SkyRender

Step 1: Open /GameData/Squad/Strategies/Strategies.cfg Step 2: Change Outsourced R&D's minRate to 0.0027778 and maxRate to 0.00347 Step 3: Change Patents Licensing's minRate to 80 and maxRate to 100 Step 4: Change Fundrasing Campaign's minRate to 70 and maxRate to 90 Step 5: Change Appreciation Campaign's minrate to 0.0041667 and maxRate to 0.00520 All balanced.

I decided to do a little experiment to see just how little actual force it can take to destroy a structure at KSC. Turns out the answer is "not a whole heck of a lot"! Some of those collisions were sub-25m/s. Granted, I was hitting them with rapidly-spinning structural parts, but still.

Depends on who runs the space program. If it's mine, definitely would work in the VAB as a part of the ground crew that stands around waving those batons pointlessly. If it's Scott Manley's, I'd be off working in the Astronaut Complex as the guy who keeps the computers running (and makes sure that Shepman'); DROP TABLE Recruits;-- Kerman doesn't get added to the roster... again). If it's Danny2462's space program, off-site evacuation drill sergeant... at a completely different space center.

Personally I use Open Broadcaster for recording, Audacity for audio mixing, and AVISynth + VirtualDub for editing and final compilation. I don't recommend those latter programs unless you're a big fan of text-based interfaces and pedantically clunky controls, however.

Once more I embraced my inner Danny2462 and tried to think up the most impractical-yet-amusing way possible to destroy the KSC. The answer: stomp on it!

I've done some more testing to see if I can combat this crazy roll problem. Doubling the mass of the SP+ elevons seems to have helped, as well as halving their deflection strength. There's still a slight random roll during takeoff, but that happens in stock too.

Actually, the problem isn't the fact that the SP+ parts all have lift. I designed a perfectly functional SP+ plane in 0.24.2 by using the then-stock control surfaces instead of the ones included with SP+. With stock flaps, the phantom roll problem basically didn't exist, but even in 0.24.2, the SP+ elevon flaps would cause phantom roll effects. Even if you disable roll control on those flaps, they still cause your craft to roll randomly with far greater intensity than the C7 flaps ever did.

I guess it's somewhat satisfying to know that the exaggeration of the problem is in fact something caused by the new parts as I surmised. Probably gonna be a pain for Ferram to fix, too...

I think the rover I devised can handle it. I call it the Tumbler, because flipping does not stop it for long. It has a pair of mini-SAS attached above the center of mass and out past the wheel wells. Whenever it flips over, I turn on the twin SAS modules and flip it right back over.

Maybe I'm just missing something, but is FAR getting more prone to introducing phantom fluctuations lately? It might just be the SP+ parts doing it, actually, because this problem was nowhere near as pronounced in 0.24.2 with the old parts. I just can't help but notice that my planes are more prone than ever to entirely unexplained rotation despite being absolutely symmetrical and exceptionally aerodynamic. To the point that craft now wobble unsteadily with SAS on, and require constant roll maintenance with it off. Is there some sneaky setting I have to trigger to get FAR to behave well with SP+ elevon parts, or perhaps some adjustment I'm expected to make to account for the new flap designs? Someone help me out here.

After toying a bit with Fine Print, I support its addition to KSP stock. It really does make Career mode more robust. As for future mods beyond Fine Print getting into the stock game, the VAB/SPH function of Kerbal Engineer Redux is high on my list (although hopefully without needing a part to activate it!). After that, definitely Kerbal Attachment System. It's just so handy to be able to remove and place small parts with your Kerbals, and the various connection systems like the winches and pipelines are also dead useful.

This last day or so, I've been toying with the soon-to-be-added-to-stock Fine Print mod. It has some pretty interesting goals in it, though it does seem to have a fetish for spawning aerial survey contracts. I definitely like the station/base/satellite contracts, however. Combined with my custom Hard difficulty (saving/reverting allowed, 50% rewards, otherwise the same as normal Hard), it's made Career mode pretty fun.

Landing is, as mentioned, not that difficult as long as you keep your plane's nose up during the landing sequence. This can be tricky in stock at times, especially if your vehicle has too many lift surfaces, as there's a bug in stock KSP aerodynamics that causes lift to constantly generate force on a craft while in-atmosphere (usually referred to as the "infiniglide" bug since you can exploit it with enough control surfaces and fly with no engines at all by flapping them). It does help to land somewhere flat. Also, during the final sequence, don't just hold down the brakes; pulse them and stop if your craft starts to tilt. If your craft seems very prone to tilting, your landing gear probably needs a re-balance. The gear should be at least 50% of your total wingspan away from the center of your craft for any paired landing gear. Also, there's a few tricks to designing a plane that aren't readily apparent from your typical tutorial, but that will affect your landings more than your take-offs. One of them is controlling your fuel flow so that the craft's center of balance remains the same throughout. If you just build your typical cockpit-fuel-engine model of plane, it will have a center of mass pushed either far forward or far back by the end of your flight depending on which end is heavier, causing your plane to naturally want to tilt up or down (which depends on the way it's been pushed). This makes landing difficult, to say the least. You probably won't run into it with a test flight, but you definitely will on a full-scale one that ends with your fuel levels meaningfully drained.

The easiest way to fix the brokenness of Outsourced R&D is to go into the GameData/Squad/Strategies/Strategies.cfg file and add an extra 0 after the . on the minRate and maxRate for it (so 0.0027778 and 0.00347 respectively). That drops it to a much more reasonable level of reward. I also suggest doing a similar thing for Appreciation Campaign, and boosting Fundraising Campaign and Patents Licensing by adding a 0 to the end of their values. Doing that should more or less balance the game's currency exchange out.

Seeing as this mod is now going to be implemented as part of the stock game, I think I'll get a preview of what is to come and install it in 0.25.

My installs of KSP from 0.11 on up to now are all littered with ships that were designed and never launched. About half of what I build is just for exposition, even now.

Step 1: Build the most massive, mind-crushingly huge rocket you can manage. Step 2: Put it on the pad. Step 3: Zoom out until you can see from orbit. It's generally less humbling if your rocket is proceeding to explode on the pad as you do this, but surprisingly not by a huge amount.

Alternatively-alternatively, go into GameData/Squad/Strategies/Strategies.cfg and add an extra 0 to the Outsourced R&D's minRate and maxRate values (ie. set them to 0.0027778 and 0.00347 respectively). I suggest you also factor UP Patents Liscensing and Fundraising Campaign (ie. add an extra 0 to the end of their minRate and maxRate), so that it keeps those from being drop-in-the-pan rewards even at 100% dedication.

Center of lift is not what you're looking for; you want center of thrust. Center of lift has to do with which direction your craft's natural air drag tends towards.

I've noticed a bit of a problem with winches... If they're assembled with a non-KAS part attached to their connector port, they won't function at all. They'll just complain that a non-KAS part is attached, and refuse to do anything (including disengage from the offending part). If the part in question is one that KAS does not let Kerbals pick up, the whole affair just gets even more messy since it makes the winch into a useless decoration for all time. Is there any way we could get a "detach" function for winches that lets them disengage from non-KAS parts attached to the connector port?

Here are my top tips for building spaceplanes with FAR installed. 1. The stock fundamentals do still apply: CoM slightly ahead of CoL, fuel drain balanced so CoM does not shift, enough intakes per engine to actually reach a decent altitude. 2. Make sure you have enough wings! 2 delta wings and a pair of connector wings are not gonna cut it for a 50T payload, even if they totally will in stock. 3. Aim for a TWR of 1.2 to 1.5. That seems to be the sweet spot for whatever reason. 4. Make sure you toggle flap controls appropriately! Tailfins should only control yaw, outer elevons should only adjust pitch, and inner control surfaces can handle both pitch and roll (though you may want to disable roll and just use reaction wheels/capsule torque for that). 5. Set up your landing gear appropriately: rear wheels should be behind CoM and about 50 to 75% of the way between wingtips and center of plane, front wheel(s) should be fairly far forward and as near to the center as possible (for single-front-wheel configuration) or also 50 to 75% from the center vs. wingtips (for double-front-wheel configuration). If your rear gear is too close in relative to the size of your spaceplane, it will induce a pendulum effect (ie. your plane will rock back and forth as it goes down the runway and flip itself over). 6. Struts! I cannot stress enough how important it is to strut spaceplanes. Floppy wings are dangerous wings in FAR.

KSP looks decidedly less interesting without this installed. Looking forward to 0.25 integration.

You should probably not put Funds below 30%. The way the game is set up right now, generally the rewards for contracts are around 500 to 800% of the setup cost of the absolute most efficient possible way of doing things. At 30% funds rewarded, you would be slightly better than breaking even (150% to 240% of initial costs) if you managed to do things perfectly and cost-effectively.

I think that funds->science and funds->reputation just need to have a 10x nerf (ie. 350-to-1 instead of 35-to-1). That would cause their benefits to be more in line with the payouts, and give a small-but-noticeable bonus to science/rep along the way instead of boosting you to absurd levels within just a few contracts. Hopefully we'll also get a direct way to spend funds, science, and rep on one another in the future as well, but that's not really mandatory.

That would be a problem, if there was ever any real need for more than about 5% of the overall parts in the tech tree. 25% funds to science seems to be the sweet spot on Hard, since missions generally reward about 4x the funds necessary to complete them on Normal. On Hard it's more like 2.5x, and with 25% funds going to science, you get around 1.5 to 2x your launch costs back in Funds as well as a very nice bit of science to play with.