Archgeek

[quote name='cantab']Well, the long "tail" on mine did make the launch a bit of a nuisance. But other than that it worked well. It's hard to see in the pic, but it goes 10 xenon tanks, decoupler, five tanks, decoupler, five tanks, letting me shed dry mass as I go to improve delta-V.[/QUOTE] Heh, mine's even more out of hand -- enough xenon tanks in the spine for three giantors on either side, plus 2 1x6s orthagonal in the back to provide reasonable power in case of mis-rotation, one more tank for docking clearance, docking port (nice we can stage those now, they're like re-usable decouplers), and an insane fuel pod with 49 more tanks in 8 additional stages.

[quote name='cantab']I'd heard the horror stories about Moho, and was determined that whatever happened I was [I]not[/I] going to run out of delta-V. Over 20 km/s in the orbiter there. Sure, TWR is low, but that's what clicking hold manoeuvre and watching a TV show is for. [/QUOTE] Blast it sir, that one image has invalidated my entire XenonTempest series of high dv transfer craft. Why should I bother with heavy modular engine spars docked in orbit when I can put 'em in a ring on any size 2 part that lets cubic octagonals surface-attach? 'Provisional ship with my own fuel pod system has nearly 28km/s, shattering my previous record around 17km/s, which is about what it has with just the xenon in the spine. I feel stupid now.

[quote name='tg626']Sooooo..... Where does one extract the "KSP_Linux" folder to for starters...[/QUOTE] Anywhere you see fit. KSP keeps its files pretty local. Then you just KSP_Linux/[COLOR=#333333]KSP.x86_64, or ./[/COLOR][COLOR=#333333]KSP.x86_64 if you've navigated into the KSP_Linux directory already.[/COLOR]

Aw, so Danny's planetkiller craft no longer works?

HEH, there was no way I could've expressed that that made much sense. A ship with ion engines was too wide due to the crossbars its engines were on. I pulled them off and mounted them parallel to the spine for launch by a stack separator on on the centre engine, to be assembled by a micro-tug in orbit. This required the use of not just one, but a pair of small docking ports, so as to ensure the engines actually pointed straight retrograde for thrust purposes. The game's tree model of part attachment made it very difficult to make both the docking port pair and the center-mounted separator to happen. (Lotta re-rooting.) Docking angle limiting would've saved all of that trouble.

Blast, only mod support? Sad, that would've saved me a lot of trouble fighting the part tree representation to get both two clampy bro.s jr. at the docking point and a root attachment on an ion engine with a separator elsewhere. Angle forcing would've made that a dang lot easier.

I just added his channel to my twitch watch list, resulting in notifications at my gmail.

I must say that this is easily among the best of mods. Alongside Alarm Clock and Engineer, this pack improves the game dramatically. Especially the fairing and gimbal fixes. Gimbal speed alone saved a design of mine with a long wiggly payload in a long fairing. Though I must inquire -- why, when plus is enabled for ModuleGimbalFix, does gimbal speed not not default to active? I was a little surprised that it had to be turned on for every newly placed engine, rather than an option to turn it off. Finally, a minor issue to report -- the instructions for installation state "Unzip the zip file to the KSP/GameData directory. ModuleManager.X.X.X.dll and StockPlusController.dll should be in the root GameData directory next to a StockBugFixModules folder." Doing this caused several of my engines to start spewing flame down and also with second jet to the left in the editor, and they exploded on the pad. Attempting (somewhat hamhandedly) to fix this completely broke both editors, which I've just finished recovering from. 'Turns out the dll would much rather be in the StockBugFixModules folder, otherwise it thinks it's missing, causing a null pointer in the editor, curiously exposing the flag and two kerbal parts, which would rotate and quickly scale up on hover. This will of course only affect users who read the readme closely enough to think they need to move StockPlusController.dll out of the StockBugFixModules folder and into GameData. Unzipped as is, it works without issue.

An early bit of fun for me was the silly Derpatron 4k Launcher not depicted due to extreme idiocy, but I recall it required some serious strut-stitching between the levels of the rockomax stacks. This lead to the XenonStorm series of vehicles part-count busting experiments in fuel density and power consumption culminating in the a capable sun-diver with a neat Sword of the Stars sort of aesthetic And then of course there was the idiotic Helicoptopus II: which sadly precesses out of control in the new aero due to some weird asymmetric drag.

Attempt to land a probe on the sun, then send a team just above where the probe exploded to investigate what happened.

I believe the technical term is "kerbfuffle".

Easy mode: Just grab one of the "JEB!" images and put our little green hero's face in place of the politician's. Normal mode: Find a #JebCanFixIt poster, replace imagery with our own Jeb grinning in front of an explosion (like on the steam card).

Well, the main tension left at that point is the fact they they are on very different orbits, and he needs to accelerate a lot to not slam into the commander like a sack of wet bricks. I agree he should've started his derpy manuver by jumping off the roof, using the MAV capsule as his remass (considering he needed every dange m/s he could get I was very suprised when he didn't), but they imply pretty strongly that he needed more delta-v than space suited jump could alone provide. I need to get ahold of the book soon to find out how the author handled that bit. Well, that and to enjoy all the stuff they had to slice out to make it movie better.

That's a neat technique, there! I'm kinda surprised you aren't having the tanker act more as a Von Braun tug, though -- gassing up the mission craft, completing all or as much of the transfer burn as it can get away with, then undocking and slowing itself back down to head back to Minmus.

I'd say update your mods to the latest good version you can find, and copy your KSP folder to a larger, non solid-state drive, like an external or a NAS (Network Attached Storage, pretty much an external or several in one box, sitting on your local network). You're pretty much stuck backing up the whole thing, but you can at least back it up off your SSD and just drag it back if you need it. Heck, it's not that huge, so you can even shove it on flash drive if you like...maybe even zip it up so you only get one file's worth of transfer latency, which would also be good for the NAS solution.

Hehehhee, think of what a PR guy has to deal with. - - - Updated - - - CURSES! I've been ninja'd by a moon!

Nova ninja'd me a bit on the nuclear shaped charges, but he did leave out the fun part -- the nuclear shaped charge is just for firing up the real propellant -- an expanding disk of tungsten(!) plasma that the nuclear shaped charge is designed to make and slam into the pusher plate (which is designed to easilly take the repeated blows). A little under 30-odd percent of the blast power is wasted, if I remember correctly. Imagine replacing the tungsten disk above with lithium, and tuning it to produce a very long, narow cone of nuclear plasma. Then look up "casaba howitzer". Ah, so mainly Tylo landers, then.

Neat, that would allow for a lot more hydrogen per unit mass. Though it may make tanks and processing equipment smell like cat pee.

Ah, but water is over 14.1 times as dense as liquid hydrogen, so not only can you use lighter tankage, you can use a lot less of it, cutting dry mass something fierce. I'm not sure why NTR heat would be a problem, though -- the intent is to prepare enough LH2 for the desired burn duration, including reactor spin-down. Or in the case of the possibly more efficient LHOx (which could be run fuel-rich, leaving some O2 for the crew), you could just use regenerative cooling as normal. EDIT: I see with insane expansion ratios, it's possible to beat 480s: http://www.alternatewars.com/BBOW/Space/Propellants.htm That requires the engine run a bit oxygen-heavy, though, but it looks like we can still beat 470 with our split water. Score another for good ol' LHOx. Dang it, this is making me want to run the numbers on this tomfoolery.

...There's something unwholesome about a recursive turbojet. That will bring nightmares. Well played. XD

That is terribly unfortunate, but due in part to recent exposure to the game High Frontier, I think I smell a work-around. What of a single, very small (say a quarter or fifth the expected size, or just big enough for reasonable burn times) zero-boiloff active cooled cryotank, that is refueled by an internal process from a much larger tank of something much denser and far easier to store? High Frontier abstracts fuel and money both to great stonking orbital tanks of liquid water -- if a ship had water as its main fuel store, it could use solar power to electrolyze what's needed to produce the hydrogen needed for a burn, pumping the gas through a cooling system to liquify en route to the cryotank. This would perforce generate plenty of waste heat, but that could in part be run around the fuel store to prevent the water freezing, then just dumped with a radiator. The resultant oxygen could simply be breathed by the crew. Heck, I'm not sure how the efficiencies would work out -- since you get four times the remass for the same volume but around half? the Isp -- but one could even forego the nukage altogether (save perhaps as a secondary power source), and have a second cryotank to use the oxygen for good ol' LHOx propulsion, effectively flying on really indirect solar power -- ripping water molecules apart with it, then slapping them back together in the engine's combustion chamber. Yipe, do not try to diagram that sentence. It is not a run-on, but it is very complex with too many clauses.

Also lots of fun, plopping fuel tanks cross-fed into the core atop or amongst one's SRBs, with throttle and thrust limiters set such that the droptanks run out just as the SRBs do, allowing them to be staged off at once.

Aw, but I don't have any cake.

Now now, we both know the Orbiter thread is from before there existed a KSP forum site.

Indeed it will, since the decoupler will stick with the part on the side that was initialy its bottom. What I do is tell the abort action to cut all the lifter engines and decouple the return stage from everything else. Then I just stage off the LES with the upside-down decoupler, and to save possible insanity from complex staging, hit the action group I assigned the return stage chutes to. Very similar to how RIC does it.