moogoob

When making craft I tend to self-limit to reasonable clipping - for example, the inside of the inline battery banks look as though they could conceivable be hollow, so I see no problem with shoving a smaller RCS tank or whatnot in that space. Same goes with fitting surface scanners or antennas further into an octagonal strut structure so as to not collide with eg. landing legs, or clipping an LV-909 slightly into a fuel tank for adjusting ground clearance. As far as fitting five fuel tanks in the space of one, I just don't do it.

In my current sandbox Jab and Bill are in Kerbstation Alpha in LKO and Bob and Val are in the Minmus Refueling Station, awaiting landers to go to the surface.

Whackjob got me into it through posts he made on Fark. Youtube helped me learn though, certainly.

Interesting idea! But you're right - it would work best for larger ships (that refinery part is MASSIVE) out at the edge of the system say Dres/Jool/Eeloo type long-term missions. Haven't even started playing around with resource collection myself (first is an experimental Minmus mining expedition) but your "Capital Ship/Refinery" idea sounds like it could work.

Everyone beat me to it. Fairings and fins. Right now your payload is producing enough drag to pull the centre of drag ahead of the centre of mass, and that means rocket goes flip. Fairings reduce the drag of the payload (a the cost of weight, which more than evens out) and fins near the bottom bring the centre of drag downwards, stabilizing your flight like a dart.

Ehh moons are fun so here's my top three: Pol, for the low gravity and awesome surface scatter. Not so much for the getting to, it's all the way out by Jool there and waiting for transfer windows are a pain but the little allergy moon is worth the effort. Secondarily would be Minmus, with its low gravity again and its unique and fun landscape. Much easier to get to than Pol! Lastly Laythe. It's one of only four rocky bodies with a meaningful atmosphere and is the only one that's a moon. And that view of Jool! Once again, pain to get to. Runner up is The Mun, of course. Just cause Apollo. In fact I like most of the moons. Except Ike.

Did either of them use the Kraken container AKA the size 2 service bay? It's been known to go all erratic and destructive-like.

I used it in career before you unlock Mechjeb. I would always think, "Like hell nothing's concerning about this vessel. Everything is concerning about this vessel!"

Maybe try asking this in one of the modding forums - those folks who are willing to go more than surface-deep into the files and engine could be able to answer your questions a bit more. But it does sound like the physics config file and how the game loads it might be a culprit. May I ask - why are you welding parts? What does that accomplish? Smaller part count? More rigid joints? Just curious.

I was considering this too, but the next bit of flight would quickly become either a game of "dodge the space debris" or high-altitude fireworks, depending on your luck and piloting skills.

Does part welding create a new part from two or more different ones? Maybe it's not adding up the physics of both parts correctly. As I understand it, each part has a front, side and rear drag value - and presumably other things are handled like this too- heat dissipation, buoyancy etc. If the game is looking for a skipper in the physics file, it finds the skipper's drag cube and all is well. If it's looking for a skipper/tank monstrosity, it finds nothing and uses default or broken values. Could that be the reason?

My 2009-era Macbook pro can run it, so long as I boot into my Windows 7 install. Have to turn off pretty much all the fancy graphics like anti-aliasing, but once I do that it runs fine. Either one of those should do well even with max settings. EDIT: though you may have to downsample from whatever resolution "retina" means to 1920 x 1080 or somesuch. Or not!

I almost got a high-altitude plane that launched a manned 1-kerbal rocket to work... flew more like Virgin Galactic than a successful orbiter - getting sufficient fuel for more than a suborbital flight was difficult. Eventually abandoned the concept on grounds of practicality in favour of simpler size-1 rockets.

Solar panels got hit with realism pretty hard in 1.0.2. (Or was it 1.0.1?) Ox-stats are often no longer enough to power resource-hungry applications with just a few of them scattered about like we used to do. The emergency power method is pretty useful - I do like that we have to take running out of power into account, and engineer workarounds.

I had a space shuttle blow up on re-entry last evening. Not from heating, but because I pulled up too sharply (started drifting and over-corrected) and the resulting forces ripped it apart. THAT is awesome.

Agreed. Maybe have clouds at 25% opacity when in map view or something to make picking a landing site easier. It's already nearly impossible on Eve.

Not going to necropost on that thread but that was the awesomest thing I've heard today. No foolin.

Danny took a Kerbal from the Mun to Kerbin and landed him on his head ages ago. Kerbals are tough stuff.

Planetshine. It's a small change that makes screenshots look gorgeous. Duna's red glow, Eve's purple and Jool's green are particularly striking.

I sometimes play around with using all-SRB launch stages (The "Fool" line of launchers, I call them), but they mostly serve a need to get the wet thrust-to-weight ratio of traditional liquid stages high enough for a decent launch. This is absolutely essential if you're attempting to do something odd like use the Kerbodyne Advanced engine (which has half thrust at sea level) as a launch stage.

As Red Iron Crown said. They wanted to make the two types of deployable panels different - so the lightweight ones can not only not survive re-entry, but can't be undeployed either. I learned this the hard way when using the small inline service bays to deploy from - "undeploy" basically means closing and opening the bays until the panels break off.

I've had this problem too. Took a while to diagnose as it was contained inside a fairing so I couldn't see the shaking and Kraken-ness. It's funny the first time when your station core snaps off the launch vehicle (still inside the fairing!) halfway off the launchpad. Not funny when it keeps happening no matter how many struts you put on.

Nice! Does it have the corridor with the stupidly-placed crusher blocks?

Wow, didn't notice that! Then again, it took me a week to notice that they'd actually named the littlest engine the Ant. I mean, everyone was calling it that already, it just made sense.

While I'm just enough of a crypto geek to figure out one-time pads in high school (merely from reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, of course), decryption has never been my thing. Too abstract for my liking. I much prefer physics puzzles - like getting to Moho without turning your orbit into a flyby.