Motorsheep

Yeah okay those terms did ring a bell but... Jesus Christ where do I even start? As to the distances... they're going to be VERY short. Planets are close together and they're tiny and dense, and gravity falloff is accordingly fast. You can basically reach escape velocity from Earth in a matter of two seconds of full thrust. Stable orbits around moons are just about doable, but no more than that. They won't be a big part of the gameplay. (Currently, Earth is only about 80 times larger than the player ship is tall, and the whole solar system is 60 times "Earth"'s diameter, but that's probably bound to change a few more times as gameplay elements progress). Anyway. The basic approach would be to create a coordinate system relative to the SoI's position and then plot a function displaying my current orbit with the help of Kepler's laws? I've skimmed over the Wikipedia article on Kepler orbits.. Gotta say... This looks a whole lot more complicated than I hoped

Yeah, so I would have liked to post this in the Addons section because I'm looking for help from coders and/or math geeks, but since it isn't really KSP-related, I decided on this place. Mods, please do move the topic if you feel it would fit in a more specialized section. Anyway. Here goes: I'm making a little 2D arcade space game that basically puts "Lunar Lander"-like elements in a tiny solar system with orbiting planets and moons. Fuel efficiency is obviously going to be an important gameplay point, and so I want players to use gravity assists etc. For that, I need to be able to show predicted trajectories. And that's where it gets complicated. I'm using Game Maker, and the tutorials, discussions or even marketplace scripts that I found on the topic rely on Game Maker's built-in physics. And those don't help me because obviously I don't have a constant "down" direction for gravity to pull in. I've only got relatively basic skills in GML (and I know even less about other languages) and while I'm not exactly sh!t at maths, high school was a long time ago. So I'm looking for help creating (or finding somewhere in the GM marketplace) something that will allow me to graphically display a projected trajectory. Since I'm not using GM's built-in physics, so far it's all just simple vector addition (current veloctiy + sun gravity + current grav-well gravity). But I have no idea how to draw a prediction, since my gravity direction changes constantly, and I have multiple sources of gravity AND distance thresholds at which they become active, like SOI's in KSP. Somehow I think that a frame-by-frame prediction of next x and next y over thousands of frames would kill most computers running this game. So. Is there anyone out there who... a) can point me to someone who knows this kind of stuff (the person/people who made MechJeb maybe?) b) can help me find something on GM Marketplace that would do the trick c) can help me directly with coding this d) ...has done this before and could help me port it into GML? Thanks very much.

This is probably a dumb question and would be answered by reading the material thoroughly, but it's late and I'm tired and counting on the kindness of the forum folks, especially since I usually figure everything out for myself and hardly ever ask questions: Is my capsule supposed to go supersonic in free fall? I just got back into KSP after a long break and started off with the latest FAR installed right away. Now in free fall, my MK1 capsule will easily reach supersonic speeds and keep accelerating right down to sea level. This makes for some very interesting parachute brake maneuvers going from 400+m/s to 8m/s within seconds, subjecting poor Jeb to 15+g's in the process. I can't imagine that it's working as designed for me?

Looking through my mod list, I realized I had some stuff loaded that wasn't even 0.25 compatible anymore. I guess that was the reason, because after disabling all of my mods, loading the game once, and then loading all the mods I needed again, TAC LS now works.

So I just installed this, and while the in-line recycler parts show up, the rest of them don't. The mod works, Kerbals consume resources and everything, but I get no supply containers, no tanks, nothing anywhere in the part tree. Any ideas as to why this may happen? ps I'm using module manager 2.5.1

I have no idea why, but after starting up the game today, the mod worked.

Are there any smaller parts available, or would it be possible to scale the Mechjeb case down? I'm having a hard time installing mechjeb on my interplanetary probe bodies.

Yes, that is what I did. I've used this mod before, and i'm running a number of other mods, so I guess you could say I'm familiar with installing mods for KSP. Only when it didn't work after several tries with fresh flights did I decide to even look at the folder structure. It just struck me as odd because I was used to seeing .dll files in the "plugins" subfolder, that's why I was asking. The reason why I suspect RasterPropMonitor to interfere with this mod is that RPM has its own extra navball and uses modulemanager, so I think it's possible that RPM adds its own version of the stock navball as well, thus overriding any changes that the docking alignment indicator made. (This may very well be completely untrue - I don't know the first thing about programming)

I used to use this some time before science was a thing, and it always helped me a lot. Now I can't, for the life of me, get the marker to show up. Is it correct that the dll goes into Gamedata\[modname], as the folder structure in the download suggests, and not gamedata\[modname]\plugins\ ? Are there any mods this is known to conflict with? The only one I have that I can imagine to cause a problem is RasterPropMonitor. Unfortunately I can't verify it because KSP goes insane when I uninstall RPM and doesn't let me enter buildings anymore in my saved game.

Umm...where in the tech tree will I find the Kerbal Engineer? I have unlocked most everything up until the level that has nuclear engines in it. I am, however, missing the "flight control" branch. Is that where it will come up?

I'd love to be able to disable flow from RCS tanks so I don't always end up with empty tanks on my lander after I've used RCS to turn my larger rockets over in space.. edit: ah, I see tijaiha has mentioned the issue before.

Still using the previous version, so this might be obsolete, but I also don't want to go to all the trouble and try again until it happens again: Does the UI disappear randomly for other people, too, including the on/off button? This has happened to me twice now. Funny enough, I made it to Eve without problems, but the plugin crashed on the same craft during a course correction while on my way to Duna. Is it possible that this plug-in doesn't get along with MechJeb?

This might be a dumb question, but how do i use the winch? Ah, I suppose I don't, since you probably can't do a cable. So, powered landing, I guess.

Nah, if you wait for the SOI switch, it will give you your Sol orbiting speed, which will be around 9km/s. So the figure you're using should be right. I've never used the figure though. Just did it like with orbital rendezvous - burn until your apoapsis is about the same as Duna's orbital radius. If the trajectory prediction doesn't turn out a Duna encounter, then you mis-timed your burn. So far, I haven't managed to get into another planet's SOI. I find it incredibly hard to eyeball the angles, and I don't have a protractor at hand... also, you might just be orbiting Kerbin in the wrong direction.

Ah, I thought by "map" you meant how the Kethane is distributed over the planets. But you were talking about your satellite maps. Duh. Well yeah, that would be cool if those could be made permanent.