Opus_723

Umm, I may have....umm....killed Valentina. She rode our shiny new quadcopter, courtesy of Breaking Ground, up to about 5km before the batteries died (got plenty of lift after tweaking the blades, but those new motors eat up charge fast). She ejected on the way down, and deployed her parachute.... Then the pilotless screaming, whirring mass of blades caught some wind and changed direction, barreling down behind her and ripping her parachute to shreds before a rotor blade, still spinning pretty fast on inertia, caught her helmet and just *flicked* her toward the ground at 100m/s. Poof.

Rotors aren't ideal for propellers, but I got a quadcopter up to about 2km before the battery ran out. Don't think I'm going to be able to live out my fantasy of lifting a rocket into Eve's upper atmosphere though. EDIT: Hmmm, tweaked the rotor blades a bit to get more lift and slapped some more batteries on, got up to 5km easy. Might be hope for this thing yet. Quadcopters are definitely doable with the rotors. Now I just have to figure out how to steer.

Having a blast with the new parts, but I seem to be encountering a bug, or maybe I just don't understand how this all works. Haven't figured out how to replicate it consistently yet, but sometimes (often!) between VAB and launch my tracks that I made for the controller part are disappearing. Which is a real pain as I then have to remake all of them. Currently using lots of hinges on 4 separate controllers to make a "blooming flower" solar array. I have like 11 hinges on each controller, and the play button on all the controllers action grouped to custom 01. Sometimes this works BEAUTIFULLY! But occasionally after I fiddle around a bit in VAB, everything's working good, then I launch and the controllers have forgotten all of their tracks. It might have something to do with the fact that I've been using symmetry to edit all of the tracks (apparently if you attach controllers using symmetry and edit one, they all update their tracks accordingly, which is nifty). I know without being able to replicate it consistently this isn't much help, but I thought I'd leave a note in case anyone else is having similar issues. If I figure out how to replicate I'll do a proper report. But man, when it works it is a thing of beauty! This DLC is fantastic and I haven't even left the ground. EDIT: Figured it out. I don't think it's a bug, I just wasn't using symmetry and robotics the way it was intended, I think. If robotic parts are added by symmetry, just click *one* of them to add to a single controller. This will automatically apply the track you make to its symmetrical partners. What I was doing that the game didn't like was applying symmetrical controllers to the symmetrical parts and then editing one of those. This will also work sometimes, but it seems to make the multiple controllers "forget" their tracks after one launch. Another technique that caused problems was adding all of the symmetrical parts to one controller. In sum, when you want multiple robotic parts applied in symmetry to follow the same track, just add *one* of each symmetrical component to a single controller, and the game will take care of the rest. I didn't expect it to work that simply, so I tried to do it more manually and it caused problems because it was anticipating the simple approach.

I know the force law is different than for a point mass, but it shouldn't be too crazy to add a "Hookean" sphere of influence, unless the code is a lot more spaghettified than I'm assuming.

It would be pretty cool if they just added the major stable Lagrange points (Kerbin-Mun, Jool-Kerbol) to the solar system as orbitable spheres of influence in the current patched conic system. Then we could park asteroids and stations around them.

I was not expecting an editor that powerful, this is fantastic! I would like to add a vote for some sort of copy/paste or other symmetry mechanisms (invert track, reverse track, etc. would be nice) for the tracks, however. Timing many parts to work in sync at the same amplitude (or careful ratios) is going to be tricky. But that just speaks to how powerful this editor is, I wouldn't have even thought to worry about these things before seeing this video, would have simply considered it out of reach. Again, fantastic job SQUAD! I'm really excited.

I'm curious how high a helicopter can get on Eve before launching a rocket-powered upper stage.

Wouldn't that just be a bunch of individual Hype Cars though? Possibly all going in different directions? We need to make sure our collective hype is coordinated in the same direction, with a narrow cross section, so that we have the maximum possible hypementum and force per area in order to break through the paywall.

It's a single player sandbox game. If you don't want to launch from the moon.... don't? Personally I won't use it, but I don't mind it being an option.

Yeah but.... STOCK DELTA-V!!! These are glorious times when the old ways are cast aside, and we bare our jubilance... nay.... our hype! For the world to witness!

The parts are looking great and I'm very excited about the navball! I have my fingers crossed that this renewed attention to the game's art may presage a planets art pass in 1.6 or so.

I tried the demo, got a crew capsule stuck in orbit, then designed my own 'claw' out of extendable landing gear, rendesvous'd and 'docked' with no RCS, just a terrier and a reaction wheel.... After spending hours accomplishing that, did some googling and learned that the full game had docking ports and RCS and IMMEDIATELY BOUGHT THE FULL GAME.

My biggest hope for the game is simply that the other planets get an art pass that leaves them with as pretty and varied terrain as Kerbin. I want my Valles Marineris, the cliffs of Miranda, etc.

No need to get weird about it, it's just random.

Is anyone around here experienced in hobby rocketry? I've been thinking it would be a lot of fun, but I have very little expendable income for hobbies right now and it seems like a spendy one. I saw that one amateur group actually managed to build a suborbital rocket, which was really inspiring! But I'm stuck with match rockets for now I think. Does anyone who launches rockets have any good stories have any good stories or advice to newbies who are interested?

I'm disappointed in the delays as well, but I wish people would stop comparing modern projects with the Apollo program. NASA used to have ten times the budget they have now, and most of it devoted to one project, as opposed to dozens. It's a whole new reality now.

I'm waiting for a round of bugfixes before I buy, but I always do that. No big deal. Congratulations on the release, and I hope the more mean-spirited griping doesn't get you down. It's a great game, and you should all be proud of it. In the meantime, I have a glorious mission percolating in the back of my mind. Mostly involving fire.

You can do the exact deltav calculations with numbers provided by the stock game. I just use the calculator on my phone. I've never really found it very time-consuming. Honestly, all I want is a button to drain and refuel all of the engines in a stage all at once instead of using all the sliders. And that's only because I've never been motivated enough to calculate how much fuel weighs and write it down somewhere. It's not exactly rocke... *Ahem* Rocket science isn't actually that hard? That doesn't sound right...

Did this forum disappear? That link worked yesterday but seems broken now, and I don't see the forum on the main page. EDIT: Never mind, not sure what happened but it's working for me now, must have been mistaken.

Got busy, of course. But I did a test run around Eve and dropped down to 60,000m and came back up! It was a rougher ride than I like, though. I burnt off most of my "accessories" (RCS, solar panels, ablator etc.). So I've still got some tweaking to do if I want to get any lower.

That would be amazing! Imagine actually docking with a space station that's actively burning up and collapsing in the upper atmosphere. I could never do it, but I'd have fun trying. I wonder if people will come up with a way to integrate kOS (never used it myself, don't quite know how it works) to automate some other vessels to do things without the players' input? I'm also imagining using some kind of stock weapon to "shoot down" the player, forcing them to crash land on an alien world, if that's possible. I'm pretty sure that at least the BDArmory people will be able to pull off some cool things like that.

Does anyone want to share their incredibly overhyped, wild, probably not possible ideas for missions they want to make, or is everyone going to keep them secret until the release? I for one want to basically recreate the movie Gravity, starting the player on EVA at a space station with a carefully spawned debris cloud in a crossing orbit (I worry a reverse orbit would entail such high speed collisions that the Kraken would be summoned), but I'm not sure my computer would be able to handle all of the debris. So maybe someone else should make that. Someone would have an amazing computer with tons of visual mods and beautiful explosions, though. They would play it and make a video, and I would watch it and it would be glorious....

I would honestly just like more varied terrain. More canyons, cliffs, mountain ranges, craters. Kerbin, the Mun and Minmus are alright in this regard, but the rest of the planets are quite flat and featureless. Duna in particular, as almost everyone's first interplanetary trip, is a bit disappointing. I just want something like the Valles Marineris. Maybe some actual glaciers instead of white ground. One or two grand features like that on each planet. That would make my whole game. I think textures are secondary to this. If I had more cliffs I'd be buzzing them with ships, racing down canyons, and base jumping Kerbals. That's what would actually make planets more fun.

Just when I thought I got away from LabView by becoming a theorist. In all seriousness, this looks great. I'm sure people will come up with some really creative stuff!

Just made a quick first draft for an entry, cheated it into Kerbin orbit and did a practice dive to 30,000 m in Kerbin's atmosphere. Good news: -The vessel was able to reach 30,000 m and return to orbit with fuel to spare. Bad news: -Vessel became aerodynamically unstable around 35,000m, although a little bit of thrust was sufficient to regain full control. -Payload failed to detach. This was determined to be due to an oversight in how parts were attached in VAB. -Battery overheated and exploded. I think it did well enough to warrant continuing with the basic design, though! I've already fixed the payload issue, and I'll try a new wing configuration and move the battery someplace cooler. I also need to add crew capacity (currently probe controlled as I got excited to try and didn't finish reading the challenge). Once I can dive into the lower atmosphere (<20,000m) on Kerbin and return I'll start testing on Eve. EDIT: Update: Just successfully dived down to 19,000m over Kerbin and returned to orbit, steady as a rock the whole time. Should be ready to actually attempt the challenge on Eve this weekend!