Snark

Moving to Gameplay Questions. Depends on the radiator type. For the deployable radiators (i.e. the folding ones that rotate to stay edge-on to the sun), no, it doesn't matter where you put them. At all. You can have the hot stuff at one end of the ship, and the radiators at the opposite end-- doesn't matter, they pump heat from the whole ship. For the static radiators, they need to be mounted close to the thing to cool. Whether they only cool the parent part, or can extend their reach a bit farther, I'm fuzzy on-- I get the impression that KSP has kinda gone back and forth on this somewhat over the past few versions, and in the past (pre-1.2) I observed them cooling stuff from all over the ship even though supposedly they're supposed only to cool locally. So I'm not completely clear on their exact behavior now (not least because I never use them, ever; the folding panels are just better). However, broadly speaking, I believe that yes, their placement matters.

For a nice example of bigger landing legs-- with, incidentally, a SpaceX flavor-- check out the SpaceY mod. I'm not trying to present "there's a mod for that" as an answer ...just a handy source of inspiration.

Aaaand that's a wrap.

Locking per OP's request.

Sorry, this is the exact opposite of what I observe. Tested it just now on the launchpad. Create a craft in the VAB consisting of the following parts: HECS2 probe core Thermometer Communotron-16 antenna Launch the craft. (The antenna is retracted, which is the default setting.) On the launchpad, right-click the thermometer and press the "Log Temperature" button. When the science dialog pops up, press the blue "Transmit Data" button. Result: The Communotron-16 extends itself, the data transmits, then the antenna retracts again. Not sure why I'm observing something different from you. You're running KSP 1.2.2, right? If we're getting different results, either one of us is seeing things, or else it's some mod or game setting or such. I went rummaging in game settings, but didn't see any obvious "antennas will/won't auto-extend" candidate. AFAICT, I'm not running any mods that ought to affect this behavior.

So, just to be clear: you made a craft in the SPH you saved it before launching after launching it, flying, and recovering, you go to the SPH and it's not there in the "load craft" dialog however, if you go look in your SPH folder, you see the .craft file for your ship Is this correct? (Sorry if this seems unnecessarily dense or nitpicky-- it's just that you keep saying "the save file", which is a bit ambiguous. I want to make sure that by saying "show up in the save file" you mean "shows up as a .craft file in the SPH folder", and not anything involving a .sfs file in the saves folder.)

Hello, and welcome to the forums! Can you explain a bit? How are they "showing up in the save file" in the first place? Are you saying that you created a craft in the SPH, and you saved it, and after saving it you go to load it again and it's not there? Or something else? Would help if you could describe the exact sequence of events, i.e. I create a craft in the SPH. I save it. ...?

A Panther will take you up to 800-900ish m/s and an altitude ~20 km. Stick an appropriate rocket engine on there, and you ought to be able to get to orbit without too much trouble. Though what "low cost" means depends on your definition of "cost" and on your play-style. For example, in my own games, a staged rocket to orbit is cheaper than an SSTO. Why? Well, it may cost more funds... but not much more. But it takes a lot less of my time. And I measure cost not in funds, but in my time, since that's the really precious resource for me. After a few launches, I can use the gameplaying time I've saved by not going SSTO, and spend it on dashing off a quickie contract that pays far more than the money I would have saved with a spaceplane SSTO. That's just for me-- won't necessarily be relevant to someone who has a different play style or priorities. Just something to bear in mind when you're determining which style works best for you.

Moving to Add-on Discussions.

...but then again, they also keep their helmets on when they're on Kerbin, so it's hard to read much into that... I've always assumed it's a caste / status thing. "Hey, look at me, I'm an astronaut, not one of you landlubbers. Check out the helmet!" <preen>

Just to pile on here, it's fine. My own save files routinely get up to 10 MB or thereabouts, in later career when I have a lot of ships flying around. (The sole exception I've encountered regarding the "don't worry about save file size" rule was when I had a career in which I was using a buggy mod that caused the asteroid-spawning routine to go berserk, and there were literally thousands of asteroids clogging the save file. I "fixed" it at the time by writing myself a little perl script to go through and scrub them all out of the file, and I'd just run that once a day or so. Even with all the thousands of asteroids, though, it didn't crash the game or anything; just made it slow to load and slow to pop up the "load save" dialog.)

Well, that particular scenario hasn't come up for me, since it can't-- I like to play comms in "hard mode" (i.e. no comms on unmanned ship = no control whatsoever, which would prevent any actions, including extending the antenna manually). However, I've definitely seen auto-extend happen when, for example, my crewed Mun lander needed to transmit a crew report or something. I just say "transmit" and it extends the antenna long enough to send.

Well, there's nothing stopping anyone. Not a bad idea Mod authors are welcome to create new threads if they want to, and the moderator team is happy to merge threads later as needed. Naturally it would be up to the mod author to decide how much effort they want to put into the OP of the temporary replacement thread, given that it's expected to be throwaway work. But even if the new OP is just a stub placeholder "hi, this is the temporary thread for ___, here's the download link and source code link and license", at least it would give users a place to 1. download the mod, and 2. talk about it.

Moving to Add-on Discussions.

Or you could give the longer form, which is essentially what was already said: "We appreciate the inconvenience that this technical difficulty is causing our customers, and we apologize. Rest assured that we are working on fixing the problem and will have things restored to normal just as soon as we are able. We have taken steps to prevent this problem from recurring. Thank you for your patience." In all honesty, I gotta say that I've seen a lot of technical outages from various companies over the years-- most of them much better staffed and funded than Squad-- and that's about as much as I've ever seen by way of technical details. It's very rare to put technical details out there, unless they're really necessary (e.g. for a security breach or something, which this isn't). It's not unprecedented. I do recall one major Amazon AWS outage a few years ago, for example, where they actually did send out a technical explanation of just what happened... but the Internet's collective jaws were dropping that they actually did that, because nobody does that. (Not even Amazon, most of the time.) I believe the reason they did it on that occasion was that it was a majorly embarrassing screw-up, on a scope many orders of magnitude worse than this little kerfuffle, and throwing open the doors like that was a way of trying to calm down the outrage. It was an in-extremis move. Companies generally don't release technical details of screwups because in general, it doesn't help the company, doesn't actually assuage the customers in most cases, and doesn't help resolve the problem any faster. If going-public-with-minutiae was a thing that was helpful most of the time, companies would be doing it most of the time. Is it right? Is it nice? Should it be different? I dunno. I may be too close to the problem, given that I've been working in the software industry for a couple of decades (including operating high-volume customer-facing services), so I've become accustomed to "how it's done". I'm not really trying to defend the system here, just simply saying that this is generally how things work and Squad's not being atypical here.

Or you can assume that Squad knows exactly what they're doing, and what the problem is, and they are in fact working on it, and input from Random Internet People is unlikely to help much, but is likely to cause a lot of randomization trying to explain things. When competent technical people are hard at work on a thing they understand, I find that it's generally best not to be jostling their elbows and breathing down their necks, so they can get on with it. See the FAQ: In a similar vein, Also see the FAQ: There, see? Hallmark of a good FAQ. It answers the actual questions people are asking!

Sure thing, nothing wrong with speculating.... as long as it's clear to all concerned (the speculator, and the speculatees) that that it is, in fact, just speculation. It may seem obvious that "I'm just guessing here" is understood context, when one is speculating... but it's easy for that to get lost in the shuffle, and discussion can kinda snowball. Just trying to make sure we keep it real.

Hi everyone, This is a topic where emotions are running high. That's perfectly understandable: here's something that's really important to you, and it's been unexpectedly taken away, and that makes you unhappy. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. And of course, there's a natural human reflex to want to do something about it (which in this case you can't), or to try to understand it (which in this case you also can't, since you don't have the internal technical details of what happened or what's being done to fix it). It's galling to be ignorant of what's going on, and powerless to do anything about the situation. Totally natural and understandable, and there's nothing wrong with feeling that way. However... there's another natural human reflex, which is unhelpful despite its ubiquity. That's the urge to try to make an explanation, or to predict what's going to happen. Which is completely pointless in this situation, since any explanation you come up with is almost guaranteed to be wrong, given that it's basically impossible to make technical judgments without access to technical information. Here's the actual state of affairs: A bunch of threads that lots of people care about went poof. The folks at Squad are well aware of the issue and its impact to users, and are working to fix the problem. It's taking a while, because fixing the problem requires a lot of work. It'll be ready when it's ready. All you can do is wait. That's basically it. Speculating about what happened, or why, or what's being done to fix it, or how long it will take, or whether this was all preventable, or the competence or diligence of the people involved, etc. is unproductive, because in the absence of specific knowledge of all the stuff that's going on under the covers, you simply don't know what you're talking about. If that sort of speculation helps to blow off emotional steam, well... that's as may be, but please be aware that that's all that's happening here. For the curious, here's a FAQ about the situation in a spoiler section. Thank you for your understanding.

Locking thread, so as to contain discussion of "where did the mods go?" to the central thread linked above.

Alas, sorry, no. It's not possible with this mod as it stands, and I have no plans to add such a feature. Mainly because "time since last mission" isn't something that I ever care about. If I'm launching a ship, I care about "what can a kerbal do", not "how long has it been". It's not as if time spent sitting around swigging coffee in the Astronaut Complex causes kerbals' skills to deteriorate, or something; time since last mission is irrelevant for gameplay purposes. I can certainly appreciate that there may be other reasons (e.g. roleplay) why someone would care about how long it's been, but that's not what this mod is about, and (since I don't use that in my own gameplay) it's not something I'm likely to write. I agree that functionality like that would be handy in some circumstances. And certainly I think there's a lot of room for improvement in the way that KSP sorts the astronaut list-- I've often found myself wishing that I had better options to keep them sorted in a certain way (some user-selectable combination of skill level, and/or profession, and/or time since last mission). But that would be a pretty major feature implementation; the reason I haven't already done it is that the ratio of "how much work would I have to do" to "how much do I care about it" hasn't come close to reaching critical mass. So, the status on that would be "maybe never, but certainly not anytime soon."

They didn't just "extend by themselves" before, they were normally retracted all the time. Unless you're talking about when they transmit science. In that case, you're right: they used to automatically extend, transmit, and retract, every time you transmit. And they still do. If you have a retracted antenna, and transmit science, it'll temporarily auto-extend the same way it always has. That hasn't changed in 1.2.x. The only "micro-managing" you need to do is, if you have CommNet turned on, and you want to use the antenna continuously so that you can control the ship, then yes, you need to extend the antenna yourself, if it's one of the deployable ones. That's a feature, not a bug. The whole point of CommNet is that it provides additional challenges. If you don't like it, the problem is easily solved-- just turn off CommNet in the difficulty options and the game will act exactly the way it did before 1.2. And in any case, I wouldn't call this "micromanaging", at least not any more than the rest of KSP already is. You need to manually extend/retract solar panels, after all. And radiators. And landing gear. And landing legs on airplanes. And drills. And there are a gazillion ship systems that you have to turn on and off manually, such as SAS, RCS, fine-control mode, fuel cells, ISRU, lights, engine modes, etc. This is just more of same, and it's a pretty minor thing-- extend the antenna once, as soon as you're out of atmosphere, and then leave it extended. There, done for the remainder of the craft's lifetime.

"1614 units of fuel" is a little vague: is that 1614 units if liquid fuel (not counting oxidizer), or do you mean you have a total of 1614 units of liquid fuel plus oxidizer? From your screenshot, I think you probably mean liquid fuel itself (because if you only had 1614 units of LF+O, that would be just 8 tons of fuel, and your fuel gauges would show lower than that). So, I'll assume you have 1614 units of fuel, plus an appropriate matching amount of oxidizer. That makes 1614/90 = 17.93 tons of propellant. If your ship is 74.76 tons, and you're using Skippers at Isp 320, your available dV is: 320 * 9.81 * ln(74.76 / (74.76-17.93)) = 861 m/s. (Note that this assumes that you turn off those Thuds and use a Skipper only, since the Skippers have a higher Isp than the Thuds do.) That's not enough to go anywhere. Not to the Mun, not to Minmus, not to Duna. From LKO, it takes ~850 m/s just to get to a low-Pe flyby of the Mun; that's not counting the extra couple of hundred m/s you'd need to circularize. On the other hand... if you refuel your ship in LKO (by docking a fuel tanker to it), then you have lots of options. If both of those big Skipper tanks were full in LKO, you'd have 32 tons of fuel to play with instead of 17.93. Your dV would go up to 1400 m/s, and that is enough to get to Mun or Minmus orbit. Duna would also be doable; you'd need to hit a good transfer window, plus use aerobraking on arrival. It takes ~1050 m/s to get a Duna intercept from LKO, which would leave you with a little maneuvering reserve upon arrival, assuming you aerobrake. You wouldn't have the fuel to get home again, but presumably that's what the ISRU-equipped lander is for.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/discombobulate The humor there, for any non-native English speakers out there, is that the word "discombobulate" (which is, in fact, a real word) looks like a standard-formed word with the "dis-" prefix added to a root word "combobulate"... except that there isn't actually any word "combobulate". The Blender plug-in is making an implicit joke by calling itself "combobulator"; they're basically making the same joke as whoever authored this splash screen sentence.

Moving to Spacecraft Exchange. Bonus points if you can get it to leave droppings all over the runway.

Also, there are game options that can make Kerbin-orbiting satellites more necessary-- for example, there's a toggle to turn off all the other communication centers, so that you have to have a signal to KSC itself, not just Kerbin, which can be an issue when KSC is on the opposite side of Kerbin from your ship. And there's a game difficulty option so that you totally lose control if you don't have a communications link. But those only happen if you've chosen those options specifically-- neither of them is the default.