Project Bases to Land Planet Hopper Class star ships

[garyw]

I thought of doors. But an airlock with doors would have to be pretty quick when taking in a space craft traveling at almost 100 m/sec. Plus only one door can be opened at a time.

Why so fast?

 

[RisingFury]

So... you promised us screenshots for the weekend

 

[TCR_500]

Check page one for screenshots.

 

[insane_alien]

you promised us NEW screenshots

 

[TCR_500]

Oh. Oops. Ok, here they come. Just give me a few minutes to run up orbiter, make the shot, and upload it (screenshot is going to be of the lunar base).

Ok, here it is. Probably not the best view, but it gives a pretty good layout of the base. Note the solar panels between the landing pads.

 

[insane_alien]

so when are we going to see this planet hopper you keep banging on about?

 

[RisingFury]

Yea, nice pic of....... a DeltaGlider.... with a 50 pixel runway.


Dude!!! Come on!!!!!

 

[TCR_500]

Ok, I'll be back in a few minutes. Oh, and I found a bug on the lunar base. When I extended the runway to 2 kilometers, I accidentally put the start and end point in the same place. Unfortunately, I uploaded the bases to Orbithangar before I discovered the bug.

Change the z value of one of the ends of the runway to a negative value.

Ok. Here it is.

 

[ThatGuy]

When I extended the runway to 2 kilometers...

He used metric!

You going to put any buildings on this?

 

[TCR_500]

Eventually, yes. In fact, I'm going currently creating a pressurized dome for it. Sence the engine doesn't allow for buildings to have their own atmosphere, I'm building a planetary body to simulate the atmosphere. Except it's not going too well (yet).

 

[ThatGuy]

This has been bothering me for a while:
Sence=Since

 

[RisingFury]

Eventually, yes. In fact, I'm going currently creating a pressurized dome for it. Sence the engine doesn't allow for buildings to have their own atmosphere, I'm building a planetary body to simulate the atmosphere. Except it's not going too well (yet).

Well... you'll probably have to make your dome a vessel. You'd have to manually simulate the effects of drag and lift... overall, I don't think it's worth the effort.

 

[TCR_500]

Maybe it's not worth the effort, but I'm going to try to simulate the atmosphere. The alternative is to put an atmosphere on the Moon. Well, the Moon does have an atmosphere, but it's so thin that it doesn't effect a space craft's path or have any visual effect like the Earth's atmosphere.

 

[ex-orbinaut]

This has been bothering me for a while:
Sence=Since

:ditto:

....Break lockup is easier to accomplish with lower gravity, but most aircraft/spacecraft (at least that I know) don't have big enough break disks to lock up the wheels. However, since there is no atmosphere, I'd be more concerned with overheating the breaks than locking them up....

If you lock up the breaks on Earth, they wouldn't heat up either.
It's the friction in the break that causes the heat.

By the way, locking the breaks is not the most efficient way of breaking (even if your tires wouldn't blow up). If the wheels start to slide, the friction is lower then the force of static friction. If the wheels rotate and you're squeezing the breaks just hard enough for them not to lock up, your breaking force will be larger, however heating will be greater.

:thumbup:

The engineering definition of a brake is; a machine that converts motional energy into heat energy (based on that, we'd need another term for those magnetic brakes). When I first posted about brakes locking up, I assumed that everyone already knew this was not efficient. Seems that one of us did not....

That said, TCR 500's original comment about brake temperature is valid. It is for this reason that most aircraft brakes (for anything heavier than a Cessna) are "Maxorette" type, not unlike a "dry" version of a wet multi-disc clutch found in automatic gearboxes. They better deal with heat build.

The cooling problem in a vacuum, in reality, could possibly be solved by ducting nitrogen over the brakes, to disipate the heat. Or as already pointed out in the posts, using more advanced (maybe even superconductive?) material, like carbon fibre.

Now, the Moon landings. Maybe I have been getting the concept of what you are trying to do wrong... Are you attempting to touch down at ORBITAL PERIAPSIS VELOCITY? (1650 odd m/s?) :dry: You really will have a "Hopper" and a half. I thought you were at least slowing down to a "normal" touch down speed first, an assumption on which I based my own experiments. That really seems a bit ridiculous. I am sorry to say it.

An example: (1700 / (4 * 0.85)) * (1700 * 0.5) = 425000 meters (light the retros at 425 km from the base).

Why the 85% and not 100%? I use part of the retro thrust to generally arrest the rate of descent, by incrementally pitching the nose down as velocity bleeds off (I don't use the hovers untill the end). The average horizontal retro thrust component over the trajectory works out at about 85% of the total available....

Done some more tests with this. 93% to 96% of retro thruster acceleration is right for low angle approaches (avg nose pitch down over trajectory is 15º). The 85% was for my original high angle approaches, to arrest a high ROD.

 

[TCR_500]

Ok, at this point, I'm going to try the space craft aproach. First off, for a space craft, is the DLL a requirement or is it just considered "proper" to have one? It looks like a lot of a space craft can be controled with the CFG file alone.

I'll delete the planet I've built because there is no way that I can see a planet working (at this point).

---------- Post added at 02:24 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:23 PM ----------

By the way, 2 km is not very much of an extension from 1 mi.

 

[garyw]

You can use a DLL, a CFG or SC3 for vessel creation in Orbiter.

 

[TCR_500]

Ok, thanks.

One more question, can a CFG file deturmine the virtual cockpit controls or the controls on a 2D panel?

 

[Biscuit]

Have you bothered to even open any of the documentation?

 

[TCR_500]

Yes. I understand it perfectly until it gets into the DLL part. That's basicly all that's holding my starship back. I'm not sure where to put anything in the DLL.

 

[TSPenguin]

There are very fine tutorials in the tutorial section of this forum about making ships. I highly recommend you read them. If you need to make a DLL you should also take a look at the code included with the SDK, such as DG and ShuttlePB.