Loskene

Here's a decent crash course to get you up to speed

Copy one of Tyler Raiz' kOS launch scripts and remove what you don't need. His are set up so you just have to edit the target orbital parameters and it'll take care of the variable details on the way up. There really is no one-size-fits-all gravity turn, even the GravityTurn mod uses a trial and error approach (from starting "best guess" parameters) to refine the optimal trajectory for each rocket you design, every time you launch it.

Another issue to raise is your craft design doesn't suit your landing profile. You were trying to land with zero pitch but your landing gear is uneven, making your nose gear touch down first and causing SAS to try and level the craft while you're trying to force the rear gear down, combined with the precarious balance on one wheel made the whole thing fundamentally unstable. Plus your landing site is unsuitable for the speed you were going and the braking power the craft has, you'll need retrorockets rather than RCS or wheelbrakes to remove most of the horizontal velocity. Since your plane already has rocket engines, try landing backwards, it might actually be more stable touching down the rear wheels first, and you weren't using those wings to begin with so there's nothing necessitating forward flight. Burn the engines to bleed off horizontal speed, pitch the nose up slightly to stay above the ground, then level off for landing once you're slow enough. If you've eliminated all these issues and still end up flipping or crashing then try practising it from an equatorial orbit (over the Great Flats) rather than polar as well, just in case Minmus' rotation is affecting your touchdown at high speeds. Good luck.

If it is a power issue you may be able to skip this by deactivating the large reaction wheel and just using the torque from the probe core to turn. I can't imagine the large wheel would give you more than a couple of a seconds before it burns through the probe's tiny internal battery.

Some points I noticed here I might be able to add to. For the ASL/AGL toggle, I remember saying in the original design thread it should be contextual, and tied to the surface/orbit speed indicator. The game automatically switches from surface to orbit mode and I said the altimeter should do the same for the same reasons. So yeah, good idea Can only speak for myself on this one but I use the vspd display a lot flying planes. Having a swinging needle there I actually find far more useful to glance at while maintaining level flight (which can be a twitchy affair since I like to fly manually) rather than the KER numerical readout. G-force meters are passenger-specific, their GLOC threshold determined by Kerbal stats. The main G-meter for the whole craft is useful when launching rockets to manage your G-loads on ascent, mainly for reducing losses from wasted overthrust in dense atmo, though it could probably be capped to 10G instead of 15 for greater clarity. Rarely does anyone peak the meter for long enough to look at it, and it's generally not helpful information anyway since that's most commonly during harsh re-entries. The lights shortcut, just for lights, probably not all that necessary. I do use that action group for solar panels, antennae, radiators etc. in conjunction with lights for a single use "power on!" button, though even then I generally press the key for it. Give or take, though I do like having an indicator for fixed action groups like that and the brakes. Trim is for planes yes. It's actually kind of bothersome to not have any display for it.

How well does it scale? I've been tinkering with blender space scenes and the free planet models available online are just too low res to show from low orbit at 1:1 size. Been wanting to just make my own planets but not sure the best way to go about it.

"Ice cream research experiment on the Sun" is slaying me

You'll get there pal. Took me a few false starts too before I got to grips with how these special beasts (in terms of KSP engines) handle in practice. The real magic is in "feeling" the amount of resistance the prop blades are getting against the airstream, which constantly changes with airspeed, direction and blade deflection. If you're at speed and the blades are gliding through the air like butterknives through water, drawing only enough force to counteract drag, you need practically no power at all to maintain them. I have the motors set to less than 5% their maximum on every prop engine, which is the minimal range I've found to maintain RPM when the blades are shoveling through the airstream flat-on, and I just leave them at 100, since the blade pitch angle really determines the strain on the motor and the forces on the plane. You can get them to dive through the transonic region but you have to know what way to fold the blades so you don't have any accidents on the way up to that speed. I haven't tested the cargo lift capacity of this one yet but there's a lot of internal volume to work with and the engines are still overpowered for the empty frame, so I have no doubt you can make decent transporters from it. Shame about the timewarp effects though, that pretty much disqualifies them from long distance cruising that they're suited for.

I did notice the stock game is a lot more susceptible to runaway RAM usage or something as well, or I assume since it's my current bottleneck at 8GB DDR3. I've been getting a lot of crashes when switching scenes and loading a craft at the same time, such as reverting to VAB/SPH (reverting to launch and recovering is fine, returning to KSC and entering the building before loading up the craft file is fine, but nothing that combines those actions). I've had to cut down my part count and actively avoid crash triggers because of it, and the only explanations I've found for the symptoms online are RAM limitations. I haven't got framerate drops like you describe though, even with all the visual mods (I've had to remove most of the part mods but scripts and shaders are good), because I have a midrange 4GB GPU and don't run into the problems Lisias mentioned. It wouldn't surprise me to learn the new additions and DLC have raised the minimum system specs across the board.

Resource intensive but enjoyable. Buy it a day or two before you want to play it also, because you'll be waiting a while for the 100+GB of ground textures for the entire planet to finish downloading.

Yeah I found out very quickly even a lightweight swing-wing with the strongest servos is basically infeasible and stopped trying. I don't know how you'd fix that one exactly, maybe have the phys engine disable flexible joints on parts connected to rotor nodes. I also had this problem trying to make a quadcopter with folding ducted propeller arms to fit inside a small diameter fairing. Any uneven forces, like the kind you'd get on approximately anything, applied across an assembly bridged by a robotic part turns the whole thing into wet noodles, worsening the more movable parts are involved. Powered or locked nothing seems to make much difference. Second problem: This feature is actually beneficial when making tough but simple rover suspension.

1.7.3. I have a handful of old versions archived if I ever need them but I've never encountered something that made me roll back or stick with anything but the latest version, so I don't know why I keep them tbh. I use ckan for mods because there's too many to keep track of and I just can't be bothered. Mods break with updates far less often than seems to be commonly thought. The only radical habit change I've had to take on lately is reducing the number of memory-intensive (mostly part) mods due to the expansion of the stock game's basic requirements with additions and DLC. I'm still working with 8gb here so I have to be picky. Upside: quicker load times and less part clutter, 90% of which I never used and just installed because they looked nice.

I think I wasn't clear. For a good half hour before I posted this thread every profile with the default (no) avatar had that as a picture. I should've taken a screenshot of the homepage, it was kind of funny. Disappeared in between posting this thread and the first reply, to be replaced by the broken image link and now the old kerbal silhouette is back.

Binding the RPM limit to an axis binds the full unrestricted range regardless of what you set it to in the VAB, 100% throttle is read as 100% RPM limit, same for torque. I got around this using a KAL with the start/end points set to the range limit I want and binding the KAL's play position to the throttle, that way it only does 0-100% of whatever's in between the two timeline points, rather than the complete range of the slider. This works for any slider you want to enforce a range limit on, I also use it for prop blade pitch angle because the default deflection range is enormous and makes them fiddly to control by eye.

It's just been deleted and gone back to the broken image link it's been on the last day or so. I see you out there, IT guy who thinks it's ok to do backend testing on the live build

lol did someone hack the ksp forums or is there a reason for the new default profile pic

Now send it to laythe in a single launch. Edit: Actually that gave me a legitimately good idea for a relay ship floating around laythe dispatching drones to different biomes or other joolmoons with relay antennas and science gear. They're practically free to orbit from there with an airbreathing first stage.

Let them eat static It didn't perform quite as well in combat as hoped, but it exploded nicely.

Oh yes BDAc is a lot of fun. I'm working on a spaceplane that can deliver HEKV missiles to minmus and I need something to shoot at when it gets there, so here's some raw test footage of the target station

If nothing else I would like all probe cores to be software patched whenever I unlock one with a higher SAS tier, otherwise I just never use them on spacecraft.

So I found out BDArmory works with 1.7.3, works very well indeed. May have a short video of it doing donuts later, thing's awesome to drive. Turret with a howitzer cannon actuates 360 degrees as well as up/down with the translation keys, at a suitably tank-like traverse rate. Going to build a "regular" tank that the AI can control and see who wins.

Serious lack of love for rovers in this thread, especially with the new capabilities breaking ground has unlocked for them. This pseudo-tracked landplane here cruises at a comfortable 60m/s, can reach 80 with the jets before you start losing wheel segments to impact damage, can climb seemingly any terrain without grip pads, and can be thrown off a cliff and fully expect to absorb the landing shock. The motors also only need a fraction of their maximum torque to move so it sips the juice, and it skid steers like a real tank! I haven't built a rocket since 1.7.3 came out tbh. Ey! Build a fricken jet tank huh. Oh, when "rolling your own" wheels, just be careful not to accelerate too hard on top of destructible surfaces like the runway. It seems tarmac has a lower crash tolerance than girder pieces, who knew?

Ok, now we're cooking with fire. I think I have the new props and rotors figured out, and I have to say I've barely started using the KAL1000 but I'm already impressed with its versatility. I have 2 controllers, one for the blade pitch with the 2 points set to the min/max deflection range I want, and that's hooked up to the main throttle, while the second one controls the motor torque and is bound to a translation axis, since the motors spin at a constant rate and I don't need to babysit it. Great stuff.

I want my rovers to sound like this

Ah, the things that could be done when you actually plan ahead Speaking of planning ahead, next thing I'm definitely going to be trying with rotorcraft is using a KAL to restrict the blade deflection range to help mitigate any further landing, uh, hiccups. Unless that bar has a range restriction option, I only saw it on the servos.