AdamMil

Though I haven't gotten anywhere in GAP, I have to agree here. What makes aircraft no fun in stock KSP missions is the time involved. I'm just not interested in spending an hour flying in a straight line. Rovers are even worse. Who wants to spend hours holding the W key? Ideally, aircraft contracts would be near KSC and involve largely interesting activities, or if far away, allow you to use supersonic aircraft. No flying long distances in slow aircraft. That's boring. Or else, it'd better be worth it...

This is a frequent problem with ContractConfigurator contracts. I don't know if it's related to CC itself or bugs in the contract packs, but contracts frequently seem to get attached to particular ships after which they cannot be completed by other ships (even if the ship the contract is attached to gets destroyed), so if you accept the contract and don't complete it immediately it may become uncompletable. I've seen this with other contract packs too, like Advanced Progression and possibly KFiles.

It's not limited to a predefined set of resource types, but as you discovered it doesn't let you transfer solid fuel around.

I'm glad you find them useful. See above for more of those features, if you're new to them.

Okay, thanks. :-) I'll just ignore them and try to unlock the parts in the usual way.

Hi, I downloaded this contract pack today because I always thought there was little point in building aircraft (except for the fun of building them). But I didn't like the "accept this pseudo-contract to unlock various parts" contracts. I'd rather unlock them the normal way, and they don't seem to play well with modified tech trees. Is there something I can do to skip those and get to the real GAP missions?

I think you'll have to wait for 1.2 (at least) for Squad to improve the stock contracts. 1.1 seems to be just as boring contract-wise as 1.0.5. Can you please provide a working download link in the mean time? I really don't want to grind part testing contracts at 4k each to get the 320k I need to get the next interesting stock contract. :-( EDIT: This looks like it: http://ckan1.spacedock.info/storage/Tjsnh_8014/Advanced_Progression_Contracts/Advanced_Progression_Contracts-4.5.1.zip

Great. :-) I haven't tried it out, but I'll update my posts to point to this thread. Here's the original post I made describing my changes. Here's a short summary of the features. (See the linked post for a more detailed description.) 1. You can select multiple parts and apply an operation to all of them at once. The selection is done by clicking on the name, and it supports using Ctrl to add or remove parts to/from the selection and Shift to select a range, as well as Ctrl+Shift to add or remove a range to/from the selection. Shift-selection only works within a single resource. (If you have throttle controls bound to left shift and ctrl, you can use the ones on the right side of the keyboard.) You can also click the "Select All" button to select or deselect all parts in a resource. 2. You can select parts by ship, so if you dock a ship with a station or a tanker, you can easily move fuel into or out of all of the ship's tanks at once. You do this by alt-clicking on a part, in which case it'll select all the parts on the same ship. This can combine with Ctrl as well, to add or remove those parts to/from the selection. The mod determines where ships start and end by looking for docking bays. 3. You can select all parts of the same type, for instance all FL-T200 tanks. You can do this by alt-shift-clicking on a part. As usual, this combines with Ctrl to modify rather than replace the current selection. 4. You can sort and group the part list. This may combine well with range selection (i.e. click, shift-click) to choose the biggest, smallest, emptiest, or fullest tanks, etc. For instance, if you want to group by ship and sort by name within each group, you first sort by name and then sort by ship. (Basically, if you want to sort by columns X and then Y, choose them in reverse order, i.e. Y and then X, from the menu.) 5. I added experimental support for remembering settings when you switch between ships. It doesn't remember after you quit the game, only in the same session. Also, changes (e.g. balancing) will only be processed for the current ship. 6. I added support for transferring liquid fuel and oxidizer in the correct 9:11 proportions. This is implemented as a pseudo-fuel type called "Rocket" fuel, which only shows parts that support both liquid fuel and oxidizer. It should work as expected as long as the liquid fuel and oxidizer are in the right 9:11 proportions already. If they aren't, just balance them individually first. 7. There were other miscellaneous fixes and changes not worth mentioning here.

I tried the mod just now. In the documentation it says "Early experiments rearranged in the tech tree. Start with the thermometer, then unlock the barometer right at the beginning. Only later unlock the Goo and the MatLab." but in the game, I started with the goo, then unlocked the materials lab, and only later unlocked the thermometer, and I haven't seen the barometer yet. Is the documentation wrong or is the mod malfunctioning a bit? I have 1.1.2 and no other mods.

The source code, based on 2.5.1, is available from my download link. I've also gone ahead and created a patch to the 2.5.1 source code (or at least the Source directory within it) containing my changes, which is temporarily available at the following URL: http://www.adammil.net/tmp/TacFuelBalancer.diff

I've also been having trouble with SAS. It makes it much harder to get spaceplanes into orbit since the planes won't hold a course as steadily as they used to. Hopefully they'll fix it soon, but they don't seem to prioritize bug-fixing. I've been watching bugs that would be trivial to fix go unfixed for 3+ years... but here's hoping. :-)

I don't know about 1.0, but before 1.1 was 1.0.5, which was quite stable. It crashed only about once every 40 hours for me, unless I was flying very large and heavy craft, in which case it tended to crash if they exploded sometimes.

I have a Mk 3 spaceplane that worked fine in 1.0.5, but in 1.1.1 the landing gear go underground on launch half the time, or while I'm traveling down the runway, usually only on one side leading to sudden catastrophic loss of control. After 15 attempts I haven't managed to get safely down the runway yet... Also annoying that on launch the aircraft no longer point straight down the runway. They're at a heading of like 88 degrees, and since the larger landing gear have no steering, this means they run off the side of the runway before you can get them going fast enough to steer with the rudder. Well, most people don't have a liquid-cooled computer. The game is probably running it a tight loop rather than being event driven as it's supposed to be.

Seems like you can't click on an apsis marker to make the apsis altitude stick anymore. Kind of annoying... Also seems like cargo bays don't protect their contents against overheating perhaps. I had two Z-100 batteries in a cargo bay that exploded on reeentry at 45km.

I've also had noticeable SAS issues in 1.1.1, although I don't think it was ever perfect. (Even in 1.0.5, certain craft would oscillate like crazy under SAS.)