Duke23

I got phase 1 of my manned Duna project up and going... The transfer ship made it and dropped off the Kethane scanner in a nice orbit, but ran out of fuel while adjusting the final orbit (stuck at ~300x500km) so I just sent the lander and rover down to start surveying. For some stupid reason I purposely landed about 15km away from where I originally intended to, thinking the terrain was better. It wasn't. I also just realized that Kerbals only apparently carry one flag at a time. Halfrid was driving around looking for nice places to put a base (and subsequently drive the lander to since there's not much spare fuel until the rest of the Kethane supplies get here) and yup, can't plant a second flag. So I pulled one of the radial attachment plugs off the rover (for KAS) and dropped it on the ground instead. Newdon will figure it out. All in all I can't complain so far as I haven't run out of fuel on anything that matters, or broken anything (knock on wood). The rover is *slightly* unstable while docked with a load such as the lander, because I extended the wheelbase a little to prevent flipping with brakes but left the docking port closer to the front. So when it's actually carrying something it leans forward, probably defeating the purpose. Oh well. Next order of business is make a final decision on where to build this base before my Kethane supplies get here in 51 days and I'm occupied with that. So basically I need to drive to where I think I want to put it (about 10km away as of now) and then drive to the anomaly nearby (about another 10km away from the potential base site, I wanted to be within a reasonable driving distance) and then drive out to the nearest Kethane site to see if it's a ridiculous amount of trouble to go back and forth, or if I need to move the base. At the very least the base will be out of physics range of the Kethane site in case I step up operations out there and start causing lag. Base will include habitation, solar, fuel storage, a lab, and hopefully a small long range biome hopper with science equipment. At the moment I just have a small Kethane rig on the way to pull behind the rover and use to refill the lander or anything else small that I might send out this way.

I always love the look of bewilderment when that first rocket (or 3 or 5) either crashes and burns, or barely goes anywhere. I remember when I first got the game and my short one or two stage rockets weren't going anywhere so I thought "I've got this", and built the tallest most unstable and underpowered thing I've ever seen. It's got a ton of fuel and more stages so it HAS to work... It almost fell over on the launchpad then slowly but surely slithered and wobbled it's way up to the top of the atmosphere, and still didn't make stable orbit. "ok maybe I should try some radial attachment now".

I'm getting pretty excited for this. Destructible buildings are "eh" but I want to see where they go with it and what modders can do. I'm really wanting to play with the new parts (even though I already use SP+), explosion effects, and I like the navball improvements. Also, Rows, I'll take the flowers and the date. I'm lonely. (lol)

I got frustrated on Duna. Remember my (what I'm now calling) Kojourner mission? Probably not. Anyway I put a SCANSat probe in orbit with a small rover attached, plotted out the anomaly I wanted to go see, and dropped the rover. Well then I lost my bearings and was kind of sort of aimlessly heading in the right direction. The rover wasn't big enough to add a BTDT, and the probe can only see the rover and anomaly on two different maps (stock and SCANSat map). So in my frustration I got the bright idea to (gently) crash the probe into the surface near the anomaly and use that as a point of reference while still hopefully functional enough to show me the map. That turned out to be a very bad idea, which I realized as I careened into the surface at about 650m/s due to a severely underpowered engine. So I sighed heavily and loaded a save, and now I'm trying to calculate where I should be based on longitude and latitude of the rover vs the anomaly, and *supposedly* it's directly north of me. I hope. I didn't care too much about this mission before but with .25 rapidly approaching I'd like to go ahead and wrap it up. Edit: Still kinda far away though. Edit again: I'm not going to spoil the spoiler too bad even though everyone probably knows what it is... But I'm almost to the objective and I'm working on a followup mission now, manned. I have sent a transfer ship with a Kethane scanner, and a lander / crane with a rover on it. The rover has assorted science equipment and also a winch for towing capabilities -- It will pull a "Kethane Trailer" to be sent by probe during phase 2 of this mission, which can drill, store, and refine Kethane as well as store fuel, in relatively small amounts of course. It'll be perfect for refueling the lander crane for phase 3 when I start to drop base supplies. The lander crane rover assembly had some extra fuel in the ascent stage since I pretty much use the same setup to lift everything right now (lazy) so this is the messed up docking procedure. I disconnected the lander (which was upside down) from the ascent stage, turned it around and docked with the transfer ship, and KAS piped the lander to the ascent stage to transfer the remaining fuel. I can probably make it on what I have, but I'd like to still stop by my Minmus depot to top up and be sure. And yes those are drop tanks on the transfer ship because it's carrying a little more weight than I intended. Burn times are going to be horrendous on the way out there but it should be worth it.

There's some positivity, this thread was really starting to bring me down. Good points, I'm also interested to see what modders can do with this. Also, I wonder if it's possible for you (yes, mostly specifically you) to build something that breaks the launchpad with the physics drop... lol I feel like personally the destructible buildings will only affect me when I start trying to build large planes again, which I'm not at all good at. Or maybe playing with asteroids. Better save up some funds before I go strapping wings to a bunch of orange tanks again.

As for dropping stages on the launchpad I don't think I've ever done that even when going straight up, just because of the slight rotation of the planet. But I could be wrong, I don't exactly spend most of my launch looking at the ground.

Wow, I was almost sure that wasn't going to be the feature. Pretty cool! I do wish they had incorporated damage levels or building health instead of hit it hard enough and it goes poof, but I've gotta give them credit for the destruction animations. I assume that will come at a later date anyway. And who knows, an intrepid modder could probably dig into whatever they used to trigger it and tweak all that. Either way it's a nice step to... Why does my brain immediately jump to destructible moons and planets?! I did enjoy how Max revealed it, in any case. I totally thought he was going to say "If you don't like the admin building you can just disable it in settings." lol

On my phone so can't vote, but I'd like to see some of your work as well. If this can be done right and get some inside interviews I could definitely get behind that. Maybe a follow up would be in order after completion.

I think I wet myself a little every time I aerobrake at Duna and that's without FAR... Congrats on your success

Trying to deorbit a relatively large ship that wasn't actually made to be deorbited... FOR THE FUNDS MAN THE FUNDS. The instrument tower on this thing alone is worth ~100k funds... (Background: I had a contract to put a station in orbit of the sun so I picked up some science data while I was out there, brought back the ship I used to push it plus the science instruments. Kinda cheaty, I didn't even man the station.) I just found out placing parachutes with KAS is a pain in the butt. They weigh just enough to make the entire process very unstable. Needs a tether!

The descent for my Duna rover went pretty well. I didn't land exactly where I wanted to, but I also didn't need to use the attached engines to deorbit or to touch down, so I instead used them to change the course a tiny bit. Instead of deorbiting with the engines attached to the rover's chute cluster, I used the SCANSat probe it was attached to which had a good bit more DV to set up the descent, then decoupled, then brought the probe back into a stable orbit and switched to the rover. This may have been a little silly but I wanted to take a "more realistic" approach to my exploration instead of what I did in my last game which was to fire a Kerbal over there at my earliest convenience, accidentally strand him, then leave him there for about 3 years until I had the tech to go back and pick him up.

Long story short I got my Duna probe and rover ready finally, and made some pretty good progress. Here's what the rover ended up looking like. It's kind of a bad shot but the better ones are before I did a few modifications to it. Nothing major, but it's different. Also before I launched it I stuck a headlight on the front. As for the rest... Here's some more on the mission itself: A shot of my wobbly rocket standing by. If I had been smart I could have saved money and dropped by my fuel depot at Minmus before leaving, but I decided to just head out. Looking good so far I swear I didn't even plan this, I just built and launched. The window was about as good as I could have asked for. Fast forward through a ~6m burn, a couple minor corrections, and a long ride and here we are right after attempting to aerocapture. I got as low as 13km and ran out of testosterone, so I had to burn coming out of it to finish the capture. After adjusting the orbit and ditching the transfer stage, here we are running the initial scans of the planet to see if there's anything worth checking out down there. If my scanning orbit was good enough here (meaning I don't have to use much / any fuel to correct it) I'm gonna head over to Ike and scan that too while I'm here. After dropping the rover of course, that blasted thing is heavy. I got a little paranoid with the descent system and I really don't want to destroy this thing that took me so long to build (but that was my fault for being indecisive). Now I'm a little disappointed because there's no BTDT on the rover... I was gonna say I "forgot" it, but where the heck would I have put it anyway? Oh well. Tune in next time for wheels on the ground.

I'm still shaking my head at myself. First off, I've put my Minmus Kethane mining operation on a very brief hold so I can load up a vaguely Sojourner-ish rover for a one way Duna trip just because. But I don't like the probe core I have right now so I wanted to research the Okto-2 before sending it. Enter the Data Retrieval Pod. It was a great idea. Lightweight, plenty of DV (or so I thought). Plan was to skim by the Mun to complete a contract, meet up with the orbital fuel depot at Minmus and hit the surface once or twice for science, stop by the fuel depot again, and head home, while also finishing a second contract. Not so fast. Problem 1: I didn't pack QUITE enough fuel. I mean, I was off by about 30m/s (the lander has ~2300m/s DV with a full tank). I thought I'd have a bit to spare, but I didn't actually factor in passing by the Mun when I was setting everything up. No problem I thought, I'll just burn off some of this excess monopropellant to finish my burn and meet up with the depot. But... Problem 2: I somehow, and still haven't figured out how, put it into a retrograde orbit. I could have sworn I lined everything up so that wouldn't happen. So I need about another ~130m/s to turn around and head the proper direction and altitude, not counting any correction burns for the actual rendezvous. No way my monopropellant reserve is going to be enough for that. After banging my head on the desk a few times (figuratively this time) I thought "Duh, I have a small tanker/lander for the depot anyway." So I tossed a little fuel into that and met up with the DRP. Hey, that's perfect. DeRP. Anyway, my depot is far enough out that orbital speed is ~65m/s so it's no big deal for the relatively small tanker to swing by and drop off some fuel. Just still scratching my head. Anyway all was good on that front so I hit a new biome on the surface and if all goes well on the return trip I should complete both contracts and get a much needed few hundred thousand funds that I can burn on my Duna rover mission. I decided not to do any more exploration on this trip since I don't have all the science equipment I'd like to. This was supposed to be light and cheap, so I'll send a bigger lander later and a lab for the depot to soak up all the data I haven't collected. If anyone was wondering, here's the placeholder design of the rover I'm sending to Duna. The telescope piece is mostly just for looks but I'll of course use it when approaching Duna. Design subject to change completely or not at all at my discretion.

Last shots of my fuel depot / Kethane rigs for the night... This isn't really efficient but I'm kind of proud of it. First time I've actually "used" Kethane, other than just messing around for a minute or two. I think tomorrow I'll add a solar array to the ground setup, I can't run everything at once as it sits. Also I shattered one of the panels on the converter rig about 5 minutes after I parked it, because I decided to cut it a little close while jetpacking over with a ground pylon. Sigh...

I finally started my plan to mine Minmus for Kethane (for a leaving-the-Kerbin-system refueling station in orbit). So far so good. I was going to use Imgur for this but it won't let me sign in for some stupid reason. Launching the SCANSat / Kethane probe (cheaply) In orbit of Minmus with plenty of fuel in the probe itself Launching the orbital station (well, most of it) Launching my "Kethane Drilling Truck" Sweet, sweet Kethane. Now I just need to send a tanker/lander to bring the stuff up to the station, and attach a converter. Hopefully I get this all figured out because I'm not 100% sure what I'm doing. I've mined Kethane before, just never actually done anything with it. Edit: I decided to refine the Kethane on the ground and bring it up as its final product. Well I dropped my rolling refinery about 1.5km away and without any Kerbals or probes (after jettisoning the descent engines) so I had to go get it. I linked them together with a pipe and made a convoy!

I was kind of hoping for terrain deformation or rescue crews, out of all the possibilities that have been thrown out there. Maybe the secret feature IS the new explosions / debris and they're laughing at everyone...

I don't like all this "cloud" stuff either. It has its uses but it's too slow to be a primary means of storage and then your data is "out there" for someone to hopefully not hack into. I have my own cloud... My computer at home. I can access the files on it any time I want from any device and it's securely in my possession on my property. I prefer android in general because it strives to be more. It's less limited and more customizable. I stopped carrying a laptop around when I got an android tablet. More power to Apple, they give their customers what they want just like any good company does. And for everyone else that the Apple world doesn't work for, we have our options too. My Galaxy S4 was one of the best purchases I've made recently. Don't like something apple did? Hope they take heed if enough people agree. Don't like something Samsung or Google did? Root the sucker and fix it. Easy? Apple. Powerful? Android all the way.

I just had a moment and deleted my post by accident, go me. I can't say you're completely wrong on a lot of that and I don't claim to speak for SQUAD, but it makes sense they'd prefer hype rather than apathy. And unlike some other companies they do care what the people want and try to implement things that are important to the community faster when it's feasible and doesn't throw off their internal release schedule too bad, as has been shown in the past (the early x64 release for a quick example). Rowsdower and maxmaps to an extent have even been encouraging the hype, and it's usually contained pretty well to a thread or two. If people are hyped for the next release, they know they are doing something right! I think it's important to them to get a feel for what the community thinks and wants when it's reasonable, especially in a pre-release scenario. Again I'm not one for off the charts hype myself and I'll not be disappointed no matter what they release next. In my relatively short time here (since .22, a couple weeks before .23) I have seen some pretty great changes and in the end I know SQUAD will do what they want when they want, and we can take it or leave it. I bought this game with no expectations past what was about to come out - if they had put out .23 and called it done, my money was still well spent. I just don't get why people see the hype as such a negative thing.

But where do you draw the line for what is unwanted... I have been known to leave things laying around that could be considered debris. Part of a crashed craft I dragged back from the grasslands, a plane that failed miserably during testing, etc. Maybe I'm being nit picky.

What's the harm? Gregrox might be a little out there and we'll be checking the lock on his padded room after the update hits (wink) but let them have their fun... I built a "hype train" myself because I was bored and it sounded fun to string a bunch of stuff together that wouldn't normally be built in this game and mess around with it. As for all the actual "hype hype hype" that goes on on those threads sometimes I don't care for it too much, I go there for the wild speculation and general humor in an otherwise pretty serious place. To each his own, it's not hurting anyone. Just my 2 cents.

I did literally nothing in KSP today, but last night I got carried away with making a hype train (pics are scattered somewhere in the Official Hype Thread) but there was also a video which took some editing and speeding up and uploading etc. Sooo here's that. It was originally just going to be the "engine" and one 16-kerbal passenger car, but um, HYPE happened and 69 kerbals (after the recount) went to space. It also wasn't going to go to space until I showed the 66-kerbal lag inducing train to a friend, who egged me on to strap rockets on it and hack gravity/fuel just to see what would happen. Warning: I am not a good video editor.

"These are not the planes you're looking for..."

The .24 (not typo) hype train just literally crashed my phone. I was watching the video of it on the last page and went to hit share in Chrome (for the page not the video specifically) and my phone froze. On restart it kept saying system process error or something. I just had to factory reset... Thanks, hype train.

Nope... I had planned to in my "Jooles Verne" mission in .23.5, but I didn't build my lander up to snuff.

Holy crap, that went from reasonable to WTF in no time. I was going to say interesting, this is probably worth discussing but... *shakes head and walks away*