Archgeek

The real question we all want to know the answer to, though, is whether there's a biome for that toilet in the astronaut complex.

All bodies eh? Time to set up a big crazy ion-powered KOHO mission. Gotta get dat Kerbol science. XD

Lead? Gold, maybe, spray-painted to not be shiny anymore? I'm guessing lead.

Stock-only with a probe and none of that cheaty FAR-nosecones-actually-work tomfoolery, just raw violence. (alarm clock, engineer, and hot rockets aren't actually doing anything) I'll have to improve it a bit to beat the current best. Was it actually made clear if we have to include a kerbal? It's not mentioned in Manley's original video.

I took Manley's Shortest Possible Space Mission Challenge, resulting in concerned roommates vis-a-vis my maniacal cries of "RISE, MY TERRIBLE CREATION~!" and the like. I've managed to pull 2:07 in testing with KER assisting with terrain height, but already submitted sans KER at 2:10. I'm very much looking forward to others' crazy responses to it.

Primal terror? I tried to steal his lander leg design for an Eve lander/return vehicle and wound up accidentally doing something simpler. His actual design takes 2 working sub-assemblies, a lot of struts, and a 3rd sub-assembly to serve as a template for how to put it together in order to get right.

Welp, after a lot of testing, I've found that switching to Rockomax decouplers solves the issue for the craft in question, but I also cannot reproduce the issue in anything else. The (all stock save for hot rockets) lifter on this crazy thing is nearly identical to the one in the above, and the glitch refuses to appear. It's apparent that the fairing coming with the decoupler doesn't matter (as I tried with several engine types), the part count amazingly doesn't matter, as putting very part-dense subassemblies on the test craft wouldn't cause the glitch, nor would tearing most of the craft off the lifter in the original ship make it cease. More oddly, this may in fact be a good bad bug, as the weird decoupling behaviour lacks that inward pivot issue one sees these days.

Heh, much the same as most here. My OctoBail escape tower sub-assembly from before the NASA pack is actually beefier (if less violent and efficient) than NASA's, and goes atop anything chunky enough to need it. Abort action is mapped to kill all main engines, decouple the pod/can/etc, and fire the escape tower. Action group 0 gets to decouple the escape tower and fire the chutes. Though if a lander is capable enough or it's a funky powered return module of some sort, I'll forego the tower and have the abort light those engines to get away from the underlying catastrophe. I've started sneaking linear RCS ports under capsules in lieu of getting out and pushing now that they have accessible internal mono stores, though I should check if that will consume the kerbals' supplies or not.

Well that's just curious. I'll have to test it with rockomax decouplers and see if that both fixes the problem and makes the lifter look dumb. Good to know it doesn't have anything to do with insane 3-dimensional asparagusing in the lander above or some insanity.

Is it common for decouplers on very high part-count ships in the same stage to not fire at once but instead only fire one of them, repopulating the stage with the remaining decouplers? There exists a chance that this issue has come up before, but keyword searches are ineffective at phrases like "high part count staging glitch", and I'm finding the nature of it quite odd so I must inquire if this takes place frequently. I've got a 700+ part behemoth of a single-shot Eve vehicle with asparagus'd lander/return vehicle, 6x LV-N transfer drive and orbital xenon repository, and a loathesome dual-stack onion'd thrust plate lifting platform with 38 half-size kerbodyne tanks half with 12 KS-25x4s and 7 KR-2Ls lifting 6 mainsails and 13 more KR-2Ls in turn lifting the rest of the ship. It's staged so the lower outer stages drop and the upper outer stages light, dropping upper stages as they run out of fuel and with each tier separately feeding into its respective centre. The physics rate is about 5 seconds per real second at liftoff, but it otherwise works, save for the glitch in question, which can oddly be worked around by pressing the stage button once for every decoupler in the stage. More strangely, this only seems to affect ditched stages taking fairings with them when under very high part count, as the upper stages detach all at once in a nice ring, as do the engines above, and the lander seen above stages just fine. Also of note, I've got minimal mods -- just alarm clock, enhanced nav ball, engineer, and hot rockets. I am curious if this happens to others with any frequency, or one of my mods is acting up somehow.

Yup, pretty easily. Just hit up your save's persistent.sfs file, change the title line from say: Title = Budget Concerns (CAREER) to Title = SCIENCE! (SCIENCE_SANDBOX) and torch the funding and contracts scenarios: SCENARIO { name = ContractSystem STUFF } SCENARIO { name = Funding scene = 7, 8, 5, 6, 9 funds = 43154.6917546988 } Then your old science career will be just like you left it.

The NASA file works fine, but there're issues with the affected Squad parts.

Heh, I made one of those myself back in .23 -- Some miscalculations (and obsessive near-science altitude checking) on a Minmus mission at very low tech ran poor Bill out of gas, though I got him closer by getting out and pushing to a munar gravity assist. The rescue craft just had two pods, with the rescue pod having a small tank and engine of its own so they could return separately. All that science is still up there, though...The kerbals should do do another rendezvous to retrieve it from the pod and goo cans.

Yup, you can not in fact say that it works with .24, save that rockets made in .24 will work. Anything brought over from stock, an old .craft file, or a save brought over (including ships actively in flight in the persistence file) from .235 or earlier that uses any engines the mod touches will not work correctly until the affected engines are removed in the editor and replaced with ones currently affected by the mod.

Okay, results of testing a mod-build craft sans mod have been...interesting: Glow effects are seen but the flame and smoke are missing, fuel flow is NaNU and there's no thrust. Unless infinite fuel is on, then it's infinityU and everything's thrust (including the SRBs) is throttleable from 0 to 215kN. Here're all four .craft files: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/59091477/HotRocketsTesting.zip

Yeah, those should be fine. Looking at the .cfg files, between stock and NASA, it should only affect the big 3 Rockomax engines, All 4 LV engines including the nuke, the RT-10 and Rockomax BACC SRBs, both stock jet engines, the aerospike and the ion engine...as well as the 3 NASA liquid engines ...Ah just tested it, yup, those all suffer the issue, save for the NASA engines for some reason. Rather easily--just torch the MP_Nazari folder in GameData. ModuleManager doesn't do anything a .cfg doesn't tell it to, and the new smokescreen doesn't seem to be causing any problems either. Just know that any ships you've made with the impacted engines while running the mod will have the double controls issue and won't throttle up. .craft files of a test rig in all four states incoming.

I run with minimal mods -- just Alarm Clock, Enhanced Nav Ball, Engineer, and Hot Rockets -- and I'm seeing multiple incompatible behaviours (stuck animations, no thrust, doubled controls) even in the new 7.24 version, so I poked around in the .craft files that result if one saves after module manager has done its work, finding out the following: ModuleEngines is changed to ModuleEnginesFX The Activate and Shutdown events get " Engine" tacked on the end An extra ModuleEngines object is added after new ModuleTestObject module It seems to make its changes just fine to new parts, but affected engines on existing craft wind up with the extra engine module, resulting the effects not going away, as well as doubled tweakables bars and activate/shutdown buttons. One gets NaNU fuel flow rate while the other actually works. It can be fixed by replacing affected engines with fresh ones in the editor, but that doesn't help craft already in flight. If a ship is saved or launched with the mod in play and the game restarted without the mod, either the missing FX on ModuleEngines or the missing " Engine" on the Activate event is resulting in NaNU fuel flow rate and a non-functioning part. It also winds up with doubled tweakables and activate/shutdown buttons for some reason, but only as displayed -- the two share the same state when one is dragged or toggled. This happens with every stock part the mod touches, but not the NASA parts for some reason. I'm not sure about SRBs, though other posts imply yes, and I see ModuleEnginesFX on SRBs in squad_hotrockets.cfg, so I'm guessing they are.