SignalCorps

I installed the Kerbal stock part expansion mod (http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/107047-1-0-x-KSPX-Kerbal-Stock-Part-eXpansion-mod-reposted-v0-2-9-11-05-15) which gives you rounded, side mount fuel tanks, much like the monopro tanks) of either fuel or lox. I attached several of both to a large tank to give it some extra fuel, but at no time did any fuel get used from these tanks. I could do a resource transfer, but doing so with 30 little tanks while lifting off is problematic. (and attaching hoses to each tank really defeats the purpose of those tiny little things). Monopro radial mounted tanks work fine...should the radial mount mini tanks also be working? Or is it a glitch, just not programed right in the mod, or am I doing something wrong?

With aircraft, it's easy to get true airspeed with a flow meter, and speed above ground with laser or radar (or GPS). And in orbit, you can track position over ground or use laser...but if one is traveling between planets, how do you accurately measure your speed without anything to measure against (air pressure, something for lasers to bounce off of?) I imagine a bunch of really smart people use smart people calculations to figure that a if 3 ton ship that puts out X pounds of pressure burns for 3 seconds, speed should be changed by X amount. But how do they know, other than what it *should* be? Like if that kid and his monkey that were always hiding in Speed Racer's trunk had snuck onboard and changed the weight (however slightly). How would you know the difference between what you *should* be going, or what you're actually doing? Or if you were Voyagering your way out of the solar system, and Superman came by, grabbed ahold of your ship, and gave it a good push for 20 minutes. How would you be able to track your new speed when you don't have known burn rates and velocities to go by? Of course these scenarios are highly implausible, so feel free to substitute a more likely occurance if that helps.

I try and search for existing threads before I ask, but I guess I didn't use the correct keywords so I missed any existing ones. Sorry to cause you all distress with a repeat question, I'll try and do better next time. I just found it odd because I was nowhere near a boundry, I was in the middle of the southern icecaps. And I've encounter this problem several times in different locations 10-100's of km apart. And I understand glitches happen, it's part of coding. But I don't think we should just 'accept' glitches and expect them just to be there. It's part of a developer's job to address these things, especially in a game we pay for. I'm not faulting Squad for anything, as they've done a remarkable job with this game, and have been doing very well at addressing issues. But we should expect a developer to fix problems, otherwise you run around in Assassin's Creed 4 with no face and fall through the game world forever. I'm not bitching about this particular glitch as it isn't that big in the scheme of things, I was just curious if it was a common thing.

I have landed at the southern pole, near where it starts to get visibly mountainous on the map to do a surveying contract. I figured I'd so some science while there (as I haven't maxed it out) but I'm getting no science points, and the dialogue box lists it as "grasslands' even though I am on a great big blanket of white, with not a blade of grass in sight. Is this a glitch?

I had maybe 70 hours in ver 0.9. Mostly it was screwing around in sandbox, building cool space ships and finding new and exciting ways to not successfully land on the Mun or paint the run way with spaceplane parts. I left it for a while and got back into it once ver 1 hit and have been doing the career mode, where I am somewhere around day 45 and have several trips to the Mun, where I not only landed, but made it back with the same number of Kerbals I left with. Now I have several gaming systems (PS2-4, Xbox 360 and 1.) and a severe backlog of games I am trying to finish before all the new AAA games start dropping, so I've been trying to shelve KSP for a while. But like heroine addicts or retired mob enforcers, I keep getting sucked back in, thanks to TV and movies. There was some space movie on Syfy that made me want to play again. I stopped for a few days, and then the new season of Defiance started back up featuring scenes of alien ships floating through debris fields, and I had to play again, and yesterday, damn Apollo 13 was on TV, and I had to start up planning my first landing on Minimus. Every time I get away from this damn game, I see a show dealing with spaceships, and I have to fire it back up. Will my torment never end?

I have a contract to put a sat in polar mun orbit, and after much failure trying to start from a polar orbit on Kerban (Mechjeb doesn't much like polar Hoffman transfers, and even when I do it on my own, I don't arrive on the correct polar plane) I just started on a 0 degree orbit and figured I'd sort it out once I got there. I got into a stable equator orbit and after much thrusting and cursing, I got myself pretty damn close to the indicated orbit. Ap was listed 181km and I was at 180 (Per is about the same margin), I don't really see how to check my inclination in the standard game, but Mechjeb lists me at 90.076 (contract asks for 90) and my orbit looks dead on to the indicated contract line. But it's not completing. I have a checkmark for everything but "reach the designated orbit". Then I noticed the little swirling dots on the indicated orbit are going the opposite direction I am. Does it really matter if I am orbiting counter-clockwise and the indicated orbit is clockwise (at least from how I am looking at it currently)? And is there a better way to go about putting sats around other bodies at odd angles?

In career mode, lvl 2 tracking. I've been putting parachutes on everything to try and recover some of the costs since I am early in, and some of the contracts don't make me much money, once I build a craft to do them, when you count all the parts I loose. (30,000 to test a rocket booster at 16,000 feet. Need two for balance, plus I need to get them up that high. Craft costs me 27,00. Though I did combine with another contract) I did the contract and watched as all the parts landed (mostly) safely. The main pod gets back home, and there are stages sitting all around the space center (went straight up). But I can physically see most of everything I went up with. But 'debris' isn't showing on the map, and even though it's all sitting *right on the center grounds* I can only recover whatever is still attached to the pod. Should I be able to recover the other stuff, or is that really not doable in this game? Again, thanks for all your help.

The end that fire comes out of, needs to point toward the ground. If it ever points up to the sky, you have done something wrong, and will not go to space today. /xkcd - - - Updated - - - Mechjeb can make your game less frustrating. If you just want to build things, and connect them to other things while they are moving at 3000 meters a second in an oblong orbit at 450,000km, or just want to land on the Goddamn Mun without your landing craft looking like the neglected end of a salvage yard, and your poor kerbal standing there with no means of ever going home, and looking at you in despair, just ONCE in your miserable life, and you want to do all this without taking several astrophysics college courses and making friends with a math nerd, Mechjeb is the way to go. Of course you don't get to spend months learning savant-grade math and the difference that 20 delta-v can make, but you get to actually make space ships and get them to go places and only explode every other time instead of 49/50 times. - - - Updated - - - Docking. Especially with Mechjeb: 4 way RCS thrusters and a lot of them. But you need to make sure they cover ALL axes (that is the correct plural of axis). For example I spend an hour designing and redesigning a mk2 chassis shuttle to dock with my space station so the 5 kerbals would have a ride home anytime they needed. After all that time of getting it to space in a non-exploded state, I was having trouble docking because I put my thrusters on either side (1 front and 1 back x 2). I could go up and down and front and back, but I had no side to side. And when your docking port is near the nose of your craft, and you find yourself 2 meters to the right of where you need to be, not having side thrust makes it rather hard because you have to turn (which throws and off center docking port out of whack), move forward, and then turn back and hope it was not too much or too little. Even Mechjeb was having a hard time docking, and sometimes it just gave up. You can always just put a single port RCS thruster to cover the one axis you're missing. It may not seem like much, but damn does it matter.

So to make sure I understand that, if I had a craft in motion, went to the map, and then went to the space center that happens? How do I unhappen it? Any time I go to launch a new craft, with no other flights in progress, I am looking at the ass-end of Kerbin. When I was playing in sandbox mode, it always defaulted to the side of the planet I was on.

This is only a minor problem, but an annoying one. I am just starting in career mode, and I go to launch something, and the first time I hit map view, I am looking at the far side of Kerbin, and I have to scroll the view around to properly see my ship and apoapsis and the like. And it does this with every new launch. Is there a reason for this? It is by no means game breaking, but it does cost me an extra couple of seconds (which can be very precious sometimes) to swing the camera around.

It might have something to do with mirroring and added multiple parts at once. When I added the parts in multiples it gave me the problem. When I added them piece by piece it worked fine.

This is part of a later stage (in early career mode. the mk1 pods are for tourists.) The middle engine draws from the tanks above it, and I've been using that one first until empty. Then the left and right engines are both drawing from the right tank, causing it to deplete first. But then the left engine starts using it's own tanks while the right engine shuts down and won't draw from the left. Is there some rule to fuel flow that I'm not getting, or is it just being weird?

So I figure I land a driller to do the digging with a holding tank, and also land a mobile or non mobile (is mobile a good idea?) storage/processing facility. I imagine I'd have a docking port on the driller and a side mounted docking port on the storage facility (though I figure I'd have be very careful to have them at the same height once they are landed, otherwise there would be some distraught Kerbals standing around the digger looking at a docking port that is 1 meter higher than the digger, wondering what to do next). I assume docking port jr is good enough for ore transfer? I think I am okay so far (please tell me if I am not). But how to interface the shuttle vehicle to the processing facility? Do I have a docking port on top of the facility and a lander with a docking port underneath with thrusters ringing the outside? I'll be using Mechjeb (for now anyways. Once I get the hang of this I'll try and do more manual stuff). Is it possible to do vertical docks in low or even normal gravity? Because once I go into docking mode, I am now using RCS thrusters, and I fear they simple will not be strong enough to keep me from crashing. Especially on a normal gravity world. Or do I have a lander with also a side mounted docking port, and wheels so that I land as normal and then scoot over to the processing facility to load up?

I use the large scanner and it gives me a nice readout on the planet, and shows me good hotspots. Do I need to further scan in orbit with the narrow band, or is it more like I fly over and area, find the hotspot within the hotspot and try and land there, or is it more like I aim to land in a hotspot, and use the narrow band on the way down to refine my landing?