Esme

I've only just spotted this thread - may I say 'jolly well done!'. I was thinking of looking into how one might retexture stock parts to get a somewhat Steampunkesque look to things, but this mod far exceeds anything I could manage. I shall instruct the head buyer at the Bannister & Moore Engineering Works to sort out a contract for supply of parts from your good selves forthwith. Yours, Miss Esme Moore

Each to their own. My Kerbals have travelled hundred of kilometres in them, without incident after the first one. They get the job done, are simple and can always do sub-orbital hops if need be. Heck, they can even return to Kerbin. (shrugs) Works for me, anyway!

Thanks very much again, Goatrider! Claw, yes the celestial sphere is a texture - it becomes quite obvious if you zoom in on it (try using a Mk1 cockpit clicking on a window, then using your scroll wheel to zoom the image). When I was still getting to grips with KSP, I judged Mun intercepts by aiming for patches of the Milky Way a certain visual distance ahead of where the Mun was in the sky, and as a result became reasonably familiar with some of the Kerbaloid Milky Way's features. features. What I'd like to do now is to produce a proper map of it and the rest of the sky.

(laughing) Many thanks! (added shortly after) Hmmn.. turns out the stellar background isn't in there or another folder with some mbm's in that I tried. I suppose it might be buried in the program code..

You're correct, SpaceSphereofDeath, it's a star map that I'm after. There's a couple of personal projects I have in mind that would depend on having a reasonably accurate star map. If one doesn;t already exist, my favoured choice would be to extract the relevant texture(s) from the game and manipulate the images in a paint program to produce a usable star chart. If I HAVE to I'll just screenshot the entire sky over time, but I;d rather not have to! I'm female, btw. :-)

It's a bit late here at the moment, so I've only lightly skimmed this thread, but this sounds like exactly what we need to offer an alternative to Curse. This gets my support!

Apologies if I've been blind and missed a reference to one somewhere, but is there a map of Kerbin's night sky anywhere? As in one showing lines of Right Asenscion and Declination? (or even if it uses something more like 0-360 degrees equatorially and +90 to -90 degrees N-S I'd still be happy). Failing that, can anyone tell me how I can extract the night sky textures into .PNG's or JPEGs, please, so I can start making my own map?

Firegeek, I did say 'cockpit' Those command chairs don't have reaction wheels built in. You try putting a Mk1 cockpit on one end and a Mk2 cockpit on the other end facing in the opposite direction of a 10-ton ship/rover. 'Awkward' isn't even close.. :-}

Oh, wow! Since the Rapier engines were added, I've been thinking about trying to make something (with the bits available in KSP I mean - I'm not a modder!) like Skylon, but aren't very good with aircraft. Good luck with this, I look forward to this project's completion!

Tried landing a 3-man capsule on Minmus for the first time. Trouble was I;d put the thing together in too much of a hurry, and only realised when well on the way to Minmus that it lacked a few things. Like extra batteries, or some solar panels. So no reaction-wheel control. And I'd fluffed my trajectory a bit, so was low on both fuel and monopropellant. Free return, or try landing anyway? Land! Within minutes I'd made another fluff - forgetting that I had no SAS due to the lack of electrickery, and not keeping my eyes on the game, the ship had slowly rotated and was now trying to escape Minmus rather than land on it. kill engines, and re-evaluate. Can we still make Kerbin? Really not sure.. howsabout MNimus? Well, it;s rather tight, but with a 'suicide burn' landing we should just be able to do it. So, down we went. Except I had misjudged, but didn;t realise until a tad too late to push it back into a Minmus orbit. Main engine fuel ran out somewhere between 1 and 2km, so I was using attitude thrusters for all they were worth, and trying to ignore the fact that the ship still had 30ms-1 sideways velocity, whcih would normally be sufficient to cause a catastrophe all by itself. The ground was closing fast - I didn't think we were going to make it. So I ordered one of my Kerbals to EVA, thinking I might save at least one of them with their jetpack. Too late! BANG! The EVA'd kerbal was launched into space, and I winced every time he hit the ground, expecting him to die every time. But no! He actually survuved! I;d no sooner got him onto his feet when, enter stage left - the nose of the ship hove into view, sliding along the ice and ground to a halt just metres from my much-bounced Kerbal. Two landing legs were damaged and the main engine plus monoprop tanks had gone, but I discovered later that the legs could be repaired, and I flew some spherical monoprop tanks up from Kerbin. I salvaged solar panels and some batteries from obsolescent gear cluttering up the terrain near my base, and managed to use the ships reaction wheels and thrusters to get it onto its legs. Shortly thereafter, it successfully returned to Kerbin with Science! I only realised later that the sideways velocity was probably what had saved both the ship and my poor bruised Kerbal - if they'd hit at 90 degrees to the surface, theyd almost certainly have been destroyed.

Despite having played for a few months, I've only successfully landed kerbals on Minmus and the Mun so far - and have only successfully returned them from Minmus - but then I'm in no hurry with this wonderful game. Anyway, my Minmus rovers (produced by the Bannister and Moore Engineering Works) so far have been based around a Mk1 cockpit, with a monopropellant tank behind that, followed by an FL-T400 fuel tank, and finally an inline reaction wheel. To this I add four undercarriage wheels , two almost as far back as they'll go without poking beyond the reaction wheel, and two as far forward as they'll go without poking beyond the monoprop tank. A fifth wheel is then added under the nose of the cockpit, with the light shining forwards (so that the three foremost wheels make a sort of tripod). Add small engines and thrusters plus other equipment to suit. Finally put one or two landing legs on the top back of the rover. You land this like you would a normal lander - onto the landing leg or legs - but then you simply pitch the nose down and get it onto its wheels. Most of my rovers have also had ladder rungs added to the monoprop tank, too. then, when the rover stops, retract the undercarriage, and when your Kerbonaut EVA's, they can simply climb back on top of the rover and back into the cockpit - handy until you get the hang of the jetpacks. Because I haven't got around to learning how to use action groups yet, every time I halt a rover for some exploration and retract the undercarriage, it gives the whole thing something of the appearance of a dog lying down. So much so that I have named the ones currently in use at my Minmus base 'Rover', 'Spot', 'Fido' and the extended twin-cockpit version (has a Mk2 cockpit at the rear, but still only 5 wheels) 'Cerberus'. Then when they are boarded and the pilot deploys the undercarriage, it looks like a dog standing up raising it's tail eager to be off.. On the flat icy Mare of Minmus, this design works very well, and once you have set the rover in motion at over about 2m/s-1, it will continue without further use of fuel until it hits something or encounters a slope. I sometimes set one going at 10ms-1 (about 36kph) and leave it whilst I do something else for a bit as it traverses the ice. Of course, if you use it on uneven terrain, and particularly when ascending or descending slopes or mountain sides, you need to be at the controls all the time, but it WILL happily cope with such terrain, provided you don't go too fast. And if you can't be bothered with that amount of driving? Point your Rover in the direction that you want to go, and tell it to 'sit' (retract the rear two undercarriage wheels), then just use its rocket engine(s) to put it into a sub-orbital hop, landing on its tail (landing leg(s)) exactly as you landed it on Minmus in the first place. If you have sufficient parachutes in place, this Rover can easily make it back to Kerbin, provided it is sufficiently fuelled, too. My original designs lacked the nosewheel, but did have a slight tendency to nose over on rough terrain. I have tried a three-wheeled design, as per the five-wheel design but with the paired forward wheels removed. This works fine on the flat, but unsurprisingly isn't so good on undulating terrain. The reaction wheel should not be kept on constantly whilst gliding over the surface, as it will, within a few minutes, tend to cause the nose to lift and the back wheels to dig in, and you will slow down. Also, I discovered that one should never ever create a twin cockpit rover/ship with the cockpits facing in opposite directions (because the reaction wheels in the cockpits will be fighting each other). I did this once, and whilst I did manage to land the rover, it was so troublesome to handle both in space and on the ground that I sent a rescue ship to bring the crew home in. :-}

I've been thinking for a while that I'd like to see a functioning telescope in the Science faculty at KSC, so that one could get a rough idea of the terrain on the Mun and Minmus, and maybe even a vague idea of the surface of Duna and Eve before sending probes there. I very much like your idea of an astronomy department that assists with planning trajectories for mission, finding launch windows etc. Pendrin. Thinking about it, maybe a small amount of initial science could be gained by mapping moons and planets with the telescope, too. Not so much that you;d have to do telescopic mapping first, just enough to give a wee bit of a boost initially for those that want/need it.

I understand your point, Jas1126, but that's if you look at it simply as a game without reference to what it represents and how that makes some folk feel about it. I want realistic engines because, having been interested in astronomy since before Apollo 11 and having expected that one day I could well be knocking lumps off rocks on Mars, I feel cheated by how things actually turned out. So for me, yes, KSP is a game, and I enjoy the silly and pure fun side of it as much as anyone. But it also gives me a lot of pleasure trying to do things (reasonably) realistically, because, durn it, KSP is (aside from my participation in Zooniverse) the nearest I'm ever going to get to living that childhood dream. So ion engines you can travel to Duna, land on Duna and return from Duna with? No, thank you.

I haven't got to a point yet where I can build ion-engined probes (and solar-sailing ones, using KSP Interstellar!), but I was looking forward to doing so - and I'm dismayed if ion engines have been made so over-powered. However, perhaps this kind of issue (and one or two others I;ve seen discussed in the forums) could be dealt with by a 'realism' switch amongst the game options? So that those who want things as realistic as possible get realistically low-powered ion engines, and those who don;t (for whatever reason) can select an 'easy' mode and pootle around with fun, but unrealistic stuff to their hearts content?

I'm in favour of a delta-V indicator being easily available, but not necessarily a 'permanently on display' thing as the readings from the navball and altimeter are. Whilst I appreciate the fun to be had by guessing or just throwing stuff together and seeing what works, beyond a certain point, that can get incredibly frustrating, and there indications of delta-V can be useful. It needn't be something as complex as MechJeb's delta-V display, in my opinion; it could just show a total delta-V, perhaps, and even a warning that the figure given is only an approximation, if necessary. If it were also possible to have some kind of in-game link pointing people to where they can obtain more sophisticated tools like MechJeb and Engineer. This latter might require a slightly finer breakdown of sections in Kerbal Spaceport, eg separating mods that give you improved readouts from those that add parts that give you finer control of your ship (better thrusters or reaction wheels, etc).

Yes. Because my PC is rather old, I downloaded the low res version, and there were definitely volumetric clouds in that.

Having the other day nursed my Automated Drilling Rig - 1 onto one of the mare on Minmus, I'd fired it up only to realise that there'd been a slight slip up back at KSC, to wit - no fuel lines connecting the kethane processing unit and the fuel tanks. Durn. So the follow-up manned mission piloted by Bill was to do double duty; deliver a hab to get a base started next to the ADR, and take some parts to fix both the lack of fuel lines and the lack of power that had only become apparent when the ADR-1 was fired up for the first time. Well, I don't know if Bill got distracted by a loose packet of crisps floating around the lander capsule, because he usually nails his landings pretty well. Not this time. he landed with a little too much sideways velocity and one side slightly low, just sufficient to knock the ship into a spin and bounce it off the surface. Desperately, he tried to regain control, to no avail. Then he tried to make it to the hatch, but found himself pinned to his seat by the spin. Then... BOOM! RIP Bill Kerman, you will be missed. It was decided to send up one of the rookie Kerbonauts, Wehrgel Kerman, in a simple one-man ship, with the sole objective of getting the ADR unit working. Wehrgel made a good landing a couple of kilometres from the ADR, then hopped his ship to within easy reach of it. Time to get out and fix things! But after an hour of trying one thing after another, nothing, fuel just would not transfer between the kethane processing unit and the fuel tanks on the ADR. Wehrgel reported back to KSC. Within half an hour, KSC had one less engineer in its ranks and was advertising the job. The engineering team rethought the ADR design from scratch, and triumphantly presented the directors with a design coming in at a little over five tonnes - about half the weight of the ADR-1 - and better balanced and more controllable to boot.; 'Build it;' they were told. Meanwhile Wehrgel settled in to wait for the new ADR to be sent up. Some days later, the ADR-2 arrived, and landed a couple of kilometres from Wehrgel and the ADR-1. That was a bit inconvenient, but after checking that the ADR-2 was working as advertised, Wehrgel set about shifting both his ship and the ADR-1 closer to the ADR-2 - no sense risking the new unit! Once this was done, he set about cannibalising the ADR-1 to provide more solar panels and batteries for the ADR-2 as its one flaw was that it was still somewhat underpowered. Once that was done, Wehrgel admired his handiwork, then jetted up to go over to his ship - and flew straight through one of the solar panels, stunning himself in the process. Fortunately, he hadn't jetted too high, and landed with no more than a few minor bruises and a bit of a scratch on his faceplate. He then removed the directional solar cell units from his ship, replaced the broken unit on ADR-2 and stowed the spare on ADR-1. Next job was to refuel his ship, which had had barely enough fuel left for the trip back to Kerbin when it landed. This went without a hitch, so then it was just a case of waiting until Minmus' rotation was pointing Wehrgel's ship the right way, and launching straight up. A week later, Wehrgel Kerman successfully returned to Kerbin to a hero's welcome with the first sample to be returned from the surface of Minmus! Next mission will be the second attempt to land a hab unit on Minmus.

Definitely a newbie, here. Even with MechJeb's help, have only just learnt how to dock, have only landed on the Mun once (but couldn't get my Kerbonaut back to Kerbin), and only just about got a tiny base started on Minmus. No Kerbals outside of Kerbin's SOI, every attempt to send a probe to Duna missed by a loooong way, and I managed to fumble the one probe I got to Eve by accidentally aerobraking too hard (though I'm still proud of the single orbit's worth of mapping that probe achieved). But the adventures I've had, rescuing crashed Kerbals on Minmus, trying to nurse a somewhat fragile rover up onto a plateau and over rather uneven terrain to get to a Kethane processing unit before it ran out of fuel.. priceless. But I'm learning. I like the current cartoon at XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1356/ - whilst unfortunately I couldn't finish my physics degree and have never worked for any space-related company, that learning curve looks awfully familiar (although the tail end of mine would be a bit flatter!)

Rbray89; many thanks! I just love your mod - can't wait till one day I have a PC that can handle those volumetric clouds :-) I'm flying west from KSC at the moment, first major flight above the clouds.. - beautiful!

Please pardon my ignorance, but how do you get that GUI relating to this mod to appear in-game? Unfortuinately, my PC isn;t up to handling the volumetric clouds (it's a refurbed Dell Optiplex 745 with teh original graphics card which cant be replaced because the box takes non-0standard cards only :-( ). To give you an iodea of what I see, if I go to a sattelite in orbit of Kerbin and look directly down, what I see is three jagged hexagonal patches of flat pink that track teh motion of the sattelite (I'd add that re-entry effects also appear as flat neon pink too. Sigh..). The non-volumetric clouds work beautifully, so I'd like to be able to turn the volumetric ones off, if possible. Durned shame, as I really, really wanted those Dunan dust-clouds... ah well, maybe next year :-}

Oh, so W and D aren't supposed to be down and up respectively? I'd presumed there was some arcane but good reason for that which I'd realise eventually when I got good enough! :-} Right, I'm off to mess with by settings to sort that out!

Hello! I've been playing KSP a few weeks but I'm new to the forum here. Unfortunately, I'm having zero luck with getting the ARM patch in place. I'm not entirely sure if this is the right place to post this, so apologies if I've erred. I run Linux Mint 16 (32 bit) with Xfce4 as the desktop, on an old refurbished Dell Optiplex 745 which has 4GB of RAM, but the original graphics card (I think; it's an AMD/ATI RVI 516 Radeon X1300/X1550 series Dell 'half-height' card, anyway). First of all, I tried simply letting the launcher patch my main install (which has a lot of mods, including Interstellar, KW Rocketry, KAS, Kethane and several others) and this caused the graphics settings to be reset, the science tree to be somewhat reste, and when I checked available parts, I could see the grabber. However - nothing else whatsoever of the upgrade was apaprent - no asteroids, no new functionality in the Mission control section. So I then renamed that folder, and did a fresh install of the original zip file for 0.23, then asked the launcher to patch that. Nada. Then I thought to check the patch file and set its permissions to allow it to be executable - still nada. I'm scratching my head over what else I can sensibly do.. Can provide the logfiles if need be. This evenings problems with the patch aside - (hey, it's alpha, and these things happen) - may I say what an excellent game KSP is! (and well done to all the modders, too!) I haven't had so much fun with a computer game for years! I'll refrain from gushing about bits and bobs I'd like to see in KSP in future here.. UPDATED: Just realised I can get the patch as a download from the Store. Doh! Will update with whether that does the trick for me. :-} Final update: The downloaded version has done the trick. Oooh, pretty lights! And bigger 'splosions, erm rockets, oooh! I can see the asteroids now, too, yay! :-)