galactictaco

am i the only one who tries to dock a shuttle to a station and winds up accidentally cycling to the debris falling out of orbit? i keep hitting the wrong cycle button (or whatever the actual term is for it) and having to watch my first stage fall back to kerbin before i can go back to docking my vessel to my station. usually this occurs at the very end also, when I'm like 100 meters from the station and headed directly for it, i switch to the station to adjust its attitude and instead I'm locked to my debris 25 Km behind me and i have to watch it fall back before i can switch to station, by now solidly on the night side of kerbin with my shuttle miles off course. so can we make it that debris doesn't lock you in the way a piloted vessel does? can we move the limit to like 40km in stead of the 60's for what counts as technically 'within the atmosphere'? can we go back to the hard limit of 2.3 km to prevent this nonsense? is it my own fault and i have a setting i can change and i should shut up about it?

to throw my hat in the ring, i enjoy the idea, as some one who uses rovers a lot in caveman runs, but i have a problem with it. gravity: stability is essential in a new alien environment like the Mun or Minmus and your rover will be more stable on Kerbin with the higher gravity. the way i do it usually is a quick spin with the rover on the launch pad, a hard 180, then drive it down the ramp and see if it flips about and explodes when it gets to the bottom. then drive it across the field and see if it turns acceptably. its usually a rigorous enough testing regimen to work out major stability concerns, especially since rover missions are intentional grind fests, fueled by the zen effect of listening to rap music and watching a little adorable rover stunt across a lunar landscape. you don't do these at more than 10 MPS unless you are just having fun for S's and G's. if you are driving tens of kilometers for a mission you start taking sensible precautions like just taking it slow and preplanning a route around, not through, a crater. so i think its a cool idea, but that it would be a window dressing more than anything, because it won't be an analogue for the Mun or other low G low pressure environments, and the KSC already provides a good number of slopes and hard edges to give your rover the business before launching it into space.

if it worked like the Portal steam system, where players build campaigns for other players, i don't see how that is different from a lot of the mod work being done. i think you misunderstood me. because I'm not talking about an official story line.

your solution doesn't solve the time problem, because the AI is similarly delayed ( i would hope) making it pretty much a lateral change. i still get to the mun in my opening salvo of missions, and the AI would need to have cheated to have beat me, because by doing this you would've basically made it a turn based game. and I'm still making the same moves. and life support is a excrementsty addition. either you turn it off and ignore it, or you turn it on, put all the recyclers you need on your vessel and ignore it. or you use the Kolonization mod to build self sustaining colonies, and then ignore it. or you purposely hamstring yourself and devote your entire existence to supplying your orbital station a million times while you wait for your supply missions to make it to your Duna station, and so on. have you ever done an interplanetary mission with TAC and just decided to let your crew perish back in LKO because you couldn't be bothered to resupply them the god-knows-how-many times it would need it while your probe flew to Jool? not an exhilarating addition to the game. it sounds like an obvious addition, but the reality is it adds nothing and would just be ignored regardless of if it was on or off. compelling story lines are the only actual solution, this is after all, just a flight simulator. perhaps the new update to the missions will be enough to fix it, with players submitting compelling mission progressions for each other.

what good is the race either tho? you can still get to the mun in your first 24 hours, far less realistically. so that race is either too fast to be doable or too slow to be a challenge. maybe a Duna race, but again, the transfer window is so far in the future its a joke to race for it, maybe if you had to over engineer and leave early, but thats not really a challenge if you regularly build outsized vessels (and most players begin that way, following youtube tutorials and the such.) IRL space races are based on an inability to design certain things, and the need to test them. in KSP however the engines are pre built, guaranteed to work, life support mods are either too easy or too full of micromanagement to be enjoyable, and even without patched conics you can still land and return with relative ease. so you aren't really building up to a mun landing at any point, because the only risk of failure s you not bringing along enough fuel, which with KER becomes a non issue as well.

rather than making me reset the gravity every time i turn on the game in the debug menu. i was doing a 2X gravity run recently and this bugged me a lot. so there should be a setting option for gravity in the game set up window.

it was probably scrapped because it would either need to hand hold in the missions or be left so vague and impossible to figure out as to be a community project that no single player ever really figured out since you'd need help even figuring out half the easter eggs exist. who's going roving in the desert looking for ancient ruins when you know you're probably on the wrong side of the planet?

for LKO rendezvous you launch when your kerbal is about over the second patch of desert on the other continent, maybe over the ocean right next to our continent. normal launch but go a little higher than the kerbal, you're probably gonna be early. a few tries and you'll get it. all you need is to get close, then if you're behind it, try to orbit a little under, and if you're in front of it go a little higher. it will slowly come closer, don't worry about rendezvous. then when its within a few Km or closer (closer the better) switch to the kerbal and EVA pack your way over. an apollo moon landing with caveman should in principle be doable but you would need cross feed to make it enjoyable. but with enough math and enough low orbit construction, sure...start with your return vehicle, get it in orbit with enough fuel, then build backwards, docking a lander module, then adding your insertion/return vehicle(s) and then build up a rear stage to transfer that all into an intercept trajectory. if you throw a handle on it you could bring a kerbal along, but you need enough return delta V to avoid aerobraking, so thats scaling up your insertion/return stage and this means an even BIGGER transfer stage. altho the kerbals 500 (probably less by a good amount i the end since he floats off in time warp and needs it to keep with his vessel, both going there AND coming back) could be used for part of your braking if he carries the science, and you just make an OP verbal launcher to go get him, but you will need a better rendezvous method since he will be out of fuel, so save a bit id say start doing apollo missions in sandbox to get in the swing of orbital docking on the mun (on kerbin its easy once you learn when to launch). its a fun way to do it, especially if you set the orbiter nice and low, you wind up waiting till its coming up fast and you punch the accelerator and fly a Km over the surface racing up to speed. haven't done it without patched conics tho, but it'd be fairly straight forward. like a brute force docking. just keep your orbiter like 6Km above the surface when it comes past you, then just keep your target icon on your retrograde (i think?) and pray you have enough fuel.

some rover designs in my non kerbin science fueled caveman run.

the trick is to leave him in orbit and send up a little probodyne with a ladder on top.

it felt very 'mercury style' to send and land a kerbal just holding a ladder. i dealt with time warp by letting him drift around (furthest he got was 1.6 KM on the way in, but i was much more lucky on the return and he kept along side for good chunks of flight) which added to the sense of smallness and insecurity. all he had was his little EVA pack as a life line if he drifted too far. it'd never be enough to get him home if his vessel failed and it would probably be too little too late as an emergency escape system if he slid off the edge of his ladder. very eery.

http://imgur.com/a/D8gVD

http://imgur.com/a/6nka5 im sending a rescue mission eventually, gotta get jeb home safe.

following suit, http://imgur.com/ZpHuww1 i propose a mission challenge of using this to ferry a single verbal to and from the surface of the mun. i also propose someone other than me does it.

this must involve some lawn building cause i cant comprehend having the delta v in orbit without fuel cross feed that even remotely gets a landing and return manned from dun but not the mun. even with aero breaking

it should be, at least orbiting the sun. people got proper flybys of duna and eve? with returns? impressive. id have to break the rules and reinstall KE to play with it before i had any confidence sending that mission. edit: i suppose it would be easy if you didnt care about time...i cant stand waiting for minutes of time warp as my kerbal flies around the sun 8 or 9 times waiting for kerbin to be in the right position the hi-gain antennae say they can be used for relays but my satellite attempts don't seem to function at all, maybe I'm using them wrong. i crammed 11 of them onto 2 satellites, one low and the other half way out to the mun but my second interplanetary attempt still wouldn't connect anything other than ground stations

so i am back with my official submission,without kerbal engineer. i documented my final mission (the previous ones being the generic kill-me-not design, along with a 75% successful small plane for highland exploration) in which a redesigned GT-Rover landed in the southwest (?) crater, set off for the canyons before hanging a hard right up into the midlands. http://imgur.com/LwfJxry http://imgur.com/ed91B0B http://imgur.com/TR1UYMc http://imgur.com/QYqK7Ab http://imgur.com/AN0L216 im gonna try for a interplanetary mission next, for S's and G's edit: def not going interplanetary, those antennae lose contact before I'm half way to dun.maybe if i used like 8 of them?

oh it was the most fun I've had. especially on caveman, since orbiting a body is pretty boring, I'm considering a mock up for a jool mission or eeloo flyby, but they feel hollow since they won't likely succeed without real antennae and bigger solar panels. so I've been holding off.

well, GT Rover 1 suffered a catastrophic gravity turn on its descent into the midlands crater, proving it is easiest to land within one THEN exit, rather than the other way around. GT Rover 2 (modified with lower blast batteries and the subtraction of the KER electronics relay) launched under a clear sky with minimal cross wind, finally landing successfully (ran out of fuel about 10 meters fro the surface) in a midlands crater in south Northern Basin and traversing approximately 25 kilometers into the lowlands south (at a break neck 10 MPS, doubling the average cruise speed of the GT 1), heading for whatever crater that is down there, however tragically was lost in a chaotic event mission scientists are referring to as 'i hit the quick save button mid explosion'. http://imgur.com/b5cAL8c http://imgur.com/lSRiraj

well i will certainly be interested in trying so far the galactic taco rover has traversed the 48ish kilometers from touchdown on the neck of the twin craters to midlands crater i identified in the previous pic. well, i made it to the peak of the mountain on its rim (1st link), interestingly, 4500 MASL so if you are looking for a location for 'smallest delta v to orbit from lunar surface' i found your locale. I've gotten too angry trying to scale the side of this mountain into the crater, and am traversing down the southern face to enter the crater from a better angle (2nd link). its been a journey i won't ever try to reproduce lol. third link is of second rovers intended path. http://imgur.com/yQmufGj http://imgur.com/DLzLJmb http://imgur.com/prhrpWk

im re reading the challenge,is it 1188 points PLUS filled level1 tech tree? or is it just filling the tech tree? cause I've been dreading the inevitable torture of getting to minmus if i need another thousand points (after i rerun the whole thing without KER, thankfully i don't use it for much beyond terrain ALT and as a HUD for apoapsis on launch. is it permitted in the VAB for building the craft?)

i have spent my night driving it (roughly) along that squiggle towards that midlands crater, around a few craters (so it is taking forEVER) I'm just shy of that patch of highlands as of my last rage quit. will def be modifying the mk.2 destined for the northern basin to optimize COM. it does indeed have a high tolerance for tilt, i turn using Q E if it goes off track which tends to negate any tilt, but 'pebbles' between ground layers or something tend to send it flying if i go more than 8 mps.

http://imgur.com/ilKJKSz i will take a pic tomorrow of it on the launch pad, but this was snapped just after touchdown of the maiden voyage. it wont let me properly insert it, possibly because im using safari? it occurs to me kerbal engineer may be against the spirit of the challenge, i accept this may have disqualified me.

I've been struggling with this but managed to land a little 1 ton rover on the mun (well, .5 tons without the fuel). i was very impressed with myself. 2 'big' 1 meter tanks plus the one thats half its size ontop of a swivel with 2 smallest solid rockets for boosting to launch it. I'm having an issue loading a picture but its 2 oscar B on top of a 6 sided probe core with a thermo/bar on either side and a proper antenna, with a small structural part (for going 1.5 to .625) with 2 rover wheels and 2 front landing gears (for balance), 3 solar panels and 2 batteries along the sloped side of the structural part and a little spark engine on the bottom. this had 1700 delta v (ish) and landed on empty (scott manley could've landed with maybe 300 delta v, i came in slow and steady and used it up, but it had plenty, most of the TLI burn was done by my launch vehicle). landed in twin craters, made it thru lowlands and a headed west towards midlands, aiming for a crater, maybe, if i have the patience. its a long way away.