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Anton P. Nym

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Everything posted by Anton P. Nym

  1. Yup. I usually mount a pair of Mk 1s; when I see them light up the terrain I know it's within 500m, when the spots separate I know that contact is imminent. (Stole the idea from The Dambusters, to give credit where it's due.) -- Steve
  2. Space may not conduct sound, but the structure of your spacecraft does. I'm okay with the audio effects as-is; doing without would (in my opinion) be boring. -- Steve
  3. A while ago I saw a map (fan generated?) for the solar system in the Firefly TV show... the writers there insisted they didn't have FTL but travel between several habitable worlds was a matter of days or weeks, which gave a lot of the more science-literate folks pause. The map postulated a quaternary star system with a large-ish (A-class?) primary and two smaller (K-class?) secondary stars nearby, each with worlds in their own habitable zones, plus a distant minor star (M-class?) with couple of large gas giants whose radiated heat created their own small habitable zones. It'd be esoteric but not completely ridiculous... and if you want travel between stars in KSP that doesn't need "magic" drives, it's as good a model as any. -- Steve
  4. Don't worry, Kerbin; this Atlas ain't gonna shrug. (The KSS Piazza Kerman, about to redirect an E-class asteroid that became an impactor when the KSS Argo suffered a malfunction in its mission; the Argo depleted its RCS monopropellant in recovering from the accident and so was unable to reattach to the rock so Big Pete had to intercept.) -- Steve
  5. Memo to self; more reaction wheels on the next model, and maybe convert the LV-Ns into twinned LV-909s in a fore-and-aft "pushmepullyu" arrangement. -- Steve
  6. We're here to cancel the apocalypse! (Oops, wrong movie.) That's the KSS Carl Kerman maneuvering into position to grapple an E-class impactor and brake it into orbit around Kerbin. In the background is Raywig's Rock, so named by Raywig when he scooped up a sample and climbed back up the ladder of his Prospector "lander". (It's casting that wee dot of light on the rock.) -- Steve
  7. I have mixed mission profiles. Small rocks get probes. Big rocks (with their huge masses that make the mass of crew quarters trivial) get crewed flights. I'm also sending a crewed nuclear-pulse mission to an E-class impactor, because it's an excuse to light off 60 15kt bombs. -- Steve
  8. I made an 8-probe array myself and found just right-clicking on the separator for the probe I want to launch was the simplest solution that didn't lead to disaster. Staging each one got weird if I docked a pair of arrays to a craft, as did action groups, even if I didn't use symmetry in the VAB. Too much of a pain. -- Steve
  9. Actually the whole Citadel rotates for spin gravity. The outer Wards get slightly more than 1G and the Presidium ring gets about 3/4G if I remember the in-game journal entries correctly. The Council Chamber at the top would be in microgravity, but it gets a mass effect field for comfort. Of course the game itself only modeled 1G, except for the scripted zero-G bits. I gather that was a limitation of the game engine. -- Steve
  10. Curious to see in a gaming community that no one's brought up the Citadel from Mass Effect. (link to picture on wikia) It had a water body that ran along the middle of the ring section basically dividing the whole interior into two sets of river bank property, with fountains for decoration and humidity control. The lake acted as one of a set of potable water reserves; no mention of using it to help with mass balance, but I could see it working that way too. -- Steve
  11. The maneuver node system changed with the ARM; I can see "closest"-approaches out to hundreds of thousands of kilometers not just for planets but also targets like asteroids. Much, much easier to make solar-orbit rendezvous now. (Note that "easier" does not mean "easy".) -- Steve
  12. I use 3 refueling stations so far (150km above Kerbin to service LKOs & SSTOs, 300km above Kerbin to service cis-Munar missions and reusable interplanetary transfer stages, and 100km above the Mun for Search & Rescue) mainly because they are easily locatable and serve as good repositories for "left over" fuel from other missions. These days I need few dedicated supply missions to them, mostly to replenish jet fuel in my LKO station but even that's getting rarer. (Also, they provide a place for me to park the Big 3 Kerbonauts so they stop hogging all the missions.) It's not "the" answer for every program, but it works for me. -- Steve
  13. I pushed with this vehicle for about 160m/s to make a plane change and had no trouble. The trick (for me, anyway) was to align the craft with the maneuver node, use RCS to translate until that maneuver node aligned with the rock's marked Centre of Mass, and then moved in to "Claw" the rock. My craft had plenty of torque and RCS to compensate for any slight misalignment... but I must admit it took a while to execute the maneuver properly, and I have another and longer burn coming up to get it captured by Kerbin. -- Steve
  14. The "Trilander" Duna mission finally touches down. Weird; the aerobraking was so successful that it only had to fire its landing rocket for 1s before touchdown. Such a waste of fuel... Rockdiver 2 swoops down, "Claw" bared, upon its chosen prey. Gonna feed a few hatchlings with this kill. You, uh, know that we can see daylight through your rocket, right? -- Steve
  15. Only named one so far, after the Kerbonaut who grabbed the surface sample. I think it's now called "Kemrie's Rock", but I don't recall for certain. Pity we can't stake flags in 'em... -- Steve
  16. For electric-driven ducted fans, though, it'd be simple to keep the thrust fairly low and have a steep fall-off of I(sp) with air pressure to prevent it from becoming a default Eve-killer. -- Steve
  17. Yep, or even just making selections of what's being displayed in the map view persistent would serve. -- Steve
  18. If I'm not lifting much more than a single Jumbo orange tank, then going to the LFBs is overkill with its added fuel. I have some light crew exchange vehicles that don't need anything more... so in those cases Mainsails (for which they were designed) make sense. (I suppose I could switch to LFBs for my refuelling missions, but the current arrangement works fine and I don't see the need to change them up.) -- Steve
  19. But they haven't. SLS is nowhere near this strawman-level of overpoweredness... indeed they're not the game breakers the sackcloth & ashes brigade is making them out to be. They're useful for heavy lift, which is what you want for an asteroid redirection mission, but I haven't suddenly found the rest of my fleet obsolete. I'm still using Mainsails and LV-T45s and aerospikes, a lot actually. (If anything, it's the stronger joints that make things so much easier for me with so many fewer struts... but I'm not complaining about that, nosiree...) -- Steve
  20. Testing out the Arro "Prospector"; an RCS-only craft for exploring asteroids with a "claw" anchor system to keep it on the rock. Currently the launch system barely gets it out of the atmosphere, but it did get into a 150km circular orbit from there on its own jets. Nimble little sucker. -- Steve
  21. You have to remember when grabbing an asteroid to "arm" the Claw before touching the asteroid; when it's armed you can see hooks coming out of it, when it's disarmed the hooks are shrouded like they are in the VAB. In order to let go of an asteroid you've grabbed onto, you have to disarm the Claw. You can arm and disarm the Claw by right-clicking on it and selecting the option in the pop up menu, or you can set an action group key to toggle between armed and disarmed. -- Steve
  22. There used to be a difference; the Advanced Stabilizer used to be called "ASAS module" (if I recall correctly) and you used to have to add it to a craft in order to use the SAS function (the "t" key in standard bindings) in flight. Since about version .21 SAS is included in all control pods, so the old module became obsolete. I think it's included mainly so that older designs aren't made unusable. Now there isn't much reason to use it aside from looks, or if you're looking for some extra weight to balance a design or something. Personally I think it should give some extra torque for the extra mass to rebalance it... but it's not a big issue, really. -- Steve
  23. Dusted off Nyrath's mod to create a Kerbal version of a real proposal; in case of an oncoming major impactor, send out a nuclear-pulse rocket to redirect it.* I introduce the KSS Carl Kerman, also known as "Big Carl". Haven't actually tried an intercept with it yet, but I think I will with the next E-class rock I spot. I'm not quite sure that "the Claw" can take those g-loads... -- Steve * Though the real proposal would have put it atop a Saturn V, instead of using radial boosters, and I added the LV-Ns as station-keeping engines because RCS alone is agonizingly slow in a game.
  24. With the advent of the ARM pack, thought I'd dust off ol' Boom-Boom and build an ELE defense craft. I've learned a bit since last summer... I give you the KSS Carl Kerman (aka "Big Carl"). The SLS boosters get her up to 35km and 1km/s before I have to light the big candle, so no embarrassing craters/fallout at KSC. She's in a 380x350km equatorial parking orbit for now, with 499 charges remaining in the main stack and 60 each of the 400MN and 0.88MN charges. When I spot a class E impactor, we'll see if she can save Kerbin. -- Steve edited to add: This is still active on my copy (d/led last October), but bomb selection is manageable by action group if folks are looking for a work-around.
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