Snark

How is this different from the various decouplers and separators that KSP already has? They do exactly this, right? That sounds exactly to me like "attach an external tank hanging under the fuselage with a radial decoupler." That's exactly what they're for. How is this suggestion different?

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I've never actually heard of Desmos before, so I just pasted your question verbatim into ChatGPT, and here's what it produced: I have no knowledge to be able to comment on the correctness or otherwise of this answer. I merely present what the bot said. I then asked it a follow-on question, ...and here's what it said:

Yeah, IK is hard. You can get a back-and-forth control via keys like you describe by binding a control axis, but that's at the joint level and won't give you the IK that you really want.

Hello, and welcome back! (We've taken the liberty of moving your post to the right place for this sort of question.) Well, for one thing, there's a little mod that I wrote which somewhat simplifies robotic arm control... but it's not inverse kinematics at all, so I'm not sure whether it's what you're looking for or not. Caveat: it's not under active develoemt and at this point it's unlikely I'll be going back to add stuff to it, fix bugs, etc. AFAIK there's no reason why it shouldn't work on current KSP, but I haven't actually run it myself since KSP 1.8 or thereabouts, so I don't actually know that for sure.

Good point, and thanks for reporting! What I observe in a sandbox game is: science instruments always initially blink The craft remembers what science it actually currently has on board. So, for example, if I take a reading with my gravioli detector, it stops blinking and shows that it's full of science. And if I have that particular science on board somewhere (for example, collected to the command pod), it doesn't light up. However, the game doesn't remember that "this science has been previously collected from another mission", so if I recover the craft and then launch another one, the new craft will be blinking again even though I've already recovered that measurement. #1 and #2 are behaving exactly as designed, and exactly the same as in a career game. #3 is, I believe, the issue that you're running into? So, that's not exactly... intentional, per se, but it's also not obvious what the correct design would be. The issue is that the way this works in a career game (so that a new ship will "remember" that a previous ship recovered a particular science result) is that a career game has a built in "science repository" that remembers all that stuff, and this repository simply doesn't exist in a sandbox game. The game literally has no memory of what any previous spacecraft might have done. So, there are basically four options: Live with it. As a workaround, if the science experiment is annoying you with its blinking, just go ahead and take a measurement on that craft in order to shut up the blinking. Disable science indicators in sandbox games. Just disable them entirely, so they don't light up, don't blink, don't do anything. It would be very easy to program this, and would "solve" your issue with #3 above. Unfortunately, I don't view this as a reasonable fix, because it would also completely break features #1 and #2, which is undesirable. Implement a custom "science store" in sandbox just for this purpose. Doable, I suppose... but it's a fair bit of code, would be tedious to debug and make sure all edge cases are handled, and seems to me that the amount of complexity it would introduce is not worth it just to solve what I consider to be an edge case. (Especially since KSP2 is coming out in a couple of weeks and I'm not motivated to make large changes to my KSP1 mods at this point.) Add a custom setting for the mod so that the user can, for example, choose between the current behavior, or the "completely disable science indicators in sandbox" option. Also doable, but again, complexity, plus it's playing guessing games with what most users are likely to want, which I'd prefer not to do. Given the above, I'm mainly inclined to go with the "live with it" option at this point. (Though I'll certainly keep this issue in mind, if I end up writing an IndicatorLights equivalent mod in KSP2, depending on how that game eventually ends up dealing with science. Thank you for raising the point!) Funny you should ask that! As it happens, a few months ago I actually thought of this myself, and started to implement "core heat" indicators for drills and ISRU units. The code shouldn't be complex. However, once I got it to a semi-working state, it behaved oddly and after sinking a few hours of time debugging it, I kinda lost interest and wandered away. I'm not saying I'll never do this, but with KSP2 coming out in just a couple of weeks, my interest in sinking substantial time into my KSP1 mods is a bit low at this point. Time will tell. Thank you for the suggestion, though!

Moving thread to Kerbal Network, since this is about the forums rather than about KSP itself.

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You can see their little green faces in flight view! <squees quietly> Ahem. Anyway, I dunno whether this may have been observed elsewhere before, but some things I note here: I like the sun reflection off the water. The shader makes it look "wavy". Substantial improvement over KSP1. The clouds are casting shadows on the surface. Yay! \o/

Some content has been removed. No worries, nobody's done anything wrong, but please understand that whatever you see here on the forum is always free to download. The KSP forum doesn't permit posting (or discussion) of paid content. Please confine discussion here in the forum to the free download available from the OP of this thread. Thank you. (And thanks to @blackrack for making such amazing mods!)

So, the question's already been answered ("no"), but in the (possibly futile) hope of forestalling further questions in this vein: For any question of the form, "Can you do <obnoxious thing that would confuse fellow forum users and/or substantially complicate moderating>," the answer is always going to be "no".

"you will not go to space today"

Sure. Just don't read the KSP2 section of the forum until launch day. It's less than three weeks away, anyway.

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I can't really speak to points #1 and #3, since I don't know any more than anyone else about that (though just speaking personally, I'm not especially concerned, for reasons that are probably not of interest to anyone but me, so I won't bother going into them). However, regarding this point: Citation needed. Based on my experience creating mods for the original KSP for the past 8 years or so, my expectation is precisely the opposite. I expect modding KSP2 to be great, and I don't expect mods to be breaking all the time, and I look forward to making new mods as we progress through the roadmap and new features become available. My rationale: When I first started modding KSP, the game was still on 1.0.x. Now we're on 1.12.x. During that time, they've added tons of stuff to the game, including pretty big sweeping architectural changes such as when they made everything localizable. And you know what? As a modder, it's been an incredibly seamless experience. Whenever a new major KSP release came out... my mods almost never broke, at all, even across multiple major KSP releases. As in, I didn't need to touch one line of code, or even recompile. The same darn zip file just continued to work. And on the (very) few occasions where I did need to make an update-- such as when KSP shifted the major version of the .NET platform it used-- the amount of work I needed to do to get the mods going again was trivially lightweight, and I was back up and running with a new published version of the mod within a day or two, at most. In short: KSP version updates did not inconvenience me as a modder, and did not inconvenience the users of my mods, either. They didn't break. They just kept working. (I did occasionally have a mod here and there that became obsolete, because I wrote the mod to address some shortcoming in the game, and then those rascally devs went and fixed the game so that my mod was no longer necessary, but I view that as a good sort of "problem" to have.) In fact, AFAICT, this was true of almost everyone's mods, not just my own: I use other people's mods too, and those generally kept working after a KSP update. The reason for that is that the new updates mostly added new stuff rather than changing how old stuff worked, and the engineers-- who are competent-- made a reasonable good-faith effort not to hork all the mods. Because they know mods are important, and they know lots of users use them. In fact: having a deep roadmap for KSP2, with big additions planned, makes me more confident about the stability of modding rather than less. Why? Because if the engineers know ahead of time that they're going to be making great big major additions to the game, they have a lot of incentive to architect it in a way that is not going to force a complete rewrite of the architecture every time. They don't want to rewrite all their code any more than modders do. (Source: have been working as a professional software engineer for 25 years.) This gives them a reason to plow effort into cleanly modular separation of code. If they don't have to rewrite their code, it makes it less likely that modders will, either. In summary: For me to assume that KSP2 is going to be a rougher ride than KSP1 was in that regard, I would have to grant all of the following assumptions: That the KSP2 team doesn't care about modding. That the KSP2 team hasn't learned any useful lessons from observing the KSP1 experience. That the KSP2 engineers are not good at their jobs. I believe none of those to be the case. I believe that they really get it when it comes to modding. I believe that the team gets it, and I believe that Nate Simpson gets it. I mean, really gets it. I've met the guy in person and had a chance to interview him one-on-one for half an hour, back in the day, and he's one of the few people I've ever met who's more of a raving KSP fanboi than I am-- he loves this game so much it's palpable, he practically vibrates when he talks about it, and this does not strike me as someone who's going to drop the ball. I asked pointed questions about modding, and it was clear that they want the KSP2 modding experience to be even more amazing than KSP1, and I believe them. I could be wrong, of course-- I don't know what the future holds any more than you do. But "it'll be fine" feels to me like a pretty confident assumption, based on having been there and done that with modding KSP1 over most of the past decade, and nothing I've seen or heard from the KSP2 team has shaken that confidence. So anyway, those are my reasons for thinking that. Out of curiosity, what are your reasons for thinking it'll be problematic?

There is not. SRBs are solid fuel, which can't be pumped. Their two main limitations: once activated, they can't be turned off or throttled down no fuel transfers It's because of balancing. Almost certainly the reason you're having these problems is that you've designed your shuttle in a way that is aerodynamically unstable. Your CoM (center of mass) is too far to the back of the craft. It's basically impossible to "fix" aerodynamically unstable craft with RCS thrusters or reaction wheels, so don't bother even trying: the aero forces due to the instability are orders of magnitude stronger than RCS and reaction wheels, so they're pretty much useless for this purpose. In general, almost certainly what you need to do to fix this is to move your center of mass forward. It would be easier to offer specific advice if you could post a screenshot of your craft-- ideally, one that shows the CoM without the SRBs attached. (For example, in the VAB, temporarily take the SRBs off, and then turn on the CoM display via the button in the bottom left corner. That would help to answer the question of what's going on. It's worth noting that very probably the reason your craft is unstable and won't fly right-- i.e., the reason the CoM is too far in the rear-- is precisely because you tried to build a craft that looks like the US space shuttle. This is a well-known issue that a lot of players have gotten bitten by before you. The problem is this: On the one hand, KSP makes it really easy to build a craft that looks just like the US space shuttle. Mk3 cockpit, Mk3 fuselage parts, Big-S delta wings, Big-S tail fin, Mk3 engine plate, Vector engines. On the other hand, if you build one out of those parts... it tends to be horrifically unstable. This is because, first, the CoM ends up way in the back, because that's where the heavy engines are, and, second, all the control surfaces are right back there too, which makes them useless because they have no lever arm to work with. What it boils down to is, you can build a craft that either looks like the US space shuttle, or can actually fly. It's very difficult to do both. If you could post a screenshot, though, we might be able to offer some concrete suggestions about how you might be able to improve your flight characteristics.

It's also worth noting that not only do the forum and the Discord serve different purposes, but they also tend to appeal to different people. And that's fine, and does not in any way indicate that one platform or one type of person is somehow "better" than the other. They're just different, is all. For example, I'm pretty much the epitome of what you might call a "forum person". I like it here. It's my comfort zone. That's because I don't like engaging in rapid-fire realtime; I like to read detailed points, mull them over, consider a response, and then answer in detail. It's just how my brain works. I've tried stepping into the Discord, and almost immediately my head explodes and I have to make a beeline for the exit. Clearly the Discord is not the place for me, and I doubt I'll be spending time there. But that doesn't mean it's bad. It just means that it's not for me, just as the IRC wasn't the place for me back in the day. When I was in the Discord, I observed many people happily chattering away, clearly enjoying themselves, and they appeared to be in their element. Clearly, it was serving their needs quite well, and providing them a mode of engagement that works for their brains. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them may have tried the forum and found it stilted, slow, or constraining. Different people like different things. Some, like me, will prefer the forum. Others will prefer the Discord. Some folks may be comfortable with both, and use both. It's fine if you like one platform over the other. I sure do. But I sure hope folks don't assume that the platform they personally like is somehow "better", or that they're somehow better than folks who prefer the other platform.

The forum is very good for doing forum things. The Discord is very good for doing chat-type things. They're apples and oranges, and debating which is "better" is like asking which is better, a pencil or a screwdriver. They serve different purposes, and neither is a viable substitute for the other. ^ This. Not gonna happen, the Discord is not even vaguely a substitute for the forums. The forums are a going concern, shall continue to be so, and will continue to fill the role that they've done up to now. (Also, bear in mind that the Discord's not even particularly new. KSP already had a chat platform on IRC, and it was well used for a long time, it just gradually kinda tapered off. The Discord is just an updated, more modern platform as a replacement for IRC. It's not a replacement for the forum, nor is it intended to be.) Not sure how the idea of "oh noes the forum is going to go away" even got traction, here-- it's not happening, and nobody who actually knows anything has said it would. So you can rest easy on that score.

OK, once I got started on hamster album covers for various music genres, I just couldn't stop. Classical: Death metal: 60s folk: Hip-hop: Ska: Country: Punk: Gospel: Hillbilly folk: Reggae: R&B:

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Much content has been removed and/or redacted. Kindly stay on topic, refrain from personal content, and do not get into politics. C'mon, people, you know better than this. Thank you for your understanding.

Some content has been redacted and/or removed, due to making things overly personal. Folks, please try to confine your discussion to the game, not your fellow posters in the forum. The way your peers choose to express themselves is not your concern, and it's not appropriate to discuss their attitudes or motivations. In addition, please refrain from any public discussion of moderation, per forum rules 3.2, 3.3, and 3.4. If you have any concerns about someone else's behavior, please file a report. If you have any concerns about moderator action or inaction, please raise the matter privately with us and we're happy to discuss. Thank you for your understanding.

Cthulhu on the cover of Vogue Jack Black as a panda

And of course, if anything can be a dinosaur, then anything can also be a starship.

Turn anything into a dinosaur, in a few easy steps: Get a picture of the thing Feed the image as input to Midjourney, with the text prompt "dinosaur" Is it dinosaurian enough? If not, take the output image and feed it back into step 2 Repeat as needed. Results are below. In each case, aside from the finished image, I've provided links to the source image and any intermediate steps for anyone who's curious, since I think it's kinda fun to see how the image evolves. RAWR! Pelican: Cat: Squirrel: Mr. Bean: Teddy bear: Daffy Duck: Excavator: Kitchen mixer: