Mars Pathfinder
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Venus tour with all parts Recovered.
- Thread starter SFSAbhishek
- Start date
James Brown
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James Brown
Thinker/INTJ/investigator/Natural Science lover
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Mars Pathfinder
«★★» CMDR «★★» // PT // FartFinder
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James Brown
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bobbblair123
ሁልጊዜ ንጹህ የውስጥ ሱሪዎችን ይልበሱ
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Congrats SFSAbhishek , that's a first one indeed. 
For those who are not keen on maths but still want to go into delta-V calculations, I have an interesting tool, the ship design assistant. It's a spreadsheet in which you enter the characteristics of your ship, and it calculates everything for you. I use it a lot myself. Here is the link:
SFS 1.5 - Ship Design Assistant
It's in read-only mode. That's intentional, otherwise several persons could use it at the same time. Please make your own copy to use it.
Here is how to use it:
View attachment 53237
Firstly, you may only be interested in the upper part. The tables below are used for more specific calculations. You have to fill the grey tables, the blue tables show the results.
Engine configuration:
In the up left corner, you have to specify which engines you use, and how many of each:
View attachment 53238
It's done that way because the specific impulse is tricky to calculate when you mix several types of engines. The blue table below shows the characteristics of your engine configuration.
There's also a colum labelled "unused". You may want to use that one when you don't use all engines.
That would be the case typically for a starship, that has 3 vacuum engines, and 3 ground engines. Which could be 3 Frontier and 3 Hawk ingame. While navigating in space, you'll only use the Frontier engines. In this case, you would enter "3" in the "Unused" column to tell that you don't use the Hawk engines. The assistant won't take them into account to calculate thrust, fuel consumption and specific impulse, but it will still account for their mass.
Ship specifications:
Then, in the up right corner, you have to specify how much fuel your ship has at its disposal, and the mass of all other parts (anything that is not an engine or a fuel tank):
View attachment 53239
Then you have everything you want to know in the blue table below, especially the delta-V.
Example:
As an example, the sheet has been filled for this ship:
View attachment 53240
- Engines: it uses a single Valiant. In the engine table, just enter "1" for the number of Valiant engines, and leave the rest to 0.
- Fuel: 20 tons
- Remaining mass: we have 1 capsule (4 tons), 1 separator (0.4 tons) and 1 parachute (0.4 tons), so that's 4.8 tons.
And that's all!
Note that this is meant to be an assistant, not a full calculator. You can only calculate the characteristics of one stage at once. It's possible to find some more advanced caluculators in this sense (Horus Lupercal has one for example). But it's practical to make a few tweaks while being very simple. ("What if I add an engine? More fuel?"...)
For those who are not keen on maths but still want to go into delta-V calculations, I have an interesting tool, the ship design assistant. It's a spreadsheet in which you enter the characteristics of your ship, and it calculates everything for you. I use it a lot myself. Here is the link:
SFS 1.5 - Ship Design Assistant
It's in read-only mode. That's intentional, otherwise several persons could use it at the same time. Please make your own copy to use it.
Here is how to use it:
View attachment 53237
Firstly, you may only be interested in the upper part. The tables below are used for more specific calculations. You have to fill the grey tables, the blue tables show the results.
Engine configuration:
In the up left corner, you have to specify which engines you use, and how many of each:
View attachment 53238
It's done that way because the specific impulse is tricky to calculate when you mix several types of engines. The blue table below shows the characteristics of your engine configuration.
There's also a colum labelled "unused". You may want to use that one when you don't use all engines.
That would be the case typically for a starship, that has 3 vacuum engines, and 3 ground engines. Which could be 3 Frontier and 3 Hawk ingame. While navigating in space, you'll only use the Frontier engines. In this case, you would enter "3" in the "Unused" column to tell that you don't use the Hawk engines. The assistant won't take them into account to calculate thrust, fuel consumption and specific impulse, but it will still account for their mass.
Ship specifications:
Then, in the up right corner, you have to specify how much fuel your ship has at its disposal, and the mass of all other parts (anything that is not an engine or a fuel tank):
View attachment 53239
Then you have everything you want to know in the blue table below, especially the delta-V.
Example:
As an example, the sheet has been filled for this ship:
View attachment 53240
- Engines: it uses a single Valiant. In the engine table, just enter "1" for the number of Valiant engines, and leave the rest to 0.
- Fuel: 20 tons
- Remaining mass: we have 1 capsule (4 tons), 1 separator (0.4 tons) and 1 parachute (0.4 tons), so that's 4.8 tons.
And that's all!
Note that this is meant to be an assistant, not a full calculator. You can only calculate the characteristics of one stage at once. It's possible to find some more advanced caluculators in this sense (Horus Lupercal has one for example). But it's practical to make a few tweaks while being very simple. ("What if I add an engine? More fuel?"...)
Altaïr
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Checked out your SDA. Me like. It's fun to use and proved something I already knew in the back of my brain. I wildly over power secondary stages.
In practice, unless you have a constraint in terms of TWR, the ideal delta-V for a stage is around 2000-2500 m/s. If you start hitting 3000 m/s and above, you may consider adding a new stage because from this point you'll need to add a lot of fuel for little delta-V added.
