Zuqq

The Walkabout is one of my absolute favorite missions and I really look forward to seeing this one unfold!

I'm pretty sure that was the picture that got me thinking of an observatory in the first place! From the SAS no electricity thread? Anyways, the tracking is pretty spot on but I wish I could get a finer fine control lol. It likes to go a bit too fast. I was really curious how you grouped your reaction wheels together (if I remember correctly). Does that allow you finer movements?

I was going to make stationary lights but two things steered me in the other direction. 1) Setting up stationary things (and moving them) is much harder and makes the transportation vehicle design 100x harder lol. (See the telescope transporter vs. the light posts). 2) I'd like to be able to move the lights around as needed. I only have 4 up there now but I will make another delivery of 4 when I can muscle through the few hours of travel time. Once the second set of 4 is up I will be shifting the first 4 so I can start making a circle of light. I'd have to plan much more if I were doing it with stationary lights. Again, thanks for the VTOL tips - they will all come in handy. I especially didn't think of the grabbing point for whatever I'm moving... I was going to use more than one point of contact for stability but I don't think I can make that work based on your experience lol. I'll have to make sure everything squares up CoM wise somehow or figure out a really strong connection (docking ports are pretty wobbly). Which may be difficult if I want to move a 20 ton "building" up to the observatory! I'm thinking of using a cage design similar to the telescope transporter which will allow me to secure the load a bit better. With the cage mounted on a winch, and some quantum struts to stop rotation. If I center the cage perfectly, hopefully whatever it is picking up will also be centered! Im suprised to see your VTOL has a capacity of ~30t, thats awesome and would handle most if not all of my needs. It looks pretty small to handle such a load! I don't currently have B9 or KW parts on this install as I was memory-managing, but pretty soon I will be including them back in as it's hard to design some things without the extra parts. I may have to roughly mimick your layout! It looks like a nice wide and easy landing. I appreciate the offer for using the craft but you hit the nail on the head - it's much more rewarding to overcome the challanges yourself. Step 3) What about crew? So I was feeling a combination of ambitiousness and laziness after the lights were set up without a hitch... So I swiftly whipped together a mobile base and moved it up to the mountains over dinner. Again, target lock is awesome... It arrived without a problem and I now have a few of my smartest kerbals posted at the observatory. I'll get some better screenshots once the base is a bit more organized. This is just a temporary solution until I can think up a more permanent solution... I really need to start getting creative with names... Can you tell I really like the kerbal foundries mod? Lol. They are awesome. I do wish they had a break pressure control slider though.... I may have accidently tipped this over disembarking the launch pad... They are torquey and I went a bit too fast, followed be overcompensating the brakes... Lol I think I need more lighting... (and turn up my light pixel count thing)

The fuel tanks are acting as a ballast actually. I had to keep the CoM as low as possible or any sort of movement resulted in some serious stability issues. Theres no rockets, but the fuel tanks do supply some generators from the Kerbal Foundries mod (the wheels come from that mod as well - and are awesome). The generators operate off of very small amounts of liqued fuel and oxidizer so they provide consistant long-term power for the wheels letting me travel at night time without worry. I will have to check out your centipede mission! I always enjoy reading other missions. It did take a LOT of dedication, I paid closer attention and it took closer to 2.5 hours to reach the mountains. I have figured out a great weight system for my w key lol! It was quite the challange keeping ~30 tons of telescope tame. I appreciate the suggestions regarding VTOLs, I will definitely keep that in mind for when I build a prototype! My main concern will be how to stabalize the loads it has to carry. The telescope was probably on the upper side of things, but I'd like to reliably carry at least 15 tons to the mountains with the VTOL. Anyways.. Step 2) And then there was light! So, the telescope was functioning fine but it was quite dark up there in the mountains at night time. Considering night time is really when the best veiwing is possible, and I want to create a working self-sufficient observatory.... Lighting was the next step! I did have a few different light designs but it obviously didn't take near as long as the telescope did. These lights are very simple, coming in at under 40 parts a piece. They have enough battery power to last ~4 hours with the lights on and solar panels to charge up during the day. I could only safely haul about 4 at a time - otherwise I ran into some interesting physics glitches. I think it was just due to the way I secured the load this time around (one docking port on the transporter, and the lights docked to each other). All loaded up. Loading bay raised to prevent disasters. Top view. Front view with the bay in travelling position. Thanks infernal robotics! So as you can see, this transportation system was much easier to create. But as I mentioned above - it still takes a long time to reach the mountains. Thank god for target tracking and a weighted down 'w' key. (At least until we hit mountain terrain). Skipping out on a lot of the journey to the mountains as... Well you've seen it above and it's not that exciting! Arrived at the telescope! Unloading the first light. Unloading the second light. Not super exciting, so only one overall view!

Thanks! It really is awesome what is possible. Only limited to the players imagination! The journey into the mountains took a pretty long time. My transporter tops out at around 24 m/s when travelling on fair terrain. Once the slopes started hitting, it could go 24 m/s but it was very bumpy so I lowered to wheel torque and continued on at about 10 - 14 m/s. I was very rarely able to use time warp because when docked to the telescope the vehicle was approaching 500 parts and it ran into some serious issues with a slight turn or a bump the size of a small rock. I didn't keep exact time, but it was well over an hour, possibly even two, to arrive at the mountains, and probably an hour or so scouting out a flat piece of land fairly high up. My observatory is located ~3200m above sea level. With such a long travel time I really need to figure out a faster way of transportation. I've cooked up a few prototypes for a small and fast vehicle to move kerbals to and fro the observatory... But need to figure out a faster way of heavier object transportation. I'm currently moving four solar powered light posts (weighing in at about 3500kg each) from the KSC to my observatory and it is taking forever. I am thinking of making some sort of VTOL crane that may be able to move heavy objects faster - but I have absolutely no experience building VTOLs. I will upload pictures of the lights once I arrive at the mountains (still probably 30 minutes at least to get to the base of the mountains) and get all set up.

Nice mission reports. Theres some beauty shots in here. You're ships are much more elegant than what I can design, especially for such large missions! Very much looking forward to the next installment.

Love it. The slight smile... Perfect.

I normally just tinker around in KSP, and in fact haven't even landed or visited the majority of the planets yet. Not because I don't want to - just because there is so much you can do just on and around Kerbin! I do eventually want to make a few epic journeys to other planets (I've seen some amazing mission reports!) but I'm starting small... I've been playing for a few months now and haven't really created anything I thought was worth showing but I think the task I've set myself deserves a thread, even if I'm the only one who reads it and it only serves to track my progress. I've decided to build a fairly complex observatory in the mountain range near the Space Center. I've come up with a few things that I want up there and I'm sure more will pop into mind. I run a fairly modded game so there should be some fun possibilities! Step 1) Starting the Observatory the Right Way - With a Telescope! Part A) Building a Telescope Well, I set out on this task expecting to spend at least a few hours designing the telescope and maybe a coupe more to design the transportation vehicle. I grossly underestimated the amount of time required. I would guess I have 40+ hours into this step, not counting the actual transportation part! The telescope (part courtesy of HullCamVDS) took a lot of tinkering to get it right. I went through a number of iterations (a few are pictured, the majority were too shameful to even take a screenshot of lol) before settling on one. This one worked fine, but it looked sloppy and thrown together.. This one was an early prototype. I just wanted to get a hang of balancing the telescope and letting the telescope itself pivot, before working out how to make a 360 degree base. One major design constraint was the fact that I wanted to transport the telescope with a seperate vehicle. I didn't want the telescope to have any means of movement over terrain by itself. This meant I had to keep it short, or make my transportation vehicle even bigger (it was already pretty big...) Part Testing the Transportation Vehicles With a rough design (emphasis on rough) for the telescope complete, I thought it would be a good time to figure out a way of transporting it into the mountains. I really thought it would be as simple as putting a large electromagnet on a winch (KAS, of course) and picking the telescope up, and starting the journey. Obviously, that wasn't the way to go... Basically, that magnet wasn't able to hold up the 30,000kg, and dropped it. So I figured a bigger vehicle with a bigger magnet should solve the problem! So... The bigger magnet held the weight but it was really not too stable... But, after taking a few more approaches I finally designed something that was capable of carrying my telescope... That's one of my failed attempts in the background there. I had to sort of design the transportation vehicle and the telescope at the same time. I had a rough telescope design, which allowed me to make a rough transportation design. Then I worked some kinks out of the telescope design, which I had to follow up with some changes on the transportation design. Eventually it all fell together into a well designed telescope and a well designed transportation vehicle (in my opinion at least!) The telescope is perfectly balanced, and will hold its position without SAS engaged. It's only limitation is that it still moves pretty quickly even with fine control enabled. It rotates 360 degrees around and the telescope itself has a pivot range of about 220 degrees. As I said earlier, it weighs in at about 30,000kg. I'm really proud of how it turned out! Here's the part you've been waiting for.. (Well I assume so if you've read this far! lol) Thats me lowering the cage. And we're decoupled! And that marks the first official installment of the Zuqq Observatory. I have a few ideas for what to bring up next but will happily take any suggestions! I think the next step will be a set of 5 or 10 solar powered lighting posts to light up the observatory area. I will also have to design a way of transporting and setting them up on site. I'd like to also set up a small station within a few hundred feet, complete with a fuel oupost and some speedier vehicles for travelling to and from KSC as well. I realize my mission isn't as exciting as some of the interplanetary-super-omega-bases but this is a fun learning experience for me and I'm looking forward to setting up a fairly complex observatory. I hope you enjoyed the read and stay tuned for part 2!

You have to have an upgraded building to do EVAs (I forget which one at the moment but you can mouse over the buildings to see what happens when you upgrade them). You should be able to do a crew report though by right clicking on the capsule. Hopefully that can help more than me.

For your first question, right/just/a bit behind the CoM is really up to you.I usually have half of my lift marker or so behind the DCoM.. Which may or may not be halfway or 3/4 of the way behind the CoM. (I try to build planes as balanced as possible). In reality, as long as its behind its not that big of a deal. Your CoL shifts about with speed and what not As for your second question, a mod called RCSBuildAid will show you how your CoM moves when tanks are dry. Or you can manually right click on all the tanks and drain them of fuel to see where you CoM ends up. Glad you got things working somewhat. It can be hard to vertically launch a plane sometimes as you generally have to travel through some unstable attitudes before you are in stable flight again. It may help if your glider had a bit more wingspan on it by the looks of it. But, it can definitely be a challange making planes with low tier tech.

Mach and dis-assembly have lots to do with the graphs. The graphs show how your plane behaves at different mach values... It's right there in the name so to speak. Planes that are stable below mach 1 may suddenly spin out when reaching mach 1. Too much G causes dis-assembly, which you can get an idea from when the drag on your graph triples at a certain AoA.

I wouldn't say they are that far apart... The NEAR page lists only 4 major differences between FAR and NEAR, one of which being the analysis tools, the others being things which are intended to make FAR more complicated (physics based on mach, more complicated lift/drag ratios), hence the graphs. But I do understand your point. The graphs and stability page is not essential to building a plane. But I find it does give me a lot more insight in how to go about building my planes. I wouldn't go as far as to say they are useless and should be ignored.

All good points mentioned but the quoted part I definitely don't agree with and don't understand why you would ignore these awesome tools if you ddecided to go with FAR. If you don't want the graphs and stability derivatives, go with NEAR. . In reality, you don't need to understand how the numbers are derived or even what the numbers mean. You can click the button, and if the numbers are green you are good to go. If the numbers are red, you will have problems. Input different speeds and altitudes. Quite easy. If numbers are red, fiddle with stuff until they turm green. Without any prior knowledge, you will slowly learn that when a certain number is red - mess with your wings. Or if a different number is red, mess with the tail. (Edit: As well as which numbers you can safely ignore, or worry less about) The graph is also quite easy to read and gives quick essential info about your design you wouldn't otherwise know unless you test fairly extensively. You want the yellow line below the x-axis. Input an angle of attack range to see up to what angle your plane is stable, or you can input a mach range. Scott Manley has a video glossing over the graph and stability page, as well as building with FAR. I'm sure there are thousands of other videos giving FAR tutorials. Edit: As you replied while I was writing this I will also adress the certain red number thing: Zq and Xq aren't really all that important, but they can make minor changes to the way a plane behaves under very large amounts of pitching. Generally, Zu and Xw can be disregarded if their magnitudes are much less than the other ones. They basically consider how much additional velocity affects lift and how much additional angle of attack affects velocity, respectively; they can be the "wrong" sign at some angles of attack and Mach numbers due to Mach effects or nonlinear body drag." Source So yes, some of the numbers don't have a lot of effect, others however do.

I'll have to agree that electric is becoming a powerful contender but a small nitpick: they don't accelerate faster - they just have near instant torque curves. This can translate to faster acceleration but not independently. I personally think that a diesel generator powering an electric engine is the way to go. Similar to the McLaren P1. The diesel generator powers up when the elecric batteries need a top up, or when the extra power is required. Its fairly expensive to do now but with some research and optimization I think it's the way to go. But thats a bit off of the OPs question. If its just between diesel and gas, for transport, I would say there has to be a reason the majority use diesel.

With FAR, make use of the graphs and stability derivative calculation page. These will help you figure out if your plane will be stable at specific speeds, and altitudes. The graph will help you understand your max AOA. Make sure CoL is slightly behind your CoM (and DCoM - RCSBuildAid mod helps with this). Here is a link for the FAR Wiki explaining the symbols and what not

All professions level up with the same mechanisms I believe. For example: Orbit Kerbin, Plant Flag, Orbit Moho, Plant Flag on Eve, etc etc. Engineers - Level 0 engineers have no special abilities. At level 1, they can repack parachutes. At level 2, they can repair lander legs. At level 3, they can repair wheels. They gain no further abilities with additional levels. Here is the wiki page.

It would be nice to see that mods you are playing with. It would also help to know where it's gettiing stuck. (Which part is it trying to load when it freezes?)

I use RCS vs. Vernors as I feel the RCS gives me better fine control. As well as 1 RCS port is able to fire in 5 directions where I believe the vernor can only fire in 1 direction. So you would need 5 Vernor engines to give you the same attitude control I can obtain with 1 well placed RCS port. I find Vernors are especially overkill unless you have a very large ship you are trying to move around. But the beauty of the game is that if you find vernors work for you and RCS thrusters are useless, go for it!

Jeb is on an accidental ~14 year trip out of the solar system... He's loving it.

Is there anything someone can do user-end to speed this process up?

ATM is a must with B9 in my opinion. And B9 is also a must in my opinion. But, like many others, I have pruned my B9 folder down to the essentials I use. I kept the S2 parts and Mk2 parts but deleted the HL and HX parts. I also have procedural parts so I've deleted anything that crosses over (mk1 parts, decouplers, struts, etc). Since I use Adjustable Landing Gear, I also deleted all the landing gears. And now, since B9 has procedural wings out (which are awesome) I have also deleted all the wings, stabilizers, etc from B9.

All I have to say about this video is.... Bill Nye said the F word. My childhood was just changed.

I'm definitely one of those people who thought longer loading times was sort of normal.... Im a touch disheartened to see that my load times are obviously a bit whacky. I do not have Hamachi, and am curious to how I would achieve a sub-minute load time. Is there any other known programs that don't play well with Unity/KSP?

I don't see TweakScale on your list, but usually this sort of thing has TweakScale as the culprit... Happened to me with solar panels and air intakes. If I tried to place it, it would become unclickable/unmoveable and the whole craft I was working on would become corrupt. With that large of a list of mods there could be a number of culprits... If not TweakScale I would start sifting through for any mods that *could* cause your issue, and start deleting. Start up the game, if the issue is still there, reinstall whatever you just deleted and move onto the next mod. Sorry I cant be of more help

FAR definitely takes a bit of getting used to but once you do it is well worth it. The main thing that helped me learn to play with FAR was the stability derivative page. I've spent hours and hours on a single plane moving things inch by inch to see how it effects the stability of the plane at all different speeds. (I go from mach .25 - 5, and altitude 0 - 20,000). Ill move or rotate something and recalculate the stability. See where it changed. Eventuallly you'll get the hang of knowing when Zw (or any derivative) is red, what to do. Here is Ferrams wiki explaining the derivatives. And of course what others have said is good advice. RCS Build Aid is really helpful for DCoM. Always have CoL behind DCoM and CoM, etc Edit: A quick tip that I just remembered that really helped me... When designing with FAR, a great place to start your design is something that at least looks like it could fly in real life. Learning to read the graphs will help out as well. You can change the mach values to see if your plane stays stable at supersonic speeds (as well as your lift/drag and L/D ratio)