Kerba Fett

I've played a lot of KSP on the PC, but not much on the PS4 which I generally prefer for gaming. I downloaded the new version for my PS4 and have been having fun with it except that I can't seem to find any way to activate precision controls for flying. This would be the caplock on a PC, but I don't see any mention of it on the console version. Is that feature missing, undocumented, or am I just too blind to see it? I'm really enjoying flying with the controller compared to KB, but find it a little twitchy for some stuff.

I found that line in the latest Dev Blog to be pretty interesting. Last april when they made a big fuss out of leaving early access I assumed there wasn't a lot of work to do. Now it's 8 months later, they're still adding features and they've gone back to admitting that the game is nowhere near finished. So when will it be finished? Later this year? 2017? Is there even an estimate? I for one would be happy enough with a nice stable 64 bit version so I could choose my own mods without running out of memory rather than waiting for Squad to build all their favorite mods into the stock game. They've already spent plenty of time to make stock versions of Kethane, FAR, and Deadly Reentry. Version 1.1 is supposed to have the stock version of Remote Tech. Instead of spending time to duplicate what someone else has already done, why not work on stuff that modders can't do? More interactive IVA's that we can move around in would be a great start. Perhaps working on the performance of ships ships with high part counts would be possible. Maybe they could do some official modding tutorials rather than the random patchwork of info that's out there now. I'm sure there's a huge list of things that only squad can do if they weren't distracted by trying to add new content that modders have already done.

Apparently too many new players were surviving suborbital flights in previous versions of the game. The 1.05 version of the game increased the heating and thinned out the lower atmosphere to address that. Later in the tech tree you'll get drogue parachutes and seperatrons that you can use to slow your craft. While you're waiting for those, it's easier to just stick with orbital flights with a shallow reentry.

[quote name='KerBlammo']I put off learning docking too. It's intimidating for good reason, its one of the hardest things to do in the game IMO, but of course that makes it all the more satisfying when you do learn how to do it. For me its still more a feeling of relief when its over than one of enjoyment! My favorite thing to is still landing on the Mun, even though its become almost routine to do now. I play sandbox, and must have orbited the Mun 10 different times before finally screwing up the courage to try and actually land.[/QUOTE] Docking isn't one of the most difficult things to do in KSP, it's just difficult for most people to figure out for themselves. Orbital rendezvous has a couple of things that are somewhat counter intuitive and most people have trouble with the actual docking process the first time because they don't really understand what the navball is telling them. With a good tutorial that explains the principles as well as how to execute them even a noob can dock with 1 try. I've talked a few people through it using the broadcast feature on steam and they're always surprised how easy it is. The problem is that most people don't have it explained to them very well before they try.

Still don't see how that cost you a kerbal. Even if you were in a full stall when you tried your abort button, your parachutes were still in your staging menu. Why didn't you just tap space till they deployed? Or, you could have just reverted to launch unless you wanted the challenge of playing with reverts turned off. If you selected that option when you started, then it sounds like you're to blame for the death of your kerbal, not Microsoft.

Don't know if it works in EVA mode, but your middle mouse button will allow you to rotate the camera for framing screenshots. Perhaps you've just done that accidently at some point and it's remembering the rotation when you switch views like it does on the external view for ships.

Was this the mod you were thinking of? http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/129771-1-0-4-Talisar-Parts-v1-0-0?highlight=talisar

One other thing you can do with small rovers to give them stability is to mount an RCS quad thruster on top. When the system is on the jets will fire automaticly to prevent wheelies when accelerating and the one on the outside of the corner will fire to prevent it from rolling. When braking use reverse as well as the brakes to make the front facing jet fire and prevent the nose from diving. Of course you'll also need a monopropellant tank.

Why would you ever want to bring it home? Keep it in orbit of Minmus and send a lander to work with it. the lander refuels at the station tanks then goes to the surface, does EVA reports, takes surface samples, runs goo and science jr experiments then heads back to the station. You then transfer all data to the station, refuel the lander, clean the experiment bays, and do another landing in a different biome and repeat the entire process. You transmit any data that's worth100% and keep the rest on the station. When there's enough to make it worthwhile, you send a small courier ship to the station and collect the data for return to Kerbin. The station never leaves orbit till all the science is collected and the lander can be small since it only has to travel between the station and the surface. Once all science is harvested, you move the entire operation to the Mun and repeat there. You should rotate your crew back to Kerbin after they each plant a flag on the surface so they can level up, but you can do that one at a time on your data courier.

It's not actually limited to having just 2 tanks selected. I do multi-tank transfers all the time. Select a bunch of tanks then press the in or out button on one of them. If you're transferring into that tank it will draw from all the other ones selected. If you're transferring from that tank it will split it among the other selected tanks.

I was recently reminded of the importance of frequent quicksaves when my cat was feeling ignored and walked across they keyboard during the munar insertion burn on my first trip there of this campaign. Of course she managed to step on the spacebar and seperate the capsule from the rest of the rocket. Reverted to launch and screwed up the next 2 tries myself, but at least I was remembering to quicksave as I went.

I've noticed that my ship often tumbles when I EVA, but just assumed it was because the SAS shuts off when the pilot leaves the ship and figured it was the blast from the EVA pack causing the ship to rotate. I've never seen the ship actually move under it's own power once I was out of it. To confirm that there's actual control inputs in the ship while you're outside of it, try adding RCS jets to the ship and leave them active when you EVA. Since the jets are easily visible it should be easy to tell if the ship is receiving control inputs. If it's a bug, it's one I haven't encountered yet. Have you tried going back to the space center then back to the ship through the tracking center? I'm wondering if the bug is persistant through a reload of the ship.

I'm pretty new to windows 8.1, but I'm able to ALT TAb back to the desktop and still see the icon on the taskbar. I run all games in full screen mode and haven't found any that I can't ALT-TAB out of then return to. I don't normally use the tiled view for anything except shutting the machine off. If the icon vanishes for some reason, can you use the task manager (CTRL-ALT-Delete) to switch back to it?

I wouldn't use a probe for collecting science on Minmus. By not doing EVA reports or surface samples you lose out on a lot of science points. Much more than you get from experiment bays. One thing that does work well on Minmus is ion powered ships. The low gravity really helps and you can run 4 ions off a pair of the large solar panels or, if you use Universal Storage, a single fuel cell. Ion ships will sort of work on the Mun, but your TWR makes them better suited to short range hovercraft rather than orbital shuttles. Getting to or from orbit in an ion ship takes thousands of ms dV since you need to run at full throttle for most of the trip.

I played with a variation of Steve's craft. I used Kerbal Engineer to tweak the TWR to 2.0. For this particular craft that's 79% on the engine thrust limiter for those of you not running mods. I removed the oxidizer from the fuel tank but all the other tanks are full. With a 2.0 TWR you get hover thrust with 50% throttle. To take off you can use 50% throttle and just use the H key to fire the downward facing RCS jets or just throttle up to 55 to 60% then throttle back to 50 once you're in the air. To land start with 40 to 45% throttle then go back to 50% once you start to descend to maintain your descent rate. To slow your descent use short bursts of RCS and use X to cut your throttle when you touch down to keep from bouncing back up in the air. You could also use upward facing RCS to help manage your vertical speed but you'll use your monoprop quicker. Also keep in mind that using precision mode reduces the thrust of the RCS jets. I used that landing gear since it's what I had unlocked in career, but it also has the advantage that you can spin on your axis while landed. By mounting a ladder right under the hatch, it defaults to an angle that gets over the RCS thruster and lets the pilot get in and out for surface samples. It's a good short range craft that's fun to fly.

Steve's craft is a great design. I used to use those all the time. The easy way to land used to be to just pop the chute then repack it while you're on the ground, but now you need to use an engineer to repack chutes, so the flying is more difficult. Mods also help. Dazio's vertical velocity controller has some trouble with the spool up lag, but I was using it to tail land a full size jet, so maybe with the thrust limiter on the engine turned down it would manage better. Another option would be to find the throttle setting needed to hover and use RCS for rapid thrust changes since that's independant of throttle setting. Using jets as a booster to get rockets up is also a great use for them. They don't go as high any more, but they still get a lot higher than an SRB will last you. When using them as a booster it's important to let them get to full power before releasing the launch clamps. Right click on an engine and wait till it gets to at least 90 to 95% of max thrust. You've got a limited amount of altitude for them to work so you might as well get all the push you can from the ground.

Thanks for the advice sal, but I don't see how it could be the registry when replacing the directory seemed to fix the problem. Renaming the directory that I brought over from my old machine so that that's where steam looks for KSP seemed to solve the issue. That tends to indicate that the problem is inside the KSP directory. I suspect that something critical in the fresh install is set to read only and that it's supposed to be either changed or deleted once you run the game the first time and it's not happening. I tried making settings.cfg read only but KSP doesn't like that so that's not the issue. And KSP does modify the files so it's not windows access permissions. The save files work just fine and if you open settings.cfg with notepad after you run KSP and change the graphic settings, the new settings are there. I think I even verified that the new settings are there after KSP closes, but I was trying a lot of stuff and I'm not sure. (maybe someone still having the problem can confirm that) There seems to be something that KSP looks for when it runs to determine if it's the first time it's run. When it doesn't find it the game reverts to default settings and brings up the data tracking window. That something is located inside the KSP directory since I was able to fix the problem by replacing the entire directory. Whatever it is, 1.02 doesn't seem to set it to the correct state, but if an older version of KSP set it to the correct state then 1.02 is willing to accept that. Since I've fixed the problem someone else will have to continue investigating. I was looking at these lines of the settings.cfg wondering if they're what the game looks at. These are from my installation that works but I didn't think to compare them to what's in the config file when I'd run the game, fix the graphics, ALT TAB to the desktop, then open the config file while KSP is still running. CALL_HOME = False DONT_SEND_IP = False SEND_PROGRESS_DATA = True CHECK_FOR_UPDATES = True I didn't see anything else in the .cfg that looked likely so if it's not those then perhaps there's another file that KSP is looking at. I hope somebody figures this out since it's a really annoying problem and not everyone has other installations they can try and fix it with.

All right, thanks for the info. I'll just keep watching for those missions to come up again.. By the way, I've also got Universal Storage and I notice that some of the US versions of your experiments are in different nodes than the standard versions. Was that intended, or just a glitch that slipped through? For instance I notice that the standard Magnometer boom is in Engineering 101 while the US version of it is 4 tiers up in Miniaturization.

I had a few missions active that use this mod. A series of scans of Minmus and the Mun. Due to a glitch with my settings going back to default every time I start KSP, I removed all mods and also tried a fresh install if KSP after backing up my saves. Now I see that these missions are gone. They're not active, canceled, failed or available. Will I be offered these missions again at some point, or does the mod think I've already done them?

I've got the same issue. Every single time I run the game it shows me the tracking window and resets most of my settings to default. The only thing it leaves alone are the keybinds, but the graphics settings are all reset to default. If I verify the local files, it always reports that 2 files need to be downloaded. If I tell it to verify a second time it says all files are up to date, but when I run the game it's back at defaults and when I quit and re-verify it says 2 files need to be downloaded. The annoying thing is that this is a new machine that had no trace of KSP and I let it do the full download through steam. The more annoying thing is that when I copied the KSP directory from my old machine through the network and set steam to run it as a non-steam game, I don't have this problem. It's only the version that supposedly installed itself properly through steam that has this issue. It's also a completly stock unmodded copy of the game. Update: I deleted the local content, got rid of the directory and let steam redownload the game. Same issue. Then I tried putting the settings how I want them, tabbed back to the desktop and used notepad to open the settings.cfg file in the KSP directory. The new graphics options seemed to take so I made the .cfg read only in it's properties. It still opens the stat tracker window, but once you close that all menu options are ghosted and you can do anything except kill the program from the desktop. It doesn't like the config file to be read only. Next I deleted the directory through windows explorer. Then I copied my directory that came from my old machine, changed the name so it would match what steam was looking for and tried running it. This seemed to fix the problem since it keeps the resolution and UI size through multiple restarts. It seems like the issue isn't that it needs a fresh install of the game. That seems to cause the problem not fix it. I did try using a joystick on it, but the calibration was WAY off and I couldn't figure out how to calibrate it in Win 8.1 so I finally gave up on it and unplugged it. I can't find any traces of it in the windows control panel and I tried the reinstall after I'd gotten rid of it. In the input settings there's no axis listed for any of the controls. My only non-default control is that I changed precision mode from caplock to P. I don't understand why it resets the resolution and UI size and leaves my keybinding the same when both settings are in the same config file.

Minmus is way easier, but if you really want to go to the Mun and are playing without mods, try to land in the center of a crater. You won't have to hover as long to find a flat spot. If you're OK with mods, I'm pretty sure Kerbal Engineer shows the slope at your landing spot. (not sure if it's updated for 1.02 since I haven't bothered to look for it yet.) Daizo's vertical speed controller is also a big help in holding a hover while you're looking for a flat spot. As mentioned, short and fat helps. I use the smallest 2.5m fuel tank for my Mun landers.

Is the feature still there in sandbox where there is no techtree to deal with?

I've noticed an odd issue with your mod. I just bought a new machine and am trying to get back into KSP. When I try to download your mod with Internet explorer I get an error message that it can't connect to the page. Kerbalstuff downloads work fine. I can do a search and go to the Curseforge page, but once I'm there doing a search for "Kerbal" gets 0 results. I installed the Chrome browser and that takes me to the DL page with no errors and I was able to DL the mod, but a lot of new users probably wouldn't know to try a different browser. Is this a known problem with IE?

That would be me. I've been having a lot of fun with Elite Dangerous and Subnautica lately and just can't seem to get much interest in KSP any more. Steam says I've gotten over 2000 hours into it so I've gotten my moneys worth, but I'm not really that curious about how the final version turned out. Maybe in a couple of months once all my favourite mods are updated I'll have a look. (if 1.0 even has enough memory left for mods once it's running)

You shouldn't really need it. When the lines in the center of each marker line up you're at your closest approach. If that doesn't get you close enough, install MechJeb and make a custom window that shows closest approach distance and tweak it with RCS.