problemecium

Addendum to my previous entry: I got on a roll as soon as I didn't have docking bugs to worry about, and I ended up launching fueling missions 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 for my Jool-5 mothership (out of a projected 25). Then I made this diagram: More information via my signature.

More details via my signature.

More details via my signature.

More details via my signature.

Part Seven: Math According to some back-of-envelope calculations, I'm either going to have to make roughly 25 runs with the existing fuel tanker or invent a significantly larger one. Thus for obvious reasons I'm not going to pollute this album with documentation of every single one of those repetitive missions. The typical profile for the missions so far (currently five have been completed and five more are in progress) is simple: the launch vehicle brings the tanker to orbit; the tanker separates and sets a rendezvous course with Kidonia; then, while the tanker is en route, the launch vehicle returns to Kerbin and is recovered. While the launch configuration costs nearly 200,000 funds, with a recovery near KSC the net mission cost is closer to 7,000 for each run - essentially just the fuel costs (disclaimer: my math may be wrong). 25 such missions should end up costing a total of around 200,000 funds, just barely within my space program's current budget. Here the launch vehicle is pictured returning to Kerbin after dropping off a fuel tanker. Despite KSP 1.0.4's reentry heating buff, the drag supplied by the large empty tanks keeps the rocket going slowly enough to not burn up - just barely. The air brakes probably help too, although I haven't run a test on that specifically. ADDENDUM I'd originally planned to post this later, but I got too excited and couldn't wait. Without further ado: This diagram explains all the major components for the mission, including how Kidonia itself is constructed. Assuming everything goes to plan, this is how the ship is going to be configured when it departs for Jool.

That's exactly what I tried to do. The Newtonian orbits were what had hung me up xP

Today was a sad day for my space program. I finally got fed up with the recurring docking bugs plaguing my LKO ring station (see http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/124103-PartJoint-None-of-the-provided-nodes-was-valid%21) after they struck today for the zillionth time, so I hacked my persistence file and "recovered" it (the plan being to launch a duplicate). Thus I bid farewell to my awesome ring station :C I think I'll try building a new ring station with the same basic layout, and if I get those docking bugs all over again I'll conclude that they're probably the result of KSP getting confused about loops in the part tree. Alas, if only I were a dev and had the KSP source project I bet I could cure this :\

I predict that this new antenna occlusion thing will be rather like the 1.0 aerodynamics. First, people will rage about it because it makes things harder and more complicated. The realism idealists will rebuke them at every turn. Eventually people will adjust to the new status quo (in some cases begrudgingly), but General Discussion will for a few weeks be flooded with "My probe not work, pls help" threads. After a few months people will accept it as the way things should be and wonder how KSP could have been considered complete without it.

1/10 for not being a spaceship... yet? Perhaps something like this?

"I'd like some chicken tenders please, but only the small ones. The big ones have too many antibodies and that makes them taste funny."

At this rate SQUAD's going to have to remove this feature to avoid forum spam. It will become a melancholic legend of old just like the Magic Boulder... :\

I just figure that A: perhaps the helmet doesn't come off, so the Kerbal would have to take off the whole suit, and B: Kerbals are aquatic. We can't go underwater, so for all we know there are vast cities down there. Indoors they can climate-control the buildings to keep them humid so they don't dry out, but in general it's too inconvenient to build cities on land. The KSC is only on land because launching from the seafloor would be a huge pain.

Hmm. Most of this thread is irrelevant to me, but I do concur on the issue of a map marker for KSC. It's a little silly that one of the first things I do in a new Career is go plant a flag so I can see on the map where KSC is at night xP

^ This. No timewarping or unlocking is necessary. Just reject them. There is no penalty for rejecting contracts at the outset (only for canceling after accepting them), and new contracts will spawn to ensure you always have some available. If you reject a lot in a short span, the game might fall behind, in which case do something else (or timewarp if you like) for a few hours and a new batch will appear.

Housekeeping and more housekeeping today. I sent up what I believe are the fourth and fifth fueling missions for my Jool mothership, mopped up some leftover Science from the Mun, and sent a small ion probe on a rescue mission.

I may have made a slightly older save a long time ago when I did an Eve rescue mission, but within the last couple years (wow, it's sure been a while) my longest running save is my current 1.0 career save, which today reached Day 180. In that time I have cleared all but four or five nodes in the tech tree, strip-mined the Mun and Minmus for Science (except for the Mun's poles), posted a station in Munar orbit, scanned Kerbin for Ore (just to see if I could) and constructed (but not yet launched) a giant mothership for a trip to Jool. What I haven't done, lousily enough, is go to any other planets yet (in this save) xP

After another short break, I got back to KSP today and reworked a couple of my launch vehicles based on the adjusted aerodynamic model. Drogue chutes are very important now! I also seem to be getting an impression that launches go faster now, with my apoapsis breaking 70km before I know it, even if I start my gravity turn on the ground xD

Docking is like riding a bike. The first time you try, you'll spend hours on end falling on your face (at least figuratively) and having to start over and try again, but once you've got it you've pretty much got it. Once you've mastered basic docking, it's not a big step up to other things like multi-docking, docking without RCS, etc.

I admit I have KSP dreams now and then too. In fact I had one today and didn't want to get up because I wanted to keep playing. Then I remembered that unlike most dreams, I can play KSP in real life xD

These aren't bad, but if you are planning to upload several ships in rapid succession, I recommend starting a thread in Spacecraft Builders rather than multiple threads in here. No worries, you don't actually have to pretend to be a company to post there.

O_O DANG. That's actually a really good replica, and no offense to the others but much better than any previous attempts I've seen. Good job!

The Starship of the Imagination, because my Eve ascender only exists in my imagination xD I have never built a successful Eve ascent vehicle, nor have I visited Eve at all in KSP 1.0.

And here I was feebly hoping someone had either discovered an ingenious solution or had a hilarious joke to tell. The above posters are right. 500 parts is a huge rocket and beyond what any normal computer running KSP should be able to handle smoothly. The update to Unity 5 is expected to help to a limited degree, but I would still expect to have trouble with hundreds of parts. If you are desperate and have a budget, you could buy a computer with a high core clock speed. KSP currently does not capitalize on multithreading, so multiple cores will do you no good - what matters is the CPU clock, i.e. at how many GHz it runs. Few computers go higher than 4 GHz.

Currently, no. I'm just toying with some space stuff in my spare time. I could try to make a procedural universe, but with stuff like SpaceEngine, Elite: Dangerous, and No Man's Sky out there already I'd have to quit school and start working full-time to come up with something that'd stand out. Maybe in a few years :\