annallia

I haven't run into this problem with any of my vessels yet... I have however run into it with kerbals. I have EVA parachutes (VNG mod) so when I lose control of a plane I bail. Problem is even at the same speeds at the same altitude every once in a while a kerbal will poof and it will say they overheated. I've done this several times to test it out, seems at 200 m/s at 5,000m every third kerbal turns into popcorn.

I did the same thing in a mono lander on Minmus, didn't work quite as well though the thing keeps swaying around and I am afraid that it is going to pop out and fall over.

Valentina: "KSC tower I am coming in for a landing, I lost my approach vector and low on fuel, will have to land off the runway" Tower: "Roger that, damage control teams dispatched" Valentina: "Negative tower, I am in VTOL mode" Tower: "We are unaware of any aircraft with VTOL capabilites, please state your vessel class" Valentina: "Rover" Tower: "Uhhh you broke up there Val, repeat again it sounded like you said rover..." In other news, Valentina has returned from her visit to Minmus. Edit- Vessel has a 1.3 TWR on Kerbin, was way overpowered for Minmus

Even without those kerbals are surprisingly hard to kill... You know unless you drop a 30 ton crane on top of them from the VAB like I did last night...

I actually had a counter weight on the other end, it snapped off when things started to go horribly wrong

I continued work on my elevator... The superstructure proved most difficult to maneuver into place... The entire time I was driving it was fishtailing (perhaps using anti-grav devices on it wasn't the best idea...) and eventually I would hit a bump and that would happen. Then I thought, hey, I have a crane! Lets go with plan B! Everything seemed just fine... Then it wasn't... At some point while trying to turn the boom to drop them on the roof the whole thing tipped over, eventually even the grapple being used to keep it in place gave way and the entire thing went spilling off the roof of the VAB. The three inside the basket all survived the fall, until the crane itself fell on top of them claiming two lives. Bill was consulted on the accident review and stated: "I don't know why it failed, yes the crane could have been anchored better with a wider base but the crane itself weighed nearly 30 tons, a 2 ton (give or take) basket shouldn't have caused it to tip." Memorial services will be held as soon as it is confirmed that the two missing are dead and not somehow pushed under the walkway.

I just recently started forbidding myself to time warp. I have 17 days yet till the next Duna window, in 12 days I will start crewing my ship (ship is ready just needs crew and fuel) but until then I work on other projects, once it begins its journey to Duna I will also be working on other projects instead of time warping my way through. I used to just be like "Oh hey 32 days till Duna no problem change orbit and timewarp, change back to a lower orbit and go" then I would time warp my entire trip there (dropping out only if course correction needed) until it was time to start my breaking burn. Months would go by at the KSC without anything going on. I decided I don't like that. **I do still timewarp for missions within Kerbin SOI**

I continued tinkering about on the VAB roof working out my crane system. That is when things got a little weird... To quote Scott Manley "Your physics have no power over me" Alternate explanation... The kerbal telekenesis experiments are showing excellent results...

Every so often on this forum I see people who do things that are completely unnecessary and maybe even a little odd. By an example something I do in sandbox games (or careers once I reached a certain point). I launch all of my rockets dry (obviously SRB's start out full). I then drive a fuel truck out to the launch pad and fuel the rocket, or several trucks really. I also leave a small structure near where I park my trucks that is really just a probe core with an upturned rocket engine on it (this thing is firmly attached to the ground) that my fuel trucks dock with to burn off excess fuel before they get parked again... you know, for safety. Where do the fuel trucks get their fuel? From my fuel depot of course, a row of large tanks, but what about them? Well they get it from my refineries... on Kerbin. Yes, I do on occasion when those tanks run dry actually drive tankers several hours to my KSC for the sole purpose of refilling those tanks.(I do admit to sometimes using hyper edit to make the tanker suddenly appear at the KSC or just fill the tanks, can't be micromaning everything all the time after all). So I am wondering, what other sort of odd things do you people do that really serve no purpose other than for some strange reason you like it?

My gamedata folder is fat enough already... Stop giving it a bigger spoon!

I find them ridiculously expensive for two reasons. #1 The price goes up with every kerbal, even the ones you rescue instead of hiring. You quickly end up spending hundreds of thousands to hire the kerbal(s) to man the station that you are only being paid (after expenses) a few thousand for.. Essentially it eventually becomes pointless to directly hire them resulting in you relying entirely on rescues which just takes a ton of time running boring missions or timewarping to get different contracts. #2 No class selection. I would love for there to be say 12 kerbals in the complex waiting to be hired, 4 pilots, 4 engineers, 4 scientist, when you hire all your scientist it recruits more. Barring that mechanic how about a function to tell them to recruit a specific class? Because I play my own version of career scientist and pilots are not exactly needed as much as engineers are. I would love for the ability to tell my recruiters to recruit more engineers making it stack the complex with more engineers than other classes. Also need a way to dismiss unwanted kerbals from the complex without hiring them (essentially refreshing the list) so that way I am not sitting there with 34 kerbals off planet in a dozen vessels each with 2 pilots in them and still have 15 pilots sitting at home.

My only real uses for them are mono landers and escape pods on my stations (which are really just command pods with puff engines and a parachute)

I am preparing to build an elevator to the roof of the VAB using KAS/KIS... Does that count? Still a little stuck on the cranes though... Anything big enough to use to lift my frame to where it needs be seems to be too big for the open area on the VAB. Thinking of doing away with the crane entirely and just going pylon/probe core/battery/winch but that just feels a little cheap to me.

Launching crafts, specially the large ones who take forever and a half to get into orbit and require minimal output from me is boring (to me). As such. mechjeb and I can go make a fresh pot of coffee and come back to send the craft wherever it needs to go. Edit- Like Hazelnut I wasn't always able to do all the things Mech-Jeb can do when I started using it, but now I can (for the most part anyway...) I used it primarily as a learning tool, I watched how mechjeb did it, then I did it for myself, then I did it again cause I crashed, and eventually I got it down.

I built a crane for a rather large building project I have only to realize when I started to think of how to get it where I needed that I had built it way, way, way too big (the base not the crane). So I turned the speed way up the the rotating bit attached a kerbal and sent him for a ride... until it destroyed itself from spinning too much... At least he appeared to have fun. Then I disposed of some excess pilots (please squad, allow us a way to stack the astronaut complex with whatever class we actually need so I don't have to hire 5 pilots just to clear it and get a afew more engineers).

Space race! Ok, actually I realized I forgot the probe cores on the sky crane for my Duna rovers (ok I didn't forget it, I just put them on the wrong end of the mini tug attached to the sky crane )so I practiced my firing them up and releasing it.

I just want a clarification on the rules... Specifically the no eva jet pack and no using a separate vehicle to launch from. If I were to put a seat on top of my rocket would I be within the rules to get it to orbit (or at least space) then eva out to the seat and stage to get to that final bit? Or would that be bending/breaking the rules?

I didn't do much today. Partially due to limited time, partially due to how ridiculously long it took me to test land, or rather crash a spaceplane into Duna. That being said... Did get an awesome view! Other than that I finally got around to launching my crew landers and assembling their ship, since the rover, life support, and utility ships are already enroute just need to wait for another Duna window to get this thing underway. P.S. I hate docking in the dark... yet I always foget to add lights! Edit- Forgot to mention, one thing that I think anyway is cool about the design of the ship. Once it reaches Duna and drops the crew pods it will separate the command module (right where the 1.25-2.5 adapter is not the one at the base of the command module but the one slightly obscured by the crew landers)and the engine module (just above the fuel tank) and redock, essentially dropping all of the mid section. The rover, habitat, and utility freighters will all dock together after dropping their payload, this ship will then dock with them and take all the remaining fuel for its return trip to Kerbin.

While my armada may have missed the Duna window my probe ship finally arrived (it got a little lost on the way...) Ok so the pictures don't tell the full story. The "orbital probe" wasn't really orbital, I was just unable to retract the solar panels, it touched down later. The second probe core I dropped came in too steep and suffered a rapid unplanned disassembly event. The third core (touchdown) was the first one to behave the way it was supposed to, 4th core did the same. All in all their only true purpose was to essentially be survey markers, I dropped them in high concentrated ore areas and the one that looks like the best place to be a colony will be it... Next Duna window.

Depends on the mission. Short hop up to the space station or Mun/Minmus? Jeb all the way. Long term voyage to Duna or anywhere out of Kerbin SOI really? Valentina I do this not on a whim, but because of a test NASA did simulating life on mars and found that women were generally better suited in some regards than men. Also I like Valentina more and my interplanetary missions generally have a lower rate of catastrophic failures than my more local ones for some reason...

It has been one disaster after another for my space agency today. First due to an error in the construction of the mother ship to set up a Duna colony it was decided that the ship would be de-orbited and rebuilt (faster to launch the new design than futz around fixing what was wrong with the old one). Lennex Kerbin however died as a result. Originally it was thought that a deployed solar array had survived re entry and killed him as he bailed out of the ship. Upon further review he simply overheated (despite the ship only going 250m/s) and exploded into popcorn. After that, the first launch for the new mothership also met with disaster. Due to a staging accident the launch clamps released and instead of the first stage engines firing it was the tug being launched with it that fired up. The following is the end of what was really a quite spectacular light show: Fortunately no Kerbals were lost in this accident though a small rover that had been left as a memorial for Lugal Kerman who lost his life last week when a rover being delivered to the Mun landed on him was also damaged (part of the upper stage went flying off and grazed it)

Recently had my own failure, not so bad as yours, one dead but the other 4 (and more importantly Jeb and Valentina) survived. Realized I had screwed up on the construction of my mother ship, rather than disassemble it in space and then reassemble it I decided to just deorbit the ship and start over. We decided the blame was on a defective solar array. How was it defective? It somehow survived re-entry as well as the ship snapping in half causing the poor kerbal bailing out to slam into it

As to the mod issue that is really a non issue. Normally updates are far enough apart that the modders have reasonable time to update their mods. The 1.0.X issue was all bug fixes really that needed to be done. Also most of the mods didn't really break with 1.0.4 There is only one that I use regularly that even gives a "may not work" thing and it works just fine, the rest were all just fine as well. I realize that there are people who have half thier mod list not working now, and I realize that some of the bigger mods like B9 hadn't been updated in a long while, but in the end you cannot really fault Squad for that and it will, eventually, be updated.

With the Duna window fast approaching and my space agency being way, way, way behind in their construction of colony ships today I finally tested a lander that met the qualifications I had set. Those would be: 1) Carries a minimum of 12 kerbals (this holds 16) 2) Can dock with the colony ship (only reason for the mono tank/rcs wheel on the top... to extend the docking port) 3) Can land safely on Duna within 10km of the colony site. 4) Can be launched in one piece (to save time) 5) Under 40 parts each (cause the ship itself is already 200...without all the addons) Little scary on the landing will have to be sure I am watching closely if I attempt to land at any of Duna's higher elevation points (this was about 2.5km asl) as the chutes didn't really slow me down to a safe speed until I was already less than 100m from the ground! But it does contain enough fuel for a small burp to break faster if needed. Now just to launch 4 of these and attach them to my ship...

I built a pub on the Mun for all the thirsty Kerbals who will soon be building a base nearby. Really needs a big tacky neon sign on the front... Maybe "Jeb's Kracken Bar-n-Grill"?