cantab

As a showcase of what PQS mods can do, this is awesome work. As what I'd want the planets to look like, not so much. Regarding one specific case, I feel that on the Mun the density of small craters should relate to the polygonal terrain, ie less/more craters in the light areas than in the dark. At the moment there's this strong contrast but then it feels compromised by the small craters being uniform everywhere.

In the latest design the centre of mass is near the middle of the (only) fuel tank. That means CoM shift will be small. And yeah, when it comes to your first planes I would say keep them fairly conventional. So have main wings, a tailplane at the back, and a tailfin. Tailless designs, with or without canards, are harder to make fly well.

A relatively small number of mods. Any time I install or update a mod I run a framerate test, it's tedious but I've found I need to run these to catch performance problems, for example the latest Kopernicus causing an 80% - yes, eighty percent - framerate drop.

Soldering the die to the heatspreader seems to be held up as the ideal. But supposedly it's hard - and thus expensive - to avoid cracking the die especially with the smaller dies as process nodes shrink. Intel restrict it to their expensive E-series processors now.

For a vacuum body there's a simple in-game way to estimate it. Get a ship in low orbit, set up a deorbit manoeuvre, then set a second manoeuvre on the planet's surface and drag the retrograde handles back until you see it flip round. Add the two burns together and that's your delta-V for landing. (Hover over any manoeuvre in map view when the handles are closed to see the delta-V). Then add safety margin to taste.

Actually I would lean towards using a 64-bit OS on a PC with 4 GB. When using desktop Windows a 32-bit version can't even use all of 4GB because of other things hogging address space and the lack of PAE support. Even on Linux where that's not an issue I currently have 4 GB of RAM, run 64-bit Ubuntu, and run and benefit from running 64-bit KSP rather than 32-bit. Not that that PC's hardware spec is any less silly mind you.

Great work!

I raised an eyebrow here, but a quick check confirms you're right - there are thousand pound laptops going with a miserly 4 GB. Talk about a rip off.

I use the I-Beams for engine clusters. I-Beam attached to the bottom node of the fuel tank, engines attached radially round it how you like, decoupler on the bottom of the I-Beam to support the stage below, strut it up and add a fairing for strength and streamlining. Great for LV-N clusters since it avoids making engine shrouds.

This is a bit of a con though. True there are no "wings", but there are still plenty of lifting parts. More interesting would be what the minimum amount of lift is. For ascent we know it's zero because rockets can SSTO, re-entry and a targeted landing is the real challenge.

The Skipper used to be really bad. So did the Poodle, actually. They've both been relatively improved, but I guess old habits die hard.

And to this day the developers prefer to make their big announcements on other people's forums.

Would loading up the original Alternis be useful? Then you can probably get orbital figures out, though it might take some hunting around for old versions of mods like KER or Hyperedit.

-27. Minus til I die, I'm Minus til I die, I know I am I'm sure I am I'm Minus til I die.

I'm not sure if you can release solely under the MIT License. As per the original Alternis Kerbol thread, the artwork is CC-BY-NC 4.0. If you want to use a different license things will get complicated. (Personally I think the use of NC licenses for KSP mods is a mistake - do modders truly plan on trying to collect money from major Youtubers and Twitch streamers?)

I'm amazed it was possible with just the Mammoth, I'd have thought it would need nukes for use at altitude or something. Awesome work.

Wait, what?

Yeah, try rolling back to an older Kopernicus version. 0.2.4 didn't have the issue, 0.3.1 might be OK (I haven't tested yet). You could also report the issue in the Kopernicus thread.

Did you update Kopernicus as well? I hit a performance issue similar to what you describe with Kopernicus 0.3.3.

The 48-7S got hit with a well-earned nerf bat and now offers 270-300 s Isp. The Ant has 80-315 s so awful in atmo but better than the 48-7S in vacuum, while the Spider (the radial ant) is a shade worse across the board at 260-390 s. So if you can deal with the TWR you get the Ant is the better option.

Those pitch attitudes at those altitudes are about what I get when I do a good ascent. A gravity turn still needs an initial pitchover to get it started, unless you opt to tilt the rocket on the launchpad. Quite, hence why I spoke of the problem being oversize payloads not overweight payloads. I try and ensure my fairings are flush with the stage below, or at most slightly wider - if they're bulging out a lot that's asking for trouble. In angled flight the consideration about losing fuel fighting gravity still applies, but to the vertical component of your thrust.But I just don't find my rockets as flip-prone as yours seem to be. Like I said, provided I follow that prograde marker above about 150-200 m/s I'm fine. To which I can suggest a few explanations: 1) Newstock aero makes the rockets too flippy. I use FAR myself. But I thought newstock was supposed to be more forgiving than FAR, not less. 2) You're starting off with too much TWR, which lets you hit problematic speeds lower down in thicker atmosphere. I usually design for 1.3-1.4 TWR at launch. 3) Your rockets are unaerodynamic, which I was talking about earlier. I really do think that if you can sort the aerodynamics out so you can go full throttle you will get better performance. 4) You have lousy control authority. Likely if you use solids a lot, but then you wouldn't be throttling down.

My generic ascent profile: Vertical until 100 m/s. Pitchover to somewhere between 75 and 85 degrees, depending on the rocket. Let the prograde marker catch up with the heading. Then follow prograde until I'm up to at least 30 km. Provided I hold it right on that prograde marker once I'm at any appreciable speed even a mildly unstable rocket will fly fine. A severely unstable rocket with an oversized payload up top will still flip, but I just try not to build rockets like that!And throttling down is also wasting fuel. If you're ascending vertically with 2.0 TWR then for every 1 unit of fuel that accelerates you you waste 1 unit fighting gravity. Throttle back to 1.25 TWR and suddenly for every 1 unit of fuel that accelerates you you wast 4 units fighting gravity. (As for why not have a huge liftoff TWR, partly because carrying excess weight in engines is another way to waste fuel, and partly because is still such a thing as too much speed too low it's just much faster than in the .90 days.)

How does FAR handle the stock A.I.R.B.R.A.K.E.S? Is it simply done by the voxels when they're in their deployed position, or is there something special going on? I ask pursuant to discussion on how Trajectories handles (or doesn't handle) them.

Bear in mind Titanus has high gravity which offsets the thick atmosphere. How do you start the game, and have you checked for correct behaviour on Kerbin? KSP 1.0.x has a nasty bug where if it's started from the wrong folder - which usually happens with desktop shortcuts or similar - the aerodynamics and thermal system get all messed up. The same issue occurs if physics.cfg gets corrupted or deleted.

I had that terrain issue but I wasn't using the latest New Horizons when I encountered it.