UnusualAttitude

It happens to me very often on my Osx install, in particular at the end of a long play session. With all the practice this bug has given me, I take pride in being able to land my spaceplanes safely with up to 50 percent less airfoils than usual... F5 before every final approach. Restart if symptoms persist.

I'm getting generally better performance than with the stock system, although I still have to deal with memory leaks and inevitable crashes inherent to the game. Frame rates on Kerbin are basically the same as stock (ie: very bad on my Mac with its poor GPU), but performance off-world is much better and if I'm just flying ships out in space and don't launch from Kerbin I can spend all evening playing without a single crash. Even on a body like Laythe with an atmosphere, FPS is much better than on Kerbin, which is why I'm still wondering how this works and if it possible to get the same improvement on all bodies... (do you have an answer, Greg...?). There is a transfer window planner that works for Alternis Kerbol (http://toadicus.github.io/ksp/). Kerbin to Laythe is about the same as a transfer to Mun from LKO in stock, plus you can aerocapture. I love this system and would be favorable to something like it becoming stock (though it will never happen), because there are so many places to go within spitting distance from Kerbin, and once you know how to do a Hohmann transfer there is no added difficulty over the stock system. It really is a huge gameplay improvement.... Great job on the update, downloading ! Cheers, UA. PS: Laythe's atmosphere is still relatively unforgiving. Try starting at around 46km for capture if you don't want things to get too toasty

If it helps, I can confirm that taking science reports worked normally on Laythe prior to your previous update with the new biome map. Scansat worked too. Thanks, good luck !

Building a lo-tech spaceplane with a useful payload around just Wheesleys is probably not possible. However, if reusability is essential, it is quite possible to build a suborbital craft that takes off horizontally, flies up to about 10k on the jets and then boosts its apoapsis out of the atmosphere on rockets. Separate your payload, switch to it and circularize, then switch back to the launcher to re-enter and fly back to KSC for full recovery. This would be more trouble than it's worth in a normal career game. But if full reusability is a requirement and you don't want to wait for the Whiplash, you might consider it. I even built a launcher like this using Mk3 parts (just for the hell of it).

Yes, the SOI is 49km and Minmus' radius is 29km, so at an altitude of 20km from the surface you are at the limit. Is this not how it should work?

Hey Greg, great job with the updates. I particularly enjoyed the subtle increase in Mun's gravity just before I put my heavy spaceplane down there. Fortunately, it bounced. I've now got to Minmus and the view is insane... Just a couple of things to report: - I too am experiencing the inability to take science reports on Minmus (have not tried Laythe or Tylo). The "collect sample" or "log gravity data" button appears as usual, but if you click on it, it disappears and nothing happens. Also, ScanSat is rendering the terrain map but not the biome map. - Orbits around Laythe can be unstable. If you timewarp while not focussed on a ship there, you might return and find the Pe/Ap has changed. Some of my ships have even crashed into the surface. By the way, what magic makes Alternis Kerbol's performance better? And would it be possible to apply the same treatment to the other stock planets? For those of us with decent CPUs but poor graphic cards (Mac users, yay), the real killer is terrain rendering, and I'm getting decent FPS on Laythe whereas Kerbin is still terrible. Just wanting to understand... Thanks again, I'm having a great time with this system. Regards, UA.

I recently started a sort-of-career game in the Alternis Kerbol system where I've modified the resource .cfg files to make ore pretty rare around the system (especially on Kerbin) and I've multiplied the cost of fuel by x10. Oh, and no contracts. At all. I imagine an innovative prospection/mining company in a resource-starved world, with no-one left to pay for the science. This makes mining ore (converted to fuel) for profit actually feasible, and also significantly increases the cost of launching. Side effects are that it actually introduces something that is a bit like a real budget, in that my income depends on the fuel flowing in at a steady rate, rather than the go-there-do-this-get-x-funds of stock contracts. To avoid excessively tedious mining operations, I think big... ...and this Mk4 monster hauls in 22,000 units: that's about 180k funds over a period of about twenty days. The scarcity of ore around the system also makes ore-rich asteroids much more valuable. I'm in the process of bringing in a class-E, which should hopefully leave me with more than 1,000 tonnes (or several million funds worth) of fuel into LKO.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/64711-1-0-TweakableEverything-1-12-For-all-your-part-tweaking-needs I believe Tweakable Everything is what you are looking for...

Not voting. I've been playing on Mac OSX since 0.24, and in terms of performance KSP has delivered a completely consistent experience for me: it has always been abysmal.

Yes, drag does reduce with altitude, but - as it should - so does the thrust of your engine as the air gets thinner. So, for a given constant altitude, thrust increases with speed up to a certain point, after which it starts to drop off, until drag equals thrust and you stop accelerating. The thing about the J-33 is that it rarely reaches its max theoretical thrust before drag prevents it from accelerating further; unless you have a really compact, low-drag design (as demonstrated by Jouni). I really wouldn't bother trying to calculate air requirements, at least not for the J-33. I have never experienced a flame-out due to lack of air with a single circular intake per J-33. Yes; in most cases the J-33 is only good for puttering around or for long distance flights thanks to its great efficiency. You won't be braking any speed records with it.

Did I already mention that the views are awesome?

Hi there, congratulations on releasing this Greg. The system looks very interesting and the views are spectacular. I downloaded it to give it a try, and I couldn't help but notice... ...that the orbital velocities of the system's planets are very low, meaning once you get out of the Jool system, transfer dV is relatively low but takes an incredibly long time (I guesstimated 120 years to Eeloo, even getting to Eve might take a few years). Sorry if this is a silly question but I'm not familiar with the original version of the mod: is this an intended feature? Did I perhaps do something wrong when installing? Regards, UA.

Yes, your initial TWR is about 0.11, so you will have to raise your apoapsis gradually. How you do this depends on how much dV you have to begin with, which I can't really tell from your screenshots. I would kick up my apoapsis to 2,000 or 3,000km in three or four short burns, then wait for Mun to come round (place your node close to where the Mun rises over the horizon) and do a final longer burn to get as close as possible to an encounter. You will probably have to make an additional course correction after this last burn to nail the Mun's SOI. For Minmus, remember that you can make significant course changes to get the encounter later on (out beyond the Mun's orbit) for a reasonable cost in fuel. If you are intent on flying low TWR ships like this one, I would definitely recommend an informational mod such as KER to calculate TWR, dV, etc. Good luck!

From my post above: "TWR and delta V are unrelated. However, a craft with a very low TWR will not be able to take full advantage of the Oberth Effect". C'mon man, read posts carefully before saying they are completely wrong To clarify my completely wrong conclusion: try doing a transfer to Mun from LKO in a single burn with a TWR of 0.1 and 800m/s dV. While it might be possible, it certainly won't be practical.

I would add that, as you can see from the rocket equation, TWR and delta V are unrelated. However, a craft with a very low TWR will not be able to take full advantage of the Oberth Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberth_effect), so you won't get as much bang for your... delta V. Remember that when you create a maneuver node in KSP, it assumes an instant change in velocity at the point in your orbit you set the node at, which is of course not actually possible. If your burn lasts more than a couple of minutes, the difference will be noticeable. To summarize: you won't get as far in a craft that has 800m/s dV and a TWR of 0.1 than with a craft that has 800m/s a TWR of 1. There may be a way to calculate just how much dV is wasted by having a low TWR, but it is probably very complicated . Sorry if this is obvious to you, but it sounds like what you were asking. Regards, UA.

In low Kerbin orbit, you are still well within Kerbin's gravity well. As you expend fuel to accelerate into a higher orbit, or escape, gravity is still pulling you back all the time. So your final speed will be very different from your intitial velocity + dV expended. This will be more noticeable with low TWR vehicles: since the burn lasts longer, gravity has more time to affect your final velocity. Do the same test and keep watching your orbital velocity after the end of the burn: it will continue to decrease until you reach the limit of Kerbin's SOI.

Hey there, Nice looking ship. You're right, stock SAS is usually very unforgiving, especially with larger craft. The Pilot Assistant mod has a range of functions to help atmospheric flight (http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/100073-1-0-x-Pilot-Assistant-Atmospheric-piloting-aids-1-11-7-(Aug-20), just tuning the SAS PID parameters should help. Not sure about the flipping though, as I can see nothing immediately wrong with your design. Try the following however: - Lock off the forward fuselage tank until you need it to make sure your CoM is not drifting behind the CoL. - Check the lateral tanks during flight for unbalanced fuel consumption (bicouplers sometimes cause this). If so, you might be able to fix it with fuel ducts. Good luck, let us know if this helps. UA.

Yes, precoolers on the tail. It's not actually that massive: I can't remember the exact take-off weight but well below 200 tonnes. I built heavier ships than this back in 0.90 with the Mk3 parts and stock wing panels, it was just a nightmare for part-count. It needs a lot of improvement but the eventually the goal is to have an interplanetary spaceplane with ISRU (in the ventral cargo bay at the rear), lab, etc. and I reckon I can get more than 4 km/s of dV from the nukes.

Yes, but with B9 procedural wings and KJR.... UPDATE:

Did you check F3 after the crash? This bug still rears its ugly head from time to time, especially after long flights/missions. The only solution: always quicksave before final approach and try again. If symptoms persist, then land a couple of kms from the KSC and taxi to destination.

Just a personal preference, but I prefer to strut from the cargo bay to the payload. This avoids leaving the strut ends on the payload after release. I'm a very part count challenged player...

KSP doesn't allow multiple connections between parts, you're not doing anything wrong, it's just a limit of how the game engine considers the connections between parts of a vehicle. Forget the second set of decouplers and add some struts attaching from your boosters to the core.

Air breathing engines draw liquid fuel from all tanks without fuel lines. Rockets, including RAPIERS in closed cycle do require them however.

Welcome to the dark side. Big spaceplanes await you...

You can build a low-tech basic jet SSTO spaceplane. It will probably have a very modest payload fraction, but you get a 100% recoverable launcher for satellite contracts or science probes.