damerell

What exactly did you do? (I suspect you changed the physwarp rate then tried to activate normal time acceleration...)

With any engine at all you can only use physics warp while under acceleration. This mod does let you adjust the physics warp rates.

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html - most particularly, that the aim of bug reports is not minimalism, and "trouble getting this to work" tells us really extremely little.

I use a relatively simple kOS script to dial down the last pulse in a maneuver then activate auxiliary LFO engines.

I'm curious as to why the rover seems to be entirely made of sticky-out bits - is that constellation of landing legs intended to make it able to self-right from any position?

I'm around Duna, which starts at https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/146923-elcano-iv-circumnavigate-all-the-things/page/2/#comment-4162386 It's late here so I literally braked to a stop and quit; Ike will have to wait.

I resolved to try and rove into the "Western Canyon" biome I'd seen on the map. From the last screenshot at 75W there was some nasty Highlands terrain, and the bottom of the Midland Sea was pretty bad, but I got into it here and tried to just steer straight down it. Here I am much further down - zoomed out, the rover as a tiny blob, and showing the vast mountains the canyon is defined by. The canyon was smooth going. My track on the Scansat map is wiggly because I followed the canyon to its easternmost extent, then decided to continue to 45W before turning towards the Hangarmoth; here is that moment. Heading towards the Hangarmoth, and in smooth terrain for a change. The last flag on Duna at 30W. I'm pleased the KSC thought to supply us with this semi-infinite supply of flags. Once nice thing about the resupply mission that was necessary is that the Hangarmoth sticks up a long way because of the extra tanks being in this tower when the thing is landed. I'd seen it a bit before, but this shows it from a distance. And home! I have not checked the ISRU situation on the Hangarmoth, let alone loaded the rover up and set off for Ike - but I am done with Duna at last. Much smaller than Eve, but I've been distracted by other matters and it's taken a while. The Laythe vehicles are coming up to transfer out of Kerbin and I will have to make sure they hit those windows.

I ploughed on through the night, or rather, spent about half the time driving and half the time rewriting the anti-overspeed kOS script (which handled the case where the desired maximum was more than the maximum drive speed so it just needed braking downhill well, but not slower roving at night; it took several iterations to reach a point where it wasn't alternately letting me go full throttle then braking to waste all the input energy). Flag at 120W: Could have sworn I hit screenshot as I got past 105W, but I've got nothing, so here's a flag at 90W: This puzzled me - was it a huge grey mountain? Does Kerbol look really weird because of some odd property of the Dunanian atmosphere? Oh, wait, it's Ike. 75W, and an impressive view in the sky. With only 50 degrees longitude to go, I should be home before dark. A pity to have set out the wrong way and done an unnecessary night roving leg, but I seem to have survived it.

I found myself roving down this canyon. I resolved to rove on into the night, having spent some time rewriting the kOS speed control script, and being concerned about being able to go to Ike or have to recover to the QA to reset habitation timers. And now it's dark. Darker still, but by keeping the speed reasonable I can drive over these gentle dunes.

I am still plugging away at Duna, I just got distracted by rewriting some of the kOS scripts.

Dawn on Duna. I know these screenshots are mostly here to document progress but even so, this one is pretty boring, sorry. A flag, and an illustration of how the ScanSat BTDT provides a neat track on the map of where you've gone. I dipped into the Eastern Canyon for a bit until it strayed too far from the Equator, then had some tougher terrain in the Highlands. Here I am taking a big jump into, unfortunately, a region characterised by ugly Z-fighting. And finally past 180 degrees East... well past halfway, then, since I landed at 25 degrees West. However, I had a realisation that was obvious in retrospect. KSP's small worlds mean on many of them the dawn moves at a speed comparable to roving speeds. On Duna, it moves at almost exactly 30 m/s - travelling east means this about halves the roving day, whereas if I'd travelled west Kerbol might barely seem to move in the sky at all. This is the first time this has caught me since Moho barely spins at all and I took polar routes on Eve and Gilly. In the hope this is of interest to other circumnavigators I present the speed of dawn for Kerbol-system bodies. Note this is a bit imprecise for moons because it depends on the moon's position in its orbit about its parent body, and only for Moho have I bothered to distinguish sidereal and solar day. Moho: 0.6 m/s Eve: 55 m/s Gilly: 3 m/s Kerbin: 175 m/s Mun: 9 m/s Minmus: 9 m/s Duna: 31 m/s Ike: 12 m/s Dres: 25 m/s Laythe: 59 m/s Vall: 18 m/s Tylo: 18 m/s Bop: 0.8 m/s Pol: 0.3 m/s Eeloo: 68 m/s There's a whole range there from too slow to care about to too fast to keep up with, but it seems pretty clear in retrospect that the direction to set off in is West not East. Oh, well.

Flag at 60 East: I regret my usual image presentation workflow broke down here. I stopped in the dark to drop a flag at 120E, then went to launch the Lathe recovery jet. This was slightly awkward since it involved a huge heavy sail on one side of the rocket. Basically, there's a tank with two LV-Ns on it which roughly balances out the jet and its two LV-Ns and smaller tanks. Of course as the fuel burns off there will come a point where the empty tank can't balance out the jet, but a) I think I have surplus dV and b) kOS can dial down one set of engines appropriately. The upper stage LFO engine is in the middle here (so you can't see it, sorry, bad picture-taking) but once it runs dry both it and the nose tanks pop off, leaving jet and ventral tank attached to a monoprop tank and reaction wheel.

Thank you. I think my understanding of what version numbers go with what is still a bit limited, but armed with that I was able to know to try with a later Mono than my distribution supplies and build it OK. Fortunate since I neither have Visual Studio installed nor have any clue how to use it. ;-)

I would like to build MechJeb. https://github.com/MuMech/MechJeb2/blob/dev/README.md#build provides compilation instructions for Linux and Windows. The Linux instructions seem impossible to use because the Makefile sets /langversion:8.0 and Mono only has partial C# 7.0 support, unless my understanding is limited. The Windows instructions - well, perhaps this is down to me not knowing enough about building things on Windows, but there doesn't actually seem to be a point in them where you _build_ anything. Step 3 seems just to be editing something - then what?

Yes, only affecting play in 1.8-1.9 (which I believe the version you suggest is incompatible with; unless I made some kind of mistake I found the commit that fixed that issue and tried the corresponding release). That is why my post was just an FYI for anyone else in the same situation.

Coo, your Laytheboat is more aerodynamic than mine. Launching it from Kerbin posed considerable difficulties. Mind you, it is built to sail in Scatterer waves.

Commit def1487870e33081b4512dfac89150b259379960 does if (p.Modules.OfType<ModuleCargoPart>().Any()) { ScreenMessaging.ShowPriorityScreenMessage(CannotAddGroundSciencePartMsg); UISounds.PlayBipWrong(); return null; } My use case is being able to put anything in an inventory at all.

I got a bit distracted by the question of absurdly fast boats and a way to do Gilly without leaving the ground, but here I am at the meridian. I'd shut down shortly after, since it was getting dark, and go to relaunch the Laytheboat. I did start roving a bit before sunrise, though, the terrain being so easy. Sunrise on Duna. 30 degrees East. 45 degrees East. I should at least rework the Laythe jet delivery vehicle before doing more roving.

Oh, I know - I'm just wondering how fast I can get a boat to go with modded parts (which are no more magic than stock solar / rotors ;-) ETA: as far as I can see the answer is "not very" - these NTJs are heavy and unlike electrically powered propulsion the entire added mass is in one place which has to be above the waterline (I'm aware KSP will let the engine run quite happily while immersed but I might roll an eye at that); the resulting boat wants to nose into the waves about 70 km/h, and while I've experimented a bit with hydrofoil configurations my understanding of stock drag is nonexistent.

Could one of you rotor-powered types estimate the thrust to mass ratio of your craft? I'm trying to work out if my nuclear thermal jet idea is at all feasible.

Out of interest I uninstalled FAR for a bit and got a heavily modified Laytheboat with an improvised hydrofoil and nuclear thermal jets up to 100 m/s. Briefly. I may leave this one to you. :-)

Precise positioning is easy in a node-node world. I'm not sure "fit first then resize" in newer KSP versions is on the brink, even if it is mildly annoying.

I sit corrected. My apologies. I'll try and reproduce this myself when I get home.

There's no way to resize it if the bug can be reproduced with no other mods installed, which would be necessary to confirm it is in KF itself. KSP has no DRM. You can just copy installs around. The correct Player.log is the one in the directory where the minimal install is located.

This doesn't work for three reasons, one annoying, one serious, and one apparently impossible to overcome. Firstly AFAIK all the ground tethers on a vehicle turn on or off together. This is normally what you wanted but is no help here. That can be worked around by using Hangar Ground Hangars, whose anchors operate individually. Furthermore the minimum DockRotate incremental rotation is 1 degree, with the port trying to turn at at least 1 deg/sec. With a 500m beam, this means the other end is moving in roughly 9m increments and - if torque can overcome gravity - getting slapped into the ground at 9 m/s. This could perhaps be worked around by a very flexible beam and the feet having landing legs to cushion the resulting impact. The fundamental problem is that even under Gilly's gravity, to lift one "foot" into the air by applying torque at the other end of a very long beam needs a very large amount of torque and what happens in practice is the port gets twisted clean off the foot. Bigger heavier ports attached to bigger heavier parts just means you have bigger heavier feet. One idea is for the foot/beam joint to rotate freely and for the rearward foot to propel itself upwards with some kind of piston fast enough that it will pass over the foot that's anchored to the ground, then use reaction wheels to control the descent speed so it doesn't just smack into the ground at the same speed. Another idea is to make the whole thing much smaller and try to operate it faster to get an acceptable ground speed. A third idea is to have the feet have wheels and to have the vehicle move by anchoring the front foot then contracting like a caterpillar, then anchor the rear foot and stretch out again.