cephalo

I have one more dumb question, when we talk about TWR in a vacuum, usually in orbit I guess where things are functionally weightless, how is that measured on these charts? Sometimes I'm frustrated with the sluggishness of the LV-N and would rather have a Poodle for more thrust, but I don't know how to quantify what my desired thrust is. I was thinking of using dV per minute, enough to avoid 8 minute burns to Minmus I guess.

I'm a little confused by the atmospheric chart. This tells me that if I want a rocket with 3000 dv, at 5 tons I want the LVT-30, for 8 tons I want the skipper, but then for 10 tons I want to go back to the LVT-30? If this chart is made by a function, how is this possible? EDIT: said LV909 instead of LVT30

Gaming and food is a dangerous mix. If you take your gaming seriously, you should be calorie counting and that means set meals, not pigging out while you do other things. Multitasking can be efficient, but you don't want efficiency in terms of damaging your health.

I think you'll have to repeat this test a good number of times. Since I'm terrible at launching, I usually have to revert many, many launches, and I have seen that even the same rocket can behave very differently depending on the exact starting conditions. The starting of the physics engine results in weird random stresses right off the bat that can cause rockets to lean a little etc.

I did extensive testing with the 30 torque brakes while learning how to design rovers, and they aren't even noticeable much less stop anything except the tiny-est of rovers.

Nah, if anything went wrong I would just panic and mash buttons. That's my style. Rockets just make the failure more spectacular.

Check out the confidence with which I can approach the cliff edge! Wouldn't have dared this before brakes were invented.

Yeah... Just installed Claw's bugfix mod, and it's a different world. You guys saved my science bus! Now it doesn't matter that I'm almost out of fuel because not only do I have brakes now, but I can climb hills with only battery power! How does fixing brakes accomplish that? Anyway, I don't even need RCS at all anymore as long as I'm careful. Big thanks to Claw for putting in that fix. I see now that rovers were supposed to be viable and fun even on the Mun.

Flipping, spinning... sounds like the same problem to me. Either way your rocket is pointing the wrong way. My rockets flip when they spin, and spin when they flip. I have made orbit after a couple of loop de loops. Never give up!

That's kinda what I assumed too. I spent half an evening tooling around the KSC getting all the biomes, because I wanted to make sure I was prepared to take on the Mun. Yeah, get rid of that stuff plez.

I find that hitting the sound barrier too low altitude causes all my rockets to flip out. This happens to me 4 out of 5 launches. Thank goodness for revert.

Actually that is where the bug lies. If you try to do that with the orange wheels it will max out at 30 instead of 300. I had no reference for how brakes were supposed to work because I wanted front wheel drive on my first rover, and my second rover was a big bus with many wheels where the center ones had their steering locked. All my tweaking broke them both.

Nah, speed is not the problem. It's the sudden stop... (My stepdad used to tell that joke every week) Without brakes though, speed is a real problem.

Here's what's happening to my rovers. I can start with the landing struts down and brakes on, and once I raise the struts, movement starts and gains pace. How can this happen? If my rover is too heavy down RCS should make it worse, if it's too light, it should certainly need much less friction to stay still. It doesn't make any sense. Maybe some of the later wheels are better, but the orange ones really need to be better. These are on gentle slopes by the way. I've had driveways steeper than these slopes. - - - Updated - - - Aha, that must be the whole issue. The thing is, you have to right click to set steering or no steering. That can be important.

That gives me hope. I'm still using the orange wheels. Perhaps my issue is with these.

No, no. That's not even true on Kerbin. Try stopping a rover on the slope that leads from the runway to the KSC. You can't. I've designed two rovers so far, one small and one large, and it doesn't matter how slow you are going on a slope. Nothing will stop you except powerful, wasteful RCS.

I understand that driving a rover in a reckless manner ought to be dangerous. The real lunar rover had a top safe speed of about 3 m/s because of the Moon's bumpy terrain. However, I'm pretty sure that rover had much better handling than any deathtrap you can make in KSP. Here's the issue: Driving over a cliff on the Mun or Kerbin should be not much different than driving off a cliff on Earth; however even on a gentle slope with the brakes full on, you're going to hit 30ms(70mph!) and nothing is going to stop you until the next bump sends you tumbling through the air in an entirely unsurvivable manner. I think we all know this is very, very wrong. I'm quite sure this is also highly unrealistic in addition to being highly unsatisfying. We should be able to drive downhill in a controlled manner with nothing but wheels and brakes. Hey, funny related story. My solution to this problem was to put Verner RCS controls front and back to assist with speed control. I made a big, beautiful science bus that absolutely drives like a dream all over the Mun. Problem solved right? Then I realized that in driving 10km I used about 3000 delta-v in fuel!

Careful there, games in general are all about doing things with one hand tied behind your back. I understand what your saying though. Much of KSP's challenge comes from finding your own solutions to things, not just a lack of tech. I still think the tech progression should last a bit longer. The whole progression system seems kinda raw. With more consideration it could make the first playthrough even better than it is. I also agree with DarkGravity that the first thing they should do is get rid of most of the biomes on Kerbin itself. That's just a silly grind. Far better to replace those points on Duna at least.

Perhaps this is not a good thing, and maybe the tech progression needs to be stretched a bit and labs more necessary. The Kerbin system should provide enough science to leave the Kerbin system to the next step, et cetera. The tree might need a bit of reworking to make sure you have all you need to progress, (rover tech comes rather late for example.)

Right now I think that its a per-craft basis. I have two labs on a craft and it's not working like that.

I'd like to return to the subject of having 2 or more MPL's on a single craft. I didn't realize the limitation before I recently landed a very nice science bus on the Mun that has two labs. Was that a complete waste? When the first lab is finished with the data, can I then load the same experiments into the second lab? Does the first lab make the second lab totally invisible and thereby useless? Have any of you reading this thread explored this configuration in detail? You shouldn't let people build craft with two labs if it's a waste. I like the MPL mechanics, but it needs polish. As someone mentioned, with labs you can complete the tech tree without leaving the Kerbin system. The labs need to be better integrated into the career mode's pacing. That means you might have to change the whole science gathering system to accommodate them.

I have found that using symmetry on struts in pre-assemblies sometimes causes them to fail. My original placed strut will be fine, but the others are pointed into space or somewhere I can't see. I had an issue on a rover undercarriage that was strutted up. When I went to attach the rover pre-assembly, all the struts on one side were arranged seemingly random. I solved my issue by placing struts individually as close as I could. EDIT: Also, I have observed that sometimes things do get in the way of struts after placement, in that you place the strut and it looks fine, and then when you move the part group, a rocket nozzle or something will be in the way and become the new connection for the strut.

Had a crash while in the VAB. Never had one before. Is there some debug report I can give from somewhere? EDIT: I think the crash happens when you get the crew check reminder, open the crew assignment without closing the reminder, and then launch.

We have freeze dried ice cream, and it doesn't get better than that thank you.

I suppose that means there is no functional reason to ever upgrade the astro complex to level 3.