helaeon

I knew there was something special going on when I saw the view from orbit the first time in the demo... Probably took me a couple of weeks until I really understood what was going on and could think intuitively about the trajectories my ship was going to take... Now almost 4k hours in I do a lot of things without even bothering to make a node (or can fix an emergency situation if necessary)... Started really feeling right when I quit trying to fly with the keyboard and mouse and got out my Xbox controller. I ran most of the historical missions, or a version of them, to learn how to do all the things NASA thought were necessary to know in the 60s. It's a good way to learn it. About the time I was done with Apollo 11 I could do about anything. I think what stood out as how amazing KSP really is... is seeing how open it is to modding code wise and how generally cool our modders are to people that want to help and learn (players generally being cool actually - especially to new people - is something that's prevalent through the whole community). It's very special. I've been doing modding of some kind or another for quite a few games, Skyrim, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Unreal, Quake, Half-Life 1 & 2... on that front KSP is something else and it's one reason the game has the legs it does and we can play it for years.

Really like the new kerbalized Dragon (Rodan). Just ran a mission with it and the docking port shroud caused some problems... Could there be a non-shroud or a flip 180 degree option?

@jd284 very good. Something to note: I wrote the angular momentum conservation mode. The reason it's there is so you don't get free energy (or at least not as much as conserving velocity). As you climb out of the gravity well you have to give up your kinetic energy for potential energy and vice versa. You describe this effect pretty well. I do agree that the velocity mode is much simpler and easier to understand. The conservation modes were meant more as a gameplay option than to solve a delta-v problem. Also, that multiple slingshots work with angular momentum mode, they don't with velocity. That's what got me to write it in the first place. Also didn't like that when I went from Kerbin to Eeloo suddenly I had enough energy to escape the solar system. That just seemed... wrong.

I was using the fusion reactors for quite a few things, so hacked my saves to not mess up any vessels. Thanks for making the name-change easy to swap in Are there plans to use ChargedParticles for anything? Any need for radiators? Or for now does chargedparticles behave like Thermals and are just a dummy resource that fills up and doesn't do much?

Not really seeing a huge problem with your rocket. I'd just move the SRBs down so all your first stage rocket motors are even. TWR off the pad might be high, so you might want to just keep your throttle down. I usually want to take off at a TWR of about 1.6 and start the gravity turn about 100m/s With high gimbal engines, sometimes the gimbals point the wrong way when added in symmetry (happens on low gimbal too, but it's not as big of a deal). You might want to add them on one at a time. I'm also seeing too much control authority there. Many of the vibrations are caused by the vectors occillating back and forth setting up a harmonic. Might want to turn down the gimbal range. Some aero fins are probably a good idea too. Not 100% necessary but I find they can make a big difference, and don't have a huge loss of Delta-V when they don't. I'd put those on the core stage, and two on the drop tanks. Location of your root part matters too. I've built space stations with their root part far away from the SAS and on the edge of the craft and it vibrates itself apart. If I move the root closer to the center it's better. It's also better if your SAS modules are near the center of the craft as well. Definitely autostrut across any docking ports or decouplers. Those LV-Ns should be moved out away from the core of the ship just so those nozzles are clear before decoupling that rhino stage (I'm assuming the reason you did that is because that's not meant to be staged right away, or is meant to be replaced later. If you're not making a replaceable stage use a normal decoupler rather than the seniors) This thing I'd be using autostruts across any docking ports, and on those boosters and drop tanks. the swaying is from the payload in the fairing, so autostrut that for sure. For flight I'd use that docking port at the very top as my control point. You just draw the camera inside the fairing and do "control from here" I don't know of a way to change it in the VAB. Hope that helps Doing the above just real quick I was able to fly it to a 150x150 orbit without too much problem. Little wobbly at the start but then it's fine. Ended on the Rhino stage with about 1100m/s delta-V

I think there may be something up with your setup because I have a i7 3770K w/ 32gb of DDR3 and I usually get 30 fps. I'm rocking SVE (medium res), Gallileos planetary textures as well, Scatterer... and on and on. I have a VERY modded setup. My Delta Physics is set at .04. Running a nVidia 960 video card too. I have to get something like 200+ parts in a vessel before my timer starts ticking to yellow, and that's just momentary (x64 KSP can multithread by vessel, so as long as you don't dock those bases into huge part monstrosities it does pretty well even with lots of parts in-scene, as long as they're not one vessel). Aero can bring it into the yellow but the game is still smooth and I think most of that is due to the re-entry and mach effect shaders, once that goes off I'm back to green land. Now I'm wondering if I tick the physics delta to .05 if I might be green nearly all the time... Something that KILLS your FPS regardless of the rig is lights. The more lights you have... the worse it is, and that's a per-scene issue. So if you have 16 lights on your ship, yeah you're going to have a bad time.

It might be useful to look at how small head-lamps are made and what components they use. I have a tikka lamp sitting here on my desk, and the LEDs and reflectors are small enough you might be able to fit something onto a glasses frame. You might even be able to find a lithium ion battery pack that would fit in there too so no need for a power pack on your belt. Whole thing could be self-contained. All of the LEDs have reflectors built around them so I'm pretty sure you're going to need to build a housing into the frames to make it work right.

If you gave it wrench functionality, could always put it waaaaaayyyy far up the tech tree and make it cost a lot.

@Enceos I think so too... Just wanted to save you a little time on the data transmitter on EVA by passing on what I found out in some experiments I was trying the other night. Pretty sure something is up with a kerbal on EVA that it doesn't even check for the comm network. Nice thing though is now kerbals are "parts" you can MM them. They use the same modules as the other parts in the game it seems. They're here if you didn't already know \GameData\Squad\Parts\Prebuilt\ BTW. Love your models. Standard issues for my kerbal engineers is your holographic multi-tool.

I tried to add a data transmitter module to the kerbal itself via ModuleManager. Even tried using EVA fuel as the resource to make the transmitter work. Still said no. Wonder if there's something up with the EVA code so that it KSP doesn't even check for signal? Would the kerbal itself have to be made a command pod or probe?

You know even in Star Trek we're looking at days or weeks between star systems. Warp 5 gets you Neptune in about 20 minutes. If you want faster one needs is to have the drive's speed scale with proximity to a gravitational body... kind of like the frame shift drive in Elite. I don't think it would be that hard but, I just haven't been into testing and refining it. Anyone is welcome to use this starting point. Formula I'd start with is Speed = WarpFactorBase * ((((altitude)/(planetary radius))^2)/GM) * c WarpFactorBase being a dual constant that makes it so your top speed is an appropriate fraction of c for that drive based on your current altitude. Could even build the safety switch in this function by making large warp factors impossible too far inside the gravity well. Reason I've been thinking about this is actually to go slower when you get closer to planets and the sun. Reason I haven't done it is... not feeling the load & unload & load testing in KSP to make it right and I think there will be some major SOI handoff issues where you leave say Jool, then suddenly you can go really really fast suddenly and that will be hard to keep control of, it's jumpy enough at SOI transitions. I don't have an elegant solution to that problem. Only thing I can think of is alter the formula to compare distance^2/GM of the parent body, and your current body, and use whichever one is smaller. This also doesn't fix floating point issues, but maybe would be less of a problem as your velocities would be much, much lower closer to things you might want to orbit.

I too use your parts in a very mix and match way. I love the science instruments, and antennas and use many of the probe parts and engines for kerball-ed landers. Many of the larger probe type parts seem to fit just right for a small-ish lander. I'm trying to figure out a way to use a surveyor frame or 3 for landing supports

on 1.2 64 bit. Using Dmagic's RoverGoo and MaterialsBay, letting the auto sampler reset the experiment locks it. Can get it truly reset by changing in the save file under the DMRoverGooMat module in each part: ExperimentNumber = 2 experimentsReturned = 2 from 2 to 0 then it works as expected. Looks like there may need to be a special check in the reset module to reset those values.

I think depending on the mod that may not be a problem. Maybe just limit the mods to a short list of popular ones? Like BDB and Near Future are fairly complementary to yours.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/96dwzt9q6sgr49k/ZWarpDriveModels_forUSIAD.zip?dl=0 You mean those? However... I haven't updated these or even looked at them since May of 2015. So they're several versions old, I don't know if they even still behave in modern KSP because I haven't tried them. So, use at your own risk. You're welcome to fix them. They use ZZZ's models from way back for the original KSP-I that I hacked into working with CFG changes. To make this work properly more work may be necessary.

The other mode uses many many more calculations and is responsible for the FPS hit, however you get no free orbital energy. In most cases it seems to work backwards of the velocity conservation mode. If you go out to Jool from Kerbin for example you have far too little angular momentum, rather than with velocity conservation where you have too much. Think of it that you still do the transfer you would normally, except you pay in delta-V all at the end and you get there in 20 seconds rather than months or years (provided you don't do successive jumps to use gravity to match orbits).

Did you all come from 1.1 without deleting and making a new settings.cfg? When I did that the flicker mostly to entirely went away. --- Flicker is back. Running win10 anniversary, dx9 and 11 both show it. Running tons of parts mods. Can easily reproduce by grabbing scroll bar and scrubbing it. Though it does often show with mouse over of some parts. Compete Mod list: BDB, CommunityResourcePack, CxAerospace, DockingCam, Firespitter, InterstellarFuelSwitch, KAS, KIS, KerbalReusabilityExpansion, MechJeb, Mk2Expansion, PartOverhauls, PlanetaryBaseInc, SVE (EVE, DistantObject, Scatterer), KAC, USI, VanguardAstrodynamics, WaypointManager, ModuleManager 2.7.1

@JohnBoyKerbal The thing that most new folks run into is not being in a high enough orbit. It's 1 planetary radius, so for Kerbin 600km. You need to be located above this altitude ASL, not just have your apoapsis there. If you want to change that value I explain how with module manager a page or two back.

It seems that Minmus also generally spawns better ore deposits in more locations as well. Finding a good place on the Mun is more difficult and I've found flights more difficult. However, for some reason I prefer the mun base over a minmus base. I've thought for a while due to the increased landing difficulty the science and resource values for the Mun and Minmus should be switched.

I had a space station once that generated an absurd amount of heat for no reason causing a similar BOOM! when switching to it or entering its physics range. Try turning off heat damage in ALT+F12 prior to loading the station.

That's actually pretty excellent... absolutely can recognize the people. Is still a bit off-putting though. I think you're sitting in the uncanny valley. Your Buzz Lightyear makes me think if you dialed back the shading a bit on the realistic ones they'd be about perfect. Like making a comic book version the likeness, with fewer lines but more solid rather than shaded where they remain.

One idea I saw from Nils277 was make a depreciated config of the old name (and make it no longer show up in the tech tree or VAB) and switch it to a rusty or crusty texture of some kind to give people notice that part is no longer there and they better replace it with the current version. Then the next version (or two) you remove those old configs. He was even talking about having multiple phases of rusty to let people know how close it was to the old part being removed.

So... I like to have my warp drive work at a bit lower of an altitude. Minimum altitude is 1 planetary radius normally (so 600km on kerbin if I remember right), I like half. If you'd like it to be lower you can make yourself a MM patch @PART[WarpDrive*] { @MODULE[USI_ModuleWarpEngine]{ @MinAltitude *= .5 } } I put that chunk in my over all module-manager personal tweak patch. If you'd like 1/4 you can do .25. Keep in mind though, warranty void if you do this. Especially if you make the activation distance even lower as crazy unexpected things may happen. The reason I did this is it makes repeated gravity assists to capture much easier and less repetitive.

I've had female kerbals since Shaw gave us the ability to do so by having different textures on the heads. The reason I did that... I wanted my crews to be more interesting. Yes I could have a whole bunch of male heads (and I do), but now having a bunch of female heads too allows for even further degrees of freedom. Makes the game more interesting to me. To me Kerbals are everything that humanity could be or could have been, but we refuse to. They don't need to play these over-thinking gender and classes and such games. They go to space instead.

@Geschosskopf KSP isn't switching the vector. It is actually staying put, and that is very much by design and on purpose. Picking which physics/behavior you like in the VAB is on purpose. There's a very cheaty (even more so than a regular warp drive) procedure one can do if they can switch between velocity preservation and orbital/angular momentum mode in space. Now, I seem to remember back when I was working on this a ton I set it up so you could save-edit switch modes if necessary. The reason both modes are there is/was a very vocal group wanted the old KSP-I behavior (velocity vector preservation)... I thought that mode while much easier to program was not at all how an Alcubierre drive would behave as you gain significant amounts of free orbital energy. It seemed to me that what would be preserved is your orbital angular momentum vector (the vector h, which is actually a KSP function). If you search my user name in this thread you'll get a lot of explanation on the theoretical physics as to the hows and whys behind a lot of this. Roverdude and I decided the best option would be to let people pick their drive in the VAB. You can't do normal algebra on vectors, so in order to not have infinite solutions to the velocity vector upon dropping out of warp, I decided to retain the original direction of travel as well. You'll see in angular momentum mode if you warp from Kerbin to Jool, you'll get there with far, far, too little velocity to be captured. Rather than far too much in a lot of ways the two modes are opposites. Angular momentum mode works like a Hohmann transfer where you "pay" for the whole trip at the end. Except you have a warp drive - you can use successive warps to capture or magnify the effect of your burns by doing almost all of it very near periapsis (This too is by design - I tested it at Dres to make sure it worked on even a very small body). You're picking up/losing orbital energy by taking/giving it to the nearby gravitational body. Just like a gravity sling-shot because it is one, just a successive one... again by design.