Joshua A.C. Newman

I figured you couldn't possibly be talking about the Red Green show!

I don't know who that is, but it sounds like I want to!

That's tempting, particularly since the MacPlus used phone cords, which opens up all sorts of options. I hacked my MacLC ADB cable to use a 10m cable so I could walk around the room with the keyboard hanging from a guitar strap, using a game pad as a mouse.

Oh, yeah, I was assuming that you'd go all the way down the the resistor ladder or whatever's in there, bypassing all ICs. (This thread has me scouring EBay for my favorite old Mac keyboards. Keyboard II or die!)

Is there a sketch (and library list) that someone's published for their controller? I'd like to explore it. I'm doing something wrong on the Arduino end, as I can't get it to register as a game controller, even though joysticks work well. (I'm using OS X.) This is definitely doable in principle. You could even use a coily phone cord, since USB is also 4-conductor! Then put a USB mini on the other end — it's not that different aesthetically from the RJ-22 phone jack!

I've just started my own controller, starting simple with a throttle slider. ...but I'm not having any luck getting the Joystick library working. That's an Arduino Pro Micro and I'm using OS X. I've already tested this setup with different code, and between smoothing code and a capacitor, the slider generates a really smooth input, jittering by only 1. ...but then it doesn't report anything as a throttle. Is there a particular library you folks are using that's easier to understand than this one (the examples are needlessly baroque on this one; I have to strip out all sorts of stuff just to get to the basics of "adjust throttle".)

Ha ha! How many years of travel does that represent? Cuz I get stiff driving in a car for an hour.

Ah! Everything I was reading said you needed to hit with the Klaw with force! That makes things much easier!

Thanks, Snark! Good point. It might make sense to put extendable arms out to make the torque seriously nonzero, since this is a really tiny object. Plusck, part of the issue here is that I'm not approaching a docking port (see the image at the top). I'm using the Klaw, often in the dark, and have to be able to hold it on for the half second (or whatever it is — why doesn't anyone know the actual specifiation for the Klaw?) as I'm bouncing by a 5m/s.

Thanks for this! It's still mysterious to me, but now I think I know how to use that first click at least!

Jeb died in an early attempt at our space program's first space station. Abort protocol caused a computer crash, and when we returned, it looked like we'd been returned to the launch pad. In fact, it was frickin' BILL in the pilot's seat, freaking out as Jeb burned up.

Huh. Thanks! I avoid MechJeb (and intend to continue to, up to the point where there's enough going on and we're good enough at it that it reduces tedium), but if it works around this ridiculous problem, I can install it for the one feature. Thanks! I use RCS Build Aid all the time! It was such a relief when I discovered it.

You've got this backward. Winglets on the front are adding drag to the front — exacerbated by the CM moving aft as fuel is burned up because it's a longer and longer lever. Of course, once atmospheric drag is gone, they have no effect, so it's OK to put them only on the bottommost stages.

Well, the kid's a couple years older and wiser now, I'm sure. (I checked. He hasn't put up many more KSP videos, but at least his voice has changed.) I've built a lot of flying models in my life. Watching YouTubers struggle around in the SPH oscillates between frustration and glee, then back to frustration as they throw out a right answer, inevitably in search of "stability".

Well, toggling it is what I'm trying to avoid. It's another thing to screw up at precisely the wrong moment. But I don't think I can guarantee zero, since that would require me to know where the center of mass is after I've burned a variable amount of fuel. Huh. I could use TAC Fuel Balancer, actually, split the tank in half, and design it so the CM is at the joint between the tanks.

I can't believe I didn't think of that! Thank you!

Because there's very little fuel onboard and it'll rarely have the ∆V to get home, making it another piece of debris. But you're right; it would usually be better to bring it back if I can. That means docking with the klaw on the space station to refuel, which is really funny. I've been thinking about switching to a scaled-down Poodle to do that job. That means a lot more fuel for the same ∆V, but then it doesn't have to come home. If the first burn doesn't bring down the target, that implies it's extra big, and is therefore worth two Deorbitizers.

A friend and I are operating as a committee, getting together most Wednesday nights to work on our space station. We design together, we plan missions together, we sometimes play as pilot and CAPCOM (Very helpful with new or shaky vessels, and fun to play that way!). Along the way, despite our shared reasoning, some mistakes were made, and now there's some really, really dangerous debris in orbit. Big stuff. The kind of stuff you don't want to encounter. So, taking a page from Planetes, I've designed a space station tool designed to get the stuff out of the way (and, ideally, deorbit it altogether. I call it the Deorbitizer. It's a small nuclear rocket designed to attach with the Klaw, point itself (roughly) at the center of mass of the whole ill-conceived mess, and then deorbit. Pro: get rid of the orbital garbage before we Kessler ourselves. Con: We're, uh, dropping nukes back to Kerbin, which seems like a poor shepherding of resources, to put it in the most utilitarian terms. (You'll note a difference between these two Deorbitizers. I'm trying to work out the best configuration, which mostly comes down to TWR.)

I'm building a dramatically pared-down vessel* on which I want to carry an absolute minimum of mass. Because it's very small, there's no issue at all with rotational torque; I use a tiny reaction wheel, and that's fine. But I need to translate in order to line up my docking*, and I need RCS for that. The issue is that RCS fires when I'm trying to rotate to "help", which not only applies more torque than I need, but also wastes an extremely limited resource. You know how, when you set up control surfaces on wings, you can set them up to only generate pitch/yaw/roll? Can you do something similar with RCS? *"Vessel" is an overstatement. It's a missile, designed to use the Klaw to attach an engine to dangerous debris so that I can deorbit it.

I wish! I don't think I've ever designed something that, upon reflection and with the wisdom of hindsight, shouldn't have been at least a bit better.

Goddamn, this is cool.

Take it up with Arthur C. Clarke. I think it's a really neat idea. I think the big challenge would be making it visible from a distance. Can you see the other planets across space, or do they have a visible range limit like spacecraft? Oh, man. Yeah. You could use it for solar power in the outer solar system. Naturally, this would require a mod that adds a ton of weird .... into the biomes of one of the moons. ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT VALL. ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE. (Honestly, I think Laythe is designed with precisely this in mind, sans Lucifer.)

Maybe you could implement this by making batteries (and, I suspect, fuel tanks) refuse to pump fuel until "activated".

I'm wondering if you can use this to mirror, as Columbia says, above. It could make docking small vessels much easier.

Really looking forward to turning this into a utility pod, àla 2001!