Misguided Kerbal

Continuing to work on my totally not cursed paraglider concept, I think I've finally settled on a workable design. Pathfinder re-enters like a normal capsule, utilizing a conventional heat shield. Here's the most critical phase. With the capsule still aligned retrograde from the reentry, a drogue chute is deployed not from the nose, but from the rear to slow it down. By deploying from the rear, this allows the capsule to reorient into a position for paraglider deployment while not completely killing off all velocity, and allowing for a smooth transition to occur. Once in the correct orientation, the paraglider is deployed and the drogue chute is cut. While I was originally aiming for a runway landing, I ended up reentering short and had to make a landing in a random field instead. Oh well, any landing you can walk away from...

That's a very intriguing idea, I never considered a solution like that. I'll definitely have to try something like that, but that sure sounds like kraken bait.

A while back, I was messing around with a Gemini paraglider concept, but due to flight instability issues, I gave up. But nonetheless, it's now a few months later and the idea has still not left my head - I'm back at it again. A huge issue last time I made this design was the lack of control - the 'steerable' paraglider (from Knes, an amazing mod) has a misleading name. Essentially, it's just rigid so you can steer with it. I didn't realize that, and ended up making some abomination using jet engines for some semblance of thrust (and thus, 'control'.) But this time I think I've figured it out. Since I can't really make anything to shift the center of mass for control as in real life, I have basically made a flying reaction wheel. The design is still very difficult to fly and needs a lot of refinement, but I now at least have semblance of control. Also, it's eyecandy, for sure. If I can get it to work slightly more reliably, maybe it'll see the light of day again one day.

Speaking from experience as a Mac user (I own and play KSP on a 2020 Macbook Pro) The M1 should be able to handle KSP perfectly fine - it's a lot more powerful than most people think, but you'll want to stay away from super intensive graphics mods, not because of performance, but because of lack of RAM. However, you should be able to run something like spectra + maybe scatterer (with slightly lower settings) and a full Near Future suite fine, not a real issue. But the RAM isn't actually the biggest issue - the Macbook Air lacks a fan, so once the CPU gets too hot (since KSP can be quite intensive on the processor), the CPU will automatically throttle giving you less performance, which sucks.

ShuttlePilot

That looks amazing! Just wondering, are those boat hull parts part of Buffalo 2?

Yeah, as much as I call it a 'monstrosity' there's a nice place for it in my heart. I'll probably use it to fling a probe or two towards Eve or Duna when the time comes. I agree, I think I like the look haha. I left two docking docking ports on the Leo for a reason...

Chapter 12 "I don't know what what you could say about a day in which you have seen four beautiful sunsets." - John Glenn

I do be a Misguided Kerbal. @Watermel00n melon.

Turns out that putting even a tiny little satellite into Geostationary orbit was a lot harder than I thought it would be. Originally, I put the Courier (a new class of relay satellite, basically just a QBE probe core with some antennas and an engine stuck onto it) onto the same launcher as my Pioneer probes bound for the Mun and Minmus, with only 6 SRBs strapped to the core stage. However, I underestimated. I assumed that if a probe had more than enough delta-v to get to Minmus with extra to spare, it would more than suffice for entering a Geostationary orbit (after all, Minmus is a lot further from Kerbin!). Well, it wasn't enough (I assume, due to the expensive circularization cost.) So I built.. this monstrosity. Going full Delta here. 10 Shrimp SRBs mounted onto the side, the true incarnation of MOAR BOOSTERS! A ring of fire. One ring... one ring to rule them all. (Terrible, I know.) After much pain, a Geostationary orbit is achieved at 8968.11 km, which is the GEO height of JNSQ Kerbin. Gsync is 9 milliseconds away - yeah, I can't do anything about that. I just don't have that type of precision. I made a cool gif, too! I spent a lot more time watching the world go by with time warp on high than I'd like to admit. Certainly worth it though!

Sorry for the hiatus - with school starting, I've been caught up in a whirlwind of classes and homework, so while I'll try my best to keep this updated, my posting schedule will probably be somewhat erratic. Nonetheless, the space program continues to march on. Chapter 11 "Flight, we are docked. It was a real smoothie." - Neil Armstrong

In Kerbal Konstructs there's a setting to set the space center view to the one you last launched from.

I got just a teeny bit sidetracked re-playing the entirety of Endless Sky. Chapter 10 "We're flying in formation with [Gemini] VII. Everything is go here." - Wally Schirra

Ah, sorry for being an idiot and not specifying anything. Go to the releases and just download KEX-Plugins.zip and just install it like you would with any other mod.