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problemecium

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  1. As part of an assignment for graduate school I created a planet for KSP and its Kopernicus mod, which I have dubbed Hira. Beyond the orbit of Eeloo, between where Sarnus and Urlum orbit in the Outer Planets Mod, Hira is suspected to once have been a rogue planet that was captured in the last few thousand years by the combined gravitational influences of Kerbol and Jool. It includes five custom biomes and a number of unique Science reports. With low gravity, a moderately high rotation speed, and no atmosphere, its surface is relatively easy to visit once the planet's SOI is reached. I make no claims about this being an exceptionally interesting or elaborate planet pack, but since I made it I figured I'd share it, so if you are looking for a new planet to visit, here it is. Let me know what you think or if you have any questions or issues Prerequisites: Kopernicus Installation is the standard procedure for any planet pack and most mods. Extract the ZIP archive and either copy the GameData folder into your installation directory or copy the problemecium folder into your GameData directory. Download
  2. I FINALLY DID IT It is done! I am free! Please advise me if any additional documentation is needed and also feel free to leave any other feedback ^^; P.S. I made this "Jebediah's Level" version of the badge for anyone who has completed Jebediah's Level to use:
  3. Part 12: Conclusion After several attempts to find a maneuver plan that fit within Aletheia's uncomfortably waning delta-V budget, it became clear that it was, sadly, not feasible to return the command section to Kerbin. It proved fortuitous indeed that not one but two ARKs had been brought, leaving one still able to bring everyone home. A gravity assist from Laythe would eject it from the system and send it on its way to Kerbin, so Aletheia returned to Laythe one final time as all of the crew transferred into the ARK and detached. The now empty and all but spent mothership placed itself in a stable orbit to serve as its resting place while its crew bade it a loving farewell. Shortly after they bade the Jool system farewell as they performed their ejection burn back toward home. As Jool receded into the distance, everyone took one last look at the system, the planet and all of its moons visible together as if to wave goodbye themselves. The return to Kerbin ended up involving an incredibly fast approach that was very difficult to handle. A strategy was adopted wherein the ARK would expend most of its delta-V just before entering the atmosphere, then orient perpendicular to the air stream and roll to combat any concentration of heat as it aerobraked, and finally use a gravity assist from the Mun to achieve a safe re-entry trajectory within a vaguely reasonable distance of the space center: Having barely managed to survive intact, the ARK was now able to parachute gently to the ground and use the last of its fuel to provide a soft landing for its weary occupants: The crew jubilantly climbed out and planted a flag to commemorate their achievement. Before Aletheia reached Jool's sphere of influence, the space program stood at a total of 2906.8 science points. With the mission complete, including some science data generated in the onboard lab and some contributions from lucky contract offers and the Kerbin World Firsts Record Keeping Society, the final total was brought up to 17209, with 8755.7 points recovered from the return vessel (plus an extra 0.1 point for a surface sample gathered at the final landing site) and a further 5546.5 earned during the trip: - With that, the Jool-5 Challenge is at last complete! It was in many ways imperfect, with some opportunities for science data collection missed and many things not going according to plan, but through cautious preparation and a great deal of perseverance, it ended in success. I can finally say I did it and look ahead to greater adventures in the future. For this challenge, a number of visual mods were employed, and a few mechanical mods were present, but no parts or functionality provided therein were used during the mission, so this is meant to qualify as a mechanically fully stock challenge submission at Jebediah's Level: - All stock parts, resources, and other mechanics - No functional parts were clipped into one another (I can provide craft files to support this claim if necessary) - No ISRU or refuelling missions - Normal difficulty settings used at minimum - The mission departed Kerbin's SOI as a single ship, with no additional components provided after departure - Each of Jool's five moons was visited by a different Kerbal, who was able to exit the ship to explore the surface and then board again - All landings were performed in an enclosed landing craft rather than by EVA or an external seat - All Kerbals were returned safely to Kerbin aboard part of the original vessel rather than via a shuttle or rescue mission - Entire mission performed in Career Mode with default Science and Funds multipliers and the stock technology tree - Bonus noteworthy circumstances: no DLC, no administrative strategies, no autostruts, no ion engines used for challenge completion (only for the survey probes which weren't part of the challenge), all mission components fully reusable Please advise me if any qualifications were missed or require additional documentation, and thanks to all those who helped create and oversee this challenge! It brought me a great deal of enjoyment that KSP might otherwise have failed to provide me <3
  4. Part 11: Tylo, Bop, and Pol Once again transferring from one moon to the next was among the easiest parts of the mission. I found it special that I happened to get a periapsis to a precise multiple of a kilometer: The Tylo lander was finally able to fulfill its intended purpose and actually land on Tylo: Tatiana Kerman proceeded to plant the flag. With barely any delta-V left to spare, the lander managed to make it back to Aletheia. The lander, like the Laythe lander, was left here in orbit for potential later reuse while Aletheia moved on to Bop. The survey probe was launched, and with it, Aletheia, and the small lander all working together, an extensive search was performed for a certain rumored point of interest I had never visited before: Barbara proceeded to plant the flag and return to the mothership: Here a package containing a small rover and skycrane was deployed for potential later use exploring the surface: The mothership then advanced to the final moon of Jool, Pol, where it deployed its last survey probe. Pol's gravity was so low that the small lander didn't even need to refuel before landing here, which was fortunate considering the fuel shortage that had been incurred earlier in the mission. Finally, Peggy returned in the lander to Aletheia. All that was left to do now was make it home safely...
  5. Part 10: Vall Transferring among Jool's three inner moons requires very little delta-V aside from what is needed to eject from and capture into orbit around each, so plotting a course for Vall was simple. On arrival, the survey probe was deployed early while still in a high elliptical orbit in order to conserve fuel, not that the probe itself had much need of this thanks to its ion engines. The heavy lander was then detached and sent down to the surface. It turned out I was making a serious mistake here, as I would discover later... Mavis Kerman successfully brought the lander down safely and then returned to the mothership where it was once again a tight fit to insert it into its cargo bay. At this point I realized my mistake when, preparing to drop off the portable station, I noted that the small lander attached to it had over 1800m/s of delta-V - more than enough for a Vall landing! I had recalled some instance in the past wherein my small lander hadn't been up to the task, so I'd used the large lander instead, but alas! This had not been part of the mission plan, and not enough spare fuel had been brought along to refuel it. This could have been a disaster. Fortunately I had prepared for the unexpected and brought a spare life boat Auxiliary Return Kraft (ARK), which contained enough fuel to refill the lander. This meant that the ARK would no longer be usable as a backup in case of emergency, so it would have to be left behind here along with the portable station when it was deployed shortly. I also noted a second, thankfully much less significant mistake. I had deployed a survey probe from the extra probe package rather than the one conveniently attached to the station. I thus had to detach the latter and painstakingly relocate it to one of the auxiliary docking ports. I think this may have been the first time I ever docked something solely using ion engines! The portable station was then deployed and the empty ARK sent to join it. In the future it might see use as an escape vehicle in case some emergency should happen to the station, but as I did not bring any extra crew to leave behind here, the two of them would simply sit idle for the time being. The station was now no longer available as a source of extra science points, so all of its research was transmitted home and the scientists moved into the main crew cabin aboard the mothership. With all of the business with Vall completed, it was time to proceed toward Tylo.
  6. Part 9: Getting It Done *cough, cough* *Necromances the thread like a boss* KSP2 came out and I diverted my attention to that for a little while, then a bunch of other stuff happened that took me away from KSP altogether for months but this week I decided I had had enough of never having finished the Jool-5 Challenge and resolved to put my perfectionism and other ambitions on hold and finally get it over with. All those years living with the shame of having logged countless hours in KSP yet never beating the Jool-5 Challenge could finally come to an end. So where did we leave off? I did a live stream wayyyy back when of the ejection burn from Kerbin and took a few screenshots along the way: The ejection maneuver consumed over 46% of the total fuel supply but put Aletheia on a course to intercept both Tylo and Laythe, providing maximum opportunity to conserve the remaining delta-V using gravity assists: From here I decided to park the mothership in a wide orbit around Laythe to make later retrieval of the transfer stage easier. All of the fuel was extracted from the transfer stage in order to maximise the capabilities of the command section. Because none ended up being left over, it seemed likely and indeed later came to pass that the transfer stage would be left in orbit of Laythe for potential use as a fuel depot in the future, rather than being retrieved and used for the return trip. The command section detached and proceeded to enter into a low orbit and deploy the Laythe plane. After a fiery reentry, Maya Kerman successfully brought the craft to a safe landing. Because the plane had been designed to be capable of performing a single stage ascent into orbit from Kerbin during tests, returning to the mothership from Laythe was very straightforward. The plane was left in orbit above Laythe for potential later reuse, and a survey satellite was launched to observe Laythe going forward and provide supplemental orbital science data. All moons except Tylo would host such a satellite. From here it was onward to Vall. To avoid creating an excessively long post, this final report is being split into several parts. For these forum posts I have posted a selection of the most important and prettiest screenshots, but many more are available as supplemental documentation in case any doubts arise about how parts of the mission were accomplished.
  7. I FINALLY COMPLETED THE JOOL-5 CHALLENGE All those years I spent living with the shame of having logged so many hours in the game yet never having completed the Jool-5 Challenge are finally over. I'm free! Yay!
  8. Thanks for the tip, but I've already adjusted my OS mouse settings to my comfort, and needing to change them back and forth for a single game is bad UX. The fact that COD and Valorant don't support that doesn't make it okay, it makes those games part of the problem. And do keep in mind DPI is not infinite. I can't just crank it up to ten thousand because a game shipped with a bad value, because mouse hardware physically can only scan so many intervals within a given physical length (hence the term Dots Per Inch) - and requiring players to buy an expensive high-DPI mouse to fix a bad configuration setting is also bad UX design. Also KSP 1 had adjustable mouse sensitivity and I was glad to have it. There is no legitimate reason for KSP 2 to choose to step back from this (hence I presume the missing setting is among the many "not yet done" parts). Sorry to sound like I'm lecturing but I wanted to cover all my bases here lol
  9. This is admittedly a little non-standard but hopefully it proves fruitful to some degree; I've moved this post from https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/212549-problemeciums-bug-reports-hopefully-im-not-making-a-mistake-posting-this-here and updated it with some corrections and additional details. I played for the first time for about four hours on Friday, including taking all of the tutorials. During that time I jotted down every significant bug I found (i.e. excluding little stutters, inexplicable crashes, and things I just personally didn't like). There were way too many for me to make a thread for every one of them, so here's the whole list. The ones I think are most important to address are in bold: part selection highlight all over the VAB and around Kerbin can't remap any non-keyboard inputs (e.g. mouse buttons) or adjust sensitivity of any inputs mouse wheel sensitivity very low UI too big tutorial blocking some parts of UI UI appears to be designed for pixel perfection at 1080p and scales itself, badly, on other resolutions such as 1440p, resulting in uneven jagged blocky outlines etc. UI can't be rescaled or repositioned atmospheres too bright near horizon: as used to be the case in KSP1, atmospheres are nearly white near the horizon, much brighter than the terrain at the same point, which should only occur when within the atmosphere looking out at a sun, not while in space looking down cannot pause dialogue during tutorials tutorial progress not saved persistently (automatically) and thus is lost in crashes cannot use F for momentary SAS toggle Navball heading marker still not precise, covers actual heading with dot the Mun is a "terrestrial planet" (further analysis suggests that the "terrestrial planet" text is a placeholder so this is probably known already) cannot persist vehicle popup in Map (only visible while hovering) marker popups such as the Apoapsis do not remain open when leaving and re-entering the Map skybox needs revision, e.g. a lot more stars tutorials do not define or explain delta-V before referring to it KSC LOD pop in/out is too close and thus looks horrible PQS LOD pop ins/outs look bad cannot change focus using Tab in Tracking Station or Map yellow alert popups are annoying, are too large, and can't be disabled end/replay/continue buttons are too similar and not in consistent places leading to confusion workspace thumbnails are too low resolution and thus blurry thermal part category popup description truncated ("Disperse and protect against") several part descriptions truncated or with formatting errors can't place parts while holding Alt absolute translate/rotate does not snap to an absolute grid/orientation cannot deselect parts in translate/rotate mode undo does not undo colors Procedural wings in symmetry appear with the first one being a big pink rectangle while the rest are normal sometimes when adjusting the parameters of a procedural wing in a symmetry group and then detaching and reattaching the group, the wing parameters get reset Laythe's atmosphere looks like a solid plastic shell docking ports cannot decouple from preattached state (hopefully not intentional) cannot view current fuel level in specific tanks or transfer fuel EDIT apparently this is a thing but I couldn't find it so my "bug report" is that maybe we need a hint about how to access this cannot aim camera at a particular part in flight cannot adjust camera aim using MMB in flight default zoom in VAB and flight is too close for large craft no auto-saved craft on launch (intentional?) no TWR readout anywhere I can find in the VAB or in flight EDIT apparently this is also a thing that I just couldn't find so same as above undocking marks the mission as a failure and causes the vessel to stop in place and free fall saving seems to break randomly!I was not able to find a clear pattern or trigger for this. Supplemental information: KSP version: KSP 2 version 0.1.0.0.20892 Operating system: Windows 10 Hardware: Intel Core i9-10900k, NVidia RTX 3080 Founder's Edition No mods. I'm happy to explain any of these in more detail. I hope my calling attention to these helps at least a little, in some way. Obviously Intercept Games has a lot of known issues through which to work and I have no idea how many of these already exist in the bug tracker. Please let me know if there is a more effective way for me to report these.
  10. I really hope they reconsider having mod support so far out on the roadmap and enable what they can in a (hopefully coming very soon) hotfix patch so we can just not have to deal with mod loaders. Watching, for instance, the Minecraft mod and mod loading scene evolve over the years has been painful, and I really liked that KSP 1 simply loaded whatever was in the GameData folder, even if it technically was a security issue.
  11. On the topic of this scroll wheel debate, I eagerly await the ability to rebind the rest of the controls and change their sensitivity in this game. Mouse sensitivity is too low (for me) most places - admittedly I keep mine way higher than the average player, but that's my point here - it should be adjustable because anywhere I find it fine, it's probably way too high for many other people. The throttle is a similar deal: I actually find it too sensitive by default. I'm a freak who doesn't like to use the scroll wheel (some kind of neurodivergent thing involving rotating mechanical parts) and preferred to use the + and - keys in KSP1 to zoom, but behold: that's not an option any more. I don't demand that the control scheme be tailored to me and my unusual tastes, but in the modern world changing controls for accessibility reasons is a very important issue, especially for large studios with large audiences. There are also keybinds such as F to momentarily toggle SAS that were very useful and are sorely missed. I really hope these control issues get addressed, and soon!
  12. oof I knew it xD I looked specifically for a forum like that but somehow didn't see it. I request this thread be moved, or if no mods come by to do that for a bit, I'll recreate it over there ^^;
  13. [Moved to https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/213773-problemeciums-bug-reports ]
  14. lol I'm glad I came here because I just saw it for the first time too and was like "what mod does that?" xD
  15. I have come out of hiding to express how excited I am about building with the new parts that have been and will be introduced! Quadruple NTRs will be a huge boon for large interplanetary vessels' part counts.
  16. I found a few more scattered among my vast screenshot archive, some of which have appeared here and there on this forum in the past: "images captured moments before disaster" captioned this one Val stands victorious! Heating bug during a Jool-5 mission a while back. The time I went to Eve and got ganked (I imported the model file for a ship from Eve Online as a KSP part and shopped in an explosion so it's kinda fake sorta). There was an old "what's the biggest ship you've ever launched" thread and I had imported this ship from SpaceEngine to play around. A true favorite - how I used to preferentially land my planes because trying to do a rolling landing with the old wheels and the low framerate my laptop gave me just didn't feel worth it.
  17. Technically it wasn't today, or in KSP, but the day before yesterday I had, for the first time (that I remember) a dream about KSP. It was weird because I've had dreams about Minecraft and Eve Online before but hadn't dreamed about KSP despite playing it more than either of those two.
  18. Today I sat down and actually completed the Elon's Problem Challenge, finally. It was in Sandbox mode so there was no thrill of grabbing loads of Science points or pulling it all off within a budget, but my goal was to get it over with so I can get the badge, and now that is done Gallery: https://imgur.com/gallery/q1Gebn1 P.S. It seems there wasn't an actual badge to be found anywhere, so I made one: Slap it on your own signature if you complete the challenge.
  19. Today I seem to have duplicated a Kerbal. Trust no one, not even yourself, I guess. Yes the random name generator did name her Madden Kerman and I do find it amusing.
  20. oh wow look at me coming up with the same idea and blathering about it before clicking the links xP
  21. That sounds like a start, yes, but what we're discussing, mathematically, is data compression, and data can only be compressed so much without significant loss. Imagine an extreme case, for argument's sake, wherein all of the information you described was contained in a single massive data structure and the ship were only one part. The ship would be entirely rigid and unable to detach stages. Perhaps a stage could be detached by procedurally rebuilding all the data about the ship and repacking it into two separate craft, but that sounds like something that would cause a big lag spike, no? That's not even mentioning that yes, we'd have eliminated the physics engine burden of calculating drag cubes and inertia and forces etc. etc. for the parts, but all that data about fuel flow, crew, heat, etc. would still have to be processed, and that single part would have very complex geometry (including colliders and other invisible geometry used for physics calculations) and thus perform far worse than a single part normally does. In short, a lot of the data processing that makes craft lag isn't made simpler by reducing the nominal part count, and there's a big cost associated with aggressive optimizations like this, and with the diminishing returns of one optimization after another, KSP is already pretty close to as good as it is practical to get it. That's part of the motive behind making KSP 2 - to get KSP much more performant than it is would require so many changes to its code base, from bottom to top, that the time and effort involved would be comparable to a big chunk of a whole new game. In the meantime, the existing part welder mod is pretty effective at what it does and might be enough to tide you over until the sequel lands.
  22. Sardaukerbals OMG imagine the backwards Spanish throat singing xD EDIT: I couldn't resist and spent 40 minutes on this terrible joke.
  23. Immortal Jellyfish everyone? I just imagined what would happen if Kerbal death from old age was added but "Lost crews respawn" was left on so after dying of old age Kerbals just respawned xD
  24. Good point! I had deleted them since I personally only had a use for maybe one of them and then totally forgot to put the others back in for the public release. I'll get on that once I have a spare hour or so to dig through my old installations again. The flags from the original mod download (if the old link works) should be fine in the meantime. I'm a fan of GitHub (I preferentially use it for all my mod downloads) but I currently don't have an account and can't spare much time lately so I just threw it somewhere I was used to hosting files xP Also this one mod isn't likely to get any more maintenance (aside from me putting the flags back in) since the KSP code base is expected to be fixed from now on.
  25. Hmmm, seems like a bad idea to make a new year's resolution related to KSP (other than "don't play too much KSP") but if I were to make one, it'd have to be this: FINISH THE JOOL-5 CHALLENGE ALREADY for crying out loud I've been at this for like 7 years now and there's no excuse >.<
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