AHHans

I agree with @bewing suggestion. This calls for for the Kerbal Universal Docking Adaptor, aka Advanced Grabbing Unit, aka The Klaw! In my previous career save I had the similar problem: I had several crafts (tugs) with a docking port but wanted to dock them to crafts without a docking port. So I sent up a small probe with several combinations of docking port and Klaw (you really only need these two parts (but make sure that the port faces the right way)), and then in turn grabbed my main space station with one of the Klaws and decoupled the docking port. And - voila - my space station had a couple more docking ports. (I then used those to dock my crafts to these docking ports, and disconnect the Klaw. Thus changing my tugs from only being able to propel crafts with docking ports to all crafts.)

@Geonovast O.K. Yes, that could be a thing. Thanks for the information.

Can I buy a second license of KSP on Steam now, and gift it to someone else later? When I try to "Purchase as a Gift" then the Steam client wants me to specify immediately which of my friends I want it to gift it to.

Well, both! This thread is titled "KSP Spinoff Game".

Have you tried the stock missions from the Making History DLC? (O.K. I only played the first few.) I think that if they had a few good (and no bad) stories in there, then the mission builder would have been more successful. And, yes, the number of points you get in a mission is part of the story that this mission tells. Hmmm... maybe the stock missions are so bad because at SQUAD nobody thought about telling a story with them.

(The angle of attack is the angle between the blade and the incoming airflow, because the direction of the airflow onto the blade changes with airspeed you cannot directly set it. What you do set is the pitch of the blade.) I believe you set the pitch of the blades by setting them to deflect and then adjusting the "authority limit" in the PAW, correct? You can bind this authority limit to one of the axis groups in the SPH and use that to adjust it during flight. What you describe is exactly the effect I'm talking about. If you increase the pitch of the blades above the value for optimum thrust at standstill, then it will give less thrust at low airspeeds (your plane lifts slower) but will give better thrust at high airspeeds. But: I made a test, switching the 2m prop blades with the 2m helicopter blades on one of my planes. And got essentially the same result you got: good acceleration at low airspeeds, but lousy maximum airspeed (for me it was ca. 40 m/s instead of 120 m/s with the prop blades). So I guess that this is the fundamental difference between these two types of blades: the helicopter blades give higher thrust in general but max out at low speed, and the prop blades have less thrust at low airspeeds but can keep their thrust up to higher speeds. You could try prop blades instead of the helicopter blades, or adding prop blades to the same engines that you have the helicopter blades on (i.e. have two sets of blades on the same engine). But my guess is that both won't work too well. (Prop only will probably have too low static thrust to lift the plane, and with both on the same axis the helicopter blades probably generate lots of drag at high airspeeds.)

Well, if it can lift, then it has a TWR greater than 1 when standing still. But once you start moving the angle of attack on the blades changes and they produce less thrust if the blade pitch is not adjusted. I.e. did you adjust (increase) the blade pitch in horizontal flight?

Getting back to the original question about a spinoff game from KSP: I'd love ho have a game like KSP that has an actual story to tell. Something like an adventure, where you need to build and fly rockets to proceed. Or XCOM like, where you have a story in an overlaid "world view" and then go onto missions from there. Maybe "dumb down" the engineering and flying part of KSP somewhat for that to keep the skillcap low and make it more approachable for a wider audience. One issue with that, is that - at least in my book - SQUAD doesn't have a good track record for telling stories.

I would love to have some actual story in KSP, or in a spinoff from KSP. But I'm with @MR L A here, I don't know how well this would fit with most of the community. If there is a story added to the existing KSP, then something like the original storyline would indeed be a good choice. But using actual SSTV signals is IMHO not a good idea, it would be better to stay in-game with the decoding. Ah, no! Just, no!

You can move the mouse only left/right and up/down, but not forward/back. Thus when placing a component the program essentially has to guess, at which distance from your screen the component should be placed. So what the program does is to put the component onto the already existing component that is closest to you. So if you cannot attach a component where you want it to, then do try moving the camera around until you find an angle KSP agrees with what you want. If there is no existing piece of the rocket where you are pointing, then the actual position in space that KSP assumes is indeed often strange. But for me that is only an issue if I put something "to the side" and then need to search for it when I want to attach it again. In your video (this one: https://photos.app.goo.gl/t9mPoHNAW6h48i2f7) KSP has no idea at which height you want to place the component, so it moves around erratically. It is also not really clear to me what you want to do. Place some unconnected components next to each other? That is unlikely to work. (And I don't understand why you want to do that.)

I don't know about pigs in mud, but I do enjoy playing with the new toys. I just made a solar-powered, folded-wing plane, that can get to Eve, fly over Eve on solar power, and boost its cockpit back into Eve's orbit. The biggest problem there wasn't getting the propellers to works, but to survive the aerobraking without burning up or getting ripped apart and tweaking the ascent trajectory to make it into orbit without running out of fuel. To me it feels like I finally mastered the last bossfight of KSP. IMHO there are issues with the new parts, e.g. the non-functional cyclic control of the helicopter blades, the fact that they are extremely wobbly when attached to a heavy load, that they rather suddenly loose lift at a certain altitude, etc. But the fact that to use them one has to learn a bit how propellers work is not one of their problems.

@mystifeid "16 deg" on a servo between engine and blade is probably not the same as "15" units of blade authority. No, I'm not using the biggest motors. On the contrary, I'll try to use the smallest motor that I can get away with. Extra weight is just extra cost getting it to the surface of Eve. And thanks my plane now not only survives aerobraking on Eve (having folded its wings into the shadow of a 10m heat-shield), but can also go from parachuting to flying, and can get it's 3-Kerbal capsule back into Eve Orbit. Even if the latter is tricky and requires to get the ascend trajectory just right. Btw.: Well, te forums seem to have a "nasty"-word filter. I wouldn't compare Eve to one of my favorite vacuum-stage engines. "Poodle, when a Terrier just doesn't have enough bite."

what? Why does it need negative pitch for autorotation? That doesn't make sense... Well, I guess that's Kerbal physics. I use a servo between the engine and the blades to set the collective pitch. And of course I set the limits for the servo to not allow negative pitch. So I never tried that. Yes. I'm constantly monitoring blade pitch, engine RPM, and ascent speed. With the old (elevon-based) blades I needed to gradually lower the blade pitch the higher I got to get the best ascent speed. (Also because the torque wasn't enough to keep the engine at max RPM for most of the ascent.) With the new blades I can use a fairly high pitch and still get max RPM and a pretty high ascent rate, that increases with elevation -- until it starts decreasing and things go pear shaped. Lowering the pitch at that point (from ca. 16 deg to 5 deg or whatever) doesn't really help much if I don't have the spare engine power. I guess my current strategy is at least related to your "high speed" approach: I ascent at best speed (maxing out at around 20 m/s) until the ascent speed starts to drop, then I fire up the rockets and drop the rotors. For me that's because If I don't do that then I start dropping fast, and with the low TWR that I have in Eve's atmosphere I would spend a long time just reversing the drop-speed if I'm not quick... Well, Eve is a poodle! In my folding-wing Eve plane the parachutes rip my craft into pieces during the descent. Not because of high stress during unfolding, but because the static forces are too high. Guess I have to attach them to more than one spot...

I don't know about yours. But my Kerbals don't like playing lawn-darts. (Too many bad memories of being inside the dart I believe.) But, yes! Some space to move around in is required, so 2.5m parts it is. Since the BG expansion I include a gravity ring in my stations, its current iteration is made from the 1.25m passenger cabin.

Yes, I think I do it they way you mentioned. For pitch/roll/yaw control I essentially just do not set the authority limiter of the blades to zero. (Setting it to 30 works well for me.) Because it is a quadcopter and the rotors and their thrust-vectors are all well away from the COM, this works reasonably well. The one thing I really did, is to use servos between the rotor and the blades for the collective control.

When playing around with the new helicopter blades I noticed that they seem to have a rather sharp height ceiling. When my Eve-ascent quadcopter gets above ca. 5500m on Kerbin or 17000m on Eve then it dramatically loses vertical speed and then starts dropping. My old version from before 1.7.3 that used elevons as the lifting surfaces showed a more gradual behavior: it didn't ascent as fast in the lower atmosphere and lost vertical speed much more slowly when it got higher. So that it could de-facto hover at its service ceiling. With the new helicopter blades my craft ascends much faster, but then rather abruptly goes from ascending at 20 m/s or so to falling within a couple of seconds. Also there is no autorotation, but rather the opposite effect: once it started dropping the rotors slow down quickly. To get them to rotate again I need a lot of torque, much more than to "just" start ascending from a standing start. Which means that if I don't have rather overpowered motors (i.e. otherwise unnecessary weight) the craft is unrecoverable once it starts dropping. Has anyone else noticed this?

Nope. (Well, at least I didn't, although I tried.) A quadcopter with servos between the rotor and the blades as the collective and the blade deflection as cyclic does work.

Yupp, there is an option for that. Called "Advanced Tweakables" which can be found under "Gameplay" in the "General" section of the settings.

And that's perfectly fine with me! I expect that they'll be great for the "landing legs" of my big mining rig. (With the caveat that in my current career save the best mining spot on Minmus is on the Greater Flats...)

On this day 125 years ago, on the 25 June 1894 Hermann Julius Oberth was born in the Transylvanian town of Hermannstadt (today Sibiu in Romania). Instead of the traditional occupation as a vampire, he choose a career in rocket science instead. He was (one of?) the first to mathematically prove that multistage rockets can indeed escape the Earth's gravitational field and travel to other planets. In the 1920ies he was a member of the "Verein für Raumschiffahrt" in Germany, an amateur rocketry group, where he worked together with a young student named Wernher von Braun. After becoming a naturalized German citizen he worked on the rocket program of pedant Germany in Peenemünde between 1941 and 1943. After the war Oberth mostly lived near Nürnberg in west Germany. Eventually he came to work for his former student - the von Braun guy - on the US rocket program for some time. He retired in 1962 and died on the 28 December 1989. His legacy is tarnished by being a member of the new funded National Democratic Party (NPD) in west Germany from 1965 to 1967. In 1962 he caused a small scandal when he said: "I had hoped to find a rocket weapon that could smash the ignominious Treaty of Versailles. Unfortunately I failed." (translation by me...) at a public speech. To KSP players he is known for his effect on rocket efficency. Remember: always burn at periapsis! (If possible. Terms and conditions apply.) P.S. All actual facts are shamelessly copied from Wikipedia. So blame them if I got it wrong.

And with the passive seismometer from the Breaking Ground DLC you can have both.

My $0.05: I don't think that Squad is working on a new game. I believe that Squad is a very small company and that they use/need all their manpower for maintaining KSP. Having said that: I would be glad if they would be making a new game! I'n not really in favor of that. I see two alternatives for a "KSP-2": one would be more or less the same game, just "better". I don't see where KSP could be updated enough to make it worthwhile to have a KSP-2, while still being more or less the same KSP. In this case I would prefer if they would keep making incremental updates to the original KSP. The other alternative would be to make a different game. In that case I would miss having the original KSP being updated.

Or did you use autostruts onto or across the servos? (Autostruts to "grantparent" that don't touch or go across a moving part seem to work fine for me.)

Hi, welcome to the forums. In the pop-up text for a 5-star engineer (in a career save) it says: Provides repair skills: Repack Parachutes Repair Landing Legs Repair Wheels [...] So I guess scanning arms are not meant to be repairable. Like solar panels etc. (That also feels logical to me: if you break a delicate scientific instrument then it takes a lot more effort to fix it than it takes to fix a flat tire.)

Well, I could say "duh, that's the obvious way to get high torque", but the truth is that I didn't think of this myself earlier. And patent offices are littered with inventions that seem obvious in hindsight. Those who - like me - don't like parts clipping through each other can also use the interstage nodes of the payload fairings for one side. (You probably want to disable the truss structure.)