meyerweb

I was watching the alt-F12 debug log to see if I could figure out why the game crashes a lot these days, and I spotted “[Error]: Cannot find a Module of typename 'DangIt'”. I don’t have DangIt installed, though I may have at some point in the distant past. Anyone know why KSP is expecting to find DangIt when it isn’t installed, and how I can scrub this from KSP?

Yep, I discovered that in my tests, in fact. Thanks to all the help I got in this thread, I put together a five-probe scaffold on top of a rocket and got it into orbit! And then realized I forgot to prevent fuel crossfeed, so all the probes were drained dry long before orbit. Hooray for reverting to the VAB! Now I just have to figure out how to lower the part count so I don’t keep crashing the game, and everything will be great.

I had not considered that approach! I’ll definitely have to play around with that idea. However, I do want to use spaceplanes to launch one or more satellites as well, so understanding how to attach probes to cargo bays will still be useful to me. It looks like part rooting makes the most sense for what I have in mind, but we’ll see. Down the road, I might try to combine the approaches by creating a strutted framework holding several satellites as compactly as possible, then root that framework and attach it inside a cargo bay. Or a fairing!

In that case, wouldn’t the stuff underneath the probe core (like the batteries, fuel tank, and engine) clip into the GBCBL’s body, causing physics-engine problems when I decouple the docking port? Like, explosion problems? Ahhhh, interesting. If I root the engine, what happens when the probe is detached? Does the engine stay the root node, or does it revert to the probe core? If it stays with the engine, will that cause problems with flight control? If I root a docking port, which stays with the main craft, what becomes the root of the probe? Or does the concept of rooting not really apply in flight, but only in the VAB?

I’m trying to build a launcher with a huge cargo bay that can carry and launch multiple satellites or other craft. For example, I could load up three science probes to boost to Kerbin orbit, then detach/undock each one in turn and boost them out to their destinations. (Or use the Burn Together mod to boost them as a fleet to one destination, whichever.) The thing is, I cannot for the life of me figure out how to do this in the VAB. I can build the probes, and I can build the Great Big Cargo Bay Launcher (GBCBL), but I can’t figure out how to attach the probes to the booster. I’ve read various posts about multiprobe launchers, but none I’ve found have actually explained how it’s done, short of building a series of probes in serial and then building a booster underneath them. I’m after something a little more modular, so I can design each probe separately and save (or subassembly) them, then add the ones I want to my GBCBL. So far, nothing I do allows me to attach the probes to the GBCBL, whether I try to use stack separators or docking ports to make it happen, except that I can sometimes attach the probe core to a docking port—leaving everything on top of the probe core clipped into the GBCBL’s body, which I definitely don’t want. So: is there a tutorial that goes through how to do this, step by step, with clear pictures and simple words? Recent is preferred, but as long as whatever the tutorial describes works in 1.0.5, I’m fine with it. Oh, and I’d greatly prefer the solution to be stock-compatible, but I’ll consider installing mods to make this work if there’s no other sane alternative. Is the root tool somehow the answer, and if so, how? I appreciate any help!

I’ve also noticed that some of the orbits have at least some parameters completely wrong. Example: the farthest-out Minmus SAR orbits, from UEQx 5 through 21, show an inclination of 0.00º. Having just tried one of them (~730Km @ 0.00º), I can assure you that these will not suffice unless your goal is to image only the equator. I switched the orbit to 89.5º—trivial to do at that distance, since orbital speed is less than 50m/s—and will see what I get, but it seems that some of the data I was able to rescue is wrong. Whether it started life wrong, or was mangled by caching and rescuing, I do not know at this point.

Try Minimum Ambient Lighting, which raises the minimum light level in flight mode, including the map. You can drag it up with a slider, then hit “Reset” to go back to default. There’s also Tracking Station Ambient Light, which works in the Tracking Station, not the map view.

Hell YEAH there were! I finally got to play with this today and I cannot express the depth and breadth of my love for this enhancement. Thank you!

That link didn’t work for me, so I went cache fishing. I cleaned up what I could find and threw the result up on my personal site as static HTML: http://meyerweb.com/eric/ksp/024-ideal-scansat-altitudes-v10.html If those orbits are out of date or otherwise bad, let me know and I’ll slap a warning at the top of the page.

Paolo Encarnacion did a test implementation a year or so back, but never released it: https://youtu.be/jrUpbGvXrnQ I suspect you would make a lot of people very happy if you created a plugin to do this, both in-atmosphere and in space.

I just upgraded ContractConfigurator and now, when I type `ckan list` in Terminal, I get this: * ContractConfigurator 1.9.0 I expected this instead: - ContractConfigurator 1.9.0 So what’s the asterisk mean?

I don’t think you do understand. Here, have an annotated screenshot: The sections I highlighted by surrounding them with red boxes are pre-defined by KER. I want to remove them so they do not appear in either the Control Bar (on the left) or the Flight Engineer list (on the right). If anyone can give me a process for doing so, that would be most appreciated. I’ve tried everything I can find using the in-game UI, and also directly editing KER’s XML configuration files. So far, no luck. Happy to learn of something I overlooked, though!

I can edit the stock sections’ contents, but I can’t get them off the list entirely—the stock sections (Orbital, Surface, Vessel, Rendezvous) don’t have “Delete Section” buttons, unlike custom sections. I want those four stock sections completely, literally gone from all KER interfaces in the game. Off the Control Bar, out of the Flight Engineer list, gone.

Is there a way to remove the stock presets from the KER dropdown/control bar? I tried cutting them out of SectionLibrary.xml but KER just puts them back.

Is there a way to remove the stock presets from the KER dropdown/control bar? I tried cutting them out of SectionLibrary.xml but KER just puts them back.

I highly recommend Kramax Autopilot. It hasn’t been recompiled for 1.0.5 yet, but works just fine (I had it land me twice today) and comes with landing patterns built in.

This’ll certainly save me the effort of adding the cockpit lights to the Lights action group every time I build a new spaceplane. Thanks, Snark! As for the solar panels, I already use Solar Panel Action Group! for that, so I probably won’t install the optional bit. But it raises the question of whether you could make it so any keybinding will open the panels. If I could just install this and bind solar panels to ⇧P (or whatever), I’d happily drop Solar Panel Action Group and just run this one.

(NOTE: This is not, so far as I know, a 1.0.5-related question. Also, I did read the documentation I could find and tried to Google an answer, but neither effort was successful.) I use the CLI on OS X, because it’s faster and I started out on a PDP-11 and then moved to MS-DOS, so yay keyboard prompts. Because I can’t leave well enough alone, I wrote some simple bash scripts to help me filter CKAN’s output. So, as an example, I have this as an output option: ----------- Upgrades available ----------- ^ ModuleManager 2.6.8 ^ WaypointManager 2.4.2 ^ WiderContractsApp 1.2.0 ----------- Marked incompatible ---------- X SASTuningFix 1.0 --------------- ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ --------------- * DistantObject v1.6.3 * DistantObject-default v1.6.3 * QuickScroll v1.32 * QuickSearch v1.14 My question is, what are the asterisks meant to represent? That symbol isn’t listed in my legend for 'ckan list', which says: Legend: -: Up to date. X: Incompatible. ^: Upgradable. ?: Unknown And, while I’m here, are there any other symbols that CKAN can generate, but aren’t in the legend? I may as well filter for them too.

Makes sense. I should probably set up a separate save where I can just do that without having to worry about messing up my actual career game. Speaking of which, once I iron out the last few wrinkles and come up with an actual agency and flag, I should be ready to release my contract pack. Is the best way to do that to post it to GitHub and give you a heads-up? And is there a pack you would recommend I emulate in terms of the file/directory structure? Right now my contracts are just a folder in GameData but I suspect that’s not the preferred strategy.

A related question: in the alt-F12 debug dialogs, the Contracts/Add pane has E/M/H buttons. What do those mean? All I can think is Easy/Medium/Hard but I don’t see what that would have to do with adding contracts. What I’m doing now when I want to get a contract to spawn in the Administration Building is open that pane and then click the E/M/H buttons a few times each for the ContractConfigurator contracts (since there’s no way to tell which is which) until I get a contract to spawn. Is that what I should be doing, or...?

So, I figured this out: first, I had to rebuild the satellite in the SPH, instead of just merging in the VAB craft. If I merged in (or even just straight loaded) the VAB craft, it had zero attachment points; I couldn’t even save it as a subassembly. Next, I loaded up the SSTO file and mounted a docking port inside the cargo bay. It had to be manually placed, as the docking port’s attachment points didn’t snap to either of the interior snap points in the cargo bay. (Unlike, say, stack separators, which were totally fine with attachment-point snapping.) Then I merged in the SPH version of the satellite, which snapped to the docking port just fine. Runway testing of the satellite release procedure checks out, so I’m finally ready to take my own stab at this!

This is exactly what I’m trying to do next, and what I can’t figure out is how to mount the satellite inside the cargo bay (Mk2) in such a way that it will just drift out. Not to mention, attachment points are being really annoying: when I merge in my satellite design from the VAB, it has no attachment points. Can you post a shot of your cargo bay setup in the hangar, with satellite? And, ideally, some idea of how the frell you put it together in the hangar? Thanks!

Not that I disagree in principle, but how would you classify a spaceplane like the Aeris 4A or Stearwing D45? Plane or spacecraft?

I successfully completed my own contract. It worked, thanks to you! I was wondering if I’ve got the following right or not. The basic idea is, the contract shouldn’t complete until the craft comes to an undestroyed stop on the KSC runway. Here are the parameters I set up for that: PARAMETER { name = Land title = Land safely on the KSC runway type = ReachState situation = LANDED biome = Runway maxSpeed = 1 PARAMETER { type = VesselNotDestroyed } completeInSequence = true hideChildren = true } Is there a better way to enforce those specific conditions, or is that about the size of it? Anything I botched?

You get rep just for creating the condition that Ktolemy requires Kopernicus. We’re not worthy!