Claw

Quicksave... (F5) As an alternative to pushing (if you're not that handy with EVA). Lay down a maneuver node right in front of your ship and see how much dV it takes burning retrograde to stop your departing orbit (without crashing back into Kerbin). If that dV is less than 600 m/s, then you can jump ship with your kerbals and use their jet packs to stay in orbit. You'll have to do the EVA burn by eyeball (aiming to one side of Kerbin) and watching the map to make sure you're getting the right orbit shape. Then scramble and build your rescue ship. With some luck, you'll pick them up within a couple days. Learn how to rendezvous. You'll get some practice on this mission. There are several videos on youtube. You might want to watch a couple to get different techniques. Let us know if you need help finding one. Make sure your rescue ship has a few extra ladders around the sides for your guys to grab onto. Build it light with lots of fuel to maneuver, or perhaps build/launch more than one rescue capsule. If you can manage to save some of their EVA fuel during the retro burn, then it'll be easier to get them back to the rescue ship. Oh yes, make absolutely certain that your rescue ship has all the stuff it needs (power, solar panels, probe core, etc). Also make sure no kerbals stow away on your craft when you launch. You wouldn't be the first to send a "helper" along with on a rescue mission, or find your rescue boat out of fuel/electricity. Both these options can be challenging. Good luck!

Hmm. I assume you're talking about in the SPH. And I agree, a picture would help. I've built quite a few airplanes and don't recall running into this very much. The only times I can recall seeing something maybe like this is when trying to attach things where the symmetry is messed up in some way, or the parts are clipping together strangely. Also, the parts labeled "control surfaces" have some buggy-ness about them. If you place them at funny angles they sometimes give lift lines that aren't what you'd expect.

If I recall correctly, someone created a chart with optimum PE heights to hit your desired target on reentry based on your AP. (i.e. if you're doing LKO, Mun, Minmus type returns). I don't know which thread it's in, but you might be able to find it digging around a little. MJ is the only addon I use. I find it less than helpful for airplanes, but seems to be okay for capsule craft. It does a much better job for craft that can retain a rocket during reentry so it can make corrections. Although I will also say that I don't use it very often. I typically set my PE to what I think works based on experience and accept what I get. But that clearly doesn't help you consistently land within 10km of a desired point.

Yes, it certainly does and has broken many space stations.

Taki, I think maybe you misunderstood what cantab said. He is 100% correct in saying "for how quick torque turns you...moment of inertia. The more mass, and also the further it is from the center of mass, the harder." KSP does, in fact, simulate moments of inertia. Mass distributed away from the CoM is much harder to turn than mass at the CoM. Long, heavy ships are much slower to turn/stop turning. You are also 100% correct in saying that the position of the reaction wheels has no effect on their turning efficiency. And it's not contrary to reality, it is 100% in agreement. I will say that it's not intuitive, but it isn't wrong.

Yeah, a picture would help a ton. I can throw a list of things it "might" be up here, but it's easier to give specific advice if we can see it.

The small landing gear bay (used on airplanes) used to be massless, but I don't see that line in the gear part anymore. Maybe that's why it was on the list. I was able to find the PhysicsSignificance line in the small battery (Z-100). Chris said he removed this line from his parts. It looks like this if you want to do it. Go to the corresponding parts.cfg for whichever thing you want to remove the massless physics. The example below is the Z-100 battery pack. Note that the Physics line is lower in this part than typical (I made it bold). PART { // --- general parameters --- name = batteryPack module = Part author = NovaSilisko // --- asset parameters --- mesh = model.mu rescaleFactor = 1 // --- node definitions --- // definition format is Position X, Position Y, Position Z, Up X, Up Y, Up Z node_attach = 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, -1.0 // --- editor parameters --- TechRequired = scienceTech entryCost = 800 cost = 80 category = Utility subcategory = 0 title = Z-100 Rechargeable Battery Pack manufacturer = Zaltonic Electronics description = The Z-100 battery pack is the standard model for electrical applications. Holds two (2) AAAA batteries and holds a maximum 100 units of charge. // attachment rules: stack, srfAttach, allowStack, allowSrfAttach, allowCollision attachRules = 0,1,0,0,0 // --- standard part parameters --- mass = 0.005 dragModelType = default maximum_drag = 0.2 minimum_drag = 0.2 angularDrag = 1 crashTolerance = 8 maxTemp = 3200 [B]PhysicsSignificance = 1[/B] RESOURCE { name = ElectricCharge amount = 100 maxAmount = 100 } } Delete that line, and your part will be as it was in 0.23.0. True (and I agree), but the game is also deeply in development. So I'm sure they are trying out different things along the way. There are quite a few features that "shouldn't be so hard for squad to do," but they're also putting in things that are hard to do. And they make changes like this so that we can give constructive feedback (like this thread).

I tend to agree. The 900 m drop is probably mostly to do with docking. As far the gradual decay, I can't say that I've sat and watched an AP/PE over very extended periods of time but you're probably just seeing jitter (as pointed out earlier) or possibly the rounding errors that happen while the game calculates all the physics. When you aren't actively watching your station (i.e. you're working with another craft more than 2.5 km away from it), it should not decay. The game puts ships "on-rails" which means they simply move about their orbit without much in the way of physics calculations. You could even put a craft "on-rails" in Kerbin's atmosphere (at high altitudes) and it won't decay as long as you're not looking. So I guess my point is that there's no need to worry if you leave it for a while.

Cantab's idea works well. Another way you can sort of "cheat" the hibernation by simply not watching the craft the whole time. Go back to the tracking center or switch to another craft while your Munar probe is on it's way. When you switch back to the Munar probe, the batteries will be at the same charge as when you left them. (They don't drain if you're not looking.)

When you say "mass-relay" what are you envisioning?

Sweet! I'm always excited to see people hit their goals. Two thumbs up and thanks for sharing! By the way, that VTOL I posted earlier also went to Minmus and back with four of those small radially mounted rockets as an SSTO. (Although it's not a rover.) They aren't great on the gas mileage but they sure are small.

Updated, in case you read it already.

Ahh, okay. So I thought it was a units problem at first, but then I spotted the issue. You're using the wrong value for your axis. You're using your AP and PE that's read out in the game. However, those values are not from the center of the ellipse. They are from the surface of Kerbin. You have to add 600,000m (the radius of Kerbin) to your 749,453m. So if I use 1,349,453m in the equation, I calculate an orbital period of 5241.26s.

I see that this is already "Answered," but for sake of completeness (and if anyone else looks here for info)... If you're using v0.23.5, ladders are now insignificant to the physics engine. So while the VAB may show that the CoM moves when you put the ladder on, it won't actually effect your CoM in flight. This can also be a problem as it make it difficult to line up Center of Thrust and Lift on a Center of Mass that isn't telling the truth. You used to have to add ladders on opposing sides, or other utility things. But not anymore. See these two threads for a list of physics insignificant parts (and discussion). http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/75951-PhysicsSignificance-related-problems http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/76173-Massless-parts Cheers

I think I agree about massless RCS ports feeling cheaty. - Having all of the extremely minor parts being massless certainly seems like no big deal, and I could definitely live with it. Although I'm also a fan of making incredibly small probes. As such, having all the really small parts being completely massless makes small probes much less challenging. Now I can slap on anything I want. - The idea of applying the mass directly to the parent part sounds like a good idea at first (and I sort of like it), but I also thought that it might introduce too many buggy "features" by creating special cases in the code that handles the part tree. (Like Kasuha pointed out.) - Spreading out the mass over the whole ship seems like a workable thing too. Although I imagine it's implementation being a lot more straight forward (and less buggy) if it was just applied directly to the total mass of the ship. (I'm thinking game code here.) I guess what I'm thinking is that instead of peanut-butter spreading the mass over the whole ship, simply apply the total "insignificant" mass as a single "extra weight" at the end of the mass calculations instead of as a moment arm on the ship. So the parts wouldn't effect inertia calculations, but they effect the overall mass. (And subsequently the delta-v, acceleration, etc...) I think that would still make small probes challenging without having to deal too much with the very sensitive parts balance issues for things like ladders, etc.

No problem! Have fun.

I like to play with it on, but my game seems to crash more. So off it remains...

I beg to differ. I don't think it's just a "that's how it works so get over it." It might be a bug, or stock game limitation, it might not. What I really want is a picture of your craft. Preferrably in the SPH and in flight showing the problem. My guess is actually that your craft is flying plenty fine. You are climbing up and accelerating. When you descend, you are going back into more dense air. An airplane's engines can only push it so fast, based on it's drag. If you make the air more dense, there is more drag. If there is more drag, then the engines won't be able to maintain speed and you will, in fact, slow down. This will happen in either FAR or stock (and real life for that matter). Alternatively, your navball might be in orbit mode. In which case your speed won't make much sense at all. I think that is unlikely, but possible. In either case, I see the topic of air density came up before, but you don't mention what the extremes are that you are seeing. As a baseline, it's pretty easy to get a plane up to 1600+ m/s at 30km. If that plane starts to descend, it's speed will almost certainly go down, and quite a lot. The atmosphere starts to thicken up around 25km (where it will probably slow to 700 m/s or less) and even more around 12km (300 m/s ish). KSP actually lets you accelerate to a craft's high end of drag pretty easily. So you end up finding yourself going at the fast end of the drag curve most of the time, even if you don't intend to.

What is weird is that the kraken isn't ripping ships apart. The planet is quite simply disappearing, and the craft falls to the blue dot and crashes. ... Perhaps if this happens again to someome, try to zoom way out and see if the ship has clipped into the terrain.

Awesome! Glad it worked out for you. I don't have much experience with flying rovers on Minmus, but it's effectiveness really depends on how you plan to drive/fly it. If the rockets are there mainly to land it, rescue itself from inadvertent orbit, and suborbital hops then tweaking the thrust will probably work out well. If you're going to use rockets for all matter of fine tuning, then it might be tougher and you'll likely want to really reduce the thrust. Driving rovers on Minmus can be tricky too. They bounce a lot and sometimes send you hopping along higher/further along than you want. Some people simply use RCS to help with that. Some even fire RCS straight up (so it's pushing the craft down) to keep it planted on the ground. There are lots of options, but the only truly useful advice is to build something and go give it a try! Then tweak your design to do what you want.

What ever you want. Seriously. Build a massive space station on top of it. Do some science. Connect several of them together. Go land it on Minmus, or the Mun, or Kerbin. Just realize there's still quite a few bugs with the claw (and multiple claws) as well as asteroids themselves. So keep a copy of your save game somewhere safe in the meantime.

If you're using the Space Plane Hangar (SPH), you only have the "no symmetry" and "2x symmetry" options. That's because classic airplane designs are typically symmetric in this manner (along the nose->tail axis). If you did 4x symmetry, the wings would be coming out of the top and bottom of the airplane also, which doesn't do much for you in terms of lift going up. If you would like to build a craft with 4x symmetry, you can do so in the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB). It is capable of 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x, 6x, and 8x symmetry. There are also mods out there that allow even more options if you're interested. The SPH is more for airplane design, whereas the VAB is more for rocket design. So it depends on what you're trying to build. By the way, welcome to the forums!

Just realize that fully dry CoM and fully wet CoM might not be your worst case shift in the CoM. Especially with that fuel tank stacked below the science jr (however it is you feed that one out).

MJ was smart enough to know some parts were weightless, but it seemed hard coded. If you modified a .cfg, MJ didn't seem to catch on. KER didn't recognize that the small gear bay was massless but MJ did. That's actually why I chose MJ over KER several months back when I was first deciding. So I know that at least that part was right. Personally I went in and modified the landing gear .cfg file so that the mass was zero. That way the CoM in the SPH stopped lying to me.

Additionally, I don't see your navball but I would say that sometimes the orientation of your controlling part can lead to the craft interpreting your inputs differently than you intended. Take this VTOL for example: The heading shows 135, which is definitely not the direction this craft is pointing. (Just trust me on that.) And having the navball oriented this way makes it difficult to control since control will be in an inconvenient axis. If the craft starts to tip over, yawing or pitching will actually cause it to roll around sort of flat. Now look at the same craft. I selected "control from here" on the probe core on top. Now if I yaw or pitch the craft, the flat plate design will actually tip in different directions. If I roll, it will roll around the center of the circle (looking straight down in the picture). If you already have all that sorted out, the other thing it might be is that the SAS is just barely able to control your craft. (Again, I can't see your trim indicators.) When you put just a little input in, the barely in control SAS stops providing input and then takes a second to catch up once you stop giving input. So your craft tips off further and the SAS isn't able to catch up. That's why turning on the RCS helps out, because it gives enough added authority to fix the problem. So... 1) Fix your CoT so that it's directly below your CoM. Or at least in a good enough spot over the range of CoM movement. 2) Add another reaction wheel. Also, be advised that rovers tend to be difficult to control on Minmus because of the low gravity. Also, if your craft has enough thrust to lift off of Kerbin, you might find yourself accidentally in orbit around Minmus more often than you'd like.