fourfa

Can we request new community fixes here? The Poodle engine gimbaling is all wrong - either too much authority range for ordinary rockets, or its gimbal rate and damping are out of tune, or something. In any case, pretty much every default-settings rocket with a Poodle is constantly overshooting and oscillating. Turning the gimbal down to 25% seems to cure it, with no downside I can find. I'm happy to write custom default patches for my own install as I did in KSP1, but it would be more helpful for the community to share these corrective fixes in a place like this

If there's an easy way to read out lat/long in stock, I haven't found it. Mods tho

I’ve been putting nose cones on the docking ports, even when inside a fairing, and jettisoning before circularization. Shame that it’s necessary and I hope it get cleaned up in future patches

I had to install the Community Fixed mod to solve some docking problems in the current version…

I hope docking, undocking, redocking etc are now stable enough to do a Kerpollo run now!

Might want to look at what happens if the player sets Science Rewards to something non-default. For instance, when set to 50%, all the completion percentages are high by a factor of two and add up to exactly 200%. I don't know where the bug creeps in, but there probably needs to be a check against player settings somewhere.

actual 26° 39’ 17” N, 22° 48’ 00” W. Or X=26.6547 Y=-22.8000

Man, what an ordeal. Saw nothing from orbit, but deorbited over roughly the right Mun coordinates posted above. Still see nothing. Landed pretty close by the numbers, but still see nothing anywhere. Val goes on EVA, and the entire lander falls over sideways (KI) and breaks a landing leg. Val runs 5km hunting all over, saving jetpack fuel, watching the location to try getting closer on foot. Finally, she spots the thing. It's small - tucked into a crater, absolutely impossible to spot from orbit, or even from 0.5 km away on the ground. You have to be right on top of it to even see it. Lander launches suborbital, trying to get its experiment package inside the tiny biome for the sweet science. Burned a lot of fuel maneuvering, accidentally hitting full throttle in the wrong direction, but finally got there and after nearly crashing five times - landed just outside the biome circle (at 8m/s but didn't explode) then promptly tipped over. So, what the hell, it's already on its side, I rolled it closer and inside the circle and came to rest with the damaged spacecraft... Victory! Val boards, we pirouette around for a while, and get the craft upright on the three unbroken legs with reaction wheel torque. Launch, burn hard for the western horizon on bingo fuel, get a 8km AP. Skim 100m over some mountain ridges. Burn at AP, and clunk out at -1000m PE. Try to finish on RCS but nothing comes out. Spend some time frantically reconfiguring thrusters in part manager while altitude is plummeting. Fortunately Pe is over a large maria. I get the thrusters set up (they were set for docking translation only, at low power), a quick off-axis maneuver to get the Pe +2000m, and 4x warp through practically scraping the Munar surface. Finally get to AP, and am just able to circularize on RCS with only a single thruster firing prograde on H. Never did figure out why only one. Now, the crew settle in for rescue in a relatively safe 15km orbit. This was the most kerbal mission I've had in a long time. The bugs in this case played exact like gamified part failures. Absolutely loving it

Gorgeous!

Are there any current KSP2 mods that provide real time coordinates? Micro Engineer? EDIT: Micro Engineer does have a lat/long position readout under the Surface tab

Click-thru problems; if you position the Science Arkive window directly over a craft in the VAB, when you click in the window, it clicks on whatever part is under the cursor too Hiding unavailable experiments might have gone too far - I'm missing surface samples QQ: in KSP1 there were some corner cases where you could be splashed in various land biomes, if you found spots where the biome map was pixellated and had little errors. (I played a lot of Caveman and it was beneficial to hunt for tiny science rewards like this, lol!) Are we certain this is not possible in KSP2? Lastly - I'm seeing nothing in SpaceWarp's Mods Settings window - probably my config problem, but if you or anyone knows how to diagnose that, I'm all ears

\o/

Thanks for this, saw it in CKAN, loaded it, works great

Let's hope there's an asset pass soon - most the KSP2 assets (ie part shapes, textures etc) were ported over from an earlier KSP1 version and are missing the late-KSP1 part revamps. Mk2 lander can was one of the most-needed revamps, yet here we are stuck with the old one again. That protruding bottom lip is one of the things they fixed (apart from the wisdom of trying to enter atmo with any lander can with very low temp tolerance...)

One more UI nitpick: there's an option to collapse/hide particular experiment types. Whatever I set these to, they reset as soon as I change celestial bodies in the Arkive window. I think it might be better if the open/collapsed selection was sticky across planet selection, and maybe even from one game session to the next? (easy to say, no idea how hard it would be to code). Relatively low priority. Taking a step back though I think the main reason to close these is that the player hasn't discovered the tech yet, so they just add clutter or even confusion (to a new player, is the late-tech Orbital Survey experiment obviously different than running earlier experiments while in orbit? Maybe not?). Perhaps unresearched experiment types shouldn't be visible at all? Or simply collapsed by default.

Oh hm: I went to a new biome, collected all the science available at current tech, and none of the new reports show up in the Arkive window.. Even after reload, and after quit to main menu. It only shows up after a full quit and restart game. Everything I had before loading the mod was accurate on first start.

Looks great! At the moment, I like seeing the names (gives me motivation to go find them) but I agree, should be a user option. Hidden by default, but user can select to show names (not locations) Thanks, I was looking for something exactly like this

I ran into this recently - sometimes when starting EVA, there's an unpredictable impulse force exerted on the craft. In my case it was a wide, short lander on a very flat munar mare. Hit EVA, and a phantom force appeared that knocked the whole thing over. Y'all might remember the EVA glitch drive (kerbal walks upward on a ladder into a fixed object, and generates phantom force), this looked like that

If you start a new career on the default settings, you can certainly accomplish every traditional KSP task - landings, grand tours, and so on - without ever building a plane. You might also play on harder difficulty - say at an extreme, Nano-Crystalline Diamond mode in the Caveman challenge, where you’ll likely scrape every single fractional science point on Kerbin’s surface with planes. Or self-impose challenges like building ground relay stations, or improvised refueling airbases, or never ever use the Recover button unless back at the KSC runway. I’ve been enjoying building tall radio towers on mountaintops since the ground anchors dropped, with teams of engineers deploying on cargo helicopters. There are many ways to play the game. Play long enough and there will be no stock parts you don’t use.

You might try the technique I use in this craft for the nose. Start with a 1.25m fairing base on the Mk3 nose but don't build the fairing yet. Attach a 0.625 heatshield in front of the fairing, then offset it like 4-5 ticks forward. Build the fairing, straight walls for the first few ticks, then close it on the side of the heatshield. Set the fairing to not staged. Attach a 0.625m part (any part) to the FRONT of the heatshield, outside the fairing, then offset it INTO the fairing. Now offset the whole nose assembly back into the Mk3 cockpit until it looks clean. Might take a few tries to get the curve of the fairing nose to match the Mk3. It's a bit tweaky with the aero, but it bugs me that a heatshield with an open node has like 10 times the drag of the entire rest of the craft, and this solves that This setup should be good for 1600m/s+ in the mid-atmosphere, and orbital speed in the high atmosphere

Sure, good question. There's a trick involving the service bay right behind the heat shield on the nose. Attach the service bay, then attach the heat shield. If you leave it like this, you'll find the heat shield has crazy drag, like ten times the whole rest of the craft, and probably can't even break Mach 1. So add a basic nose cone in front of the heatshield (occupying that drag-causing attachment node) but then use the SPH offset tool to move the basic nose cone backwards, into the service bay. Now it's hidden from drag, the heatshield is super low drag, and the high heat tolerance of the heat shield (3300K) and service bay (2900K) work for you. You can skip the service bay too - just put the heat shield on the Mk3 cockpit, then the basic nose cone in front of it, then offset the nose cone backward behind the heat shield. Not hidden from drag any more but not a big deal. On my craft the service bay is doing a whole lot more than just hiding the nose cone, so I need it there.

Aesthetics yes up to a point; I don't want to have intakes that are totally invisible inside some other part, or on the ventral (bottom) side where real-world reentry ablation would destroy them (despite the fact that KSP doesn't care at all). Everyone's got their own playstyle, I guess I have played with how to protect a nose-mounted intake with the front-most part being a node-occupied heatshield: I personally don't currently see the node-occupied tweak as an exploit. A thin, sideways, high-temp part like this should not have ten times the drag of the entire rest of the craft - that's how it is otherwise, just an odd side effect of gameplay tweaks that don't make sense for this alternate use. And hmm, so far the dorsal precooler experiment has been a bust. No substantial change in cooling, and a little more drag. There's something magic about the advanced nose cone + shock cone nacelle, it's super slippery. Not what you'd expect from a whole additional 1.25m drag face ordinarily.

Fascinating! Yeah for both those examples, I need the wings for fuel. It's not THAT much fuel though, there might be another way with structural wings. But it would be interesting to replace the dorsal aerospike intake with a dorsal precooler, and attach the wings to that... I have seen that heat-dumping behavior, where one of the hot wing segments suddenly cools down massively, then starts to heat up again.

I've been spending time lately optimizing SSTOs for high speed and low drag. I found out a couple of interesting things. Top speed in the atmosphere on ascent is often limited by the temperature tolerance of the nose pieces. No big newsflash there, I'm sure we've all had some cockpits blow up from overheating on ascent. (Assuming here that you have enough engine power, intake air, and minimum of drag, so that it's possible to overspeed the heat tolerances on your spaceplane.) So naturally, we'd think to put a heatshield on the nose of the craft to take advantage of its 3300K limit, highest in the game. Then you'll find out something interesting about the heatshields - if both the inside and outside attachment nodes are occupied (like the configuration you'd find in an ordinary rocket stack), they are very low drag pieces. But if the outside node is not occupied (like you'd have on a capsule re-entry) the heatshield drag is stupendous, totally out of line with other similar sized parts. I assume this is one of the tweaks made to allow for safe and easy capsule reentry from a broad range of orbits. So if you just slap a heatshield on the nose, you will likely never get to high speed at all. So, hack the system - attach something to the outside, but use the build tools to offset that piece away from the front. Even better, offset it into a service bay or fairing to hide it from drag entirely. Doing this, I routinely find that the wings (all of which have the same 2400K limit) are the limiting factor. Not much you can do about that short of using heatshields themselves for wings... This simple hack has me routinely seeing 1650m/s on just airbreathing RAPIERs, instead of the 1200-1400m/s I used to normally see. Then the rocket equation reaps benefits - that extra speed on ascent means less rocket fuel needed to reach orbital speed and circularize. It's a bigger assist than one might think, and directly leads to smaller fuel tanks, fewer parts, less mass, less drag, fewer engines, fewer intakes... it's good fun to downsize for better performance rather than spiral bigger! While we're misusing fairings to hide things from drag - consider that a fairing only needs to surround the centerpoint of an item (ie where the three Offset tool handles converge) to occlude it. This makes it very easy for a central 'spine' of fairing to occlude lots of parts (fuel tanks, fuselages, even cockpits) from drag... and thus also from heating. Hax! Cheating! Definitely but it makes it possible to build some very small pocket SSTOs, things that fit in cargo bays. This craft has no drag or heating on the entire front half due to a hidden extension to the fairing seen at the nose: https://kerbalx.com/fourfa/Starling-Science-SSTO This craft hides the whole nacelle assemblies in interlocking fairings, plus the orbital engine in a tail fairing, plus attitude control RCS in the nose service bay, and I was surprised how small and simple it ended up for the payload capacity and ease of flight: https://kerbalx.com/fourfa/Sundiver-SSTO The node-occupied heatshield trick could make a circumnavigation-record craft a little easier, something I might work on soon Hope someone finds this interesting.

I've been mucking about with drag optimizations and heat tolerance. I'm now routinely hitting 1650m/s on ascent without exploding: https://kerbalx.com/fourfa/Starling-Science-SSTO