eddiew

Minecraft is Java though, it's always going to be slow Absolute travesty that it has not been rewritten into C++. That said, KSP seems to be written in C#, which is somewhere between the two. Easier to code than C++, but also slower.

So after an unexpected break in which I broke a tooth and sighed over Imgur's inexplicable new UI, I finally brought the Pink Cougar's crew back to ground. Ah yes, the Wirliwiz. Because it meets all of the demands to be a stable vehicle under KSP's aero model. Mass and lift are balanced around the central axis, the thrust torque is less than 0.5 kNm, and it flies about as well as anything else with similar wing:mass ratio. At 62 tons on launch, take off speed is a modest 110m/s, although it's better to stay shallow and not try climbing below 250. Design-wise it does have a lot more intakes than it needs, and a mk2 has already been proposed to smooth out the nacelles at the front end. Because aesthetics matters, obviously. Having rescued Sakura from Otho orbit, there are now one more kerbals aboard Pink Cougar than can fit in the command pod, so Yuki - now known for her love of daring EVA hijinx - heads over alone to take up the second seat in the pilot's cabin. Transferring the command pod between Pink Cougar and Wirliwiz is a little fiddly, requiring cooperation from all pilots and having little margin for error, but with only a few scuffs and scrapes the docking ports lock on and the pod is fixed in place. If Wirliwiz has one problem, it's that it is quite hard to stop after re-entry. The angled wing surfaces mean it doesn't like to lose altitude, and the pitch control is adequate, but not generous, leading to a wide turning circle. Nonetheless, there's plenty of fuel left on board - in fact most of the nosecone is still full - and it's easy enough to bring her in for a retrograde landing. Which only bounced three times before coming to a rest. Although one of them was on the grass before the runway, since someone slightly misjudged the rate of descent and minimum flight speeds. And there we have it. Returned a vessel from Otho, Jannah, Hephaestus and Augustus. I think I will try to use this technique for future multi-body explorations, since it saves dragging redundant crew capsules around. Sadly it did not fulfil criteria for rendezvousing vessels in orbit, because I launched the pod atop the main expedition assemblage. Next time I will send the pod to meet the rest in LGO and see if KSP actually tracks the fact that they are separate launches over the duration of the mission.

Now I want to play Subnautica again...

Sadly I suspect that wouldn't fly without some very cheaty engines x) On the other hand this... this went to space, survived re-entry and landed. Carried about 4-600 oxidiser more than it needed, and has a slight tendency to roll to the left, but on the whole it did surprisingly well

Build an ordinary normal and totally functional and flyable spaceplane to get my command pod down from LGO. Then threw it away because that's too dull. This? Still not asymmetric enough... it's better, but it's not THERE yet.

Well, this made me laugh in a public place...

With every biome tapped out for science, the Blind Dragon sets course back to the Sourdough Ascent Vehicle. Turns out the SAV is sitting on some very loose sand, and while it's landing legs have found purchase, Blind Dragon's wheels do not, and the scoutplane begins to slide down the dune. Luckily the crew are well trained in emergency evac procedures, and quickly bail out to avoid a bothersome walk. By the next morning's launch, Blind Dragon seems to have settled into a depression in the sand, and doesn't flinch as the SAV's engines fire up to loft the vessel skyward. Returning to dock with the Pink Cougar, the team finally remembers that they were supposed to send the comms relay up to high orbit before they began their descent... They decide to do it now. What mission control never hear about won't cost anyone their snack privileges. Docking with the lab, the command pod transfers all its data plus scientist Yuki, and the team settles in for the long wait for their return window home. ...dat SAV doh. Let me tell you about how I tested that thing 3 times before this mission launched and it was fine, and then on the day, it barely... BARELY had enough fuel to reach orbit. Made the rendezvous with 12 units of LF left aboard. Definitely squeaky bum time. Still don't know how it ended up being so terrible, although I have noticed that KER and Mechjeb and stock delta-v readings have all been different for many of this expedition's vessels. Starting to think that the undocking and re-docking and weird staging has broken the maths somewhere...

Needs a C that dips the left wheels into the water, and then performs switchback turns up the mountain

The Augustinian exploration continues as Blind Dragon zigs north. And then zags south. The bright star that is Ciro, the looming bulk of Otho and the small disk of Hephaestus seem to play a game of cosmic tag as the Blind Dragon flies westward. And with that, we've hit every biome. Blind Dragon is an extremely efficient way of exploring this small, chilly moon, cruising around 250m/s and covering the distances between waypoints in just a few minutes.

A rescue borne of my own Yuki Gaelan's incompetence. Turns out that kerbals fall more quickly than the Blind Dragon, so it takes a while before the ship is able to fire up its engines and swing around to recover its missing crewmember. It also turns out that landing on Augustus requires active engagement from the vernier jets, since the lower gravity vs Gratian does not make up for the thinner atmosphere, and the banshee engine just can't provide enough lift to keep the craft airborne in a hover. Nonetheless, both pilots are skilled and while there is some bickering about who controls what, between them they bring the scoutplane down to a gentle landing just 50 metres away from where Yuki is waiting. And as luck would have it, this biome looks exactly perfect to bring the Sourdough down on, being low altitude and relatively flat. Time to radio up to Sakura. Once again, a rather boring descent ensues, but now we have confirmed our evac zone, morale picks up and the expedition can get underway.

Having assessed Otho's two outer moons for interesting confectionary and come up with nothing but worthless gold dust, the team head back to meet up with the Pink Cougar. Since the ascent pod can carry 5 kerbals, but there will be no lab facilities on the surface, pilots Jay and Lyssa, scientist Yuki and engineer Tora board the Blind Dragon and prepare for deorbit. Scientist Astrid will remain in the orbital lab to make a start on the data gathered thus far. Pilot Sakura will take the Sourdough Ascent Vehicle down them once the scout team has identified a suitably flat landing spot. Atmospheric entry goes smoothly. Too smoothly. Caught by an unexpected gust of wind, Yuki loses her grip on the handrail and plunges down into the chill alien atmosphere, her scream of panic shrill in her comrades' ears! Until she remembers she has a parachute. Maintaining radio contact with the Blind Dragon, she glides down to a safe descent on what turns out to be a pretty hospitable patch of ground for the Sourdough. (The parachute saga was unexpected. I am delighted that it didn't kill anyone and I thus feel able to live with the outcome.)

Spotted a celestial alignment. Where Jannah is gold and sparkly, Hephaestus is... less so. Beige, wrinkled, mottled, and covered in what might be lava flows, it falls under the 'interesting but ugly' category. Nontheless, the team had fuel to do a quick biome hop, doubling up on their science return before returning to orbit and setting course for Augustus and the mainstay of the expedition.

Thought I'd just leave these here because it was a cool transit to watch. Augustus is surprisingly large as viewed from Hephaestus

Getting the nod from mission control, the crew investigate the distress signal from beyond Jannah. Closing on on their target, they find - once again - a survivor from one of our less-competent competitors' space programs. Welcome Sakura, we look forward to all the fine work you'll be doing for us in the future. And yes I am finding pretty much 100% female kerbals in these missions. And yes I do customise their names for my own inscrutable purposes. Jannah has been an invitingly sparkly target from a distance, but as they get close, the crew can make out an unmistakable glitter. This can only mean one thing! Stupid gold dust. Just one more heavy metal like we find in abundance on every body we visit. ...and they have idle animations now! Eeeeeeee, I'm so excited! Admittedly I had to wait a while to get multiple kerbals to randomly animate funny things at the right time, but maybe the answer is to have MOAR KERBALS. Perhaps I am being far too mundane with my plans for merely 5 per mission. I just googled for mission name generators and rolled with it Why, what's wrong with Pink Cougar and Bad Chrome?

I... have a sudden urge to watch Ghibli films...

Practise That and have a plane that handles well below ~80m/s, with widely-spaced landing gear that is appropriate for its weight of the vessel, and a shallow approach profile with a vertical descent speed of less than 5m/s - the gentler the touchdown the better. If you can't get OFF the runway at low speeds, you're going to have a problem getting down onto it again without something breaking. Airbrakes help a lot to manage your speed, but failing that a drogue chute (or any chute) on the tail can be used to kill your speed fast once you're on the deck.

Apparently everything from 1.4.x works in 1.6.1 so... we return you to our normal schedule of exploring Galileo's Planet Pack + Grannus Expansion Pack + some mysterious homebrew things that probably aren't bombs. Cookies if you remember the bombs reference. I made a mistake in my last post; the Otho expeditionary assembly does not weigh 200 tons. That would of course be about the mass of a basic Eve lander. Hahaha... how mundane. This thing is in fact just over 500 tons, all of which needs to be delivered to LGO as a unit because I can't be bothered docking things in orbit. On the pad, the mighty Pink Cougar ended up at 2600 tons and provided a serious engineering challenge for not letting it fall apart under its own weight. After several sims and an awful lot of struts, it finally looked like it would make orbit, and the expedition could begin!

Mission planning day. I'm pretty sure that this... ...is enough to go from LKO to Otho, land 1-2x on each of the outer moons, then fully explore every biome on Augustus with the Spicehunter, and handle all the data with the lab module. The whole caboodle will park up in Augustus orbit, hopefully with the dregs of the transfer fuel left spare. The command pod will first take the nuclear stage to the outer moons, return and rendezvous, decouple, attach to the LFO-based Augustus stage (this saves something like 5 tons of payload by not duplicating command pods). One of the pilots will take the Spicehunter down first to choose the landing site, pick up the crew when they arrive, and gather all of the sciences before returning to ascent vehicle and bringing it all back to the orbital lab. Between them, the lab and command pod have capacity for 8 kerbals, but probably only 5 will be assigned to this mission since every stage can be remote controlled. The command pod should fit in a mk3 cargo bay for recovery to ground once it returns to LKO. All together, this thing weighs 200 tons. All I have to do is get it to LKO. At least it fits in a 5m fairing, even if it will stick out of the top of the VAB

The safest rover designs ensure that whatever the orientation of the vehicle, the only thing that can contact the ground is either the wheels, or metal frames/panels/i-beams with massive impact tolerance. It's fun to flip out at 50m/s and not take any damage

Took a few hours of investigation, but my 1.4.x career seems to now be updated to 1.6.x Which means it must be time to continue exploring the Ciro and Grannus systems as provided by Galileo's Planet Pack and Grannus Expansion Pack. As luck would have it, the nuclear VTOL 'Spicehunter' I used on Gratian about 4 months ago is perfectly happy on Augustus, so that's a big part of the expedition covered. All I need now is an Augustus escape vehicle, something to handle visits to Otho's other two moons, and a transfer stage that will get them all there and back again. ...that sounds difficult. Bring it on

I do this in all my games My labs store 5k data and 1k science. Beware the power required to transmit. I usually have to cheat with 50x timewarp to get it sent. (Which is why they don't store 10k science.)

This bit is easy(ish) Avoid thrusting all over the place. This isn't Elite and you don't need constant engine thrust to move. When you do get within a few km, click the "orbit: 2xxx m/s" readout above your navball and it should change to "target: xx m/s". Now you can aim for the retrograde marker and burn gently until it reaches zero. From here on you will hang around at roughly the same distance. Point at target, burn slightly towards it, e.g. 20m/s, and wait to get closer. Navball is everything for rendezvous and docking; ignore everything else on the screen above because,it's not relevant

I don't really rage at KSP... sometimes it is exasperating, but mission errors are usually my error, not the game. Problems due to bugs are usually rare enough not to happen on a reload, and if they do, then that is also my fault for not testing it before the real mission. Design problems are 100% avoidable with good testing. The biggest problem for me is that hard problems (e.g. Eve missions) glue me to my seat rather than make me walk away. I've had several unexpected fasting days when I forget to eat until late in the evening because my brain prefers KSP to calories Advice for keeping your cool: Revert and reload is not cheating. They simulate having a team of hundreds of very very clever people to assist your design decisions. Test everything at KSC. Check your hatches, ladders, solar panels. Check your kerbal can get out and back in without a jetpack. Test everything in situ. Use the debug menu. Zip from the pad to the orbit of the planet you're going to, land, do the tests in point 3. Launch to orbit. Revert. See point 1. Use the aero overlay to detect unexpected drag if relevant to your build. A lot of rocket flipping is due to a draggy payload. When in doubt, ask the forums! This is possibly the most helpful community ever, and while we can't just give you stuff, we can usually solve your problems. Engineering is hard, but the KSP hive-mind is all knowing

My apologies, they both looked like "send beacon here to be able to use it as a warp point" ^^; I'm too deep into this career (upgrading my 1.4.x to 1.6.x today) to swap, but maybe for 1.7 FTL will be my new thing

If anyone's still paying attention, the 1.4.1 version of this mod seems to work just fine in 1.6.1 - at least, my customised parts using ESLD beacon modules are zipping my craft between them. For some reason, it didn't work until I installed Interstellar Fuel Switch. Maybe it was always a dependency and I just didn't notice, or maybe I've done something very odd with my install. Of note for people starting a new career, https://spacedock.info/mod/835/FTL Drive Continued looks very similar and is up to date with 1.6