MaxwellsDemon

This turned the trick for me. Definitely need to be sure Magicore is up to date.

Oh--- is that a separate download? Was encountering the same issue and rolled back.

Ever since Making History's Vostok/Voskhod analogues came out, I've been wishing for a compatible set of Soyuz capsules. Tantares is nice but is all based around 1.25m parts and doesn't seem to react well to TweakScale (at least in my admittedly limited skill range), and Homegrown Rockets/HGR is old and needs a considerable amount of tweaking to make them work... Anyone working along these lines?

Not a question, just a gripe. I wish news writers would stop using the phrase "dark side of the moon" in connection with the recent Chang-E landing. Even when they call out in the article that the far side is not the same thing as "the dark side," the phrase still tends to crop up in the headline. There's as much a "dark side of the moon" as there is a "dark side of the Earth," for Pete's sake! It's called "night." [/gripe]

Just can't get enough of supporting mods, can you? XD Seriously, thank you for picking this one up-- it's one of my must-haves. (Well, maybe that's a tad strong. Really-prefer-to-haves.)

Aha... I think this was it:

I seem to recall that there was a mod that swapped Crew Reports and EVA Reports, so that when you were orbiting low over a body, you made successive crew reports above each biome instead of popping outside, grabbing an EVA report, and popping back inside again... I don't think it was the only thing in the mod-- maybe not even the main feature-- but I can't remember which mod had it. Anyone else remember it?

Here's one to skip: Eberhard Rodel's The Soviet Space Program:  First Steps, 1941-1953. Looks slick, but is choppy and severely lacking on sources and annotations. Also, strange in places: one two-page spread describing the German invasion of 1941 actually summarizes a movie about the event, rather than the actual invasion.

I noticed this as well-- the radio button to switch to GT appears to have gone away. That might be linked to the fix recently implemented for the repeatedly-checking-GT-availability, at a guess.

More likely the former than the latter. Two possibilities occur to me: 1. If you're playing a campaign game, you may not have researched the tech that makes Gravity Turn auto-circularize your orbit; or 2. You might not have enough delta V remaining in the stage to circularize. If the first, you'll need to manually circularize the orbit... (Or, it might be something else, of course, but I'd check those two first.)

Awesome! This will help lots. Will d/l and start using... er, testing... immediately.

Oh, no. But it's easy enough to stick the part on there.

In the VAB, yes. Looks especially nice with the FASA towers in particular. It's just adding the part to the clamp in the VAB. I'm primarily thinking of the FASA towers, though; haven't tried it with the stock launch clamps-- maybe it wouldn't work. Will have to try it out.

I do that by adding the "emissive" part to the launchclamps.

Thanks! Sounds like something I can quit worrying about-- roughly 50km is about the altitude that I pop them as it is, so sounds like there's no big adjustment to be made on my part.

Is there a general rule of thumb as to the optimum altitude/velocity/pressure (Q, I think) to jettison fairings-- where the aerodynamic drag reduction is no longer worth the weight/gravity loss? I don't really need the exact equations-- just a general "feel" for the right timing/altitude. Thinking of firing off a series of sounding rockets to test, but I imagine someone else has done a lot more thinking about it already...

Got my kerbosynchronous commnet up and operating, flew a couple of rescue missions, built a second launch pad (Kerbal Construction Time), upgraded Mission Control, and sent Jeb up in a KV-2 "Pea" pod using my R-7 tribute in honor of the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight. I believe I heard Jeb shout "Eelakeyop" at liftoff.

Happy Cosmonautics Day, Yuri's Night, and International Day of Human Spaceflight!

Didn't have time for much last evening, apart from fulfilling a couple of rescue contracts and ordering an upgrade of Mission Control. My computer was busy downloading and installing Windows updates, and I was busy hoping that these were not going to cause even more Windoze-Offender problems.

More (happy) grinding... the boost to R&D provided by the upgraded facilities is energizing the program. A dedicated 'rescue' variant of the Thoth capsule was tested by Val by rendezvous with a commsat, and then launched empty for two rescue contracts. Although Morie's capsule landed rather precariously in the mountains west of KSC, it was successfully recovered. Tested an R-7 tribute to launch the Voskhod-like capsules added in MH... a bit overpowered if I engine it realistically, so I need to tweak. On the other hand, that means there's margin for heavier payloads, so it's all good.

Energiya-Buran is "out for delivery," according to tracking. I love those three words!

Pff! It's spelled "s-m-r-t."

Rolling along... The upgrade to R&D is finished, and Werner and Linus report that research is now proceeding twice as fast in the new facilities as before. (Translation: I spent a Kerbal Construction Time upgrade point to increase the research speed, which, according to my personal rules, I only do when R&D gets a physical upgrade. Helps spread out and delay the research of new techs.) In the meantime, it appears that several private companies have been successful at launching Kerbals into orbit, but not so successful at getting them back. So, the Thoth capsule is undergoing redevelopment to make it into a rescue pod. The makeshift commnet works acceptably, though the slight variations in orbit at a low latitude mean the commsats keep bunching up and spreading apart again, but there's enough of them to compensate. With advances in flight control, a kerbosynchronous commsat is now a practical possibility, and those will be launched soon. (Interestingly, I noticed that Woomerang is by default a tracking/comm site, even when I have the other tracking sites turned off. The line looks faint, though, so it must not be a big antenna...)

I considered this but decided against; the first-gen commsats are based on the Stayputnik, and making stable maneuvers without SAS is tricky. Once I get the tech, I'll be putting up the second-generation commsats with better orbits. (That's why I made 'em cheap and disposable.)

Managed to get a series of commsats into orbit. Playing without the extra tracking stations, I ran into some interesting difficulties getting non-piloted things into orbit... I'd go to circularize and I was already out of comm range! The bootstrap solution seemed to be a large set of cheap commsats in a low (75 km) equatorial orbit, because I could get them circularized before they flew out of range. The orbits aren't perfectly synched, so I launched more than strictly necessary to cover the otherwise-inevitable gaps. It's clearly a stopgap solution until I can get some kerbosynchronous commsats up there, but at least that will be possible now! After the volley of commsats, I sent Val on a victory lap. Now that I've gotten to the point where I can have the basic solar panels, I'm not so dependent on battery life, so she set a "new" (for this campaign) endurance record of 3 days (18 hours). Fulfilled a bunch of small contracts (mostly pad tests) to build up cash to upgrade R&D. Scratching to get that 451K funds early in the campaign can be a chore...