SkyRender

So it turns out that 300t of asteroid goes a lot faster than I thought it would, filling only about 6 or 7 Rockomax-64 tanks despite reporting there being so much rock left to mine. Seems like I was getting more ore for the first 25% than I did for the last 75%, should probably investigate that... Fortunately I still have more than enough to get Dunaverse out the door without relying on surface fuel, but man. This whole asteroid mining effort was a complete waste of time, though. I used way more fuel draining it than I got out of it.

After a comedy of errors that required 3 different ships just to mine this space potato, I finally have things in place. This class D is in fairly low equatorial Kerbin orbit now and has about 3/4ths of its useful mass left. I expect I'll get about 20 to 30 Rockomax-64 tanks' worth out of it, which works out to around 18 to 27 after you account for having to ferry it back to the orbital fuel station in proper LKO. That's about 4.5 times more than I'm going to need for the Dunaverse mission, so I'm good with it.

I nabbed all of the pre-paid versions many years back when they were all put up in archive form, so technically I have the first non-closed-testing release (0.7.3). That said, the oldest version I have that I actually played at time of release is 0.11.1. EDIT: Let's have a quick look at that fateful first official KSP release! The title screen was a lot more basic in the old days! It also loaded instantly, but that was because assets weren't loaded until after you started a new game. The Space Center was so much more basic back then! The only thing you could click on was the VAB, which looked much different back then. Also, this was ages before persistent saves existed, let alone quicksaves or even the ability to feasibly reach orbit. The editor was very barebones back then. Money didn't exist yet, nor did part limits or basically anything beyond about 12 parts to choose from. For ages we had a useless tab called Decals too, which ultimately was dropped around the time that the context menus were added. Oh did I not mention that parts have no context menus? They also have no symmetry options. Removing a part from the rocket instantly deletes it in this version, too. The engine you're given can barely lift 2 fuel tanks' worth. The launchpad also had a cosmetic tower on it, which mostly just got in the way in later versions since it limited the size of your ships to no bigger than about 6m in diameter. SAS didn't exist back then, RCS definitely didn't exist, and staging was generally a mess to deal with since nothing could be rearranged. The water texture back then was a default Unity asset, and the water itself was rock-solid. The atmosphere was thicker than Eve's is now (and absolutely uniform with no aerodynamics modeled to boot). KSP has come a long way in the last 9 years. A very long way indeed.

Last night in a mad quest to find an alternative to break-happy rover wheels, I accidentally invented a dancing robot. Instead of walking about, it just sort of does a merry jig with its 4 legs and generally spins around looking like it's having a great time. It's hilarious, but hardly useful.

A wide base is best, yes. You can force it with aforementioned massive alligator hinges, thus letting you keep a low profile the rest of the time. Or if you're feeling adventurous, you could make a skycrane system and bypass the whole mundane construction techniques. That, however, requires serious precision landing skills.

You're running into an age-old issue, and the main reason why construction cranes are usually stationary. This is why buildings are constructed from smaller pieces, and the really big stuff is carted over on flatbeds and then lifted via a stationary crane. You may want to consider a strategy along those lines, in fact: get the base pieces where you need them via flatbed rover, have your crane lock itself to the ground with hinges when it's in position, and then lift and transfer on site.

You need a counterbalance. That can be done in two ways: you can either introduce a counterweight system (usually a pair of fuel tanks that have a full tank between them does the trick; just shift the liquid to the side that needs more weight), or add large alligator hinges to all sides to use the ground itself as a stabilizing force. Since you're trying to move something, I would advise the former.

Giving my current Minmus miner one last run for its money before it gets replaced by a contractually obligated variant. That thing was a disaster, I sent it up originally without a docking port for the rover to attach to and intending to fulfill an oddball contract that it couldn't because it didn't house 5 Kerbals. Here's hoping its replacement is less absurd.

I'd like to actually play the game past getting the entire tech tree unlocked and actually leave the Kerbin system again. It's literally been years since I bothered, if you don't count the launch of solar commsats.

There's at least one mod for that. I think you can set to use the hardware cursor in the settings still too, for which most recording software is smart enough to have a "do not record" option.

According to my old Hitchhiker's Guide to Kerbals (specifically its section on struts), Kerbals deliberately altered spacetime around their solar system. They did this with the negative gravioli principle, a technique so mind-bogglingly advanced that most species never discover it. Kerbals found it on accident, realized space flight was now way too easy, then used the negative gravioli principle to make spaceflight harder and destroyed all knowledge they'd acquired on the subject just to make sure they wouldn't be tempted to do things the easy way instead. I miss that old series. So much silly lore I came up with back then...

Just getting to Duna is evidence enough that you can get to the other planets if you really want to (even if you might not necessarily be able to land or even orbit about them). All that takes is a bit of engineering to get enough dV. Hm, my newest KSP sin? Probably my oldest: I abandon my existing saves every new version. Consequently, I have surprisingly few saves where I bothered to leave the Kerbin system (though even fewer where I didn't unlock the entire tech tree just from the Kerbin system).

Always interesting to see how others design their craft. Other than the most basic designs, no two designers seem to think alike! Also, what are those three lines? A mod part, I presume?

It still works the same way, it's just that sometimes... it doesn't actually work. If you use the EVA build mode to put them down, it really messes them up and they'll never deploy even though you put them down correctly otherwise. To be safe, grab them from a ship's inventory and deploy them without putting them in your Kerbal's inventory or using EVA build mode. EDIT: If you have a deployed science module that is stuck permanently in inactive mode, you can fix it via save editing. Find the part in question, and go down to its ModuleAnimationGroup section, then set isEnabled and isDeployed to True instead of False. You'll also need to set isEnabled in the section directly above this for each deployed ground science to True too.

Can't speak for this user, but when I do this sort of thing I use the Pencil Sketch rendering option in Paint.net and then use some color and thickness manipulation shenanigans to make it look like a blueprint drawing. A simple blueprint background behind that, then an overlay texture filter to make it look a bit rumpled, and there you go. EDIT: An example! I added some coffee stains too. Fonts are Sergoe Script and Sergoe Print. Arrows are done with hand-adjusted bezier curve lines.

Prototyping galore today. This has been a 3-day project so far, developing the latest version of my Duna-Ike exploration mission "Dunaverse". Pictured here is the current testing model of the assembled station with the 6 main components of the mission: station core, orbital habitation, surface base (hinges with servos are used to deploy it), heavy-duty 8-Kerbal lander, Ike mining mission (surface-to-orbit fuel ferry, wheeled fuel tanker, mini-miner), and the Ike-to-Duna fuel ferry.

I used to use a ton of mods. Then almost every mod I used ended up becoming a stock feature. Now I use 3: TAC Life Support, Kerbal Alarm Clock, and Planetary Base Systems. The first is to add an extra element of challenge, the second is a major convenience feature, the third supplements the game's rather lackluster base-building options. Other than those, I don't really need any other mods.

I first played KSP right around the start of November of 2011. It was a very different game back in 0.11, there was a whole lot more spontaneous unplanned disassembly and a whole lot less actually reaching orbit. I've been playing this game for 9 years now. And it still leaves me with a sense of joy every time I play it. That is insane.

I figured out what happened. When they were deployed, the game did not set the isEnabled and isDeployed flags. As soon as I set those for the appropriate parts in the save file, the issue was resolved. I don't know WHY they didn't activate those flags when I deployed them, but at least I was able to fix the problem.

When I deployed them, nothing happened at all with them. They have zero interaction options and no context menu. The only thing I can do when I walk very close to one is play a little animation with the F key that does absolutely nothing useful.

I tried that, as per the older versions. Though they definitely got placed, none of them activated. And yes, as my signature says, I'm the one who uploaded the KSP music to YouTube years ago.

I ask because it seems to have changed. I tried putting down the science parts with an engineer Kerbal, and they just sit there being unusable. I sent a scientist to take a look, and the parts remain unusable. How does one deploy surface science experiments in 1.11? EDIT: I seem to have found a bug, a very nasty one. The experiments now sit on the Mun's surface, untouchable by anything at all ever. Kerbals aren't allowed to interact with them, they will not deploy, and engineers cannot pick them up to put them back into cargo storage. This is, to say the least, suboptimal.

Some elements of KSP scale up just fine when you're running at mega-resolutions. Others... don't. The AP/PE text (and almost all other map screen text for that matter), for example, are utterly microscopic in 4K and it will only get worse at higher resolutions. Many mods also don't properly scale to 4K+, but that's on mod makers. The UI scaling options do nothing, and thus I am forced to run the game at 2K if I don't want eyestrain when using map mode.

Adding the best parts of Kerbal Attachment and Inventory System mods to KSP is so very welcome. I would like to second the motion to add winches, pipes, and connectors! Running a gas station on the Mun just sounds too cool to pass up on.

I will admit that I'm more than a little rusty on this sort of thing, but how can this mod be considered updated for the current version of KSP when one of its dependencies (EnvironmentalVisualEnhancements) is still 3 versions behind?