Allocthonous
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Posts posted by Allocthonous
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11 hours ago, septemberWaves said:
Though, in all seriousness, I find that designing a launch vehicle for a specific payload capacity and then designing payloads to use as much of that payload capacity as possible is a good way to go; it doesn't make the rockets any cheaper but it gets the most mass up there with the fewest overall launches. Of course, it doesn't always work (depends how many launch vehicles you want to design, and how much time you want to spend tweaking the payload masses, and whether you even want to use this approach) but I like to use it as a general guideline.
I like this approach too! I had a lot of fun designing a series of recoverable SSTO rockets that could reliably launch payloads based on the standard fuel tank sizes. It won't say it actually saved me any time, given how much of it I spent tweaking them, but it did make things faster later on when I could just merge designs in the VAB based on payload weight. I think the largest payload size I got up to was an orange tank, but it's been a while since I worked on that save.
As for launch costs, re-usables are probably my favorite method. Collecting multiple contracts that can be completed by the same spacecraft helps a bunch too.
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You may find it less nerve-wracking to use the in-game cheat menu to do this. Alt-F12 opens up the debug menu, from which you can access the 'Set Orbit' interface. It still has all the fancy abbreviations and everything, but you can fiddle around with them and see what they do a lot more easily than with a save file.
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No, no...it's obviously in the foreground.
It's the ghost of the previous kerbal ground handler, and the two brighter dots are his batons. There's not actually a spaceship on the runway, they're just attempting an exorcism.
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"Does my spacecraft look better like this, or like this?"
I play with revert-flight and quick save both enabled, so there aren't really any hard decisions when it comes to missions. But making a ship look good? That's tough.
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So, we've all seen those alphabet refrigerator magnets, right? A really tiny set of those would work pretty great for this. Rainbow colors optional. Typos are because the kerbals ran out of that particular letter.
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I've done this before. Once I figure out I'm going to need to do this, I usually go into the right-click menu for each thruster and check the 'fore by throttle' option, so that I can control them more easily while using the map view.
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The only way I would consider something cheating in KSP is if I were cheating myself out of having fun. Usually that means sticking to the basic mechanics of the game. But sometimes I just want to get something done, or fix an error that would otherwise require repetition of effort to repair. Then the cheat menu or mods or whatever are useful tools for enjoying the game.
Really, cheating only happens when somebody breaks the rules. The rules are the accepted standard of behavior that everybody who is playing the game agrees on. In a single player game, that's just me. If I were playing with friends and passing a save back and forth, like that one community space station project, or if I were competing against others to build a rocket to certain specs and see who got the best results, then cheating becomes a concern. But if it's just me? I know what forms of 'cheating' would impair my enjoyment of the game, and what would improve it. That's all that really matters.
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So the first thing you need to know here is what delta V is and how to calculate it. Delta V is the change in velocity that your rocket is capable of. So a rocket with 1000m/s delta V can go from 0m/s to 1000m/s in vacuum, or vice versa. It generally takes 4000m/s of delta V or so to reach orbit in stock KSP. More if your rocket is really draggy, or isn't accelerating fast enough.
From the 'cheat sheet' page on the wiki:
Quote
Where:-
is the velocity change possible in m/s
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is the starting mass in the same unit as 
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is the end mass in the same unit as
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is the specific impulse of the engine in seconds
If it's not clear, Mstart in this equation is the mass of your rocket and payload when they're fully fueled. Mend is the mass when no fuel remains in the stage you are calculating delta V for. Isp can be found in the VAB description of each different engine. Keep in mind that engines perform differently at sea level and in vacuum, and the game will show you different values for those conditions. Generally a rough average of the two will suffice for quick and dirty calculations.
Once you've done these calculations a few times, you'll start to notice what mass fraction (the quotient of starting mass divided by ending mass) will produce the numbers you want for different engines. This will let you make a pretty good guess about how much zoom your rocket has aboard without breaking out the calculator.
Now, if you know exactly how much engine and fuel you are using to start with, and want to calculate the maximum possible payload you can get into orbit, you have to break out some algebra. It would look something like this:
4000<ln(R1+x/R2+x)*9.81*isp where R1 and R2 are your start and end weights, and x is your max payload.
For a swivel with the fuel and tankage you mention, that would look like this, assuming nothing but engine and fuel tanks on the rocket.
Spoiler4000<ln(13.875+x/2.875+x)*9.81*290 (a rough guess for the effective isp of the swivel over the course of the whole launch)
Divide by 9.81*290
~1.406<ln(13.875+x/2.875+x)
Take the inverse ln
~4.08<13.875+x/2.875+x
Multiply by 2.875+x and distribute
11.73+4.08x<13.875+x
Subtract 11.73 and x from both sides
3.08x<2.145
Divide by 3.08
x<~.7
So, about .7 tons worth of payload.
Of course, you need to keep in mind that a swivel will have a hard time lifting 14.5 tons from sea level. It just doesn't have enough thrust. You'd probably need boosters on that one.
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I drove a rover underneath a Mun Arch at night.
I also had Bob plant a flag on the highest point of the arch so I could get rid of my KerbNet waypoint for it.
Better pictures of the rover in question:
SpoilerThis is the Indestructo-Rover Mark Two (IDR Mk2) buttoned up for travel.
And this is what the internals look like.
The rover is symmetric with the exception of the probe core in the center. This means that if I want to turn around, I can change which cockpit is in control and swap the steering from one end to the other. Using plane parts means that I can cruise along at 35m/s without any trouble. At least, until I run off the edge of a crater that I wasn't expecting. The two inline docking ports allow a skycrane to latch on and return it to orbit for redeployment. Eventually I'm going to build a skycrane that can return the rover intact to the surface of Kerbin, but I've got a few more Munar biomes to collect science for before then.
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Auto-delete only occurs below certain altitudes (or rather air pressures). You can find the list for different bodies here, although I can't swear to their accuracy. But it does explain what you're seeing here; your boosters almost certainly went past the auto-delete threshold above the kill line.
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You may be on to something here. I just drove a rover through the East Farside Crater and collected a bunch of science. When I look at those reports in the archives they're filed under 'EastFarsideCrater' but the descriptors on the reports and the reports themselves all say 'East Crater.' I haven't done any science for East Crater yet, except for one high altitude gravity scan. I do also have a gravity scan for East Farside, but I don't know if I was awarded science correctly for the overlapped reports.
I suppose I could drop a lander on the crater tomorrow and see if the science goes through properly, but just the way the reports are labeled incorrectly shows there's a bug here. I'm wondering if it's similar to the issues that Minmus has with the various flats getting sorted funny in the archives.
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48 minutes ago, Fireheart318 said:
[I haven't read the other responses here]
I've always assumed the flags and plaques were pre-made, and being able to type a message on the spot is just a gameplay thing. Also, the same thing applied to space probes before 1.2 - there were pre-programmed and being able to directly control them is just a gameplay thing
Well, yeah. The original question only really came to me when I was putting down flags as waypoints to track the progress of a manned rover. It ended up being a journal-anecdote sort of thing about the mission. It wouldn't have been something that you could use pre-engraved plaques for.
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3 hours ago, razark said:
Is there any evidence that the plaques are made of metal? The way Kerbals are popularly depicted, they may very well be using Play-Doh.
And now I want to know if anybody has ever exposed Play-Doh to a vacuum. A cursory google search tells me that if they have, they haven't posted it on the internet. My gut feeling is that plaques made of Play-Doh would be crumbly and gray after a fifty year time warp, though.
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Like the topic title says, how do they manage to produce long lasting writing on metal in vacuum? Sure, they could be hauling pre-engraved plaques up with them, but given that you can pick what's written on the plaque at the time of flag planting, I like to think they're doing it on site.
One possibility is that they're using a soft metal like gold, and just scratching it with a sharp stylus. Another is that they've got a sort of super-bubble-wrap arrangement with little tiny pockets of acid instead of air, and running a blunt stylus over them releases the acid and etches the metal underneath. Anybody have other ideas?
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The game does keep a few backups of older saves on hand. They should be in Kerbal Space Program > Saves > (what your save is named) > Backups. Delete the persistent.sfs file from the (what your save is named) folder, copy and paste the persistent(date of creation).sfs file from the backup, and rename it to be just persistent.sfs.
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18 hours ago, Gargamel said:
Would it matter? Usually most places, like an employer, don't care what the score is, they just care if you passed. Is there a reason, other than college admissions, to try and up your score?
If you score higher than a 170 out of 200 (I think, don't quote me on the exact number) you can request they send a recommendation to whatever college you're attending to issue you college credit in the subject. I think over all four exams it amounts to 10 credits of 100 level courses. They charge a fee for doing so, but compared to hundreds of dollars or better of classes that you probably don't really need, it'd be a pretty good deal.
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As I was lying in bed trying to fall back asleep this morning, I was amusing myself with some mental math, namely the Fibonacci sequence. Starting with 1, add the previous number to get the next number in the sequence. 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34...
I was messing around a bit with the relationships between the numbers, and hit on something kind of cool. If you take any two consecutive numbers in the sequence, square them, and add them together, you'll get the number in the sequence found by adding the places of the consecutive numbers together. For example, sequence places 3 and 4: 2^2+3^2=13, which is 7th number in the sequence. For sequence places 4 and 5: 3^2+25^2=34, which is 9th in the sequence. This holds true for any pair of consecutive Fibonacci numbers, as far as I can tell. If you want the fancy formal notation of this, it would look something like:
For Fn=Fn-1+Fn-2 F1=1, F2=1,
Fn+(n+1)=(Fn)2+(Fn+1)2
(If I've done that wrong, please tell me. My math education has only touched on sequences and their notation very briefly.)
I have no idea why this happens, or if it's good for anything. I'm chalking it up to the golden ratio being spooky. I couldn't find anything on the wikipedia page for the Fibonacci sequence about this particular feature of it, but I'd be really shocked if it wasn't mentioned somewhere already.
Anyway, I thought this was neat and wanted to share. Hope somebody finds it interesting.
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So I actually took the GED just last month. They make you sign an NDA for the test, so I can't be terribly specific about what sorts of questions there are. I will say that you should read the word problems very carefully before trying to answer them.
They've got a website that you'll have to sign up for to take the test, and they've got practice tests available that should give you at least some idea of what needs work (they do cost a little bit of cash, though). The test itself wasn't too stressful, although I just about ran myself out of time on the essay/long answer portions for English and Science. They don't give you actual paper for scratch paper, they give you a laminated sheet and a dry erase marker. You'll have access to a formula reference sheet for the math test with all the various volume and area formulas, the quadratic formula, and some other stuff. So don't stress rote memorization too much, but figure out where you need to use which one. You'll also have access to a calculator, you can either buy a specific physical model, or use a simulated version that's displayed on the testing screen.
I don't recommend scheduling all of your tests on the same day, if you can help it. While you can finish a test early, if you do take the whole time you'll end up with about 8 hours of testing all at a whack. They give you plenty of breaks, but that's still a lot of sitting and thinking hard for one day.
I did my test prep for math through the Khan Academy website. It's free to use, has instructional videos that are basically what you'd get sitting in math class in a brick and mortar school, and there are lots of practice exercises that you can do. A month isn't much time to run through all the material it sounds like you'll need to, but you can get a good start on it.
The last thing I'll mention is that failing a portion of the test is not the end of the world. You can retake the GED pretty easily. They will tell you which parts of the test you screwed up on when they give you your score, and the testing fee is reduced for retakes. You can also retake if you passed but want to try again for a better score.
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14 hours ago, Pretty Fly Guy said:
I've never heard of these until now. Perhaps it would be a great place to build a refuel station for missions venturing out into the outer solar system?
Eh, not so much. Dres doesn't have that large of a gravity well, so it's really fiddly to intercept. And those asteroids orbit at really low speeds, so it takes a really long time to rendezvous with one, especially from somewhere else in Dres' SOI.
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I've been building standardized SSTO rockets that can survive Kerbin re-entry and landing. I've been using payload sizes based on the 1.25m fuel tanks. So far I've got a 2.25 ton, a 4.5 ton, and a 6.25 ton finished, although the 2.25 has a tendency to lose aerodynamic stability at the end of its landing sequence. It's a lot of fun trying to design payloads for them that fit within the weight constraints and the size constraints for the 2.5m fairing.
2 hours ago, bobcook said:I designed and tested an Apollo style lander for the Mun, suitable for two Kerbals. Has a descent stage and an ascent stage. Works great as a lander as well as a science platform!
That is a very cool looking lander. I'm curious about your choice of ascent engines, though. It doesn't look like you've got a max accel of more than 4m/s in zero-g, which seems kind of low to me. A couple twitch engines instead would double that for only a tiny bit more weight.
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Eesh, yeah, the Science Jr is ridiculously fragile on reentry. Before the experiment storage unit was available I'd have kerbals go EVA to collect all the experiments rather than try and bring one of those things down unprotected. It was just too hard to get the heat protection and the aerodynamics for the whole capsule right.
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I had one of those "whoops, we meant we wanted it in a retrograde orbit" contracts for a solar orbit once. I really wish I'd known how to use the 4x physics warp out of atmosphere back then, for those long ion engine burns. I didn't know nearly as much about orbital mechanics or delta V back then either, so it took a bunch of trial and error to get it right. But hey, I learned some good tricks for changing inclination on the cheap!
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That is an awesome story. I bet hitting the recover button for that one was satisfying.
I play a much less hardcore configuration of the game than you do, so this isn't nearly as impressive, but it was still a nail biter. I accepted a mission to recover a kerbal from the surface of the mun, at a fairly high latitude. I put together a spaceplane with a lander that docked in the cargo bay, got it out to a polar orbit of the mun, and found out that I did not have enough fuel on the lander. I think I had been doing a bunch of minmus landings that career, and had forgotten how much more delta V the mun takes. Normally this would be a mission scrub--revert to hangar and try again. I'd quicksaved and reloaded at some point, though, so that was out.
I noticed that while my lander didn't have enough fuel, I did have a healthy surplus on the spaceplane. I burned retro with the main engines to dump a bunch of velocity, then detached the lander, maneuvered it away from the mothership, swapped back to the mothership and re-accelerated, and then swapped back to the lander to complete the landing process.
I don't remember anymore if I had to decelerate the spaceplane again to make rendezvous on the way back up, but I'll claim that I did since it makes for a better story that way. I do remember it being finicky to match orbits because of the mun's rotation and the high latitude.
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Does using clamshell deploy make any difference? I haven't encountered any problems with this bug yet, and I always change my fairings to clamshell. But then, I've only been using the 1.25m fairings in my latest career game. It sounds like the larger fairings have it worse.
Can I decrease the allowed margin of error for satellite contracts?
in KSP1 Gameplay Questions and Tutorials
Posted
I've been feeling lately like my satellite contracts are too permissive. For me, the fiddly maneuvering to match the specified orbit is the fun part of these, and the margin of error on the completion conditions is large enough that my target disappears and the contract ends before I get to the fine corrections. I've skimmed through the settings and physics config files, and I didn't see any way of decreasing this margin of error and making the requirements stricter. Does anybody know of a way to do this?