reaction_wheel

I took some inspiration from these replies, and did some experimenting. It appears that I have KSP-AVC installed (pulled in via CKAN by some other mod, I think). I had _not_ gone through and set the KSP version compatibility in the AVC GUI on the title screen. This, I think, did not used to matter -- but I enabled the necessary versions to proclaim compatibility with all my installed mods, FinalFrontier included -- and voilà. FF works great for me on 1.9.1 now. In case anyone else asks -- make sure you have compatibility enabled for FinalFrontier in Addon Version Checker. if you have it installed.

The FF stock toolbar button seems to be missing for me in 1.9.1. Any ideas what's going on? I really enjoy playing with this mod.

In doing an in-orbit assembly of my (first!) crewed mission to Eve, I inadvertently built the service module of the spacecraft with a pair of EVACU-8 service airlocks (from Stockalike Station Parts), thinking they were 2.5m docking ports, rather than the 1.25m extending docking ports that they actually are. The airlock modules were attached to a 2.5m PPD adapter module (from the same mod). Anyway, out comes Tanlorf Kerman with her electric screwdriver to remove the mistakenly placed EVACU-8 modules, so that they can be replaced with stock 2.5m docking ports... but when she (and by that I mean me) holds down 'H' or 'X' and mouses over the modules, she gets a grey detach icon. No go. She can remove stock parts from the spacecraft, but seeming not any of the parts from the Stockalike Station Parts mod. Eventually, Tanlorf gives up and uses one of the KIS/KAS explosives at a low yield to simply blow the airlock modules to a fine dust, but the question remains... What's going on here? Is this a bug (or some other issue) with KAS, KIS, or Stockalike Station Parts? Where's the right place to report this issue, or is there jury-rig a fix on my own install?

We were planning on going home.... emphasis on "planning"...

My flight director, uh, I mean, girlfriend was watching over my shoulder when this mishap occurred. We laughed the whole way down to the bottom of the crater.

For the record, I built a similar ship in the VAB, but with appropriate symmetry around the CoT, then sent it up in pieces, reassembled it, and it steers just fine. So I'm going to hypothesize that my earlier steering issues were entirely due to off-center mass distribution. Lesson learned!

I've been playing KSP for years but never actually mounted a crewed interplanetary mission, because, well, you know... this game is hard. So I've assembled a great big crewed interplanetary exploration vessel in orbit around Kerbin, but every time I try to put it through an orbital maneuver with any meaningful amount of thrust, it veers off course. In fact, this has happened to me in a couple of different games with radically different ad-hoc ship "designs". Of course I have reaction wheels, SAS, etc. etc... I've even trying putting KAS struts everywhere to keep the ships from wobbling, but no dice. This veering off course happens whether I'm performing the maneuver manually with SAS, or whether I try to have MechJeb manage it. I'm guessing that this is because my chimera of a spaceship has been cobbled together in such a way that the center of mass is off-axis from the center of thrust. My question is: Does anyone know of any mods or techniques for determining how far off-axis the CoM is from the CoT, so that either the mass or the engine thrust can be trimmed to center it? I'm guessing that there may be some way to do this with the MechJeb "Attitude Adjustment" window, but I haven't been able to figure out how. Or alternately: Is there some other reason I haven't thought of why my larger ships won't maneuver straight in orbit? Thanks!

Question: Does the time that a Kerbal spend in a DeepFreeze cryopod count towards that kerbonaut's "home" counter? Or is the home counter only updated when the Kerbal is actively part of a vessel's crew? If the answer is "time spent frozen still counts as time away from home", perhaps this is a feature request for the USI-LS mod. I feel like I might be able to figure this out by poking at the save files, but I was wondering if anyone had a straightforward answer. Thanks @RoverDude for such a great mod, and thanks to anyone who can provide some insight.

I'm planning my first asteroid capture mission, and (without having played the tutorial mission) I got curious to learn how much fuel and thrust I would need to put on the capture vessel in order to bring the asteroid into a useful orbit around Kerbin. I spent a lot of time trying to learn something about it, and thought I would share. I would really love to hear your thoughts and feedback! The lovely little space rock I have in mind to make my own is one SDD-569, a class A asteroid. SDD-569 is approaching Kerbin for a leisurely flyby at a periapsis of ~2,079 km, well inside the orbit of the Mun. This puts SDD-569 into a sharply looping orbit around the planet, before it flies back out into parts unknown. I'd like to drag the asteroid into a circular orbit, and then bring it down to about 500 km for future research and exploitation. Can we calculate how fast is SDD-569 going with respect to Kerbin, based on what we already know? Since energy is always conserved, the total kinetic energy for a given object (from orbital speed) plus its potential energy (from gravity) never changes. The relationship of kinetic energy to velocity is a consequence of Newton's third law: In other words, for a constant mass, v2 is a measure of kinetic energy. The vis-viva equation describes the conservation of energy for a small body orbiting a much larger one: GM, also known sometimes as μ, as is Kerbin's gravitational parameter, which the KSP wiki reports is 3.5316 x 1012 m3/s2. This parameter is the product of the gravitational constant of the universe with Kerbin's mass, which is effectively constant. a is the semi-major axis of the orbit as measured from the center of the celestial body. Kerbin's radius is 600km, so we add that to the altitude of SDD-569 at periapsis to give a = 2,679km. r is the distance between the two objects at a given time. An object moving fast enough to escape Kerbin's gravity is in an orbit with a semi-major axis that is effectively infinite. At periapsis, this simplifies the vis-viva equation to describe the kinetic energy that an object must have in order to overcome Kerbin's gravity from a given distance r: In other words, escape speed from Kerbin orbit at the moment of periapsis (r = 2,679km) is ve = 1,623 m/s. But since SDD-569 is tracing a hyperbolic (i.e. open) trajectory through Kerbin's SoI, it must be traveling faster than this, or else it would be captured. How much faster? Consider the other extreme case of the vis-viva relation, where the asteroid has shot past Kerbin and the distance r between them trends towards an infinite apoapsis. Setting r =∞ in the vis-viva equation tells us how fast the object is still going at that point, which is called its hyperbolic excess velocity: (where μ = GM) So for the flyby of SDD-569, the hyperbolic excess velocity is v∞ = 1,148 m/s. This characteristic energy is over and above the energy needed to escape Kerbin's SoI from that distance, so the total energy possessed by SDD-569 relative to Kerbin at periapsis is: This gives a total velocity for SDD-569 relative to Kerbin at periapsis of 1,988 m/s! By how much do we need to reduce this so that it drops into a nice 2Mm circular orbit from periapsis? In a circular orbit, the distance between the two objects r and the orbital radius a are always the same. Thus the orbital velocity is: Not coincidentally, this is the same as its hyperbolic excess velocity, because r = a. So at r = 2,679km, an object in a circular orbit around Kerbin travels at 1,148 m/s. So, to get SDD-569 into a circular orbit from its flyby periapsis, we need to bleed off Δv = 840 m/s. To then bring SDD-569 down to a more convenient altitude of 500km, we would do a Hohmann transfer, which can be calculated with the standard formula, and works out to another 614m/s Δv to descend to a 500km circular orbit, for a total of 1,454 m/s. What’s more, the spacecraft sent to capture SDD-569 needs to match orbits with the asteroid in order rendezvous. That means that if the spacecraft starts from, say, 500km above Kerbin, it will need to expend that much to get to the asteroid in the first place. So, starting from a 500km orbit around Kerbin, the total Δv budget for this mission is 2,909 m/s. Next up: Asteroid capture planning, part 2: How much fuel do we need to bring? Mission to SDD-569: Where the rubber meets the regolith! Did I get this right? If you have feedback or ideas, I would love to hear them!

As soon as I have a block of free time, I'll do just that... In the meantime, is there another thread where you describe how the heck you planned the sequence of maneuvers for the "Grand Tour"?

@Cydonian Monk I just want to offer mad props for etching this incredible story into the annals of the KSP forums. I've always felt that Kerbal Space Program offered the tools to create the kind of sweeping epic narrative that accompanies humanity's own space travel history -- and I think you've captured just such a story with the right blend of humor, drama, and technical elegance. I read through all 25 pages of forum posts in a couple sittings, with as much anticipation and engagement as just about any science fiction literature I've ever enjoyed. (Unfortunately, I'm probably going to have to put the serial down when the Jool 4 leave on their historic mission, because I've yet to send even a probe to Jool in my own (year and a half old) game and... I can't stand the spoilers... ) In any event -- bravo for sharing such a wonderful story. Keep 'em coming!

CKAN helps. I took a guess and removed the mods that add parts, and narrowed it down to Procedural Fairings, which I probably don't need anymore what with the stock fairings. Thanks for the suggestion! /me loads up vim and prepares to manually edit persistent.sfs...

I'm seeing an issue with 1.1.2 where a crewed capsule doesn't launch with the rest of the rocket. Instead it just hangs in mid-air over the launch pad. The rest of the rocket is uncontrollable. I've tried this with and without head shields under the capsule, same result. One other data point: Parachutes no longer show up as a separate stage in the VAB or the normal vessel view. After experiencing this, I tried reloading a game from 1.0.x where I had a crewed spacecraft docked to an orbital station... and the capsule instantly detached as soon as I switched to the station... and flew off into space. I've attempted removing as many mods from my setup as I can without negatively impacting my gameplay style or seriously breaking ships in old saved games. I just came back after a few months of not playing KSP, and the game is now utterly unplayable for me. I did a quick search of the forums but haven't found anything. Anyone got any ideas how to fix this?

It looks like the Δv needed to reach low Kerbin orbit from KSC went down recently from 4,550 m/s to under 3,600. I've seen references in the forum that suggest that this is due to the new aerodynamics modeling in 1.0.4(?), but can anyone explain why?

I absolutely love this mod, first off -- it makes docking a breeze 99.9% of the time. However, I have seen a weird behavior sometimes. When trying to dock with a spacecraft that has both a crewed pod and a probe pod, I select the docking port on the target spacecraft as the navball target, but the alignment indicator seems to want to align with the target vessel's probe pod instead. Has anyone else seen this? Is this a bug or just something I'm missing?