allmappedout

I miss this feature so much! I used to have KSP on my mac and whilst it was a pain to do Fn+>, at least it worked! Without it I have to actually move my mouse. It's a DISGRACE.

Wow! What a good idea. Whilst I'd thought about having a timing delay on the action groups, the idea of putting them in the staging tree is a stroke of genius! It makes remembering what your action groups are much simpler, as you can do all the requirements pre-launch, where you need to. Each AG could just have a simple box with (1), (2), etc etc to denote which button it relates to, but you wouldn't need to know what was on it if you'd set it up correctly, which I think would help massively.

If we're going to necro this thread, we should quickly point out that tweakables should do a lot to reduce a lot of the number of parts needed, both before the payload and within the payload, since you will be able to make custom sized parts. However, it's considered bad form for necro-ing a thread. This should possibly be locked (especially seeing as I seemed to kill the conversation last time!).

Yes, in one usage, however words can have multiple meanings and it can also be used to mean "something that is mysterious or obscure." Let's not get bogged down in semantics and instead, concentrate on all the cool things that are coming soon.

Maybe the game has its own PID controller The only issue I'm still finding with the SAS is that when a ship doesn't have a huge amount of control authority (ie: it's a 'laggy' turner), when you move the ship to a specific heading, the PID controller doesn't seem to take the point where you stop putting input in as the point that you wish to remain at, and seems to compensate back to a point somewhere between where it started and where you stopped inputting the controls. This is obviously only really an issue with big rockets which take some time to turn, but I thought I may as well bring it up here; everything else works like a charm, and it certainly seems to work broadly in the same way as the OP describes.

Really enjoyed today's dev note - I stayed up to watch the stream last night with Yargnit & the community managers, and got very excited about Kerbal Kon. I'm glad they're going down the stream route and I think it'll be a really good thing to have the entire team together, and I'm looking forward to all the cool announcements that were cryptically hinted at!!

Whilst they may be damaged, it might not be damaged to the point where they're broken. As long as your tanks don't explode, they will still function fine, and as long as the engines don't overheat from any exhaust being pointed at them, there should be no issue.

Whilst now isn't the time to debate being a purist, my advice would be to try and standardise your action groups. Whilst I understand that's not always possible, I always set my solar panels to the same action group, or parachutes or all science to another, just so I'm far less likely to do something stupid with a constructed ship. It's been (mostly) successful and has cut down on me accidentally shooting up the wrong set of engines and ending up crashing into Jool (look...it happened once and I'm SORRY, but can't we let things live in the past, Jeb?)

Bear in mind that for every battery and RTG and Ion engine you add, you're reducing the available dV you get from your xenon tanks, and unless you have sufficient electrical charge to run multiple Ion engines you won't be able to do a total burn, which given the low thrust means you will have to do lots of periapsis kicks, or similar. And remember that every engine you add doubles the amount of electricity you need so you need to add more solar panels or RTGs, but that increases your weight so your TWR goes down so you add more engines, but that means you run out of fuel too early so you add more xenon but then you need more thrust for the added weight and.......etc etc etc Unless you are building super light vehicles, there's no point to Ions.

Plus there's the major issue that to keep Ion probes running for any good amount of time you need vast amounts of electricity which involves putting batteries and solar panels on your probe which adds to your weight and thus hits your dV hard, and your TWR even harder. The problem with ion probes is that even 400 units of xenon is far more than you really need to go anywhere, but going there in a reasonable time is still better done by an ant or a 48-7S (which has the highest TWR of any engine apart from the mainsail IIRC, and still maintains fairly good ISP in a vaccuum).

Really wish I could enter this, but am still getting to grips with all the different variables available and learning all the syntax. Shouldn't be too hard to do as I have a fair bit of experience with programming, but it's always interesting learning a new language

I'd love for somebody to ask about how much internal work has been put into the aerodynamics and the robotics/moving parts bit of the game. Given that tweakables seems to provide a lot of the functionality that robotics might need in future, I'd love to know if there were any upcoming plans.

M5000, thanks for that, that's good to know and fits in with what i've seen, now I think about it. Geschosskopf, that's a cool idea, I'll have to give that a whirl!

Really good post from a newbie, very well laid out and informative; welcome to the forums by the way! A lot of your concerns have been brought up or addressed (or plan to be, anyway!) but I tend to agree with a lot of your points. Keep up the good testing and rocketry!

I think that's a simple solution, i'm sure there'd be lots of uses for it (particularly for launching rockets from aircraft, for example) as well as the one I mentioned above. We shall see....ISWT!! (In Squad We Trust)

Cheers; that's a shame. Like I said, I've been building for a while and it's just always bugged me that there's no better way to do it - I usually use the x-beam strutting idea to keep everything from shaking apart and that works fairly well, but hopefully this'll look like something that could be improved in future releases (obviously I understand the limitations in the parent-child structure of craft, I was talking more about the physics between parts).

Hi all, I've been building rockets for a while now, but i've never known how to solve one issue that has always bugged me - for long sets of fuel tanks (say, 3 or 4 big high), they can only have one connection point when you're using radial decouplers. As a result, they rotate and wobble around this point, which usually results in unplanned disassembly. Placing multiple decouplers up the length of the main rocket doesn't help because they're not connected to the outside stack and when they decouple they tend to explode in hilarious fashion. Apart from large amounts of strutting, there doesn't seem to be an elegant solution to this issue. Is it just me being stupid? Am I missing something obvious? Is there a solution, such as attaching docking ports to both sides prior to connecting the tanks so when physics loads all the decouplers are properly linked? (has someone tried this?)? Or do I just have to grin and bear it? For reference, I like to build pretty tall rockets, so I have Kerbal Reinforcement installed which makes this easier, but it doesn't seem to solve this issue. Alternatively, are there any mod sets that have really long decouplers that are, say, nearly the length of an orange fuel tank so the connection is stronger? Thanks for your help!

Imagine having a 50 part space ship, or even a 20 part probe in orbit around saturn. Then imagine that you have 1.5million 1 piece spaceships/rocks within 2.5km of your position. Imagine having to buy a new motherboard. Anything less and people will complain it's not a proper ring. Make them too big people will complain it's not granular enough, make them too small people will complain they can't interact with it. Make it too busy and people will complain they crash into it too often. The problem is that even after surmounting the technological issues with having rings, there's a ton of other issues which the devs will have to look into. It'll be interesting to see how they approach it.

The only way that this could be done is if you had a sub-program which contained all of KSP's assets and was solely used to render the craft. It'd probably be trivial to create for squad but on the other hand it'd require updating at every iteration so it probably wouldn't be worth their time to keep it updated as it'd just be KSP-lite.

vexx is right - a ring of any thickness lateral to the planet would have extremely strong tidal forces acting on it which would very quickly tear it apart, if it could even form in the first place. Something like the Halo in...Halo...would actually work better as it is thin in depth, and so the gravity gradient between the furthest point and the closest point is far lower. Obviously constructing something like that is unfeasible for any of us, but the theory is sound.

Cheers, that's what I was thinking, I just couldn't be certain! The Dragon looks like a very ambitious piece of kit once it's completed.

Hi all, I was reading up about the SpaceX Dragon module, and came across the Draco RCS module which is currently used for orbital maneuveuring. What I also saw was that they're planning to install SuperDraco engines, which produce huge amounts of thrust. Now, what I can't work out from any articles is whether this is in addition to, or as a replacement for, the Draco thrusters? Since the thrust is so high on the SuperDracos that it can be used as part of an LES, my thought was that there's no way these can be used for fine orbital control, but then it does mention that it has full throttle control and multiple reignition facilty. Does anybody know one way or another, and have any sources for verification? sources: http://www.spacex.com/news/2013/04/04/draco-thrusters http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonRider

It does, in that if you're willing to wait a long time, the ION engine will get you there more efficiently than the LV-N, presumably?

Yeah, you need to post something! You've got me intrigued!

I remember a long time ago that either C7 or Nova when he was a dev mentioned that they wanted to do it at some point, but it wasn't their highest priority