silent_prtoagonist

Yeah my 4 GB of VRAM is pegged full pretty much all the time. Wouldn't surprise me if that's the dominant factor in my case.

Built an ion probe to try out the new persistent thrust, and since it's the only new planet added so far in KSP 2 I decided to fly it out to Dres. The rings and equatorial ridge were awesome! This new planet seems really interesting and not boring at all.

System Specs: CPU: Intel Core i5-6600K @ 3.50 GHz GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 980, 4 GB VRAM Memory: 16 GB DDR4 Storage: HDD OS: Windows 10 Display: 2560x1080 @ 60 Hz Settings: 2560x1080/Lowest See note below on ultrawide resolutions. Results: Main Menu: 100+ FPS Space Center: ~30 FPS Assembly Building: ~60 FPS Parts initially load with missing models/textures, resolves after a couple frames. Tracking Station: ~60 FPS Celestial bodies take a bit to load in. Flight: With very small part count: ~20 FPS looking at ground, ~50 FPS viewing space and vessel only. Performance degrades as expected with increasing part count, have not tested large craft past ~50 parts. Noticeable hang-ups whenever a new asset is loaded, e.g. bringing a new building into view, engine ignition, etc. Performance similar viewing other planets, not just Kerbin/KSC. (Tested at Minmus) Loading Screens: Loading times are long. (Expected with HDD) The exception is assembly building -> launch, which is very quick. "Pumping Sim Once" is going to become a meme, you heard it here first. Verdict: Playable, but not a particularly pleasant experience. GPU limited in pretty much all cases. Biggest performance bottleneck appears to be rendering planets, hopefully this will be relatively easy to optimize. When not looking at a planet in flight mode the game runs surprisingly well. (But then looking at planets is kind of the point.) Aesthetically on minimum settings the game is comparable to KSP 1 with moderate graphics mods. Some things are prettier (mainly the rockets) some things similar (low clouds are not volumetric) some things worse (aliasing, etc). I have not yet experimented with optimizing the graphics settings. For me I think it's good enough to play around with/provide feedback, but I'll need a hardware upgrade to really enjoy playing for itself. I'm probably going to wait for the latest-gen low-end GPUs to come out and reevaluate then. Note/Workaround for Ultrawide Resolutions: The game does not appear to natively support resolutions for aspect ratios other than 16:9, however you can apparently "trick" the game into doing it by setting it to borderless window mode and then back to fullscreen without changing any other settings.

Some more eyecandy

I just started playing with Kommander as well, and I've been having similar thoughts about the importance of aerobraking. First thought: Use the 10m inflatable heat shield, which doesn't use ablator and is thus completely reusable. You'd just have to be careful to never accidentally jettison the thing. As an added bonus it lends itself to flying saucer designs, which are just cool. (This was always one of my favorite ships from Orbiter that used such a design http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=3629) Thought the second: Don't make such deep dives, staying relatively high and cool to protect the fragile parts, and make up for it by making your ship as draggy as possible/doing more braking passes. A good reentry vehicle has as much drag as possible (basically the opposite of a good aircraft, which is why the space shuttle flew like a brick) so that it sheds as much energy as possible in the upper atmosphere before the real heating begins. You could even give it some stubby wings/design it more like a spaceplane, which would allow you to fine tune your flight profile and ride that bleeding edge of just barely not exploding.

This mod is dangerous; I had to really work at paying attention to my reentry.

To be fair a pretty large portion of the spaceflight industry agrees with you.

I love these designs. Remind me of Lockheed's Star Clipper concept from the 60s.

Are the ailerons close to the center of lift, or rotated in the editor, or otherwise weirdly placed? I noticed some similar behavior with some of my more...creatively placed control surfaces. As a temporary fix you can un-invert them by setting the Authority Limiter to negative values in the right-click menu, even mid-flight.

I am having trouble getting KSP to launch with the Steam overlay in 64-bit mode. I am running a clean install of 1.1.1, Steam version (obviously), on Windows 10. So far I have tried three different methods of launching KSP 64-bit: 1) Selecting "Launch KSP (64-bit)" when launching the game normally through Steam. 2) Editing the launch options. I have tried using two different commands 3) Adding KSP_x64.exe to Steam as a non-Steam game. (Note: Adding KSP.exe as a non-steam game successfully launches 32-bit KSP with the Steam overlay enabled) None of these methods have launched KSP with the Steam overlay enabled. I have double checked that the overlay is enabled both in the general Steam settings and the individual game settings. So, anyone have any other ideas for work-arounds? Normally this would be a minor annoyance but I have been trying to set up KSP with my new Steam Controller, which unfortunately requires the overlay to function.

I'm having this issue as well, but only running 32-bit KSP. In 64-bit the config window shows normally. Unfortunately I'm using a steam controller and I have yet to figure out a way to run 64-bit KSP with the steam overlay (a separate issue) which is required to edit the steam controller settings.

I'm just amused that the vector feels so over powered when in fact it's the closest ksp engines have come the performance of real rocket engines, at least in terms of thrust/physical size. Thrust to weight is still horrible by real world standards, though.

Just a note, you can set your starting funds and science in the difficulty options when you create a new game. However the most you can give yourself is 500,000 funds and 5000 science, which I just tested is enough to get you lvl 2 R&D and every 160 science node, plus a few 300s. Still it makes a nice middle of the road option if you want to skip the early game and don't want to edit configs.

A center of thrust misalignment isn't your problem. The problem is that your center of mass is so low on your rocket, and therefore behind the center of drag, so your rocket wants to fly backwards (COM in front of COD). Note that what the blue marker in the VAB shows is only center of lift, which only accounts for lifting surfaces on your vessel and not general drag. Currently there's no way to display the center of drag on a vessel, which makes solving this kind of problem very frustrating. But the general solution is just "add bigger and bigger fins until it works." EDIT: You can also redesign your rocket to move the center of mass farther forward (try to avoid big long fairings with low density parts inside them like the one you have), but this can be difficult for certain pyloads. Or you can often fly even an unstable rocket if you never let the nose get more than a few degrees from the velocity vector, but that can be tough to do without some sort of autopilot.

Periodically during the game you will get a contract to test a new part that you haven't researched yet. This part then becomes available for you to build with so long as the contract is active. This is a very nice mechanic that lets you access some critical parts without having to research a whole node to get them (small landing gear I'm looking at you). My problem with it though is that you don't get to keep the part after you complete the contract. I often find myself taking a contract and then ignoring it while I fly around with my shiny new part. I only complete the contract once I've finally gotten around to actually researching that node. It would make sense if you got to retain access to the part after completing the contract and it would give you more incentive to do these types of missions (in addition to 1.0.5 making the testing contracts friendlier in general).

http://brickset.com/sets/1682-1 This was one of my favorite sets growing up. I noticed that they're using the same truss piece that was used for the majority of the service structure on the shuttle for the LES tower and had a huge nostalgia trip. Very cool project; I especially love the new internals. This instantly got my support and I'm passing the word on.

The Adventures of OktoProbe​TM Hail Probe! Planetary Alignment (Minmus, Kedbin and Jool):

One thing Skylon has going for it in terms of reentry is the fact that once it's massive hydrogen tanks are empty it'll have a very low overall density, which will do a lot to ease reentry heating compared to the denser space shuttle.

It would be a win-win for Spacex. Not only would they be getting more business, but it would increase demand for the engines, allowing them to ramp up production making the cost per engine (and thus cost per Spacex rocket) lower.

This reminds me a bit of the big dumb booster concept, I like it. Looking forward to reading more.

Sadly she is scattered as a fine mist of ash in kerbin's upper atmosphere, first and last victim of 1.0's heat shield bug. Per aspera ad astra!

Yes it looks like you forgot to convert KSP "units" for the fuel to mass. Both LF and Ox are 1 tonne / 200 units, and xenon is 1 tonne / 10,000 units. I never have quite understood why Squad did things that way, instead of displaying everything in mass units. Maybe at some point they were thinking about having different density fuels, i.e. the same tank can hold less hydrogen than kerosene? I also looked in the config and the ion engine's vacuum thrust is exactly 2, and vacuum Isp is exactly 4200s. Btw, you have to be a bit careful dealing with Isp in KSP, since apparently the game uses a value that's slightly off from g0 (9.82 according to the wiki) to convert from thrust-specific impulse (measured in s) to mass-specific impulse (measured in m/s, aka effective exhaust velocity), which is what gets used in the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation (the delta-v eqn.), Dv = Ve * ln(m0/m1).

*Maths incoming* Ok, the ION engine consumes 0.486 xenon/s = 48.6E-6 t/s 8.74 ec/s and produces a thrust of 2kN With fuel cells, the ec costs 8.74 ec/s * 12.5E-6 t(lfo)/ec = 109.3E-6 t/s so the total mass flow rate is 48.3E-6 + 109.3E-6 = 157.9E-6 t/s Specific impulse is thrust/(mass flow rate) = 2kN/(157.9 t/s) = 12.63 E3 m/s which is equivalent to ~1300 s So it's a big performance hit, but still better than any other engine, including the LV-N.

HarvesteR. I was still active on the Orbiter forums way back when HarvesteR introduced KSP there. Decided to check it out and was not disappointed. EDIT: for great nostalgia! http://orbiter-forum.com/showthread.php?t=22998

The delta vee lied to me.