Brainlord Mesomorph

Career: Year 1 day 356: I have a lot going on. Just cracked ISRU and spent a week completing two very complex ship build outs. One, a small scale ISRU platform and two, a horizontally oriented single engine nuclear lander/rover. Both involve a lot of complex swapping of symmetry (mirror here, radial there) sometimes symmetry wouldn’t work, and I had to manually place components. Did notice some weirdness in the final stages of the rover testing. If the rover would crash, some parts would fly away seemingly unbothered by gravity. (I always reverted to the SPH) Anyway, last night I moved the thing from the SPH to the VAB put it on a rocket, and launch it without incident. Then I try launching the ISRU platform, and over and over again halfway up through launch it just explodes! F3 mission report tells me that everything that was attached to the ISRU converter, or to the ore drum, just fell off! (it also says one component splashed down hard, even though we were 10 km up) I rearranged the platform so the ISRU components are at the top of stack, so there’s no extra weight on them, doesn’t help. Worse yet, if I revert to launch, all or most of the rocket is invisible. It’s still there, I can recover it for its full monetary value. But even if I save the game, and return to it, the rocket is missing. Then I wonder, what about the rover? I loaded the rover in orbit, and most of it is missing, and the planet Kerbin has been replaced by a digitized white ball. OK, the game is corrupt! I do have a backup save, before I launched either of these ships (and several hours a lunar construction ago). But if I load either of these ships, and then revert to launch, most of them is missing. Are the ship’s fixable? (some method of reloading and resaving them that might fix the corruption, some utility like a “compress and repair” database function?) If I rebuild the ships am I likely to have the same problem? I can easily imagine them my design is so complex it’s giving the modeler fits. Is the game trash? Is it possible to ships are OK but the game is screwed up? (now I’m too frustrated with this game to play it, I’ll have to find something else to do on Saturday morning!) EDIT: UPDATE: Ships are trash. i just moved one to another (sandbox) game, same issue,

yes, KSP is very relaxing. I often turn to it after a stressful day. put on some light classical music, its like 2001 a space odyssey. Someone once saw me doing slow careful orbital maneuvers, and said "that takes forever." I said, "If space travel is very exciting, you're doing it wrong."

Hey, Geschosskopf criticisms of the game model aside. Filling up w/ data is *good* ? My lab won't break when I get to 500? about the game: IMHO we're due for a science overhaul very soon, I think we need a lot more science gear, (including cameras!) squad needs to hire comedy writers to make that part more fun, and we need to triple the prices in the tech tree.

Ok I get the diff between results and DATA. But I have labs that filling up w/ data, how do get THAT out?

I actually have an Orbital Sanitation Department space station with "Debris Interceptor" Probes and all of my launches are fully compliant with the Clean Space Act. Nevertheless, accidents happen (I've had orbital collisions and I once blew up the fuel tanks I was trying to tow), there is no convenient way to get rid of spent trans-lunar stages, and rescue contacts leave a lot of crap around. I may have to put Orbital Sanitation Department space stations at Mun and Minmus.

Its already too small to actually burn as a star, you know. And I think it does a good job of representing the difference in size between planets and stars(within the fun-size solar system of Kerbin) Not to big, IMHO

Well, I think there's your problem, right there, sir.

jeez. touchy. and sure, year 16 and 35 mill in the bank, none of it matters. (heck you get to use the ion thrusters!) EDIT: hi slash, the OP was asking if recoverable boosters were a waste of time, IMHO: no EDIT 2: maybe I (and perhaps other KSP players) identify to personally with NASA's budget problems!

By your own math the rocket is 40% of the cost of the flight. If you only save half of that money by reusing the rockets, then for every five ships, you get a free ship! Payload and all! I think that’s well worth the cost of watching the thing re-enter. And besides, I have fun seeing how close to the KSC I can throw them, it’s like darts! And 3-5 million per mission? How much money you have? What contracts are you getting? Or, what year have you time warped to? I’m on day 300, I’ve got about two million, my first bots are on their way to Duna, and yes, I need to save money on my launches.

I have to disagree. Reducing your cost to orbit is key to building a large interplanetary fleet. If you want to talk pure economics, your cheapest orbital lifter is an LFO-SSTO rocket. (given the 22k bubble). Yes they are expensive to build but you can get 90% back if you parachute them in near the KSC. I’ve reduced my cost to orbit from $2000/tonne to 600. That pays for a lot more payload!

I did it for space (pardon the pun). My TechTier 5 Space Shuttle needed both droptanks and SRBs and there just wasn't room on the little thing to mount them both. I'm in the SPH holding a fuel tank in the air and there was no place to put it ... except for these big green dots on the ends of the SRBs!

YES I HAVE! The LFO-SRB!! it works fine. yes the timing is an issue, you can either carry the spent SRBs, or jettison them with a little LFO left.

I was thinking of this in 0.25 You can experiment with designs on Kerbin by simply lofting the craft to LKO, reentering down to 2 km and seeing if you can make orbit again. One of the biggest problems is that you have so much downward velocity that you have to cancel out before you even budge upwards. And without O2, you're going to need a lot of LFO. Wings helps with the first problem, multi-staging with th second, So you end up with something like a Saturn V with wings, (but you can get all the science on a fly-by or could in 0.25)

This is very interesting. I found out about the difference between the projected course and the actual course the hard way, by smashing into one of the moons of Jool. But I didn’t consider it to be a mistake, but a deliberate element of game play. In a virtual reality sim, there would be no reason for projected course to be any different from actual course, the same mathematical model would produce both courses and the ship would fly precisely along its course. But in reality that wouldn’t happen. So I figured they introduced a rounding error deliberately to simulate that difference. (Kerbals aren’t very good at math) That also worth noting that our piloting isn’t perfect, we’re never precisely aimed at the node, our timing is almost always off, and our burns are, at best, off by a few tenths of a m/s Beyond that, the mass of the ship isn’t the same after the burn, as it was when you are plotting the maneuver. And if you are plotting three or four burns in advance, there’s no way are ship will be precisely where you expected it to be a year later as you approach Duna. And if it was, I don’t think that would be as much fun. 'EDIT: About Duna's air: Elevation is everything! Some of the mountains almost peek above the atmosphere. If you want to maximize aerobraking, try to put your ship at the bottom of the Rift Valley, where the air is thickest.

Attach a girder segment, radial attachment point of even on of those little cubic octagonal struts rotate it 180 so it clips inside the landercan, then slap the probe core in it., (i do that with every ship) (you can radially attach ANYTHING this way)

oh, so when I reload he'll be awake. (I was getting ready to rescue an unconscious spaceman.)

thanks guys I've saved and quit I also have a constructor bot with a claw on a lower orbit. I'll be trying these things in the morning I think I tried that.

Bill just tried to grab onto a ladder, hit his head and went totally rag doll, is now flying away from the ship at high velocity and won’t turn on his retro pack. On the surface, you rag doll until you come to a halt, Bill won’t be coming to a halt in space! What do I do?!

Are you kidding? hauling this stuff on rockets is costing me a fortune! I'm about where you are - game wise (about day 300? ktime?) And I just spent a weekend trying to build a Tech Tier 5 space plane. I did it. It's kinda sketchy, and needs two SRBs, but it can take 3 kerbal to space and back. Immediately used it for an orbital rescue contract,

Here's to pancake lifters!

you can test your (Lathe and Eve) planes on Kerbin. IMHO in a career game other than Kerbin exploration contracts, early planes do seem useless,

I’ve been thinking about this today and I’ve come to the conclusion that my head is Mission Control, my mouth is Capcom, and my hands are Jeb’s. This is because I’m off in talking to myself as I play the game, “ we have liftoff” and “go for throttle; up” and rattling off distances and speeds, esp during launches landings and dockings. I actually find that helps keep track of things. And then there are times that I am telling Jeb things, and he’s not listening.: “…4.5 kilometers. 540 m/s. We still have red lights of the chutes. 4 km, 475 m/s still negative on chutes. 3 km, 325 m/s. Still holding on chutes. 2 km. 225 m/s OK, go for chutes, Jeb. go for chutes. Jeb? Do you copy Jeb? Go for chutes. Jeb we are go for chutes. One and half km, 200 m/s, Go for chutes. 1 km 187 m/s Go for chutes. FIVE HUNDRED meters … Jeb?! …We have cute deployment. 300 meters, 8 m/s…”

There have been a lot of kerbalnauts on fark. Screenshots often show up threads, Just seeing them I knew i was a game for me! Then Steam put it on sale and gave me a popunder just as I was getting board w/ Portall2 That was around 0.17

Hey Tex, Oh, that explains a lot. esp. given my big ships, and that always make the root part the CM or probe core(!) Given the re-root tool in the SPH and VAB, it would be easy to root any ship on its CoM. However most of my big stuff is assembled in orbit. So I have no idea where my root part(s) are.

IFAIK, the point (and lines) of map view refer to the CoM of the ship. If the ship is big and wobbly (space station, hello) then the COM is moving a tiny bit within the ship. I think that's what causes wobbly Pe and Ap points.