tsaven

Am I correct in understanding that you can't actually see the surface of planets until they've been scanned? That they just appear as flat grey until you've gotten a probe to them and scanned them? If so, I LOVE THIS MOD EVEN MORE THAN IN KSP1!!

Chiming in to give another vote of appreciation for the candidness of this post, and the technical explanations of what's going on. But, uh . . . yeah, you might want to call it something besides CBT. That acronym has certain associations when it comes to the internet.

Man, this whole thing is just unrealistically good. You're making us all look positively lazy by comparison.

Hoping that someone can give me an idea as to what I can do to get this working on my old save...

Hey guys, I'm still playing on a 1.3.1 game because it's a long and complex career save with a lot of mods. I'm trying to use SVE, but I'm getting the black sky/no water issue. Weirdly this worked when I played it last year, but since then something seems to have broken. I've tried removing/reinstalling SVE but the problem persists. I'm installing everything through CKAN. Output.log: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1jFBoxbkgMAvrUYq-4zRsicn2dzXJbnsq GameData folder: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ggAp5h-3Ed-zjjSmWnHbKOzfskionTFI I really appreciate any guidance you can give. I have confirmed that I'm running Scatterer .0.324, which according to the patch notes should be the correct version for this game.

A while back someone posted a link to some 3D files for some toggle switch caps that look like they'd do a decent job of emulating the switches on the Space Shuttle. Just for fun I had like 50 of them printed, I got them in today: Overall they're a bit smaller than I expected. I think if they were upsized by 30% it would feel a bit better and will surely fit on the toggle switches easier. As it stands I think I'll have to drill them out and trim the toggly part of the SPST switches from Sparkfun to get these to fit. Not really sure what I'm going to do with 50 of them, but they were like $1/ea in this quantity so whatever.

I plan to, but right now I'm still having a lot of problems with the timing calculations. The time displays work fine part of the time, but the seconds counter will randomly get stuck for exactly 59 seconds (until the minute number needs to change) at which point it will work for another 15 seconds before getting stuck again. I've got a 4x20 LCD that I need to hook up so I can spit variables to it from different parts of the calculations to figure out exactly where it's messing up, but I wanted to make sure I got all of the more basic controls functioning first before I move on to troubleshooting the more ancillary bits.

That is most definitely the problem. I'll change it when I get home tonight, thanks a bunch for your help.

Taking the demo code and building on it is exactly what I'd recommend, that's how I've gotten started. Take a look at my starter controller a few posts up, I've gotten something very similar to what you're describing. 7-seg displays for the Ap/Pe/Alt/Velocity, some analog gauges, and nice big buttons for staging. As for learning the Arduino environment, I wholeheartedly recommend the Sparkfun Inventor's Kit as well as the matching Guidebook. It's exactly how I got started into the world of micro-electronics, and will give the building-blocks to start learning the Arduino language (which is really just C++ with some additional functions/subroutines built in). Sparkfun (while they are expensive) also has a bunch of add-ons and products that will make your life much easier, such as their Serial 7-Segment Display and the matching Hookup Guide which makes hooking up a lot of 7-segment displays vastly simpler. Their support and guides on how to hook things up have basically saved my ass, almost all of my controller is built off of chunks of their demo code that I've modified to work with my own variable names.

Looking forward to seeing progress! I hadn't considered the problems that the double-sided tape glue might present for smaller systems, the machines I've got access to are a little beefier. Any reason you're going with plywood as opposed to a plastic of some kind?

Greatly appreciated! I installed this through CKAN so apparently the requirements there are out of date/broken? I can do a manual install but I greatly prefer to keep things in CKAN.

Hey guys, sad to report that this doesn't seem to work in 1.7.3. I'm getting the black sky, and the only other mod on the game is KSPSerialIO (I get the same black sky problem without KSPSerialIO as well). Everything was installed through CKAN, after having to tell it to accept 1.4 mods as compatible. Output.log: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Qo7IkvkQfuVRbaFpqxqMvfS5Co28hk3K Any ideas?

Quick update for those who are interested. Thanks to staying up until 2:30am on a work night, I've made a lot of progress on my test controllor. Only about half of the buttons work so far; The SAS mode select/LEDs are still running on the breadboard, as are the Altitude & velocity selection buttons, and the throttle isn't hooked up yet. But the 7-segment display readouts are working great, as is staging and RCS/SAS toggles! The left displays are Apoapsis/Periapsis, the right two are Altitude and Velocity (switchable via buttons on the breadboard between Surface/Velocity/Target and AGL/ASL) Bit of a video of some basic functions in action!

@zitronen, I have to give mad props to you for creating and maintaining a mod that has such capabilities. I'm farther along in my controller than I ever expected to be and I'd never have been able to do it if your demo code hadn't spelled things out so clearly and easily. Thank you, thank you for documenting and commenting the code out as well as you have. I'm integrating more and more functions into my controller every day!

For cutting soft things like wood and even aluminum, as long as you're cutting into a sheet with a lot of surface area I've found that firmly pressing it onto a continuous bed of strong double-sided is plenty strong to keep the work in place. And it keeps your clamps out of the way so you have full access to the piece, plus the aformentioned sacrificial nature of it. I'm still working on my plan. I think for style I'm going for a Space Shuttle/Apollo look as much as reasonably possible, but I'm having a hell of a time finding the exact type of buttons that I want. But so far, this is a kind of rough plan. The cutout at the bottom is for my keyboard.

I know the i9 is a different beast, but at least with the prior generation the only difference between the i5 and i7 was the addition of Hyperthreading, which doesn't make a nutsack's worth of difference for most games at all. It's still questionable if adding another couple of cores for the i9 is really worth it either, given how few applications will still take advantage of it. But they do give a giant e-peens to wave around at your local LAN party, so that's gotta count for something.

For this game an i9 or even i7 is pointless. You'll get nearly identical performance with an i5-9600K, and it's half the price. Kerbal Space Program performance is almost singularly dependent on single-thread speed, which depends mostly on the clock rate of the processor. If you really want maximum KSP performance, get an i5-9600K and spend the money on a decent water-cooling kit to overclock the hell out of it.

That pretty much sums up all of KSP

My project isn't nearly as pretty or as finished as many of the other setups here, but I've got the basics working so far off of my Arduino and SerialIO. I've also started to bolt together a temporary stand to hold most of my equipment while I continue working on the code. The various timing functions (Such as displaying time to AP/PE/Target) have been giving me a world of headaches as I try and keep the formatting correct, so when I feel like taking a break from lines of C++ I get back out the drill and sword of Exact-Zero and start wiring stuff together.

I feel like this comment summarizes this whole thread pretty well. We want a controller for our lego spaceships game for no functional reason, and then end up spending hundreds (thousands?) of dollars on tools and parts for these kind of screwball passion projects. It's really quite Kerbal, when you think about it. Your plan looks seriously badass man, I can't wait to see a functioning mockup. Also, a minor life-pro-tip: I've found that clamping a sacrificial sheet of MDF or plywood to the bed and then using 2" wide double-sided tape to stick your work piece to it will be plenty strong enough to hold the work piece in place while cutting, while allowing you to cut all the way down through the work piece (and into the MDF) to separate it without damaging your bed.

You don't need to put any code on it; it comes pre-loaded and configured. The only thing you'll possibly want to do (if you're using a lot of them via I2C) is to change the address, which is easy with a few commands. Then you can daisy-chain up to 128 of them together and address/control them all just using the SCA/SCL pins on the Arduino. The Sparkfun hookup guide has very detailed instructions on hooking it up and getting it working with whichever communication method you chose, including sample code: https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/using-the-serial-7-segment-display/all

They're the Serial 7-Segment Display from Sparkfun. It's actually an entire ATMega328 dedicated just to running the 4-charecter display, but because of this it's got a bunch of other features that make them way easier to deal with than having to multiplex and eat up a zillion I/O pins. I'm planning on using ~20 of these 4-charecter 7-segment displays in my final controllor, so being able to use I2C instead of Serial is going to make the wiring way easier and reduce the load on my Arduino(s).

I figured others here might like to see the slow progress I'm making. I've gotten most of the quirks of writing I2C data to all of my 7-segment displays worked out, including how to split the longer numbers over multiple displays. Right now it's all running on my breadboard, but due to the ease of hooking up dozens of I2C devices it's going to be easy to have it all working once I figure out a layout and a frame that I like. Right now I have the red 7-segments displaying Velocity, and the blue one displaying heading. Halfway through you can see me pressing some buttons that change the Velocity readout; these buttons switch it between displaying Surface, Orbital, and Target relative velocity. The bottom LEDs will eventually be labeled and will indicate exactly which velocity readout is being displayed. *edit* Come to think of it, maybe I should have taken a video of a rocket launch or a plane that will actually exceed 999m/s to show off the fact that the other red 7-seg display actually works for that...

If you wanna be efficient, launch a couple of empty Kontainers for Specialized Parts and Material Kits next to your existing station and disassemble/recycle as much of the station as you can into them. Then when you do start building out your new stations, you've already got a ton of mass up there to inflate your modules with or build stuff with gia GC.

If you're worried about the health of your little green dudes, recall them all to KSC before you transfer your save to a new version and then yes, they should be okay. You'll have to rebuild a majority of your infrastructure, but the game itself and the kerbals within will be fine. (I do this every time I upgrade, because there's so many chances of things going wrong and blowing stuff up. My career save is still on 1.3.1 for this reason)