Ratzap

Something else odd that I saw just now. I have a rather simple lander/probe build launching from Duna, when I go to build it it says Jet Fuel XXXX/XXXXX. The design has no jet fuel in it and the base has none either but it still builds no problem (not in debug mode).

I put a ramjet together today but it flamed out at 30,000m around mach 7? Is that about right? I'm using FAR and it has plenty of intakes. A turbojet to get to mach 1 then it was pretty slow going to mach 2 where the rams really took off and I could switch the TJ off.

FAR works with novapunch no problems and I use asparagus designs a lot - all working no hassle with FAR. Even my launchpad base on Duna seems to benefit from FAR - ~2300 from surface to SoI escape. Using proc fairings of course.

Sadly this broke FAR and some other MM using mods. In particular I noticed it because FAR control surface allocation is dead in the SPH. If I remove your mod and put the 13KB modulemanager.dll back the other stuff works again. The wildcard extensions do not appear to be present in the newer 13KB MM version as the log contains load errors and your mod doesn't work when it is active. A pity because surface mount engines would be nice but I need FAR more.

Nice one, glad someone is looking after robojeb

Some nice looking bits here to try out. Thanks

That's cool mate, people will be happy to know you haven't simply vanished One I'd add that I can repeat: If I have a manned ship (or KAS amalgam of ships docked) and dock a new ship to it while the kerbal is still EVA, pieces get dragged all over the place like gravity is working on them. If I take the kerbal back on board before hitting the dock button in the UI, everything is fine.

Great breakdown and analysis. I came to the same conclusion yesterday with much less science while trying to build a stable plane around the kethane engine. Pwings are fun and easy to use but I just couldn't get the plane to stay in the sky. B9 wings did the job.

Thank you so much for that answer, it makes clear what is going on. I actually found a way to make a single engine version BTW and it flies rather well - just too fast. I might tinker around and make a bigger slower version if I can.

I use Kordo's RTG pack, the XXL on a few things does the job for normal drain and when I have drills on I flick the keth generators on. That tank pile was hypered in and even then it took a few tries. Hyper edit lowers things to the ground at 1.1m/s, sounds slow but as soon as one edge touches down it lets gravity take over. So one corner touches and the whole thing drops under gravity the rest of the way - all the RTGs fall off and struts snap. So I finally found a use for the shock absorbing legs a guy posted They actually withstood that 178 tonne pile bouncing down on them. They broke off as it filled up though, 300,000 rocket parts are heavy as hell. That smelter rover on the left got so heavy as it filled with metal that the tires exploded and the probe controller fell off...

Speaking of which, I was playing around with the kethane bypass jet today. It's quite a lot heavier than other jet engines and that odd squarish bit coming out one side gets in the way mounting sometimes. It also needs high atmospheric pressure to work? - flame out at 11,000m on Kerbin was a fair surprise. The drag is fairly high, not usually a problem but I'm using FAR for plane testing. Then again it seems to flame out at low throttle as much as it does at high settings. Around the 60% mark seems to run fairly well but then you end up going pretty damn fast. Another big problem is that it seems to be impossible to start it again. Once it's gone flame out (and that Kintake hits 0) it will not come back, pretty bad since it's not at all hard to flame out in. Intakes don't seem to make any difference at all: I built two variants, one with no intakes and a nosecone, the other with ram intake and radial intakes. Both sit just under mach 1 at 1000m on Kerbin and produce almost exactly the same thrust. 94.5 kN vs 98 kN - close enough that my manual throttle setting is probably to blame. Has anyone else tried the kethane jet? Found any uses for it or how to stop it flaming out? Or better yet how to restart it...

The part is 24/s electric and 0.1L/s so I was getting the 10t/s at about 6 arrows fast forward. The heavy kethane drill is 5L/s and the same energy draw - 50 times faster. So yeah, bumping the drill to 2 or 3L/s would still be slower but not horrifically so. I know this is all new and rather complex but I wish more people using it would actually playtest it rather than leave it on debug, launch a few rockets and go weeee. Without proper playtesting to balance/tune the mod it's going to be pretty useless. I finished off my Duna station with 2 hypered in parts. I was sick of sending parts to build storage to fit enough parts to build bigger part storage in order to.. and so on. Some of my large launcher/payloads are almost 250,000 rocket parts even something tiny with like 3 parts to it is 400. The whole base weighs 2947 tonnes, 90%+ is parts/metal/ore storage.

Immersion breaking? Hehe but sending an entire launchpad that magically weighs 14 tonnes on it's own to another planet is totally acceptable? w/e - anyway, your problem with connection = KAS, kerbal attachment system. You need a lot of mods to get everything going and you're going to need patience because you'll be scraping/repeating a lot till you work it all out.

I've spent 3 days putting together a launcher base on Duna. The main problem I see with the current LP/ore system is you spend so much time on logistics of getting parts to make storage so you can send enough parts to make bigger storage and so on in a cycle until you can finally build something worthwhile. A decent heavy lifter costs a vast amount of parts to build, ore mining is very very slow - the electric drain I can live with but 10 per second per drill is terrible. Even on high time warp it takes an age to fill up and process. I started out with a launchpad and a KAS hub (ship with a kerbal in and 8 winches round the bottom plus 4 movable plugs). I got a ship landed and plugged in with part hex cans which serves as fuel storage and built 4 rovers to cover kethane mining, ore mining, smelting and workshop. I have 1 free KAS connector now (after plugging in a big blob of rocket part storage) for a kethane refinery to complete the base's self sufficiency. Two of the rovers are so heavy when full that the tires burst and cannot be fixed Metal is the big problem there. Part count is also now so high that it takes 25 seconds to load when I switch to it (I have a beefy i7 machine) and the lag is pretty bad. Which kind of defeats the purpose since it's hard to launch and fly around in a slide show. All in all the mod has promise but it needs a lot of balancing work yet to make it less tedious, less storage hassle (and that guys idea of making smelting a 2 part process will not help there at all) and lower part counts. If it was possible to make buildings and place them once it would be fabulous - So much wasted part count on wheels, rockets etc for things I will never move. Base building tools are badly needed in KSP.

Ok, that's what I meant. So if it's not in the resource def file it uses default. Cheers, I may go back and scan Ike

I decided to try this one out today. I added the 2 pod parts to my MM config for mechmeb so they don't need the part stuck on. Then reading the files I noticed Mun and Kerbin have no ore generated? Ike isn't mention either or some other moons, are you planning on adding them? I'm going to set up a base on Minmus first as it's close and easy to get to - iron out the kinks before heading to Duna. For folks with MM and mechjeb add this to the stock file: @PART[exLaunchPad2] { MODULE { name = MechJebCore } } @PART[RocketBuilder] { MODULE { name = MechJebCore } }

Heh, 1000 is pretty low I think but yes, he could be a little more precise. BTW, someone was writing on another forum:

Oddly enough I really liked those ones and would have liked more for each planet if you can think of useful things to do on them. I'd never bothered going to visit any of the other planets because KSP simply has so much to do and I like trying out various mods. The worst part of the extra planetary ones is the time they take waiting for the warp to finish. Make the long range full planetary exploration thread optional or an unlock? The least fun part of the whole series IMO was the spaceplane stuff and that is simply because spaceplanes steer so badly atm. Ever with FAR installed it was a major pain getting the damn thing to fly straight and steady while holding speed. I used the FAR stock builds then built my own in the hope that I could maybe get something better but spaceplanes are just a bitch to fly in 0.21

I had a quick look at these yesterday. It's a decent idea but I think you'll need to tune them a bit yet I think. The 'fuel' consumption seemed rather high for the charge return when compared to the alternatives (kethoelectric or RTG) and it doesn't have much of a weight advantage either. Refueling would be time consuming and require people to add storage for the chemical on stations. Basically parts like this which add another fuel component face stiff resistance from users because they have to change their designs not just for one particular craft but for stations, tenders etc too. If they aren't compellingly more useful I'm afraid they just won't get used. For comparison, the large RTG from Korda's pack has a mass of 1.5 and delivers 7 charge per second plus it will never run out of fuel. Kethoelectric covers the heavy users with 75/s so you need to find a niche to aim at. Something small say 2/s, light and only generates when there is drain (watch a kethoelectric in action to see what I mean) is something I would consider for probes.

I finished the pack yesterday. All the missions seem to work from a basic point of view and even being sloppy I finished up with 3M banked. Then I tried one of my monster loads (built with novapunch) and since I knew the thing worked I launched a 1M cost vehicle with a 147 tonne payload - ka-ching. 5M for that one might be a touch too much. Also you might want to flesh some of the branches out a bit but I don't know if MC will let you set goals like 'mine 10k kethane on mun' or 'build a refiner and land it'.

Nice one Leonon, I simply didn't even think of landing/recovering the jet stage. I'll ask you since you use jets, is there any reason to flameouts? I've tried adding or removing intakes, various throttle settings, complete shutdown and restart etc. I know they will flameout at altitude anyway due to lack of oxygen but the altitude it happens at isn't consistent.

By all means tune the payouts yes but I see one problem with shaving them too hard: it makes diversity lower but making people seek the one truly efficient way of completing the mission and still make a profit. I'd say a lot are a bit too much atm yes but on the other hand enough slop to let people go nuts with wasteful designs now and again. Then again the hard mode switch can cover that aspect right? Tune the missions so that hardcore is very tight and the normal version will naturally be easier. PS: Yes, I'm reading the story too

Costs for jet engines are huge atm, like 30,000 to 220,000 each. They really need a mark down to something realistic, they are good for Kerbin boost in packs then rocket from 35km or so but can't use them in missions at that price

Only if your RCS is unbalanced and it's constantly correcting for rotation/translation errors (or if your ship is some offcenter mutant thing). Get the RCS build aid and use it - with a well built final stage and balanced RCS MJ docks with next to no mono use (if somewhat slowly).

Have you never noticed that KSP sort of dumps your rocket on the pad and it jiggles and sways? In 0.20 I've had things snap off and the crash screen would say 5.6G max experienced or something just from that drop onto the pad. Since the drop and jiggle still happens I'd say that's your problem. It happens to me too. I've been messing around with mission controller and some of my rockets for those simply exploded on the pad before I got to do anything. Revert to VAB, come out and try again :-/ Having removed deadly reentry for the time being the random explosions have stopped.