surge

...and also ask elsewhere. This is a forum for Kerbal Space Program, not generic unity development.

You mean 1.3.1 or 1.3.0? The old parts are still there in 1.4.x, change the part view to manufacturer, or decouplers.

I would like to know what the maximum payload capacity is. Have you tried launching dummy loads until it fails?

Yeah, the apollo systems just returned in a *very* heat resistant capsule. If you take a scientist with you, he can grab the information out of the experiments, and store them in that capsule; which is essentially what they did in real life - they didn't bring back a massive "tank" full of "science", they just packed the rocks in the return pod with them. Come to think of it, even pilots and engineers can *take* data from experiments, so you don't even need a scientist, unless you need him to reset it and do another one - which is actually very lucrative and profitable if you can manage it.

Have loved your previous work, Gaarst, but this spreadsheet thing... Will you update this forum post from it's contents, or is it entirely useless now? I am not interested in complicated faff known as google database or whatever. I realise it's a real handful to manage, and have suggestions I can't really voice properly, but in the end I have a URL (for this forum post). When I need to check for addon updates, that URL is where I go. Frankly, Take-Two should be paying you for this

"old ksc" as youre calling it, is actually called Baikerbanur, a play on Baikonur. I find it... well, completely retarded that the "woomerang" site is in the northern hemisphere. In fact it's not very far from Baikerbanur, which begs the question, why put 2 potential launch sites (see KerbinSide) next to each other, and also insults us Australians, slightly. What they should have done is stock enable the old Baikerbanur site, which as an easter egg already has some interesting structures (or "artwork" as you call it), and if they felt the need, put a Woomera-like site in the southern hemisphere. That way you can get the idea of what launches are possible from the different sites, and understand inclinations properly. BTW, Woomera is military controlled; aside from the rogue chopper shots above, which are very old, you wont get much out of it. It's kinda like the australian version of americas area 51

Just tried 1.4.1, same deal. Guess I won't be playing the making history thing for a long time. But it's fine - I just perfected an Energia in 1.3 thanks to tweakscaled vectors

Reiterating over Lambert problems is taking forever? Tired of the sysadmins yelling at you for clogging up the cpus? Fear not, the laziest solution is relatively simple! It will give you V1, which is how fast you need to be going (as in the dV and direction of your burn) at a radius of R1 to hit something at a radius of R2. As you can see, you only need to supply the two "positions". It can potentially do the rest; V2 is the vector you will to be going when you get there, and dT is an *untested* calculation of the time it will take. Useful if you want to land at an exact point on a planet, or rendevous with something else out there. As always there are caveats: 1) It doesn't take into account movement/rotation of targets or planets; you must pre-calculate that. 2) It calculates "minimum energy", but it's minimum energy from an absolute 0 starting velocity. So if you try to use this to descend from a higher orbit, it will often give a very inefficient path that "jumps up" first, then descends to the target radius. It really works best from a lower orbit, or even the ground, like an ICBM. Now you too, can act like america and threaten everyone on Kerbin with this new technology!

See that little knob at the centre bottom? Click it, and it will open the navball and you have control. Nothing to do with updates. It's always been like this.

~/.config/unity3d/Squad/Kerbal Space Program/prefs can contain: <unity_prefs version_major="1" version_minor="1"> <pref name="UnitySelectMonitor" type="int">1</pref> Change the 1 to whichever monitor you like, but be aware of the way X11 orders them.

Hmm, Take Two, still an Australian company? The guys that made GTA III? Can't say I'm unhappy about that! They need to get their excrements together though, that takeover was ages ago.

I happened to login to the KSP store (kerbalspaceprogram.com) to do some version checking on a previous release and, as always, I click the wrong button and end up at the page where you buy KSP. Then I noticed it says it's disabled. Does that mean I can't buy the upcoming Making History expansion from there? That would be annoying, because I rather like the peace of mind and simplicity of getting it from the source.

The URL for the java client is broken BTW.

Steel, thanks for your input. But this whole "its not possible" garbage I've heard before and proven wrong (I cant remember the url, but search my name, perhaps) I've nailed it down to what's called the definite integral according to that website. The area of the graph of say, speed vs altitude when the 'german s' equation is newtons gravitational law. I wonder which integral rule I should be using to calculate the distance required for the final speed to equal 0?

Right, but since F = GMm/R^2 changes (because of the R) as you descend, how do you figure out at what altitude to thrust at to get to 0 velocity at a particular value of R. i.e. land without crashing at a bajillion km/hr? I've figured out it's the integral (area in non-stupid terms) of F=GMm/R^2, combined with something like d =v1t +1/2 at^2?. I'm pretty lost at this point, but all I want is given a thrust value, a distance to stop within. The forces are a necessary nastiness of doing this properly, right? I've come up with MU/R^2*mass which will give you the thrust to cancel out acceleration from gravity, i.e you will decend (or even ascend) at a constant speed. I'm lost as to how to proceed. For reference: https://www.mathsisfun.com/calculus/integration-definite.html I'm still reading through and trying to understand... And disappointed not one of you has regurgitated an equation for me to use.

I guess you meant Does. But yeah, I've since done some calculations and measurements that indicate when dealing with ships, it Newton's gravitational law, not 1st law. Thanks. I think I also got a bit befuddled because I'm trying to do crap like integrals, and the only ones that are useful are apparently something called 'definite integrals' whereas every maths teacher starts with the other kind and that makes me angry because I can't check and test them with a computer. In other words, I'm trying to calculate the distance above the body I should start thrusting in order to hit it at near, or exactly 0m/s! That's a definite integral of some kind as gravity changes, but I'm a bit stumped for now. So far I have a throttle setting of mass*mu/R^2, to neutralize acceleration entirely, but if we're going at 800m/s, and trying to land, that can only end in disaster!

Hello, It's well known that F=m*a, and perhaps lesser well known that F = G*M1*M2/R^2. Which one does ksp use to determine velocity/acceleration? i.e. does it account for the ship's mass. And no, I'm not asking about rocket thrust, for which I know it (roughly) does account for, I'm simply talking about a free-falling object. Ideally on a body with no atmospheric drag. I have already painstakenly determined that for moons orbiting other planets, it does not use the second mass to implement the orbital characteristics. Those are all 'on-rails' or fixed/nerfed to defy the exact laws of physics though (in order to implement the scaling). I've heard ksp is a 2-body system, but in that case it's really 1-body. I'm guessing they meant it's 2-body when calculating the physics for ships? I could test this using kOS and writing a bunch of code to measure it, but for the moment, it seems easier and quicker to ask here.

function launchangMinE { parameter Alt, ra, Rt. // Optimal launch angle will vary from 45 (closest) - 0 // (other side of planet). local Rr to (Alt +Re)/Rt. local EminA to arctan(sin(ra)/(Rr -cos(ra)))/2. return EminA. } ...in kOS script is minimum energy launch angle, where: Re: Radius of body (otherwise known as sealevel) Alt = current ship altitude above Re Rt = Re + targets altitude above Re ra = range angle, the angle from you through the centre of the body to the target. The only equation I have for range angle is related to geodesic coordinates, and probably useless to you, so you should find another way to calculate it. But just in case, I use this: function rangeangle { parameter from, to. // geopositions local _ra to arccos(sin(from:lat) *sin(to:lat) +cos(from:lat) *cos(to:lat) *cos(to:lng -from:lng)). return _ra. } "from" and "to" should be obvious. This is minimum energy launch angle (those yanks worked reeeeaaallly hard on this, so it's very accurate). It can never be more than 45°, never less than 0°. Spreadsheets are a terrible way to do this, but good luck trying to do the above maths in them. And most people just launch at 45° because you don't really lose that much energy in a no-atmosphere environment and it's safer. The only reason I bothered to learn this is because I was trying to emulate ICBMs on Kerbin where pummelling through the atmosphere at demented angles is a big energy loss.

It is, but when localisation makes more customers and money, what are you gonna do? It's a rare innovative and pretty good game in the end, so I can't complain too loudly.

I recently bought "Russia in Space", Anatoly Zak in an effort to understand why america has, after achieving and claiming so much become so pathetic at rocketry. Unfortunately the book was filled with political garbage instead of the technical information I was after, but some people who will undoubtedly be profiled by the CIA as "communist, shoot on sight" after buying it might find it interesting. It has a lot of nice pictures too.

Pretty much anywhere the "terrain scattering" loads in beautiful trees for me to look at while parachuting over the grasslands. Due to the multithreaded way the game works, this doesn't always happen, but occasionally I screw up just so, and it does. It's especially beautiful when I come down near the coast so there's an ocean nearby as well - reminds me of my time in Vanuatu.

Rockets cannot be rockets... What?

It won't be bright, venus and probably even mars will be brighter. it will look like any other dim star. I took a photograph with a semi-professional camera the last time it and earth were aligned (i.e. we were as close we will ever get) some years ago. It came out as just a 4-5 pixel blob. To find it now, however, there is xephem which has been updated significantly from it's athena widget scientific program in the 1980s, and also, celestia. Although whilst giving you an understanding of whats happening, I don't remember celestia being able to tell you where to look from your poor earthbound position.

At some point in the past, "b" was a trigger, and "B" (as in shift-b) was meant to be a toggle. "B" only ever worked on windows though (or so I've been told), and instead of fixing it properly, it's been removed entirely; the input system can't distinguish if shift or capslock is on anymore as far as I can tell.

Well, ok. I've read parts of books such as "Orbital Mechanics for Engineering Students", "Fundamentals of Astrodynamics", Bate Mueller, and "Fundamentals of Astrodynamics and Applications", D. Vallado. But actually there is a video on youtube that explains all the "anomalies" (there is of course Mean Anomoly too), and that was in part, my real source. The guy that made such an eloquent video is called OrbitNerd And of course braeunig's site which had all the fundamental mathematical equations in non-ridiculous terms that all those books above didn't. I essentially just condensed his work into the above code. Happy reading.