Galactic Nexus

After playing the game for over 3 years now, career is a nice change of pace. I know how to build vast rockets to get to the edge of the solar system and back and to be honest it's gotten kinda boring just doing it for the sake of it. Career gives me restrictions and I like that. I use 1.25m parts like back in the old days before they were just eclipsed by 2.5/3.75m parts. I can't build stupidly overengineered monstrosities because I need to worry about how I'm going to afford it. It's not as polished as I'd like it to be yet, but I still enjoy it. Sandbox is still where I build my replicas and silly experiments though and it's where I play a fair percentage of my time. I just don't go very far outside of Kerbin anymore.

I know that FAR is. It checks to see if you're running x64 and disables itself if you are.

I started with the first ever public release; 0.7. Oh how times have changed. Back then, we didn't even have symmetry, that was added in 0.8. Before that, trying to balance your rocket such that it didn't somersault into the launch tower (another relic I shan't miss) was actually an ongoing challenge. Even once symmetry was added, the game was a lot harder than it is now. The atmosphere didn't taper off, it was a solid wall at 30km that often resulted in falling craft breaking from sudden g-force. There was no map view until something like 0.11 either, so (after discovering "escape velocity" and moving on from point and shoot launches) attempting to get into orbit was interesting. On that note, there was no time warp either, meaning that if you wanted to find out if you were in orbit (without calculating it based on your angular velocity), you had to leave the game running for 30 minutes or so, and see what happened. I feel like the development process was a lot more transparent back then. The devs seemed a lot more active on the forums and because there were no dedicated QA testers, we were ALL the testers, so dev-cycles seemed a lot shorter. This is understandable of course, as the more complete the game becomes, the more work needs to go into creating big features, but even so, I do miss the days when running over a month without an update was a rare occurrence.

I did too! One of my proudest creations; flies like a dream too. I ought to redo it with RAPIER engines now... On a different note, I've really been wanting to find the time to teach myself to model, so I can make a modpack based around the retro-futuristic style of spacecraft seen in Fallout. Hopefully I'll do it some day. Nice to see the Shinra No. 26 there Xactar; I've been meaning to make one of those too. With the new 3.75m tanks and massive SRBs from the ARM update, I may be able to soon.

I'd definitely like to see GP2 one day. I've visited every celestial body except Moho now (I really ought to go there), so something new would be nice. The Titan analogue idea sounds excellent. Perhaps something like Pluto? A tiny, far out planet but with 5 moons ranging from nearly the size of its parent, to little more than a few kilometres across.

Decided to finally try out the Kethane mod and thought I'd just dive in the deep end. Screw a simple refuelling on the Mun, I'm mounting a return trip to Laythe. Just finished assembling the 3 part craft in Kerbin orbit (after far too much grief trying to get the damn engines up there) and will be heading off soon.

Playing around with HL Airships, B9 and Firespitter; I finally managed to build a working replica of the Highwind. Also recreated a certain picture of it

Well I found the cause of my ship's crazy flipping. Turns out it wasn't the cargo bay's fault, but the (stock) .I appear to have overloaded it with funk.

Un/docking in space, yes. I'm not using Mechjeb, so that's not the issue. I was using standard SAS though, so I'll try turning that off next time. Well it's still worth a try I guess. I don't mean I timewarped while docking, I mean after the payload had been attached and was part of the vessel (and started spinning) I tried time warping to remove any momentum.

Here we have the SABLE II Reusable Interplanetary Transfer Drone, shortly before rapid unplanned disassembly upon docking with its payload.

I've been having a little trouble with the cargo bays. Whenever I dock something inside it (it doesn't happen to things I've docked in the VAB until un]/i]dock them), the whole ship starts spinning wildly out of control, in spite of any SAS and/or RCS trying to hold it still and the payload bends back and forth. I timewarped to try to stop the spinning, but as soon as I dropped back out of warp the ship just exploded into chunks. Any fixes? Do Quantum Struts help at all?

Malsey Kerman. He is one crazy mother****er. I mean, he even puts Jebediah to shame with his glee at anything and everything happening around him. Not to mention the fact he appears to multiply when I'm not looking; he's currently deployed on both Eve and Dres simultaneously.

Sent Malsey II and Shepdan to Dres as the first Kerbals to ever set foot upon it. Despite their ship being woefully underfuelled, thanks to their brilliant piloting skills they successfully managed to crash into land on the Dresian surface. With 30% of the lander missing by the time it stopped rolling down the hillside, it was hardly a textbook landing, but by god it was a landing. Considering the lander had to perform most of the capture manoeuvre and attempt the landing with barely any fuel remaining, I'd say they did rather well.

Here's the first one I've made so far. The two stars signify the moons of Kerbin and (I didn't think of this when I made it, but I like the idea) the green sweep signifies Kerbalkind. Any critique would be appreciated. I'm thinking I may design a new flag to mark each series of missions I launch, with this one being the generic one. For example I think I'll create one for my Duna base mission(s) of a similar design, but with an amber corner, Dunaian landscape on the planet with a single large star where the two currently are and work in some kind of lander silhouette instead of the rocket.

I could have sworn last time this topic came up, one of the devs said they weren't considering Greenlight, but were in talks with Valve over putting the full game on Steam. It might have been in Kurt J Mac's livestream. Either that or I dreamt that up.