problemecium

Yes, indeed. If a spacecraft does not rotate at all, then on opposite sides of its orbit it will be facing opposite cardinal directions (i.e. the opposite way on the navball). Real satellites that need to maintain orientation relative to Earth have a few different ways of doing this. One such way is gravity gradient stabilization. One end of the satellite is made to weight more than the other, and because Earth's gravity is ever so slightly stronger on that end, a tiny tidal force is generated that keeps the satellite pointed the right way. This is, technically, simulated in KSP, but not applied during timewarp, so the only way to leverage it would be to leave the satellite in question focused at 1x time speed forever... but we can already guess that's a bad idea.

That "weldable ports" thing - I literally requested a mod like that like two years ago. I'm so glad someone finally got to making it! It's like a dream come true.

I second the concerns over the fate of Porkjet's parts overhaul. This announcement comes as such a surprise to me that I'm actually suspicious it's a hoax. It's nowhere near April Fool's Day, but still... wut o_O

I DID IT! I finally caught up on all 67 chapters of this thing. Whew. Since you've indicated that you're concerned about spelling, allow me to take the liberty of pointing out some of the mistakes you've been letting slide most often: - "It's" is a contraction of "it is;" for "something that belongs to it" you're supposed to use "its." Yes, it seems backwards, but that's how our crazy language works xP - A hanger is something that hangs things. Where planes are stored is a hangar. Think about the "ar" at the end being like the "ar" in "airplane" ...actually never mind, that mnemonic's dumb. - Breath is the thing you exhale when you breathe. I recall there being a few more but I forgot what they were. I'll mention it if I start seeing another one pop up frequently

I'm sure many others have fond memories of the various Kerbal History threads (and perhaps some less fond memories...), but as I recall they were all plagued by one problem above all others: They kept starting at the dawn of civilization and prophesying that the "current" year was some number like 5000, and as a result we ended up with silly figures like the Jebediah being 3000 years old, and also we missed out on important events in prehistory. So here's my go at it. In this edition we start at the current year, i.e. Year 1, Day 1, 0h, 0m as displayed whenever one of us takes control of a new save game. Then we go backward just a little bit at a time, listing important events that led up to that point and then what events led up to those. The game will of course end when we reach the Big Bang, but who's to say how many billions of posts that will take? Rules! - No repeated MLP, Homestuck, Doctor Who, etc. references. I hate to call out specific fandoms like this but we've all seen what can happen. If the Kau or the KIONICLEs want to make one or two cursory appearances I won't press F9, but we'll all be sad if the thread derails and crashes. - Don't jump back zillions of years at once. I don't want to see the second or third post be "Year -13750000000: The Big Bang. Thread Locked." - No other horrible thread-killing events. Since we're going backward in time it's very hard to say "Year 5: Kerbol explodes," but I don't doubt people's creativity in coming up with ways to ruin everything. ;P - No going forward in time! If someone violates Rule 2 and jumps back too many years, you can try to fill in the gap with a few events, but don't go forgetting and posting stuff going forward in time or we'll all get very lost and confused very fast. - I reserve the right to add a few new rules in case some nasty contingency appears. Also if a post is exceptionally stupid I reserve the right to mark it as "non-canon," but as much as possible I'd like to leave it to the people in the thread to fix problems with clever narratives. Examples last few events, to get the ball rolling: Year 1, Day 1: The official Kerbal Space Program opens its doors for its first day of business at the newly constructed Kerbal Space Center. Late Year 0 BK (Before Kerbal Space Program): The Mark 1 Pod memorial is erected to commemorate the long service of the now-retired Mark 1 Pod. Three of the last remaining original rocket parts are transported to the Island Airstrip to be stored and preserved for posterity. Year 0 BK: The old northern Kerbal Space Center closes its doors for the last time and most of its employees are transferred to the new equatorial Kerbal Space Center. (From here we count up BK years the same way we count up BC years on Earth, i.e. 10 BC was the year before 9 BC.)

It may have been asked already, but this thread leaves me personally with only one question: Has anyone really ever been so far as even go want to do look more like?

Perhaps these changes in 1.2 will finally cure the plague of asparagus rockets with flat-topped cylindrical tanks bulldozing their way through the atmosphere. ;P

I think he means that, but now that it's been brought up, why DON'T we have a Size 1 cargo bay? It seems like an odd thing to be missing.

Pfft. And here I was expecting to see you abusing the "landed while in space" bug (that thing that goes "cannot timewarp while moving over terrain" even though you're obviously in orbit).

- I use docking ports as decouplers so much I've all but stopped using actual decouplers. I've slowly started trying to retrain myself now that decoupler crossfeed is configurable. (I exclusively use stack separators as cannonballs xD ) - I frequently create spacecraft that only exist as subassemblies. As far as I can tell the .craft files are the same either way, so why have two when I can have just one? - Related to the above, I frequently use fairing bases as the root part, which I have a hunch is somehow bad. Occasionally I also use fairing bases just to get the extra nodes and scaffolding, e.g. on my latest experimental Portable Station, without making any use of the actual fairing feature. - Every once in a while I use hardpoints as landing legs. - I've always been against the willy-nilly use of the cubic octagonal strut for forcing radial attachments due to its tiny size and shape and how ridiculous it looks to have big engines and tanks attached through it. Consequently I do this using other parts such as the small nose cone, e.g. on my "LV-Nx4" engine pod subassembly wherein the nose cone's high heat tolerance is vital. - I use large wings or I-beams to stab through fairings and trick struts into attaching to the fairing walls. - While it's not a part, I horrifically abuse the Offset feature to get around having to use external fuel lines and various radial attachment adapters.

This sounds a lot like the old SAS behavior, and I do want that back as an optional mode. In fact I'd like two new modes: - Hold the current bearing as tightly as possible; if the ship is forced away from it, turn back as soon as it's possible to do so again. This would help a lot with things like asteroids where the centers of mass and thrust are out of alignment and the ship starts to swerve during long burns. Rather than having to manually reset the heading, it'd be nice to have the SAS do it. - Hold the current bearing relative to the parent body / navball; if the pilot turns to face, for example, heading 225 degrees at 30 degrees above the horizon, maintain heading at 225 and 30 even as the craft moves around in its orbit. This would be very helpful in reentries and aerobraking maneuvers, in which the ship is likely to need to hold a specific angle relative to its descent path even as that path curves around with the terrain. Alternately the old SAS behavior could be toggleable for all available SAS modes.

This is me prodding the thread to see if there's any news on NavBall Docking Alignment Indicator and KSP 1.2. Is work being done? Has anyone tried to run the existing version? Does it work?

Sounds like in-the-box thinking to me. I can easily imagine with a decent budget someone could design an engine tailored to survive sea landings. And what about landing on a barge, hmmm?

Yes, would you mind taking some screenshots with the Sun shining on it? I've seen troublesome nighttime shots plenty of times, but these are all but completely black.

"Legal action?" Whatever could the Kerbalmaps people have done? Surely it isn't an attempt to defend SQUAD's copyrights o_O

I all but categorically refuse station contracts unless they restrict themselves to only requiring a small minimum crew and the accessories. In fact I'm likely to refuse them if they dare to ask for more than six Kerbals.

Why no water recoveries? What's wrong with landing in the water? Heck, SpaceX's Falcon 9R lands on water, if you don't count the barge as "land." ;P

I start a new Career save nearly every major release (the only exception so far being when I ported my 1.0.5 save into 1.1), but my old installations I compress into a 7-zip archive and stash on an external backup drive.

A butte is a very small plateau.

If I may offer one more bit of subjective advice to the OP: You'll get friendlier responses if you adopt a humble attitude and direct your anger only at the problem and not at the developers or at the game itself. That means not throwing around words like "crap" and "unplayable." When the rest of us see stuff like that, for most our first response is either to ignore the post or treat the author as a noob.

Nope. Sometimes I get lucky and tweaking helps, but usually when I have this problem I find no combination of spring strength and damper strength will stop it. And yes, Terwin, you and I seem to be talking about the exact same bug, and alas, it hasn't gone anywhere.

An interesting paint job the thermal overlay. I turned it on so you couldn't see the parts and therefore how big it is. ;P EDIT: So what Jade said xP

Following my new tradition of making every iteration of my Jool mothership significantly larger than the last just for the heck of it, here we see the prototype hull of my latest version. I'm still not sure I made it big enough though...

Like how I used the thermal overlay as a spoiler tag? xD

I don't think this is a practical idea. You may have noticed that the little orange autostrut line all but invariably goes right through parts, so if it were a physical object you're basically doomed to have horrendous kraken-bait part clipping all over everything.