Decent Weasel

Thank you, IgorZ!

I haven't graduated to 1.3 quite yet, so if the feature I'm asking about has been implemented since then, sorry- Is there a way I can tweak the coding so that I can 'equip' an 0.625m heat shield the way you'd equip a chute, and have the ablator absorb heat instead of the Kerbal while it lasts? (I've always, always wanted a MOOSE pack and nobody seems to have even tried making one, so I figured I'd roll my own.) Thanks!

As far as resource use, I'd be interested in seeing a variation that expended electrical charge to change buoyancy (e.g., running a pump to recompress lifting gas, or running a resistive element to heat air).

I just wanted to give an update supplementing Torham234's discovery about radiator fins - I took an LV-N powered craft from Kerbin directly to Laythe. Similar to Torham's, it had one motor and twenty-four fins, but mine were mini-deltas. It also had a couple outrigger tanks with airbrakes on them just in case. I messed up my insertion so I wound up landing, but even on a Kerbin-to-Jool direct aerocapture profile, the engine didn't even generate an overheat bar, and the fins stayed green. The brakes did, even in stowed position, but the engine was fine. Lesson learned: At least for default-difficulty reentry heating, Torham234's trick also lets you make reusable non-ablating heat shields.

It almost sounds like the benefit of mining asteroids is not to refuel your tanks, but to throw away mass so the asteroids aren't as difficult to push. I always had a hard time docking, so rather than building orbital refueling stations, I'd just take the whole ship down and land on the flats. A lot of worlds, landing is an impractical dV load, but it wasn't too bad for Minmus / Gilly / Bop / Pol. I like the idea of a reusable ship, but the problem I keep running into is aerodynamic heating - I'm not sure a trip to e.g. Jool would survive aerocapture without ablative shielding, and braking via retrograde burns seems ludicrously inefficient. Maybe capture an asteroid and hold it in front as a shield?

Force pushing outward? Wouldn't that just be the ship's tangential velocity?

I'd click on the 'brakes' symbol next to the altimeter, next to the 'lights' and 'gear' indicators. That tends to keep 'em stopped. Be sure to click the symbol, rather than just pressing 'b,' as the latter only works as long as you hold the key down.

Okay, the controls are still wrong even with elevons, I think it's #3 and #4- the non-square ones. shrugs

Labhouse, I gave that a shot, and it didn't work. Good thinking though. Kujuman, yes, they were indeed the elevon 5s! Maybe I'll try some deltas with straight elevons instead, as a stopgap measure.

I made a plane last night, little tiny thing that looked a bit like the Komet (I can post the craft file if you like), but when I flew it I found that while the roll and yaw controls were fine, pitch was slaved backwards, so when I tried to pitch up, my SAS tried to lift my nose up and my elevons tried to push it back down. I tried everything - rebuilding the wings, turning the elevons into slats, everything. The game was steadfastly committed to wiring my elevons backwards. So the plane didn't fly because the game misinterpreted how it was built. Suggestion for a tweakable: the ability to selectively invert a control surface's axes. In this case, I'd go into the SPH, invert the pitch axis only for the selected surfaces, and go. I mean, I get that the game will occasionally get mixed up, but it'd be great if I could manually correct it, instead of simply junking the plane in question.

Drunken Hobo's right on the money. Me? I like grasshopper mice. They're just nuts.

Try color-matching white and black in the lunar images with white and black in the KSP screenshots? I know the moon's surface is crazy dark. (edit: I tried this and the results are middling.) Either way, yes, it should be brighter due to the omnidirectional reflective qualities. I'm from New Mexico too, btw! What was that saying? "You might be from New Mexico if you regard half a ton of crushed rock as the ingredients for a nice yard." (Hey, I do.)

Good point about the landers. However, by that same token, darkening of the ground shouldn't be unexpected in general. If our surface is 60' off the normal, the illumination area (in keeping with cos(60) = 1/2) will be doubled. However, the radiant energy from the source will remain the same, so each unit area will receive half the light that it would at noon.

Isn't the relative lack of intensity of light during twilight due to the surface being at an angle to the normal of the sun's rays, so 1m^2 worth of energy falls across a larger actual surface of the body? I mean, I know lunar dust reflects light in all directions, and so tends to appear the same intensity regardless of time of day, but the darkening of a surface at an angle is just radiant intensity. The moon wouldn't look like this, but it would be a question of modeling the soil correctly, not correcting for atmospheric effects. Twilight was, in my understanding, the period of time AFTER sunset when the light emitted by the sky continued to illuminate the surface. On the Moon, radiant energy intensity per surface area of the moon would decrease as the sun moved lower into the sky, just like Earth. The difference, at least due to atmosphere, would be that once the sun was down, it would become absolutely dead midnight black immediately.

My kerbal always seems to lose his grip due to drifting up or down the ladder, so my workaround was to bolt a few ladder rungs to the decoupler underneath (and, if possible, above) the capsule. That way he can drift further up or down before losing his grip. Stupid workaround, but it works relatively well.

I tested a drive on a tinier ship and was able to get it into solar orbit reliably. However, my tiny K-drive didn't work, so I put a big K-drive on a small ship. I found the thing liked to fly backwards. Given the payload was lighter than the drive assembly, is the CoM important in directing K-drive impulse, I wonder?

In fact, I've always crossed the SOI border without the drive active. Despite the fact that it theoretically enables brachistochrone travel, I've mostly been flying Hohmanns with it. Could it be the result of a high lunar orbit dropping relative velocity below 750m/s? Would that cause me to freeze in place, in which case I've got to ask, why don't I hover as I do when I activate my drive on the pad? Or does that cause spontaneous unplanned disassembly instead? You guys are awesome, by the way.

Okay guys, if this is addressed earlier and I missed it I apologize, but: I've managed to build several working K-drives. They necessitate a number of non-krakened reaction wheels to keep them pointed straight, plus Jr ports to damp transverse impulse and standard ports to pump axial motion. But they work. However, when I manage to enter the SOI of Mun or Minmus and attempt to thrust retrograde, the craft instantly sheds all of its orbital velocity relative to the moon, begins tumbling madly, and when I right it again I can't push myself back into orbit. The drive seems to 'turn off' all velocity relative to an object in a new SOI. I haven't tried it with the Sun yet - heck, that could be a great probe idea! - but I'm wondering if the rest of you guys have run into this issue and if so how I can treat it. Thanks!

Fascinating... thanks guys!

Correction, the number pad plus and minus keys DO work for zooming.

Um, I'm again using 0.25 on Windows 8 Pro, and I'm using the 32-bit version if that helps any. When I try to scroll on the menus using my touchpad, it works fine. When I try to zoom in or out, or scroll up or down, in the VAB or SPH using the trackpad, nothing happens. When I try to zoom in or out in flight or at the space center using the trackpad, nothing happens. In both cases, I'm using two-finger scrolling. Right-click-scroll to pan around the space center works great. I would figure the game had trouble detecting two-finger scrolling, but it works fine on my Mac, and it works fine in menus. I think I also tried using the zoom in/out keys on the number pad, but that was also to no effect. I'd post screenshots, but given the nature of the case, they wouldn't show the problem, and the problem is just illustrated by what doesn't happen, rather than what does. Sorry, I'm not sure how to get more descriptive.

Hey, I've been running 0.25 on my MacBook Pro with osx 10.8.3 without major issues, but since installing 0.25.0 on a ThinkPad running Windows 8 Pro, I'm unable to use escape in the VAB or SPh, or scrolling in the VAB, space center or SPH even though they work fine in the menus and in regular windows. Any ideas?

Okay, two questions- 1) how does a simple slingshot around the back of a body compare to using aerocapture to add velocity? 2) how would TWR factor into maneuvers made in freefall? Isn't efficiency due to Oberth related to the gravity gradient, which would favor higher gravities?

I keep wondering what'll happen if I blow up a building, stand in the debris, then go back to space center view and repair it. Will my dude be teleported onto the roof? Will he glitch inside the building? Will he die? ...It'll probably be an anticlimax to find out, but it's driving me nuts wondering.

I know this is a weird request but I'd love bigger, military-style tents I could store ships under, with selective alpha mapping so they look like artillery netting...