Loren Pechtel

You simply set Steam to load the "beta" that is 1.5.1. Now, if you're talking a pirate version, it's too good a game for that, walk the plank!

It might be from another mod. Stuff moves from tanks with a high number to tanks with a low number.

The refiner has suitable containers, nothing is showing up in them and the Convert-O-Tron is saying it has no ore.

My first try at local logistics, what am I missing?? 1.6.1, everything updated as per Steam & CKAN. Vessel #1: Mining vessel. What is of interest is the Kontainer with 3900 units of ore and increasing. Planetary warehouse on , local warehouse on, pump is on, level 16. There is a Duna logistics module on it with a level 5 engineer. Vessel #2, parked maybe 20m away: Refining vessel. It has a Kontainer set to ore, planetary warehouse on, local warehouse on, pump is on, level 0. There is a Duna pioneer module on it with a level 5 engineer. Ore continues to accumulate in vessel #1, none of it shows up in #2. This is on the shores of Kerbin, a few km from KSC. As a test I tried reversing the pump levels, no change. The miner continues to mine, the refiner is starved and does nothing. Both vessels have plenty of energy, the miner has successfully operated overnight, the refiner hasn't spent a night out yet.

But won't the game update itself when launched if there's an update?

Could we have the current version available as a beta? With all the mods for this game one generally does not want to blindly update and the beta system lets us do exactly that--but we can only lock to previous versions, not the current one.

Why hire Kerbals? They'll pay to join you via rescue contracts.

Yeah, if those had been width and height the window would be ginormous.

Aha! I figured it had to be storing the window somewhere, I was just looking in the wrong area. That's jut XML, easy enough to edit the window size.

KSP is running very slowly and with frequent, periodic lag bursts. I've got a good machine, a very good graphics card and a heap of memory. I was looking in the log file to see if there is anything in there that would give a hint. I'm looking at a 136mb file and I would say upwards of 80% of the whole thing is: [LOG 19:40:54.465] [CurrencyConverter for Outsourced R&D]: 0 Funds taken, yields 0 Science [LOG 19:40:54.465] [CurrencyConverter for Unpaid Research Program]: 0 Reputation taken, yields 0 Science (Obviously the timestamps vary. These occur in blocks of 13 or 14 repeats) There are also a decent number of lines of the form: [LOG 19:40:54.452] [CurrencyConverter for Unpaid Research Program]: 21.60591 Reputation taken, yields 9.600873 Science The exact value is often repeated, if it's not that exact value it's something similar or sometimes around 10. It occurs after the big block of the zero ones. I can't think of anything I was doing that would have been awarding reputation. At the time in question I had only two active missions, a mining experiment sitting on Kerbin that didn't get focus and what I was currently doing: running a rover around Kerbin (controlled by Bon Voyage) doing some science cleanup. There are three ScanSat birds that have mapped their worlds and have their scanning turned off, a ring of 4 communications satellites with nothing to currently talk to, a few abandoned craft on the moons, and a surface scanning rover sitting around. At the end of the log I recovered the rover for a redesign, at this point there are a large number of lines that take the form of two pairs of zeros followed by one actual line and then one pair of zeros and an actual line. Far more lines than there was completed experiments in the rover. These are both legitimate things, I am diverting both income and reputation to science, but why the insane spam in the logfile?

I'm a bit behind as I'm still running 1.4. I have a stupid annoyance that there's probably a simple fix for: The window showing the rovers got shrunk and is now completely useless. The window edges won't resize, how do I get it back?

One thing to note about "flying high". It goes clear up to 70km. That means you can collect "flying high" science at 69.9km--and the drag at that altitude is tiny. It doesn't take a lot of fuel to "orbit" at that altitude. I find it much easier to collect science than with an airplane and since you're moving at orbital speed you reach biomes faster. (And on the other end, "flying low", coupled with some form of automated science gathering, can be obtained from a rover with jump rockets--balance them the best you can and cut them off very quickly. You can wring just about every drop of science out of Kerbin without building an airplane.)

That was my first thought. I deployed one of those panel-blocking monstrosities, didn't work.

Ok, that explains that. I do have life support installed, I'll hunt down the right part. ... Confirmed, replacing the laboratory with the greenhouse solved that one. I do have Orbital Science installed, I figured that was probably where it came from but I don't know what part.

I agree, but that doesn't change the fact I can't figure out how to do them.

This behavior is a logical consequence of orbital mechanics. You said you were 500m from the target. If you were in it's orbit and 500m ahead or behind you would remain in that position forever. However, with an eyeballed intercept you're not even going to be close and the game's resolution isn't enough that perfection is even possible. (If you want truly perfect orbits--say, communications satellites that will retain their relative positions for centuries--the only way to do it is to cheat and use HyperEdit to position the satellites and then never switch to them.) You are in a different orbit that merely comes close to your target at the current moment. The closer you are to your target when you have zero relative velocity the slower you will drift away but you're always going to drift away eventually. If you get reasonably close and match velocities well the drift rate is slow enough it's not going to matter for a rescue. I can't remember if you have 500 m/s or 600 m/s in the jetpack but you certainly have a boatload--your rescued Kerbal can chase after his ride home.

[x] Science! is showing "Plant Growth Study" and "Radio Astronomy" and I can't figure out how to do them. I thought the "K&K Planetary Laboratory" did plant growth and it has a research button, but [x] Science! doesn't think the Plant Growth Study is on the rover. Likewise, I've tried everything I can find antennaish in the science section and it doesn't think Radio Astronomy is on board.

Got a little bit of a bug, I don't know if it's MKS that's responsible. I have a rover with a surface scanner on it. When it was in an area lacking in rare & exotic minerals it reported their concentrations as unknown rather than as zero.

That turned out to be the problem. I thought you couldn't get a 0% on normal (which is why I didn't think of it originally), but those two are 0% over most of the planet.

Why can't I mine ExoticMinerals and RareMetals? I have a vessel that should be able to mine everything that can be mined. Wheel it out, everything else works fine, but for these two the drills simply don't start. The one thing notably different about them is that everything else has it's own Kontainer, but when I set a Kontainer for ExoticMinerals it also gets capacity for RareMetals.

I don't know if it's related but I've seen this sort of behavior being caused by the rocket not being able to turn fast enough. It's easy to have a very high TWR on a low-g world, if it doesn't have much command authority it's not able to make a meaningful gravity turn into such a low orbit. Years ago I had one rocket that I could actually get better performance out of on Minmus by burning radial out for about 1 second, then shutting down my engines and turning completely horizontal, then burning for orbit--by the time I started falling back I was building up enough horizontal speed. I was trying to figure out how to modify it to take off at perhaps 10 degrees from the horizontal but I didn't see any practical solutions.

You must be a sadist! Getting that much delta-v from pushing is going to take ages, and then quite a while more to get his periapsis into the atmosphere (good luck getting a proper ejection angle from the Mun!)

RTG's are weak, it takes a lot of them to keep things powered. For your money there are two other options that work better: 1) Fuel cells. Yes, they'll burn up some of your take but it keeps things running during the dark time. (Note that this is only an option if you have a refinery on the craft set to produce fuel and oxidizer.) 2) Big batteries. They're heavier to lift but don't consume any fuel. Obviously you must have enough solar to charge them up. Nuke is overkill for a simple mining base.

The claw contracts pay better than the simple rescues but if your real objective is Kerbals they're very annoying. I also mod the number of contracts way up so I can do more at once--my current recruiting ship seats three dozen. (I'm only keeping the level 5 guys so I need to rescue quite a few) but I'd hate to try to bring back more than one part on a rocket. At least with the mods I'm playing with there's nothing that important behind the claw, the top manipulator part can be researched without the stuff before it.

Thank you! Last night I got to wondering if I could do it with KAS and avoid researching the claw (once you research it many rescue contracts say to bring back the part the guy is in and I do all my recruiting in low Minmus orbit and don't want to have to haul parts home) and it sounds like that's the answer--much easier than clawing, also.