Xavven
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Posts posted by Xavven
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54 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:
Intake spamming was fixed almost a yonk ago, not really relevant now is it?
Oh, I haven't made a SSTO since beta. What's fixed about it?
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Air intake "spamming" isn't cheesy. It's an appropriate and logical solution to flying at high altitude with low air pressure.
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Rather than a gentle gravity turn where you are thrusting prograde and using throttle to adjust trajectory, I prefer to have 1.8+ TWR and aerodynamic control surfaces to aggressively accelerate off the launchpad and fly with an angle of attack to aim for 45° and 1000+ m/s speed by 25,000 altitude. I want to get the heck out of the atmosphere so that when I drop my first stage, I'm at 40,000 m altitude and don't have to worry about the aerodynamic stability of the middle and upper stages.
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The opposite is usually true.
When devs stop updating the base game, generally it's the start of the golden age of mods. It's easier to mod because you don't have to worry about the base code changing and breaking your mod. More time is spent adding features to the mod and less time is spent keeping it working with new base game versions.
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12 minutes ago, Lisias said:
I disagree.
The limit of changes a code base can withhold depends more of the skills of the developers involved on the first implementation than anything else. More experienced developers already knows how things change over time, and tries to architecture the code base to allow these changes to happen without too much hassle.
Given the turbulent development of KSP until 1.2.2, with a lot of rewrites under the same team and leadership, I think things may not be ideal, but not that bad neither . Hey, they recently migrated KSP from two Unity releases, being the first migration from a pretty obsolete one (Unity 5 to Unity 2017). And the thing survived relatively well.
What I think screwed things royally are not the changes itself, but a perceived lack of compromising on preventing breaking what was working on the process. I detected methods being shunt to return NULL (completely screwing up code that was relying on the feature), kludges being brute forced on the KSP's Life Cycle (as the Editor since KSP 1.9) and some terrible decisions made on implementing things (as the Robotics). And none of that are related to changing an ageing code base, it's exactly the other way around: these are the actions that were ageing the code base...
The Linux Kernel is an fabulous example for what I'm saying: there are terrible code there (as the floppy drive support), but since the overall architecture is solid, the crapness is confined on its own playpen and can be changed, replaced or just removed without compromising the product.
As long there're will and skill available, things can change almost forever and still be solid.
Just echoing this. One of the other games I play is Falcon BMS. It's based on a Microprose game from 1998. The code was released and a team of modders have been tweaking it ever since. Its most recent update was less than 1 month ago. It is vastly different from its original form.
Regarding the main topic, I don't mind waiting until 2023 at all. I still have more things to do in KSP 1 and will be enjoying it more this year.
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9 hours ago, TheFlyingKerman said:
Aaaahh, brilliant and simple! Thank you!
6 hours ago, jimmymcgoochie said:Stock KSP: attach the two vessels using a Klaw, engineer attached external fuel duct between the attached vessels, transfer fuel as normal. EVA construction only allows parts to be attached to a single vessel, I’d imagine to prevent convoluted part tree messiness, but once attached I see no reason why you couldn’t attach a hose and transfer that way (note- not tested so I don’t know if this really works). Alternative option- docking ports attached to robotic pistons that can move the ports to the right height to dock on the surface (breaking ground DLC required).
Damn, why didn't I think of that? A total workaround to the original issue I had-- not being able to weld a fuel duct to different craft. Just make them 1 craft, temporarily.
Thank you!
5 hours ago, Curveball Anders said:DMagic's EVA Fuel Transfer from the stash of small mods adds just the needed hose.
Great! Just the kind of simple mod that removes the requirement to do a klaw workaround to get a hose connected, without adding other stuff I don't want to mod in. Thank you!
To all: what a wonderful community. In less than a day I got multiple great solutions. I'm excited to get my surface base going now! Another big thank you to everyone.
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16 minutes ago, bigcalm said:
Question - with or without mods?
But yes, imagine if the Kerbal's invented such a ground-breaking concept such as a hosepipe. What wonderous science that would be!
Without mods: Maybe a rover with a Klaw on the front. Yeah, it's likely quite Krakeny, but autosave before doing any "docking" and you should be ok.
With mods: KAS gives you hosepipes (some faffing required), MKS gives you a window that allows automatic transfer within 150 metres (but MKS also comes with lots of other complexity, like life support).
Ah, yes, good questions and I should have specified. I'm playing vanilla/no-mods and with the restricted fuel transfer rules on. Fuel cannot transfer through the klaw part with the restriction option enabled. Yeah, I had immediately thought of KAS for hoses, and in my unmodded game tried to get an engineer to weld an External Fuel Duct pipe between two crafts, and found out the base game doesn't let me do that.
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All my IRSU logistics designs to date have involved landing a whole refinery with drills, mining and refining on the surface, then returning everything to orbit and docking with the craft to be refueled. This works on low gravity bodies, and I like its simplicity of implementation.
But on heavier bodies with higher dV requirements, hauling the drills and refinery to orbit and back (and empty ore tanks) eats into my total fuel yield.
So I've been considering having a permanently grounded refinery and a separate fuel delivery lander, but my major logistical hurdle is the fuel transfer on the ground. Landing precisely on a docking port is quite tricky and maybe a fun challenge, but fuel-consuming, so I don't want to do that at all. It is within my abilities to land very close by (within crane range) and have a crane arm connect, but I'm concerned about dealing with uneven ground and therefore having to have a robotic arm or crane that articulates in 5 axes, potentially with a counterweight, and that can fold up nicely into a fairing. Doable, but I feel like it's maybe overly complex? I've thought of having a wheeled fuel-truck rover act as a middleman between the refinery and the lander, but that has downsides too, and the same issue of having to line up docking ports on the surface at predefined heights and angles. Maybe that approach is more complex, actually?
So I'm looking for suggestions. How have you grappled with this problem?
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On 9/23/2021 at 3:52 AM, jimmymcgoochie said:
“What’s the best liquid fuel engine in KSP” is a bit like asking “what’s the best internal combustion engine”- it depends very heavily on what you’re doing. A little 2-stroke engine will be useless on a truck, a massive V8 overkill on a leaf blower and a gigantic container ship diesel engine is no good for a plane.
If you’re only after raw power you want something big and heavy that gulps fuel like it’s going out of fashion but produces tremendous power- whether that’s a Rolls-Royce Merlin or a Rockomax Mainsail. If you want maximum efficiency even at the expense of power you’ll get something small that makes the most of every drop of fuel- a 3-cylinder turbodiesel or a Terrier. If you want power AND efficiency and are prepared to pay for it, options are there too- a modern Formula 1 engine or a Wolfhound, which both produce plenty of power with high efficiency* but come with a cost (literally in the F1 engine’s case, and metaphorically for the Wolfhound as it’s much heavier than other vacuum engines compared to its thrust output, as well as costing more).
I exclude jet engines because using an external propellant source (oxygen in the air) is cheating, massively inflating their ISP numbers compared to a rocket using the same propellant- which since both Jet A-1 and RP-1 are both refined kerosene is actually a valid and fairly easy comparison to make.
*Today’s F1 engines are some of the most thermally efficient ICEs ever made and can turn more than 50% of chemical energy from their fuel into usable power that drives the car; a typical road car might manage 20-30%.
I agree with this, basically. I use all sorts of different engines on stages depending on need. However I will say that there are some engines that come into my builds quite often, and others that seldom fit my purposes.
Spark, Terrier, Cheetah, and Poodle I use often on upper stages, landers and probes, or even sustainers. Ant, Spider, and Twitch I hardly ever find a use case for.
Bobcat and Skipper see a lot of use as a light first stage, or a sustainer engines. But Skiff seems to occupy this strange niche case that hardly ever comes up, and the combined cost of the decoupler and the engine is usually as much or higher than simply using a Skipper with a larger fuel tank instead on a $ per DV basis.
Skipper and Twin Boar are great first stages, with the latter being overkill for many of my builds but it's just too cost effective compared to the alternatives. And clustered Skippers make great first stage heavy lifters until bigger engines are unlocked in the tech tree.
I hardly ever have a use for Thud.
Huh, if I had to pick one, I'd pick Twin Boar. It just has SO much thrust and is so cheap that it had wide applications as a first stage for payloads big and small. I often find that I don't need something that powerful for my payload, for example it is giving me a TWR of 2.8, but when I price out a more tailored multi-stage lifter with engines that keep the TWR more in the 1.5 - 2.0 range, it ends up costing the same amount or more. Frankly I think the Twin Boar is just underpriced. But we don't need perfect game balance. Sometimes in real life you get a design that just dominates because it's effective, reliable, strong, and cheap. I like to think of the Twin Boar as that magic combo that some Kerbal rocket scientist devised.
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If it's an orbital fueling station then I put a boom on it that branches off to all three sizes so any ship I conceive of now and in the future can use it.
Generally I use jr. on probes, standard on most manned ships, but occasionally I build big ships too with sr.
I tried standardizing on jr. for all refueling, but quickly found out that even during refueling you want a solid, non-wobbly connection, so bigger ships need bigger ports.
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I agree. I'm sure it depends on personal build style, but I tend to put smaller landing struts on my creations, and in past versions I've had to manually set the struts to max strength and damping. In 1.12.2, maxing them turns them into rigid beams of diamond. They also seem to have less ground grip and my landers slide down even slight inclines much more easily.
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4 hours ago, Superfluous J said:
To be fair, 1840 was over a century before the space age
I think the entire home system should be known, though I'd love to have to discover the surfaces of the planets. I mean, there were still people who thought there were canals on Mars before probes reached it, and it's our closest neighbor whose surface we can see. Similarly, Mercury was thought to have 1:1 resonance between its orbit and rotation until about the same time, though that was proven without needing to send probes.
I think it's totally reasonable that we get ridiculously bad maps of local system bodies to start (with an option to turn that off because I don't know if my 84th career will really require that mystery) and star-only data for other systems, perhaps even with some stars "hidden" in that we either can't see them or don't know they're significant compared to all the other stars that are assumed to be around but we can't visit.
I was looking to say the same thing effectively.
I'll add that I'd like us to have blurry/low-res textures for planets and moons in the home system for starters, to simulate the limitations of what you can see from ground-based telescopes with the Kerbal equivalent of circa 1960's Earth technology. Maybe slightly better textures if the player launches a space telescope to Kerbin orbit, but you don't get good textures until you send a probe into its SOI.
For exoplanets, we should only have as much information as using the transit method ala the Keppler space telescope would give. Meaning, rough estimates of size and density, and only if they orbit their star in the viewing plane. No textures at all, and if they are small enough we shouldn't know they're there until a probe is in that star system.
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4 hours ago, Sav said:
But that is the point isn't it? they are aware of bugs, one of the developers stated they have stopped sustained development on the game and that they will patch the game when they have time.
Why not just stamp out whatever is left that they feel they need to fix and tell us players the game is complete, there won't be any more updates.
Hence players and modders can enjoy the game without anymore updates and changes to worry about, is that not logical? From a financial standpoint and for the playerbases happiness.
Nothing we say here is changing their minds, but to help you understand, software development is a business. They aren't going to make enough money bug fixing KSP 1 at this point. KSP 2 is very likely to be profitable, on the other hand.
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18 hours ago, Sav said:
Not to provoke any further arguements, but would it not be prudent to stamp out all remaining bugs/issues on KSP 1 so you can dedicate all your resources to KSP 2?
That way people can continue to play ksp 1 without any further problems, modders can do as they please to their hearts content and people who want a finished product to enjoy without having to install
updates or starting again can do so in peace?
I have been waiting 4 years for the "final" patch so i can enjoy my career without having to start again and adapting to the changes, finish the game and let it come to rest please, stop dragging this out any longer?With something as complex as KSP, there is no such thing as stamping out all remaining bugs. At some point you have to call it "good enough". They have devoted the rest of their resources to KSP 2, which is why we haven't seen another bugfix patch in a month and probably won't for some unknown time more.
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Is @Whackjob still playing KSP? You could look up some of his videos on YouTube. Looks like he stopped uploading KSP stuff 6 years ago, so it's missing a lot of improvements like the Making History parts (including 5m parts and engines), stock autostruts and joint reinforcement, but his principles still apply. Look at how he arranges rockets, girders/panel, and struts them together.
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After getting to the point where unlocking all the career nodes was pretty easy, I set my sights on more sandboxy things like:
- Jool 5
- Eve manned return mission
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Tylo landing & return vehicle
- Do it again but this time it must be a single-stage from Tylo orbit to landing and back to orbit (no dropping any spent stages)
- Laythe spaceplane
- Build a spaceplane that has the same launch and return profile as the Space Shuttle
- Quad-copter exploration of Eve and Duna
- Build a space station inspired by the ISS
- ISRU operations on Mun and/or Minmus that include the mining rig, ore processing on-site, trucks if necessary to transport fuel to a ground-anchored and custom built (by Engineers using the i menu) launchpad, transport of fuel to orbit, optionally to a space station, acting as a refueling gateway for other missions.
- Apollo 11-17 (pick one) reenactment
And you can do a whole career with additional self-imposed rules like:
- Kerbals require extra roomy spacecraft with multiple rooms for any mission lasting longer than 14 days.
- Kerbals require the above, plus artificial gravity by some means of centrifugal force if the mission lasts more than 1 year. This could be mods that add spinning habitats, or "pretend spinning" by custom building your own circular habitat or just putting the living spaces at the ends of a spacecraft that is reasonably long enough that it could generate enough centrifugal force by just sending it tumbling in the pitch or yaw direction, understanding the game when time-warping stops the rotation, but we pretend the Kerbals keep it spinning when not performing maneuvers.
- Environmental policy bans the use of solid rocket boosters, except seperatrons
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Anti-Kessler syndrome policy: no spent stages or orbital trash is allowed in orbit around Kerbin. No deleting debris allowed (unless its periapsis is below 70km implying atmosphere would decay its orbit quickly), so trash must be manually de-orbited within a reasonable timeframe or when able.
- Same as above except the rule applies to all other celestial bodies, so transfer stages must impact into the surface. No trash in solar orbit either.
- No landing on engine bells. Must use landing legs (or custom built landing legs that look reasonably structurally sound)
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This isn't meant as a bug report, but is anyone else getting duplicate parachutes (the personal kerbal ones) every time they use the EVA science kit?
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On 8/11/2021 at 10:23 AM, Michel Bartolone said:
Yep, I was able to do it repeatedly. I had thought it was the addition of the Wwwwwww mod, but I removed that, and relaunched the mission. I get to the satellite, move in so I'm about 3 meters away go EVA, and as soon as the engineer gets outside of the ship, I'm travelling 7+ m/s in the Z axis, and reverse RCS thrust doesn't even slow me down at all, and no I am not trying to use the EVA'd kerbal's jetpack to slow the ship...I switched into the ship and can't get the Z axis motion to slowdown unless I flip the ship around and kick on the engine. I get back to the satellite, creep up to it again, I'm about 1 meter from the satallite in the Y axis, 3 meters in the Z axis, 0 in the x-axis, and my velocities relative to the target are 0.00 m/s and the velocity difference is less than 0.05 m/s. Again my engineer goes EVA, and the ship started accelerating in the Z-axis AND the Y axis (away from the satellite).
Sounds kind of like a kraken drive. Do you have anything near your exit hatch? Upload a craft file.
Speaking of aging satellite contracts, I really like them! I love the idea of servicing other spacecraft, adding reaction wheels and/or batteries, etc. It's one of my favorite mission types now and it makes the Kerbal system feel more alive and realistic.
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Naming systems that denote purpose and version are practical and useful, especially for organization and when you have dozens of flights going at once.
So of course I don't do that and instead pick naming systems that are fun, but leave me forgetting what the heck it was for and how old they were in the tech tree. https://namingschemes.com/Main_Page has a giant list of suggestions. Lately I've been using horticulture and animals, so things like Pothos IX and Polar Bear Mk 4.
In my next save I might go with Hobbit/LOTR characters. Sure would be fun sending Dwalin and Balin to the moon
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10 minutes ago, KerbMav said:
After making a copy of savegames and mods?
Yes, I copied my KSP directory to my Documents folder first, but I did my testing on a new save and without mods.
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I'm not getting any drift on a (very simple) craft that I built as one craft on the ground, then decoupled and re-docked while on the ground (using rover wheels) then cheated into orbit with F12, rotated 15 degrees (on both ports) and then un-locked both ports. I saved and reloaded and quit and reloaded, then saved and reloaded 5 more times. They're still perfectly in-line. Does this bug only occur with very large craft?
I will say that after the 1.12.2 patch, KSP was causing my entire computer to crash very consistently (no problems in other CPU and graphics intense games like DCS). When I verified game files in Steam, it re-downloaded 34 files. Still crashed. Verified again, 0 files had to be redownloaded, still crashed. It wasn't until I uninstalled completely, deleted the KSP directory from my Steam common folder, and redownloaded completely that the crashes stopped. Is there a chance that the part drifting bug could be solved by others if they deleted and reinstalled completely fresh like I did?
EDIT: Warning - copy your KSP folder somewhere safe first so you don't lose your saves
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Yes, here are the relevant notes in the patch:
QuoteRejoice and explore the Kerbal universe once more… you might even encounter some of the new easter eggs and unlockable launch sites scattered around the solar system. Are you ready?
Quote* Fix Mobile Launch sites where all the legs will now try to extend if one does not find a ground collision.
* Fix Mobile Launch Sites could end up with a null reference for positionMobileLaunchsite. -
Very touching! I was hoping you would get Felipe in this video and I cheered out loud when I saw that you did!
I was planning to stop playing till Release Day. Am I the only one?
in Prelaunch KSP2 Discussion
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I'm doing the opposite. There are a couple things I haven't done in KSP 1. I feel like once KSP 2 comes out, I'm not going to have the motivation to go back to KSP 1 and complete them. Now's the time to strike off the bucket list!