Javin

[quote name='magico13']Noticed some issues with 1.0.5. I'm pretty sure a recompile is all that was needed, so I've done that and have pushed a new update. If you're using KSP 1.0.5, you'll have to update. No new features yet, those are still WIP.[/QUOTE] LOVE the mod. Is there any way to remove the icon? I prefer a "set it and forget it approach" instead of being reminded that I am using a mod while immersed in the game.

Do you have any mods installed? I find getting a truly geostationary orbit without the aid of Flight Engineer is pretty much impossible. (Unless there's some other way to see your current orbit's period. I've not found it in the stock game yet.)

New... Favorite... Thing... Evar...

Jebidiah was your typical Kerbonaut. About as average as they come, really. Not overly courageous, and not overly stupid (the stupidity a result of years of inbreeding creating a race of almost genetically identical peoples, all sharing the same family name.) However, he was a Kerbonaut, one of a select few (of three, to be precise) to be the first to enter the Kerbal Space Program (KSP). The KSP was founded in year T0. (As Kerbal is an otherwise barren planet, it's assumed that they started time from this date due to it being their crowning achievement, mostly that they managed to build a Space Program apparently prior to discovering agriculture.) And their first Kerbonaut to set foot in a rocket was to be Jebidiah. Jebidiah had little knowledge that on another planet, his name was Hebrew for "Friend of the Lord." Rather on Kerbal, the name was first uttered in a particularly impressive belch, followed by a hiccup. The sound played across the ears so well that Jebidiah's father (little is known of his mother, or of any female Kerboid for that matter) gave him the name on the spot. Jebidiah was 32 at the time. Selected for the position because he happened to win a rousing game of duck-duck-kooz, Jebidiah was elated as he stepped foot into his first mission: In this mission, he sat in a command pod on the launching pad, and nothing else... After the appropriate countdown, he proudly climbed out of the landing pod, picked up a pebble from the asphalt launching pad, and wrote his report before climbing back into the command pod. There, he waited to have the vehicle "recovered." Which meant, bringing it back into the hangar. His first successful mission! With this information, Kerboid scientists were able to make leaps in the development of further rocketry studies, and there were promises that the next command module may even be capable of leaving the ground! And leave the ground it did. On his second mission - this mission took place that same evening; Kerboids are nothing if not efficient - a small fuel tank and a rocket were strapped to the command pod, and a parachute added as an afterthought. To everyone's surprise, everything went as planned, and after firing a few meters into the air, and landing safely, Jebidiah was able to add another report and a pocket full of grass to his growing list of achievements. His third mission (the following morning) truly showed the growth of the KSP. This time Jebidiah managed to end up a quarter of the planet away, and still made it home in time for supper, with a third pocket now filled with dirt and another crumpled report. These were deemed slightly less valuable than the prior local pebble and fauna reports according to the Scientists. By his fourth venture into the command pod (still on day 2) his dreams of space were finally realized! In a loose orbit around Kerbal, he got out, and promptly let go, of the command pod. For a long, and panic filled fifteen minutes, he struggled to get back to his ship. After attempting to run, then swim in vain, he finally had to pull out the manual to discover that he was in possession of a jet pack! His first approach broke both of his legs and sent him spinning ass over over elbows into the void, but another hour and he had himself under control. After much time had passed, he grasped on to the hatch of the command pod, and managed to pull himself back inside. It was then that he realized he'd forgotten to write a report. He stepped out of the pod and immediately let go again... This time he was a little faster about smashing his face into the engine with enough force to spin the entire ship bringing the command pod down on his head where he snagged the hatch door. Some scribbled notes later, and he was on an exciting burn into the upper atmosphere, having completely forgotten about his trauma, and elated to be "doing the fly" again. This time landing God-Knows-Where, apparently the Kerboids (still without agriculture) had managed to (without so much as a satellite or communications aboard the rocket) find him within minutes. It's assumed telepathy was involved. In a show of Kerboid ingenuity, the KSP technology exploded exponentially from the report Jebidiah had gathered. Multi-stage rockets were a reality, and a trip to the Mun was imminent! The first trip to the Mun was a simple fly-by, with Jebidiah writing his reports, and managing not to get thrown off of his ship. The second trip to the Mun would find him in orbit before returning home, and this brings us to the fateful day of the first Mun landing. Jebidiah was stoked. He has flown flawless missions, and played numerous games of hang-man with himself while outside of the ship and turned them in as reports. (Nobody read them anyway.) And now, he was to be the first Kerboid to walk on the Mun! Everything went as planned. The execution was flawless. Coming into the Mun's orbit flying low, with liberal usage of the SAS to keep the ship steady, Jebidiah finished off his last burn just as the lander touched down as if he'd been doing this for years. He may have broken three out of four legs off of the craft, but the engines were still intact! He dove out of his module, stumbling face down on the surface of the moon, and immediately grabbed what he'd come here for. His fourth... Pocket... of dirt. By now he had some fancy sciencey gadgets attached to his pod that he was instructed to "open" upon arrival. He did so, and wrote a "report" in the form of a rousing game of hangman that took him 10 minutes to figure out, then climbed back aboard his pod, and fired the engines at full throttle! As the lander's engines sucked the last of their fuel, he popped the final stage and was left with just a pod and a small rocket identical to that of his first flight, with a full tank of gas, and nothing stopping him from getting home! He gunned the rocket and started growing his apoapsis to leave the Mun. Just as his ships arch threw him into Kerbal's orbit, he turned turned the rocket 90 degrees to adjust his heading... And nothing happened... He tried again... Nothing... He smashed the keyboard in a panic... Nothing but the hum of the engines as the ship continued to accelerate and began to tumble. In sheer terror he started to smash the keyboard with his face, not keeping in mind that the spacebar would fire the final "phase zero." His pod detached from the rocket, and spun out of sight. Today, it is presumed that Jebidiah is still alive, circling somewhere out of Kerbal's planetary orbit, and living his life circling the sun and playing hangman. In the investigation after the incident, it was discovered that someone had forgotten to put batteries on the ship. More specifically, that the designers were not actually aware that the ship they had built took batteries at all. Bill and Bob Kerbal are next in line, and are currently in small-scale training maneuvers around Kerbal in preparation for a rescue attempt. It's estimated that this attempt will be carried out some time in the next 10 years. (This is seriously everything I've done since Saturday... I'm bored at work as I write this.)

* Note: I can't stress how important the North/South orientation of the two ships are. I managed my first dock without it, but MAN was it irritating... Just have to throw that out there. When you're placing your RCS thrusters on the ship, are you making sure to place them center-mass ONLY on the portion of the ship that's going to be docked? Nothing else should be attached to the ship at all at that point, not even a decoupler. Add the rest of the stuff AFTER the RCS thrusters are placed. That might be a gotcha, too.

LMAO! I've got another Kerboid in the same predicament. I'm going to try and rescue him tonight. I find that it's ALWAYS prudent to do a couple of corrective burns after the initial waypoint burn to get my distance from the moon just right. And always come in IN FRONT OF the moon to take advantage of the slight slow-down it will give you. (Coming in behind it will speed you up.)

Start at home: * Make a tiny ship. And by tiny, I mean nothing but the initial pod. * Have your character step out of the ship (EVA) immediately, and then right-click him. Write a report, take a soil sample, and get back in the ship. Free science points. * "Recover" the vessel. Dump all of your science points into the science branch as much as possible. You'll eventually get things like the thermometer, barometer, a capsule of goo, a science lab, etc. After you get each of these, take them to each planet (including Kerbal's launch pad!) and right-click them and use them at each location. You'll have the option of either transmitting the data home, or physically carrying it home. There's a finite amount of Science points you can get from any one method on any one planet. So if you transmit the data home, you'll have to make more trips, but if you carry it home, you can tap out all the points in fewer trips (3-4 instead of 10-15). There's also different "places" to take the data. Write a report and do your experiments in each orbit of the planets. Apparently there's also "near" orbits and "far" orbits for some, including the sun. Do the experiments on the planet's surface, and even at different locations on the surface (I've found at least two different points of interest on the Mun so far). Just keep doing the experiments everywhere you can think of, and then returning the data home. If you eventually get to the point where you can haul a science vessel out, then things really get interesting. This vessel can be used to repeatedly transmit data back, then RESET the experiments to do it again! You can start moving the vessel around from planet to planet and grinding science with it. (I've yet to manage to land the thing, I don't have all the parts unlocked to handle its size yet). Good luck!

Ahhhh, gotcha. I wonder how long before someone gets a multiplayer mod working, and then some lasers...

This seems to be a solution to a problem I do not have. I can access the navball in the map just fine. The problem is from map mode, I can't trigger stages. But yet, I need to also keep an eye on the Apoapsis WHILE I'm triggering stages. This requires popping back and forth between the map mode and the ship view during takeoff, which can be quite seizure inducing.

What about an overall level of difficulty option, like most games? Easy, medium, hard. For hard, you'd have the "deadly reentry" plus a lot of other things (more realistic physics, certain planets having atmospheres that otherwise wouldn't, etc.) Just give them the standard options.

What the what?! Is the kraken in the game yet? And will you be able to fight him off? And speaking of weapons, is there anything that can be used to destroy space debris without a mod?

Awesome response! Thanks! I was in the process of firing him off of the surface of the Mun, and then JUST as I was ready to turn him in the correct direction to return him to Kerbal's orbit, I lost control. It took me a few minutes to figure out what the heck was happening (while his throttle was still full-on) and by the time I had realized I REALLY needed to turn his throttle off, he'd started to pitch AWAY from Kerbal. I killed the throttle and he started to tumble. I tried gunning the throttle when I figured he was "kind of" pointing retrograde which only made the tumbling worse, and ended up bringing him out of Kerbal's orbit all together just as he ran out of fuel. Fortunately, I don't have the food addon yet, so his rescue isn't time sensitive, though I'd imagine he's very, very nauseous by now. As a general rule, I agree, though I have added three mods so far: 1.) Removes that ridiculous "wobble" from the joints. These things are made of steel and shouldn't look like they're made of rubber. It also REDUCES the strength of the joints to compensate for the wobble removal. In other words, stacked objects are far more stable, but also more "brittle". It reduces the pointless torque significantly while also making torque more dangerous. Thus, if something is going to start spinning, or take a blow from the side, it'll smash apart more realistically, but I don't need a bajillion struts to get a standard rocket off the ground. I believe this is the "Kerbal Joint Reinforcement" you mention. Personally, I think these should be the stock settings. Struts are entirely too necessary and unrealistic in the stock version. 2.) A mod that has a bunch of stuff that I turned off, but have kept ONE new gauge: The Apoapsis and Periapsis displayed on the regular ship interface. I really do think this should be a stock option. The maps should be for planning trips and maneuvers. I shouldn't have to rapidly and repeatedly swap between map and ship to try and time the cutting off of an engine and/or dropping of a stage (which I can't do from the map) correctly. 3.) A mod that adds an "Alarm Clock" that I've also mostly disabled. The only feature I've turned on with it is the ability to kill Time Warp just a minute before it hits the waypoint - another feature I firmly believe should be stock. In my defense, I'd say these don't really break the "stock" game, but rather "tweak" it to what I believe the stock should be. * FAR - Looking into that one and the Fairings now! * Deadly ReEntry - I've looked into this one, and am considering it, and the heat shield ones, but from what I've read in the comments, the heat shields are buggy. The "RealChute" I feel like would be a game breaker. In theory, if I can configure the chutes any way I want, there'd be no reason not to just give it settings making one chute the be-all end-all. If it's easy to cheat, I'll do it. I have no will power. I'd prefer to see something where someone had created a series of different types of chutes based on real-world limits. If I had that option, I'd definitely go with Deadly Reentry. * TAC Life Support - Totally going to add this. Probably sooner than later. Do you see little skeletons in spacesuits in your Kerboid window? Someone should make a mod where as they start to starve, their texture changes to make them look gaunt. Then after they die, they're laying there with the little "X" over their eyes. After a set amount of time, there's just a Kerboid skeleton. Morbid, yes, but I'd pay for that. * Kerbal Attachment System - I'm particularly interested in this one, but can't seem to find much about it other than very high-level stuff. Does it have any immersion breaking glitches? It looks brilliant. Anything I should know about? Thanks for the response! Great info!

Basically, I was just trying to figure out (without too many mods) how much a specific item weighed, vs. how much a specific rocket system could get into space. It's probably a super hack, but I ended up installing a mod that gives me 1, 5, and 10 ton "weights." Then I created giant "scale" object that I can connect the the weights to one end, and the ship to the other, then go to the launch pad to see what the balance looks like. I'm sure there's some mod that'll just give me total ship weight somewhere, but the only ones I found (MechJeb - which has what I consider "cheat" options, and Engineer Redux which gave way TOO much information and cluttered up the screen, not to mention required adding a not insignificant piece of hardware to the ship itself) were way too overly complex and added far too much to the game. I wish they'd just add to stock a very simple "total weight" at the top of the screen when building. In other news, I managed to rendezvous and dock for the first time last night! I also discovered the quick save / quick load option... Lord the amount of time this would've saved me... But due to an earlier mentioned issue with a poor Kerboid that is currently lost in the vastness of space and orbiting out of control around the sun, now that I know how to rendezvous, I can send out a rescue mission, getting my stats back to ZERO Kerboids lost to my Space Program! HANG ON JEREMIAH! I'MMA COMIN' FOR YA!

Gotta agree with this. If they don't end up making this option stock, I absolutely love the "Kerbal Alarm Clock". If you configure it just right, it will add NOTHING to the game except the ability to stop a warp at a predefined time (you set it) before a waypoint, so not much of a change from the stock game. Absolutely perfect. Thanks for the suggestion, Pursuedtank!

@ SRV Ron LOL! Your lander design is almost EXACTLY like mine, but the ship I used to get there (with less fuel, even) was far, far more convoluted and with way more stages. I'll have to give your design a try!