cephalo

I didn't see anyone mention NavyFish's docking alignment indicator. It really makes the process actually enjoyable.

I would say that it's a bad idea. Why go through the trouble of designing a big mission to find out why it won't work.

So, I decided to get rid of the cargo bay, and I found that just having a cargo bay is a drag nightmare. I get the feeling that the parts fore and aft are not sheilded either. Like there was a gap between them exposing their large flat surfaces. Without the cargo bay, and without the bi-coupler, I now have almost no red arrows.

Great, I'll try to look at this more in depth. EDIT: I just thought of another question: There is only one node on the cargobay right? Things can be attached on both fore and aft sides but only one is shielded?

I'm finding that when I pack a lot of stuff into a cargo bay, I'm seeing a bunch of significant drag arrows that seem to originate from there. It appears that inside/outside a cargo bay is not how drag actually works. What are the rules? I was hoping to put some Mk0 liquid fuel tanks into the extra cargo space in my spaceplane. With two radially attached on a center Mk0 tank, even though they are well inside the cargo bay, they appear to be causing much of my planes drag. It's hard to say with all the red arrows extending from the center of the craft. Another source of drag appears to be the dual Mk2 coupler. Should those be avoided? I use it to put two rapiers on a Mk2 fuselage.

When you have excessive flexing and oscillations, sometimes you can stop the feedback loop by speeding up time for a few seconds. That will often stop things from shaking apart.

Unless you have a draggy payload, such as a big fat fairing. Then you might need to counter it with fins.

So I have some satellites with anomaly detection ability, and I've never found one. What should I be expecting? Is a waypoint created automatically? Are anomalies found this way just the monoliths, or do other things show up as anomalies? Is there something else I have to do?

One of the Jool 5 challenges is to bring back all the science you can. I think the leader brought back around 53,000 or so.

I really don't remember seeing these seams in previous versions. Were they there and I just didn't notice them? Maybe the wheels were so bad that it just didn't come up as an issue.

Lol, my rover is so nasty. Someone secretly suggested some grammatical advice. I should change it.

So I'm trying to drive a small rover over a large distance on Eve, and there are these devastating seams in the vertex texures that cause it to explode if I don't go very slow over them. it's tricky because they aren't visible from every angle. It's a tortuous process of save scumming to get anywhere. (That said, wheels work great in 1.2!) Anyway I think I know what the problem might be. Blending vertex textures together is very different from blending pixel textures. Pixel textures are designed to tile adjacent one another, while vertex textures have to overlap by one texel so you are using the same data for two tile edges. Otherwise, whatever interpolation method you use is going to be slightly different along the edges of the patches. It might not look terrible, but it sends small rover launching in the air on Eve...

It used to be that you could see target markers and labels for ships that were within a certain distance. Since 1.2 I've had to locate rendezvous targets visually, which is much harder. Currently, I am driving away from my Mun lander in a rover, and looking back, I can't see the lander anymore! I wonder if I'll be able to find it again since all the craters look the same. Is there an option to turn on the old labels so we can see our ships from far away?

Here's what happens. I'm about to land on whatever. I usually botch this, so I an alt F5 quicksave, which brings up a window defaulting to quicksave #xx whatever number of quicksaves you have. The game saves. Then I proceed to land, and start pressing the wrong buttons and crash my ship. I hit escape to bring up the menu, try to load my last quicksave but the load game screen is blank! There are no save files to choose. If I go to the KSC after crashing and exit the game, The persistent.sfs fixes itself so I can start the game again but I still can't load my quicksaves, presumably because one is corrupt, but I have about 20, and I can't tell from looking at them which of the saves is corrupt. EDIT: I found in another post from a dev that if one save is corrupt, the list gives up and appears blank. Also, I have several times been able to eliminate the corrupt file by guessing, but I keep getting new corrupt files, and every time it risks all of my career progress as I try to fiddle with the save system manually.

I'm having serious problems with saves corrupting. Mods are just KER, Docking Port and KAC. I had this problem before I installed them though. I get to a dangerous part of a mission, alt F5 to save, and then when I crash my ship and want to reload, there are no choices for games to load because one in the list is corrupt, which means you can't even choose the good saves that aren't corrupt. One workaround is to change the name of the quicksave you want to persistent.sfs, but that gets overwritten quickly so you lose that one. It's hard to tell, but I think the problem happens when you crash your ship, and try to load a game before the actual crash report comes up. I think it saves the game there and if you press load it aborts corrupting the file. That's a wild guess! The whole system shouldn't fail just because one save is corrupt. This is frustrating.

Does it ever make sense to not just auto-strut everything then? Maybe the solution then is to just remove the feature and make all connections a lot stronger. It seems so absurd.

I am really struggling to understand the autostrut feature. It's just makes things more rigid? It's invisible? What's going on? From what I've heard, this would seem to greatly increase the potential size of feasible craft. It almost seems like cheating.

Yeah, I'm getting multiple crashes per evening. Sometimes the app just closes without even an error message.

So if you build a space station with two labs, can you put the same science in both of them and get 4 scientists going?

Ok, I built my first mobile lab in 1.2, and I see a couple of new things and I'm wondering about the state of labs these days. The wiki is still outdated so far. What does the 'level up kerbal' button do? Do scientists gain xp in the lab now? The lab seems to be the first available part to see biomes on KerbNet, but requires a 'qualified scientist' on board. Can that be any scientist? Last time I played, multiple labs on one craft did not work at all. Is that still the case?

Thank goodness! I also have a question about relay 'stacking'. I can't imagine what that means. Can anyone explain?

I use KER only these days. I only needed MJ to fly planes straight, but stock seems to be able to do that now!

Ugh, went to play after work and I have a corrupt save! That's not good. I may have lost a few hours over that one. Now that I think about it, many of my crashes have to do with saving the game... I think.

So there's no stock antenna that's as powerful as the level 3 DNS ones, so you probably don't need relays around Kerbin. If you could get a satellite in the Duna system with a powerful antenna, you might get away with a less powerful antenna on your craft. However, I'm still early in my career game, and I heard that most of the probe cores will only control from a direct link and not a hopped link. I'm not sure of that though.

Look on the wiki entry for CommNet. There is a link to a google sheet that calculates signal strength between two points. Keep in mind that just because you have the top level tracking station and powerful DNS, doesn't mean two satellites will talk to each other. No matter what, you need access to powerful antennas to communicate long range.