CaptKordite

I just flew a mission to Minmus. In orbit around Kerbin I was fine. Rock steady. In transit, I was fine. No change at all in periapsis or apoapsis. In a 10km orbit of Minmus my periapsis was loosing nearly 30 meters per second. So, even if the relative velocities between two craft were not that much, the fact that both of them are falling towards the surface at 30 m/s really kind of interferes with docking.

"if you have survived three years of KSP where this issue was worse, you can survive it when it's better." When The bug showed up for me, I stopped playing the game because it made docking too difficult to be fun. I waited for the 1.1.3 patch that promised to fix the problem. It did, for a time, but now that the problem has returned, I am again not having fun. I had reached the point in a career (another restarted career, by the way) that docking was going to become much more important. Those problems make the effort not fun. To my mind, KSP is a game. I am supposed to enjoy this entertainment, not merely survive.

Herein is my experience: I had the orbital decay problem appear with 1.1.2. Everything was fine, orbits were rock solid, then suddenly ships started showing a decay. It was a matter of 0.1 meter per second or so. It affected every ship that was under active physics, the ship I was controlling and a ship I was attempting to dock with (making docking more difficult). If I switched to another ship, that ship had a problem. Craft on rails or under time acceleration did not suffer this issue. This is Windows 10 and Steam. I deleted all the files in the KSP folder. Had steam revalidate and reinstall everything. Started a new stock game, and the issue was still there. When the 1.1.3 update arrived it installed and the issue was resolved. I did not attempt loading up any of the old game saves. A pure stock game ran without issue. I added mods, started a new career, and everything continued to function normally until yesterday. The symptoms are slightly different. Most of the craft already in orbit are fine. Their orbits remain steady. All the craft in orbit around Kerbin are fine. Their orbits remain steady. A space station and a lander recently put in Munar orbit are having an issue. Other satellites already in orbit around the Mun and Minmus remain fine. A new satellite in orbit around the Mun has the issue. The apoapsis and periapsis fluctuate quickly, perhaps 3 or 4 meters per second up and down, but they tend downward. With Kerbal Engineer you see the orbital period declining at a rate of about 0.5 second per second. This also occurs with a space station around Minmus. There is a space station around Kerbin, launched after the other two but derived from the same craft file, that does not have the problem. In a Sandbox save, I launched the same craft file space station that was having problems around the Mun. It was stable in orbit around Kerbin but had the issue once it entered Munar orbit. As before, I deleted the installation and allowed Steam to reinstall. The issue persisted on a new stock save. I copied the save file from my Windows 10 install over to my Ubuntu partition (which has graphics issues and runs really slow). The craft in Munar orbit still had the issue. What I don't understand is how I can delete all the files and reinstall and still have the problem. Especially in light of the issue not being there when I first updated to 1.1.3. Is there something stored in the registry? If so, how does it also carry over in the save file to be a problem on Linux?

With the death of Kerbal Stuff, is there a way to get this mod without downloading their 66 Gig torrent? I don't have that much free disk space?

I've uploaded a number of craft at Kerbal-X. Maybe that will generate some new interest in this mod in particular and steampunk in general. http://kerbalx.com/CaptKordite/craft If one could not work out the complexities of anti-gravity in KSP, I should think that it should at least be durable. In "The First Men in the Moon", the Cavorite sphere impacted on the moon quite hard, bouncing and rolling. It could be fun to slam the thing into the surface at upwards of 50 m/s and have it survive the impact.

I have been involved with steampunk for a number of years, have been playing Kerbal Space Program for just a year and have been playing the Professor Phineas Kerbenstein's wonderous vertical propulsion emporium mod for about a month so it was probably inevitable that I would come across this thread. One of the things I do in the steampunk community is present at conventions on Victorian spacecraft. And, in my research for that topic, I found the the 19th Century's ideas of how they were going to get into space, both in scientific romances and in science, was NOT rockets. In 1779, Erasmus Darwin, the famous grandfather of the more famous Charles, made a sketch of tanks of compressed inflamable air (hydrogen) and dephlogisticated air (oxygen) mixing in a chamber and being ignited to make a liquid fuel rocket. He understood the principals involved (that had been generally known for millennia) and understood that compressing (liquifing) the gas would make a better rocket but it would take until the end of the next century with the works of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky to put it all together into what we would recognize as a space craft. In between, rockets sucked. People used them for fireworks. The military used them for signalling. They tried using them as artillery but that's where they really stunk. So much so that no one even made the leap that, if improved, they could take people into space. Even Verne, who imagined the technological steps necessary to take the submarines of his day to create Nemo's Nautilus, didn't consider rockets when taking his protagonists to the moon. By far, the most common way that Victorians got into space, at least in the fiction of the day, was some variation of anti-gravity. Or, perhaps more accurately, non-gravity. Based on new discoveries in the fundamentals of light and electricity, it was not uncommon for scientific speculation to imagine that gravity was something similar. A wave or a ray travelling through space to act on other objects. So, if you were able to make an object opaque to gravity, that shadow would protect things behind that object from the effects of gravity, thus rendering it weightless. While the Cavorite sphere in H.G.Wells "First Men in the Moon" is probably the most famous of these anti-gravity machines, I want to talk about a much earlier, and perhaps the first such presentation. In 1847, John Leonard Riddell published a story titled "Orrin Lindsay's Plan for Aerial Navigation." He called his spacecraft the Electric Balloon and through an amalgam of steel and mercury plus an application of electromagnetism, his spherical ship became opaque to gravity and thus floated above the Earth. To direct the craft in one direction or another he would open a window, thus allowing a ray of gravity to enter the craft, act upon the inside, and thus pull the craft in that direction. His story was ten pages long with five additional pages of footnotes. At the end of the Victorian Era, Wells recognized that, were a sphere like Riddell's to be made suddenly opaque to gravity, it would already have the centripital force of the Earth's rotation and would be suddenly hurled into the sky. (Actually, it would be travelling tangentially to the Earth's rotation, 600mph in England, but would appear to leap into the sky at 150mph.) I could go on but want to spin that back to KSP for now. I know that there is (or was in earlier versions) a way to hack gravity to make it very light. Can that be built into a craft to simulate anti gravity? Difficult to make it quite the same because KSP does use three-body calculations. Imagine falling towards the Mun and having to counter the ballistic fall by opening a window and letting Kerbin's gravity in to slow you down.

I have been involved in steampunk for close to a decade and playing Kerbal Space Program for just about a year and have only just now discovered this mod. I reloaded 1.0.2 just to play this and am enjoying it immensely. Originally a chicken coop, repurposed as an outhouse and then packed full of explosives, this is now a two story rocket for taking taking aristocrats with an overabundance of funds into space. The aristocrats get to ride in the bottom outhouse. So, Kerb-fu, having been involved in steampunk for all that time (and actually moderately known within that wide community), perhaps I could provide some inspirational ideas towards the revival and updating of this fine mod. Cavorite sphere?

Orbital craft. Some historical. Some not so much.

The ones I tested on the ground didn't have the docking ports on the side so that's not what's going on. And, oh, forgot they were Tantares.

So, after grunting this station into orbit (and don't even ask about why the Khleb capsule doesn't have a service module) I find that I am unable to transfer crew into the inflatable lab. When I click on it during the transfer, it puts the crew in the Smoke module. Right click on the inflatable and there is no one there. I built some test craft on the ground and could not transfer any crew into either inflatable module. If it is attached to another module (such as the Smoke here) the crew goes there instead of into the inflatable module. If it's separated, it's as if it's not there to be transferred into. Anyone else noticing this problem?

That particular craft is using the Contares 1875t Decoupler but it could also use the Tantares TK-QS01A decoupler (that's in Tartares LV, right?) More importantly, I have added a Contares BTG2S Upper Heatshield to the Spektr module because it has a tendency to come in nose down on reentry. Adding a heat shield weights the back end so it comes in back end first, keeping the parachutes from exploding. The other Spectr-based craft also has a smaller heat shield weighting the back end.

http://kerbalx.com/CaptKordite/craft Caution. Most of them were designed for 1.0.4. You may need to swap out the http://kerbalx.com/CaptKordite/R7-Semyorka-Booster because, when I originally designed them I had the nesting rockets pointing straight at the core to peal the boosters away in a nice Korolev's Cross. In 1.0.5 that causes the core to explode. And, even then, the replacement subassembly doesn't behave the way I want. I'll need to work on that a little more.

Absolutely. And just to add some more explanation, I created a girder that I attach to every craft before I screenshot it with Kronal Vessel Viewer. Since the beam is a known, consistant length, I use it to adjust the screenshots to a 1px = 1cm scale. The full size version is here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/kordite/23136259069/

My assortment of orbital craft (some historical, some not).

This is my uploaded craft and I just checked it. It uses Tantares and TantaresLV. There are no parts from this 1.0.4 craft that will not work in 1.0.5 so, if you loaded those two, I don't know why you might be missing things. Something to note: When I built it in 1.0.4, I placed nesting rockets to push the boosters away from the core in a nice Korolev's Cross. The new thermals in 1.0.5 unfortunately cause those nesting rockets to explode the core rocket. You would need to rebuild the rocket and move the nesting rockets elsewhere to keep the craft from detonating. Soon, though, I will be posting a new R7 subassembly on KerbalX so you can replace the booster with something a little less explody.

My Vostok experience was similar to Redhornet's, but worse. When the nesting jets activated for my Korolev's Cross, the core stage instantly overheated and exploded. When I decoupled what remained of the core tank, the activation of the second stage caused that to overheat and explode. On reentry, the Vostok capsule was heating up and the ablative was ablating, seemingly as normal. Suddenly, all the remaining ablation burned away and the capsule exploded in the matter of a second. So, yea. Something is up with 1.0.5.

You can use PorkJet's Habitat Pack mod.

With all the talk of landers, I threw together a few vaguely historical landers.

I've got some stuff over at Kerbal X. [Link]

Mir 2 Craft files available at Kerbal X

Here's my interpretation of Orbital Technology and RSC Energia's Space Hotel. Craft file at Kerbal X.

Soyuz-R Soyuz-P My other stuff at Kerbal-X [LINK]. GLONASS will be posted soon. Working on a Mir-2 as well.

I've had issues with the R7 flip, even in the previous versions. I was never able to get the hang of adjusting the throttle on ascent. I tend to solve it with a consistent gravity turn and limiting the engine thrust to have a 2.0 TWR at launch. I have to go back and rebuild a bunch of craft then re-upload them to Kerbal X.

And. . . .there it is. The issue wasn't the version. I was also running the Soviet Career Conversion mod. That apparently limited a number of parts, even when not in career mode. Of course, in my haste to clear that out I accidentally got rid of some things I didn't want to delete, like the Mir-2 station I was working on. But, hey. Now I have ALL THE PARTS. I think I'm sending Gemini to the Mun with Project Pilgrim.