helaeon

Reeaallllly wish there was a version of the contract for expanding an existing base.

Same. No deadly re-entry also on latest FAR. I was having similar problems with the .25 version as well. I tried the descent profile settings a bunch of different ways +180, -180, +-90, 0 none showed me the actual final answer. I wonder if something is being passed incorrectly to Trajectories from FAR. If it helps I'm flying a lander back so reasonably complex drag profile.

It could be and I could see how it might be it as I was only seeing it regularly on Minmus. The 10 or so that I've done on the Mun I've yet to see it happen. Could be the one on Kerbin was an anomaly. I have another survey involving "flight above" for 3 waypoints on Minmus. I'll edit this post and let you know using this latest version. Update: New distance read-out is working as expected. ETA counter is a bit interesting... doesn't work when in orbit, gives read-out when landing but it does get goofy, bounces all over the place when bouncing over the surface on EVA (tested on Minmus). Works awesome when jetpacking or in-flight in atmo. To me the distance read-out is the important one and it works great.

Just tried shiney shiney new version with latest FAR. And that pile of errors disappeared from the test build. so yyaaayyy!

Okay... so I have a weird one related to actual distance to waypoint again: Distance to waypoint on the ground always works exactly as it should. So that's fixed. If I walk a kerbal up to the waypoint on the ground it shows 0.0m (or something close enough to that). The weird one comes on aerial surveys and ones you can do by zipping over in orbit or a sub-orbit (I'm exploring minmus right now). What happens maybe 30-40% of the time is the distance shown is way, way off, but other times it is exactly right. I'm thinking it may have something to do with northern and southern hemisphere. The one I just had that happen with is in the south, and the one I remember working correctly was in the north. Not 100% sure on that one, probably not because now that I'm thinking about it I had that happen on an aerial survey where all the nodes were north of KSC (I think). Two of the Three points read correctly, the third said it was over 100km away but I was right on top of it. Flashed and everything (same with these ones around Minmus) EDIT: After further testing it seems to have nothing to do with the hemisphere. Just did two around the Mun that were in the southern hemisphere and were correct. So no idea why some are off by a lot or what might be causing it. Have I mentioned how great this mod is? Survey missions are my favorite now. I like having the waypoints for walking Kerbals on EVA. Usually they are 2-3 km away from a central landing place so being off by a little bit would have you off by a lot, and that translates to not fun pretty fast. Especially with the map view switching that must be done to get pointed in the right direction.

Same issue as Baythan and same builds of Trajectories and FAR, also ton of mods. Does this in space (orbiting Minmus when I tried to turn it on). Prior to the release of .90 I was having a similar problem but thought it might be related to the MkIV spaceplane parts not playing nice with FAR... but maybe related?

Well if you want such a thing there's KIDS http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/52882-0-90-Kerbal-Isp-Difficulty-Scaler-v1-4-2-12-16-14 Then you could adjust your contract rewards to give out more funds.

I think you should get XP for each mission and I'm not really entirely sold on a cap for a certain body, however some stuff should be worth more than others and the experience received should be based on class. For example: Pilots can get XP for flying survey missions. They get more off-world, but you can get 1 xp per flight on Kerbin and level one up all the way... but they need to be doing a survey contract to get it (or maybe amount of xp earned for the lead pilot can be stated in the contract, any additional pilots or non pilots get half that.). Certain burns and maneuvers would also give some, as would landings. Basically flying stuff. Engineers get XP for serving time on bases or space stations. Basically they get XP based on time in orbit. Maybe could do something involving resource extraction contracts. Scientists get XP for collecting science and going on EVAs. Their XP is based on the science they have transmitted or returned. The body they do this from is a lesser thing than that they did these things. That way you could train up a crew in the Kerbin System before sending them to Duna or Jool if you wanted to.

This is excellent. Thank you. While doing a survey on the Mun I noticed that the distance to the waypoint didn't take into account terrain altitude vs above sea level altitude. So even though the marker showed on the ground at my kerbal's feet it said I was about 5km away (Which happened to be my altitude ASL). Not a huge deal. Having the marker there is a game changer.

I've used enhanced navball for a while and that scaling ability is great, which is part of what got me thinking it would be pretty neat if the widget stayed the same size on your screen but it would zoom in on the center of the ball (though i think individually scalable and positionable widgets would be a great feature generally). For example if you are on S, you can see the edges of E and W on the nav ball but when you hit precision controls maybe you'd only be able to see 45 degrees to either side and your controls would be padded to match with a touch of a button (toggle precision control). Then you hit it again and your nav ball and controls go back to normal. I think it would be really slick and something beyond what navhud and enhanced navball do.

I've been playing with NAV HUD and realizing that I like the precision I can point on to a maneuver node with because the navball it's projected on a much larger area. Which, got me thinking about the Navball and precision controls. I play with a gamepad, so when I toggle on precision controls it doesn't actually work. Not with the D-Pad (thinks it's a joystick axis) and not with either stick. I hear the joystick folks are in the same boat. So, what if precision control toggle zoomed in the navball significantly, possibly in a configurable way, for more precision on the nodes. This would also be nice for targeting center of mass on asteroids. Then in doing so the controls would actually be nerfed so the ball seems to move about the same as it would if it were normal, but of course if it were zoomed in you'd actually be covering far less area so the controls would actually be precision.

I think Engineers are going to be fairly valuable to modders shortly. I will be surprised if Roverdude does not take advantage of the Engineer tag for his bases and have those kerbals have special powers as far as those go. Possible that KAS will be going to Engineers having special abilities or parts only being able to be removed safely or attached by engineers.

KER seems to be supplanting MechJeb in my game for a lot of functions - especially the HUD. That leads me to a request for some readouts under rendezvous: Synodic Period (not super necessary but nice) Heading to Target (I use this one mostly when piloting ballistic trajectories between landings and ascents to a mothership) Relative Velocity at Closest Approach Distance at Closest Approach Time to Closest Approach

I'm getting this one too. It happens when you have a flight going, exit the game, and re-enter it switching to the flight from the tracking station. I just did a one at a time mod re-adding and problem went away after removing tweakscale and came back when I put it back so pretty sure it's tweakscale. To see if maybe a mod conflict this is what I have going : All of RoverDude's mods except sounding rockets. FAR Firespitter KAS KER MJ RealChute ScienceAlert StageRecovery TextureReplacer TweakableEverything All of my mods are the very latest versions and only the .90 updated ones

One thing I always try to remember in a xenobiology context is: it's probably weirder and involving chemistries, physiologies, metabolisms, and mechanisms we will never think of on our own. We've yet to exhaust even what is possible using our biochemical and cellular setup. I love when we find things like the black smokers because a lot of people who thought they had the limits figured out and claim things impossible have to eat their hats. (In that case biochemistry working well in excess of boiling temperature, multicellular, and thriving!) Yes, the way we do things on Earth could be incredibly efficient and really the "best" way so you'll see life everywhere trend in that direction regardless of their chemistries. What if that life is using a genetic molecule different than ours? What if this molecule self replicates differently? What if it's manner of randomness is different (rather than the process of meiosis it does something different)? What kind of reproductive necessities would come about in the creature's behavior because of those differences? An example would be that in plants an individual possessing multiple genomes can be hugely beneficial where as in animals that is absolutely deadly. Just because multiple genomes present in an animal will kill them well before birth, doesn't mean in every organism that must be true. As long as physics allows it and the chemistry is reasonably efficient. Life could try it somewhere that something else that is efficient, like what we do, hasn't already taken hold. It must also be remembered that you see highly conserved features among large swaths of the tree of life because there was one organism that started going down that path, and all the life after it shares traits with that one organism. That doesn't mean all those traits are required, some were, but not all. Example is bony fish and sharks. There's no reason that sharks couldn't have went the direction the bony fish did and ended up evolving traits needed to live on land and we'd all have properties derived from shark bodies rather than bony fish. (Neil Shubin's Inner Fish explains this idea really well) Again though the plausibility comes back to the demands of the biochemistry. Like a genetic molecule with more than 2 strands. There would be no point in 3 or 4 and would needlessly complicate the organism's metabolism and reproduction. Error correction could occur via some sort of parity rather than proof reading proteins, but how would that work chemically using very weak bonds and how would that correction occur spontaneously? In a low population situation you don't want to require more than 2 individuals needed to make offspring, preferably as many as possible to replicate those genes as much as possible. Kerbiloid posted about the Selfish Gene, that's the idea here. Each gene, each idea, wants to replicate as much as possible. Successful ones do and become nearly ubiquitous in the population and deleterious ones exist in low concentration. Neutral ones are often common but as they don't hurt or hinder can flux in concentration in the population. Anything that defeats this dynamic in the function of reproduction will itself be out-competed by a method of reproduction that obeys this idea.

Just a thought about the base contracts... instead of having to build an all-new base could there be an option to expand an existing base rather than start over? Does the contracts system even support "do this" or "do this instead" and it completes the contract?

I saw earlier in the thread you can't do much about it but thought I'd leave the bug report anyway: A mission to do an aerial survey above Duna at 810-1440m was generated and it was near Duna's south pole. This window was about 1500m below ground level at both waypoints. I tried flying around looking for a hole I could drop down into and nothing. I am on version .59, also have all the detail and terrain settings turned all the way up.

I have a suggestion: Could asteroids have an internal part value of some kind even if they aren't scanned? That way one could land it rather than mining in space and then if you recover that vessel they could yield funds. Maybe could also make asteroids not neigh invincible too.

Biochemistry degree here: N2 has a triple bond and few organisms possess a metabolism that can break it effectively. Nitrogen is needed to make amide bonds. So every amino acid needs a nitrogen that's been liberated from that triple bond. Nitrogen is also needed to make nucleotides. It's a very very biologically necessary material and its very plentiful, but life can't use most of it. If the blight organism had an enzyme that could make its own ammonia, nitrate, etc from N2 in the air efficiently it would be a big deal and could have a huge survival bonus. Likely we would want to study this organism and turn it to our own purposes to make fertilizer cheaply. Fungi and bacteria do this for us in the soil and fertilizes plants but slowly and at a huge energy cost usually requiring "free" sugars from the plant, as the plant cannot do this themselves. What they can't do we add through fertilizers. If the blight organism crowded those fungi and bacteria out out or killed them and kept the liberated nitrogen for themselves and didn't pass it on or in a form that the plants could use that would be a huge, huge problem. You would see crop failures of many species because of it. Yes, we could still use fertilizers though. Ammonium Nitrate in particular. But, if the blight organism used up all of that or otherwise made it un-available for plants as well again huge problem. The organisms in Interstellar probably wouldn't be using the nitrogen to fuel themselves, such as through respiration, but build as they'd be putting a ton of energy in to breaking that bond. This wouldn't be the piece of their metabolism that caused the blight, it would be something else maybe related to the fact they could make biologically useful nitrogen compounds on their own. Possibly creating some sort of novel anti-fungal. antibiotic, or herbicide using that part of their metabolism. So that isn't really that absurd as some life on Earth already has a metabolism that can take atmospheric nitrogen and use it, and it's essential for life but it's done in a symbiotic way rather than a parasitic or cancerous(?) way. Edit to add: it's generally a bad idea to wall off things life can do with chemistry. Once you think something is impossible you find some organism that can do just that.

Even with the DLL mechjeb won't calculate the aerobrake correctly. What you want is Trajectories

On the newest version it seems like when you scale the stock radial RCS containers the weight scales appropriately initially but upon reloading the file the scaled tanks return to their original dry weight but retain their physical size and fuel volume. I'm not sure if it applies to any other items.

1469. Will be adding to that shortly when this monster file finishes saving in Illustrator

It is editable. If you click on the KER button and then the edit button on the hud you want to move you'll see a background show up. You can then click and drag that window you'd like it can also add other huds so you can have your value read out wherever you like them.

Location of the docking port actually isn't super critical. It only gets annoying if you get up to dock and decide you'd like to orient the spacecraft a little differently, then when you rotate it you'll need to translate it because the ship rotates around its center of mass. Location of the RCS ports absolutely is critical, each port should act on the center of mass equivalently. On space planes I find the linear ports are really handy as you can put them directly through the center of mass and only worry about one translation axis. Or equally spaced away from it to get an even push against the center of mass. Same principle as balancing multiple engines on a space plane to not get rotation. The RCS build aid mod is super super useful here as it will show you your rotation on an axis if you click to place a RCS part at a certain place.

Found a bug in Agents.cfg Path for the agency logos is incorrect and prevents a new save from generating contracts. says "Squad/Agencies/..." rather than "RealChute/Agencies/..." Changed it on my install and it fixes things right up.