purpleivan

Someone asked if it was possible to still land on the control tower on Runway Island in v1.25.5, after I posted some (pretty ancient) pics of a flight just such a landing, in the Creepiest Lonliest KSP Moment thread. So I decided to take a flight there today, with similar, far from a perfect landing, results. Got the thing snagged between the antenna and had to use the F12 menu to free it, before "landing" it on the roof of the tower.

To answer your question... yes... yes it is. I just now made a landing there, albeit with a slightly smaller vehicle, so the whole thing could actually fit on top of the tower. However, things didn't go quite according to plan. It took 3 attempts to get a trajectory that didn't overshoot too much, or fall too short, but I finally made. Launch and staging went fine. Then it was time to deply the chutes. Just eyeballing this so that they were deployed a short time before i'd pass over the top of the tower. The idea was for them to bring the vehicle to a quick halt, but as the deploy altitude for them was the default of 1km and I was about 6km up at the time I released them, I had to quickly run around and set chutes to the max of 5km deployment. Looking good at this point. Almost alighned vertically with the tower and the tanks were about 50% full, so a decent amount for manouvering for the landing. However, I had to find a couple of chutes I'd missed, that we still set to 5km deployment, as this meant my vehicle wasn't hanging fully vertically. The time I spent doing that meant I had to waste some fuel slowing the decent. That resulted in me running out of that delicious stuff before I was properly lined up with the roof. As I was REALLY close to making that landing, I decided to jump into the F12 menu and for thelast 10 seconds or so, give myself infinite fuel, so I could nudge the vehicle over a few metres before landing on the tower. All of which resulted in this. I could be a smartass and say this was my plan all along. That I was going for the much harder "land on the antennas" goal, but in truth I fluffed the landing and got knabbed by them, like a tasty piece of chicken between a pair of chopsticks. To free the vehicle I again went to the F12 menu, dropped gravity to 0.02, then with some light bursts on the engines, got free and landing it on the tower itself. Kinda... sorta. One of the landing legs exploded on impact (I think as a result of suddenly turning gravity back to 1.0). But any landing you can walk away from..... With the landing completed, it was time for the crew to scoot down to the tower top, for their time in the spotlight. I could probably have made the landing without resorting to the F12 menu, after another couple of attempts, including some tweaks to the vehicle setup. But it's still true to say that a landing on top of the tower in 1.12.5 is still possible.

As I remember it took a few attempts, but I was determined to land that thing on the roof. Not a long trip for each attempt, so didn't take too long to accomplish, but very satisfying to nail the landing, even if it was just about hanging on, up there.

My creepiest moments both happened on the creepiest of creepy places... Runway Island. This was back in my early days in KSP (2014) and back in those days I didn't fly anything with wings, just rockets, so my trips there were by rocket up and then parachute down around the runway itself. The first time I went there, I launch my lander/rover by rocket towards the island and dropped onto it with parachutes. The landing went fine and Bob (I think it was him) started to explore the buildings around the runway. After stopping at the control tower, he drove the the open hanger, but a few seconds after venturing inside, the screen went black for a moment, then the view reappeared, with just the lander can remaining of the rover, high up (hundreds of kilometres) over Kerbin. To make matters worse, the lander can was zooming away from Kerbin at many km/s on an escape trajectory from Kerbin. For some reason I EVA'd Bob and grabbed a screenshot of the event. The two slowly drifted apart, but still rocketing away from kerbins at 10's km/s. So Bob decided to just hang out and take in the view, knowing there was no way home. Vehicle and crew lost. My second creepy tale of Runway Island happened when I sent a later, larger vehicle, to deliver a whole bunch of kerbals there, for the "Old Tower Challenge", in which the aim was to get as many kerbals inside the room at the top of the control tower. I launched a test flight, with just Val as pilot onboard, to try out the lande, another "rockets up, chutes down" affair. I don't have pics of that flight, but here is one of the my precarious landing on top of the tower, for the challenge entry itself. The kerbally cargo of which can be seen inside the tower. On the earlier test flight, a landing anywhere near the runway was good enough and Val touched down just off the runway, on the opposite side from the tower. She then left the lander to take a look around on foot. Almost as soon as she stepped off the thing, it started to slowly (probably about 1m/s) float upwards. No engines firing, no-one on board to fly it, it just slowly rose upwards, into the air. I watched it for a couple of minutes or so, feeling very puzzled, as it climbed to an altitude higher than the tower, before deciding to load the gamesave I made afer touching down, after which behaviour was normal. So... if you're thinking of going to the runway island, my advice is don't go alone, don't go at night (spooky!!!) and watch what you're doing in that hanger.

Given xAI's owner, hopefully not. Is there any more to this though, than Musk having said that he wants xAI to develop games. Amusing quote in that article though. “Too many game studios...are owned by massive corporations"... says the worlds richest person.

I did a publisher transfer of a Steam game in the last couple of weeks and and as part of that process, there is an agreed date, at which revenue from sales goes to the new owner. In our case that date was a couple of weeks after the agreement that triggered the transfer (sale of a game belonging to the company to a publisher) was signed, so that it lined up with the end of a month. So the date at which the sale of the IP occurs might not be the date that sales revenue switches to the new owner, as that depend on the details of the agreement between the two companies involved.

It's possible that whoever bought PD didn't plan to keep all the IP that it has, but may have been negotiating a sale of some of them, to one or more interested parties. Of course that would make for pretty complicated negotiations and planning, but it's not out of the question. So, in theory at least, company X (not suggesting it would be RW) could buy up PD, with a sale of the KSP rights to company Y (again, not likely to be RW, but a publisher or other project financier) with RW lined up as the developer for to the work for company Y. All of that is wild speculation, but the wick seems to have been turned up regarding talk around KSA, a couple days before the news of the PD sale is confirmed. Might mean something or, it's just coincidence... and those things happen all the time. Either way, an attempt to revive the KSP franchise by RW, given the people involved, would (on the face of it at least) be a good thing... if it happened.

I've got something over 3000 hours in the game and I had no idea that this stuff had been added. Almost all my playing time was 2014-2020, so these additions in v1.12 (in 2021) slipped under the radar for me. Good to know that there are some bits and pieces in the game that will make a re-exploration of the system worthwhile... even if they were added 3 years ago.

@Bioman222 post prompted me to throw in my 2 cents on the question of setting up an alternative (non-official) forum. I know this a while after the events that triggered the OP, but I thought I'd chime in, in case there was still any serious consideraton of this. I think there are 3 main questions, the answers to which determine if an alternative forum is viable, as a replacement of sorts for this one, should it disappear. 1. Are there enough users interested? 2. Are there enough people with sufficient time/interest in setting up and moderating a new forum? 3. Would there be enough finances available to support it? If the answer to any of these is "no", then it's probably not worth even attempting to create one. The question I have, is what is known, or could be found out, regarding answers to those 3 questions. Here are my thoughts on those question Is a tricky question to answers, although a pole on this forum (but it would need to be pinned to maintian visibility), might give an idea of at least the minimum numbers of those players who might be interested. Is a personal question, for those already involved in the moderation of the current forum, as there's not likely to be a many people with suitable experience, volunteering at this stage. Possibly @RayneCloud could canvas opinion amongst the mods regarding this (assuming this hasn't happened already). How much would an alternative forum cost to set up an maintain. It's not as if a forum with the capacity of the current forum would be required, as player numbers are already much lower than when the game was at it's peak. I've no idea of the costs of the kind of forum arrangement that would be suitable/necessary, but hopefully @RayneCloud would have some insight regarding that. Once there's a reasonable idea of the scope of the funding required for a new forum, then at least there would be a goal to meet in terms of pulling together some funding. I'd imagine that the funding available would be in the form of personal donations via [insert crowdfunding portal name here] to the cause, most of them small (say $5-20), with perhaps a smaller number of players willing to stump up more substantial sums.

It's been a while, but with the end of KSP2 development and the knock on effect on the forum (which I found out about a couple months after the fact) I was in the mood to do something I'd not done in a while... fire up KSP. It's been a couple of years since I flew anything, so I thought I'd start simple, just a quick jaunt to orbit for Val, mainly to remind myself of the construction and flight controls. Nothing fancy, just a 1 seater vehicle doing a quick trip to orbit and back, but as they say, it's the little things that count. This also prompted me to renew all my mods, as I was a few versions out of date with my KSP install. Thanks to CKAN (plus manual install of a few older mods) my install of 1.12.5 is now looking the way I remembered things. Just need to do a few tweaks to the settings of TUFX to get the post processing stuff looking how I like.

ok, thanks @Lisias and understood regarding all that, especially the issues regarding Fair Use.

Only came across this thread this evening, but have now read through it to get an idea of the current state of play. Regarding "what to do if the worst happens", is there a plan in place regarding communication, if the forum was to disappear imminently (say, 5 minutes from now). As I understand it @Lisias efforts to create an archive copy of the forum are going well, but if the forum went "pop" suddenly, are those involved in this effort, set up to communicate with each other outside this forum. Additionally, in that situation how would other not involved in the archive effort, but who might be interested in access to the archive (either immediately, or perhaps weeks/months later), be able to find out how to do that? I'm concerned that the effort to archive the forum might not reach its potential, if the many who might want to get access to it (if they knew it existed) weren't able to find out about it, due to the forum's demise. Off the top of my head, possibly a prominent post (with help of the mods) in a pinned thread (possiblya new thread being added), to say that this is what is being done and should the forum disappear suddenly, further news will appear in these other forums/discords etc. I've had a pretty long day, so might not be making sense, but hopefully I am.

I worked with a bunch of the guys who'd worked on that just prior to some of them starting their own company (the one I worked for).

Probably followed by laughter by both and Jeb comically re-enacting his demise.

Myy first negative reaction to KSP 2 on playing it, was to the poorly designed, stylistically inconsistent GUI... including the fonts. KSP1's visual GUI design works. It clearly presents game information to the player, in a way that is internally consistent and in a style fitting the other visuals in the game. That's what good GUI design does. I've done my fair share of GUI work over the years (it's not really my thing, I've just ended up doing it from time to time) and I've worked as art lead on teams that had some really talented GUI artists. It's a shame that one of them weren't working on this project. As with so many things with KSP2, there was a solid, well developed design (not just GUI, but in general) to build on, but with too many things IG seems to have suffered from "not made here" syndrome and made decisions to change things that didn't need changing; just a lick of paint, and minor improvements where prudent.