m/s or a bit more.

Turn around so engines point down, 100-200 meter above surface reduce speed to 2-4 m/s for touchdown, on touchdown use rcs to push down toward surface.

You have landed.

Dropping the legs entirely and just use grinders or other high impact tolerant metal parts might be the best way. Optionally use the legs only for landing. Using plane landing wheels is also an option. This has the benefit that you can move the base with an small engine on the side.

This is pretty much my standard base design.

It has an small science lander on top who is an scaled down version.

Wheels are only used to move the base, typically up to stuff who need refueling. Then I stop I retract them.

As its no spring and dampeners base is very stable even after warp while drilling.

O.K. Jokes aside: what works for me is to: a) "land" at really low speed (try to...) And b) once I'm more ore less down and wobble around on the landing legs, I use RCS to push me downwards to the ground to dampen the oscillations. I.e. burn downwards when the navball shows the prograde marker.

-% rr stacks with itself indefinitely. Flat RR only highest value applies (global flat-manticore, elemental flat - elemental storm and physical flat- Break morale). There are also some items that have various flat RR

What about stacking same type of RR, all rules are save:

Works only strongest of Reduction of each type; (Strongest of X and Strongest of Z)

All other different source debuffs stacks. (All Y-s are summed over)

Viper is activated by weapon damage. Skills that deal %weapon damage and default attacks will apply the RR from the last star, modified by the % of weapon damage (up to 100% power). As stated earlier, fiend would trigger it, but at a much lower power level because it is less than 100% of weapon damage, but cadence would only trigger it at listed value, not 400% of listed value or whatever.

I understand your frustration with the sometimes sparse descriptions of tricky inner workings of the system, but I find that there is some fun to be had in hunting down the truth about this mechanic or that mechanic. Plus, if you have questions about specific mechanics, the forum can help you out

It's either the COM or not enough authority/large enough Horizontal and Vertical stabilizers. Also your angle of attack does definitely matter, too shallow or too steep and aero forces might very well take what looks stable into a spin abruptly as you plunge into thicker and thicker air.

Since you say it's during reentry, a common problem with planes is that your COM often moves as you burn off fuel. So when you check to make sure your COL is behind the COM in the VAB/SPH, make sure that's the case both with fuel full and with fuel empty.

@Cloakedwand72, could you please post a pic of your plane? Ideally in the SPH with CoM displayed. (Especially if you could do so with empty tanks, i.e. mimicking the plane's condition on reentry, so we can see where your CoM is when you're not carrying a heavy fuel load.)

If your CoM is in the rear, then that's almost certainly your problem right there. It's very difficult to make any craft aerodynamically stable if the CoM is near the rear; that's like trying to throw a badminton birdie backwards. The massive end wants to be in front. So you very probably need to design your craft with the CoM farther forward.

Yeah, the biggest problem is that your CoM is near the rear. That enormous, lightweight fuselage poking out in front of the CoM is your problem-- it's gonna be very hard to keep that pointing forward. Anything you can do to put something heavy farther forward, to move the CoM nearer the front, would help.

The real problem, I expect, is the engine. You've got a big heavy engine in the rear-- and if the rest of the plane is basically a bunch of empty fuel tanks and empty cargo bays, then there's just not much that has significant weight to it.

One design strategy that some folks use to combat the "heavy engine in the rear" problem is to build a more Skylon-like design. Instead of having a big heavy engine on the rear of the fuselage, have a pair of engines mounted amidships, on the left and right sides of the fuselage. Since this brings the heavy engine mass forwards, it really shifts the CoM and can help with aerodynamic stability.

@Cloakedwand72 The tank that's sitting at the CoL can be swapped out. Use one half the size, and then put another half tank in front of the cargo bay. You may also want to set the priority on the front adapter tank so it drains last.

Anyways: while the Center of Lift is behind the CoM, the Center of Drag is not. At least not if the craft have any deviation from surface prograde (the nose of the craft is quite a bit of extra exposed surface to the airflow ahead of CoM)

You may probably find something youlike at kerbalx and the spacecraft exchange sub-forum. But give us some details about what tech is available and the performance required (in particular, payload and orbital height) and we may come up with something.

Point one: any spaceplane that big is hard. I've certainly made hundreds of planes at this point, and it would likely take me the better part of a day to make something that big work, unless I'm going with a design I already know works from having done it before. So I would recommend starting less ambitious: first figure out how to make a plane ol' plane based on Mk 1 parts, with one or two engines, then figure out how to give it enough power to get to orbit, then make a bigger one, and then work your way up from there. As a rule of thumb, if it's 120 tons is a beast.

Second, as to your design specifically -- there's a reason planes have vertical stabilisers and rudders. Stick a nice big one on way back and see if it helps. Those turned-up wingtips aren't doing anything to stabilise it because they're so close to the centre of lift, the rudder needs to be well aft of it.

BIG factor here. Take this advice especially. Your craft is most likely suffering from poor yaw stability. Your center of mass being so far to the rear means that you need a large vertical stabilizer, as far back as possible.

A spaceplane to carry an Mk3 cargo bay of payload to LKO doesn't need that much engine, so you could definitely benefit from switching to smaller ones. Part of your fuel/thrust is being wasted just to lift all that engine mass up to orbit.

But who says we have to be efficient? KSP offers us the fun opportunity to be playful and extravagant, and try out all the what ifs we can come up with. I really like the looks of your concept, so I gave it a test run to see how to make this a viable -and safely returnable- cargo vehicle.

I couldn't make out from the screenshots how you constructed the boosters, so I used a simple twin-boar stack for that. The flat spin was solved quite easily just by adding the vertical stabilizer with an elevon 3 for rudder. To get the CoM more forward without having to ditch the Rhino, I replaced the nosecone by an Mk1-2 command pod, and split the Mk3 LFO tank moving half of it in front of the cargo bay. This allows manned missions as well, and the docking port on the nose means docking to stations becomes an option.

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