Technical Ben

This is why all my craft now have docking nodes/ports. If it falls off, we can put it back together!

Was this. Seems worse though sadly. Now about 50-100. :/ Might have a look at my overclock of running programs. But it might be some changes in 0.20. I'm chuffed though, as my mega project comes in at 150 parts.

So we orbit Moho at 200km. Guslin decides he is going on his own to land on Moho in a tiny lander. But after the initial burn realizes he does not have enough fuel to land, let alone return from Moho! So he tails it back to the orbiter. The team devise "Plan B". They must take the drive section closer. Leaving Lenry in the orbiter at 200km, Lemry and Guslin take the drive section. Approaching at around 20km, Guslin will pilot the tiny single seated lander on Moho. But things did not go according to Plan B. The lander still does not have enough fuel, even at this close range! So to help Guslin feel better, Lemry agrees to drop him off ON Moho. They make a successful landing in the drive section. Yep, that's Guslins little lander, that had to land about all of 50 foot (Kerbal feet at that!) onto Moho. Thankfully his big brothers are looking out for him. Only one last problem... who is looking out for big brother? Yep, we ran out of fuel again. So stuck in orbit around Moho, the orbiter at 200km and the engine section at 40km, we await an automated resupply. Along with the fuel comes "Colossus Mark 2" "Colossus Prototype Mark 0.3" (Might have "fixed" the broken prototype), just in case anything else goes wrong...

Well, some successes, some failures. First, the breaking in the atmosphere of Eve... Um, yeah, the Kerbals aimed for Eve, not Duna, but back to the mission... The aerobreaking in Eve resulted in wobbly spagetti, so a change to the ships design was made in orbit. Before and after. As you can see, it flies like an arrow now. They could land on Eve, they brought parachutes, but there is nothing return with. So as the probes have been sent autonomously previously, it's nothing by an orbital sight seeing exercise for now. Well, apart from testing the heat shielding. So, perhaps a trip to Gilly? Well not quite. That's the parting shot. The Kerbals did well to fly up to the moon, but both it's low gravity and their retro aproach (orbiting the wrong way) meant a landing would use up all the avaliable fuel. So instead, just another sight seeing tour. Hopefully the approach to Moho will go better... ... who are we kidding!?

Not really much out there that is as far in development as KSP or as broad and functional. :/ Spore is good artistically, but not really functionally (space ships are 100% artistic).

My latest? Setting up a massive interplanetary ship to fly the solar system. Heading for Eve, but having nothing worthy for landing. That's ok, I think, I can swing by and land on Gilly. Oh, were orbiting the wrong way for a landing/intercept. Ok, so 1 planetary flyby and one moon flyby and we can go to Moho. Oh, that ton of fuel I brought? Should have been 2 tons, I rand out of fuel just about on Moho. Got back into a 30km orbit, and am awaiting an emergency re-supply. Lemry, Lenry and Guslin have a long wait. But at least Guslin got to land on Moho... after help from Big Brother Lenry. Yes, the large lander had to drop off the small lander so Guslin could claim a "mission success" and still make it back. Next time pack a bigger return craft! PS, when sending up a tanker with fuel to the delivery craft (An upgraded version of the large lander above), I was on the dark side of Kerbin for a little bit too long and rand out of auxiliary battery power. So it's attempt 2 at refueling.

"Only makes it harder"... "3D only makes it harder"... and you play KSP? ??? PS, the 3d had a real effect as most units had 3d arcs of fire, plus in MP it meant you could attack from on top as well as behind, so that really played interestingly.

I keep getting dupes. :/ Gets annoying as it's hard to track who is who.

Nice. I have a 1GB 4870, Penny 2 x4 (unlocked ), but get general lag (9fps) with 200+ parts. Anything around 100 or less is wonderful though. I can cope with my obscene constructions being laggy though, that's self inflicted.

Thanks! I'm planning on building and launching my next set of ships while my previous set return to kerbin/intercept other bodies, so this plugin will be a real help. Especially if I wish to send supplies/fuel to other stations.

Clipping. Dockign forces (too close but undocked etc). Rotation/physics. Timewarp changes the positions slightly. Landscape loading (loading a mountain over/in the rover or visa versa). SAS wobble. Impacting debris (don't leave it in orbit ). Solar panel/lander legs deploying into other parts (they are physics enabled, so they will push off that fuel tank/wing if you put them in the wrong place. Lol). All these things need to be kept in mind while in this beta.

This is the layout for the final burn. Will drop the end tank quick, as it's almost empty (used it to deliver the other tank). The burn to the Mun was 4 mins or so (800dv). A burn for a planet should take a good half hour at a guess. Lol.

Picked up some fuel from the Luna orbital station. Well, after testing the drive unit for "Lander" mode. The rover ("Catfish") is not part of this mission. It was just the target I was practicing landing near (With mechjeb, so totally automatic, soz ). Got to within 500m so quite happy. Ah, the lander is now back at the orbiter. So will dock (manually, don't trust Mechjeb for that!) Should have 1 extra large fuel tank, and refill the half empty large one. Might be overkill for the fuel, but it means I'm not tied down to location choices.

Sweet go cart! (PS, Kerbal Race/Cart Program needs to be a game )

After the multiple successes of reconfigurable probe ships, I've decided to send my first "Manned" craft to Duna. Named "Colossus" due to it's size, it should be able to change and adapt to a mission as required. It has room for 7 Kerbals, but the first mission is taking only 3. The drive section has it's own command module, so can double up as a small lunar lander or an emergency return craft. Small "command pods" are docked on the side that can pick up "service modules" for parachutes, rockets and other resources. 1 tiny rover and 3 small probes are available for external maintenance or dropping off in orbit for permanent coms. Built in orbit just before the 0.20 release, the docking was not upgraded to "large" connectors, but it does fly rather well with no wobble. Managed to attach a couple of seated pods too for some powered EVAs. I'm experimenting with ion based maneuvering there, as I tend to burn through a lot of RCS in docking and reconfiguring the craft. So if the little pods work on ion drives, I might try a stock ion RCS setup of some sort for Collosus 2.0.

Wait, your board only has 2 slots? Hmmmm...

I loved the "tumbling pigeon" idea in the link on Atomic Rockets dot com. The ship design I made in sketchup uses just about ever possible artificial gravity going. It would end up having a use in almost ever orientation. Both acceleration created g, rotational g, auto-rotating pod, "tumbling pigeon", landing on a gravitational body, and some magnetic fields to apply needed forces just to keep the crew from floating away during a free fall orbit.

Kerb, the rotating parts rotate normally on mechanical spindles. Each rotating section is self sealed. To get in or out you fly a little docking craft into it. So treat each rotating section as a separate ship entirely. Only they are connected, but as they are self sealed, you can stick the rotating joint on the outside.

That and space elevators don't work in KSP. :/ Might be able to do something on Gilly though. That thing has stupid low grav.

It's neither. You can add multicore support to the physics engine (it's been done by others), but it requires bespoke programming for that.

Yeah, MMO seems a more distant goal. You need to make the steps there first. Not that it's impossible (no such thing in programming ), but that it takes longer, so make some goals in the interim. Basically, if needed, in an MMO, each "solar system" would follow the "instancing" or "co-op" model. So timewarp/pausing between systems is trivial, because we do not need to apply it. With massive ammounts of players, only those on the server/system/instance actually share the temporal effects (time warp, real time or pause). So if you can do a co-op mode, you should be able to scale it to MMO at some point. Even if you decide or a large "hub" system (say Kerbin), then you'd keep that one system real time all the time, and leave the rest (out of the Kerbol influence) as "instances" that can timewarp as needed by the players via vote. It may even be possible to instance individual ships, so their orbits are on rails (time warpable) but within 2.2km (physics sim) they can undock, redock and perform EVAs in "realtime". So you get both a local timewarp (physics effects only) and a global one (on rails/orbits).

http://youtu.be/IYloGuUZCFM Seems the moon is really active and interesting when it comes to meteorites.

It's co-op. You don't get to do things the group does not want to. SP is for that...

Give it another 10 or so years and we could send a robotic android Asimo style. However, the 6 min delay would mean all actions need planning and waiting for updates.