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tater

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  1. tater
    Career contract fulfillment observation: The station parts don't seem to count in terms of power generation, docking ports, or antennae... but I am unsure of which. I suppose I can test a station to orbit with a stock solar panel, and if that works it's the solar, if not try adding an antenna, etc.
  2. tater
    This seems like one of those "guess the number of jelly beans in the jar" things (or a better one my son's friend's mom did for a birthday part, guess the number of legos in the jar, and you get to keep the jar (she was clearing out some legos)... I'm guessing under 30.
  3. tater
    And S turns...
  4. tater
    If you wanted to make your own spaceplane add-on, seems like you could have them stretch by segments, right? The stretches are discrete, so 1xmk2 hull, 2xmk2 hull, 3xmk2 hull, and so forth, right?
  5. tater
    A bunch of the parts have odd craft type defaults in map view: SC-A-SM: defaults to Ship vs Probe SC-B-SM: defaults to Ship vs Probe SC-C-SM: defaults to Ship vs Probe SC-GEN-PPC: defaults to Ship vs Probe SC-TANK-MUS-ST: defaults to Ship vs Probe SC-TANK-MUS-CB: defaults to Ship vs Probe I didn't check the station parts as they are still in flux.
  6. tater
    Seems like you might be able to make a patch that replaces the stock 2 (ugly) ports with the models from SSTU... You need to add the " MODEL { model = SSTU/Assets/SC-GEN-DP-1P scale = 0.5, 0.5, 0.5 } code in, right? to point at the better model?
  7. tater
    You alter the reward paradigms a little. Allow sample returns via probes (add such a part), but the amount recovered is small (make it a mini ore drill, and it collects a tiny amount, say 1kg or less). You can collect much more, but it's a bigger craft. Assign a large mass to kerbal-collected samples by comparison---10---100 kg). Weight the science returns accordingly. EVA reports are obviously kerbal only. Given that parts are bought with science, add new orbital science that is in fact kerbal medical stuff in space. Generate science for that, and weight it as that has far more bearing on new tech than rock samples. Make funds rewards predicated on Rep gains, and Kerbals on the moon are worth vastly more rep than probes on the moon (or duna, etc).
  8. tater
    I only mentioned Tycoon because Squad explicitly said that was the design goal of career mode. So to the extent they have even stated what they were aiming for, that's it. Sounds like they didn't come close. Regex put it well ages ago in another thread that "contracts" in career are just random side quests. I end up having to just role-play career. I allow reverts, but I explicitly use some as "simulations" (then revert), and then tweak, and launch for real, sink or swim.
  9. tater
    I always have a stock build, and test new versions in stock. I have a testing version where I tend to test single mods, or mod suites in otherwise stock setups to provide feedback to the modders (currently it's SSTU). When I actually play, it's an upscale like 6.4X or RSS with a few must have mods (KER, KJR, FAR, KAC, SSTU, etc), plus sometimes stuff like SVE. As soon as 1.2 is stable, I'm gonna go RSS/RO again. Stock in actual play is sort of boring at this point since you can get virtually anything to orbit with no thought.
  10. tater
    Yeah, my concern would be that CRS-7 and this incident were actually the same problem, and their stated cause for the former was in fact wrong.
  11. tater
    Yeah, I'm sorry for the sort of red herring. I literally never noticed the issue until I posted that screenshot of my Apollo (33 parts, including 4 launch clamps, and 2 ISDCs, and knowing me I could have saved a couple!). In actual play, you'd likely never notice.
  12. tater
    I'll agree that career is in fact non-trivial. It's actually much harder to design well than the actual "fly stuff in space" aspect of the game. Their stated goal was a "tycoon" type game. Since I have never played tycoon (assuming that's a thing), I am unsure how well it managed that. Given that I see career as: 1. impossible to lose, indeed nearly impossible to even lose a single crew member. 2. gets easier over time (i.e.: make it a few days into a career game and you're on the gravy train, and infinite funds/etc are oTW). I don;t see how it could manage feeling like "tycoon." That sort of game implies a foil, actually, as business tycoons have competitors. Hence my statement that KSP desperately needs a competing program (government or commercial) as "player 2" to have a race with. That would change everything, as you'd constantly be balancing limited resources and technology vs getting something done NOW to beat the other guys to whatever milestone.
  13. tater
    I run SVE on my 6 year old iMac just fine, so I'd assume anything that is not actually old could handle clouds easily.
  14. tater
    I agree that "Hard" mode as is is "grind" mode, and boring, but I disagree on LS completely. I think it profoundly changes things. If you miscalculate a dv requirement, and lack propellant to head home, a rescue mission becomes a race, for example. I suppose the fact that I play on scaled up systems virtually all the time aside from testing things vanilla (including mods) factors in here. The problem with the stock game is that getting everywhere is so trivial that the entire game balance is borked. In stock you can orbit single stage stuff with ease---if you can build a rocket with a mk1-2 capsule on top and get it to orbit with something that doesn't look like an Atlas I or Saturn I (not Ib), then the balance is screwy. So I suppose since sending huge payloads is so trivial in KSP, LS could be percieved the way you do, since it's trivial to add more mass to the top of the stack with literally no bad effects. In a more tightly constrained balance (more realistic solar systems), adding kg to the top of the stack can make the difference between getting anywhere or not, and designs need to be far more optimized.
  15. tater
    You could patch in the PROPELLANT inside ModuleRCS for those parts to use Aerozine50 and NTO.
  16. tater
    The shadows are not too small... the external PIPE shadows are too big? That or the pipe shadows are spot on, but the non-pipe areas of the MFT-A/B are thin. That explains why it's not the whole tank, the changes are where the pipes are. EDIT: within the VAB, they seem OK, it's gotta be an LOD issue for only the distant shadows, and the only real time to notice is around dawn when the VAB is there to have the shadow hit. I only notided it after posting my Apollo screenshot, which just happened to be at dawn, looking in the right direction.
  17. tater
    @Diche Bach, I understand completely that they need to aim at the middle of the market, but then again, that would require, you know, bothering to aim at all. I think that you are under the mistaken impression that they actually aimed at something. I think career mode was an afterthought. They tagged some stuff one without an overarching plan, then added more. If they ever realized it was a poor design, they fell victim to a sunk cost fallacy, and pushed ahead. I don't think there was anything remotely like "Hey, let's design the best possible career mode for the middle of the player base." Not by a long shot.
  18. tater
    I tested in my pure SSTU/KER/KJR build, I had the Apollo craft file saved to both. For the test rig, the huge tank at the back of the VAB was for the shadow to have someplace to land.
  19. tater
    It's easy to rig up a test in the VAB. I put a huge SSTU tank towards the back of the building since the light source is on the door side, then you can build in front of it and see what happens. It's just the MFT A and B tanks as far as I can tell (I'm home waiting on a repair dude, so I can check). EDIT: to be clear, I would not have reported this with 6.4x. I checked it in a clean SSTU build before posting.
  20. tater
    Making a bicycle capable of reaching LEO would indeed be vastly more complicated than a rocket. People have talked about spaceplanes for a long, long time. None have happened. The current contender for the most plausible (but still entirely unrealized) spaceplane is what, Skylon? If they ever make it work, it will barely achieve LEO with a cost to orbit that's basically competitive (?) with existing LVs. I think the basic fact is that while rockets have to move through the regime where most all the aero problems aircraft face happen, they do so very quickly, and the solution to the problems in that narrow regime is easier given the goal (spaceflight). If this were not true, we'd have spaceplanes already. Basically they hit max Q in under 2 minutes, the it's downhill from there. Any spaceplane concept lives in that regime for a while.
  21. tater
    Wow, I just noticed something, @Shadowmage. Look at the Apollo shadow on the VAB: Some of the rescaled parts are not casting the appropriate shadows. CSM stack and the S-IVB stage are fine. The diameter change is a fairing, and that's fine. The issues look like they are actually on the tanks, but they are clearly not the whole tanks, just the top part. That or parts of the tanks are right, and all the rest are a little large .
  22. tater
    Stuff I did last night or the day before... An Apollo attempt: It's a little tall (a few m too tall after scaling to 64%), but it worked in 6.4X, there, and back again. Last night I did some docking tests, this is the bare bones SSTU install using that little "Block V" CSM---needs better solar panels to avoid that clipping of the tank when it rotates: This was a Saturn 1C type booster I made, but I was a little sloppy on ascent, and blew some dv. I ended up separating the CSM while the thing was (barely) suborbital, grabbing the station, and bringing it to orbit with the CSM's OMS engine. A similar station (this one is a lab though) in munar orbit, but this is 6.4X. The LC pod is actually configured (and really useful) as a station tug. All propellant is mono. The CSM uses a vacuum Merlin, and is bringing a docking hub with 2 inflatables to increase the habitation of the orbiting laboratory.
  23. tater
    USI-LS doesn't forget air. All the supplies required for a given kerbal are simply lumped into one, and the large % of this is water. The mass of unrecovered oxygen needed per astronaut is a small fraction of a kg/day. What it's called doesn't matter as long as the total mass is right.
  24. tater
    If you think there was human intent involved in what happened, my statement is 100% accurate. %$#@ happens, and they blew up a rocket as a result. It's not more complicated than that. I'm well aware of the internet sleuths. I'll trust people who have more data. They also seem to forget that the fill valve is also the path of least resistance for overpressure in the vessel itself by definition when it is being filled (it's a hole in the tank). All it would take was a breach, and a spark. It;s like a plane crash, it's rarely one cause, it's usually a constellation of causes (assuming it's not CFIG, though those often have multiple human causes).
  25. tater
    Right, I'm a dupe of the conspiracy, building 7, etc. We all get exactly where you are coming from.
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