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HvP

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  1. You're welcome. I also just amended my post to include a link to RCS Build Aid. I don't even attempt building craft without it anymore.
  2. @Tokamak I know of two mods that do something similar to what you are asking. But rather than balance the engine thrust, they both move fuel around your craft to keep the center-of-mass in the same position. I have not personally used any of these mods, but a quick review of the links below makes me think that something here should work for what you want. PWB Fuel Balancer Restored which focuses on allowing you to set a center-of-mass marker in the VAB and it will adjust fuel levels as necessary to keep that COM constant during flight. and TAC Fuel Balancer which includes other fuel transfer options as well as the ability to maintain a consistent center-of-mass if desired makes all tanks drain evenly, but requires balanced placement to begin with. You may find this mod helpful, if a bit over-automated: Vertical Velocity Controller Redux. It will allow you to enter a desired hover altitude and then will automate the process of maintaining that altitude, including compensating for the pitch angle of the craft. Then there's the truly indispensable RCS Build Aid Continued which allows you to fine tune the placement of engines and thrusters in the VAB to carefully eliminate any unwanted torque. It will also show you where your center-of-mass moves. And, of course, a huge thanks to @linuxgurugamer for maintaining a truly massive collection of mods, the lifeblood of KSP! Happy flying!
  3. When you are close to your target and moving in for docking, try switching your camera view to "Locked" mode by toggling the "V" key. Then line up your camera looking forwards over the top of your craft. This will make it much easier to know exactly which direction you are moving when you fire your RCS thrusters and thus save on a lot of mono-propellant. Also, you can toggle the CAPS-lock key on your keyboard to reduce the strength of your RCS thrust and balance your RCS more precisely. It could save you a lot of RCS propellant.
  4. You should be in a great position to plan an intercept. I think you might just be trying to make things happen too quickly. Don't assume that you need to blast directly to the target right now. It's OK if your intercept happens on the other side of the planet as long as you get a close encounter somewhere in orbit that's what really counts. Based on your screenshot it should be possible to lower your apoapsis so that your orbit encounters the target in less than 1/4 orbit. But if you are too aggressive, and lower it too much that might well drop you into the atmosphere. This is where you can use another handy trick that is often overlooked by newer players. The light blue markers on the navball show you your radial-out and radial-in directions. Radial-out means that you are pointing outwards away from the center of the planet, and radial-in means that you are pointing inwards towards the center of a planet. These are extremely helpful when fine tuning an orbital rendezvous. Burning in the prograde and retrograde directions will move the opposite side of your orbit in and out. But, burning in the radial directions will pivot your orbit in a way that acts on the points 90 degrees around from those (3 o'clock and 9 o'clock positions if looking straight down on your orbit.) For example, if you burn radial-in then you will see the part of your orbit 1/4 of the way in front of you (3 o'clock position) drop towards the planet, while the part of your orbit 1/4 behind you (9 o'clock position) will rise upwards away from the planet. The reverse of course happens if you burn radial-out. More importantly for a rendezvous, what this does is changes the time that your intercept happens by changing the point where you will eventually cross your target's orbit. For a beginner it would be best to use this technique once you have already lowered your orbit to a point that you have a close encounter less than one orbit away.
  5. I'm a sucker for creative uses for the oscar-b tanks, a particular favorite of mine for all sorts of replicas. But besides the huge part count, the aerodynamic drag on that must be insane. Impressive!
  6. Don't feel bad. You're in good company. Even the Gemini astronauts and engineers had trouble figuring this out at first. The Gemini 4 mission failed to achieve rendezvous for the same reasons that beginners in KSP have. Orbital mechanics is very counter intuitive. If you are able to get within 10km of the target then you are almost there. It's that last little bit that's the real fun. When you are in target mode just remember this, burning retrograde will slow you down relative to your target, and burning prograde will speed you up relative to your target. When you close to about 10 km it's a good idea as @Vanamonde suggested to burn retrograde and bring your relative velocity to zero. Then, at that distance what you want to do is to practice moving that target marker on top of your prograde marker . This means that your direction of flight will carry you directly towards your target. Watch what happens when you aim a little to one side or the other of your prograde marker . If you are burning prograde then the direction you are pointing will pull the prograde marker towards the direction you are pointing - and if you are burning retrograde then it will PUSH the retrograde marker away. You can use this technique to pull your prograde direction around until it lines up on top of that target marker . You can also reverse and burn retrograde to push that retrograde marker on top of the retrograde-target marker (that just means that when you are pointing at the target this is the direction 180 degrees behind you.) As a little time passes and you move closer to your target the angle of difference between your path and where you cross your target will get wider and wider. Also, your curved orbit around the planet will start to change the angle too. This means that the two markers will start to separate again. Continue to nudge the two markers closer together again in small controlled bursts of no more than 10m/s at a time. Fine tuning things as you go, if you can. With practice you can do this!
  7. In addition to what @Vanamonde said, which is true, your fins aren't steerable - your solid rocket boosters are the only thing firing on your first stage and THOSE aren't steerable either. They don't have a gimble to redirect your rocket's course. You don't have much control until you drop them and switch to the stage with what I'm guessing is an LV-45 engine which DOES have a gimble to pivot and direct the rocket's course. So, like Vanamonde said, replace the fins with steerable fins, and/or maybe move the LV-45 "Swivel" engine down into the first stage so that it fires with the side boosters to give you more steering control. Just be sure to right click on the boosters and turn down your thrust so that you aren't accelerating too fast with all three going. This might not be necessary if the steerable fins give you enough control to steer the ship though.
  8. Do you have any mods installed that alter the contents or size of fuel tanks? Interstellar Fuel Switch, Procedural Parts, TweakScale, etc... Apparently, there was a change in version 1.9 that prevents mods from correctly changing part resources when cloning them. See THIS post in the Tweakscale thread about it. If it looks like that is your problem, then you may have some luck installing the mod KSP Recall which is intended to allow mods to overcome this limitation as long as those mods are configured to use it.
  9. If I remember correctly, I had a similar problem once and it turned out that I could avoid the conflict by making sure the stock game settings assignments were cleared out for those buttons. You also may want to make sure that you don't have multiple functions assigned to the same button by accident.
  10. One more thing I can think of right now: Make sure the antennae is deployed by right-clicking and choosing the deploy option in the part action window. The HG-5 will swing outwards when it is deployed and working. I know it's a simple, trivial thing, but it never hurts to make sure.
  11. Hi @JoeSchmuckatelli It's easy to get confused concerning the antenna ranges because we get spoiled by the strength and sensitivity of the ground relays all over Kerbin. Those massive dishes at the KSC can "hear" incredibly weak communotrons out at the Mun and Minmus, and they can also beam out VERY strong signals that are easy for the small antennas to pick up. The huge size of the tracking station dishes can compensate for the weak signals and poor sensitivity of the antennas they are communicating with. But your relay in orbit of the Mun can't rely on the ground stations to communicate with the Mun surface. The two probes have to do that all by themselves. In order to compensate for both the weak signals from smaller antennas and their poor sensitivity it's necessary to keep them closer together. For an HG-5 (5000k) communicating with a Communotron (500k) that means being less than 1,500km away. For an HG-5 communicating with a probe body built in antenna (5k) you have to be within about 150km to work. Now once the the connection between Mun orbit and the Mun's surface is taken care of, it's easy for the ground stations at the KSC to complete the rest of the path from Kerbin to the Mun.
  12. Hello @Timon Kerman The very first item of your Mun station contract is not actually checked. It's the item between the red and blue text. As @mystifeid said, it looks like you are using the "klaw" Advanced Grabbing Unit to dock your ships to your station, but those don't count as actual docking ports because they were intended to grab asteroids, and they don't mate together in pairs like regular docking ports. The contract is asking you to use any of the docking ports listed in this link HERE. Such as the Clamp-o-tron: Also, every part of the station must be launched after you accepted the contract. Any older parts docked to it will void the contract. I hope this helps.
  13. StationPartsExpansionRedux substitutes its own textures over some part's stock textures so that you can't repaint them with this mod. If you don't want the StationPartsExpansion textures on the Mobile Processing Lab or the cupola, and other stock parts then you can remove the config file "SSPXr-StockPartReplacements.cfg" out of the folder "GameData\StationPartsExpansionRedux\Patches." Then TU Recolor Depot will be able to customize the textures on those stock parts again.
  14. There's actually a cheaty trick to stabilize rovers on low gravity worlds by attaching a jet engine to the center and rotating it to point upwards. This moves the rover's center of mass unrealistically low, perhaps even below ground level, making it nearly impossible to flip over. Edit to add: I see from your video that you figured out the same trick in a way, haha.
  15. Someone else on this forum linked to this wiki list of various naming schemes for all sorts of genres. I've found it helped to spark ideas for creative names. Or, try to mash up names in amusing ways. "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Mun" "20,000 Leagues Under Laythe" "Eeloo Pioneers!" "Children of Duna"
  16. Have you selected any strategies in the administration building? Some of the strategies can give you a certain percentage in funds in exchange for reputation or collected science. Also, simply recovering landed craft and debris can add funds back into your total.
  17. Hello @Zeldenthuis and welcome to the KSP forums! The simple answer to this complex question is this: Since your flaps are behind your center of mass, when they are deployed downwards they will act like a lever pushing upwards on the rear of the plane - just like the elevators in your tail do. In real life the situation is far more complex, but trailing edge mounted flaps do often create a nose-down impulse just like that. There are other factors such as the eddies from the wash coming off of the flaps that then impinge upon the rear elevators; ground effects; surface adhesion; spoilers; canards; and automated trim settings that can all be designed to compensate for this typical nosing down on real aircraft. Ideally, for the purposes of this game, the flaps should be attached as near to the center-of-mass as possible. One way to do this is to just move the wings forward a little. This reduces the torque from the lever effect, but it's often difficult to move a wing forward without messing up all sorts of other mass/lift balance issues. If you can still balance everything well it works like a dream - that is what I would do. There are other options however that are used in real life designs. You could: Add spoilers to the leading edge of the wing which deploy upwards to correct the angle of attack. Move the flaps to the underside center of the wing in line with the center-of-mass so that they won't have any effect on your pitch. Add canards to pull the nose up. Increase the control authority of the rear elevators and add some extra trim to them to compensate. Holding ALT then tapping "S" will incrementally add upwards pitch trim (ALT+W = downwards.) Remember to cancel trim with ALT+X when retracting flaps. This simulates the control programs many planes use to automatically adjust trim in different stages of flight. Rotate the wings very very slightly to add a positive angle of incidence. In other words, when looking at the side view the leading edge of the wings is up higher than the trailing edge as they slope downwards from front to back. Even one degree can be enough. This allows the wings to generate more lift in level flight without raising the nose at all. It will usually also move the center-of-pressure forward so you'll have to carefully balance their placement and even possibly add some positive incidence to the rear elevators too so that the plane doesn't nose-up all the time. You may find that the increased lift means that you don't even need flaps anymore. Maybe one or a few of these ideas will be the solution you are looking for. Or, if not, maybe it's given you an idea of something that might work better. Good luck, and happy flying.
  18. It seems that your question has already been answered but... I just wanted to compliment you on your musical tastes. Although, I'm particularly partial to his second.
  19. You're welcome @pantherboss1668, I'm glad I could help. Have fun!
  20. Hello @pantherboss1668 and welcome to the KSP forums. I had a look at your mod list and I think I tracked this behavior down to the Jenyaza "Small Tweaks" collection of mod configurations. One of the small tweaks that Jenyaza adds is called "EngineResponse.cfg" and it changes the acceleration and deceleration of the engine response. If you don't want that functionality then you should be able to safely delete the "EngineResponse.cfg" file from inside that folder. Or, you can simply open the .cfg file in a text editor and experiment with changing the acceleration and deceleration values. I hope this helps with your problem.
  21. Hello @RockBenn and welcome to the KSP forums. Usually this problem is caused by the F4 toggle, but you said you already tested that and it doesn't help. It might be a bug in the training mission alone. Can you see if the target square shows up during regular game-play? Probably the easiest place to check is to see if the reticle shows up for separated boosters that drop away from you after launch. Be sure to press the F4 toggle if they still don't show in a regular game, just in case. Sometimes though the camera view while in orbit makes it difficult to scan the whole sky around you because of the narrow field of view. You may simply not be looking in the right direction. I find it helps to zoom out the camera so that you can see more of the sky as you look around.
  22. You'll need to install a set of configurations that this mod supports. I recommend using Textures Unlimited Recolour Depot with its Stock Recolour configurations that will allow you to customize your part's colors.
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