Hotaru

Here is a pack of simple female Kerbal textures. Not as good as some of the other texture packs out there, I'm afraid, but since nobody has yet released a set for the new female Kerbals, I thought it would be nice to have at least a basic one to play with. As tempting as it was to mess with them endlessly, I wanted to get something up sooner rather than later, so I only spent a couple hours on this, most of which was learning to make halfway-decent hair textures in GIMP--I will probably tinker with it some more and maybe upload a better version later--would like to add some different hairstyles rather than just different colors at the very least. Shame we can't edit the ponytail mesh. My first mod by the way, hope I'm doing it right. Download from SpaceDock Download from Dropbox CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0

Very interesting, thanks! So it really is realistic to have some engines be practically useless in atmo. Of course whether it makes sense from a gameplay point of view is an unrelated question--personally I think it does, but obviously plenty of others disagree!--but it's good to know the real-world baseline at least. PS. Funny how some of the names have kind of "caught" and others haven't. I almost immediately got used to calling the LV909 the "Terrier," but I still call a lot of them by their numbers. I like some of the new names but not all, some of them lack the nice sense of progression in size of, for instance, Poodle, Skipper, Mainsail, that helps remember which is which. The old SRB's are now "Hammer," "Kickback," and "Thumper," but I sure can't remember which name goes with which booster--there's no indication which is bigger, no connection between the names and the character of the particular rocket. I'll probably keep calling them Trashcan, BACC, and NASA SRB.

3, 5, 6, 10, 16, and 20 all sound like me either now or at some point in the past. Never done 15 but sounds like a good idea. Will try it at next opportunity. Hopefully will remember to do it in my sandbox save, not career. Here's another: your launch pad needs frequent repairs cause you keep dropping spent SRB's on it. Or cause you often forget to check your TWR and your rockets go down instead of up when you release the launch clamps.

I don't like it. Honestly, it doesn't limit where I can go--that's more a question of mass than part count--but it limits what I can do once I get there. I generally find before I upgrade the VAB I have to sacrifice things like science instruments, antennas, extra batteries, solar panels, and so on, and all that does is mean I have to make two or three flights to get the science I could've gotten in one--making the early-career-mode grind just a little bit worse. Same for action groups. It's not like not having action groups actually prevents me from doing anything, at least not with early-game ships--all it does is mean that I have to either right click or rearrange stages on the fly if I want to, say, abort. Both just feel like arbitrary gameplay limitations imposed to give me an artificial reason to upgrade the VAB/SPH, whereas most of the other building upgrades make a little more sense. Not sure what I'd add in their place, though, to be honest. Maybe move the size restriction from the pad/runway to the VAB/SPH, and keep only the mass restrictions for the pad/runway. Still plenty of reason to upgrade, makes realistic sense (VAB can only hold so big a rocket, pad can only support so much weight), doesn't feel arbitrary. Thanks Lord Aurelius for the link, by the way, I did not know about that mod & will definitely be trying it out next time I start a new career save! (Ironically I'll actually probably use it to increase building costs by about a factor of 10, so I can turn fund penalties way down and have civilized Kerbal hiring costs for a change. Unless it lets me adjust those too...)

Honestly, I find a lot of the engines almost interchangeable in a lot of situations. At the very least, I generally have at least two or three choices for most situations. Poodle, Terrier, 48-7S cluster, or radial 24-77s for a medium lander? Twin-Boar, Mainsail with boosters, or T30/T45 cluster for a mid-game lifter? Picking the most efficient option often gains me only a few dozen m/sec of delta-v on a ship with several hundred or thousand, so I often end up picking an engine based on other considerations--looks, TWR, configuration, cost, landing-gear clearance, whatever. That said, I do think the current balancing could do with some tweaking for consistency. Why, for instance, does the Ant have 73% less ISP in atmo while the Spider--basically a radial Ant in other regards--has only 10% less? Out of curiosity, what actually IS realistic in this situation? I've always thought of the Terrier as an analog for the Apollo LM engines--would those really have been 75% less efficient in atmo? I know some engines are optimized for atmo and some for vacuum, but is the difference really that big? I'd have guessed more like 25%.

Torus station R&D.

Orbited my first torus. Not sure what I'm going to do with it, mostly just wanted to see if I could get it up there. This one's in my sandbox save, maybe if I get enough cash I'll order one in career.

I mostly like to keep my rockets roughly rocket-shaped (even pre-1.0), but I thought I'd have a go at the torus problem. The key, I figured, was to design a launcher that carried the torus nearer the bottom than the top, so it acted to stabilize the whole thing rather than destabilize it. There were other keys, as it turned out, such as getting the boosters to not collide with the core on separation, making sure each stage had ample TWR, making sure the whole thing had enough delta-v to get to orbit, and adding enough struts so it didn't fall apart on the launch pad. This one is the Mark IVB. You can guess at what happened to Marks I through IV. Fortunately this was in sandbox mode. These things are 600,000 spacebucks each, I'd have bankrupted my current career mode on them after three attempts. Two, if you count the repairs to the launch pad after the Mark III booster-bombed it. Not going to clutter up this post with pics of all the failed attempts, think I'll put those in the "post your fails here" thread.

Piloting an ion probe: On Minmus at night: You didn't say anything about mods so I assume they're OK... wish I had more varied locales but I haven't sent Val or anyone else much beyond Kerbin's SoI. There's a couple more of her from the same trip in this post here.

Successfully tested an air-portable rover inspired by the old Mako from Mass Effect. It uses rockets rather than parachutes because it's mainly meant to be dropped onto the Mun, Minmus, or other airless bodies. It has about 350 m/s of delta-v, and the landings are quite a bit smoother than the original Mako. Crew portrait after first successful drop. Rover driver (Bill) and dropship crew (Lisbel, Hanbald, Desbin, Kirfry).

I've noticed this as well, I've occasionally seen smallish SSTO's reentering with aft CoG's go into a tumble during reentry around 30,000 meters and 2 km/s. Rather than disintegrating as one might expect, they almost instantly slow down to around 500 m/s at 20-25,000 meters, after which it's pretty easy to transfer fuel forward and recover. I don't think it would be a problem if it was a little less pronounced, or if the spaceplane was more likely to break up when this happens (larger ones do, but smaller ones usually don't). Of course, real spacecraft (Shuttle, X-15) did reenter at 20-40 degrees angle-of-attack, but they didn't hit quite the brick wall that a spaceplane in KSP does when reentering underside-first. Another questionable effect I've noticed is that airbrakes become effective before serious heating starts to build up, making it possible to avoid heating entirely on some designs by adding lots of them. I've especially noticed this on reusable rockets that need lots of airbrakes to stay stable in a tail-first reentry. They frequently make it all the way through reentry with no visible flames. (The same is true, incidentally, of reentering Kerbals.) To be fair I don't think anybody's saying the new aero is perfect or unexploitable or anything, just that it's a huge improvement over the old souposphere. I'd be curious if the same effects happen with FAR.

Bizarre! Gives me confidence in KSP's physics engine, though, to see it replicate correctly such a strange real-life behavior.

Launched a mini-shuttle: Deployed an electric lawn chair: Went to Minmus:

Playing sandbox mode last few days, so more pictures for this thread than usual... So I was experimenting with Kerbal Joint Reinforcement settings, trying to build an unstable rocket that would flip so I could see if it would break up or not. First rocket I built was a Mark 1-2 pod on a Mark 3 fuselage with a Mainsail--far from being unstable, it went straight into orbit. Cool, I thought, forgetting about the instability experiment--I'll build this into an operational SSTO for my career save! So I refined the design a bit and launched it again. This was the result: This one I liked to look on less as an unsuccessful test of a new rocket and more as a successful test of a new Launch Escape System: Working on a cargo plane. It flies great, and lands great most of the time, but every now and again I get impatient and set it down a little too hard. Then this happens: On this run my land speed record rocket managed to at least burn out all its boosters before exploding. The ejector seat worked, though: Testing a new Aerospike SSTO. I foresee a problem:

I don't think it's quite as limiting as it looks, the only major limitation I see is that a few engines don't work well in atmo, and are therefore not much use as lifters. For instance, The T30 and T45 are extremely versatile engines. I've used them as 1.25-meter booster engines, of course, but also in clusters for 2.5- and 3.75-meter rockets, as sustainer engines on SSTO's, and as upper-stage engines on a variety of heavier ships where a Terrier would be too weak and a Poodle too heavy. On landing craft, I often have a choice between the Terrier, 48-7S, 24-77, LV-1, and O-10 in various combinations, and I generally pick whichever is most convenient for the ship's configuration over which would be the most efficient--for example, if I use several radial 24-77's in place of a Terrier, I can do away with landing gear and have my ship land directly on its tail. I've found uses for all of those engines in my current career save. I do think there are plenty of gaps to be filled--mostly a lack of larger jets, nukes, solids, etc.--but I don't feel like my creativity is being stifled. If anything I think my designs have gotten more interesting and varied in 1.0.2 than they were in 0.90.

Having by coincidence just witnessed a solar (Kerbolar?) eclipse from Kerbin orbit, my observation backs up your calculations: The Mun is definitely noticeably smaller in diameter than the disc of the Sun, so this is an annular eclipse and at least a little energy should still be sneaking through around the edges. I don't know about the distribution of energy across the area of the disc, though, so I can't say if you're right about the amount of energy. I believe KSP determines an eclipse by where the center of the Sun is, not the edges, so you stop getting electricity precisely halfway through sunrise or sunset--it also doesn't seem to take into account local topography, which is especially noticeable on Minmus, where I've frequently noticed my ships continue receiving power long after the Sun has passed below the apparent horizon.

Two ways. One is serious career-mode, generally no reverts, lots of sensible, conservative designs, being way too cautious and trying very hard not to get my Kerbals killed. My current career save has a very good safety record, no ex-kerbals and only four serious accidents: an unmanned rocket crash, a manned test flight saved by the LES, a tipped-over lander rescued from the Mun, and an SSTO repaired on-orbit. Other is messing about in sandbox. No regard for cost, efficiency, or Kerbal safety, doing dumb stuff just to see if I can, building ships that, while cool, wouldn't make sense in career mode. Still usually don't revert, since Kerbals are in unlimited supply and none of my sandbox projects are major time investments anyway. I have plenty of fun either way. Sandbox silliness makes a nice break from career stress, but the structure of career is good when I get bored with sandbox.

Same here. I've found uses for just about every engine I've unlocked so far in career mode. Even the Aerospike.

I think the engines we have are pretty well balanced, except for the Aerospike, which could do with a more consistent ISP curve (mainly to make it useful on Eve again). I do agree that there are gaps to be filled, though, especially in different size categories. 2.5- and maybe 3.75-meter versions of the jets, Rapier, Aerospike, Nerva, and SRB's would all be appreciated, for instance. My only other complaint is that the visual models of the engines don't always match their performance... as I understand it vacuum engines should in general have large bell-nozzles while sea-level engines should have smaller ones--as it is with the two 3.75-meter engines--but a lot of the other sets have this backwards (Mainsail vs. Poodle, T30/45 vs. Terrier). Not a huge issue, and I suspect the nozzles on the Poodle and Terrier are short as they are largely because they're meant as lander engines--the Terrier does look a bit like the Apollo LM engines.

Taking a look at the Elcano ground-circumnavigation challenge, thought I might give it a try. So I opened up my sandbox save and started experimenting with rover designs. First, I built a little racecar type thing around a Mark I inline cockpit. I couldn't resist adding a few boosters. Unsurprisingly, the enterprise quickly devolved into adding more and more rockets in an attempt to set a new land-speed record. Some of the runs went better than others. I did, however, build a reasonably functional ejection seat. Useless, admittedly, but functional. On its best run, the LSR Mark IIE disintegrated at 574 miles per hour, and I am still no closer to driving around Kerbin or anywhere else than I was yesterday.

Any requirement to be able to return?

Level two, but you need to upgrade Mission Control as well if I recall.

Yeah, I've always thought they were a little too durable. Personally I use the VNG parachute mod to give them their own parachutes so bailing-out is a valid escape method in atmo, but it would be nice if they actually, you know, NEEDED the chutes. As for the jetpack delta-v, I assume it was done that way to give Kerbals more freedom to jetpack around on low-gravity planets... having to actually walk several kilometers on the Mun for a survey contract would be unbelievably annoying (it's annoying enough on Kerbin!), so I guess I hope they don't change it. On the other hand I would be in favor of limited EVA fuel (say, you can only refuel from the pod two or three times rather than infinite times), to remove some of the exploity "get-out-and-push" options for spacecraft rescue. Although orbital skydiving sounds fun. Must remember to try it before next update, on the off-chance they actually DO nerf Kerbal durability. PS. It occurs to me that nerfing jetpack delta-v would make rovers a more useful option for some of those survey contracts, so maybe it wouldn't be so bad if they did. I can't decide...

Is this with kerbals or just generally? I've sent at least a flyby probe everywhere except Eeloo and the Jool system (both in 1.0.2 and in 0.90, although I haven't sent one to Dres yet in 1.0), but so far my kerballed experience in any version is entirely within Kerbin's SoI, except for a single deep-space science station in my current career save. Only moon I've visited so far has been Ike. My problem is I always play career mode (I do mess around in sandbox a lot but basically never launch serious missions there), and I have yet to get as far as even a manned Duna mission before changing my mod setup and having to start over. My current career is looking promising though, not least because I'm waiting for a couple of mods to be updated before starting over yet again. Also, interplanetary space is scary. PS. Looking at my signature reminds me my Eve probes have not actually arrived yet in 1.0.