willow

I noticed this changeset comment in the jenkins changes list (Changed landing position drawing and picking to use terrain height) I tried to read the code but I don't quite get it. Is this a change to the map scene? Or does this mean the ground landing marker is being added to the flightscene? Because it'd be totally awesome there!

+1 There seems to be a necropost knee jerk reaction floating around here... If an old topic offers enough interest then why should people not be allowed to post in it?

@Baloan, I think the first thing you need is a node chaser script, which simply executes a Node, then a variety of scripts to set up nodes for changing apoapsis/periapsos (=circularization) and a scripts to create nodes that do hoffman transfers. If you have those the rest should become regular math. The specific calculations of transfer windows are at the very least code documented in various mods which all are open sourced.

The above won't work. You need vector math to do it properly you can't just convert vectors to their magnitudes and expect things to work, last time I tried to build code like this in kOS vector math was only implemented for some very specific situations. I requested it but got no response. I'm still hoping Kevin gets round to it. There's a really lame workaround, split the vectors into x/y/z variables and do the math yourself. A computer system on board a rocket like this one will primarily be used as a navigation tool. You can't do navigation without a proper implementation of vector math. I really like kOS but without vector math it's not usable for me. I'm really eager, I think kOS and a handfull of scripts should be able to replace mechjeb.

Hey, congrats on another (few) releases, I've taken the condor for a spin and I like it. I think the default 500 m/s dV is a good balance, it means you can maneuver in orbit but it doesn't get you out of kerbin orbit. Well done!

You're fast! And I like the idea of a supersleek service package. You could make that basic version an orbital maneuvering version, howmuch deltaV does it have? If it has around 500 deltaV it'd be good for orbital maneuvering and minmus activity but but too weak for a munar landing. As long as it weighs only a little it'll be usefull. A munar lander would need at least 1200, preferrably 1500 dV... I also suggested the clip on tanks. If that sleek model of yours can accept clip on tanks and you can up the deltaV that way to a respectable munar lander amount. Then you've effectively solved your problem. AND introduced nice clip on tanks for us to play with which can be used in other situations than just with that dragon service package. If 3 clip on tanks convert an orbital maneuvering vehicle to a mun lander/liftoff vehicle. Then 4 give that little extra umph. And 6 will make it usefull for the long hauls. If you don't want to go in that direction you can go for a thin tank to insert between your service package and the command pod.

You're right of course, for some reason I had in mind that the ISP for a nuclear engine in atmosphere was around 100... I realize that. Perhaps I'm just asking for too much. Maybe it'd be a possibility to sink the engine into a rocket part right now the whole is tall because you stack a fuel tank on top of an engine. If you could sink the rocket into the fuel tank. You could reduce the vertical height of the whole stack. Not sure how smart it is to surround your nuclear reactor with combustible fuel though I would suggest doing just the lower part. The dragon was cool but it didn't leave a lot of customisaton. Most I did was slap on some extra fuel tanks. If you have the 2 size lower parts you could effectively put every command pod in the game on them! If you allow radial attachments then the player can customize them a lot. In my experience after you look around internals once you never bother with them again. They're the most overrated part of the game, everyone wants them but there's nothing you can actually do with them. Good luck! Thanks for your reply

I like it, for some reason no one dared bridge the gap between the rocket engines and the nuclear rocket engines. And it's certainly good work for your first released part! Maybe you could reduce the ISP in atmosphere a little more to 180 or somesuch value? To make it a little bit less OP. Also, if you're looking for ideas. A problem that keeps coming back with nuclear engines for me is that they're all so tall. While I like to build relatively flat landers. Maybe a flat nuclear engine? And another thing that's often missing is an integrated package to slap under a capsule that provides both battery, rcs, monopropellant, an engine and a tiny amount of fuel. Just enough to give a capsule and some landing legs the deltaV required to land on and take off from the mun. A 2.5 version would be nice, but I can easily imagine using 3 or 4 1.25 versions mounted to the outside of a craft. It's a bit like the old dragon capsule, but without the crew storage. Perhaps specifically designed ejectable fuel pods (decoupler, fuel tank combo) that you can slap on the side for that extra umph? A small, side mountable 1 person crew quarter, because the hitchhiker tank is kinda ugly and large. A 1 part colony outpost, I think the keyword here is flat, because most things you can build in KSP today are tall structures.

Because no one likes a flaccid rocket! I've reported this as a bug in earlier versions of KSP but no one ever bothered to take it up as an issue. If you attach a rocket engine to a fuel tank, there is absolutely no reason you need struts there. Apart from the fact that often you just can't add extra struts without making unnatural looking rockets. I always thought that a rocket engine dancing off the bottom of a fuel tank was just ridiculous. Even for a technical staff of little green men who do everything with duct tape.

Thanks for the tip, I know the feature, but like you say, it puts your ship on top of the other ship. Which means you need to steer. When you steer, my suggestion would come in handy then. But also if you want to position yourself near landmarks or when you wish to put your landing craft in a line or circle. Like I said, precision landings. But to be fair, I'm way more interested in :

Hey I have two suggestions for mechjeb which I hope you'll like. There is the option for custom windows now where we can add our own variables and in some cases there is even support for buttons and checkcontrols. This is awesome it stops my screen from becoming cluttered and I want more of it Would it be possible to add commands from the maneuver planner dialog directly to custom windows? So that we could activate our favourite maneuvers from a custom dialog with a click of a button? It's okay, preferable in fact, if you can't set any parameters in the custom dialog after the button is made. If you frequently set your apoapsis to 100, 120 or 150, that would be done by adding 3 buttons. If you make the "Execute" "Abort" and "Remove" node buttons available to put in those same custom dialogs. Then that would save a whole lot more screen clutter. Another feature that no mod offers as of yet is a projection in the flightscene where the ship would hit the ground on the current trajectory which will be useful in precision landings, for example if you're trying to group a few landers for a mini mun base. I'm an experienced player, but I find it very hard to guestimate where my ship is going to touch down when constructing such bases and I usually need to do a few hops before I get my craft to the right spot.

It's still a must have mod for me Trigger I was thinking, is it possible for you to build a sort of "goto next event" button both in the flight scene and the non flight scenes? You click it, it fast forwards time to the moment of the first alarm in the list, then auto switches to the ship and restores the node or target or whatever it restores. This would mean a fast forward option in the non flight scene! I'm not even sure if that's possible. Also, there are two popups when you switch to an alarm, the first one is on the craft you're switching from and the second is on the craft you're arriving at. Could it be made possible for the second popup not to appear? It gives you the option to restore the node or not restore the node, but frankly I can't imagine why anyone would not want to restore the node, and on the off chance they do no longer want the node at that point, they can always delete it

You're begging the question. Your presumption is that obviously evidence is needed for opinions. It's not, evidence is needed for science, we're not being scientific here. We're talking about a game. Even touchie feelie opinions would count. I'm sorry I find your style of communication rather tasteless. You're just poisoning the well here. Our opinion doesn't count because we're gimmiegimmie instant gratification types. Which isn't just poisoning the well, you're also completely strawpuppeting or misrepresenting my point of view because we want to do stuff other than hit the fast forward button to get our gratification.

I like those ideas forsaken. That way science really becomes a reason to build outposts. It'd be nice if there was some kind of law of diminishing returns. Where 10 science labs on one site is less effective than 3 spread out across the kerbolsystem. Right now it's easy to put 4 science labs on the mun. Getting the same results from duna or one of Jools moons isn't worth the time if you're thinking efficiency. But it should be! And of course you can re-use the craft in .22, my point was that you're encouraged not to do it. You can do difficult things to accomplish that your crafts stay in orbit while de-orbiting the science I prefer how KSP Interstellar handles that.

Of course it's not the mod builders obligation to cather to everyone's desires. However, it's perfectly acceptable to share your opinions in a thread designed for exactly that purpose as chase has done. There's often a fan boy mentality where the slightest perceived insult to a favorite mod is taken as a cue to climb the barricades. I'm not speaking about you of course Tharios, it's just a general observation, totally irrelevant to the current discussion, no idea why I mentioned it... And considering the free sharing of opinions so that our mutual interplay of ideas could benefit the mod that all of us here are using to great pleasure and content. I'm with Chase on the subject of the grindyness, i posted my observations a few pages ago but was ignored... Both science systems both of .22 and of KSP interstellar have good and bad sides. .22 really ties effort to results. So if you put in effort you get results where KSP interstellar ties timewarp to results. Basically your willingness to timewarp determines your results. That's not a challenge and it isn't fun either. If you put one science lab on the launchpad and let it research and timewarp a few years hey presto you have science. So .22 is superior in that account.. Timewarping for success is lame. .22 doesn't motivate you to build outposts. An outpost doesn't give additional science benefits where ksp interstellar becomes pretty much pointless without semi permanent outposts. So KSP Interstellar is superior on that count! .22 doesn't motivate you to re-use craft. In fact it motivates you to ditch and recover crafts (and the science bonus). Where in KSP interstellar it's a waste to ditch a craft once it's upgraded. And I really enjoy the idea of re-using my spacecraft. Only using cheap ditch crafts for kerbal ascent and landing and keeping most of my fleet in orbit and in constant use. KSP interstellar is superior there. The idea that you can incrementally improve performance of your vessels is simply awesome and the primary reason to use this mod as far as I am concerned. So KSP Interstellar adds improvements to the original game as any mod worth it's salt should. But there are valid alternatives to using the timewarp button as an "I win" button. I already proposed a solution that makes science labs shutdown after a certain amount of science is researched forcing the player to keep sending out new science labs. In return the speed of research could be improved so it stops being such a grind, it's quite allright to need a science lab to be in orbit for a few days to weeks. A compromise could be that any mod upon it's initial activation produces a dose of science quickly and then does not shut down but slow down. Obeying the law of diminishing returns. And then perhaps goes back to quick speed once the lab is moved into a different biome or area of space. You know, something the user does. And I'm not suggesting this is the be all end all for science labs. But it's a starting point for constructive dialogue.

I agree on the wiki, it's a much better place for reference, forum threads tend to get bogged up and don't have any indexing, so if you're looking for specific code you're much more likely to find it if looking on a wiki.

Hear hear. I also refuse to time accelerate. Right now I have acquired 500 anti matter. Which I believe at my current tech level brings me halfway to the mun. I got here by putting two very large stations in orbit, one has 36 antimatter collectors, the other has 24. I also have a research station that has 12 science labs orbitting kerbin, and 12 science labs in a cluster landed on the mun. I have gathered about 50 science, enough to update 3 radiators. Yes, I could leave my computer on and time accelerate through the night, but to me this is equivalent to using the edit button on fuel balancer and just launching a ship preloaded with science and anti matter. It's not an accomplishment. I do like that updating two similar parts twice on different ships costs twice the amount of science. With this mod I find I reuse my craft much more than I would do previously. An upgraded ship, a veteran unit, actually means something. Though admittedly, I haven't acquired enough science to upgrade anything yet, I'm just getting into that mindset. I suspect the game will be much different if you decide to send a science mission to duna, not that the actual science done there will make a huge difference, but time accelerating through 50 or more days for the journey would fill your coffers. I'm not sure how I feel about that, I think I would not feel the accomplishment... Here's an idea though. What if the science lab produces science depending on where it is, much like it does now, only much faster, like 100 science in a week or a few days, the amount might vary per destination, easier destinations give less science, the difficult targets give you the most science. But it produces that science only once! So once your science lab is spent you must send another one. The idea is that sending a mission to duna will get you a certain amount of science, leaving the thing in orbit won't give you additional science after that. Anti matter suffers the same problem. Perhaps a game mechanic could be found where the strategy of just putting up many orbital stations with many collectors stops being the best strategy? Like taking an atmospheric dive into jool, which is dangerous, or something similar with kerbol. But the anti matter thus collected will get you around the kerbol system. Lots of return for making an effort, not for time acceleration. I agree with Chase that effort should be equated to return, not taking a nap.

Thank you for your elaborate answer payload. I was aware of the features you point out. Yes or even just set vt to v1 + v2. I'm not sure if you can do a construct like set x to velocity:x. set y to velocity:y. set z to velocity:z. set vec to V(x,y,z). I'm presuming it's possible, though I am not sure, but if you want to write anything related to astro navigation you're going to have to juggle a lot of vectors around. If you have to spell out every operation on a scalar level, you'll just end up spraining your brain The locking mechanism kOS has implemented in combination with vectors could do some amazing things. Take a very simple operation of following a maneuvering node. It'd be trivial with vector math. But you triple the amount of code when you have to break every vector down to it's scalar components. I'm really charmed by the kOS plugin. I think it solves the problem that mechjeb doesn't take every single action out of your hands I love just flying the rockets, but some missions like 5 refuelling missions for a particularly large fuel tank in orbit would be much more fun if you could build the script and say "Go!" Being able to call subscripts that perform mechjeb like actions would be akin to the holy grail... Afer that, will probably come some gui functions so you can put your scripts behind on screen buttons.

Could kOS implement Vector math. Additions and subtractions at least. Multiplications dot and cross products would be nice, but there's a lot you can do without them. I'd like to do mechjeb style node calculations. Like a circularization node, a hoffman transfer, a planetary transfer, and some functions helpfull in landing. I imagine if the vector math is implemented properly we could achieve those things in scripts. We'll still have to see how the thing performs, after all, it's an emulated script, but it should at least be doable.

I'm thinking about starting from scratch, this time using KSP interstellar, but I could use some tips. How did you guys set up your space program? What kind of missions do you recommend I start with to get things up and running efficiently?

I think the suggestions at the link are bugged. They don't work. print nextnode:deltav:mag. gives a relevant value. However, it tells me how much to burn to follow that node, which is cool, but I really wanted to know how to do the actual burn programatically. The node doesn't change whilst burning, so repeatedly checking it's value won't help me. Thanks Sma, but there's no way to do simple vector math yet? V(1,0,0)+V(0,0,1) = V(1,0,1) if I could do the above I could get the whole thing to work. I imagine there's some way to do that isn't there?

.84 definately fixes the "lock steering to nextnode." bug. Thanks for the quick fix! Does anyone have any suggestion as to how I can force my ship to burn an exact amount of deltaV in the direction I'm pointing? I can get the ship to burn. And I can see the current velocity vector. But I just can't seem to subtract two vectors.

I'd agree. I just edited my mechjeb part to include the kOS module. So every ship that had mechjeb now also has kOS.

I'm also seeing no effect on lock steering to up. or lock steering to nextnode. I'm just picking up KOs, and was thinking I was messing up. But it seems to be a bug?

We're talking kerbals, so more stupidity improves science output?