Loskene

Oh. Shame, I was about to say "cool lander"

Duuuude.

Oh my GOD! That is absolutely insane! I am so far beyond impressed with that guy's ships, he even did the bloody Aurora from Subnautica, incredible artwork. I have nothing to contribute to the topic at hand (I have roughly 0 use cases for the poodle) but I just had to comment on that when I saw it.

If you had crashed it on land you might get something back, but splashdowns without any braking beforehand tend to destroy every part, as they get destroyed on impact without having any change in velocity applied to them or parts behind them. So the first part hits the water, "disappears" without slowing down the part behind it, which does the same on impact and so on until the entire thing is gone. At least that's my personal findings from crashes vs splashes. If you want to get some pocket change back, aim near the mountains west of KSC, impacting land seems to impart motion before destruction which can lower impact velocity of following parts and allow some to survive.

Something to keep in mind with rescue contracts: beware of them on modded installs. AFAIK the craft given to kerbals needing rescue is randomly picked based on what parts have crew capacity, which can include modded parts since the game doesn't check for any other factors besides crew count. Many common mod parts have crew capacity but no hatches to allow EVA, such as inflatable habitat modules, meaning you'll need to return the entire part with the kerbal trapped inside. A dedicated rescue craft with everything you might need (klaw and a large cargo bay to secure and shield bulky parts from re-entry) is required in the unlikely but possible event that one of these parts is chosen, and is one field where space shuttles are exemplary. Though they might be a bit advanced for the stage of a career game you'd start doing rescues at, they're very handy in later game when rescuing kerbals is cheaper than recruiting them.

Yeah I test launcher payload capacities by just sticking tanks full of ore on top of them and seeing if they make it. Ore's quite dense so it makes for good test weights that'll always fit inside the fairing. If they have spare deltaV left over I add more ore or use it to deorbit spent upper stages, if it falls short I take some off. When finished testing my naming scheme for launchers includes their payload tonnage to a 450km 50 degree inclined orbit, to guarantee it'll always put at least that much into orbit from any launch site with some margin left over when flying to lower/uninclined orbits. 450km makes for a 1 hour orbital period meaning your original launch site will pass under it once a Kerbal day, which is handy for testing shuttles. You could just take the KER/MJ deltaV readouts as gospel but since the actual performance depends heavily on flight characteristics and ascent trajectory, I prefer to just use those readouts as my starting point for testing before I find out how much they can really lift.

So someone gave the Kerbals some "historical documents" and I think it gave them ideas above their station. If you're curious about the details it is a fully functional spaceship, made at roughly half-scale to the "real" Daedalus-class explorer. The hull is made from procedural parts (interesting to see the number of shapes you can get from a distorted cylinder), and the equipment and supplies to support a crew of over 100 for 5-year missions is inside, along with fuel tanks, nuclear reactors, ISRU stuff and pretty much anything else I felt like throwing in there. The ship's 80 metres long so there's enormous volume for whatever internal arrangement you want. In fact the primary hull (the sphere) is almost completely empty since I fit everything inside the secondary hull and it kept the centre of mass in a more reasonable place. 18 fusion engines are arrayed in the semicircle above and below the shuttlebay at the very stern, and I plan to add a warp drive when I can figure out what config parameter to change to override the bubble radius. I'm not sure what else I'd add since it's already nearly 300 parts and over 1200 tons. RCS turnabout takes... some time.

Well I don't have them die for every situation, I try to keep my modded installs realistic without going full realism overhaul, which never runs properly for me anyway. So I have them set to grumpy for going without food (we'll say they go into stasis or something), same if they run out of habitation, but if they go without EC for the entire grace period they die. This is to simulate a complete life support failure resulting in loss of crew. If for some reason a ship or base goes without power for 2 weeks that's kind of on me, and it's probably longer than a crew would really survive if the ship's air scrubbers stopped scrubbing and the lights went out. I don't play with mutiny or anything on though because I don't like leaving mission failure scenarios up to random chance. I taunt the laws of probability enough in some of my missions as it is.

Perfect, all I needed to know. Thanks everyone for the swift replies.

Ah, I see, thank you. So is it safe to just let the timer run out then, my kerbals won't actually die if I don't check up on them for a long period of time? Dropping out of timewarp and switching back and forth 30 times during a Duna transfer would do my head in lol

Having a bit of an issue with EC calculation and not sure whether it's a bug or a conflict, wondering if you've heard this one before. (Latest KSP version with everything installed and updated through CKAN) I have a station in LKO with 2 crew onboard and for some reason, whenever I'm not actively controlling it, the electricity in the life support window ticks down as if it's not being resupplied by the solar panels. It runs out of EC and when I switch to it to check, the batteries are full and the EC timer goes back to normal, only to immediately begin counting down again when I switch to another craft. Haven't tested this extensively as I've been in the middle of a career save and didn't want to lose my kerbals over it, so I'm not sure if it's just a display bug or if it thinks they're actually out of power and is going to kill them over it. I've been setting up more space stations and preparing a Duna mission and I'm hesitant to crew any of them now because of this, because it'd mean switching to each of them every 2 weeks to make sure they don't randomly die. If it is a mod conflict I don't know what could be causing it. The station is mostly made out of Tantares parts, which otherwise work fine with the life support, the solar panels are the stock 1x6 deployables, and the only mod I can see messing with the electrical system is Dynamic Battery Storage, which is a dependency for Near Future Electrical I believe. If anything jumps out at you there as an obvious cause please let me know, otherwise I can do some more detailed testing and get back to you. Thanks.

Ah, turns out my ckan was a version out of date and the auto updater wasn't working, my mistake. Updated it manually and it's showing up fine now.

You might want to be aware this mod isn't showing up in CKAN again

Ohh right, I had to remove it for something else a while back, that explains it. Thanks.

Having a lot of problems getting boats made with these parts to work at all, any advice what I'm doing wrong or are these known issues? Shifting them around or spawning them with vessel mover makes them explode or the joints break. I've tried every configuration I can think of re autostrutting, physical struts, rigid attachment, nothing works consistently. Mounting guns on them is another problem, the large deck guns from SM armoury just fall off and sink straight through the hull for no discernible reason and any SLBMs I put into the submarine launcher just evaporate as soon as it touches water. Any help would be appreciated because I haven't been able to make a single functional ship so far.

I'm wondering this as well, as the only bug I'm having with 1.4 is that the control surface settings window buttons don't work, and I guess this also zeroes the deflection allocations because I have no response from any control surfaces, stock or modded. This is obviously problematic for an aircraft. If I can change one config file and just use the stock buttons for setting pitch, yaw and roll control that'd be great.

Good stuff, look forward to checking it out.

I'm getting the same thing as Polishrenegade, none of the parts seem to have been moved from their stock tree locations, they all have their usual parts, but all the ones with the mod's custom descriptions are empty.

Saw steam start a download, got all excited, looked over and it was for Starbound. Proceeded to throw monitor out of window. Anyone else get hit with that particular little bait and switch?