helaeon

My thought is the "cheaty" aspect, and I exploit it like crazy, is that you can land just about everywhere mine karbonite and reliably make fuel fairly quickly in lander sized amounts. Choosing a landing site requiring re-fueling on the surface gets more interesting if it would take a year to dig up enough at site A, but at site B it will take 30 minutes. So rate of extraction probably needs to be much lower and the concentrations generally lowered, except for some really hot spots. In those cases I think the fields should be a little bigger so a super precision landing isn't necessary. I'm not a super huge fan of consumable parts like drill bits. Maybe some sort of re-fit kit for certain substrates? I'm thinking like the Cacteye Telescope mod. You could use KAS to pop in a drill module or something, then maybe some kind of mechanic so you don't burn it out. If you're careful you don't have to worry about it though. That would require scouting and prospecting to know what bit to put in (reason to do EVA!), but if you brought a sufficient enough tool kit (weight penalty of course) you could do what I am now - but slower, and you'd need to think about what you're doing after you land, and there would be weight penalty. Then for bases you'd know what you're doing so you could bring a specialized drill that wouldn't be re-fitable and that would have certain advantages other than not needing multiple kinds of bits. Just some ideas.

Texture Replacer has a great feature now where it adds female Kerbals based on the name that the game generates (provided you feed it some female kerbal textures). Plus it adds some further variety to the Kerbals as well. So for the time being there is an option if you want to have girl kerbals. If you're good with some save & cfg editing you can make ones with custom names, then have specific textures for those named kerbals. Yes, I want this to be stock, yes I'd like the female model to be slightly different. Even if just for the reason that having kerbal variety makes the game appear more fleshed out, and makes them seem less disposable. It makes sense from a polish stand point as well. BTW I'm a Missoula, MT guy too.

Pre-Release version 0.2.0 from Dropbox. I took a look at the .cfg and comparing it to the other Karbonite drills (that do work) it's still using ORS rather than OSRX. I tried swapping that in the .cfg so it was like the other karbonite drills and it didn't work, so I imagine the animation call isn't right as well but I have no idea what the right one might be.

It appears the KA-625 Mini-Drill is broken in the pre-release (using Karbonite pre-release as well) if one only has ORSX installed. Animation won't play, and won't extract resources. Generator seems to work. Haven't tried any other parts yet.

Put it in windowed mode at your native resolution and in the launch options put "-popupwindow" with no quotes. Then it will be full screen, but actually in a window so it will run nicely in the background.

I was only having performance issues with a kerbal on EVA on the surface of Ike everything else seemed fine enough. Didn't happen when kerbal was on EVA in space around same vessel. Window was closed and installed in the stock toolbar.

I was having some serious performance issues with this. In flight, launch, or space EVA, it's fine no noticeable changes. But was doing an EVA on Ike and it was so slow that I could barely control the Kerbal. Once I removed this mod things were back to normal. KSP 32 bit, fairly modded, Win 8.1 x64, 16 gb ram, nvidia GTX 560Ti, i7 3770 if that all helps any.

Ran into a problem. When returning from a mission using a command pod where I've been "collecting science" to that pod. When I recover the vessel I get nothing. If I EVA a Kerbal before recovering the vessel and have them take the science from it first I get all of it. If I EVA the Kerbal and take the science, then put it back, then I also get it. It appears the game is using 2 different storage areas for the science in the command pods and it's not recognizing the mod container to find science reports. This is using .07.

I like the ideas you have for the modules. Greenhouse generating science is good. Maybe it could also slowly make rocket fuel/oxidizer/monoprop as you could grow algae or other plants which could make precursor molecules or do it for you (if you had the right strains and processing). Maybe a greenhouse that can do that would be a tech unlock and the regular greenhouse would generate only science. Or it needs to run for a while on each start-up before it can make fuels. Probably if it's making fuel then you'd need to feed it electricity. Then you'd have a way to re-fuel ships without necessarily getting into Karbonite but, if you've got Karbonite mining goodies on your base then you could make fuels much faster. I look at it as "What is the point, the purpose, to building a base?" especially in career mode. Why spend the funds, why go to the effort other than simply awesome? Maybe there should be contracts involved like "Have a greenhouse on Duna active for 75 days", "set up a power generation facility on another world", things like that. FinePrint does a lot of these things, maybe you could get them to support this too (it already supports a lot of mods)?

I think what RoverDude means is in the .cfg file the "name=" value is still the same as the one in the full MKS. KSP doesn't use the file name of the config for the "part" in game, but name =. ModuleManager also works this way. If you look there are lots and lots and lots of "part.cfg" and they don't conflict with one another because name=. Should read in the .cfg PART { name = USKL_Kerbitat module = Part author = ndiver based on RoverDude's work ...

When I was having the 6000m rocket fly away problem it was an old version of RealChute. Make sure you have the newest one and it stops happening.

I think the idea of science can and should be part of the learning about space science that KSP provides. One of the ways that we should be able to raise money in career is by doing science, so that would be a post-tech tree use for it. But having it be a mined resource with severely diminishing returns that go to zero isn't really ideal either. Basically why you do the science and how you do it would be the key thing I'd be looking at. Why might you want to set up a base? Why are surface landings so valuable? Why is a Kerbal better than a probe? I think maybe we should be able to collect items, such as surface samples... but maybe more kinds of samples maybe some mechanic where we can look for different things around our landing zone on EVA much like what the astronauts on the moon did. This could probably be procedurally generated and would be different at each landing site. I would like to see measurements from return trips regain their value because repetition is important in science. Comparing results over time is critical. Maybe even be even MORE valuable on that second or third trip because you are increasing the number of data points. Maybe even be directed to new sites because of what you learned the first time. That the big science doesn't come from the first flight, but a later one as the world is studied and better samples and measurements are returned based on what you're learning. I think some science like the gravity scan should be about mapping and remaining on station. I don't like the current mechanic of taking lots and lots of gravity scans. I think you should have a total you can get if you have a complete map, and any transmissions are partials up until that total. Then you can scan it again at a certain time interval later and you can get more science for the repeated measurement. Some measurements we'll find do not change over time and you cannot get more science over a certain maximum amount. That's one thing that could certainly be good is value of remaining on station. So building a space-station or a surface base makes certain experiments or contracts possible. I think splitting it out into separate fields is unnecessary. Biology is chemistry is physics. They're one in the same really (because really everything is physics). I think it's more important to find out what those experiments are then design missions to best do those rather than a 1 size fits all space craft that can extract all the science from a biome and sometimes worlds even with multiple biomes in a single flight. There should be a reason to keep visiting the Mun and Minmus rather than testing new designs. All of these ideas are looking at a non-tech tree implementation of science mostly. I know I'm starting to find less of a point to going places because I've read all the funny messages from the community science project and I've got a good way to max stuff out. Land, collect, take off, dock, repeat. I'd like to have a good reason to stay down for a little bit and more stuff to do once landed.

You could use a short tank or one of the adapter plates with cubic octagonal struts to make mount points for multiple engines. Then you can use alt+click (alt copy just like in photoshop and illustrator) to make a copy of the adapter tank to use to get the octagonal struts in the same spot. The alt-copy will bring your engines so you want to copy it before you attach the engines, then put decouplers on each of the LV-Ns, then put your adapter flipped upside down, then build the rest of your rocket. May not be super reliable. I know you said no mods, but for that sort of thing the procedural fairings in-line fairing piece can make this way easier and more reliable. Another option is to launch the payload upside down with the engines facing skywards. Then use a probe core at the top of the lifter stack right below the payload so your nav ball is oriented correctly.

I don't pay attention to launch windows... at all... I build a ship that goes where I want when I want.

The University I went to the biochem route went : Year 1: General Chemistry & Basic Lab, Basic Bio if you didn't have it in high school Year 2: Organic Chemistry & Lab, Cell & Molecular Biology. Year 3: Physical Chemistry, Microbiology, Instrumental Analysis. Year 4: Biochemistry, Biochem Lab I had very little inorganic chemistry only what was in general chem freshman year, high school chemistry. Physical chemistry was more the physics of chemistry. Particle physics and the physical properties of the electron mostly. There was a bunch of physics and calculus and stats and computer science and other courses not directly related to chemistry in there as well that I was required to take. Inorganic chemistry was year 4 for the pure chemistry majors. The only geology I had was in high school. 120 credits were needed for graduation, required degree courses demanded 87 if them university gen-eds required another 24 non-overlapping. There wasn't much room to cram geology in there. If I would have had extra credits and time I probably would have taken more pharmacy and microbiology classes than I did anyway. An utterly complete chemistry undergrad degree would have taken at least 6 years at that university minimum. Though I will say in my defense: Yes chlorine is removed from the atmosphere through various reactions (I did read your post before mine and know it is VERY reactive) but enough of it and the exposed surfaces that could react with it can't any longer they're totally saturated. The reaction is then reagent limited, in this case by the surrounding environment rather than the chlorine gas itself. Once photosynthesis started on Earth oxygen gas had to react with everything exposed to the atmosphere until it was completely oxidized and the saturation limit of oxygen dissolved in the oceans had also been reached, only then could the gaseous oxygen begin to concentrate. Life did this. Is it probable that enough chlorine would be concentrated on a planet that some life form could push enough of it into an atmosphere and being used much like oxygen is here it completely alters the chemistry of its planet then after that is complete concentrates it to the point that it is ever present? Nope not probable. Impossible? Also no. "Mess up everything like mad men" and completely alter the chemistry of the planet to the point that it becomes utterly dead? Yes because O2 very nearly did that here. Not trolling and maybe my bio-focus is causing me to over look something here that makes chlorine different under this model. Found this on PubMed which follows that same line of thinking : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21118026 Hydrochloric acid isn't really a solvent, the water is. The hydrochloric acid is an aqueous solution, so water is the solvent. There is nothing extraordinary about life chemistries in hydrochloric acid, because its still chemistry of water but with a ton of protons around, there's a whole ecosystem in your stomach that lives that way. Plants kind of live on electricity. The way chlorophyll works to capture a photon to moves an electron around to make sugars is absolutely bonkers. Really you use electricity a lot too, but not wires or AC current like we think of. Electrical potentials (voltage)? Absolutely critical for the functioning of your cells. Life is generally defined, as taught to me, as something that utilizes or transforms energy in order to grow and reproduce/replicate. Basically it is something with a metabolism. There is a fuzzy line there between chemistry and life though. You study what I did with biochemistry about DNA and proteins, which are clearly not life. Then you get into ribosomes, not life but closer. Next step up is a cell, well that's life clearly. So where was the line between a very important cellular part that is essential to life on Earth as we know it and a living cell? Where does that put viruses? There's a very strong debate going on right now on that topic. It's probably that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts as far as a cell goes.

I once thought that life using alternative elements to facilitate the chemistry of life was possible, then I got a biochemistry degree. None of the above. The answer is none of the above. Life will have to be carbon based because: That 2nd row of the periodic table is special. Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Fluorine in particular. Those second shell orbitals do some interesting things and allow for strong bonding and strong association to the nuclei sharing that electron (as there are only 2 other electrons in the 1s orbital blocking them from the nucleus). Carbon has something very special in its valence orbital hybridizing its s and p orbitals to create the tetrahedral bonding pattern, as well as being able to combine them different ways to create double and triple bonds. All of this allows for the extreme number of stable, covalent compounds with many many bonds allowing for macromolecules such as proteins. Something like silicon which has a similar valence orbital holds those electrons too weakly it can't do the chains (it behaves too much like a metal because the entire 2 s and 2 p orbitals are filled and blocking the nucleus from anything that bonds to it, which is what happens as you go down the periodic table and there are fewer and fewer non-metals until there are none). Nitrogen is capable of 3 bonds at a time but it really only behaves in that way when bonded to and around Carbon. When you start getting into N-N bonds nature wants to make nitrogen gas so those compounds are not super stable so chains are not going to happen with only nitrogen either. Oxygen does the same. And Fluorine is stupid reactive and a huge electron hog, and only capable of sharing one electron so no chains there either. Each element on the periodic table is special with special properties. At something like molecular scale chemistry which is what proteins do, your material selection must be perfect. There is only one atom that will suffice. It's one reason we have micronutrients like cobalt and manganese. There are reactions in our bodies that REQUIRE that to work and nothing else will do. Best is going to win out. In this case Carbon is the best, possibly only choice as the backbone of biological macromolecules. Now that doesn't mean there aren't chemistries involving carbon and molecules, particularly macromolecules, never seen or imagined on Earth. Another life form may use molecules other than amino acids, starches, sugars, etc to build something that is clearly life. I think this is highly probable actually. But those molecules will contain a lot of carbon. I'm not even convinced that water is necessary as a solvent, and if that were the case then you'd see chemistries entirely alien to what we know. This is why I won't rule out things like the chlorine atmosphere issue, but chlorine is almost as bad as fluorine and I don't see anything surviving in a fluorine atmosphere because I don't think life could start because it is SO reactive. But evolve to use it... maybe? Possibly in place of something like oxygen. It would control the step down to fluorination or chlorination rather than oxidation. Though halogens behave differently than oxygen and sulfur do in organic molecules and that may not work at all, but it's at least on the table I think. The energy demands to dechlorinate or defluorinate to create a cycle like we have on Earth with oxygen would be huge and stepping it down like the Krebs Cycle and fermentation do may not be possible. But, I would say this is actually far more possible than a life form that uses something other than carbon as the main building material in its macromolecules. Boron can form multiple bonds but those get weak over distance. You don't see the nearly bond agnostic bonds like you see in carbon where you are gluing stuff together, the electrons shift around but its a localized effect they don't cluster causing the molecule to not accept any more bonds. Biggest problem is with 3 bonds you are not going to be making 3 dimensional molecules (they'll be planar 120 degrees between bonds, or straight with one double bond and 1 single bond). 3d molecules particularly the idea of chirality are absolutely critical in biomolecules (the "order" the bonds are in matter, you get a different molecule because it's shaped differently even though the formula of the compound is the same). Boron does have some cool organic synthesis applications though but it won't be the backbone. You need something that can do at least 4 bonds of equal strength (depending on bonding partner of course).

You'll probably want to use the aggressive version of ATM. Basic version eases things very little. Also need to make sure you have profiles for all the mods you use. If the there's not a profile telling ATM to compress everything it won't work. There are also settings in the ATM configs that let you get even more aggressive about compression. You may also want to consider trimming down the parts in KW and B9 if you find there are ones you don't like and/or never use. Since the NASA pack I dropped KW and haven't really missed it and it made room for a lot of mods, also got away from B9 and have been using SpacePlane Plus instead. Also using Lack's SXT parts because they use the squad textures so very very light on the memory usage.

Never mind my PM RoverDude. Upon more fiddling with the bags in the VAB once you deflate them there is a "recharge" option and you can cycle them as much as you like. EDIT: So I was wrong. Alt-copy with them open and they get stuck open in the vab (still using tweakable everything)

It works! SO excellent! I did a pretty good landing at 25 m/s on my 25T lander with the medium bags (the same lander was previously being shredded by the earlier versions). I'm using tweakable everything, and the inflate-deflate controls get messed up if you inflate them in the VAB to see where you are placing the expanded bags then deflate them again before launch. Not a big deal. Great work.

To give you an idea the danger of fluorine and hydrogen fluoride in particular: When I was in organic chemistry in college hydrofluoric acid was something that we weren't really even allowed to talk about. If you were doing a hypothetical synthesis and busted out HF the solution was wrong. Stated reason was the absurd danger of it and carbon-fluorine reactions in particular. We did things with fuming (often north of 30 molar) hydrochloric, sulfuric, and nitric acid. We made gunpowders from scratch. But fluorine was too dangerous. I'm not even sure if there was any hydrofluoric acid on campus at all. Which interestingly, we're around fluorine all the time. Mostly in ionic form but carbon-fluorine chemistry too. Teflon is polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), which if you make it wrong explodes. Rocket fuels we know that's dangerous and there is some risk tolerance there for what we need it to do, but you're talking about reacting liquid lithium (also not really all that safe), with hydrogen (not safe, especially in gaseous form near oxygen), and fluorine... around things with carbon like steel, us, our plastics, and oils... yeah that's a bad idea. Here's a video about fluorine

When I was messing with adding the landing leg module to the config that did seem like it wanted to work, but I was missing the proper collider on the bag I bet and that's why it didn't work completely. What would happen is the bag would start to absorb the hit but then engines, legs, structure, etc would slam into the ground because there was nothing pushing back as the legs do. That would probably work well as long as the orientation of the suspension was correct and would support such a wide area of collider and shock absorption. I was using config values about triple the big landing legs but with only the parameters from the probe landing legs. Another thing I noticed was the bags tended to wiggle in their mount much like the AIES landing legs do. I wonder if maybe one of the wheel modules might work? Then if you hit too hard you could pop a bag using the broken wheel condition, but I suppose maybe you could do that with the broken leg condition as well. The way the suspension works on wheels as you traverse and strike terrain maybe that would work well for the bag? And you could probably set those broken conditions whenever the bag is deflated if you wanted a Kerbal to have to fix it on EVA so it will re-inflate?

WOO HOO! Thanks again for the work on this. I did fiddle with the config files and tried adding some other modules and tweaking their values and it didn't work out very well. I think you're right with the approach of tweaking the next part in line or making a special mounting point part or something. Pretty sure though that my inability to make any effectual changes has more to do with not knowing what I'm doing and shooting in the dark. I tried strutting to the bag cases pretty severely and that didn't work either. I'm not using Joint Reinforcement so not sure if some of the tweaks ferram was doing there might help or if that could be used to make all the joints on the ship more rigid when the bags are deployed kind of like KJR does when physics is loaded. I used to use it but once 23.5 came out I stopped.

I have an even newer one (June 7th) of the official edited one if someone wants to re-build the google doc using it. on Dropbox

First, thanks for taking these up and making them. I was so excited when I saw you were going to use the soccer ball bounce to make some proper air bags. I've been fiddling with these for about the last hour or two. If I connect the airbags to something like the 3 kerbal command pod like you did in the video - no explosions. As soon as other parts become involved... problems. So many explosions. Like, the airbags aren't even there explosions. Works fine if I land at 8 m/s or less but that kind of defeats the point. Is there a way to get the air-bags to cause the game to ignore the impact tolerance and breaking forces of the parts they are connected to while the air bags are deployed? Or, multiply them by something, or set it to something new (like 100 m/s)? Or, is it necessary to use structural girders (with 80 m/s impact tolerance) and attach the air bags to those? Though that girder thing doesn't seem to work either, as they snap off of what they are attached to. I observe the airbag that is striking the ground bend at the mount, then the explosions start. Is there a way to stop that bending? I've been trying to modify breaking torque and force in the config and that's not doing anything. Maybe a way to use suspension from modulelandinglegs? I might fiddle with that a bit. I've been wanting to make a landing system involving air bags for quite some time. These are so very close to being exactly what is needed. I do have the worldcup2014.dll installed.

It could be hardware related my first thought from those symptoms is video card. You may want to try doing a clean install of your video drivers. They're very complex and sometimes something doesn't get installed quite right But, the hardware may be the problem: You may also want to try a known good video card from the same manufacturer as yours, or try using the onboard video - if you have it - after removing your video card, and see if then it works as expected. If it does then there's something up with your video card. If it doesn't, then it's not the video card. If pulling the card makes things work then you have two routes to go - it could be heat related. Your case may be dirty preventing good cooling. Cleaning it up might fix the problem also look for cables that may be preventing the fan on your video card (or even processor) from spinning. Heat is most likely the issue if you're also getting unexpected shut downs. (The applications stopping can be the video card going... "aaaand I'm to hot - nope!") If you put the card back in after making sure the fans are spinning and it has adequate air-flow and it still behaves like you describe, and it still doesn't work after working with the known good video device, then the card is toast and you need a new one. If it's hardware but not the video card- the next routes to go would be that you've got a bad RAM stick (some BIOS will test for you. You can also use memtest but, I've had that tell me my RAM is just fine and it wasn't. Typically you remove a pair at a time, or a stick at a time if you only have two. If the computer behaves when one of the sticks is out but not when it's in especially by itself, then that stick is bad and you will want a new pair to replace that stick and its friend), could also be that your power supply is going and sending irregular power to your CPU and video card - this one is a bit harder to diagnose without flat replacing it. The next one is that something is up with your motherboard or CPU, there are utilities that you can use to test those but I've found they are somewhat unreliable. But, it's also not super likely those are the problem unless it's getting way too hot and you're cooking something. As jmiki8 said it could be a corrupted OS install as well. You would then want to back up your documents and do a format and clean install. Because it is possible if it's a corrupted OS a virus or other nasty piece of software is responsible. So you will want to do a scan from boot prior to the OS loading that will run through your memory to make sure that if you start over again with the software on your computer that it's actually clean and you won't be doing this again in a week. It could be malware alone and you may be able to clean it off of there, but I wouldn't trust that I got it all and do a format and re-install anyway. If its bad hardware a clean OS install will not help. Some would go here first because it's free. I know there's nothing that is going to mess up my OS, so I'm going to test the hardware first because that's more likely and if I'm stumped (as in I'm not pretty sure) then do the OS, and if its still broke then I KNOW its hardware and start looking into exactly what part now is needing replacing. All computers can be fixed. There is no reason to flat replace the whole box it unless all of the hardware is so woefully out of date that there is no point and the power supply and case you either hate, are under powered, or are proprietary.