FleshJeb

You may have just changed my mind. After a few hours of fiddling, I had abandoned planes altogether.

I'm a committed atheist, but U2's Gloria turns me into a Catholic for 3 minutes and 43 seconds, every time.

Receiving messages from space: Splashed down on Kerbin

Little known fact: The Round-8 is a direct result of attempting to mitigate the unpredictable (and often dangerous) effects of trying to toast bagels. Preeminent "TPF" scientist (and part-time evil overlord) Schwartz Kerman discovered that coating them in gold foil nullified the worst effects of the Toaster Procreation Field. Eventually, Schwartz attempted to go to Duna on a vessel (The Crumbs of Our Ancestors) fueled entirely by Round-8's. Unfortunately, contact was lost 237 days into the mission, just before orbital capture. Legend says he will never go hungry.

Thanks for the info, Xannari. I'll have to look into it when I'm not working quite so much.

Generally realistically and stock parts, but using lots of "Applied Handwavium". I see KSP like Legos--The parts aren't literal representations, but abstractions assembled to give approximately the look and performance that I want. Don't get me wrong, I love realism. For example: I used to use RemoteTech, and have fully designed, and partially built out a very robust comms network for the entire solar system. It was hell on my framerate, so now I just design craft and missions as if RemoteTech were in effect. Unfortunately, some of the physics mechanics implemented in 1.x have dented the power of Applied Handwavium. For instance, the heat mechanics and airstream occlusion are poor copies of reality, and one can no longer say, "This surface-attach part is located here, but the engineers tucked it away out of the airstream". As someone in another thread pointed out, 1.x is in the Uncanny Valley of realism. At the risk of getting edited (and feel free): KSP is now like being forced to use a blonde RealDoll when your imagination can give you anything you want.

∫ex= f(un) Now that that's out of the way... OP, do you know if modding the attachment points of wings will cause anything screwy to happen? I hate that the structural swept wings attach at the rear corner, and I'd like to move it to the middle of the attachment edge. I assume this will completely screw up how Center of Lift is determined. There's about 20-30 parts I want to mod the attachment points for because they're completely unintuitive. They're also lousy for Editor Extensions' Vertical Snap. How about rotating the attachment points of all the control surfaces? I think 1.x swapped a few axes, and I'd like to put them back in pre-1.0 position, and make them all consistent. Does the size of the node determine occlusion, or joint strength? I'd set everything to 0 or 1, because the size 2's are hell in the editor.

Nice job on the triangular fuel loadout.

That might be the phantom acceleration bug. Does it persist after you shutdown and restart KSP?

Hmm, maybe this will help me with my problem: Planes used to feel like lumbering bricks, they actually felt like multi-ton monsters. NuStock feels like flying RC planes--The sense of scale feels completely off. Before, I could purposefully design something that wouldn't generate more than 2-5Gs; now I can't seem to keep them under 10Gs. I know NuFAR does that BS thing where it assumes the wing is optimized for whatever speed regime it's currently operating in. Do you think removing ModuleLiftingSurface would make them behave more like supersonic wings all the time? (i.e. a flat plate with a AoA for lift). Would a similar fix help control surfaces/airbrakes? They're way too powerful right now. I keep seeing that term... What's a "drag cube"? How does this differ from sphere? I'm guessing the cube model has a different drag coefficient per face, and the sphere only has one?

This happens to me occasionally. I believe it's an overheat issue in my case.

As a surveyor, I'm well aware of the power of the tripod. However, there's a thread from a few months back where someone proved that 5 legs offers those most tip resistance (distance from center of mass to bounding polygon, as Zarakon said) for the least number of legs.

Bumping this thread to check 1.x compatibility. I'm a surveyor in real life, and I'm planning on making some surveying equipment in KSP. This is perfect. I'm going to mount the laser on the side (or inside!) of some HullCam VDS telescopes.

That's actually an amazing write up. The error is the difference between where you're pointing now, and where you want to end up pointing. There are no individual "set points" for what you're asking--For lack of a better term, PID controllers are more "organic" than that. This is why they're good for handling many different situations. However, Kp is the "raw aggression" term. The wikipedia page discusses tuning methodologies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PID_controller#Overview_of_methods It's a trial-and-error process for each craft, because they all have different amounts of available torque and moments of inertia. Likewise, a particular set of PID parameters might work well for a full craft, but not an empty one.

A lot of us use SMART A.S.S. in Surf mode to hold a pitch and heading. Get up to your cruising speed and altitude and find a pitch that your plane barely climbs at (<50m/s vertical.) It should hold you within a certain altitude range due to less lift and reduced thrust. I've fallen asleep in the middle of flights and been just fine. I don't know how well this works in 1.x, as I mostly play 0.25

Awesome, glad I could help! I tested the crap out of that construction technique (100's of kms of full-throttle roving on Kerbin). I think the strength of the part they're attached to has something to do with the durability. Also, it looks like you strutted the front and back girders together, and that helps with overall craft stiffness. I think having a floppy craft really increases the potential dynamic stress on the wheel joints. My only recommendation on your current design would be to move your second pair of wheels farther forward. The front pair takes the most abuse, so that will help unload them. It's far better to pop a rear tire than a front one. Now, jump that thing off the launchpad at full throttle and see if you can find areas that need reinforcement. ;-)

Exquisite distillation of the problem. This is where I find myself. KSP 1.x is not realistic enough to scratch that itch for me, and it's no longer possible to achieve the same balls-out lunacy as before. I'm either going to end up playing RSS/RO or writing a bunch of Module Manager files to try and recapture the madness, but I won't be playing stock any more. ----- Since I'm taking my fate into my own hands. Does anyone have a collection of "crazy" mods that are good, internally consistent, and play well with each other? The steampunk one looked cool.

Batteries are notoriously wobbly, and your wheels are mounted to them. I prefer girder mounting. I've had a lot of success with this design. The rollover bars and bumpers help quite a bit.

Oops, gotcha. I misunderstood.

The closer you are to a world, the shorter the shadow-time: Same distance, higher speed. Unless you mean doing the burn early or late while still outside the shadow. You'd pay a dV price for off-axis, and lower Oberth, but an ion craft designed for it might have a better mass fraction than one capable of night-side ops. Personally, I always carry enough batteries to do the longest night-side burn I expect to encounter on my mission. BurnDV/TWR = seconds of battery required http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Orbit_darkness_time http://www.prism.gatech.edu/~bnichols8/projects/kspdarkness/main.shtml

Science Alert http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/76793-0-23-5-ScienceAlert-Experiment-availability-feedback

I expect it's some sort of symmetry issue. It may be that you used radial or mirror symmetry when the build structure would have preferred the other. More likely: In older versions (not sure about current), when you re-root your craft, the build tree can get really screwed up. Parts will sometimes surface-attach when they should node-attach, leading to craft that looks correct but is actually asymmetric.

That's a nice feature. It would be amazing if it were a tweakable percentage.

Hey Joe, this is fantastic! I'm thinking about shrouding a few balloons in wing panels and making a zeppelin. Of course I'll need nuFAR to do it.

"Here" is the extreme end of the playerbase. A significant and unrepresentative proportion of players here were using FAR, RSS, DRE, etc. I will consider that. So far I've only got one rocket and 5 planes built post-1.0. I have about 2000 hours of stock to unlearn. Using KER and MechJeb, I could definitely teach a pre-teen how to build and fly a rocket. The adjustment might be a matter of just saying, "Add fins to the bottom". That might work, thanks. The two kids I'm thinking of could definitely handle that. -------------------- I'm definitely looking forward to nuFAR, as nuStock handles occlusion badly and VERY unintuitively for tiny parts. I like my panel van planes, and the wings/skin panels SHOULD protect things under the skin.