arkive

I'm kind of at my wits end here. I have a mission that I'm supposed to pickup an MK1 pod and kerbal off Bop. I can get to Bop and then get down to the surface with a probe take control of the kerbal and put him in the pod, but I can't for the life of me get the claw to grab the pod. I've tried barely hitting it to as fast as 3 m/s and it will not latch on. I've tried resetting the claw after it accidentally made contact with the ground in case that messed it up and no dice. I have no idea why it won't grab but it doesn't help that this pod is on the permanently dark side of Bop. Even with lights it's difficult to get bearings at any reasonable altitude. In positive news my precision landing abilities have gone through the roof. Thoughts, suggestions? Is there a better/alternate tool than the Advanced Grabbing Unit for this job? As an aside the probe has a docking port and the plan is to rendezvous with the main ship in orbit and dock the probe/pod inside an MK3 cargo bay and bring the whole thing back that way.

There used to be a pretty handy thread on here for various tip and tricks and instead of potentially cluttering this place with a new one was just curious if there's an updated thread for this? I'm especially interested in settings tweaks that make life easier/cleaner. There were a few critical ones I've forgotten from my early days of playing, like showing the rendezvous at the planet (which seems to be incorporated into the defaults now).

I run mostly stock KSP and had done most of what one could at this point, so I was excited to dip my feet in and try something else. This mod had a lot of downloads so I decided to give it a whirl. Having unlocked the whole tree already the contracts started showing up instantly. While I like the "scale" this mod forces on you and the rewards the contracts offer, the experiment descriptions (and preferably the contracts) REALLY need a little more requisite information in them because it's VERY easy to put together a station/mission, get there, and not have everything you need. I think the description text for the parts you crafted are definitely in the spirit of KSP, but it's just not specific enough to prevent easy mistakes that can have huge ramifications when you consider the scale of the contracts related to it.

Thanks for the tips guys. That clipping mode option was an unknown, welcome surprise.

1) If you run out of electrical power, you can EVA out and use the RCS in your suit to nudge the craft towards the light (assuming you have some of those always-out solar panels plastered somewhere). 2) When you start migrating to deeper portions of space, consider using staging on your fuel tanks too. You'll save fuel in the long run using two half tanks and a decoupler instead of a full length tank. 3) This may seem like a no-brainer to most, but when designing a craft that's going to dock/RCS, configure the ship in the configuration it will be when you're docking/RCS (disconnect any staging that will be absent, etc) and then turn on center of mass. Use that to precisely place your RCS thrusters. RCS placed at exactly the CoM or equidistant from it will translate better in space and reduce the occurance of rotation when using RCS. 4) Use the Alarm clock mod, especailly if you run concurrent missions as it can track multiple ship's activities and notifiy you accordingly. Definitely use it every time you're making an SOI change and you're feeling impatient. Warping through an SOI change can drastically affect your approach distance to the new object, but the alram clock can pull you out of warp a few seconds before it happens so your periapsis is consistent with what you see before the SOI change..

On my first venture outside the close orbit or the planet I headed for the Mun and then quickly became introduced to the importance of electricity. A rescue mission followed shortly thereafter. Also, on what I think was the very next Mun mission (one with what I felt was a mught higher degree of attention to detail) I got within 1000m of the surface and then realized I didn't include any landing gear (and I was still terrible at landing, so a legless landing was out of the question).

I've been playing this game for about two months now and I'm quite hooked. Landed and returned on Laythe last week and have my eyes set on Eve now. That said, even after overcoming some big challenges I continue to be plagued by simple issues. Here's my list in no particular order: 1) In orbit around the star Kerbin when I have an encounter with another planet, the next rotation afterward is shown in purple (due to the slight shift in course from hitting the planet's SOI). However, in most cases it is VERY difficult to make a maneuver node on the blue line (which is my present orbit). It always wants to make the maneuver node on the purple line (subsequent orbit). 2) After I've plotted an intercept I can't seem to focus it and get a close view so I can fine tune my encounter from a great distance (I know this is probably an easy one that I'm foolishly missing). 3) Is there a way to highlight all struts (or even just delete all struts)? On some complicated builds I know there is occasionally a strut or two that's probably embedded in the structure somewhere that's just wasting mass and probably will somehow cause my ship to suffer a catastrophic systems failure. 4) Why can't I see/change my keybinds while I'm *in* a game? (this one is mostly rhetorical ). 5) Another mostly rhetorical one, but it would be amazing if you could set some parts in your build as not active or translucent (at least temporarily) so you could work around them without interference. I'm speaking namely about running fuel lines and struts after the fact. Sometimes I completely redo asparagas staging just because I don't like how I was forced to run the lines/struts due to line of sight issues with placing the nodes. 6) One final feature request. Please make the game less addictive. Thanks.