willow

Thanks donziboy2, in your screenshot mechjeb suggests you've only got 0.01 twr, is that accurate? Because if it is it's just a fuel depot.

Hey, I've been trying to wrap my head around this mod, but I'm having big problems getting into it. I can't get anything to work, which is to be expected considering that I'm still pretty clueless as to what to actually do with the thing. Could someone write up a suggestion for the first thing to get working that would be an actual benefit to a space program? For example. I put a reactor a fuel tank and a plasma engine together. In the editor it suggests I have a good 500 units of power, mechjeb converts this to a 1.4 twr, which would be enough to get me off the ground. But on the launch platform all that power gives me only a .20 twr which is woefully insufficient. I sent out some probes with antimatter measuring rods. I found the biggest concentration around jool, which is still only about 10^-3, converting to a 3 month loading period, is that normal? Do I really have to let my computer time accelerate through that period? Or am I doing something wrong? I've managed to produce some antimatter in a lab. (Nice to put that feature in) and then fed it into a reactor, which just produced a large blob of heat but ate through the anti matter in a matter of seconds. It would seem I need to gather anti matter in a period of months and then I can fly my ship with it for a good 10 minutes?

Doh... I meant horizontal speed... My brain wasn't working...

I like this mod. Maybe you could extend the mod with altitude/height control? You set the altitude and the mod keeps to that altitude, increasing vertical speed if you're below, and decreasing it if you're above. This way if you are hovering across terrain you could keep the ship at 10 meters above the surface even if the surface is a slope. Some way to remove all vertical velocity would be nice too.

Dude that's pretty, if you combine it with some attach points, airlocks or docking ports, and put some thought in where people could attach wheels or some other way of moving these about, then you've got a pretty sweet starting point for a modular colony. I'm sure people would be willing to help out with any problems you have with editing configs and maybe plugins, most people can do that, but can't really make pretty models like you can. I sure hope to see more of this

I've seen that too. Had not linked it to not having kerbals on board though. At least you can fix it with "Control from here" on any of the command pods, that resets the alignment properly and makes your ship behave after launch.

Oki so here's some feedback. I generally like the mod, it is a scifi impulse drive so it should be overpowered. The ISP I think is perfectly balanced, it's not ridiculous. Smallest setup I built was 9000 deltaV, largest tanks gave 90.000 deltaV. So that's good although the largest number might be a bit on the large side. It'd mean a large vessel could visit all the planets in one go without refueling. But since this thing works with kethane I'd suggest aiming for 30 thousand deltaV Which is overpowered but this IS an impulse engine, it is meant to do that. I'd tune down the trust on the engines if I were you though. I had 30 twr on the smallest ship which was ridiculously overpowered, I think a twr between 7 and 10 should be sufficiently overpowered. And this is the smallest engine! I suggest: Reduce the thrust on the smallest engines to 300 or something. The largest engine doesn't need to be stronger than 2000. This way they are immensely economic engines for your craft which can backup your normal space program. I think the coolness in your mod lies in the very small very powerfull craft. I've played KSP since .14 I put hundreds of hours into it. I'm getting a little bored with it. I like the charm of an easier craft that can get me places quickly so I don't have to spend hours doing it. Your tanks are all relatively large. Diameter is good, but why not make them a quarter of their length keeping the same weight? I'd also suggest flattening the engines a bit. You know how in the old star trek the nacelles are effectively just glowing half spheres attached to a tube? If you consider the tank the tube and fancy up the half sphere you'd end up with something nice that can be put into many designs. Many engines in KSP are too tall. I love the flat engines. I noticed you need to attach fuel lines. I'm not too sure about that. I can see where it has it's charm. But I'm just not sure.

Two things strike me... That falcon 9 is a beast compared to it's size. And the sheer size of these rockets had not really registered with me. Thank you it's very informative.

The normal mechjeb settings cause the craft to go into a strong gravity turn at about 10km, causing it to do a lot of steering. This also often coincides with dropping your second stage. Steering and dropping the second stage often lead to fireworks. Especially on big rockets. I find that if you set the beginning of the gravity turn at below 1km (250 meters for me) and change the graph to 70 (Sorry the name slipped my mind but I believe it defaults at 60). Then the result is a much more gradual and controlled turn along your entire ascent. The fuel drain isn't noticeably bigger. It leads to a much more reliable ascent, less explosive separations (I don't even need to use sepatrons on the big rockets) and the sudden loss of control problem around the 12km mark is gone. I totally recommend it.

Thanks, That answers my question Good point actually, I'm so used to having to be around the station while it reloads it's fuel (That cheat part) that this completely slipped my mind.

The model could be prettier, just making it gray and adding some ksp style lines on it would help. It's also really really big, half it's length would be fine. Think of the aestetics for someone who runs a neatly designed space station with this whopper attached... it'd stick out everywhere. I understand you don't want it surface attacheable. But this does limits the creativity of players. I'm not sure if that's the best choice. Could you at least add attachment nodes on the station side end? That way people can still work with it. Does it resupply even when the player isn't attending the station? If I attach two of these to a station, can I resupply at twice the speed? (I have vessels that require over 10.000 liters of fuel) But I like the concept. I used a cheat part for occasions like this, a large heavy part auto filling station for me. This way in my head I can at least imagine there to be a logical story behind it. I get the idea that you worry about this being a cheat part. I'd say make it have nice gameplay and don't worry about whether it is cheating or not. Let players figure out for themselves if they find it a valuable addition. When economy comes along it'll be much easier to balance this. Just make the player play fifty fold for a liter of fuel so that it's cheaper to send up your own refuellers. I 100% agree with your underlying intent to reduce the need for tedious resupply missions.

I love the SSTO, are the wings on it also from the B9 pack?

For interplanetary burns the most usefull setup is a fuel depot on the edge of the sphere of influence of kerbin. Because it's easily reachable from kerbin (you need to be able to conveniently get to it to refuel it and for IP ships to refuel) and it has low delta-v requirements to get you out to every planet. So in interstellar travel assuming it works via similar "point and burn" mechanism, the most useful setup would be a fuel depot on the edge of kerbols sphere of influence so you'll require little delta-v to get to interstellar space and can still reach it from within the kerbol system.

Yes, the fuel balanced will work with the docking ports, I do this all the time, send up a refueller to a depot, dock it, empty it via fuel balancer, undock and deorbit the craft. Works like a charm.

Isn't the new kethane file an asci file? Thus editable? If so Gavin can make sure there is kethane at the spots where desired. I presume he is not attached to all kethane sites, just one or two where he colonized. Might be another way. If you backup your ships/colonies, wipe all kethane data, update kethane, find a suitable new spot for your colony. Then use one of the editing tools to relocate your entire colony object by object. This will probably change your horizon but at least you bring your colony into the new millenium.

Never forget a bio break again!

Agreed. If you attach your happyness to the behavior of people who don't even know you you're in for a rough ride. It's general good advice for life. Just out of curiosity. I occasionally watch the yogscast. What did they do that was so evil?

@Skykooler: Could you put version number in the subject line of the topic? There's a lot of plugins and I don't reads all the posts in all the addon topics, but I know which versions I'm using so if you release a new version and change the number I'll notice that.. If you really want to be cool for people like me you could put a "last release date" in the subject line as well so we'll know when to come and get the new version. Also, I'm really happy about the state of the mod now. If I'd have to gather resources before being able to build rockets that might be more fun for others, but less fun for me. It might be a bit of a cheat but the game is about having fun and should not be a grind for materials. Unless of course you can automate those things.

How do you ever get to other bodies in the solar sysem? If you're content with mucking about around kerbin (mun/minmus) then you don't need a map, but to get to a planet you most certainly do need some kind of navigation, like Map view. I've modded a part to produce fuel once (one of gaby's nuclear reactors) because the kethane mod was on the brinks and I could not be bothered to keep sending up buckets of fuel. I put a fuel depot in orbit, imagined it to be filled by fuel missions in the background and played the bit I wanted to play, which was shooting rockets at Duna. I believe a long time ago I also replaced a ship that was circling duna with a ship straight from the editor. I believe I put the landing gear on backwards and fixed that or some such silly thing. It's been repeated ad nauseum, but this is a game where the single goal is to have fun. If you get your kicks at using no help whatsoever then that's the way to play for you. But like most games it might mean "no life" rather than "l33t" skills..

As a side note: It's a welcoming change that something in KSP doesn't blow up when it hits something.

Your inital post link to dropbox is broken. Thanks for building the mod. Does this play nice with subassembly loader? Or wil their icons collide? Before uploading to spaceport, read their legal terms carefully.

This! We had a pretty good mod website started by a volunteer from the community. What was it? kerbal.net? It was up almost all of the time, and the search functions worked. It had no weird legal restrictions. Spaceport pretty much killed that site. And the community lost something good because of it. I applaud you for standing by your convictions.

Check this thread. for a description of the same problem and a fix you can implement.. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/31536-Improve-the-rotational-power-of-the-larger-probe-stacks

Hehe, I did that too. The mod still works! Only it can't find icons and images. You can do all things if you know where to click, but you're doing it blindly. I wouldn't go so far as calling it annoying, if I had used my eyes a little more I would not have made that mistake, but if you want to moron-proof your distribution this might be something to consider...

So I was thinking, if you bring more fuel on a rocket you get diminishing returns. Doubling your fuel storage doesn't double your deltaV. There must be a limit someplace. What would be the maximum amount of deltaV one could hope to attain in the game? I'm guessing it to be somewhere between 15k and 20k. And the obvious next question would be: How do you then increase that limit? Sending out fuel depots to rendezvous with would obviously help. But these are hard to maintain and suffer the same diminishing return problems. Are there other options?