purple100

It\'s pretty stable on takeoff, remarkably. Very sluggish though.

Behold, the SpacePlate! Just thought I\'d share this ridiculous design with you guys. It had no trouble getting into a high orbit on those mini-engines alone. I expected it to succumb to drag and fail catastrophically, but it didn\'t!

Some things I used to drop the weight of my lander: 1. Ditch the landing legs. MechJeb 1.7.3\'s landing computer can bring you to a safe touchdown on the engines themselves. 2. Avoid using radial decouplers on the last stage. Gravity on Mun is so low that you don\'t need to jettison those radial fuel tanks. Of course, if you\'re doing a powered landing on Kerbin, it might be worth keeping the decouplers. 3. Switch to the MechJeb radial model, the flat one. 4. Replace each radial full-size tank with 1 mini-tank and 1 mini-engine. You sacrifice only a 1/2 tank of fuel but gain a better thrust/weight ratio. The setup I\'m using easily shaves 3 units of weight off of your lander design. I found out that lighter landers with more thrust/weight tend to do better than ones loaded up with more fuel. Feel free to disagree with any of my design choices, I just hope you can make use of some of these ideas.

I can haz .craft file?

Yeah, I think the downloads got messed up when they migrated the forums. I\'ve decided I should make this an online Java applet. The only thing it will do is list which parts packs are used by a .craft and give you URLs for the threads you can download them from. I expect to work on this more tomorrow and get down to cataloging more of the new parts.

New BACE Co.? Me love you long time! Let\'s get some modular moonbases up in here!

If you throw a MechJeb onto the stage to be disconnected, it will become a new vessel instead of uncontrollable debris. You can then switch to it from the tracking station and manually fire the thrusters to de-orbit. I\'ve done this on several of my larger craft to keep the skies clear.

Wow, good job. This actually LOOKS like an airplane, AND it flies!

Yes, that information is more useful to the end-user. I just use the name from the .craft file and match it to the parts.cfg and then report the name of the folder for human usage. EDIT: Made the interface, and it\'s ugly but it works. It currently only lists the parts installed verbosely, and lists the parts of a craft by name. It still runs from the command line because I haven\'t made a .jar file yet.

Well, the part description doesn\'t always tell you what mod pack it came from. What this program will eventually do is this: 1. Make a list of the parts/mods you have installed 2. List all the parts in a .craft file 3. Tell you what parts in a .craft file you are missing, and what the name of the folder/parts pack is (using that text file I made) So, walking through an example of what will happen when I finish more of the program: Give it a .craft file. The program finds entries that look like this: { part = basekitFuelTank_4294927144 pos = 0.2661144,20.36475,0.1843084 rot = 0,0,0,1 istg = 0 dstg = 0 sidx = 1 sqor = -1 attm = 0 link = basekitEngine_4294926666 attN = top, basekitReactor_4294928738 attN = bottom, basekitEngine_4294926666 } Then it looks at this line: part = basekitFuelTank_4294927144 And it discovers that your ship is using a part named 'basekitFuelTank'. It looks it up in the text database and finds: basekitFuelTank, basekit_FuelTank, BACE Construction Co 0.1 And finally, the program tells you, you are missing 'basekitFuelTank', that it can be found in the folder 'basekit_FuelTank', and that this part is in the 'BACE Construction Co 0.1' pack. You can plug that into the forum search bar and find the mod easily.

I\'ve compiled a database file that the program will eventually use to tell you where your parts came from. I think I covered all the downloadable parts from 'Collections', 'Part packs and Parts', and 'Plugin Releases' (except for KW Rocketry). File is in plain-text with one part per line, formatted like this: internal part name, part folder name, parts pack name Feel free to use this however you want. You can do a manual search for a folder name on the text file if you need to find something.

Interesting... bundling a craft file with its required parts? If I could make a GUI that lets you drag-and-drop, that would be pretty cool. Wow, I haven\'t written a Java program for a loooong time. Gotta study my old stuff and figure out how to make Swing applications!

Good suggestions. I can scan the parts and find the proper in-game \'title\' as it appears in the VAB, and maybe give the name of the part folder the .cfg file lives in. As far as telling you what pack it came from, we\'d need to make a database file of all the packs on the site and the parts contained inside. That list would need upkeep, of course. Definitely possible. EDIT: The program now lists all the parts you have installed and some information about them. I\'ll see about making a GUI and Jar package for this.

'Crafty' is a graphical Java application designed to analyze .craft files and report what mods/parts packs the ship uses. At the moment, it can only identify parts from these sources: Stock parts Mechjeb 1.7._ BACE Construction Co. 0.1 The program is in a usable state otherwise. All I need to do is flesh out the information in the database.txt file so it can recognize other mods. This will take some time because it means I need to download every plugin and every part pack so I can identify the part names. I\'m almost done cataloging the files from the 'Plugin-Powered Addon Releases' section, so expect an update soon. Old version information: In response to the thread 'Distribution Methods for 'Amalgamated' Ships' ( http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=7144.0), I have decided to create a modest Java command line program that takes a .craft file and lists all the parts of a ship in alphabetical order.It\'s pretty crude at the moment, and you need to be able to run Java on the command line to use it. I plan to upgrade it with a simple graphical interface and package it as a .jar file, but I wanted to show you guys a proof-of-concept first. So you take a ship like this: And run it on the command line... And there you go! Make sure to put a slash at the end of your KSP folder path name. The program isn\'t very forgiving of errors at the moment.

Yay! I used this technique to re-align my orbit around Mun and land a craft close to my previous expeditions! Glad I learned how to do this.

So, if you\'re on the green line headed south, is that a burn along your 'orbit normal' vector? If it is, that means you can use MechJeb to keep yourself aligned properly.

I guess you could say I... 'Spaced out' 8)