Jovus

Also - I might be wrong about this - but I think that if you just set up fuel priorities, your outside engines won't cut off when the outer tanks are out of fuel, whereas if you use fuel lines they will.

I'll have to give that a gander, then. I've been making due by slightly clipping and angling a series of procedural tanks.

Dumping the gimbal values on my engines might do it. And the booster tops with the inclined cones? Or am I just mis-seeing? Also, you're in RSS/RO on 1.2?

@tater That Soyuz. How'd you do the boosters? I need inclined cones! And how'd you make sure the booster engines were on straight? Whenever I try it, I get a bit of roll.

I should have been more clear. I'm not concerned with interplanetary windows yet. All I want is the (twice daily) window when a launch site is in the same plane as an inclined orbit around Earth. (Or some other arbitrary planet.)

As part of my slow-going project to make an RSS launch autopilot for an arbitrary orbit-capable rocket, I've run into a small issue. How do you calculate launch windows? I've already properly figured out how to calculate the launch azimuth from an arbitrary launch site into an arbitrary parking orbit (assuming the launch site inclination is <= orbit inclination; I'm not doing bi-elliptic transfer calculations yet). What I don't have is a way to find when the launch site is in the plane of the target orbit. Anyone feel like walking me through it? My spherical geometry is rusty, and these days I just don't have a lot of time on my hands to brush it up again.

If/when I get around to testing it, I'll drop a line here with pictures so the outcome is known.

Out of curiosity, has anyone tested this mod with any of the flexible docking port solutions?

Funny. My first satellite ended up in a ~200kmx2.5Mm orbit, and that's without as big of a kick stage as I was originally planning on using. That said, I still tend to avoid those contracts until I have BOR, because it feels hit-or-miss with TestFlight whether the AJ-10 or the solids will actually do what I want them to.

Ooh! Ooh! I maded a flag! This is the flag of the Imperial Raketecorps (Kaiserliche Raketecorps? it has been a long, long while since I last spoke German), the Holy Roman Empire's rocketry division in 1950 alternate Earth where neither side won the Great War and the Central Powers (sans Turkey) were forced to reorganize in the post-War collapse. (I've been considering writing a series of mission reports/narrative about the world and the space program with pictures from my RSS install, but if we're honest I just haven't had the time.)

I would. Human nature is part of reality.

No, it's sad because it reflects reality. If reality let us have spaceplanes like KSP's spaceplanes, we'd have already found the monolith on Europa.

The saddest thing about RO/RSS is that the SPH becomes basically useless...

I'm writing up a launch window calculator to go with my launch azimuth calculator. I have the basic logic down; now I just need to write it to tie into KRPC and convert the coordinates to the spherical coordinates my code expects. Part #2 of umpteen for writing a launch and intercept autopilot for an arbitrary rocket. This is what I get for locating my primary launch site in Zanzibar instead of Cape Canaveral.

@linuxgurugamer Out of curiosity, how are you getting the delta-V calculations to work? I just ask because KER is having trouble, and solutions are interesting.

No; RO/RSS is the suite of mods that turn Kerbin into Earth and the Kerbol system into the Solar system. It's like a completely different game. If what you want is graphics enhancements for the Kerbol system, you'll want Stock Visual Enhancements and its recommended/required mods (like Planetshine and Distant Object Enhancement) instead. Leave out the RO/RSS stuff, and you don't need RVE.

For SF? Sure. Postulate that in this theoretical future where you want people to use singularity bombs some smart guy has found a way to collapse matter into a singularity with a much lower activation energy than the 'traditional' compress-it-really-hard trick. Maybe he strengthens and re-directs the strong force or whatever. Then you get your black hole grenades on demand without having to use massively more energy to create them than they release.

Clearly, you have to finish the save. 'Finish' means visit every body with a Kerbal once, get them all home, and complete whatever other plans you had for the save. (This is the real reason modders take a while to update their mods; they're busy cleaning up their saves.) Otherwise the crack team of Squad's Save Morality Enforcers (SSME) will come to your house, confiscate your computer, and intern you in the local computer gaming shop until you manage. It's awful. You have to subsist on Doritos and Bawls.

No, really. You might just roll your eyes at this normally, going, "Oh, it's those RSS guys again; I don't have the chops for that." But seriously. It's worth it. I've been playing with a full-sized Earth and RVE+Scatterer for a few weeks now, and every time I look at KSP my jaw drops. I haven't stopped bothering my friends with inane messages like, "CLOUUUUUUDDDS!!!"

@djungelorm I've praised you earlier in the thread, but I feel like I have to do it again. I knew Python before I started hacking together a play-RSS-for-me suite, but this has really stretched my knowledge and made me much more familiar with the language and with programming in general, to my benefit. Thanks a ton. General question to anyone who feels like answering: I'm trying to create a simple script that will take a target orbit and a pre-launch active vessel and warp time until the active vessel is under the target orbit. (Specifically, I'm going to the Moon in RSS, but I plan on making it much more general - fulfilling contract orbits, setting up orbital rendezvous from launch, etc.) At first I thought this would be simple: take the longitude of the launch site, compare to the longitude of the ascending (or descending) node of the orbit, get the vessel's angular velocity, and calculate how long it will take from that for the vessel to rotate under the orbit. (Naturally taking into account the latitude offset.) Do all these calculations in the inertial reference frame of the body the vessel is currently landed on. Maybe I'm missing something, but it looks like it's not that simple? The non-rotating reference frame (and indeed, all reference frames) uses x,y,z coordinates instead of r,theta,phi coordinates? Is there some easy way to get spherical (or even cylindrical) coordinates, or do I have to convert them myself? If anyone wants to post some sample code or sample pseudo-code I'll love you forever, but that'd just be icing on the cake. Thanks! ETA: Would it be better to be using vessel.orbit? Could I even do so when I'm landed or pre-launch? Would that even be accurate?

Sounds awesome. Too bad I'm on a Linux box myself. Maybe I'll take a look at the source code and see about implementing it in Python via KRPC... (Don't hold your breath.) Edit: Oh, it's using MATLAB. I have access to MATLAB, not just the runtime compiler, so I shouldn't have many problems on Linux...

Eh. It's Sarbian's code. If you don't want to run Sarbian's code, don't. If you want to run part of Sarbian's code but not another part, feel free to download it from Github, strip out the offending part, recompile it, and then run it. If you want to run part of Sarbian's code but not another part and don't know how to edit the source code and recompile it, learn. If you don't want to learn, stick with things you paid for. Part of the reason you pay for something is support for that something. You're paying the cost of not being willing to learn. (Not being willing to learn isn't bad, necessarily. There are lots of things I'm not willing to learn about. I have zero interest in coding my own spreadsheet application, thanks.)

KSPTOT?

Has anyone figured out how to change the timezone of the KSP clock? I have a primary launch site somewhere other than Cape Canaveral, and watching morning be consistently be around 1400 is mildly annoying.

Unmanned craft save on weight, thereby making designs smaller, simpler, and less expensive. Further, there's no reason to worry about bringing Probe #102-A14 home safe from its Eve trip, because its originating factory isn't going to get a letter from the Kerbal Space Program that makes her cry if it's lost along the way. What's that? You don't feel like those are good enough reasons? But I do. You don't use unmanned craft; I rarely use manned craft; balance achieved I say.