Rhedd

I sincerely wish this were MUCH higher on your list of priorities. i already have the best Gemini MOL lab I could wish for, but this... THIS is awesome. I'd put these little colonies on every moon I could reach, if this were available! i can't wait!

Fuel mass, yep. Figured that part out quickly. Interesting suggestion that I lost Dv because of the dry tank weight. I hadn't considered that, as I was only considering the total wet mass of the ship. Clearly as the fuel gets used the effects of dry tank weight would become more pronounced. Still, each tank weighs 0.5t, so the difference in ship dry weight between the RP-1 and LH2 ships is only 2.5t. I'm not doing math, here, but I can't imagine that a dry weight difference of 2.5t out of a wet total of 29.2 would account for an over FIFTY PERCENT drop in Dv. Am I wrong? Does that sound likely? When you say "make sure you're using cryogenic tanks", is that a Real Fuels thing? I've looked in to that mod and it sounds cool, but I use an embarrassing number of part mods, and unless it adapts all tanks automatically it means a lot of work on my part, setting up .cfgs for all the bits. I have to do it to put nifty Hot Rocket effects on all my engines, I'm not looking to increase that workload. Note that all of my values were taken from a simple test ship to observe the difference in Dv when switching fuels. I would never try to build an interplanetary ship with six tiny tanks!

That script is nice, and I tried it because these really should be running on LH2 and it bugs me that they don't, but the engines don't perform as they should if you just convert them straight like that. I want to discuss the Nuclear Lightbulb engine, because it's exactly what I imagined using to send my manned mission to Duna. After converting it to use LH2, however, I found that EVERY engine out-performed it. A simple Skipper burning stock RP-1/LOX was far superior in every way, and if I compared it to other engine mods, like the Cryogenic Engines, it was insane to even consider it. It's the type of engine I wanted to use, however, so I did some testing (using Interstellar Fuel Switcher) to find out why it sucked so bad... I built a craft with one pod, one tank, and a Nuclear Lightbulb running the original RP-1 (liquid fuel). It weighed 29.12t, and engine performance was: TWR=1.58, Dv(vac)=2469. The exact same ship with the tank switched to LH2 and the Lightbulb modded to use it was just pathetic, but that's to be expected since the best real-world information I can find says you can fit over 11 times the mass of RP-1 in the same space as LH2, so I added more LH2 tanks until the ships were the same total weight. This hydrogen-using ship weighed 29.22t, using six of the tanks used on the RP-1 ship to get there, and engine performance was: TWR=1.57, Dv(vac)=1099. So, simply converting the engine to use hydrogen instead of liquid fuel lost me 0.01TWR, removed a whopping 55.5% of my Dv, and as an added bonus made my rocket SIX TIMES larger! That's the exact opposite of good. Compared to a stock conventional engine, it gets even worse. The exact same ship using a Skipper engine instead of the Lightbulb weighs only 12.2t, with engine performance of: TWR=5.47, Dv(vac)=1456. According to a NASA proposal document on NTP (Nuclear Thermal Propulsion), an engine like this could be expected to have 100%+ Isp over a conventional engine, and even with the Lightbulb's awesome starting Isp of 1500, that means we'd have to multiply it by 2.65 (if using LH2) to get that sort of performance advantage over a Skipper. Now I don't even want total realism, but, in NASA's words, nuclear propulsion opens up the possibility of practical manned missions to the outer solar system, so I at least want that to be true in my game. Clearly, this just won't do. I know this mod natively uses liquid fuel, so any discussion of hydrogen is off in left field, but even using the stock fuel it's performance isn't nearly better enough to warrant using it over another engine that weighs much less and provides far higher TWR. And if we do discuss modding it to use H2, why does the same weight of hydrogen give less than half the Dv of liquid fuel, anyway? That's one I can't figure out no matter how I look at it. Anyway, fuel types is not something I know much about, really, so... thoughts anyone?

One thing I'd really love to see added to this fantastic mod is a very thin, very light endcap for each size of hub. If you place a smaller diameter part in-line next to a universal storage hub that's larger, things like the science bay look silly since they're just open to the top and bottom. A simple, thin (did I mention THIN) circular cap that can be optionally placed on top and below a storage hub would come in very handy.

Nice. I was actually wondering if the lack of glowing engines post-1.0 was a BUG. I'll be using this.

I like the idea of the new pieces, but I really, REALLY love the old ones, and don't want to see them disappear. Since you're heading in a new direction, is there anything at all broken with the old pieces that can't be fixed in the CFGs? If everything can be updated to 1.x with cfgs and nothing needs to be changed with the models themselves, I'm happy. I can make those changes myself and you can go on to bigger (literally) and better spaceplane parts!

I had to go back to v5.32 launch clamps, because if I connected a 5.34 umibilical tower to my rocket the whole thing would just fall loosely to the ground as soon as the simulation started. Tested with no other mods and it persisted. Started a brand new game and the problem went away... once, then it was right back to falling apart on the launchpad. Very weird. Also, I don't see that attaching the tower to radial decouplers helps. I would expect it to, but it doesn't. The decoupler unlocks with the tower (and explodes!! ), but the tower still appears out of nowhere every time. Sadly, it's not intermittent with me. The umbilical tower and Atlas launch clamp reappear 100% of the time, while everything else works 100% of the time. This is such a stubborn annoying problem! >_<

Glad you fixed the sparking tank treads from Kerbal Foundries. (Although it was nifty) I had to do that myself in the last version. Thanks! Are wheels/tracks not supposed to kick up dust, though? When the sparks were malfunctioning on the tank treads it looked really cool on Duna. If they aren't supposed to, I'd like to vote for them doing so in the future.

Awesome. Thanks for the info. I'll just make that adjustment myself until you update. Thanks! - - - Updated - - -

Actually, the exact opposite is true, unfortunately. I've been using the v01a version of this with IR 0.21.1 and KAS 0.4.10 in KSP 1.0.2 (That's a lot of numbers!) ever since release and never had a problem with any part. After the new KAS release, though, the Grasper doesn't work. I was using it for landing gear feet for rough terrain, and after updating KAS the ship just bounces off the ground and then falls through as if the landing gear Graspers weren't there.

This is easily one of my top five favorite mods for KSP. Colorful ribbons make the little guys so much more lovable. I can't seem to get a mach-x ribbon awarded, though. Are they working in 1.02? I have a replica F-104 Starfighter that I built that'll get up to around 1100m/s at sea level (!!!) and kerbals who pilot it never even get recognized for breaking mach 1. On another subject entirely, I noticed there was some discussion about awarding orange suits to experienced kerbals. If you decide to do that, you MUST make it optional, because to an American at least, it would be completely stupid. The orange jumpsuit has a meaning. It means you're a civilian, not military. That's why a lot of the later Shuttle pilots had orange suits but none of the Apollo astronauts did. It's not a fashion statement, it's a uniform. White=military, Orange=civilian. So the last thing I want is for my super-experienced Neil-Armstrong-analog Kerbal to suddenly get "awarded" a civilian jumpsuit. Retired, maybe? Just please, no.

Thanks for the continual updates to my very favorite mod, but what the heck IS going on with the launch towers, anyway? The following you into space thing, I mean. Any idea what causes it? The big launch tower, Mercury clamps, Apollo clamps, and of course the vanilla launch tower are fine, but the Gemini clamps and the umbilical tower follow you into space every time. I tried making the umbilical .cfg an exact copy (other than model names) of a working tower, and that didn't fix the problem! I hate mysteries, especially when they appear out of nowhere at 13km and rip my Saturn V in half.

Why go to 200km? Honestly, just because I can. You're right, there's no need to go higher than 80, but since this was just a quick and dirty test I didn't adjust the fuel, so even going to 200km I have tons of S2 fuel that I have to jettison before starting the transfer burn, and since a higher orbit does reduce the Dv needed to get to the Mun, why not? Like I said, my eventual goal is to get all of the TWR/fuel amounts right so I can reach parking orbit with no unneeded fuel, without having to re-ignite engines that didn't in reality, and without having to leave my S2 tank in a stable Kerbin orbit. I won't be going any higher than about 100km, when I do that.

I wish I would've found this mod before 1.0, because it's EXACTLY what I always wanted! Unfortunately, since I mostly want it for jets, and I use Hot Rockets so every last one of my engines has an "EFFECT" on it, it doesn't do much for me now. Keep up the great work and I sure hope you can work around the problem with EFFECTs. I'm really looking forward to using this!

Glad to see this fantastic pod getting updated for KSP 1.0!

Thank you for the information about the landing gear. Glad it's an easily fixable problem. Since we're discussing realism and FASA rocket launches, I thought I'd share my experiences with launching the Apollo-loaded Saturn V in the new KSP aerodynamic model. I love the Saturn V, and spent a lot of time in 0.25 getting it to fly a realistic flight profile, so I was anxious to see how it flew after 1.0. As a quick test, I loaded up the SV from the FASA sandbox game and gave it a whirl. Using my old MechJeb flight profile, it would always tumble and die at around 13km (about the time the air got thin and the pressure got high). I assumed this was because of pushing against max Q, so I set up the engines to do what they do in real life, and had the center F-1 shut down at about 12km. This fixed the problem perfectly and it went into orbit every time. The only problem was that a launch TWR of 2 is way higher than reality, so my next step was to reduce that and see what happened... As a dirty job, I reduced thrust on the S1 engines until the launch TWR was about 1.2 (the real Apollo 11 SV was about 1.18). I didn't adjust the fuel amounts or anything, so as I said, this was a very dirty job just to see how the aerodynamics worked. The result was that soon after clearing the tower, the rocket would lean in some random direction (usually North or SW, for some reason) and fail. I tried over and over again with different MechJeb settings, but the lean happened too soon in the flight and could never really be compensated for. Finally, frustrated, I started taking the ship apart. That's when I noticed that the SV in the FASA sandbox save has tons of added vernier thrusters and struts to compensate for problems in flight... So I built a new one, 100% clean. Just the parts you'd expect to be on the actual vehicle. No extra struts, no extra RCS, nothing but a pure SV with Apollo payload. It flew perfectly from then on. So, this is the MJ setup I used, which will probably be surprising to folks that think you should head straight up through the atmosphere before turning, but it's quite realistic: Gravity turn start @ 0.2km, turn end at 69km, shape 75%. Limit AoA to 5deg (still experimenting with that), corrective steering off. Have the center S1 engine shut off at 12km, and the center S2 shut off at 40km (still experimenting). Using those settings a clean Apollo SV will make it into a 200km orbit with fuel to spare. Next comes trying to get it into orbit without having to shut off engines and coast at any point, and without having fuel still left in the S2. I think this is a MechJeb problem, though. It likes to outrun the Apoapsis and then have to coast to catch up before circularizing. Hope this helps anyone having problems launching a moon mission!

Take the entire "FASA Sandbox" folder and drop it in your "Kerbal Space Program/saves" folder, then start the game, choose continue, and pick the FASA Sandbox save. Play around in there to make sure everything is installed correctly.

It'd be a pro tip if I knew why it was necessary.

Start up the "FASA sandbox" saved game that FASA comes with (after putting it in the proper saves directory), and make sure you can load the ships there. You really shouldn't be having any problems like that in a sandbox game. And really, am I the ONLY person that can't select the Gemini lander landing gear from the menu?? Nobody else has that problem?

This is my all-time favorite mod, but I don't understand what's going on with the landing legs. I was running the first version of FASA for 1.0, and I couldn't select the Gemini lander legs (either part) in the VAB. Clicking on the icon did nothing. Now, after upgrading to the newest version of FASA, which said it fixed a problem with landing legs, I still can't select the Gemini lander legs, NOR can I select the Gemini pod legs at all. I used to use those mini lander legs ALL the time, so I really need a solution to this. I've tried it with no mods but FASA installed and it behaves exactly the same way. What's up? - - - Updated - - - A note on flying the Saturn V: You may not know, since I only learned this the other day, that at a certain altitude the real Saturn V shuts down its center S1 engine, and then does the same thing with the center S2. This is to keep the speed down as the TWR goes up. I intend to try the same thing, and I suspect it'll solve a lot of problems with flipping at mid-altitude.

This is a fun mod, thanks! One small thing, though; I had to flip your texture top-to-bottom before it would display correctly. I've recently run into this problem converting a few older KSP mods from .tga to .dds. After the conversion the mapping is flipped upside-down. I've worked as a professional game artist for almost 15 years and I've never seen a problem swapping from TGAs to DDSs before now, so I don't have a clue why it happens, but just flip your texture and it'll be fine.

How is the volume of a part calculated? Does it respect "rescale" values? Is there any way of hard-defining it in the part.cfg? I ask because I have some modded parts that take up way too much room compared to similar objects. Also, why won't external command seats go in a container? Other command pods will, and that seems like one that would get used a lot in small, on-site vehicle building.

That works great! Thank you very much! This thing is the only reasonable way I've found of getting a small rover aboard a LEM-sized lander.

Hope this gets updated! It's an important part of a number of other nice mods. I'm SO happy 1.0 is released so we probably won't have to worry about this every few months.

You get this working with EvE clouds, like you say you want to, and you will officially be DA BOMB! (Yes, that's totally a thing people still say. No, it is.)