damerell

Real roll cages protect from impacts at a low closing speed (as any motorcyclist knows, there is a difference between hitting the ground moving sideways at high speed and running into an object directly at high speed); a hard outer shell is useful, but can't stop every internal component from suffering from deceleration in a direct impact. A KSP roll cage made of these 80 m/s impact parts is artificially too good. As I said, also, I'm not criticising you; it compensates for how KSP rovers are artificially overly prone to rolling.

I'm not faulting you (the peculiar behaviour of stock wheels means you're going to roll for no reason sometimes) but I try and avoid that kind of thing myself - it stretches plausibility to smack into the side of a mountain with no damage because the first thing to hit it was a steel plate...

No, they aren't - on an airless world, a rover leaving the ground at a given speed and angle will describe a trajectory entirely independent of its mass.

This is making the same error again. When one wonders about whether or not to produce a game, of course one plans on a price (well, a series of prices) that will pay for the costs of development, but that's not where Squad are; the money has been spent and the game has been produced. They do not now have to pick a price that will recover those costs; it is still worth selling the game even at a price that will not recover the costs if the alternative would be to recover even less of them. That is not to say I think Squad is in that position! The continued development and current price suggest to me that they think there are plenty of sales left in the game even at this price, and long may it continue. Your example of a game that costs $10 million to produce and that one expects to sell a million copies includes the same error (well, also it seems to think the demand is highly insensitive to price, but let's take that as read). During development one has to plan to make at least $10 a copy - but even then one can hope to get some copies out the door at $20, and also expect to sell some at $5 - and it is still worth planning to sell those $5 copies once no-one is buying it at $10, even though they don't amortise their share of the fixed costs. But once it's developed, it may turn out to be a flop; it's worth then selling half a million copies at $5 if that's what one can get, because having a quarter of the development costs back is better than nothing. The price a game comes out at initially will reflect the intention of making a profit over the fixed costs, but the price it sells at after a while doesn't.

While I think KSP's price is quite reasonable, this doesn't follow. The marginal cost of selling a copy of a videogame is very low - it was pretty low even before digital distribution, and now it's almost nothing. Even if it turns out a game is a flop and the expenses will never be recouped, it's worth selling copies at a price that doesn't amortise the production costs because they are already spent; it still reduces the losses. The only minimum price point they can't go lower than is the marginal cost of distribution, which is tiny. Of course, I expect Squad, like anyone, to sell all the $40 copies they can before they start selling $5 copies...

You may wish reaction wheels to be operating either for MechJeb Rover Stability Control or for manual air control in jumps (especially on worlds like Minmus); worse yet if you are using realistically capable reaction wheels hence reliant on RCS, you certainly don't want to burn up monoprop every time you touch the controls. It's not just the "Hog" - for any serious roving, you want to disconnect the rover controls from the ordinary controls.

Nearly all laptops have a way to type keypad keys via some sort of chord or extra meta key. Failing that, there are programs for temporarily remapping the keyboard or letting you type missing keys via chords for all the OSes KSP runs on. If there's no support in the mod, I would look into those.

Clearly someone who wants stock behaviour wheels over KSPWheel wheels has suffered an unplanned disassembly above the neck, but I see the problem. More seriously I'll try and provide some sensible replies to the coming questionnaire, and thanks awfully for sorting out the stock parts.

You can do this yourself (and if the maintainer is unwilling to, that's the way forward).

Nice one; that's a very minimalist rover...

Let me give you an alternative suggestion, as a relatively recent convert - don't. Yeah, TACLS has the extra resources, but what does that add? You try and pack the same endurance in all of them (and parts conveniently come offering just that) - they might as well be one resource. TACLS kills kerbals - so does USI-LS if configured to do so. TACLS has recyclers - USI-LS with MKS has a wide range of options. TACLS looks challenging, but kerbals just don't eat that much so one easily just oversupply; the habitation requirements on USI-LS offer a much deeper challenge, and one that varies more with length of voyage than just slapping on another TACLS can does. I miss the hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells one got with TACLS - split water in daylight to bank solar energy for later - but you know what? That only works because KSP solar is absurdly, impossibly, good. It just wouldn't make sense in reality to carry the electrolyser's mass to recover a tiny handful of joules.

I think to a degree there's an expectation that life support mods with carbon dioxide supply their own air recyclers, and perhaps they vary enough that Universal Storage can't have one that's a sensible fit with all the mods you might use it with. LF by itself can be used with jets on Laythe (or Kerbin) but also works without oxidiser in NTRs such as the LV-N.

If the existing version still works, it's only necessary to inform the CKAN people of that so they can correct the metadata, not to recompile it.

Well, what we'd like to measure is the mass per kerbal, leaving aside the mass of the part devoted to other functions.This is a hard problem to solve in general...

I hope the operation is mass-neutral, since the material kits are consumed.

It's a while since we've seen one of these. Mun is a good size - not such a slog as Kerbin, but at least it's got some gravity to stick you down sometimes.

I'm not saying this is what is to blame here, especially since the OP isn't clear on whether it's the US parts that are too small or the Kerbalism parts, but one potential problem is that TACLS by default has realistic consumption for tiny kerbal bodies. There could easily be a mismatch with a mod intended to have realistic mass requirements for life support for humans.

Not to be Captain Obvious, but (to the OP) you can also reduce the wing mass and strength in FAR. A plane to fly at very slow speeds can benefit from this so its huge wing area doesn't have a huge mass (needing more lift and hence more speed and defeating the point of the exercise) and if you're only going to fly it at very slow speeds you can presumably resist the urge to throw it around the sky in 8g maneuvers and rip the wings off.

No, I didn't; the first link to the SEV has the space version front and centre with a different arrangement of windows.

The Karibou is much much closer to the Lunar Electric Rover which also turns up in NASA's Moonbase Alpha, although because humans are bigger I don't think the LER has the nifty two up, one down seat arrangement the Karibou does.

If you're just fiddling about in the sandbox, I'd Hyperedit your test rig somewhere else.

But are you using the development branch?

I know this is a bit "how long is a piece of string" - but other than lacking the atmospheric performance nerf, how does this differ from the USI Orion mod, please?

You might try KSPWheel based landing gear, rather than stock. Perhaps the problem is not FAR-related.

Besides the usual questions, which I daresay someone else will ask, this is easy to check. Remove FAR, does it still happen?