0111narwhalz

Your image didn't embed.

Better yet, she starts in surprise and falls down the ramp. Get some slapstick in here!

Have you tried adjusting the dampers and springs? I find that can make a huge difference to stability. If either value is too high or too low you'll get poorly-damped oscillations.

I think you will find MessageSystem of utility.

Spacebar will also reset the last gizmo action to its state before you clicked the part with the gizmo.

The "rounding error" is supposed to refer to the starwisp's thrust, i.e. "the starwisp's thrust is like a rounding error, and the ramscoop is more than that."

Thanks, I changed it to "more thrust than the starwisp's mere rounding error." I included a thing addressing that.

Like the story itself, I've done a bunch of rewriting. I'm now publishing worldbuilding articles elsewhere, starting with the one for FTL. It even has a couple of little animations to get the point across. Check it out!

It's been quite a long while coming, but I've started publishing again! Now, before you get your hopes up: They're not new, new chapters. Instead, I'm rewriting those two-and-a-half year old monstrosities with all the skills I've picked up since. If you miss the old chapters, they're all available here in a convenient reader compilation. I also still have some reservations about posting the whole thing directly to the forums, so I'm publishing them to a different platform and linking them here. And with that out of the way, allow me to present Kerbal Future's new chapter 1a!

Is this what I think it is? It's been a long while since I've seen the Spirit of Kerbin…

Kerbal Foundries has a little gas turbine generator that makes a ton of smoke and no thrust, if that helps. Also you can set its throttle. I don't think it has a TweakScale config, but that's a relatively easy thing to hack in.

Yeah, it has issues. But leading arms don't work well at all (and have weird tracking artifacts if you put them on both front and back), solid axle has most of the same problems as leading arm, MacPherson is decent but has poor travel (at least in my implementation), and I haven't been able to figure out the geometry for stable A-arm since an early (and huge) prototype a few months ago. I'll take a look at FoMoCo, though.

I'm developing another fancy suspension-equipped vehicle. On the hunt for the elusive stable front suspension, I've landed on the… disappointingly simplistic "pogo stick" species. The front suspension is pogo stick Mk I, while the rear is trailing arm Mk IV. The trailing arm Mk IV is the lightest-duty practical trailing arm I've developed yet, since my foray into heavy-duty with the Mk III devolved into excessive part count and questionable stability. The pogo stick suspension has some issues with dragging on the ground, but the wheels are generally big enough to prevent that from being an issue in most cases. All the same, they're equipped with skid plates to protect the fragile pistons. If you try this at home, you'll need to do a small amount of config hackery to set the pistons to move freely. The suspension is capable of the most severe articulations I could find on the KSC grounds, at least at the scale of this vehicle. It's also great fun to jump around. While it has some minor issues with slightly nose-heavy landings and steep slopes like the admin building's lawn or the runway sides near the far end, it soaks up almost everything else. Its twin gas turbines are more than sufficient to power its motors at full bore up slopes and across the plains. On level ground it peaks out at about 55m/s, and has enough fuel for over an hour of hard driving around the KSC. In the event of a roll, its srimechs are more than sufficent to right it from any likely position, whether it's on its side or belly-up. I haven't balanced it on its nose or tail yet, so there's no contingency for that unlikely case.

I'm amused by the fact that NDA has a tooltip.

5/10 Commendable, but the Tracking Station's arrays are a little small for radio astronomy.