Thousands of hours in the game, and I never really thought of lower thrust in upper atmosphere as a good thing. Now I have to redesign, and see how it goes. For people who think that atmosphere is atmosphere, already at 30k it's almost gone and you can start using vacuum engines (after an afternoon with a spreadsheet, I made that my rule of thumb.) Thank you for the entertainment, and making me learn new stuff.
I always keep trying to come back to KSP when I bought it not too long ago, I always ended up copy and pasting Mun tutorials without figuring out the fundamentals of how to design a rocket and getting it to orbit. Discovering these tutorials opened up the game to me so much more!! Thank you so much :D
Great video. Love your heavy design - anything I was making capable of that load was ending up nearly twice as tall, and much more massive. I'm now saving so much cash per launch.
@@MikeAben I always wanted to be minimal, just lacked the experience and creativity. Major inspiration watching your vids...I'm currently going through all my craft (just some LKO lifters and Mun/Minmus Shuttles) and in some cases halving the launch mass with similar DV.
Hey I know this is unrelated to the video itself but I just wanna say thanks for all these tutorials, your math series especially led me into learning the math involved in calculating stuff in KSP and now I'm doing stuff like using phase angles to land back at the KSC or to rendezvous to another ship without using maneuver nodes! (actually a few minutes in you mention an episode about rendezvousing heh Though sadly my technique relies on an orbit of e~0 so I don't think it would work well for that super inclined and eccentric orbit) But hopefully I'll learn much much more in the future but it all started with your help.
These tutorials have been exactly what I was looking for. I recently started playing together with some other people again, I'm recommending these to everyone. Thanks a bunch! Your explanations are great.
17:36 So since you want people to share their ascent profiles, here is mine. I usually like to preform a maneuver known as an apogee kick. What you do is you use the first stage to get your apoapsis out of the atmosphere, then stage, and coast to the apoapsis and burn there until the periapsis is at about 80km. It is a lot easier to control what high you want your orbit to be without having to go to a high orbit and burn retrograde from both apoapsis and periapsis to lower it in the case that you happen to overshoot.
When I started to play maybe back in 2011 or 2012 (there was only the Mun and no other planets yet) that was my go-to technique, and after 5 years of not playing and coming back recently, I was surprised how much early turning was intuitive. Now I’m in love with SSTOs and there’s no help out of it, but that’s an other story :D
13:25 Something I've found incredibly handy around this point, although I'm not sure on whether it's more d/v efficient or not, is dipping my heading ever so slightly "below" the prograde marker to keep time to apoapsis from climbing so rapidly while at the same time bringing up the rate of my periapsis increase. Again, I can't comment too much on whether this extra step adds efficiency but it makes the final orbital kick take roughly 30m/s or less with my current rockets; extremely handy for Kerbalism where a lot of those booster engines only have one or two ignitions, since I can finish the orbit with RCS very easily and then use the leftover d/v to kick out to the Mun or Minmus!
You're completely right. I thought about mentioning that but decided to just stick to adjusting thrust. I'm also not sure as to the advantage in a stock game, but it is used in real launches where engines don't have unlimited throttle range and ignitions.
Might be a bit tedious but this is a great technique, definitely gonna try it out! Especially changing my vehicle design to match the technique, seems really useful! Especially because I admit I'm wasteful with my stages, I usually throttle back anyway on ascent but never thought to just build that into my rocket by either adding more fuel to make the TWR lower to match what I throttle to anyway, or to choose a more efficient engine that I will use at max thrust.
Final comment! to quickly shift to attitude hold from lock prograde or anything else, touble tap T. this toggles SAS on and off quickly setting you back to normal
Holding and releasing F is a good trick for the same if I'm following you. Just to be clear, in this video I didn't want to turn SAS off, but instead have it hold it's current attitude for a momment instead of following prograde. I may not have explained that clearly.
my only issue with scaling up rockets in the acoustics. The launch pads are 500m away from the facilities, compared to 5000m to the real KSC facilities. Sound would be a real issue in large LVs.
Thanks for showing this. as an early player i have struggled to get orbit with a reasonable amount of weight and thrust, having tried this approach now a few times with a minimum ( for me) liquid fuel load i find if i take it slow and easy i can reach a low orbit almost each time with fuel to spare . Not sure this will work for me with my current skill level for good circular higher orbits
Also, something that IS slightly related to this video, since it's related to rocket's ascending, pro tip for anyone trying to launch a rocket and it flipping: If you have flags placed on the top, that may be why. They cause a lot of drag for something so small, but I figured out on a flipping rocket that it was due to the flag by painstakingly testing by removing parts 1 by 1 and when I removed the flag it flew straight, no flips.
Try to keep your time to apoapsis about half that of your upper stage's burn time(with a low thrust upper stage) you can pitch to control it. Don't worry if your apoapsis goes above your target peripasis. Once you go past apoapsis, if your at your target apoapsis, pitch up and try and float at that point. If your higher, pitch up to control your sink rate so that you end up at your target altitude when you get into orbit. If you reach there to fast, don't worry. Just kill off your vertical speed and float! If you play with a mod like RealFuels-stock like me, it's advantagous to try and do single burn ascents because you have limited ignitions.
Thing is with pitching above or below the prograde or retrograde vector, I believe it leads to dv losses. I still do it a lot myself but I just take into account that fact. But I know burning away from retrograde is useful for landing rockets with super low TWR on other bodies. Like I think I saw a video once of someone landing on Tylo with a rocket with a TWR below 1, they just kept thrusting way above retrograde and it reduced their vertical speed enough to be able to finally land after a long time burning. EDIT Actually never mind maybe it was Kosmo-not's video "Kerbal Space Program - How to Land" where he did it on the Mun
yes, burning away from prograde often incurs delta v losses. But with a high efficiency, low thrust upper stage, it may be more efficient to fly that way, tossing the stage up higher than need be and bringing down the apoapsis and killing off your vertical velocity in the end. Saturn V did this. So do Atlas V and Delta IV. DCSS sometimes with a heavy payload may have a TWR of less than 0.2!
@@jmstudios457 Oh wow that low? But yea I guess this would be a good thing to test out in-game, same lander with a high thrust engine for one landing that's done normal and another that is less thrust but more efficient. :)
Thanks. The other thing real rockets have to deal with is not having the unlimited throttle range we have in KSP. A lot of this is how much, as a player, do you want to fiddle during ascent. What all this discussion is really doing is inspiring me to get back to my kOS launch script to make it do all this for me. I think the real advantage in a stock game is in realizing you can likely have a smaller, and likely more efficient, engine in your upper stage.
yeah. While RealFuels-stock deals with limited ignitions, on most engines you can still get down to 10% before they shut off. If your playing RO(or work on real rockets, in that case i'm probably not worthy enough to talk to you). A good example of this is the Titan series and you can see the second stage hit things like 5gs and also has to pitch way down.
Fabulous stuff, Mike! However, it's pretty hard to find these tutorials when searching your channel. Any chance you could take some time to sort your playlists to include some of these newer videos? I know I'd watch more if I could find the episode before/after easier.
Check my channel page. Everything is organized into playlists including links in the descriptions of each video. I honestly don't know what else to do in that department, but if you have suggestions, I'm listening.
@@MikeAben I think the ones I'm not seeing in a playlist are the newer Absolute (Not) Beginners videos. I checked your channel pretty thoroughly and don't see them anywhere. But trust me, I'll find them regardless because they are THAT good! Cheers.
@@BradBordessa Just to add, don't go to the playlist tab. I have no control as to how TH-cam displays this information. Everything you need is on the front page.
@@MikeAben I also think it's hard to find this tutorial series on your channel. You could create a custom section in youtube studio customization to display this playlist separately. I absolutely think that this playlist deserves more views, since it has become the best KSP beginners guide on TH-cam. Scott Manley is good, but you are better. Thank you for all the effort.
Instal sepatrons in retrograde position and they become the best stage deorbiting tool. I've seen your rockets and from my point of view they look a bit funny. I am used to taking 6 1.5 m long liguid fuel tanks slapping them symmetricaly on a central equally long core booster. The end result comes out very soviet.
Good info on the timing/thrusting... but I think you need to check what your dv savings were without the fairing weight, what does the VAB say your dv is without fairing?
So I have a quick question that is related but also outside the scope of this tutorial. With Kerbal Engineer are the TWR calculated to reflect where staging would happen in the atmosphere or is it like stock where it assumes you would be launching from the ground again?
It's like stock. In the VAB you can set the calculations to be based upon sea level atmosphere, vacuum, or at an altitude in between. In flight, the calculations are based upon the current atmospheric pressure. Edited to add: That said once you are above 30 or 40 km in altitude, the air is so thin that engine stats are very close to that in a vacuum.
Thousands of hours in the game, and I never really thought of lower thrust in upper atmosphere as a good thing. Now I have to redesign, and see how it goes. For people who think that atmosphere is atmosphere, already at 30k it's almost gone and you can start using vacuum engines (after an afternoon with a spreadsheet, I made that my rule of thumb.)
Thank you for the entertainment, and making me learn new stuff.
I always keep trying to come back to KSP when I bought it not too long ago, I always ended up copy and pasting Mun tutorials without figuring out the fundamentals of how to design a rocket and getting it to orbit. Discovering these tutorials opened up the game to me so much more!! Thank you so much :D
Great video. Love your heavy design - anything I was making capable of that load was ending up nearly twice as tall, and much more massive. I'm now saving so much cash per launch.
I'm kind of a minimalist in my builds.
@@MikeAben I always wanted to be minimal, just lacked the experience and creativity. Major inspiration watching your vids...I'm currently going through all my craft (just some LKO lifters and Mun/Minmus Shuttles) and in some cases halving the launch mass with similar DV.
Hey I know this is unrelated to the video itself but I just wanna say thanks for all these tutorials, your math series especially led me into learning the math involved in calculating stuff in KSP and now I'm doing stuff like using phase angles to land back at the KSC or to rendezvous to another ship without using maneuver nodes! (actually a few minutes in you mention an episode about rendezvousing heh Though sadly my technique relies on an orbit of e~0 so I don't think it would work well for that super inclined and eccentric orbit) But hopefully I'll learn much much more in the future but it all started with your help.
These tutorials have been exactly what I was looking for. I recently started playing together with some other people again, I'm recommending these to everyone. Thanks a bunch! Your explanations are great.
Up Next: Rendezvous Around Another Body - th-cam.com/video/I9_qwL0QO1s/w-d-xo.html
17:36 So since you want people to share their ascent profiles, here is mine.
I usually like to preform a maneuver known as an apogee kick. What you do is you use the first stage to get your apoapsis out of the atmosphere, then stage, and coast to the apoapsis and burn there until the periapsis is at about 80km. It is a lot easier to control what high you want your orbit to be without having to go to a high orbit and burn retrograde from both apoapsis and periapsis to lower it in the case that you happen to overshoot.
When I started to play maybe back in 2011 or 2012 (there was only the Mun and no other planets yet) that was my go-to technique, and after 5 years of not playing and coming back recently, I was surprised how much early turning was intuitive. Now I’m in love with SSTOs and there’s no help out of it, but that’s an other story :D
Good tutorial so far , these tutorials have really helped me get in to ksp ,keep it up
13:25 Something I've found incredibly handy around this point, although I'm not sure on whether it's more d/v efficient or not, is dipping my heading ever so slightly "below" the prograde marker to keep time to apoapsis from climbing so rapidly while at the same time bringing up the rate of my periapsis increase. Again, I can't comment too much on whether this extra step adds efficiency but it makes the final orbital kick take roughly 30m/s or less with my current rockets; extremely handy for Kerbalism where a lot of those booster engines only have one or two ignitions, since I can finish the orbit with RCS very easily and then use the leftover d/v to kick out to the Mun or Minmus!
You're completely right. I thought about mentioning that but decided to just stick to adjusting thrust. I'm also not sure as to the advantage in a stock game, but it is used in real launches where engines don't have unlimited throttle range and ignitions.
Great video! And good timing as well, I was just fiddling around with ascent profile for my early career game :)
Might be a bit tedious but this is a great technique, definitely gonna try it out! Especially changing my vehicle design to match the technique, seems really useful! Especially because I admit I'm wasteful with my stages, I usually throttle back anyway on ascent but never thought to just build that into my rocket by either adding more fuel to make the TWR lower to match what I throttle to anyway, or to choose a more efficient engine that I will use at max thrust.
Final comment! to quickly shift to attitude hold from lock prograde or anything else, touble tap T. this toggles SAS on and off quickly setting you back to normal
Holding and releasing F is a good trick for the same if I'm following you. Just to be clear, in this video I didn't want to turn SAS off, but instead have it hold it's current attitude for a momment instead of following prograde. I may not have explained that clearly.
my only issue with scaling up rockets in the acoustics. The launch pads are 500m away from the facilities, compared to 5000m to the real KSC facilities. Sound would be a real issue in large LVs.
The KSC is packed together rather tightly.
What's the physics behind why keeping time to apo around 1 minute is more fuel efficient?
Thanks for showing this. as an early player i have struggled to get orbit with a reasonable amount of weight and thrust, having tried this approach now a few times with a minimum ( for me) liquid fuel load i find if i take it slow and easy i can reach a low orbit almost each time with fuel to spare . Not sure this will work for me with my current skill level for good circular higher orbits
For high orbits, there is nothing wrong with inserting into low orbit first and then just raising it.
Awesome Explanation, Thank You!
Great video. Thanks for the examples.
Also, something that IS slightly related to this video, since it's related to rocket's ascending, pro tip for anyone trying to launch a rocket and it flipping: If you have flags placed on the top, that may be why. They cause a lot of drag for something so small, but I figured out on a flipping rocket that it was due to the flag by painstakingly testing by removing parts 1 by 1 and when I removed the flag it flew straight, no flips.
Wow! I did not realize that flags add drag. Thanks.
I wonder if that is intentional in the game or a bug? It seems like flags are supposed to be only a decal and not a solid object?
@@Bendigo1 It doesn't seem like they should add drag to me.
Try to keep your time to apoapsis about half that of your upper stage's burn time(with a low thrust upper stage) you can pitch to control it. Don't worry if your apoapsis goes above your target peripasis. Once you go past apoapsis, if your at your target apoapsis, pitch up and try and float at that point. If your higher, pitch up to control your sink rate so that you end up at your target altitude when you get into orbit. If you reach there to fast, don't worry. Just kill off your vertical speed and float! If you play with a mod like RealFuels-stock like me, it's advantagous to try and do single burn ascents because you have limited ignitions.
Thing is with pitching above or below the prograde or retrograde vector, I believe it leads to dv losses. I still do it a lot myself but I just take into account that fact. But I know burning away from retrograde is useful for landing rockets with super low TWR on other bodies. Like I think I saw a video once of someone landing on Tylo with a rocket with a TWR below 1, they just kept thrusting way above retrograde and it reduced their vertical speed enough to be able to finally land after a long time burning.
EDIT Actually never mind maybe it was Kosmo-not's video "Kerbal Space Program - How to Land" where he did it on the Mun
yes, burning away from prograde often incurs delta v losses. But with a high efficiency, low thrust upper stage, it may be more efficient to fly that way, tossing the stage up higher than need be and bringing down the apoapsis and killing off your vertical velocity in the end. Saturn V did this. So do Atlas V and Delta IV. DCSS sometimes with a heavy payload may have a TWR of less than 0.2!
@@jmstudios457 Oh wow that low? But yea I guess this would be a good thing to test out in-game, same lander with a high thrust engine for one landing that's done normal and another that is less thrust but more efficient. :)
Thanks. The other thing real rockets have to deal with is not having the unlimited throttle range we have in KSP. A lot of this is how much, as a player, do you want to fiddle during ascent. What all this discussion is really doing is inspiring me to get back to my kOS launch script to make it do all this for me. I think the real advantage in a stock game is in realizing you can likely have a smaller, and likely more efficient, engine in your upper stage.
yeah. While RealFuels-stock deals with limited ignitions, on most engines you can still get down to 10% before they shut off. If your playing RO(or work on real rockets, in that case i'm probably not worthy enough to talk to you). A good example of this is the Titan series and you can see the second stage hit things like 5gs and also has to pitch way down.
Fabulous stuff, Mike! However, it's pretty hard to find these tutorials when searching your channel. Any chance you could take some time to sort your playlists to include some of these newer videos? I know I'd watch more if I could find the episode before/after easier.
Check my channel page. Everything is organized into playlists including links in the descriptions of each video. I honestly don't know what else to do in that department, but if you have suggestions, I'm listening.
@@MikeAben I think the ones I'm not seeing in a playlist are the newer Absolute (Not) Beginners videos. I checked your channel pretty thoroughly and don't see them anywhere. But trust me, I'll find them regardless because they are THAT good! Cheers.
@@BradBordessa Go to the channel. Scroll down. It's the second playlist on the front page. It called Contract Guides.
@@BradBordessa Just to add, don't go to the playlist tab. I have no control as to how TH-cam displays this information. Everything you need is on the front page.
@@MikeAben I also think it's hard to find this tutorial series on your channel. You could create a custom section in youtube studio customization to display this playlist separately. I absolutely think that this playlist deserves more views, since it has become the best KSP beginners guide on TH-cam. Scott Manley is good, but you are better. Thank you for all the effort.
Instal sepatrons in retrograde position and they become the best stage deorbiting tool.
I've seen your rockets and from my point of view they look a bit funny. I am used to taking 6 1.5 m long liguid fuel tanks slapping them symmetricaly on a central equally long core booster. The end result comes out very soviet.
I prefer to tip the rocket only after it have reached 200m/s so I get out of the thick atmospehre faster and pass more time with higher ISP rating.
Good info on the timing/thrusting... but I think you need to check what your dv savings were without the fairing weight, what does the VAB say your dv is without fairing?
Good point.
thanks, I didn’t stress enough how helpful this video was to me, thank you for the effort.
I'm such a child, I had to pause it and laugh at this 0:21 😂😂
It does look slightly phallic, huh. 😏
Good, thanks a lot
So I have a quick question that is related but also outside the scope of this tutorial. With Kerbal Engineer are the TWR calculated to reflect where staging would happen in the atmosphere or is it like stock where it assumes you would be launching from the ground again?
It's like stock. In the VAB you can set the calculations to be based upon sea level atmosphere, vacuum, or at an altitude in between. In flight, the calculations are based upon the current atmospheric pressure.
Edited to add: That said once you are above 30 or 40 km in altitude, the air is so thin that engine stats are very close to that in a vacuum.
you adjust thrust during ascent? more boosters is easier
ppl i need help, my rocket always flips, because of aerodynamics, at speed 320m/s +. please help what should i do
Bigger or more tail fins is the most common solution.
18:49 didn’t know amaranth was a ksp nerd lmao
Love your videos but i have to be honest... I have to watch your vids at 1.25x to feel naturally paced haha
Fair enough. I do that a lot myself.
I've seen you ignore this principles and suffer the consequences many times
It all works. I'm probably to dependent on my kOS script which does this automatically.
first!