OdinYggd

Chance question- can mechjeb's autom8 fire off events from other modules, such as the orbital construction mod's transfer cargo feature? Was thinking about making a script that would launch an unmanned cargo vessel, approach spacedock, transfer cargo, and then deorbit to crash land. Or if I felt up to it, return to KSP after delivering the cargo.

I could see this mod being HIGHLY useful when paired with the orbital construction mod, and mechjeb for stationkeeping. Launch a spacedock on a SSTO, that way it reaches LKO or it's destination with lots of empty fuel tanks attached. Then you can siphon fuel from an incoming cargo ship to refuel the station, or delibrately eject fuel tanks from the station to draw fuel out of whenever it runs low. Not only can you refuel passing craft in that manner, but then the spacedock itself also remains fully fuelled in case you need to move it- such as raising it to a higher orbit to reduce clutter or even sending it off to other planets after it is heavily loaded with supplies.

Or add a feature to the store where people who have bought the game can login to the KSP store and press a button to display their game code to enter into Steam. That way the code stays with the KSP account in case something happens to the steam account and it needs to be re-entered.

Of the different DRM types out there, the only ones I have seen to be even close to effective are Steam, and the login server approach used by Minecraft. But even they are not perfect, I've heard of people successfully pirating Skyrim for instance and Minecraft's login system is easily bypassed. KSP might be okay with a login type system similar to Minecraft, as it is casual enough that it discourages blatant copying, while not being inconvenient to the end user either as long as they remember their info. Such a feature might go well if KSP ever does get a SMP mode, because as the admin of a minecraft server I can tell you that the central login system has a huge effect in controlling abuses. Kids upset about being banned aren't going to pay for another account just to abuse the admin some more, they'll throw in the towel and shop somewhere else. Again its not perfect though, particularly when exploits exist that let people crack account passwords and then use the hacked accounts in an abusive manner. But that's as close as I dare go to actual DRM, anything more than that either is horribly inconvenient to deal with or blatantly ineffective at controlling piracy.

That's the same phenomena my Voyager 1 experienced. The first pass it had a sharp drop in apoapsis, as though I had hit some kind of atmosphere and got aerobraked by it. Second pass, the apoapsis rose to infinity, and my Voyager 1- which was supposed to obey a comet's path, ended up living up to it's namesake after all and leaving the Kerbin system entirely.

That successful landing I showed took me about 6 hours of trial and error to build. All around my launch pad is now littered with Armstrong debris from failed attempts, and a great many attempts left the ground okay but blew up in the air or went so far off course that they ran out of fuel. You're just seeing people's successes, many of which were based on existing proven designs that got repurposed to this. They're not showing all the failures. Because just like with the real thing, it took a great many failures for us to learn how to build a rocket that worked right. Apollo 11's success was rather amazing, because they were flying barely-proven hardware and concepts the whole way.

As Kerbin sets, Jeb takes the ladder. Coincidentally this is the first manned vessel I have landed successfully on the Mun, and although I recently landed and EVA'd on Minimus my only Mun landings so far have all been unmanned mechjeb craft. It is oddly fitting that it would be a ship named Armstrong that makes my first successful manned Mun landing, and as we speak I am flying the same design a second time in an attempt to land at the tranquility base coordinates. The armstrong design has a crew tank in the descent stage, so not only can the crew be returned to Kerbin (in theory at least) but it leaves a semi-permanent habitation on the Mun surface.

I have a feeling the only sensible way to make this landing is to bring it in close then flip over and perform an RCS powered landing, since there is no vanilla way to get a backwards engine thrust required to make an engine landing upside-down. I'll see what I can do though, since I still have a bunch of boosters tested to deliver over 100 tons of rocket to minimus orbit. Would not take much to repurpose the upper stage of such a craft for this.

Lemme look, but I might actually be able to match you on this one. My Voyager rocket makes a very close approach to the sun, but it is a highly elliptical orbit that I put it in. It was launched with no intention of ever returning to Kerbin, and if I am not mistaken it's orbit actually goes from perhaps 100k of the sun all the way out past Minimus. Originally it was supposed to be a craft called the Kreutz that did this, but it didn't have enough Delta-V to get this close on the periapsis. Edit: AAHHHH WHY???!!! My Voyager 1 had enough fuel remaining to lower it's periapsis to a mere 50k of the sun, while keeping a 20 billion meter apoapsis. But now I see that there's something weird going on. Initially the periapsis started degrading further like some form of aerobraking, with the apoapsis degrading to only 9 billion meters. On the next orbit around, the apoapsis and periapsis velocity is increasing exponentially, at this rate she's going to enter time warp or something. I hope I didn't just break the game. Cause after only two orbits, my apoapsis is now -5.92 TeraMeters while my periapsis is 51Mm. Orbital period is now measured in years, my comet-like orbit just became a real comet's orbit. That or Voyager 1 just boldly went where no Kerbin has gone before.

Yeah but if your ship is ascending, and you stage up only to discover a fatal flaw that causes the rocket to fall back, does it still count if it actually lands with everything that was on it at the point it fell back intact. Or does the craft have to be in either level flight or orbit for it to count. Because I have a number of in-development craft that have buggy staging which results in them falling back, mostly due to insufficient fuel in the lower staging causing it to go to a stage with insufficient thrust before it is at a high enough velocity for it to continue anyway.

Looks like I should design a lightweight high-capacity kerbal hauler. Also, why leave the ships clustered? After they're empty, fly them a short distance away so as to reduce lag in the landing site.

So really all I have to do here is crash land a second or third stage into something without having it explode? Easy enough, considering that the area all around KSC is littered with craft that did exactly that- they experienced a failure right after staging that resulted in them falling back. Some of them survived, with entire third stages and orbiter/lander assemblies coming down intact. Probably the easiest method I can think of is take one of my orbiters- which more often than not have undersized engines, and allow it to fall back. Even with the engines at full throttle, it'll still make a hard landing that usually destroys it- but not always.

Only 976 tons on the ground? That's less than my ship that pulled 103 tons to Minimus had on the ground- she checked in just over 1100. My laptop usually does okay flying anything up to about 1200 tons, go over that or have lots of struts and fuel lines and it gets to a point where by the time you see the explosion mechjeb has already staged up to the next one to counteract the reduction in thrust. Also most of the fuel-related bugs only appear when the engines are not operated at 100% at all times. Mechjeb only ever uses anything less than full throttle when making course corrections, so other than a possible crossflow issue it shouldn't be relying on any glitches. Can you share the craft file to see if others can spot where it is happening? Your design is remarkably similar to mine, but I was only using the LVT-30 engines instead of all the aerospikes and boosters. Here's my 103 ton test vessel. The lander itself is over 30 tons, and carries 3 kerbins in an attempt to land and EVA on minimus I'm still working on an uprated version called Alder, but I'm back to the same complexity barrier that I ran into before where if I try to add anything else to the craft it detonates on the launch pad by structural failures. Mind you I'm completely stock over here other than the use of mechjeb.

Just achieved 103 tons to Minimus orbit. Forgot to screencap the ascent, this was really nothing more than a test flight to see if I could reach Kerbin orbit- which yielded a 151 ton to LKO. All vanilla except Mechjeb. Perhaps later on I'll separate the lander from the orbiter and attempt a Minimus landing and EVA. I'll fly it again and screencap it if I can't do any better than that. Ended up using most of the orbiter's fuel just getting into LKO, that fuel shouldn't have been touched till minimus braking.

As am I. But my largest launch to even Kerbin orbit to date is only 70 tons, so I am attempting to smash all of my records at once. Currently my ground weight is up to 1500 tons, and the biggest problem at launch is actually my laptop's inability to render the flight- I end up trusting mechjeb. Edit: Oh my god! I reached 60,000 meters, then the craft began to tumble on me and broke up. Ground weight 1587 tons, failure in stage 2 at 687 tons.

I read the book of this actually. One of the robots had befriended one of the kids, and hacked the launch controls to CAUSE a thermal curtain failure- making one of the SRBs ignite during a SSME ground test. They were then forced to light the other SRB and actually launch it so it wouldn't spin out of control and explode. Except the ship wasn't fully flight-prepped, they didn't have the right communications gear nor was it carrying enough oxygen for them to survive in space to the nearest re-entry window. I've heard that the Movie didn't do the book justice, but I haven't gotten a chance to see the movie yet.

Getting to space is easy. Just build a rocket with enough thrust relative to it's mass to leave the ground, and enough fuel to do that the whole way. Once you get the hang of keeping your rockets from exploding, falling apart, or losing control in flight, getting to space is the easiest part of the whole game. It's getting somewhere in space that's the real challenge, because once you're in space you've only got what you brought with you to work with for fuel.

Dell Inspiron 1525s are a good little laptop, as old as mine is she still has decent bang for the buck. But yeah, other than adding RAM or a larger hard drive, for the most part laptops cannot be upgraded due to strict limits of size, temperature, and power consumption. You should talk to a local computer shop. Most areas have a couple of little one and two man computer specialists that can custom build you the best value for your money, resulting in a system without the bloatware of the name brand builds and with far superior performance. Though if you don't want to wait for a custom build, just make absolutely certain it has at least an Intel I3. Walmart in particular is still actively unloading AMD Semprons and Pentium Dual Core machines that are in fact leftover old systems that didn't sell yet because of the economic crash in 2008. They'll be no advantage over what you have now, so hold out for that I3 or I5 powered machine. Also, if you can find one within your budget, try to get an NVidia GPU that supports PhysX. Kerbal takes advantage of PhysX for physics processing, having a GPU that supports it will make a tremendous performance boost.

Just in case of a capsule fire, as a number of early craft experienced including at least one that burned up on the test stand without leaving the ground. If a Soyuz capsule catches fire, there is absolutely nothing the crew can do about it.

If that's for real, then one of 3 scenarios: SQUAD is actually a NASA contractor using our feedback from playing the game to improve on their rocket design solution to be used by NASA NASA rented some Kerbals for effect in a press release Somebody here has too much time on their hands, and a lot of UI mods in their KSP.

That one was powered by Compressed Natural Gas and Liquid Oxygen, with the tanks probably containing more than enough fuel for the test flight so they could also be sure the craft could lift itself off the ground with full tanks. If I had been standing nearby watching it, the instant it hit the sand I'd have run for the nearest blockhouse fully expecting it to blow up. Compressed explosive gases + liquid oxygen in a confined space. You can't get much more explosive than that when upside down and on fire after a rocket crash. I'll bet their firefighters were waiting a safe distance away for it TO explode before trying to fight it, that way the tanks were empty and wouldn't blow up in their faces. But I am honestly surprised, NASA must be getting rather rusty with their designs and piloting for this to happen. Though initial reports claim that the craft signaled a critical hardware failure when it lost control, so it might not have been a fault with their version of Mechjeb or the guy with the remote control. And in KSP, I'd check for structural flexing and insufficient guidance- time to switch the engine to a gymbal type so that mechjeb can keep it on course. I'm sure they'll build a better one, this time with more safeguards to keep this from happening.

This thread is making me miss my old rockets. Though I don\'t miss the one that got stuck on the launchpad. That one burned a hole clean through a 1/4' steel deflector plate using an A8-3 engine. I used to have a small fleet of Estes brand model rockets built from kits, and would fly them somewhat regularly about my yard. Sadly the few surviving pictures of them are film prints, though some of these I\'ve found similar ones on google for reference images. My favorite was the Viking, if I can find another kit I\'ll probably rebuild it. But I also had an Alpha, Mosquito, Astrocam (This took pictures in flight, really fun), Skywinder (Rocket launch, autorotating helicopter recovery), Gnome (this always whistled like a bottle rocket for some reason), Longshot, Commanche3- a massive 3-stage that only ever flew the top two, and the Silver Comet- a craft that strongly resembled a 1960s scifi vessel that was quite fun to fly. Perhaps I should dig through the attic and see if any of them survived. The prepackaged engines I used back then should still be available at the hobby shop, all I would have to do is rebuild my launch pad- more than 10 years sitting forgotten in the barn did some damage. Also the pics above of the kit that drops the gliders- what is that called? I used to have something similar, it carried two gliders into the air on launch, and at ejection the main tube separated, dropping the gliders to circle the airfield while the main body returned via parachute with both halves dangling from it. The layout looks identical as do the relative sizes, you just haven\'t installed the wings on the gliders or the bottom half of the glider mounts.

What I want to see is a practical demonstration of using a laser pulse to generate matter-antimatter pairs. Because it sounds like a perpetual motion machine to me, they need practical numbers of the efficiency of that method of generation in order to figure out how long it will take to refuel for a given solar panel area for instance. Currently the only method of generating antimatter that I know of relies on using a particle accelerator to blast a heavy metal target with electrons, in the process kicking up clumps of positrons that can be identified by their flipped spiral in the magnetic fields of the accelerator chamber. That method requires gigawatts of energy for perhaps a few individual particles yield, nowhere near the amount of energy said antimatter will give back. Though this approach does have the advantage of possibly creating fuel while in space without having to cart about raw materials, which is a big plus that was also seen in the Bussard Ramjet concepts of a decade ago.