Citizen247

I've started to understand how the particle system works, it's basically a Unity particle system saved as a .mu. I'm going to try and put something together tonight, though I only have a copy of unity 5 so I'm not sure how compatible it'll be, but I'll give it a try.

You can get around that in the interim with the debug menu, there's an option to not use strict node attachments.

Oh, also there seems to be big problems for me getting the Vista to work in 1.0. I had to drop in to a saved 0.90. Everything seems fine until lighting the engine, and it immediately flames out and all the fuel tanks start reporting their current level as "NaN".

Changing: fx_exhaustFlame_blue_small = 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, running To: fx_exhaustFlame_blue = 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, running Gave this: Anything more than that would need a custom effect I think. That would be possible, but I'm not sure how to achieve it at the moment, so would need to look into it.

Ah, I must have missed that, thanks.

It's my problem exactly, and it's because there's something off about the pod balancing in the new aerodynamics would be my guess. In DR the heat-shields are heavy, dropping the CoM making the capsule want to enter heat-shield first, that doesn't appear to be the case with the new heat-shields, so SAS has to force the capsule to stay oriented, leading to drained batteries... I somewhat suspect a lack of testing there, perhaps they should have done some public betas...

A quick look at the cfg's indicates that the relevant lines for the Vista effects are: fx_exhaustFlame_blue_small = 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, running fx_exhaustLight_blue = 0.0, 0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, running fx_exhaustFlame_blue_small seems to be a predefined fx type, I think there's a normal sized one, but I would suspect it would need custom effects to get what you want. I can't really look into it more deeply at the moment, but will try to tonight.

Heh, I've had the exact opposite problem, with DR as long as I was de-orbiting sensibly, I never had a problem. With stock half the time the capsule flips around and explodes, regardless of my entry profile. I honestly can't wait to drop it in favour of DR.

I'm glad that this is continuing, it's far superior to the new stock fairings IMHO. Procedural Parts are another wish, along with Deadly Reentry, which seems far more consistent and realistic than the new stock heating, and whose heatshields actually protect the craft... Nearly every time I reenter now, the capsule flips around and explodes, there doesn't seem to be much I can do to fix the balance of a capsule with a parachute at the top and a heatshield on the bottom... Anyway, thank you for continuing with this.

I'm not sure about how you'd go about making the Vista very bright, but I'd guess you'd want very large sprites for the particles and a very bright light spawned while the engine is running. Anyway, I'd be pretty happy to help, I've been modelling in blender for some time, and my texturing skills are ok too. I've not got much in the way of examples off hand, but I was working on this a few years back: I've not got a huge amount of spare time, but if you can give me an idea of what assets you want, and a rough idea of how you envision them looking I can look at putting some things together for you.

What are you looking for model-wise?

I've just switched back to Linux as Windows was getting annoying, and my probes are burning up on ascent. I have to pack my satellite into a second set of internal interstage fairings with a heat-shield at the front. I thought maybe my ascent profile was too shallow, I'm hitting 1000m/s at about 30-40k, is this the case or is something funky going on?

Wow, that's fast. Thanks very much works great. Have you thought about any sort of "Realism Overhaul" rebalancing? I only ask because while in Sandbox things work great, in Career it seems significantly harder to get out of LKO than it is to do the same in RO. In fact I've just had to cheat myself some extra funds to upgrade the launch pad just to put a satellite in GKO (though I delte most fuel tanks and use just procedural, so there may be more too it).

Not really. I mean having a single ground communication site is unrealistic, when Sputnik was launched it could be tracked all along it's orbit because of the world wide ground stations. Ok having perfect access to them isn't exactly realistic, there was one incident where Australian stations intercepted Russian probe data, and wouldn't give it to the Russians without the encryption key, and the Russians wouldn't supply that... And obviously NASA couldn't just rock up to the Soviet Union and use their launch pads, or vice versa, but that would seem to push it from a space program game to a geopolitical roleplaying game of the cold war... I.e. those changes would seem to make it LESS realistic.

This looks absolutely fantastic, I'm loving it. I am having a problem with the extra launch sites though, despite them being configured in Remotetech's settings, they don't have an associated transmitter. Any ideas? EDIT: I did find a small issue with a missing bracket in the config file, but I've sorted that and still haven't got any of the extra ground stations.

Just tried a test after increasing the ST1s charge rate to 0.05 from 0.0126, and everything seems to work as expected, so I think it's likely that the charge rate is being clamped.

That's a relief, I'm not going completely nuts (yet (debatable)). Since I've now unlocked the st2 and my meticulously laid out LEO commsat network (in a pretty pentagon) uses the st1, I might bump up the st1 a bit to see if they start working. I assume you know about the planes falling through the runway issue? I did finally get a plane in the air, only to find it had serious unrecoverable Mach tuck issues. Lucky for jeb I have the ejector/Eva parachute mods... Should probably remember to check far dialogues before launching aircraft...

Yeah. I'm also checking based on the live read out, which is showing that I have surplus energy, but the batteries are still discharging. I've just created a couple of test rigs, and it seems like that the ST1 Solar Panel reports that it's providing power, but isn't. The rig is five panels, each reporting an energy flow of 0.01, and a probe core drawing 0.02, for a spare capacity of 0.03. The resources readout shows --0.03 discharge, but the batteries still run down. I've tried something similar with ST2's (using half as many, since they provide ~2x the power) and they appear to provide the expected power and recharge the batteries. ETA: It makes no sense to me though, since I assume the only difference between the ST1 and ST2 panels is the config file, could there be some rounding that rounds the ST1 to 0 because it's so low?

Well, try as I might my probes keep running out of power on the way to the moon. Which was weird so checking it it looks like my batteries are running down even if solar panels are providing more power than the probe needs. Is this a known issue or am I getting something obvious wrong?

Initially I'd be looking at damage to Kerbals and Probe cores from radiation exposure. I suspect it could be expanded to heating and transmuting other parts as well. Could add an extra dimension to career, as you begin to unlock in place annealing and the like. That would be a bit further down the line, as I'm still learning the KSP API ATM though. I've played with intestellar a bit, but didn't really like it, but I was planning on looking at the source code. Though my initial thoughts were to have a base "background radiation" level for space and adjust that with fall off maps when near to bodies (so it can be attenuated by atmosphere, and accumulated in van allen belts). Parts (like NTRs) would be point sources, so I'm assuming they could be handled as calculating a vector between origins, ray casting to see if any shadow shields are in the way, and attenuating the source strength by the vector magnitude (inverse square) and total shielding level. The best thought I had for tracking Chronic and Acute exposures was to implement a "radiation" resource, "Rad-hardness" would dictate what percentage of radiation received is stored, and the counter would tick down over time to simulate the bodies repair of the damage. It's not 100% real, but I think that mechanism would be a good balance for game-play/implementation.

So for my inaugural post on these forums I thought I'd say thanks for this, launching rockets had gotten easy and "samey" but having relearned how to fly and managing to put a sounding rocket into space on a sub-orbital trajectory, this mod has helped me rediscover the simple joy of space flight I had when I first started playing KSP. So thank you very much for all your wonderful hard work. When I get home, I'll be devoting much of this evening to getting a new career off the ground, a little alternate history role playing around a British space program that doesn't get cancelled in it's infancy . I have also been considering doing some modding, and I have one in mind that I think might be doable (with the caveat that I know very little about the KSP API, and although I've coded a fair bit in C/C++, Java and others, I've never touched C#, so I'm aware there'll be somewhat of a learning curve). Basically a radiation mod, adding point source radiation from planets, the sun and radioactive parts (the NTRs, Near Future's reactors etc) and modelling it's effects on Kerbals and sensitive electronics like probe cores. I'd want to add various parts as well, Geiger counters radiation shields and so on. Would something like that be of interest to the Realism crowd?