Xyrus

Technically this doesn't really count since a) it was back in the early days of contracts and b) I was kind of messing with them a bit for potential modding purposes. But I had a contract to get a surface sample from the sun. I stopped messing with the contracts after that.

Faceplant Cheap Impact Penalty For Failure Hey, Watch This! I Stop Rockets...With My Face! Put Your Head Between Your Knees... That Noise Wasn't Good Krater Maker 2000 Kraken The Whip Kollateral Damage We Didn't Really Need That This Will Not End Well You're Going To Have A Bad Time KSP: Putting the "Dear Lord, What Have I Done!" back into space flight! Exit, Stage *BOOOOOM* Did You Write A Will? Next Of Kin Saving Jebediah Forgetting Parachutes

Just look for stump remover. Pretty much pure KaNO3. I used to use it to make homemade rocket motors for model rockets.

You mean the sound of Satan's toilet flushing? Yeah, glad that one got changed.

A spacecraft with a pilot in a control class module will still have full control of the craft regardless of comms. If you have them sitting in a passenger container (like the hitchhiker) and you have a probe core as the main control (or an empty command module) and you are out of comms range, you have limited control capabilities. What it sounds like to me is that you ran out of battery power. When that happens it doesn't matter who's in control of the ship or how good comms are. You're dead in space. Time to suit up a rescue mission, with plenty of solar panels and batteries just to be sure.

Good things come to those who wait. Bug-filled, kraken-spawning, teeth-grinding, hair-pulling, keyboard-breaking, screen-smashing crash fests come to those who don't. And now our special guest, Rob Lowe. Rob Lowe: Hi, I'm Rob Lowe and I patiently wait for major game updates to be released. Grotesquely Distorted Rob Lowe: And I'm Grotesquely Distorted Rob Lowe and I don't. Rob Lowe: When game updates are announced, I patiently wait on the developers to do a good job to deliver the best gaming experience. GD Rob Low: With my unrealistic demands for unhealthy need for instant gratification, my attitude matches my mirror breaking appearance. Rob Lowe: I like to give time for developers to release the highest quality and most stable software possible. GD Rob Lowe: And I break three keyboards posting venomous rage at the developers for a game that crashes my computer every five minutes. Rob Lowe: Timely releases of software updates allows me to experience hours of enjoyable game time with my friends both online and offline. GD Rob Lowe: And my impotent rage and trolling guarantees I have no friends and get permabanned and alienated from the very game and community I want to be a part of. Rob Lowe: Don't be like that me. Have patience and let the developers do their job to give you the best gaming experience possible. *This message brought to you by the Council Of Concerned Game Developers

Children of the Kraken

J. J. Abrams would like a word with you.

Mission: The Kerbals at Cutrate Track and Field wondered whether it was really insane or not to launch a long range bomber from the middle of a championship soccer field. Needless to say, this is where you come in.

It's a bug. They were supposed to be little green men with segmented eyes, but the Kraken would end up killing every time they hit a bump. That's a joke btw. If someone wanted to go into the models and fix that little discrepancy it make some of the creepy close up floating eyeball screenshots a guess a little less psychologically traumatizing, I'd be more than happy to download the mod.

Yeah, parachutes won't work well in this situation unless they can find a spot in the ocean that's Kerbin (no wind, no waves). That being said, airbrakes might be plausible. The materials science is there. Using a light enough composite (carbon-fiber) may help reduce the required fuel to land while possibly improving descent control. But that would depend on if the weight of the braking mechanism is less than the fuel it takes to carry it along. The rocket would be "easy" to stage/parachute/recover, even airbag the "critical" components to avoid salt water contamination. But that isn't really the point. They want the whole rocket in one piece so once it lands, they can refuel it and launch with very little turn around time.

IMHO, if you need to add airbrakes to your rocket for launch stability then you likely need to re-examine your rocket design. The only times I've had rockets flip out on me is when I've done something stupid (incorrect COM, uneven drag, too much thrust, turning just a bit too much, etc.). That being said, it's a sand box game. Your free to do whatever you want. You can build a lunar mission using nothing but boosters. You can use a tower of components for re-entry instead of a heat shield. It doesn't really matter so long as it works for you and you think it's fun.

On the plus side, the guys at mission control are no longer constipated.

Well, considering the game itself is a "cheat", I don't see how MJ could be considered "cheating". The developers decided what they thought would make good gameplay for the majority of players, and minimized/eliminated anything they thought would detract from it. Now some think that they went to far and made the game too easy, hence we have things like RSS, FAR, TAC, etc. to make the game more difficult. Some think that the developers overlooked providing critical info when it comes to planning missions, hence why we have things like KER. Others only like doing certain things and don't want to be bothered with the rest, so use MJ for all the "boring" bits. It's all personal preference and how you want to play the game. Since there is no way to "win" the game, it doesn't really matter how you play. The developers didn't provide a means to mod the game for "cheating". The provided so the community/user could modify/improve/tailor the game to how they want to play it. Saying modding KSP is cheating is sort of like saying modding Minecraft is cheating.

1. Build rocket. <> Does it explode? <yes> Go to 1 2. Does it do what it's supposed to do? <no> Hack it till it works <kind of> Mission Acomplished <yes> Gape in surprise

Victim 1, Victim 2, ...

One of my long standing rules is that if something happens as a result of a game bug, then I am free to revert. Mysterious Kraken attacks(WTH?), colliding with VAB while in orbit(WTH??), spontaneous instant overheats(WTH???), quantum teleportation into the sun (only happened once and still don't what the hell happened there), etc.

/software rant Armchair software engineering is about as useful and productive as armchair quarterbacking. First, a point. If your using mods, blaming KSP for bad performance, crashes, etc. is naive unless you can say with absolute certainty it is NOT the mods themselves causing the issues. There are number of mods that cause all kinds of problems with the game, even ones that you would think couldn't possibly impact performance. For example, I had to uninstall a mod that added atmospheric hazing because it would cause KSP to spontaneously switch to use integrated graphics instead of dedicated, dropping my normal 100+ FPS down to 5 FPS. If you want to complain about crashes and such, first get your issues to happen in a stock game. Then actually send the detailed bug/crash report generated from the game to Squad. If they still don't do anything about it, then you can complain. Squad developers don't have ESP and they are more than likely not going to have a rig set up like your machine. If they don't know about it, they can't fix it. If they can't reproduce it, they can't fix it. Posting about memory leaks, performance issues, etc. in a forum with no descriptions about what you're doing when it happens is pointless and doesn't help anyone. It's like when people send me bug reports about my software that just says "It doesn't work". What the hell am I supposed to do with that? And memory leaks aren't "foolish". I'd like to see anyone try to develop an application this complex without making mistakes. There is no conceivable way you can test every possible code path to ensure that the code is memory leak free. Worse, even if you identify a memory leak they can be notoriously difficult to track down. Managed languages (like C#) reduce the likelihood of "obvious" memory leaks, but they don't do squat against the subtle ones (like not using weak references in maps). Even with GC'd languages it is damn near trivial to create memory leaks. /end rant With that out of the way, the most annoying thing I find about KSP is that information that should be available isn't. There are several mods that I consider "must haves", but they all just expose information that you should have anyway (like KER). Yeah, I can calculate dV by hand, and transfer windows, etc. but I wouldn't consider that the most "fun" part of the game.

The El Cheapo Space Plane Or rather what was left of it. It had two turbos and a nuke. Very basic design. It had a enough delta V to orbit, get to the moon, orbit, come back. Then on approach to Kerbin, the delta wing on the right hand side suddenly poofed for no reason. No thermal overload. I wasn't even near the atmosphere. I think maybe the Kraken just wanted to take a little nibble or something. Realizing the ship wouldn't possibly last through rentry without turning into a spinning wreck, I turned the ship retrograde hoping that the rear of the ship could take the heat and the SAS would be enough to hold the ship in a constant direction. I lost the flaps and the nuke due to heat, but the turbos stayed intact and the ship managed to stay pointing retrograde. I then used the turbos to suicide burn and managed to slow just enough so when I hit the water it only took out the turbos. Mission accomplished!

New aero is much easier, at least for me. It works intuitively. The 3 day old pea-soup psuedo physics always screwed me up because the planes never worked the way I was intuitively expecting them to, especially on re-entry. I've seen a number of complaints that the new aero and physics is "just broken". It isn't. The old aero and physics were broken, and people just got used to it. Now you actually have to use real designs and real maneuvers for space planes. No more just dropping into the atmosphere. You actually have to use techniques like S curving to slow down or you'll burn your ship up. You can't just go nose in, you actually need to angle up like the shuttle.

You're being melodramatic. Ever played with FAR? You could practically make an SSTO with a command pod and an RT-10. You could almost leave Kerbin SOI with a just a S1 SRB. The parts needed a major nerf or they would have been stupid OP.

<comment deleted> Nevermind. Bug with heat shield mass.

Steam download complete. Around 200MB.

Steam is updating for me. Log out and completely close steam, then restart it and log back in.

Press F5, get bacon.