Frannington

If you're anything like me, you spend a lot of time in the VAB building, tweaking and then testing your launchers. I've had loads of fun experimenting, but I'd like you to share your experiments with me. We all have the same problems and I'm nosy/interested to know how you're solving them. Screenshots, KVV shots or even just descriptions are fine, but please do say what the launcher is intended for. Here's my new medium launcher, with a lander attached. It gets to a 150km Kerbin orbit with around 8500m/s delta-V available. I've used it to go to the Mun, but will attempt Duna later:

Blow on it. How do you spell IBM?

Kerbals don't have a gender now, but once upon a time they did. But that was on their real homeworld, when they had a very different name for themselves. Millions of years ago, a space-faring species secretly visited the homeworld of what we now know as Kerbals and kidnapped a male member of the dominant species. They took him back to the planet that we now wrongly call Kerbin. You see, these kidnappers needed a slave species and had a key technology; cloning. Unwilling to clone and enslave members of their own species, and lacking a native species that was usable for productive work, they found these little, green, peaceful simpletons to be ideal. The abductee they chose - whose name was Jebediah - was particularly good with machines, easily trained, lacked any care for his personal safety and so suited their purpose perfectly. Time rolled on and every home eventually had a Jebediah. Leisure time for the kidnappers increased exponentially and much like the Roman empire, they became decadent. Eventually an argument over wallpaper led to one of them launching a comet at another's house. That's where the big circle crater came from. In the following devestation, the entire population of the planet was wiped out. But one clone factory survived, still automatically creating Jebediahs. Unfortunately, it was subtly damaged, so small errors in replication were introduced. Bob and Bill were created. With their masters gone, the "Kerbals" inherited their late masters' technology, and started using it. And that's when we discovered them. And now we're going to give them females to give them back their heritage. Plot twist: Not all of the kidnappers were on-planet at the time of course. Some survived, and we know them as "Krakens". And that's my back-story for them.

Well it actually turns out that I'm not entirely correct. I was right about the 100% datum, but not about why it could be exceeded on later motors. I actually heard this verbally from a technician at Kennedy, so had to go looking for an actual source. As it happens, Wikipedia and its sources disagree with her, which is a bit worrying. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_main_engine Specifically, about 2/3 down the page... Their reference is a PDF which I won't link here, but you can retrieve it if you like. I apologise for misleading you.

Pluto can be whatever it wants to be and y'all need to stop laying a trip on it.

No SSME was ever run above 100% throttle for that particular engine. 100% throttle was designated as the maximum thrust that the original SSMEs could run at. Later ones had refinements that allowed them to deliver more thrust than the original engines, but they retained the 100% datum. In other words, those later engines were running at 109-114% thrust of the engines that were originally fitted to Columbia, but they were at (or below) their own design specification.

I use sepatrons to boost used stages away from my ships. Assuming a strap-on booster, I put one sepatron upside-down on the nose cone to push it diagonally away and behind. I also put one facing sideways on the body of the booster to push it away. I learned to do this after my ships got hit (and disabled) a few times by departing strap-on stages. I also put inverted sepatrons on linear orbital stages so that they get out of my way and allow me to maneuver. The earlier stages will of course re-enter. Most will have done on their own even without the sepatrons. But I terminate those that don't, and don't care if anyone wants to call that cheating. No one gets to tell me how to play, you see.

573. We try and we fail. We adjust, we try again...and we fail again. But then we tweak, fettle, try again, and then we succeed. We learned that lesson from you humans. We learned that sometimes we have to take financial and personal risks for the benefit of our species. Skylab. Hubble. STS. But you...you seem to have forgotten that. Come up here and meet us. We might not even exist, but what do you really have to lose?

I'm a sandbox player, with a career-mode save that I jump into from time to time to keep my manual skills up. I wasn't excited about .25 - and in fact it temporarily broke a lot of my modified stuff - but it did offer a load of benefits that I enjoy and everything's fixed now. So I'm happy with where we are. What worries me is the prospect of paid content and how it'll be handled. We have a huge modifying community, all of whom are working for free in an open API. They deliver everything you could ever want and many of them will even fulfill individual requests for parts, (Lack is a good example of this). Sometimes - as with .25 - we see these mods included in the base package. So what happens when this game goes gold? Will the developers leave the API open and allow free and open development, or will you wake up one day and find that your mods won't work unless the developer enters into an "agreement"? I don't foresee this happening - Squad isn't Electronic Arts or Ubisoft - and I absolutely agree that developers are entitled to a livelihood. But we who have stood by them as users, and those who have stood by them as content creators, should not have to pay the price. If I'm worried, that's why. If I'm taking backups, that might also be why...

I'd say Duna. That's where I went after I did Mun and Minmus. If you get your launch window right it shouldn't need too much Dv and you're already in the right plane.

Well done, thank you. I haven't downloaded this yet because the interim fix works just fine for me, but I will do in due course. More importantly, I hope you're feeling better now.

Like many others here, I bought the full version after spending an hour with the demo. True, this is my sort of game - something I've wanted for years - but it was definitely the demo experience that made the sale. You only have to look at the 90s success of Doom to see how important a demo can be...

I don't disagree with your conclusions at all, but just wanted to point out that the heaviest (and widest) aircraft ever to land on an aircraft carrier was a C-130F (wingspan 132 feet, empty weight 34.4 metric tons. According to that link, they tested it up to about 55 metric tons).

I'm a little bit sad that there's even factions of "career" versus "sandbox" and animosity between the two. This game allows you to play how you want. You can build a career... or you can loft whatever you like and explore the art of the possible. There is absolutely no reason why the two can't coexist and no one has a right to contradict that. This is a game. And it's great because you can have fun in the way you want to. Any snobbery or elitism has no place, and I won't bother with posts from people who act like their interpretation of the game is the only valid one.

Could this be as a simple as the upper stages being oversized for the boost stage they're sitting on?

I don't have a great deal of personal investment (time or reputation) in this forum. I haven't done anything great for it, haven't really contributed much. I've been more of a consumer of information here, and it's been utterly vital to me as a resource. Thank you all. So I absolutely support the idea that people are encouraged to use the search functions - or even just browse - before they post the 10th thread on a subject that is already answered 10 times over. It's just lazy and (speaking as a mod on another forum) I feel it's disrespectful. Someone took the time to answer the question - not bothering to look for the answer before consuming bandwith and time is...wrong. The only potential confusion I see is that we seem to have a rule against necro-posting, so there might be a conflict between "This question is answered" and "I have further questions about this topic". I suggest that new posters should find their way with that one - an apology costs nothing.

"Why did you do this to me? I learned nothing. All on my own and I wasn't even the first Kerbal here!" "Sorry Desrod. Things have...changed and we needed to test the boosters and landers. Your trip wasn't in vain."

I have a vague memory of this being an existing problem. Either way, I notice you've got an x64 rig and OS. Does that mean you're using the 64bit version of the game? If so, Squad have acknowledged that it is unstable, so you may not be able to receive support for your issue.

I felt bad for you, so I downloaded yours. It works. Many thanks! Incidentally, anyone who finds that this fix does not work needs to update Module Manager to v2.5.1.

Thanks - much appreciated. :edit: Loving the new navball though.

Honestly, I haven't found a single problem that's Squad's issue. The only snags I've have have been with mods, and I'm sure they'll be sorted soon (assuming they're still maintained). Steam quietly updated my install from .24 overnight and I came home this evening to...a mess. 1) Any ship with Mechjeb was trashed, (though I can create new ones with it and they do work and save correctly). 2) The mount points for KV Rocketry engines are now messed up. There's a good 5' gap between the motor and the tank above it and it doesn't get fuelled. I could work around it with fuel lines but it looks ridiculous. I'll just wait until it's fixed. 3) Editor Extensions don't work, though the native object placement logic does seem to have improved, (most obvious with radial parachutes) unless I'm imagining things. 4) The "Joint Reinforcement" mod throws an error, but like Mechjeb it still works. I back up my install every time I install a mod, and let Steam update as it wants. But I hadn't realised this was coming so soon and so didn't do a snapshot. That still isn't Squad's problem. Yeah, so I lost a few ships. But that wasn't a bad thing - it's spurred me to reorganise and restructure. So in summary, I think it's great, even if I don't plan to crash into the VAB. We're still in a paid beta and we might not like every decision that the developers make. But they do listen (removing flags from the TS view by default, thank you...) and I think that's the most important part. I'm happy to be part of the journey that we're all taking.

Unless the aerodynamic model changes significantly, I'll probably ignore them. And even then, I'm more likely to use fairings given what I normally launch. Also: I wouldn't dare tell people how to play KSP or what they should do. And this might be an unpopular opinion but... Kerbals are generally pretty dumb and happy. The idea that they would wage war (and therefore need bombers) seems a little sad to me. I understand wanting to play with the idea - that's what humans do - but this is a planet with no concept of countries, race or clans. It's a united aerospace utopia and that's one of the things I love about it. Layering on our aggressive BS just doesn't work for me.

On that subject, one of my cats smacked my spacebar earlier while one of my lifters was sitting on the pad. He made a better job of rendezvous timing than I ever have.

Ditto. I get the Black Nav-Ball of Death if I set a course that leaves Kerbol's influence. I haven't figured out exactly where it happens though. (A close and reload silently kills the ship). Not that I want to bore my Kerbals to death, but... where are they and what mods did you use to build that station please?

I have FSX, but haven't spent too much time with it because my investment in FS9 is so high. But whichever one you choose, I recommend the following: FSTerrain, (or a terrain package from the SRTM space missions), FSTraffic, FSPassengers, and the scenery/BGLs (usually available for free) of the airports you fly to the most. Then go and grab the aircraft you want. PMDG are awesome, but the (now abandoned and totally free) Project OpenSky birds are also excellent.