Fraktal

Addon doesn't seem to work in 1.4: the UI is a completely empty gray rectangle. Even the icon is missing, replaced with a gray square.

...and 1.4 got released in the meantime, so now the addon is complaining that I've got the wrong game version.

Considering the recent inactivity, I'm not sure if I should be bothering to post this, but am posting it anyway, just in case. Anyway. The CKAN-supplied version of AVC crashes KSP on startup if installed together with any of several other addons. The ones I've seen the issue with so far, all acquired over CKAN: [x] Science! Alternate Resource Panel Blizzy Toolbar Community Trait Icons Connected Living Space CorrectCOL Crew Light Extensive Engineer Report (but its dependency Ship Sections is fine) Lights Out Maneuver Node Evolved Mk1 Cabin Hatch Patch Manager RCS Build Aid Reentry Particle Effect (gets past Squad logo but freezes while loading Editor Extensions Redux and eventually crashes) Who Am I? With every single one of these, I uninstalled everything other than AVC and tested them one by one. If AVC is installed by itself, game starts fine. If the other addon is installed without AVC, game starts fine. If the two are installed together, "KSP_x64.exe has stopped working" with exception code 0xc0000005 (access violation) and the executable as the faulty module at offset 0x00000000009a41a3. Crash happens either before even reaching the Squad logo or while AVC's notification of checking the addons' version is visible. The fault offset is always the same, regardless of which addon is conflicting with AVC. These addons were also tested but produced no crash with or without AVC: Control Surface Toggle Editor Extensions Redux Editor Time Engine Light Kerbal Engineer Mini Airbrakes Docking Port Alignment Indicator Extended Science Information Ship Manifest Ship Sections (dependency of Extensive Engineer Reports, which does crash with AVC) With these, game loads into the main menu without problems. I next took all of the above conflicting addons and installed them together without AVC. Game starts properly, zero errors, freezes or crashes. It's definitely AVC that's causing the crash here, but there aren't any error messages in output_log.txt: it last logs initializing AVC's Starter, then the log abruptly ends. Same with KSP.log: when none of the conflicting addons are installed, AVC is logging the others' version checks but when any of the conflicting addons are up, KSP.log abruptly cuts off with no AVC version check logging.

Would it be too much of a request to add an option to disable the hotkeys or at least not execute them while a text field is in focus? I make a lot of subassemblies and frankly, it's more than a little annoying to have the angle settings change all over the place while I'm typing subassembly names and descriptions.

Having started the game barely a month and a half ago, I think it's time for me to graduate beyond the "new member" thread. After starting, I spent about two weeks learning the ropes before I jumped straight into plane building and about three weeks ago, I completed my first SSTO using Mk2 parts. In the past few days however, I decided to went back to the roots and built one out of Mk1 parts instead. Mind you, I'm very much of an amateur yet. Four ramjets in a quadcoupler, four nukes, single-stage-to-Minmus, 3498 m/s dV on full load, all stock. Oh, and it does not require manual control during takeoff: after lifting off, I just set a 15° ascent angle and aside from switching engines when needed, I don't have to touch anything until circularization, it flies up to orbital altitude entirely under its own. Not much range (enough to land on Minmus and return with 3-4 aerobrakes), I admit, but that monoprop's quite heavy and it's got a docking clamp to refuel in orbit anyway. I can add a pair of extra tanks to the rear for 4100+ m/s dV, but then it loses the hands-off-takeoff feature unless I empty the tanks and only fill them in orbit. Why the monoprop, you ask? Because it's got four monoprop engines on the bottom that allow it to VTOL on the Mun and anything smaller. I tested it out repeatedly on the Mun and Minmus today, it can reliably cover the last few hundred meters on VTOL and land softly on the gears, even at maximum takeoff weight. Overheating's a bit of a problem, though; I had the cockpit reach 93.36% heat during a munar return aerobraking at 49 km altitude, but the radiators I put on specifically to extend aerobraking endurance. Solar panels too; during one test flight, I somehow burned completely through the 1000 energy reserve with reaction wheel use between burns and in another, I ran out of power during reentry, so I added on six small cells. No more power problems. Oh, and it's got enough reaction wheel torque to limp back from the Mun with literally half of the engines missing without spinning out from 7° off-center thrust. I had the opportunity to test that too during the munar VTOL test. I landed in a crater on the terminator (and cut it very close: the monoprops ran out of juice literally the second the gears touched the ground), then tried to take off on the shadowed side but forgot to turn on the landing gear lights, hit a bump and tailstruck, destroying the entire bottom row of engines. The remaining two nukes had enough TWR to limp back into orbit from the short flight the tailstrike launched me onto, from where I limped back to Kerbin... and went EVA during a subsonic glide (the two top ramjets had enough TWR for sustained flight, but ran out of fuel over rough terrain and I was coasting downwards to find flat terrain for a parachute landing) to see if I could get an EVA report mid-flight. Results were predictable. Very next thing I did upon arriving back to the SPH was adding on a pair of small gears next to the bottom jets with maximum damping as a tailstrike countermeasure.

After a week of hiatus to regain my muse, I started experimenting with a Mk1 SSTO design. Three ramjets, four nukes, can pull off a round trip to Minmus including a landing, but I really have to squeeze out every last bit of delta-V. Short summary of the latest test flight: Takeoff, ascent at 15° angle (at 20°+, the ramjets can't even break the sound barrier) until ramjet thrust fell below 250, then switched over to the nukes and eventually managed to very barely pull the nose up to 45°. Circularized just above 120 km. Approximately 2100 m/s dV remaining. Direct flight to Minmus, arrived with 937 m/s dV remaining. Tried a Mun gravity assist in a previous test flight, but that plane spontaneously detonated in the middle of the slingshot while I was on the map screen setting up a Minmus insertion maneuver node. The flight log was completely empty, no part destruction or pilot death reports. Just a split-second explosion noise and instant catastrophic failure, Jeb KIA. Landed on a 23.3° slope on Minmus, 567 m/s dV left. Takeoff and escape burn back to Kerbin with a 60 km periapsis. 49 m/s dV left. About 4-5 days and a dozen aerobreaks later, safely reentered 32 days after departure. Burned the remaining fuel with the ramjets at low throttle to reduce weight as much as possible. Despite parachutes slowing descent to 9.4 m/s, plane splashed down cockpit-first and broke up into a dozen pieces. Valentina KIA and I'm editing the save file because judging from the fact that Jeb hasn't respawned after a month, the "respawn missing pilots" doesn't seem to apply to KIA ones.

I've been having this problem for a while now and have managed to reproduce it several times over. I take a Structural Wing Type B, attach an Elevon 2 to the end and an Elevon 3 to the root, then grab the wing and save it as a subassembly. This works fine but when I later pick up the subassembly, I can neither attach it to whatever I'm building, nor drop it unattached, nor drop it onto the toolbar to delete it. Game just makes a click sound but nothing happens and: game doesn't freeze, but I can't do anything because there's no keyboard shortcut for dropping the part, so I have to Alt-Tab out and kill the executable via Task Manager. I'm using the 64 bit version. Here's the craft file for the subassembly in question.

Sounds like something keeps activating the RCS blocks. Have you checked the action groups to make sure nothing is using them?

For that matter, I have since begun experimenting with Rapiers. ...meh. Airbreathing performance is awesome but I don't like the fuel usage in closed cycle. I think I'll stay with the ramjet-nuke combo. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Also, I discovered that Mk3 hulls carry enough fuel for me to use afterburning Panthers as regular engines. Four Panthers with the burners always on propelled my first Mk3 with something, like 45 minutes of supersonic flight endurance. Tried attaching 8 using stacked bicouplers, but it was too heavy for the wings. Also also, I just hit an important milestone in my KSP adventures: I accidentally killed Jebediah with a physics glitch. Namely, I just flagged the Crater Rim DSN station and was running down a rather sheer slope under 4x time acceleration when Jeb, who was stumbling the whole way due to the time acceleration, stumbled so bad he started literally rolling down the cliff, glitched into the ground, stretched out upwards and went POOF.

I... ...I did it. I reached orbit with an SSTO. Used up more fuel than absolutely necessary because I hadn't realized my apoapse and periapse had switched and kept burning to raise the latter, unaware that I was burning away from it now.

I'm experiencing the following problem. When I try to attach a nuclear engine to any bi/tri/quadcoupler part in the SPH using symmetry mode, at the point where the ghosted engine would snap to the hardpoints, it instead starts rapidly snapping and unsnapping about 20-30 times a second, dropping the framerate to around 8 FPS and making actually attaching the part an exercise in tedium of clicking at the right split second. This only happens with nuclear engines, only with symmetry on and - which is why I'm posting here - only when the CoL is displayed. If I turn off the CoL indicator, everything's fine. If I may hazard a guess, could the CoL recalculation possibly be throwing an exception, causing the game to endlessly try recalculating the result until it detects that the engine is no longer in the try-to-attach position? I do remember that while I had Exception Detector on, it displayed this particular mod as particularly exception-happy, throwing several per second every time I started working on something, but threw it away and consequently had no root part but hadn't exited the VAB/SPH yet.

So, I swapped out the radial intake with a pair of circular ones, no decrease in speed whatsoever and the Panthers stopped flaming out on the runway. I'm keeping them, then. Then I decided to have a little fun, replaced the Panthers with ramjets... and promptly dropped my jaw as the sucker went suborbital with a 120 km apoapse at a 10° angle of ascent! Didn't have enough vacuum delta-V to circularize and had some trouble with reentry because I ran out of power without any engines running and consequently couldn't keep the nose up and almost fried Jebediah, but still!

Try angling the main wing up 1-2 degrees. No, seriously. My design pictured above had trouble making past transsonic with perfectly level wings at 5° dihedral, but then I was pointed at this. As soon as I tilted the wing up 1°, it blew straight past the sound barrier at 1 km altitude and accelerated straight up to Mach 2.07 at 8 km altitude without afterburners (!) for as long as I kept the thing perfectly level. More than 3-4 degrees of pitch in either direction while in flight and it starts to decelerate. 2° wing tilt had the same result, any more and the top speed didn't reach Mach 2. I then replaced the radial intake with a Structural Fuselage and a large circular intake for each engine and top speed increased to Mach 2.12. Fire up the afterburners and it topped out somewhere around Mach 2.8.

Nice. Angling the main wings up 1° for my latest test flight did the trick: Takeoff, gears retract, SAS fixed to horizontal at ~200 altitude. Face east, full throttle in dry mode. Accelerates uninterrupted all the way to Mach 2.12. 100 kilometers east of the KSC, I throttle down and turn around. Speed drops to Mach 0.3. Face west, full throttle. Cannot break past the transsonic shock at 8+ km altitude, still only at Mach 1.07 at KSC flyby. Altitude drops below 3.5 km behind the KSC, speed begins sharply increasing. Plane misses the mountains by less than 700 meters (and would've crashed without the extra lift from the acceleration), already at Mach 1.86 at altitude 6153 by the time it reaches the foothills on the other side. Speed still keeps climbing despite flying at 5° pitch. Mach 2 at 7339 altitude, at 7° pitch. Speed stops increasing at Mach 2.02. I level out with SAS override, speed climbs up to 2.12 then starts dropping. So my observation is that the fuselage is fine as it is, but the engines are air-starved. They're already flaming out on the runway if I increase throttle too fast because the dual radial adjustable ramp intakes barely work at a standstill, but high-speed movement is fine.

I've recently started experimenting with Mk2 hulls and came up with a dual-Panther design that has trouble even breaking the sound barrier during normal flight, but can hit Mach 2.07 without afterburners if I keep prodding the SAS override every now and then to keep the nose perfectly level (and I mean perfectly: 3 degrees up and it starts losing speed). Even if I drop all the oxidizer (I slapped on a 909 so that it can deorbit itself from LKO without an extra stage) and gain about 0.2 TWR, it only buys me about 0.03 Mach before it can't go any faster without being knife-edge horizontal. If SAS isn't off, the thing wants to nose down so SAS keeps every pitch-enabled control surface trimmed up all the time, which causes considerable drag. Adding on canards counteracted this somewhat, but it still isn't enough and I can't add any more without going unstable (it's already doing Pugachevs whenever I try to turn, with or without reaction wheels). Funny thing is, according to the aero debug data, the one part causing the most drag by far is the second rearmost part of the main body (Mk2 LF tank), which should be shielded from the airflow by the part in front of it (Mk2 cargo bay attached upside down so that it can quickly ditch the contents mid-flight in an emergency without having to roll upside down and pray that the stuff doesn't crash into the tail).

I'm having similar problems with a Mk2 and Panthers. Scenario: at level flight, plane stops accelerating past 0.96 Mach. Switching to wet mode or firing up the inline 909 allows the plane to accelerate all the way up to Mach 2 but as soon as I switch off the extra thrust, it immediately starts decelerating. Sometimes I find a sweet spot where the plane stops decelerating beyond Mach 1.5 but it's extremely rare. I'm fairly sure it's the control surfaces: if I switch off SAS, the plane immediately starts accelerating beyond Mach 1, but also slowly noses down to about 7-8 degrees below horizontal at first, then 10-20 degrees if I keep going without pulling up. It used to nosed down much harder until I added canards, but I can't add anything more or the thing will become unstable. I also switched from two diagonal vertical stabilizers to a single completely vertical one to eliminate the torque caused by the off-center lift, but no dice. Could it be possible that the engines are air-starved? I mean, the right one flames out if I try to go 100% throttle from a standstill on the runway.

As of right now, I'm continuing my experiments with Mk1 cockpits. In my latest line of experiments, I attached a Juno to see whether I can go for full powered flight after reentry. It's working alright and I managed to pull off two landings on the KSC runway without breaking anything. Then I started experimenting with replicating the design with as low-tech parts as possible. Thing is, this produced the following: A pair of wings placed with mirror symmetry and thus should be perfectly identical... and yet one produces orders of magnitude more lift than the other at any non-zero angle of attack, regardless of SAS. SAS can keep it under control, but the thing needs to go at transsonic speeds just to maintain level flight without me having to keep pressing the S key because tier 4-5 wings suck when it comes to actually making stuff fly.

No, I really did start KSP last weekend. It's just that I went "waaaaait a second, I can use docking clamps for more than just building stations" and started wondering: if a big ship needs refueling, should I just bring the fuel or should I bring the fuel tank too? That is, should the fuel tanks be fixed, or should they connect with docking clamps so that the hauler bringing the fuel can replace them on the fly or even daisy-chain them for arbitrarily increasing range? And if the tanks can be daisy-chained, why not make the engine blocks daisy-chained too to keep the thrust scalable alongside the extra fuel weight?

After several years of watching Scott Manley videos, I discovered to my great joy last week that the laptop I brought in November to replace my elderly eight year old previous one is capable of running KSP, so I grabbed it off Steam on the spot. With one week's worth of experience under my belt, I decided to perhaps get acquainted with the rest of the community. The majority of the week I spent experimenting with Mk1 cockpits in particular, despite having read on these very forums that they make terrible spacecraft due to their low heat tolerance (which I found to be a bit exaggerated: they survive my usual 30° reentries just fine); barely an hour ago, I finally finalized a powered skimmer design that can make it from orbit to the ground 100% intact. It's not supposed to fly long distances, just aerobreak and go into a controlled glide towards level terrain for a smooth landing. Even the 909 on it is only to extend the glide range - and extend it does: in my latest experiment, I came down from reentry just off the western coast of the KSC's continent, flew over 2/3 of the continent at subsonic until the 909 ran out of fuel, then went into an unpowered glide and finally landed just over 20 klicks from the KSC with no damage (aside from the 909 blowing up because the aft ground clearance was too small). I'd prefer using a jet for this but of course, those can't take rear attachments... Still having some difficulties getting it up into the air (veers off on runway despite being perfectly symmetrical, rocket flips over from excessively high CoL unless I stuff the whole skimmer into a fairing as wide as the rest of the rocket) but once it's up, it handles fairly well aside from the fact that the nose refuses to go anywhere beyond 20°-30° from prograde. Next are some variants (extended range, multi-cockpit, high-RCS tug, possibly a science variant too), then I'll start throwing in Mk2 fuselage for further experimentation. So... yeah. I take to this game like fish to water. Probably because I'm a software developer by profession and KSP's try-it-doesn't-work-tweak-it-doesn't-work-tweak-more kind of trial-and-error experimentation is my kind of fun to begin with. Or maybe it's the customization. Either way, I love it. I have a long-term project for building a reusable interplanetary ship, but I'll cut my teeth on building smaller stuff (and setting up relay sats system-wide) first because the part count of Project Argus will be high. Not reentry-capable and certainly not takeoff-capable (even if it weren't too heavy, that kind of load on the physics engine would be kraken bait, I think); more like a mothership for three SSTOs (two rocket-powered, one rocket/jet hybrid) and a parasite rig for low-grav ISRU. But again, that's a project for another day.