Snark

Some content has been redacted and/or removed. Folks, just a friendly reminder that everyone needs to follow the forum rules that you agreed to when you created your account, same as always. I know you guys already know the rules (right?), but it appears that a refresher may be in order: Please don't "backseat moderate" (rule 3.2). You're not a moderator, so it's not your place to tell other people what to do or not to do. If you think someone's breaking rules, by all means file a report-- but beyond that, please don't try to boss other folks around. Please stay on topic (rule 2.2.o). The topic of this thread is about what your actions will be in response to T2, etc. It's not about "what did the moderators do" etc., that's not why people come to this thread. Please don't openly discuss moderator action (rule 3.3). We try to stay as transparent and explicit as we can, when we have to take action. But if our reasoning isn't clear-- or if you think we've made a mistake and want to let us know-- by all means, drop us a note via PM. We know we're human, and we encourage feedback. But open discussion is against the rules, and always has been. Please don't make personal remarks about each other (rule 2.2.d). People are entitled to express their opinions and make their arguments. If you disagree, by all means, do so in civil fashion, but please address the post rather than the poster. To be clear: There was a video linked to, earlier in the thread, which violated the forum rules all to heck due to copious profanity (rule 2.2.g). Therefore it was removed, and the reason for the removal was made pretty explicit at the time: We understand that it's easy to get frustrated if something you wanted to post is removed-- but remember, profanity has never been allowed here, and the rules don't change just because you happen to be really mad. There's clearly no "censorship" going on here-- note the lively debate going on here or here, for example, or for that matter just see the other video that was linked here and is, of course, allowed to stand because it does not violate the rules. Folks are free to express themselves here and share whatever opinions they want-- just, please adhere to the rules when doing so. Thank you for your understanding.

You can't. Auto-saving is automatic, and that's a good thing, because it's for your own good. It's what protects you from losing all your progress if the game crashes or something. You can have exactly what you want-- just, loading the auto-save is not the way to do that. What you do is to make your own save and load that. The simple way, using a quicksave: Hit F5 first, before you do the thing you're worried you might mess up (like doing a burn or whatever). Do the thing. "Oh noes, I messed it up!" Press and hold F9. It loads the game at the point where you pressed F5. This is nice and simple. It has the disadvantage that there's only one "save" slot, and each time you press F5, it overwrites the last quicksave you did. The slightly more flexible way, using a named save instead of a quicksave: Hit Alt+F5 before you do the burn or whatever. It'll prompt you to type in a name for this save. Call it whatever you want. For example, if you type "here goes", it would make a named save file called "here goes.sfs". Do the thing. "Oh noes, I messed it up!" Press Alt+F9. It shows you the list of saves available that you could load. Pick the one that you just saved in step 2 (e.g. "here goes" or whatever you called it). It loads the game at the point where you pressed Alt+F5. You can have as many different named saves as you want, and none of them will ever get overwritten unless you explicitly save a second time with the same name. (And even if you do, in that case it'll prompt you to ask if you want to overwrite it.)

Hello, and welcome to the forums! ...However, given that all the prior discussion in this thread was six years ago, I think it's safe to say that everyone involved has since moved on. Accordingly, locking the thread to prevent confusion. If anyone has related questions on this topic, please feel free to spin up a new thread.

Pretty hard to do, given that "throws KSP 2 under the bus" is, 1. vague, and 2. a loaded term. If KSP 2 ends up looking like a fun game that I will enjoy playing, with enough freedom to mod it that I expect to be a long-term player, then I'll buy it. If it doesn't, then I won't. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Seems pretty clear cut to me.

Given the contentious nature of the material in the article, I wouldn't expect most businesses in such a position to be publicly commenting on it. So I wouldn't be surprised if no comment is forthcoming, though of course would love to hear anything. I note that there's already a dedicated thread that someone posted about the Bloomberg article, for anyone who cares to discuss it:

Not sure what you mean by this? The one called "persistent" is the default one-- this is the one that the game automatically saves to every once in a while and on each scene change (so you don't lose everything if the game crashes). The "persistent" one is also the one that gets loaded when you start up the game. The one called "quick save" is the one that gets saved when you just hit F5, and loaded when you just hit F9. All the other ones are the saves that happen when you make a specific named save via Alt+F5. Yup, they're great for that! It's doing most of what you want-- it's just that your mental model of what "saving" means doesn't quite match what's actually going on. When you save a game, it saves the complete state of the world, not the state of the UI. What this means: It does save everything about the state of the world: what ships have been launched, where they are, how much money you have, where all your kerbals are, etc. It doesn't save the state of the UI-- for example, it doesn't save the fact that "I was flying this ship when I saved". Every time you load a game, it always takes you to the KSC scene, regardless of where you were and what you were doing when you saved. So, let's say you've flown your ship to orbit, and then you save the game. When you do that, the game takes a "snapshot" of everything in the world-- including where that ship is and what it's doing-- and saves that. If you then load the game... it puts you in the KSC view, but the ship is right there where it was when you saved it. So all you have to do is switch to that ship (for example, via the tracking station), and there you go. So, basically, it does exactly what you want... it's just that there's an extra step involved (you have to switch to the ship after loading).

Not sure what you're talking about-- I use 'em all the time and they work great for me. The math does matter, though. Not sure how you may be Doing It Wrong™... could you provide a screenshot of a typical attempt at a ship of yours? It's a lot harder to answer "what am I doing wrong" questions if we can't actually see what you're doing.

Thank you, though I think I'd be unlikely to add this-- it just doesn't seem necessary. If I want to see whether a panel is exposed to the sun, then I just see whether, y'know, the sun is shining on it. It's right there, it's pretty visible, doesn't seem like it needs an indicator to me. (Yes, technically speaking it's not 100% certain whether it's "in" or "out" if it's partially shaded, but that's a minor nit and not important in the majority case, so simply not worth bothering about to me.) Plus, whether any given solar panel is in sunlight or not simply isn't very important for gameplay purposes. What's important is the overall amount of electricity being produced for the whole vessel... and that's already visible at a glance in the game's UI, so doesn't need any extra help from IndicatorLights, as far as I'm concerned. (Also, I haven't gone rummaging through all the fields of the modules that are on the solar panel, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's a way to cobble together what you want with config anyway, using parameterized toggle syntax-- e.g. "toggle is on when electricity production is greater than zero", something like that.) So, my criteria for considering a feature request tend to boil down to, is it actually necessary? (Or is there already a good way to get that info in-game) is it important for gameplay? could someone do it even without help from me, just using config? ...and of course the really big one is, "would I myself like to have this in my own gameplay" ...and in this case, I think this particular request is zero for four, at least from my perspective. Thank you for the suggestion, though!

Hi @Rodger! Apologies for the delay in responding; IRL has been busy of late. Not currently supported. From reading your example of what you've tried, above, it sounds as though you probably were working from the documentation here: IndicatorLights toggle syntax ...specifically, the part where it says, The thing is, that syntax only works on boolean fields. It does not work on multi-value (i.e. enum) fields, such as ModuleControlState. When you try to do this, ...that's not going to work, because the ModuleControlState field on ModuleCommand isn't a boolean. You'll also note that you've tried to tack on some values in parentheses there, which isn't part of this syntax. So I see what you're trying to do... and it's a reasonable thing to want to be able to do... but it's simply not supported right now. (So I'll regard this as a feature request.) Yep, due to exactly that problem. Not supported. Incidentally, something that may be useful to know when you're trying to debug "why isn't this working" type of problems with IndicatorLights: Any time you see the "error pattern" colors flash... IndicatorLights will always log a specific error saying what it's unhappy about. So whenever you see those error colors, open up the log (either via the file, or from the Alt+F12 console). You'll see an IndicatorLights message that hopefully should give you a pretty accurate idea of exactly what's wrong. That would be one way to do it, yes. Would need to mull it over.

Hello @Demos Fobos, and welcome to the forum! We're sorry, but we've had to remove the download link due to not complying with the add-on posting rules. Details here, since it happened just a little while ago in this very thread: We understand that you meant well, and we're sorry that we had to remove it. Unfortunately, though for various reasons, there are rules about posting links to mod downloads (see add-on posting link above), and this doesn't meet them. We realize it's a hassle, but unfortunately it's how things have to be. Thank you for your understanding, and again, welcome aboard!

Could you post a screenshot of your ship? Lots easier to diagnose if we can see it.

Note that even a fairly tiny burn or can adjust your Pe height by quite a lot, if you do it when you're still far out on the fringes of the SoI. So as long as you have the dV to spare to do a substantial burn when you're near Pe to slow yourself down, you totally can. Just do a (tiny) burn when you're way out on the fringes of the system to raise your Pe an appropriate amount, and then when you're closer in and soon to hit atmosphere, you can do a burn which accomplishes the dual goal of slowing you down (to better survive reentry) and lowering your Pe to what it needs to be for reentry. (The closer to the planet you can get before doing the burn, the better, in order to take maximum advantage of Oberth effect.)

I would actually disagree with this recommendation-- or, at the very least, it's a lot more nuanced than that. The thermodynamics of aerobraking can be... counter-intuitive. For example: It's a very common mistake that a lot of folks make who are new to KSP, to think: "Well, I heat up from entering atmosphere. And there's more atmosphere lower down. So if I dive too deep I'll go kaboom, and I'm marginal for surviving. I want the gentlest possible reentry, so I can survive. Therefore, I'm just gonna 'dip my toe in the water' and try for a very shallow reentry where I don't go very deep." That sounds perfectly reasonable and logical... but is actually wrong (at least, in a lot of cases). Rather counter-intuitively, it's actually often less heating if you dive steeply than shallowly. That is: you can have a situation where you go kaboom if you try a shallow reentry, but if you plow more deeply into the atmosphere, you do better. The reason for this is that two things happen on reentry: Drag slows you down Friction heats you up Both of those effects get stronger, the deeper you go into atmosphere. But as you get deeper, drag builds up faster than heating does. That's the key issue. If you go for a really shallow reentry... the problem is that the upper reaches of the atmosphere do heat you up quite a bit, but don't slow you down by any appreciable amount. There's just not enough drag. The result is that you get slow-roasted without ever slowing down enough. By plowing right in, it's true that heat builds up in a hurry-- but drag builds up faster, and you end up slowing down a lot (and therefore heating less) before you can build up too much heat. That doesn't mean you should reenter heading straight down. It is possible to go too steep. Just... beware of thinking that "shallower = more survivable". My observation has been that people who explode on reentry are more likely to have a problem due to being too shallow instead of too steep. On Eve, 62 km (as you say) is actually a pretty good height, maybe even you could aim a bit lower (in the high 50s). It's low enough to generate significant drag and not slow-roast yourself. If you're blowing up at 62 km, my guess is that you'd make it worse, not better, if you aimed higher. I think the real issue, here, is that you're just going too darn fast. 6 km/sec is really fast for something without ablator. So, I'd suggest that you be going slower than that when you hit atmosphere. Ways to do that: Have a good transfer window. If you launch from Kerbin to Eve on a good window, you should only be going about 4600 m/s when you hit Eve's atmosphere. Spend some fuel thrusting to reduce your velocity before hitting atmosphere. The other thing you didn't mention is, what's the mass of your lander? The heavier it is, the more of a beating your heat shield will take, because you'll need to dive deeper (while still going fast) until there's enough drag to slow you down. If it turns out that your problem is that you're super-heavy, then you could either reduce the mass of the lander, or else deploy additional heat shields so that you have extra drag surface to slow you down. Ships that survive reentry well tend to be light and draggy-- i.e. they have a low ballistic coefficient-- so you can lower yours by adding additional drag without upping your mass much. TL;DR: You can absolutely re-enter on Eve using the inflatable heat shield, and I think you're doing it at about the right altitude. Just make sure you're not going too fast, and (if you're super-heavy) consider deploying additional shields to up your drag. (And, of course, there's always the option of switching to shields that actually have ablator on them-- they can take more punishment.)

The inflatable heat shield doesn't have any ablator on it, so 6000 m/s is way too fast for it. Either hit atmosphere at a lower speed, or use a shield with ablator.

You can decline the contract... though that comes with a penalty, and may just spawn another of the same type. You can wait for the contract to expire out. Beyond that, I don't know of any way. In my own games, I've just trained my eyeballs to ignore them.

Yes. It's just there for decoration, and as a sort of in-joke. You can even land a ship on it, or plant a flag atop it, if you like. It's basically just part of the terrain.

A gentle reminder that if you have KER questions, perhaps that would be better addressed in the KER thread. That said: if you want a satellite to stay over the same spot on the planet, it needs to be synchronized to the planet's sidereal (not solar) rotation period. BBT can do that for you, as is shown above. If you want a group of satellites to stay in the same position relative to each other (which is often the case for comsat networks), then you have more choices. You could synchronize them to the planet. Or, if you don't need that, you can synchronize them to each other. BBT supports that, too. If you have an orbiting ship, just set another ship as your target. If you do that, then the BBT synchronicity indicator will use the target vessel's orbital period instead of the planet's rotation.

Moving to Gameplay Questions. Because heat shields are extremely tough and useful even without ablator-- very high temperature tolerance, and fairly low thermal conductivity. And also because your ship has a very low ballistic coefficient, i.e. it's lightweight relative to the amount of drag it produces. Lightweight, draggy designs don't take as much of a pounding from reentry heat. If your ship had significantly more mass loaded up behind that 2.5m heat shield, then you might find yourself needing the ablator. (Out of curiosity, how fast were you going when you hit atmosphere? You're only 3500 m/s in that screenshot, but you're already deep in the atmosphere and decelerating hard.)

The nav ball always shows which way you're pointing relative to the ground. The brown part is the "ground", the blue is the "sky", and the dividing line between them is the horizon. So if you want to be pointing "horizontally", i.e. parallel to the ground, then just use WASD controls to move the crosshairs until they're on the "horizon" of the navball. +1 to the earlier comments that this happens to be a really inefficient path to orbit (i.e. wastes a lot of dV). If it works for you, then great! Just, be aware that following a different, more efficient curve would allow you to get to orbit with less fuel required, so your rocket can go farther.

Could you post a screenshot of your lander? Hard to offer concrete advice without knowing what your design looks like. In general, if you want to keep the heat shield pointed , you need to have your CoM as close as possible to the front (i.e. close to the heat shield), so something low and squat. This is important, because the heat shield is big and draggy and will want to flip around behind you like a parachute. Don't even try to make it work with reaction wheels-- the torque forces generated by aerodynamics during the most intense part of reentry are insanely higher than what reaction wheels can do. The only solution is to be aerodynamically stable. One gimmick that can help is, put a heat shield at both ends of the craft-- i.e. one on the front, and one on the back. That way, it doesn't matter which end of the craft ends up pointing or ; both are protected and it'll be fine whichever way turns out to be the stable configuration.

Minmus takes some sharp-shootin' aim to hit, if you don't have maneuver nodes-- if you're a bit rusty, you might want to wait until you do. Going to the Mun, however, is quite a bit easier; it's a much bigger target, and is considerably closer. Basically, what you do is: Get into a low circular orbit around Kerbin Wait until right at the moment when you see the Mun rise above the horizon in front of you Switch to map view and thrust until you see your Ap rise to around the Mun's altitude That's pretty much it. Your aim will likely not be perfect, so you'll need to keep an eye on the map view so that you can make the necessary corrections as soon as you enter the Mun's SoI, but that's the gist of it. Good luck!

Moving to KSP Discussion, since this isn't a question about how to play the game.

It mostly comes down to geometry. When you're re-entering, the heat shield only protects stuff that's completely "behind" it-- anything that sticks out to the side, outside of the "heat shadow" of the shield, will be exposed to the airflow and will heat up. However, it would be a lot easier to offer concrete suggestions if you could post a screenshot of your ship. Picture worth a thousand words, and all that. (Just post it to some image-hosting site such as imgur, then copy the URL of the uploaded image and paste it here.)

No. Having excessive weight on your parachutes won't break them. What will happen, instead, is that they simply won't slow you down as much. For example, if you put a Mk16 parachute on a Mk1 command pod and that's basically your whole craft-- i.e. under 1 ton weight-- then when you're coming in for a landing on the parachute, your descent speed will be something under 10 m/s and is quite safe. But if you had, say, a 100-ton craft, and still only had a single Mk1 parachute, it wouldn't break the parachute-- but you'd be falling a lot more than 10 m/s, since you've got so much more weight pulling it down. So, you shouldn't need to worry about breaking the parachutes, but you might be descending on them faster than you'd like. If it's too fast, you could have a destructive crash instead of a safe "soft" landing. (If you have any engine thrust available as you come in for a landing, you could use that to cushion it right before landing-- that's what I usually do on Duna, where the air is thin enough that ships tend to fall fairly quickly unless they spam a whole bunch of parachutes.) Note that it is technically possible to break a parachute, if they fully deploy when the vehicle is going too fast. However, in practice this is generally not a problem, because many KSP versions ago, they added a feature where parachutes have a built-in safety feature by default: they know when the ship is going slow enough to safely open, and will wait until then to open all the way. So that's generally not something you need to worry about.

I think they're a great idea that open up all sorts of interesting possibilities... but I also think that it's not entirely fair to lump people-just-using-timers in the same bucket with people who can use the sophisticated automation of a KAL-1000. After all, the original Ōsumi craft didn't have fancy computerized guidance systems-- that's a big part of the point of the challenge. Honestly, "this challenge, but with KAL-1000" actually feels kinda like an entirely new challenge. Tell ya what-- maybe you'd like to spin up a new thread and call it "Automation Ōsumi" (or whatever you like), which allows the KAL-1000? (And whatever other rule tweaks you like-- it'd be your challenge, after all.) I'd be happy to add a link to your challenge from the OP of this one, so that folks who come here would see your thread. What do you think?