PringleMan

Remember the photoelectric effect and the role it would have on a solar panel. Whether or not electrons are liberated by an incident photon is completely dependent on the frequency of the light, but the volume of electrons liberated is dependent on the magnitude of photon flux on the surface. That is to say, if the light source is going to generate current at all, then it will generate significantly more current closer to the source than away. We don's really see the effects of that in a lab here on Earth because the distances we can manage in a lab are practically 0 for all intensive purposes. But in space, it is an inverse square law. That is to say if you are at 2 AU, you have 1/4 the intensity of light, so your power generation from the same sized solar cell will be accordingly really small.

Here are the screenies I grabbed while working on mine. These are just the LL relevant ones. I actually did a whole miniature space program sending out a recon probe, finding an ore deposit, harvesting it, slowly building up a base, and then building that thing. Most of it got wrecked when I tried to hot-drop that rover in with kerbals

To be honest I get a little annoyed with the people who expect any proposal to be so feature complete. Right now, if you have made something that can collect the position data and recreate it live in game, you have accomplished the first big leap in my opinion. For a pretty long while, 90% of what people are going to want to do is build stations with each other. I would say work on making that possible first, without worrying about timewarp at all. THEN work on timewarp and your log system and stuff.

In terms of engineering, the easiest would be a fuel station in kerbal orbit, a station in Minmas orbit, a lander to harvest on minmas, and an orbital freighter ferrying between the two. Minmas has such a low escape velocity it is really easy to get kethane into orbit. Once in orbit it is really simple to use nuclear engines as a fuel efficient way to get to and from Kerbin.

Kerbal dimensions are just a rescale of real-life dimensions. Someone else can probably give you the exact number, but basically multiply all of your dimensions by the rescale factor and that should get you set.

This is not strictly true. It depends on the frequency you are trying to observe in. The greater the difference in frequencies, the less signal noise. Plus, it IS acceptable to impose government-mandated "quiet" zones where certain bands are completely prohibited. Given that Kerbals seem to be totally invested in space exploration, I could see them going along with that.

Kethane, Extraplanetary launchpads, and Orbital Construction notwithstanding of course.

Banned for being a moderator making unjustified fake bans

Chase you should seriously consider something like this. Doing a metal enclosure admittedly does look and feel nicer, but can get prohibitively expensive to both fabricate and ship very quickly.

Looks pretty neat! I would personally put the launch pad in the center of the ship though, folding down into the deck. I cant help but think that having a giant rocket sitting at one end of a ship would not be very good for it.

Unity is a software package that utilizes the PartTools put out by Squad for KSP. Think of it as Unity is an IDE and the PartTools are a config package for a specific language.

You are correct. KSP looks for a blank transform named dockingNode, oriented with the y-axis pointed in the direction of docking (if I am not mistaken with the orientation). It is not a big deal to add it, but as you said if you are already opening it up you might as well make your own. You are however mistaken about how to add it. It must be added in Unity, not just in a modeling program. Basically the order for making is a part is Model -> Unity -> Part CFG. Sorry Moar, but I tried that once and it failed, then learned about the dockingNode transform. Unity has to have a reference for what direction to apply the magnetic force, and it cannot do that without a transform in the hierarchy.

Have you tried putting a clamp-o-tron on to the hinge? That way you could back up under the hitch, raise/lower one vehicle to dock them (with landing legs or something), then raise/lower till you have free motion and drive off. This way you can connect in the field and the hinge will provide the movement you are looking for.

I doubt it. There is far too much community interest, and he left at least two other people in charge (smartest move). At the very least, they could pass on the control to someone else and Nothke would roll with it. He is a nice guy, as long as there was not a big fight when he got back he would probably be fine.

Good luck to you! I hope to see at least those storage modules come out before then :3 If nothing else, please at least leave permission for someone to pick it up and make a fork as long as they leave proper credit for your content.

Not sure what you mean it would be reacting with the engines. Anyways like I said find a mod like KAS or Kethane where there are devices with toggle states. Basically right click on it and turn it on, right click and turn it off. Ultimately you just need the code segment that makes that work. Realistically to get good functionality in the long run you are going to need to make your own plugin eventually. The stock part modules only do so much.

You will need to write a plugin to do that. Use something like KAS or Kethane to look up a toggle-state for custom parts. That is unless you want to just make an engine that consumes energy and produces X-resource, which may actually be a neat approach as that will give you throttle control.

Oh I know you are not just breaking down molecules. I was saying that for what you are suggesting you COULD explain it that way, but really it is up to you.

Well remember Olympic, it is an engineering choice of mass versus lift. It just so happens with our current materials science that three blade wind turbines are the choice because that is where the effective peak of mass versus thrust is. This KSP, where there are already magic materials and different density laws, so maybe two blades is just more efficient on kerbin.

Jool-V just had an alternator like most engines. Even stock engines generate electric charge while running. You are probably thinking of the HOME mod also from bobcat, where the powerplant module had a "nuclear reactor" in it, which you could throttle up or down for power as needed. As for the converting to solid fuel part, that is really just a chemical process. Since we do not know what liquid fuel and oxidizer actually ARE in KSP, you could swing that. Energy to mass conversion requires astronomical amounts of power, plus an understanding of physics that we just do not know yet ourselves. For example an electron has a rest mass of .511 MeV / c^2, which basically means that it is the equivalent of .511 MeV of energy condensed into a weird, self contained, oscillating state. Protons are about 938.272 MeV / c^2. So in a hypothetical scenario, lets consider 1 mole of stable molecular oxygen (O2). Each oxygen atom consists of 7 protons, 7 neutrons, and 7 electrons. Since neutrons and protons are roughly the same (enough for this), there are 28 * 938.272 MeV / c^2 for the nuclei, and 14 * .511 MeV / c^2 for the electron cloud. 1 mole is 6.02 * 10^23 molecules. So we then have (6.02 * 10^23)(28*938.272 + 14*.511) MeV / c^2 This works out to 1.582 * 10 ^ 28 MeV / c^2 of mass for the 1 mole of molecular oxygen. For the amount of energy, just drop the c^2, so there is 1.582 * 10^28 MeV of energy in that one mole of oxygen. Now as a sobering reminder, here is a couple of comparisons. 1 mole of molecular oxygen is 32 grams. The actual mass of oxygen you consume on a daily basis is about 780 grams give or take. A 20 kT nuclear device will yield about 5.25 * 10^17 MeV of energy if you were able to capture all of it. Suddenly I find myself having much much more respect for the matter around me, and for the idea of energy to matter conversion. Now having said that all, this is a game and not a simulator. Therefore, go nuts and have fun! make whatever you want m8. I personally think that a better-to-justify approach would be to use a quantity of energy to break down stuff and recombine. I think that is really what you are suggesting, but there are a couple of core problems with that too if you want to get into the physics (in quantum the sum of the parts does not always equal the whole, which is why fission produces energy for large atoms)

That is a really slick shipyard/port! This definitely needs to be added as a default launch sight for boats. Would love to launch of the carriers by InfiniteDice from this place. Side note, are you planning on doing some piers?

You know, it occurs to me that an enterprising individual could script a plugin to add the city blocks one by one as time passes. That way the city grows as you play. Hell, you could even key certain conditions since the mission manager has already show that you can capture certain triggers like landing on the moon. That way the more and further you went, the more the city would develop. Anyways I would also be interested in seeing some zeppelin hangars built in to the airport. Just for the flexibility, if it is not a ton more work. I don't imagine an extra hangar building would be too terrible, but then again I cannot do 3d modeling to save my life. edit: It also occurs to me that a REALLY enterprising individual could also code a plugin to take in Kethane-based resources like the ore from interplanetary launch pads and integrate an interface to build the city chunk by chunk too, though there would probably need to be some benefit to doing so before it would be worth it. Possibly something to look at in the coming versions with the additions of a research tree and proper campaign.

I booted up KSP real quick to see if I could find something similar, and have come to the conclusion that the plugin just is not working right with .21 In my case I could not get a kerbal to grab on to the connector on the end of the winch. In your case I would guess that it is not pulling in the text string right for some reason. Whatever the case, use the right click menus rather than trying to use keyboard shortcuts. There are more options available that way anyways. Keep an eye out for the mod to update. When a new version is pushed, depending on what changes in the code a plugin may do anything from not loading, to loading with really weird things happening, to being perfectly fine. And unfortunately sometimes it is not obvious what has to be fixed in the programming to make it work.

Here is a logic test for whether or not we would be able to see a brown dwarf star that was a companion to our own: Can we detect extra-solar planets: Check Have we even been able to detect them other than gravitational influences: check Would a brown dwarf be more massive than a super-jupiter: Check Are these exo-planets more than a couple ly away?: Check Would "Nemesis" be less than a couple LY away: CHECK I am sure you are seeing where I am going with this. If we have not found a brown dwarf companion to the sun by now, we are not going to. The only good mitigating circumstance that would prevent discovery would be a dust cloud with extremely high extinction, but that would also block out background stars which we would notice. The fact of the matter is that idea came up when they were starting to be able to see the minute gravitational wobbles caused by the extreme outer bodies, but had not discovered them. Now that we know about Neptune, Pluto, Haumea, Make Make, etc. it becomes pretty clear that we had just assumed that Uranus was the end of the planets and other large bodies and did not think of the possibility of there being more out there. And before anyone screams, obviously the combined mass of all outer-solar system bodies is peanuts compared to what the mass of a brown dwarf would be which further throws a wrench in the idea.

That is definitely wrong oddible. For Chaterer (as an example) there is nothing in either the thread's OP nor the spaceport page that says to install it that way. Further, the manual that comes with the download says to put the whole RBR folder into Gamedata. Sorry friend, but you are definitely installing mods wrong. They will still function the way you are putting them in, which actually is plus points to squad for making it work either way, but now all mods can go into their own sub-folder in gamedata. A good way to tell if a mod is meant to be put into gamedata or into the basic game folders is simply to look at the contents of the downloaded archive. If the archive comes with a folder inside containing sub-folders with parts plugins etc. then the entire folder should be dropped into Gamedata. If it comes as a collection of folders in the archive it is probably intended to go into the game's root directory as you described. However in some cases this may not be necessary, so experiment with it a little bit. The TT multiwheels do require being in the root directory, but almost nothing else does now. Anyways back to your OP question, .21 might throw off things like mechjeb because of the changes to the SAS and the new reaction wheel system. Mechjeb may be perfectly fine, or it may die horribly, there is no way to tell. In general, most of the time mod development stops once it is clear that a new version is within a couple of weeks away, and the authors attend more to community questions and basically sit there waiting for the new version to release so that they can properly update. TL DR There is a slight delay but most mods update within a day or two.