Mischief

I'm testing the large boosters for how many are necessary for law of large numbers to stabilize them. Good thing I you can't run out of Kerbals...

How many fans do you have? It's tough to get stability on anything with any size with 2. 4 helps a lot. It handles like a helicopter. Throttle controls altitude but it's not instant; more lag to changes than you get with a rocket. Try to get into a hover at 100-300 meters above your target. Get as stable as you can then throttle down slowly or use hover at that altitude then come down slowly. A crash bag isn't a bad idea either; I've got one on the bottom of mine. Lets me get away with small, light-weight gear. Just don't forget to EVA and 'recharge' it after you pack it up or it won't work the next time. Here's a shot of it from the bottom. You can see the crash bag in the center. See how the fans are wide radial mounted and the gear off of them? Gives me a lot of stability for landing.

The crash bags are excellent - I worked up a ship for my Minmus expedition using the Exploration package. You can see it dangling off the back. RCS powered, stupidly nimble and with almost 2k dV in an itty bitty package and all the science gear I could stuff on it for the trip. Land, take all samples in that biome, return to ship, unload into science lab (first time I've actually found a use for one!) and then bop back down. I used to go with a 'probe shotgun' concept of sending a probe ship with 12 individual probes to Minmus, each with a lot of spare fuel plus science components. Then I'd send a lander that would land at each probe, collect science from the probe and soil samples/reports, then move the probes stock of fuel to the lander to cover his trip to the next landing spot. Slow and cumbersome and insanely risky. Using this little micro-lander was faster, easier and more fun. Notice the HERP module command seat. The first-person from that thing is a *trip*. However with the lander on the back and HERP on the front there's no option for a vertical landing. I've got a goal of 100% recovery or as close to it on my missions and so I didn't want to just blow off expensive chunks of my ship so I tried the crash bags for a horizontal landing option. Rowed up chutes on one side and put bags on the other with a DERP for each crew in case it looked like it was going to go pear shaped. Ran it like a moon landing. You come in way high, engines-first. Burn thrust to kill horizontal velocity as much as possible then chutes. I expected some bouncing, maybe the lander to get destroyed but nope. Stuck the 3-point landing without any complaint. Not as stable as landing gear for a low gravity set-down but for Kerbin? If it's not coming down powered it's coming down on these.

Oh! Also - the DERP propulsion module. Can it have linking points on both sides? I know it's radial but sometimes you want to put it on the nose of a command pod or somewhere similar for aerodynamic reasons. Without a linking point on the back end it always ends up slightly off for weight/drag positioning. Can it have a linkage point on top and bottom? Would allow for more reliable positioning when you want it in a specific spot and not just radial.

Okay. Some other things I would suggest after having played with it a while - The tiny generator needs to have mounting points on opposite sides, this way I can link them together if need be in a construction format without slight weight/drag imbalances. Especially with FAR these become very significant - especially if I'm making something with suicidally minimal tolerances. There needs to be a square fuel storage container for Karbonite about the same size/shape as the tiny generator. Better form factor, better design options. The ducted fans work awesome with the generators and running off Karbonite makes it a slick concept but the smallest radial mounted Karbonite tanks hold 40 each and so you need a couple and they need radially mounted without any 'snap to position' options really, which makes them very difficult to balance for weight/drag. A cubic tiny storage tank with about the same volume that's got 6 linking points so I can use them as a central block would be very beneficial and useful for making tiny ships with fans or Karbonite rocket engines and let me balance them far more efficiently. About the size of the double-carry cans but with linking points on all sides, or at least two sides. Greatly appreciate all you do RoverDude, enjoying all the new toys!

If I need more supplies in a DERP I can just put a small life support module between it and the engine/support section. That simple. The whole point of TAC is adding the *complexity* of supplying food, water, power and waste disposal to my crew. If I didn't want to have to worry about it I'd turn it off. Currently working on an AES/HERP commanded micro-lander for Minmus exploration. HERP needs an independent generator like the DERP does though.

HERP pod has no independent generator and runs out of power very quickly - this is a problem for anyone with TAC. Can it have the same generator as the DERP? Otherwise it's gorgeous and I'm going to use it as a command module for a number of ships. Not that hard using the Karbonite boosters to make one with 10k DV using the big ones. Ironically this turns out to be suicidal; for comedy gold I strapped a low courage max stupidity Kerbal into the HERP jump seat, stuck him on top of a bundle of 3 boosters with a TW ratio of 31 and 3k DV and fired it off. Pegged the g-force needle but the thing just whipped around in circles for a bit (quite the vomit comet) before exploding. I have FAR which creates a lot more air resistance to high acceleration. I'm considering removing it to see if I can make a Karbonite booster design that can SSTO a Kerbal directly to the sun. I have high hopes - and a lot of expendable Kerbals I've had to collect while trying to build a sufficient stable of low-stupidity Kerbonauts to populate stations. Going to see if I can get a 10k+ DV pure booster design and shoot unwanted Kerbonauts at other planets on the cheap. That entertainment aside you may want to dial the big ones back a bit - not a lot, but a bit. They're terrifyingly unstable and while a big pile of DV may *sound* like a good idea trying to get a stable orbit with a booster is virtually impossible. The concept though; cheap, expendable, highly explosive boosters - good clean family fun and fits very well into ship design.

Did the math - packing a DERP is far cheaper and more efficient than either packing a 3man command module (significantly more weight) or a 2nd 1man command module for lost Kerbal rescues. Way cheaper in fact both in weight and absolute cost (component costs/additional fuel). For my Duna mission (and other interplanetaries to follow) I'm working on just putting a large life-support + waste TAC stack with the RCS supply on a docking ring on interplanetary ships. Put some radial chutes and bouncy-bags on it for a safe landing. Then DERP my 3 crew down nearby and have a pair of KAS pipes in their KAS storage. Power generation from the DERPs plus hooked up to the TAC stack a large TAC support setup would keep 3 Kerbals alive for over a year; long enough to get a rescue mission to them if things went south. Also dirt cheap; I've got to send the large TAC stack + RCS along anyway, this just makes it detachable. The only weight this adds is some chutes, two docking rings, the bouncy bags and a few spare RCS thrusters. Less extra mass than a single booster. This raises another idea; can DERPs be reused? Deflated, refueled, stowed in a KAS box and re-installed on a ship? This makes them cheap and reusable means of deploying crew to stations and bases. I could find a lot of uses for reusable DERPs. As a final note I've found packing 3 DERPs for a large command module ship actually keeps it power-neutral; the ship uses the power generation from the DERPs. This saves weight (and part count) I'd have had to spend on radio isotope generators or larger solar panels making packing the DERPs almost weight and part-count neutral on any ship big enough to have a reason to bring them.

You've broken me with this one RoverDude. I've started down the path of micro-vessels and can never go back. I have never bothered to collect all the scraps of science from every biome on Kerbal but now I've started on the mission to get practice with the duct fans and it's insanely fun. A bit odd to get used to but you're right - terribly nimble. A bit tricky to learn to land with but the think weighs nothing and it's not hard to make a TWR of 5+ on Kerbal exploration vehicle. Here's my test pilot, Sherbert Kerman in the new Hopscotch exploration shuttle: It's absurdly tiny. Here's one of her outside of it for scale: Pretty much all the reusable science tools I could want plus some sensors and a drill for refueling along the way. It'll bop along at close to 200, which is about as fast as you want to get going at low altitude with FAR. I'm finding cool little islands and out of the way places on Kerbin I never even looked for before. I like how the Karbonite micro-engine creates monoprop; my next toy is going to be trying to make the smallest possible Munar lander/return ship using a combo of monoprop and Karbonite fuel. It'll have enough to de-orbit and land safely, mine what it needs then huff it back up to Munar orbit and dock with a 'mother ship'. These things are so light and tiny it's literally more efficient to pack a micro-lander with all the prerequisite science gear to bop down to all the Mun/Minmus biomes then back up to a mothership with a science lab than to try and land and return from all of them on separate missions. So many new cool toys come out of this. Very enthused. Thank you.

I came here looking for a solution to the tiny little drill not working and found out you updated - cuz you're a boss. You've broken me for full sized components and I'm now mocking up a design for a Moho station and surface base to support a full on Kerbol station with satellites to map the surface (SCANSAT FTW) as well as a Karborundum collection facility - all to eventually power the massive interplanetary 'Cities in Flight' style Asteroid Station. Why build a big complex facility on every major planet when I can cruise there on a plush, luxury accommodation small moon with all the science, supply, raw materials and exploration equipment I want. Fusion drive for injection burn, mass drivers for course correction and orbit insertion. It's gonna be BOSS. This lets me do landings, exploration and such with the new micro-ships you've just hooked me with with the recent updates. How can I go back to huge cumbersome 3-seaters and hundreds of tons of fuel when I can deploy a viable lander that would fit in a 3.5m fuel tank and can unpack an entire rover from the KAS storage box? You do amazing work. Thank you very much, you've added countless hundreds of hours of entertainment to KSP for me. It's greatly appreciated.

<3 Lots and lots of <3.

After a break from KSP I came back to see you'd made all sorts of cool new toys. Had to start over (updated too many mods; tried to play an old save and BAD THINGS HAPPENED) and decided to try DERP for a cheap option for recovery of a 'lost' Kerbonaut. using a DERP module is cheaper than either stacking on a second single-seat pod or shelling out for a multi-seat command pod (and that's only after you've gathered the science for it). It was AWESOME. Gregfen gets hauled in from his lonely orbital trajectory, stuffed in an inflatable ball and blasted at the planet. Went down in the desert - the kickstand/parachute setup surprised me but in context was an incredibly foolproof concept and design. The engine is going to be more fragile than the inflatable body and the kickstand soaks abuse and keeps the exit hatch clear when you eat dirt face first on the landing. I created a floating station with stock parts + KAS for use on Laythe many moons back and always bemoaned the lack of decent flotation components. I took to using empty aircraft components; they had great buoyancy and crash tolerance and looked passable when you put a nose cone on the end of them. They worked passably well - Without dedicated floatation components though it was greatly limited on what you can make. I'm jazzed to use the new ones. Can the be deployed and retracted like the OKS components can? Does this alter their buoyancy factor? When trying to link up station components (like I'll need to do with a floating Eve or Laythe base) you need to adjust height on the fly. I could do that a bit by moving fuel around but it was, at best, clumsy. I'd like to do an MKS Laythe floating base for underwater mining and flotation components I can adjust on the fly would be invaluable for that. I'd rather use docking collars, they're way more trustworthy than KAS winch/plate hookups but fussy to get to meet up in gravity and while floating. Plus flotation landing gear for recovery ships on Laythe... SO much good stuff. Due props boss, this all looks awesome. Now I'm jazzed to grind out some science and ducats to play with the new station textures!

That is forged in the fires of Orodruin out of solid AWESOME. Thank you!

Loaded up 2.2.1. Works great - in spite of all the angst I managed to survive seeing a little two-button menu in the top left of the screen when I'm at the KSC view. While it's quite possible that having to see it in the top left corner of that one screen for a few seconds when moving between locations at KSC may end up destroying western civilization I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. Been rock solid so far. I load a lot of mods that have absolutely no business being in the same save and I do it in x64. Prior to 2.2.1 I had a lot of crashes and mod-introduced components that would stop responding when clicked or engine parts that would show up with a cowl. All that went away after I switched and used the Reload Database option. I've had the 'all R&D parts need researched' again issue each time I've used the Reload Database and write to file feature. However doing so fixed a number of what I suspect were conflict related issues associated with multiple mods having been installed (likely in the wrong order, cuz that's just how I roll) and has my game running fine. However, between KAS, MKS and TAC I had something like 90 or so individual little boxes to click. Anything to make that faster would be good but I'll put up with it if it means after I do so all my stuff WORKS. Good work Sarbian, I had some hundred + hours invested into this save (with FF too; you get attached your kerbals) and really, REALLY didn't want to have to scorch earth and reinstall.

Thanks for the solutions! Updated to scansat 7.0. All is well, rainbows, puppies and kittens for everyone. Also found out that having Module Manager dlls of any version prior to 2.2.1 makes KSP winx64 *hate everyone*. Deeply and personally. Deleted older .dlls and everyone is happy again. having older versions of module manager seems to really, REALLY hate Karbonite. Threw errors trying to switch to any vehicle with a Karbonite sensor attached, then bombed out. It make my tech tree look 'empty', no icons for anything, and it said I hadn't researched anything. Due props on the mod. Now that I've actually got it working it's *terribly* cool. The growing variety of Karbonite engines ties in well with extra-Kerbin settlements; the ability to recover and use fuel resources directly lets you build a vastly superior SSTO interplanetary ship. Lots of good stuff, thank you again.

I've searched every post by RoverDude and just flat out couldn't find this, so gonna have to ask - How do I get this to work with Scansat? It looks like some ModuleManager magic but I'm not seeing what I need to do or what goes where. I also seem to have ended up with .dlls for module manager for 2.1.5, 2.2.0 and 2.2.1. Not sure if I can delete the old ones without borking some of my mods. Also getting a strange problem with the Karbonite scanner. I've got it on a sat in orbit and to start with I clicked on it, started scanning. When I tell it to 'show me hotspots' it gives me the little orange bubbles. I do however have 3 sats in orbit - each only shows me concentrations near it specifically. Then, strangely, it would no longer let me toggle the sensor on and off. It says that it's off, but it's still showing me the hotspots. If I try to toggle it on it seems to toggle on for a second, then is off again. I am running x64 but otherwise I'm not sure why it hates me. I deleted Kethane which vaped my prior scansat network, which is fine, it was all running dated tech anyway. I just want to make sure I'm not going to have to vape and replace this new loadout - in career mode that stuff costs money So short version of what I need: 1. Info or direction to info on how to make Karbonite play with Scansat. 2. Karbonite sensors only showing local hotspots. Probably related to #1. I have 3 module manager version dlls in my gamedata too, cuz why leave borking my game up to chance, right? 3. After deployment and switching between sats it will not allow me to toggle the sensor off and on. It shows off but acts on. 4. Hotspots do not reflect locations identified by other detectors nor do they seem to keep data after switching away and back. Is it just a radius thing at the time? Thank you for any help. I'm jazzed and excited about the design and direction this has taken and has inspired me to pick up TAC and MKS after I get a handle for Karbonite, resource management and exploiting KAS to scatter LIVING Kerbals through out my system, instead of the dead Kebals and debris I've generally packed it with in prior playthroughs.

Oh no. It was in. You'll notice in that picture the addition of the stack separator and chutes on the cockpit section? I prefer to play with no quicksave/restore and non-immortal Kerbals. I was well on my way to building an island of disassembled SSTO vehicle ideas off the cost of KSC before I got that figured out.

I do - but it was user error. I got it figured, problem was trying to put little wings on full on rockets and wondering why it wouldn't whip an Immelman.

Here's the wacky thing - that used to work. Most the tanks you see on that plane are empty on takeoff and landing; the thing would refuel in orbit to have the UMPH to hump it from world to world on RAPIERs. It was pretty light getting off the ground. I'd start with the forward tanks half full, the others empty and it'd move my CoM way forward while keeping CoL way back. It worked alright. I wouldn't have called it 'nimble' bit it worked and could land on the Mun. I've figured out what changed though. My newer ships are indeed smaller and twr way higher. I was starting to take off at 100 m/s but I was passing 300 m/s by the end of the runway and, yes indeed, it was ripping me to pieces cuz.... mach 1 + AoA change of 45 degrees + 300 meters above sea level = violent disagreement between ships components on who is going what direction. I suspect it's related to improvements to how you handle transonic/supersonic speeds, since in more careful review the problem was my hitting mach 1 before I was over the water off the runway. What can I say. I like a lot of zoom. In hindsight if I want to go faster than 300 m/s in less than a runways length, I should probably quit trying to fool myself about being a 'plane' and just go ahead and launch it vertical like a rocket. So, again. you mod like a boss, problem was user error.

@ferram4; Removed every mod but FAR. Still rips the wings off if they are more than 1 segment wide - here's an example of a craft I flew a lot in 23.5 Notice how it's got a central engine, then wing connector component, then engine segment, then delta wing radiating from the central engine core? If I have central engine + delta wing, I'm fine. If I go for wing connector component, engine segment, delta wing or anything like that... boom. I lift off at around 150-200m/s and nose up a bit and it rips itself apart. Has anything changed for component connectivity, drag, anything? I admit I'm at a loss as to what I've changed. Is there any sort of log, data or info I can provide? Am I just... doing something wrong? Trying to build up a heavy capacity long range SSTO again but am struggling to recreate any prior designs that don't dramatically disassemble after liftoff. Thank you again, Mischief

Did something change with attachment stability? For some reason builds that worked in 23.5 literally rip themselves to pieces shortly off the runway. Not even talking about super-massive ships; 1.6 to 2.1 thrust-to-weight. Did anything else change? Any idea what's making my ships explosively disassemble? Same mods I had before (KAS, Kethane, some texture stuff, and FAR of course). If it's more complex than 1 central engine core and some basic wing setup.... BOOM. Lucky to get off the runway.

I was just coming here to ask about this. Same issue - engine shrouds all stay on. How do I get rid of that?

So I recently decided to go ahead and put some mods back in after playing through stock all the way to a successful Mun landing/return and this time I'm keeping Jeb/Bob/Bill sidelined. Playing an ironman style game with no save/reloads or mission restarts. To give that some real teeth I've also decided to use only mortal Kerbals! Currently I have 3 (sorta 4?) experienced Kerbonauts as I'm prepping for a Mun landing. Normally I would hit Minmus first, pillage it for SCIENCE! and then do the Mun but I've also decided to let the order that Missions come up direct my playthrough - it's been a lot more challenging! TIME FOR SOME NEW HEROS. Anyone else feel like tracking missions for other than Jeb/Bob/Bill? Currently: Shelbro 1 mission, 2 failures - First launch in a ship, first above 5,000m, first orbit, tested R10 SSB. Had two attempts to test components after that which went cockeyed and disassembled, which he barely survived (Oh FAR. You're a cruel mistress!) With him being my first real Kerbonaut I decided to sideline him for a bit until I've got some better tech. Luuki - 4 test flights, 1 orbital mission (science test), 9 near-death catastrophies. Successfully tested: Rockomax Decoupler, TT45 Decoupler,TR18 Decoupler, TT70 Decoupler, LV45, LV909, LV48-7S, Rockomax Poodle engine, BACC Booster, Mk2 Radial chutes, Mk16 chutes. Lots and lots of chute tests. He has survived a stunning 9 catastrophic mission failures, though currently refuses to launch without a Mk16 on top and 2 radial Mk2s on his command pod. Edmin - 1 mission, 1 test flight - rescued Mittberry, science in orbit, first extended EVA (5 EVA data collections total), ran a test flight that simply tested the Rockomax Skipper in splash-down. Currently in debate if this makes him Kerbins first naval officer, as he puttered around in a rocket-boat for a while. He has also spent almost a full orbit bopping around outside the command pod, collecting EVA data on biomes below. Mittberry - ? He appears to have somehow ended up in orbit on his own in a stable orbit at ~118,000m without a ship - just in his suit, EVA pack, 2 empty cans of Schlittz and a bent hole punch of unknown origin. Currently in confinement for suspicion of appropriating KSP vessels for 'a wild, drunken blowout'. Conspiracy theorists suspect aliens. A 'mission log' feature for tracking accomplishments of individual Kerbals would be awesome. If such a mod exists I'd love to hear about it. For everyone else though, who are your new heros for 0.24? Anyone accomplished?

The trick is a new sort of ssto- carry it all to orbit, put a probe on it with a engine just to de-orbit the whole lifter assembly with chutes. PROFIT!

All due props!