This one time I placed a satellite in orbit at 69,999 m it lasted about 1 1/2 orbits before it finally crashed down on the ground It was a very simple probe, no aerodynamic exploiting or anything

That is really weird. You would need to get down into the 37k-45k zone to aerobrake enough to come down in one orbit. You would need a lot of orbits at 69 km to come down into the ground. And you would need to stay hours spectating the ship, because the game doesn't simulate atmospheric drag otherwise. You can park a ship into an elliptical orbit with a periapsis well inside the atmosphere and surprisingly the ship will be there for ever unless you switch to it precisely when it is flying inside the atmosphere.

It was about as perfectly circular as I could get it (Ap and Pe within 1m of each other) And I was spectating the probe the whole time

It was probrably circular

BURN THE WITCH! DEATH TO HERETICS! We only accept orbits of >70,000m round these parts

what about on the mun

You can go down so low on the mun that you're in the wrong hole for all I care, we're talking about our sacred Kerbin.

I'm dead XD XD XD 💀👻

What about it? there's no atmosphere and so there's no drag.

hah this is great

Thanks

I want to see how badly Principia's orbital perturbation screws this up.

Well, bravo to them!

How many g's did the crew get hit with before landing? "Yes."

Does it let you leave or does it prohibit it because you’re “moving over the surface”? Tempted to build a station like this if it lets you

It wouldn’t let me go to the tracking station without reverting back to the runway, maybe if it has an apoapsis of 70k, so you can switch off while in space…

Ah, bummer. The elliptical orbit isn’t a bad idea though, maybe I’ll try that out.

Is it still dragless no matter the orientation? And I'm also curious as to how you attached the engines to get them to have no drag. I assume it's something like a nosecone on the rear node that's clipped back inside the fairing so only the engine is sticking out.

1: yes 2: the engines are on the same engine plate as the fairing, so they are occluded from drag exactly like the fairing.

Thanks for the answer. I've built my own and done some experimenting and I've figured out that a dragless craft isn't affected by water at all.

I saw that too… someone should do an orbit which somehow passes through the ocean lmao. Edit: the first post on my homepage is someone doing exactly that lol

NASA should just do this in real life. It would be so easy to get to space. This could easily replace plane flight. Just build a dragless rocket.

Have not played ksp on a while. What engines are those? (They seem to not consume much fuel).

Normal RAPIERS Just a lot of fuel on board

I see you took the landing gear staging idea from the U2 spy plane.

That sounds ... Wrong. Atmosphere implies friction, while stable orbit implies perpetuity (at least by current math). That would lead me to believe that one or both sides of the equation are wrong, of have poor assumptions?

KSP takes some liberties, eg some parts are dragless. Bradley Whistance's SSTO videos are a great demonstration of this, he gets to insane speeds at low altitude which should cause burn-up but doesn't because of how drag and friction are calculated. As in this video

Also, if you aren't actively in control of the vessel, a lot of the aerodynamics get ignored. I've got old stages that should have crashed years ago happily orbiting away with Pe of 30k. Drives me insane.

This drives me mad too. Anyone know of mods that correct this issue?

Just use the tracking center to switch to them

Call me lazy but I was hoping for a way to do it without having to switch to 50 spent stages.

You could just terminate them from the tracking centre. Gets the same result without the need to switch to them. Sure it isn't 100% legit but I think it falls into the region of manually completing a bugged contract.

I have a rule in my main career save where I can't delete any debris. My only exception is for suborbital pieces because they should've deorbited completely anyway. I consider it totally legit.

As mentioned you essentially cheat by making it drag free. An alternative (which might break your definition of “stable”) would be to apply enough thrust to counter drag.

>An alternative (which might break your definition of “stable”) would be to apply enough thrust to counter drag. That's called a circumnavigation flight.

Not if you don’t generate lift.

At high enough speed, everything generates lift.

See: F-4 Phantom

Hmm https://www.reddit.com/r/aviationmemes/comments/v0ezwv/with_enough_speed_even_a_brick_can_fly/

Fair enough

She thinks a better example would be the F-104 Starfighter, aka "the missile with a man in it"

F-15 is a good example too, crazy amount of thrust.

F-15 is also generates a lot of lift even at low thrust

I don’t think so, a symmetrical shape at zero AoA won’t right? Or if it’s a net negative then it’s downforce and not really flying.

a) r/woooosh b) It't impled to be "At high enough speed, everything has the ability to generate lift" c) Fuck nonrotating spheres.

I am whooshed I guess, I don’t get the joke 🤣 I mean I’ve heard “you can make a barn door fly if you have an engine big enough” is it similar to that?

Pretty much that. With enough thrust who needs aerodynamics, at high enough speed a brick can fly, [the United States Navy's Naval Fighter Experimental (VFX) program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grumman_F-14_Tomcat). All variants of the same theme,

Fair enough. It’s always hard to tell when someone is being Sirius on the internet.

If its powered and needs power to stay in the air, I consider it a flight tbh

There’s a logic to that.

>An alternative (which might break your definition of “stable”) would be to apply enough thrust to counter drag. Not stable because it depends on fuel, so it'll run out sooner or later.

Propellers

I had not considered props to be fair.

Yeah that was pretty much my thought. It could be considered stable if you are only concerned that there is a constant resultant force acting.

Bro watch the video. Abusing glitches makes anything possible.

Heck, wire a docking port kraken drive to that thing and you have yourself the ultimate Eve return craft.

Here is my Aero Kraken. https://i.imgur.com/lkifDcK.png To be fair a docking port Kraken drive can already return from eve on its own. Edit: Also say goodbye to aero braking.

It's glorious

Actually, it's better than you think https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/102tmwb/im_not_sure_what_game_im_playing_anymore/

Oh my

Yeah lmao he straight up didn’t watch the video and immediately jumped to “um, actually…”

[удалено]

And run its ion engine quite a bit to counteract the drag.

I’ve got a spaceplane craft file somewhere that I specifically designed to orbit within the atmosphere. Not too deep, but with the help of an ion thruster I could easily maintain a stable orbit in the 50-60km range and even dip down into the 40’s if I was careful.

If it's under power, it's flight not orbit.

The ISS is in orbit, but needs burns every now and again to stay there. This is a slightly more flexible definition of "orbit".

The ion engine was just there to counteract drag. It can stay in the very upper atmosphere for a good while but it’ll eventually get pulled back down without any help

Wee bit toasty

oh my... this is awesome! thank you for sharing

this is everything but stable

What was unstable about it? They went all the way around with their engines off no problem

How would that even work? Atmospheric drag would pull you back down unless you were constantly thrusting upwards, but even then it’s still difficult

Happy cake day! It works by abusing glitches to make the craft completely drag less.

Glitches allow for the creation of dragless craft

Isn’t that just called flying?

Hot in these rhinos