Goddess Bhavani

Hi, Sorry for replying to the previous page. I wholeheartedly agree with you it isn't really necessary to manually balance everything because that may lead to some of the roleplaying fun being drastically reduced for a lot of people. Taking the previous SRB issue discussed in the thread, the custom SRBs are actually fine as they are because they cost a lot more than the stock parts but allow for superior performance through customization. It just takes a bit of roleplaying to not use the P-SRBs if they're drastically more efficient than the stock RT-5 and 10! In any case the P-SRBs are self-balancing in early stock career - go up too high and too fast before even unlocking decoupler tech and the flight becomes a fatal sub-orbital plunge As for Hitchhiker vs Mk1-2 command pod. The command pod has its uses. It won't kill the crew if attempting a parachute water landing. That itself is worth the extra weight to me as ballistic re-entries sometimes take place untargeted and it's not always possible to alter a return trajectory to hit land.

Forgot to review control surface setup! Fortunately this is not a fatal mistake with stock aero as you can reprogram the control surfaces on the fly. With FAR, you can't do this and often leads to a frighteningly realistic conclusion soon after takeoff!

The slow map drawing is one of the main complaints I get from demonstrating modded KSP to 'live' human beings. Glad you found a workaround and I look forward to testing the update!

Haha indeed! If a payload falls out of margin then the moar booster strategy needs to be applied, or in the case of the Delta or conceptual Ares (SRB derived) rockets, use a configuration with moar boosters. I usually have boosters pre-assembled on the A, B, C or whatever configuration I have for the launcher class. I thought as well that the idea of assembling the rocket and setting it aside makes for some interesting decision making akin to deciding on a launch vehicle in real life - I guess early in the project mission planners would be deciding if they are going to order up a Delta or something else, and what configuration / boosters they want way in advance. Of course I think things are simpler for the Roscosmos - they just have Protons for medium/heavy lift, and Soyuz in various upper stage configurations for smaller ones.

I think for early game at least, several classes of rockets will all look the same, improving gradually as the better tech trees are unlocked. I typically save the launcher as a subassembly and class it by 'generation' and lift capacity. As the game goes on I may have yet more generic stacks of general purpose launchers - right now its either Giant SRBs or Skipper / 2.5m cores so I thought to reverse the build procedure and make standard bottom ends first

I second the recommendation to try AntennaRange - the purpose of those comms related mods is not only to make communications more realistic in a way, but also to encourage antenna diversity. They have scalable difficulty so you can disable the "lose control of probes if outside comm range" thing if its too difficult. Stock game, there really isn't incentive to choose larger antennae outside of eye candy. It's RemoteTech and AntennaRange that give incentive to match the antenna to the mission and to setup comm relay networks if you want to send ships with short range comms a long way out into space. And yes I don't mind spending 5 minutes to transmit things, real deep space probes, especially those of earlier generations, don't exactly transmit very fast either.

Mine has to be making this fly and sending it into space. Forward swept, variable geometry wings, primitive engine tech and old infernal robotics joints with the structural integrity of a wet noodle. Oh, and it's supposed to be an S/TOVL too.

Here I am with my slowly-progressing, fresh 1.0.4 Career game finally progressing out from flying Micro Shuttles and moving on to 2.5m stages and Munar missions. This round I would like to use SRB-derived launchers inspired from the NASA Ares I and its proposed heavy-lift configurations. I had big fun with launching primitive orbital stations on SRB-derived launchers in 1.0.2. Partway through constructing a crew transfer vehicle and a prototype munar lander, I realized assembly of multiple ships could be done much easier if the rocket stayed put and I simply swapped the payload on top of the rocket. To facilitate this I set the root part as the SRB, and manufactured a ship on top of it. Each time I finished a ship, I would simply set the root part to be the command module, save it, then place it on the ground. Soon, I had a mini-museum of my future Munar expedition vehicles laid out on the VAB floor! Normally, what I'd do is save a rocket as a sub-assembly and name it by core configuration and tonnage (capability to LKO or LMO) but I felt building the ships 'bottoms up' allowed me to have a better visualization of how the completed stack would look like, and how much tonnage I can safely launch using the Triple Kickback configuration before I needed moar boosters.

2 months ago I built a V-44 Quad Tilt Rotor. It has folding rotor blades

I was just messing around in my old video capture folders and came across this sitting in the hangar for 2 months: It's the V-44 Quad Tilt Rotor which ZodiusInfuser helped me to optimize and add eye candy to - I didn't know fuel hoses were flexible! It also has folding rotor blades, thanks to parts from the IR Rework Pre-release pack. In addition to ZodiusInfuser's auto-deploy action group I also added an auto-folding action group which stops the motors, aligns the blades and folds everything in. I wanted to make this craft into a sort of heli-jet featured in some of the Ender's Saga novels but this proved very impractical: folding the blades of a helicopter in flight is absurdly dangerous for obvious reasons! The craft retains the jet thrust associated with placing a jet engine inline with the rotors, giving the chopper pilot more options in flight control. Proprotor pitch and nacelle tilt is fully functional, plus like my 1.0.x helicopter designs she has rotor trim so no need to mash the W key to keep going forward. Engineering trivia: We don't have the fancy torque-vectoring devices required by a real quad tilt rotor, so making this a pure rotor-lift-only craft has problems. Pulling too much collective will cause the thing to spin out of control due to inability to torque-vector! Thus combination jet and rotor thrust was found by me to be a good engineering compromise, providing safe demonstration of the QTR's impressive hover stability and sling-load capacity of up to 30 tons, depending on fuel load. Lessen the fuel, increase the payload. Dry weight is about 30+ tons and flight tested up to 75+ tons takeoff weight, so you do the math! Coming soon: There's another craft which I submitted for review as a pure rotor-lift vehicle, it's an electric synchropter.

A 2.5m high efficiency turbofan is not as absurd as it sounds. How big is the diameter of the monster turbofans on 777s and A380s anyway? Those look like they can swallow a 737 fuselage whole!

OMG wow I wanted to come on here to post just these requests after (blindly) using WaypointManager for the first half of my 1.0.4 career and then I saw the features all magically appeared in today's updates. Hehe.

This is awesome! The ISS was intended as part of its mission to be an (experimental) orbital factory. Now we can make orbital manufactories in KSP Also possibilities of refitting ships in orbit and making use of mining operations for parts production offworld. How cool is that - 10/10 will try soon.

In 1.0.2 I had a lack of pilots so I hired a couple off the AC. In 1.0.4 I had so many pilots I wondered what to do with them, maybe make dual cockpit setups for each ship, Pacific Rim style.

So tell me, why in 1.0.2 all my rescues were for female Kerbals, and in 1.0.4, all my rescues are for males? What is going on here lol Is there a way to manually change the gender probability? something like 50/50 would be my cup of tea.

Hi, I noticed the Glass Panes and Enclosures do not turn up in the tech tree of my 1.0.4 Career, and with some notepad sleuthing I have come up with the fix! They need the following added to the cfgs and they shall magically appear in the research lab: TechRequired = composites entryCost = 4800 When looking over the stats I noticed some of the items have absurdly high collision resistance and temperature limits. The SuperLarge panel can resist 6 thousand degrees Celcius! Is this intended, or should I bump everything down to normal Structural Panel resilence for the sake of balance? If you're interested I can shoot you an email with all the rebalanced stats/costs plus tech tree assignment, or post a dropbox link here.

Seriously, lol. Even a total space newbie could identify that the Shenzhou is related to the Soyuz when watching Gravity for the first time. Make that 3 space newbies, I brought them to the big screen to watch it.

Maybe the potato has added cheese and bacon bits, forming highlands!

I just wanted to say thanks for the hard work on this mod and, Procedural Parts makes KSP Prettier -

^ That is so funny, ima try it right meow :3 I wonder what will happen if we have multiple Kerbals in the same game?

I've been wanting to say this for some time, in the interest of fairness to newer/active channels and also to promote lesser known channels featuring KSP, of which there are quite a large number. In the current Oscar-B, the Up and Coming sections were definitely welcome!

Excellent, I shall download right meow :3 I thought the crashes were from some other place :3

I have been using micro shuttles as early career workhorses for some time - they are winged Mk.1 designs intended to be an upgrade over the traditional Mk.1 ballistic capsule as the wings allow some measure of cross-range capability - aimed right they can glide back to a perfect runway landing like the precursor to a proper Space Shuttle program. Here is a 3D 'screenshot' of the craft, the X-1: I get a fair bit of comments about the airworthiness of such a craft so I made a short video depicting a routine orbital rescue mission, re-entry and landing. There is no heatshield for re-entry - heat is simply drawn away from the hot front end of the craft via a radiator mounted on the service bays, as well as the wings generating lift to control descent rate. Landing is full manual to demonstrate the natural stability of this wing configuration - yaw control is cross coupled with roll, but there is sufficient lateral stability to ensure pointing accuracy. The service bay doors serve as spoilers and landing gear, too!

I use a radiator to channel heat away from hot parts and towards a 'cold' part of the ship during re-entry. Kinda works. The idea is to simply draw heat away from the leading edge of the vehicle where the cockpit section, without heatshield, is taking the brunt of re-entry heat.

I went all out and made a micro-shuttle out of parts available in an early career game then marketed it as a maneuverable re-entry vehicle. It works well and can conduct Munar re-entries without a heatshield, thanks to it being aerodynamically stable enough for flight, and having a radiator on the 'cold' side of re-entry to prevent BBQing. I get a lot of questions how can such a dainty little flower fly, so here's a video of a simple orbital rescue mission, re-entry and (full manual!) landing.