Somtaaw

Some of this stuff is awesome, love it. Do have a question, how easy is it to get say the Ion probe to disconnect, I always find it's ridiculously annoying to try to detach things from the Jr dock points, unless you action key it, which even if you run the mod to rebind in the field, isn't always easy to click them. On the side, given your seemingly ingenius building skills, interested in the challenge I posted for a mk3 passenger spaceplane? The emphasis was for passenger and interplanetary flight, over cargo capacity, which would still be just high enough to haul along a few ion probes or ore bots along with 20+ new Kerbals.

It's agile because it's not a long mk3 cargobay, "capable of flying a big red or more into orbit" type of plane. That alone makes you more agile than the vast majority of mk3's, unless they're specifically designed as some form of mk3 "space fighter" And you altered for a passenger just like I was looking for Awesome planes are awesome, and inspiration is always great

Nifty, a nice blend of the mk2 goodies like small and agile with vtol, but the advantages of mk3 too. I like

Small little bump to keep the search alive. After a long search, I've noticed all spaceplanes come in two primary variants. Either it's designed to be sporty & fun, with emphasis on the mk2 frame, very low passenger capability, and possible self-fuelling using a very very limited cargo capacity. Or they're mk3 monsters, designed to loft entire space stations in a single flight, sometimes with an huge passenger capability to crew the space station. Any variants are really in the mk 2 end of the spectrum, so I have not been able to find a mk3, designed to take 20 or more Kerbals on a multi-planet training flight, but with zero or minimal cargo capacity. An amendment to the list of what I'm searching for.... this mk3 does not have to be SSTO capable.Think of it as a high passenger, low cargo variant American space shuttle. Vertical, rocket-aided ascension, horizontal plane landings.

Kermany looks nice, a bit longer than is my taste, and I'd end up stripping the ISRU out from it but otherwise nice. And the SR-2 feel is love, Mass Effect was really great right up until "ha *&^% you, those hours and hours of agonizing choices meant absolutely nothing! bwahahaha". However on the downside, she looks a bit fragile for atmospheric flight, at least re-entry. For testing, since you already use HyperEdit, drop it directly into space +/- 1 second from a space station, and "pretend" you'd just undocked for a range test from there. Going interplanetary is pretty much the same as Munar and Minmunar trips, just with considerably more fuel and usually thrust involved. But the basic's are essentially the same.

I don't really think this thread belongs in Spacecraft Exchange, because I'm not actually showing off my own designs... but we don't exactly have a thread for "requesting" designs so lesser of known evils I suppose... but I digress, I'm seeking a Mk.3 Passenger spaceplane, for the purpose of quickly getting newly hired Kerbalnauts experience in, shall we say a 'supervised' environment. Minimum capability that I'm looking for here: -must have at least one Mk3 crew passnger cabins -capable of interplanetary flight (Dres or farther) -VTOL landings on low-grav moons and planets -full science package -capable of powered re-entry & landing to KSC -Stock parts If you're looking for additional challenge(s), in descending desirability: -capable of launching one, or more, mid-size satellites approximately the length of the mk-2 (short) cargobay in a single expedition -NOT be self-refuelling, provisions for external fuel drop tanks or docking to refuel yes, but no mining and refining mounted -FAR & stock aero capability friendly -Aesthestically pleasing, not simply function over form. And just because I want to try and fall within the boundaries of this sub-forum, the CSF SSTO that I've designed so far (although still haven't actually flown her)

Nice build, and from what I saw in some of the patchnotes, aren't we getting a rather limited edition of RemoteTech fairly soon? So getting some communication satellites up will be useful, if not quite as much as having the full RT. Looking carefully at the communication satellite, what the heck is side mounted from the solar arrays? The tiny little rings

Something that could be included here.... having a subassembly "category" that self-updates for all sub-assemblies not given a category. When you get to having 100+ subassemblies, trying to figure out which ones haven't been given a category to find one in specific can get very bothersome. Or if you go trolling through the ship exchange, and find someone's really, really awesome X, and without thinking about it you moved everything into your game, including their sub assemblies, and forget to go manually update the partlist\subassembly.cfg with their parts before you go in game.

The problem with the current system is actually the opposite of yours. There ISNT a point in doing unmanned mission, everything you can possibly do with unmanned can be done by just 1 Kerbal and be 100% better returns. Build a ship that can safely land and deploy arm/drill equipped rover, let it drive itself around picking up samples from a few biomes and return to the landing craft. Docking port or full up ramp, and the whole package lofts back into orbit and plots a course back to Kerbin with the soil samples for each biome visited. -vs- Build a ship that can safely land a Kerbal who runs or drive itself around picking up samples from a few biomes and return to the landing craft. Re-boards and the whole package lofts back into orbit and plots a course back to Kerbin with the soil samples in addition to having a Crew Report and EVA report for each biome visited. --- Kerbals can still add crew reports, eva reports which no unmanned mission can ever do, but a sample is a sample is a sample. Especially if it's returned to a lab or Kerbin, because right now a sample from X biome is a sample from X biome, let's use the example of the Mun. Highlands is highlands, it doesn't matter what part of the highlands you sample, I could put 2 different Kerbals on totally opposite sides of the Mun Highlands, and collect samples with each. Using two saves, before collecting each Kerbal, the science value from each will be identical despite having been collected from exact opposite sides of the Mun. How is a robotic arm or drill collecting a soil sample any different then, if we already have zero differences internally from a biome?

Well in addition to something like Decomissioned, it would be nice to actually have a "Satellite" ship type as well. Just because it's built around a probe core doesn't mean it's actually a short-endurance mission probe with a very specific purpose instead of floating perpetually in orbit of a single planet or moon.

You have what amounts to an avatar, who makes unintelligible mouth noises, and you spend a LOT of time clicking them or their environment to make things happen. The only difference is instead of the Kerbal(s) walking around on their own, they wait to be told what to do but otherwise sit there, float or orbit however they were until/unless instructed otherwise. And instead of building houses, and towns or cities, you're building rockets, bases, stations, and various other spacecraft, aircraft, or whatever else you can think up. But we're still playing what could be called a Sims game, it's just cloaked under space, math, and science stuff.

I have mixed feelings on Life Support and/or habitation effiency as it seems to have evolved in the posts over time. But with the upcoming 1.2 patchnotes showing a rather severe "nerf" to unmanned misisons (or manned missions that do not have a pilot, using a probe variant to sub for pilots), I have started leaning towards not wanting Life Support (as in food, water, etc) now. Until there's a better balance between unmanned and manned missions, since apparently only a Kerbal can dig a soil sample, despite the fact that a robot can operate a drill, collect a sample and put said sample into a container just like a Kerbal can. If the Life Support in vanilla acted something vaguely like the Convert-a-trons turn ore into LFO, and Fuel Cells turn LFO into energy... which you could say is almost Star Trek like "take carbon molecules, scramble them around, tada you have X food to personal taste". But having to load up greenhouses, and maybe even waiting on said greenhouses to mature to self-sustainability, or various other forms of "fuel but not fuel", then it'll simply become tedious running supply missions constantly, dependant on how many Kerbals are stationed or based wherever you have them. Habitability, or "keeping your little Kerbals happy", while basically just Kerbalized The Sims is already essentially what we're playing even if you don't have life support. Instead of building a single building, or a small town, etc you're building rockets. so we're all still playing The Sims with little green Kerbals. So adding in a few more Sims knockoff's, like keeping them happy, or exercised, and socialized is already something many people do as part of self-added moral system (don't use nukes in inhabited atmospheres, or sending more than one Kerbal on a long mission in more than a Mk1 fuselage). Since many people already act like that, that making it part of vanilla would simple give us added incentive to keep doing it, rather than simply for personal pleasure. If some variant of this gives a way to "skill up" crews without constantly having to bring them home to Kerbin, just to let their flight experiences tick into crew level, I'll probably start leaning back into true neutral on some variant of LS/Habitation coming into vanilla. But as I first stated, currently there's still far too much emphasis on manned missions, and nearly anything you can possibly do with an unmanned mission you can do at LEAST 200% better with just one Kerbal along for the ride.

Suggestion to have an inline Mk 3 cockpit, somewhat resembling that of the Mk 2 inline cockpit, so we can have a little more freedom in designing our Mk 3 aircraft. The Mk 2 frame also has the nifty and ever useful Drone Core sliver, which the Mk 3 also does not have an equivilent. As it currently stands, if you want to build a Mk 3 aircraft, the ONLY position your cockpit can really be is pretty much at the front of the craft, despite the small 1.25m mount point on the front, which usually ends up mounting either an air intake, or a dock port. The smaller aircraft airframes allow for the cockpit orprobe core, to be mounted physically anywhere on the plane front to back. Now I'm sure I could hunt around and find a mod that contains a part that resembles what I'm looking for, but honestly an inline Mk 3 with Mk 3 mount points on both sides of the cockpit should be part of the base, vanilla game exactly like it's smaller brothers.

Can't wait to install this... however I have a request, and a question. Question: do we just get the PAO speech regarding active flights, or will there be occasional check-in's from space stations, transmissions from spacecraft approaching maneuvering nodes (something, something, ready to apply thrust, something, something); Kerbals on EVA talking about the view and other random stuff like that? Request: interaction with RemoteTech antenna! I already have numerous nets of satellites up, and to start chucking even more into place just so I can get this to work properly would really, really suck. All my long term spacecraft already have RT antennae, and I'd have to either bring them all back home to add in the new part, or loft a dedicated attachment. edit: actually as I posted, realized you can't make the interaction happen with RT specific antenna, but perhaps an option on your side to use "stock" antenna rather than the Telemachus antenna

I should totally do this myself, I absolutely HATE burning up mono for rotation, when I specifically put reaction wheels for that purpose. Now how do I do this myself LOL.

I might have to grab B9 parts now. I'd been putting it off, because I really, really hate getting mods that have parts.... and then forgetting to update the mod whenever I decide to patch KSP itself, and then losing everything. I've been busy designing a form of stock satellite carrier, using a Mk3 long cargobay, and a pair of Mk3 to 2.5m adaptors with 2.5m docking ports. The only hard part is trying to design the new "standard sat" . I'll post some form of picture in the next day or so after I finish designing the new RT base satellites that will be docked into the carrier.

Not particularly then, I don't use active nuke engines within Kerbin's atmosphere, and I'll only use them in atmosphere's of any planets/moons I haven't started colonizing with bases. But I'll send Kerbals out solo, but only after I've started building really elaborate communications satellite networks. I play with RemoteTech mod, so if there's only a single possible "channel" for data flow to & from the ship, it's a multi-Kerbal crewed mission or it's totally unmanned. After I get multiple satellites emplaced for the network, then I send singletons because there's lots of bandwidth for "socialising" despite being physically alone. That's the closest I come.

so... like not using active nuke engines while in Kerbin's atmosphere only after reaching the 70km space limit sort of moral rules?

That's the very sort of inspiration I was looking for Van, although adding another batch of mods for the sleekness is blegh. But hmmm, I never thought of possibly trying to stuff a full up rocket with say mk.2 cargo pods, into a Mk3 level SSTO... this is good thanks.

This isn't quite a rocket exchange thread, so I think this fits in more here. Looking for some inspiration on communication satellite carriers. I like having junior docking pockets on my satellites, so at later times, I can fly out to them and refuel and/or greatly change their orbits at need. Especially useful with some contracts stating an existing satellite needs it's orbit altered. Or you're just docking an upgrade to it, expanding it's capabilities. But that docking port usage tends to mean my generally sleek rockets have these ugly, lumpy sticks extruded at somewhat random intervals and I just can't seem to design something that does the job, without looking like my satellite emplacers have cancerous tumors. Note, I also usually play with RemoteTech mod, although sometimes I turn that off, so Im looking for inspiration on manned carriers, or something I can modify into manned.

Was using this back when it was just version 1.61, quit KSP for a while, came back.... MRW seeing Kassandra updated = I MUST HAVE THIS! Great little craft, might not be the greatest for career because it uses such wildly varying parts, but if you've unlocked everything in career without really getting out of Kerbin SOI, Kassandra makes it easy to get your science everywhere nice and easy.

Wasn't really sure if this should go into mods, suggestions, or question forums so I'm just going to throw it here for now. Is there a mod for fuel switching? I'm starting to design a new spaceplane that's going to be exclusively for space, and I want to make it ion-powered for a sort-of low-signature SR-71 meets EA-6B Prowler sort of plane. I'm still looking at exactly which plane parts I want to use, but with either mk1, or mk2 plane parts use either LF or LF+O, and even the smaller engine shells hold the same. So to make my plane exclusively ion, means I must use radially attached xenon tanks, and then figure out how to properly conceal them, without making it ungodly hard to refuel the spaceplane. On a side note, wasn't there a fuel mod that allowed you to set relative fuel priorities? Something about fuel automatically 'flowing downhill', so you'd set fuel tankers relatively high, stations somewhere in the middle, and everything else low, so upon docking to a station you auto-refuelled? I can't remember the name for that, but it should help me with refuelling hidden xenon tanks.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/06/11/this-is-the-amazing-design-for-nasas-star-trek-style-space-ship-the-ixs-enterprise/ Just going to leave that here, and giggle

RemoteTech also covers the need to continously build up an extensive satellite network over multiple planets. However the stock setting also puts in slower than light control telemetry, so sending unmanned missions you have to wait for commands to be transmitted. It's possible to change some of those settings, but it also somewhat defeats the point of the RT mod, so it's 50/50.

I don't quite see why multi-launch can't happen. If I want to launch two identical rockets, with a payload that's been lofted numerous times and/or covered by the shells to streamline, while using an often-used lofter. You'd know every last bit of your launch pattern, so if you go for a simultaneous launch, and 'slave' the second rocket to mirror all commands given to the first one... something that can only be done with vertical rockets, with often used sub-assemblies perhaps?