Cyrious

Huh. Ok then, is there a setting somewhere to turn them back on, or is this a "code's not there anymore, you're SOL" type deal? Welp, found the setting, got the countdown back. Still liked the pips though. Maybe a future version of the mod can override the stock countdown text with them.

I seem to have run into an issue where the Countdown Text (the pips, i also tried editing the config to text according to the instructions) bits do not show when approaching a maneuver node. I'm not sure if its a bug with the mod itself or it having an issue with other mods/squad's code instead. The mod itself IS working, I've seen the Geosync, time to entry interface and SRB burn time indicators, but not the one that's arguably the most useful, the pips themselves. Looking at the log doesn't show any errors (so far as I can see) of the mod spazzing out or otherwise glitching, so I dunno what is going on. Any ideas?

Built and launched this thing a couple days ago. Figured I'd make a bit of a shift in how I handle things getting crew to and from craft within the Kerbin system. Normally, what I would do is send an expendable rocket with the crew pod/craft on top to the destination station/ship, let them do their thing, then fly them back. Obviously this has the flaws of using more resources and materials, not to mention having to design and launch a new rocket each time I want to send a Kerbal somewhere. This is my solution to it. Instead of launching a crewed craft directly to the destination, I instead launch a spaceplane to the station (500km might be too high though for round-trip spaceplane flights), drop the kerbals off, then use nuclear thermal inflatable crew pods (in 3 or 6 man varieties) to shuttle them further on. Liquid Fuel is fairly easy and cheap to manufacture in space, so keeping an ample fuel supply set up for the pods will be a simple affair. Just in case though, the station comes equipped with a basic LF/OX/Monoprop fuel supply for all types of visiting craft. To the left and the right on the C-arms, past the centrifuges, there's 5 docking ports, 4 opposing ports and 1 in-line port. The opposing ports (8 in all) host the 3 man pods, the 2 in-line ports host the 6-man (or larger if I really want to use the 2.5m class inflatable pods) pods. The spaceplanes dock to the arms holding the pair of 3-man inflatable globes. The Clamp Sr ports are for large rigid craft either coming from kerbin or in from the muns. Not shown here, beneath the station is an octo-girder port so I can attach a fuel module to it for additional onboard capacity. As for the pods themselves: Thats the large pod. And thats the small. Both pods use either 2 or 4 mini-NTR engines (750 ISP) for propulsion, come with remote control, and have enough range to get anywhere within the Kerbin system and back. And since I dont have to worry about silly things like re-entry, I can optimize the design for space ops. The one big issue I have with these engines though is that the little buggers run very hot, and thus radiator mass both on the pods themselves and on the vessels they'll be working from is required. Fortunately, all of my stations have radiators on them, so dumping the waste heat after arrival is a trivial matter.

I'm back! Got distracted with other games but now I'm back to playing KSP. First thing I did: go into the sandbox save I have setup and build a system-wide comm network, well, the primary elements of it at least. I went a little bit overboard on the redundancy, main save will be even more so. Here's how I got it set up. System is split into 2 halves, Inner (Moho, Eve, and Duna) and Outer (Jool, Sarnus, Urlum, Neidon, and Plock). Every planet within their own half is linked to the next planet further out, and the one further in (ex. Eve has links to Moho and Duna). Every planet has a direct link to Kerbin. For the outer system they have backup links to Dres, which then moves on further in to Kerbin. I should have set up the inner system with direct links to Dres as well, but eh, I'll get around to it later. For planets with 1 moon, its a simple point to point dish link between the main relay and the moon sub-relay. For planets with more than 1 moon, I do the same chain linking + direct link to master relay I do with the greater system. Eventually, there's going to be 3 tiers of commsat: Master Relays: Connect planetary subnets to each other and Kerbin. Dominated by massive satellites/stations (Sarnus' relay needs a whopping 8 of NFE's 500EC/s Blanket arrays to generate enough power, with the support structure for clearance to match; getting that one out on the real save is going to be an interesting exercise unto itself.). Typically no more than 1 per planet. Sometimes equipped with omnis, but usually use a short/medium range dish keyed to point to the active vessel. Moon Sub-relays: Connects the moon subnets to each other and the local Master Relay. Smaller than the master relays, and dont have the dish range to get out of the local planetary system. Are always equipped with omni-antennas. Always 1 per moon, only omitted if the SOI is too small to effectively support one without losing it to the parent body or having the game eat it because it's too close. Equatorial sub-relay ring: Around the equator of each body, 3-4 Omni-only satellites link to each other and the local Sub or Master Relay. If the target body's SOI is too small for them they're omitted. If the target body's rotation is fast enough, they're placed into stationary orbits. I am using RemoteTech, as it gives me a greater level of control over how my network is set up and ran. Certainly more of a pain to set up, but it works out in the end I think. Now, you might be asking why I chose Dres for the backup relay links. My answer: Its there, might as well make it useful. The higher than normal inclination relative to the rest of the system helps keep a link running as well. The system I built on the sandbox save is meant to essentially serve as the prototype to the network on the main save. Edit, neglected to add: Speaking of relays and other craft, I also launched this around Kerbin on my main save. It is the craft for my Eve/Gilly exploration and setup mission. It contains: The mothership itself: ferries all other craft alongside it. Power is provided by a mix of solar and the nuclear reactor at the center of the vessel. Propulsion is provided by 6 argon ion engines, 3 of which are throttled down a bit to keep within the power envelope. The Eve lander: Has a full fairing shroud and heat shield on it. Deployment will be from very low Eve orbit just outside of the atmosphere, and the onboard thruster package in the shroud will bring it in. 2x R.a.T.S: mapping and resource scanner probes 2x Dedicated sub-relays 6x Equatorial commsats BTW, if any of you ever get the chance, try playing on a large screen, it is leagues better than doing it on a 19" screen.

Yep. It does however help to check staging BEFORE you press the big red LAUNCH button Meanwhile, I'm busy doing yet more ore runs to the station. The tedium mixed with showing up at each endpoint of the journey and seeing the respective base/station is on fire again is... interesting. Then again, the base/station constantly being in a state of overheat is why I went absolutely overboard with the cooling in the first place.

Most likely. At least he didn't use the Whirlijigs to do it, or go on EVA and slap them directly onto the reactor casing.

I blame Harman. He keeps using the ISRUs to cook his burritos.

This is apparently what happens when I have something still hot core-heat wise (I think) on the station then run off to go do an Ore run. The off-line resource management dumps it all into the station without taking into account the massive amount of radiator area I have, and when It loads up again, the entire station is a good 200-300K hotter than what it should be at this distance from Kerbol. Its why I did a major upgrade of the cooling system to the 8 monster radiators, so that every time I came back from a run while I had left something on the station hot, it would far more rapidly dump the heat. I figure a 12x increase in heat rejection rate compared to before would help things a bit. Maybe I should rename this thing Hades Station, and use the floodlighting to get a nice red-orange glow going. Edit2: Cooling definitely works. On arrival and deployment of the main radiators, I had a peak radiation flux of well over 600MW. By the time I finally docked it was down to 65MW.

This is what happens when I have a major thermal event on my station. Note the 600MW of heat rejection in progress. Edit, it actually gets bad enough to the point where the heat shield on the crew capsule starts consuming ablator.

Just making another cargo flight to the station. I went and burned all 20k units of ore already up on the station to fill up the fuel, monoprop, and lithium tanks. Now I get to spend what I send up on converting into nuclear fuel, both for the reactor (as I launched it empty), and for sale on kerbin.

Yes I did. There's 6 modules there: The Core module, which contains crew quarters (for the ever critical engineer and a pilot), the fuel storage module (worst one to get up in terms of awkwardness), the Ore storage module (not much better as it was the heaviest), the processing module (by far the most expensive due to the uranium reprocessors), the docking bar (which has room for up to 7 cargo craft, 2 of which are currently docked), and the power/cooling module. I spent something like 3 and a half million funds getting it up into space and another 1.5 million getting the Mun-base feeding the beast built. On the plus side, I no longer have to deal with launching a ton of fuel alongside my interplanetary craft. I can launch them with just enough to make it to the Mun, then use the cargo craft to transfer fuel over.

I upgraded the Fuel station's Power and Cooling module. 2 reason for this 1. I had no major method of power production during the night cycle and thus had to stop production while in the shade. 2. This: Thats my entire station running in excess of 500K, with the radiators saturated in their output. I got tired of coming back to the thing only to find the heat had freaked again and turned the whole smash into a sauna. Solution: Moar radiators. Like, an unholy crapton more, plus heat exchangers on top of that (I think the exchangers come from the Radiator pack that is supposed to accompany NF-Electrics). In addition to the original 10MW core heat capacity of the 8 XR-1250 Radiators, I added 8 DF-8K Graphene radiators, adding another 64MW of core heat rejection capacity and something like 1.5GW (Thats Gigawatts) of total heat rejection capacity to the station. The heat exchangers will (hopefully) help draw heat away from the rest of the station and into the monstrously huge radiators, allowing thermal pulses to be shed faster. Both the XR-1250s and the DF-8Ks are directly attached to a heat exchanger in pairs. Each heat exchanger also has surface mount radiator panels attached to deal with smaller heat pulses that take too long for the big and hueg panels to get to work on. All in all it comes out to almost 80MW core heat rejection and ~1.7GW total heat rejection. Overkill? Yes. Do I care? Nah. As for power, I stripped most of the solar arrays off the design, leaving 4 for standby and light power generation. The batteries were also removed, as both the local power storage and bulk power generation has been taken over by a 2000EC/s nuclear reactor. This solved multiple problems, including night side power generation and not having enough power to run the entire station at full bore. As a nice little bonus, I managed to trim 20 parts off the total count, because this thing is a laggy monster and every little bit helps.

Today in KSP I learned that the heat system can be quirky if I leave everything on while I'm away from the target vessel. 147.8 Megawatts of heat outflow, and they were saturated for a good couple of minutes before temperatures base-wide began to drop. So, no more leaving the drills, ISRUs, and reactor online while I'm away. Things tend to get toasty as a result. Oh, and if anyone knows what this Z-fighting bug is and how to fix it (only kicks in if I've been switching back and forth between vessels and generally moving about. If I start the game and go straight to the target, it's unnoticeable/barely there.), I'd be quite grateful.

First flight of the ore hauler! A 3.75m class Kontainer (10,800 ore), 4x Quad-Round Kontainer tanks for propellant, and an RE-I5 Skipper as the engine due to the enormous Munar launch mass of almost 200 tons. Empty of cargo this thing could probably make it to Jool and back, but fully loaded theres about 1100m/s Delta V to play with. Oddly enough, refueling is done on the ground, as once I've offloaded to the station, there's more than enough fuel to get back down on the ground without having to do on-orbit processing. Not my best design IMO, I miss my Novapunch engines.