storm6436

Having read over the thesis bit for the first time, I'm actually pretty impressed. If you need any help, I'm in the last year(-ish) of a physics undergrad and have a background in electronics from prior service in the Navy as a communications Electronics Tech whose training focused on UHF/VHF communications. Only caveats I have on my time is that classes take precedence and I'm trying to write my fourth book. :p

That's basically what I've done. Not sure myself either. Random question re: development of RemoteTech2, how do you figure you're going to deal with signal strength? I was talking to my wife about this mod earlier and realized halfway through that digital and analog transmission systems react differently to poor signal. It seems to me the "It lowers the amount of science you can get" bit works well for analog, but with digital transmission that doesn't really hold up. Simulating packet loss might be an option, ie. longer transmission times instead of lower science yields... How exactly you'd handle this, I'm not sure other than to include a property on each receiver for analog transmission and a researchable upgrade somewhere in the middle of the tree that patches them all over to digital? Anyway, was something interesting to think about.

That's sadly very true. Call me silly, but one of the things I'd hoped for before we ever hit beta was that they'd spend at least one patch cycle updating rendering engine stuff to better balance what was done where; say, like making something like SVE a stock visual option and having integrated it, pushed more of the heavy lifting over to the GPU.

Any plans for provisional pre-release testing? Say, once you get the comm model and UI rework done? Just curious, never used the flight computer and part of the reason I got burnt out playing was wrestling with commnet vs remotetech. Admittedly a minor part, but non-ingorable nonetheless.

My use of abbreviated codes is partly being lazy (ie not wanting to type out all sorts of crap) and somewhat a case of utility... consistent naming conventions mean you can tell capability at a glance provided your convention revolves around that. Saves screenspace, too. P-3-D us a lot shorter than "Duna Passenger craft - No science - Life support (3y) - 8k dV+lander"

Initial naming scheme goes down two lines: X-1 series - Distance/altitude X-2 series - X-1 derivative but with geared toward science gathering. X-1 craft is the first built, small solid booster, crew capsule, and the only version with any science modules. Once the science is processed, the X-1-A uses the upgraded motor etc I just researched and queued for build (I use KCT) and then I add science modules then save as the first X-2. Several get queued for build as I'm lobbing them at the easy science nearby. Subsequent X-2 models are build once overall range has seen a significant improvement. Once I reach orbital capability, both X-series are discontinued. The C-series are cargo vessels, P-series are passenger craft for tourist trips, S are science specific models, DL-series handles satellite launches. Series numbering is determined by reach. Eg. C-1 is a Kerbin-only capable craft. P-2 passenger craft can handle trips to either moon. P-3s are capable of near-orbit transfers like Eve and Duna... subseries indicate updates or additional major equipment. Slightly more life support, increased battery capacity, additional antenna support, etc. Specific mission-named ships are generally done for purpose firsts, like Apollo-1 is my Mun focused first-lander with heavy science capability. Apollo-2 is generally slightly refined but similar and focused for Minmus. KGN series are all rockets for erecting my Kerbin Geosynchronous Network, Hermes series are planetary body uplinks to provide baseline coverage for each body... and Cerberus missions are my minmus orbiting refueling station and associated nuclear tugs. I might be a little obsessive? Or lazy? *shrug*

Oh wow, how did I miss this? And by LGG? Damn, between you, DMagic, Kell, and a handful of others... Are there any mods worth having that you're not a maintainer for? :p

I should point out that even with the unibody (not the right word, but it's 2AM) of real rockets like Apollo, they still flexed. Which is why they had accelerometers placed in a variety of locations fed to a central computer that calculated the rocket's bend (amongst a whole host of other things) and compensated for the bend. Our current system in KSP doesn't even bother, requiring some creative sidesteps like piloting from a probe core in the lower stages to provide a more accurate piloting solution... The speghetti effect is annoying and to some degree the rocket should disassemble much earlier than it does. Nothing rocket powered bends that way and stays in one piece.

Surely I'm not the only person refreshing this every day hoping to find a release post...

I guess I'm the only one who includes attitude correction devices (DMagic's magnetic science booms) on my roving type vehicles for when I inevitably roll it. Just activate SAS, extend the correct boom, and pitch/roll correctly till you're upright.

Some folks might consider googling Saturn's moon, Titan. Plenty of hydrocarbons to go around, not a lot of life.

Eh, that's not a strawman argument, that's more of a clarification of a subtle difference most miss. Granted, a difference small enough most would consider pointing it out as pedantry, but a difference nonetheless.

Eh, I'll look into firing up scrapyard into my current active save (after backing it up) sometime here soonish. I just failed out of one of my physics classes via essentially a linear combination of extreme burnout (because 3 years of no breaks [ie. summer classes] is *awesome*) and test anxiety ... so I'm not really in the right headspace to do decent QA, much less actually enjoy playing complex games at the moment. Depression and semi-irrational irritation don't mix very well with complexity. On the plus side, at least it was wave motion of arbitrary wave-types in arbitrary mediums (ie. physical disturbance, electrical/magnetic, heat, etc), manual Fourier analysis or arbitrary waves, and the like that beat my face in and not basic kinematics.

Thanks to StageRecovery and RealChutes, about 95% of what goes up gets recovered and reused with varying degrees of efficiency. Even the 7.5m 1st stage that put my space station in orbit... Which, well, a dozen or so radially attached stack chutes might seem like overkill, but if it saves me a million credits, it's not.

Probably my rocketjeep. I don't know why, but I decided one day that I wasn't going to bother with rovers and was instead going to make my final stage both a lander and a rover at the same time. 2.5m core, poodle as the motor with a double-long gray tank (the step down from the orange... I essentially built two different suspensions out of cubics and the larger frames and mounted sets of the big rover wheels to the metal framework. Type A suspension went in the back, 12wheels total, type B went up front with 8 wheels. The not quite symmetric mass did wonderful things to my ability to not veer under power, but moar SAS helped with that. And the landing? Easy, come down like a lander and at the right moment, you cut power and crane it over and land on the wheels. Get out, fix any that popped, and off you go. Had 130 days of life support, a science lab, and both solar panels and batteries for days. Only limit to how much science you could pull was how much patience you had. And returning to Kerbin? Not a problem. No, we didn't just drive off a cliff and ignite. Nope, I'd tuned the dV to where the jeep section wasn't coming back. Instead, you drove somewhere near the equator, lined up west to east, and proceeded to the next page in the flight manual: Step 1: ensure all science is stowed upright in the locked position. We didn't come here to leave it all behind. Step 2: Give the rocketjeep a little reverse power to get it rolling. Step 3: Deploy the mortar legs. Yes, Bob, I said mortar. Why are you screeching? Didn't you read the mission plan? I assure you, this is perfectly safe. We did it in the lab a dozen times. Step 4: Immediately before the legs come in contact with the ground, hit the stage key. This will separate the mortar from the jeep lower assembly. The jeep's momentum will carry it away from the launch site, preventing it from interfering. Your rearward momentum will also ensure the mortar will cant upwards properly, secured by the two totally-not-repurposed lander legs previously perpendicular to the ground. Step 5: Make sure nobody has to use the bathroom before proceeding to step 6. Step 6: Throttle to full. Step 7: Engage final stage. The ejection force should see you clear of the tube just fine. Continue accelerating until low orbit is achieved. Jeb has figured out that part by now, right? Right. Let him do it. Step 8: Plan and execute optimal maneuver node to return to Kerbin. Honestly, I don't remember if I was more excited I stuck the landing the first time... Or the fact that all my precision guess work translated all the way to a successful return. All hail rocketjeep, first of its name.

So here's an odd question/request... I've been tinkering around in my heavily modded install prepping to do various things... has anyone considered doing refineries in other form factors other than "Approximately 2 or 3 times the minimum height of the smallest fuel tank for the radius?" By this, I mean take the stock 2.5m refinery, instead of say, 5m wide and at least 10m tall, translated to a 3.75m "short" model, would be slightly less than 4.5m tall. -- There are some valid arguments about how realistically one cannot just make something "shorter" in terms of mechanical dimensions, so I'm willing to concede there is a "minimum height" necessary in real-world design... but that's kinda beside the point. I know, it's a bit niche. I've been grumping over adding a bunch of length to some 5m and 7.5m ships I've been tinkering with, and for the most part, the refiners are just a whee bit too tall/long and don't fit in service bays.Would be kinda neat to have something that was a combo refinery and something else, either ore storage or service bay to lower part count.

Found this today. Man, I hope this isn't abandoned. Given my Minmus station uses a SpaceY 5m tank as its central fuel storage plus 2 sci labs for science and building craft via Extraplanetary launchpads... Larger ore tanks means fewer parts, amongst other things. Reflecting this into updating my mining lander, this reduces 32 small drills to 4 2.5m drills, etc etc. No more 300+ part count when my station, the hybrid miner, and the drone orbital tug are all docked.

I know part of my general burnout is because I insist on playing career. It's helped that I've modded my game to heck and back (49 mods total) but ultimately... Starting over with each new patch gets kinda old after a while. Thanks to the amount of time I can dedicate to playing, since I started KSP in the single digit builds, I've made it to Mun/Minmus dozens if not hundreds of flights... But I've been to Duna orbit once and Eve twice. And... Well, playing the early/mid game so frequently really highlights areas this game trips up on. Science and the tech tree need about as much love as the game needs Roverdude's rocket revamp completed. Gaps in available parts make things needlessly difficult, and mods only band-aid over that so much while bringing their own set of problems (like SpaceY's tech progression being jumbled, or the sheer number of error notifications I see scroll past while playing that don't seem to negatively affect anything.) Nevermind by the time you can hit the two moons, you max the tech tree. Not really having a late game of things to strive for aside from "I got to X" hampers enthusiasm after a while. Meh, not trying to sad panda or crap on things... I'm just dealing with partial burnout. Clearly I need to add more air intakes

I missed the split burn feature. Bleh, sorry. Still kinda frustrated at myself for not expecting it with non-ions. On the plus side, now that I know about that feature I can start using ions more. Well, that and here's hoping I can figure out why Remotetech was deep sixing my comms with clear LOS and more than sufficient range available on two dishes targeting each other.

So, random question: is there an easy way to plot multiple burn departures? Oddly enough I'm not using ions for this I had a mission vehicle, quad nukes at roughly 0.6 TWR, that was supposed to deliver 5 comm sats (2 polar uplinks, 3 equatorial relays) to Moho in a slightly less than optimum launch window, about 5.5k dV total. While I have other show stoppers (like Remotetech deciding no connection available despite no obstructions and both ends using HG-5Ss pointed to eachother, yay for quicksave), my TWR is too low to dump out the 2.4k dV required on the initial pass at my parking orbit (~80k). Ended up dumping a fair amount of fuel before I realized what was going on, made a second maneuver once I got out of Kerbin SOI, figure I wasted about 500 dV above fuel allotment for departure, but at that point it was more about being bullheaded and proving I could get there anyway I'll apologize if this was covered somewhere in the 90+ pages earlier. Just woke up and prepping for class, haven't had time to skim the whole thread yet.

From an old RPG game system called Call of Cthulu -- Not sure if you're familiar with HP Lovecraft's Cthulu mythos, but the short/sweet on it, is that as you discover more and more information on "Things Man is not Meant to Know" you steadily lose sanity. The system is kinda insidious... the less you know, the less you're able to defend against eldrich horrors... but if you want to not be some extra-dimensional tentacle-beast's snack cake, you need to learn what's going on. So the big question in the game is: How much do you value your sanity compared to your life? It's a fun/funny game of "Do I read this book of arcane secrets? I mean, I might pick up a psychosis or schizophrenia ... but on the other hand I might also learn how to actually defeat these guys." Also explains why people who work on terrifically complex math/physics problems don't seem quite "normal" to the normal people. Personally, "normal" is overrated in most use-cases.

*blinks* Arrowstar, you are my freaking hero. I've been grumpy about TWP presuming a perfect equatorial, circular orbit forever and had been grousing about building my own orbital planner once I made it through Classical/Modern Physics and my Astrophysics class** I'm supposed to be taking here soon-ish... and then I found this. Seriously, I owe you I don't know how many beverages of your choice. THANKS! **= I'm currently doing the "Go back to college in your mid-30s route" and I'm a astrophysics/applied math dual major with 2 years left on the physics major and 4 classes on the math major side. As a result, I'm rather poor... otherwise I'd happily send you some money as a consolation prize for the number of SAN points everyone involved had to sacrifice to produce this tool.

Well, I've been using the Universal storage KIS containers for most of my truly small storage needs. In that vein in trying to design a general purpose cargo tug, I did run into something the "smaller" theme would address. Have you considered doing fractional height containers? Short models, that is. One more than few occasions I've looked at the space left in a service bay and frowned that I couldn't fit a container in there at the same time. Anyway, 3.75m container fits the bill to cover for my perennial forgetfulness of probe cores/stack guidance systems and docking ports... and is probably large enough to hold both. Ever notice that when you forget something, it's almost always the most inconvenient part to miss? Never something small like Bob's stamp collection.

Ah. Was on Kospy's "Planned" section in the old thread, wasn't sure if that had been dropped. Now I know. Nah, I toyed with the idea a while back but it always felt cheaty to me.

Well, I haven't dug into the numbers, it simply seemed to me that a 1.2m stack maxed out had less capacity for slowing things down than a 2.5m did similarly maxed out, so it stood to reason since trend appeared to be steadily increasing that it wouldn't stop at 2.5. The more you learn...