Hagen von Tronje

Ion "Dawn" engine or assorted similar modded engines (low TWR high ISP). Not like burn times matter for a Kerbol orbit and a lifter capable of sending, say, a Duna lander, will give you almost the observable universe in dV when most of that mass is xenon instead of a lander.

Exactly this. Just a discrete replica of the landing light that can be set almost flush with a surface mount so it maintains a low profile and fits on wings easily. Now all existing landing gear, stock or mod, can be "upgraded" for the price of one part placed in front of it, or you can custom place them for ideal visibility, or naturally use them for whatever other needs you have for a great light. I guess what I'm really after is low profile surface utilities. Seems like one of those gaps that even mods haven't filled up yet.

Sorry for the delay in update, I'm sure this was a busy week for many folks. In my defense, KSP is a really fun game, so when I have spare time, it's hard not to play a little more instead of getting the albums up! Kerbin part six is up, taking us across the antarctic ice flats to the true south pole, and Bill explores the potential of repairs in the field. Thank you! I haven't read the book but it actually looks right up my alley. In fact I want a nice old paperback copy like in the wiki image, I love the smell of a good old cheap paper book.

Have it, love it, great light. Goes great on IR rotator/hinge assemblies to make a mobile spotlight. Not exactly the form factor you want on a spaceplane, though I've put it on very low altitude surveyors.

I'd looked at B9 in the past but passed over because the thread suggests it's not working with 1.0.x. Is there a developer version with some working parts I might pick through?

You know the small landing gear? It's the only stock part with an integrated landing light. It's also the only landing light. Worse, not a single one of the stock lights are even remotely suited for aircraft. Do any mods offer extra bright lights in a low profile, aerodynamic (or at least aesthetically pleasing) form factor? Would also love to find a ladder made for planes. A roll-out rope/cord ladder would be great, or even just something with a form factor that fits Mk2 fuselage better would be sweet.

The parts come from manufacturers. They must have not only facilities, but customers. Given the part descriptions, it also appears there's little to stop private individuals from attempting to do typically kerbal things with them. Some are even found by the side of the road! Presumably the guys I go up to get are the equivalent of the guy who put a bunch of balloons on his lawn chair, except they made it a little higher and brought an EVA suit.

This is key to keep in mind, temp bars don't mean imminent destruction if things are stable. They kick on at 40% of critical temp, whether internal or skin (on Moho they will likely be one and the same unless it's a part that generates a lot of internal heat), which is obviously a far cry from blowing up any time soon. My Moho satellites are all bars all the time and nothing bad will ever come of it.

Were these two pods put into this orbit, undocked, then redocked, or did he rendezvous two separate vessels into a coinciding arch-diving orbit then dock them? Either looks awesome, though the latter would be a real triumph.

Eh, I've had exactly one incident of spontaneous overheating not caused by predictable physics in 410 hours, and I solved it by alt-f4 before persistent file updated and reloading. Problem never repeated itself. Wasn't a service bay either, but a mod hydrogen tank, and no time warp was used. I wrote it off as just another friendly visit from the neighborhood kraken. Not to say some folks aren't obviously having problems. If you are, do whatever it takes, but I've actually been enjoying some new (intended) heat management engineering problems - with mod parts of course, even stock nukes produce so little heat under typical use that you'd never need radiators except for truly epic burns.

Yes, absolutely. We more or less already did exactly that in our evolutionary past, no? If anything, intelligence seems to be overrated as a survival attribute. Which highly intelligence species other than humans has been truly successful? Most are endangered now, and while it's true enough that human intervention itself has brought that about, it nevertheless speaks to a certain lack of resilience in said species that suggests the biological costs of intelligence, which are considerable, all too easily outweigh the benefits. Even without tools, humans are easily the most versatile predatory species on the planet. A lot of folks overlook just how good we are at that; persistence hunting is one especially impressive example of how humans can run many species utterly into the ground based purely on our physical advantages. One must also imagine that even with chimpanzee intelligence, we'd certainly utilize sticks as clubs and spears, making us an instant match for anything from lions to mammoths. There's a reason why we spread across the entire planet before even bothering with civilization - because it was very easy for us, broadly speaking. Certainly you will find that, oh, chimpanzees themselves maybe, did not fare so well. As it turns out, being a tightly social omnivore with surprisingly effective innovations of biomechanics is a winning formula. Intelligence just happened to be the glue needed to hold all that together.

Hi, thank you for testing this so much. I also have done all I can to figure this out, and I think you are correct. Testing other parts as heat sources gives the same result, adding heat sinks or other methods of "buffering" really has no effect and obviously isn't worth the mass on an aircraft. On the other hand the basic functionality of it is fantastic once you learn to cope with this. I can fly reliably at 15-20km on Kerbin and achieve nearly Mach 1 with props, the only caveat is that you simply kill engines to dive and don't maneuver at extreme altitude. Also did some tests with NFE nuclear reactors, they perform great on that too...and in fact I've built a kinda-working nuclear powered AHMS cooled propeller quadruplane SSTO with plasma thruster final stage that looks ludicrous yet somehow space-steampunk. Kinda makes me want to do some Flash Gordon type things.

Where are you trying to add parts at? In VAB, make sure you hold left click then drag the parts into the inventory window. Click/drag/click just places parts on the structure, not into inventories. Outside of VAB, hold G to grab, then use the same method.

I use them constantly. Lately, more than rockets - and rovers MUCH more than either. I use them for plane things, as you might expect. Sometimes that's just making and flying a plane for pure pleasure, sometimes it's to do something useful. Planes are absolutely the easiest method of getting around the surface of any body that can support them if you can make one that operates there and get it there, and they're a lot of fun to fly as well. There's what, three stock jet engines? Zero stock props or rotors. Conspicuous gaps in parts, like the lack of any Mk2 cone, lack of landing lights on most gear and none integrated into cockpits nor any separate lights for aircraft, no ladder really made for aircraft or cockpits with integrated ladder (c'mon, of course kerbals would use a rolled up rope ladder to get out of a spaceplane, and for that matter I have to imagine so would NASA rather than use a telescoping ladder made for lunar landers), etc etc. Very few options for truly large wing structures that won't turn flappy. Needless to say I'd be more than happy with tons of new stock airplane and spaceplane parts!

Kerbal Joint Reinforcement can greatly reduce the effect of this issue by throttling physics up on load.

Can't get here soon enough. Nobody enjoys using a fraction of their machine's potential.

Unless you pick up the part and move it, in which case toggles might get stuck in VAB (but will still work outside, usually).

The mod you probably want is Community Tech Tree. It expands the stock tree with a lot of new nodes and entirely new tech tiers, and a good number of parts mods work well with it. The new nodes are pricey enough to give good justification to extensive science exploration, so if you like the progression stage of the game this will make it several times as long depending on how many parts mods you install. A lot of utility mods like MJ or KER can be configured to be partless or require a part that's bought in the tech tree, or require a specialization, to your preference.

Really depends on the craft. A lifter + payload can be rather high part count and I'll tolerate it since it's a 5 minute launch, but I'd rather a spaceplane be as low as possible.

You can make a sort of "science backpack". Stuff the desired instruments into a standard container; if desired, use tweakscale to shrink it so it just fits the volume needed. Make sure you bring tools too. In the field, carry the container (a smaller one should actually be smaller on your back if you like that), when science is wanted, drop it on the ground as containers practically always survive dropping. Take out instrument needed, attach to container, and use. Make sure to remove it and stow it before picking the container up or it will fall off and probably blow up. Not as elegant as using direct from inventory but containers make great workbenches and tweakscale actually works great on them, scales the volume and everything. I've actually got a number of premade "packages" using custom sized containers with a selection of essential gear for specific tasks, or even "build it in the field" kits, like a model rocket kit I made.

I've had the same thing in a number of Kerbin spots, typically deep inland, where I've spent, uh, way too much time lately. The big "fix" that helped me personally was turning down ground detail and scatters (trees and rocks, and cacti). I had them up, because hey why not, but setting them to saner levels helped. As far as I could tell being in the more inland areas of Kerbin just results in more ground detail getting loaded to memory than usual, resulting in out of memory crashes on the reg. I see it a lot less if I'm closer to the oceans which leads me to believe that water is simply less demanding. Turning these two settings down resulted in a lot fewer crashes (about the number I expect to put up with playing KSP).

Ah, well it's good that at least you were able to replicate it, so I don't feel crazy. Either way I still continue using it, they do a great job and killing engines before diving isn't that bad, just have to do all maneuvers at 10km or so for safety. Thanks for all your work and for looking into this!

I'll see if I can upload the plane I've tested it with. The specific structure in question (and the only part of the craft that is thermally active since the rest remains at ambient temps) is built thus: Firespitter Engine mount - attached to wing Thermal washer - attached to engine mount AHMS - attached to thermal washer Firespitter electric propeller - attached directly to AHMS No heat gets past the washer, or any that does is radiated by the wing faster than it can pass through, so the rest of the craft is practically inert for this. The assembly described rises to 600K rather slowly as I ascend; with one AHMS it will rise in temp at very high altitudes but that doesn't seem to be an issue, with two it will never go above 600K even when the engines and wings stop producing useful lift at 22km, but any dive from above ~15km seems to have a strong chance of resulting in the problem described unless engines are killed first. It might as well be noted that this doesn't happen every single time. Sometimes I've done nosedives from 20km with no problem even with engines running, others I've done simple heading changes at 15km and engines overheat. The only thing that seems absolutely consistent is that so long as you either change altitude slowly, or stop all active generation of heat, you seem to avoid it. But it happens often enough that if I try a couple times, I can be assured to make it happen. Only fix I found is to land and either save and reload, or time warp until the entire craft is magically updated to ambient ground temps, at which point everything functions normally again. Attempting to let it cool conventionally (i.e. without timewarp) will get the core temp down (very very very slowly) but skin temps remain static. EDIT response to your EDIT: That's kind of along the lines I was suspecting, that it's the interface between atmosphere and space that causes the issue. Do you have any suggested fix, or is it basically "be careful how high you fly until aerodynamics and thermals get fixed"?

Hi, great mod, great parts. Perhaps contrary to intended purpose, I am using the AHMS on aircraft, in conjunction with Firespitter electric propellers. The reason is that the props generate significant heat at very high altitudes even though they still function, and while the props have a high heat threshold, obviously I'd rather isolate that from the fuselage and payload. However, I've found a really strange behavior. I've been testing out the parts using AHMS with a thermal washer behind to keep the heat isolated to the engine area. This works wonderfully and so long as you bring enough AHMS, you can easily keep the fuselage at ambient temperature and the engine well in hand. I have also observed what appears to be the method they operate by - heat is transferred to the skin, where it's dumped, then repeating the cycle every second or so. So far, so good. Here's where it gets weird. If I fly to very high altitude with barely enough AHMS, it gets hot (about 750K) but maintains this just fine. But no matter how much AHMS I bring, if I dive sharply while engines are running (i.e. heat is being generated), the skin temperature on the engine and AHMS becomes...not quite frozen, but highly resistant to change. This completely halts the AHMS and they will no longer actively shed heat. Ever. Dropping to near sea level brings internal temps well below 600 (though about double what they were at similar altitude prior to this incident) yet the skin temps remain nearly unchanged; whereas before the internal temp was much higher than skin temp, now internal will be much lower, and skin temp stays almost unchanged. Mind you, I'm not talking about overheating the AHMS - it does this at 700K or below sometimes, lower than I previously saw it operating normally. No NH3 is ever consumed at any temp after doing this. No amount of cooling corrects it. So far as I can tell, the part is bricked. It can seemingly be avoided by completely killing all engines prior to diving, but I really am at a loss for what's really going on. Is this a known glitch with stock, where high altitude dives can freeze skin temps, inadvertently breaking the AHMS parts? Or is this all normal and I just don't get it?

As a bonus, you can use this to delete orbital debris if you don't care about recovering or sighting it (or it's forever out of reach, around Kerbol or something) to maybe improve game performance.