cephalo

Look on the wiki entry for CommNet. There is a link to a google sheet that calculates signal strength between two points. Keep in mind that just because you have the top level tracking station and powerful DNS, doesn't mean two satellites will talk to each other. No matter what, you need access to powerful antennas to communicate long range.

I'm thinking that the airplane situation is way better than it was in 1.1.

I don't know why I'm the only one or two getting crashes, but I'm definitely enjoying this version.

Ok, I get it now, the range for the HG-5 and the DSN is large, but between two such antennas is low. I figured out how to use the google sheet linked in the wiki. EDIT: Also, the range between the HG-5 and the command module built in radio is extremely low. So unless I was right next to the sat in orbit around Mun, I would not expect a relay hop.

Ok, so when they say short range, they mean less than the Mun lol. The very closest body to Kerbin. So if you are using relay antennas, you can't do remote piloting? It's only for data transmission? That's kindof a bummer. Does that mean you can't do remote piloting unless you have a direct connection to Kerbin? That would seem to largely defeat the purpose of building a communication network. EDIT: The wiki says the the HG-5 has a 500Mm range with a level 2 tracking station. Also, the sats themselves have a 100 percent signal strength with Kerbin. When I have other craft around Mun, I have a low signal strength. I don't actually have antennas on those other manned craft however, maybe that's why they don't relay. Even without the antenna, they have a strong signal in LKO that gets weak around Mun.

1.2 is the best update for a long time. I'm still early career but everything works for smoothly, and I love how the orbit paths aren't jittering everywhere when I'm doing a rendezvous. I also love how my landing doesn't explode on take off at 60 ms. It crashes quite a bit, but I'm sure that will be fixed.

So I'm trying to figure out how the new CommNet works. It's early in my new career game, and I have the HG-5 antenna that says it can be used for short range relays. So I set up a satellite in polar orbit around Kerbin and another in polar orbit around Mun, but when ever I send a ship out to Mun, it doesn't seem to use the relay even though the signal strength to Kerbin is weak, and the satellites have a direct line of sight to each other. I'm not sure I understand how this is supposed to work. Did I start my career with the wrong options? I'm using 'Normal' difficulty.

I wonder, do the new fuel flow rules change the dv calculations? I can see that the crossfeed options do.

Going interplanetary is much more work in general, and there's no real way to test your craft in those environments without cheating, so you can potentially eat up a ton of time for a design that just won't work. I tried to do a huge Jool 5 challenge to gather all science in one mission, and I just petered out after some failures. It was fun, but when all the fun was had, I couldn't get myself to carry on to actual mission success. Conversely, getting to low Kerbin orbit in a super awesome two man spaceplane is an exhilarating ride that takes a few minutes. When I get the urge to play, it's for this.

I'm not sure exactly what those tweakables do. So far I haven't had any problems with 'donuts on the runway', but when I've messed with the tweakables to figure out what they do I did see some of that.

So I tried something similar to Regex's design, and I'm finally able to fly and land. The big difference between my first plane and this plane is that the new plane doesn't use the Mk1 liquid fuel tank. That seems to be the component that the steerable gear can't contend with, plus I was landing with a full tank. I do believe the landing gear ought to be strong enough for the aircraft parts in the same tree node! Planes do have to land with a full tank sometimes right? I haven't yet seen the issue of sliding around, at least not to a degree that makes things impossible. I suppose I'll run into that later. I would still like to see a first tier science plane design that incorporates the Mk1 fuel tank for some longer range, but that can land with a full tank. I couldn't make that happen.

I'm going to give that a try regex, it has less fuel than I have on mine which should make it lighter, but mine doesn't land so I gotta try something different. Gimme a design! Screenie will do.

I've designed all kinds of planes in this game and landed them on all kinds of planets. Huge planes, small planes, space planes, everything. I think a lot of you guys are making assumptions as to the state of the early landing gear because you haven't changed your designs. I'm wondering if pre-1.1 designs aren't using the new parts? Seriously, confine yourselves to the first aircraft tree and make a plane that can land on the steerable landing gear. You cannot. Show me a 1.1 design that can do this and I will gladly use it and shut up.

That's about World War I tolerances. A SPAD XIII should be able to handle that on takeoff without catastrophic failure, although they probably did fail on occasion due to a loose tension cable or whatever.

I think in order to create an enjoyable experience for the new player, you have to get them to the Mun at least before frustrating them to this degree. Remember the flight controls (WASD) are horrendously imprecise. If a -2.5ms vertical speed is too much for landing, tapping the S key is going to send you flying back up at +5 ms. You have to go back and forth to get a good vertical speed for landing. I would also like to point out that the game was not like this before. You could abuse the landing gear, and it was fun, and the game was a huge success.

I still need to try putting the steerable wheel in the back, but in the front you can't even taxi above 50ms on the dirt runway without collapse. 10m/s vertical speed not required. Landing at less than 1ms doesn't work.

I'm more concerned about what new people think between now and the 6 months it takes for 1.2 to roll out. I know KSP is great, I'm totally sold on that, and yeah, I can mod out my specific problems. Perhaps once you climb the tech tree, being careful with your landing gear is enough, but seriously, have a look at the first airplane tech and the dirt runway and see if you can make that work at all with the smallest juno powered science plane you can conceive. I don't think this scenario was playtested. Mind you this is the very early game, when new people are still figuring out how to make a plane fly much less land. The contracts for Kerbin really don't pay well enough for elaborate solutions, and this is almost all of the contracts offered at this stage. I think it's a big mistake to let this continue for a long stretch.

I'm sure you can make parts that can't fail. Just make em super strong.

I realize that the problems we are having with landing gear are complicated and might require Unity upgrades and whatnot to fix properly, but career mode is greatly diminished by the state of things right now. If it can't be fixed then don't fix it, just make landing gear invincible for now. At least then we can progress through career mode! Pre 1.1 landing gear was nearly invincible and while that's not realistic it was plenty fun. Most of the early game contracts have to do with flying to some place on Kerbin in a plane, and all you have is this washboard dirt runway and Styrofoam fixed landing gear. So instead you have to put together some absurd rocket/parachute based solution as a work around to an early 1900's problem. It's an horrendous experience, and I don't want to be recommending this game to people just to have them run into this wall of frustration and think there's something wrong with my taste in games! Forget physics calculations, just make them not blow up.

Too funny. So I thought it would be fun to restart a career in 1.1. because I hadn't played in a long time. I have the dirt runway, very little money and the first tier of plane parts. Very difficult to make a functional plane taxi down the dirt runway fast enough to take off. Even with a tiny plane, any faster than 40ms will blow up the front gear. Forget about landing, even on the surrounding plains which are far more smooth than the supposed runway. If this had been my first playthrough, I would be turned off in a big way. Not fun to progress through career without the use of planes.

I haven't been to Eve with a spaceplane, but I've been to Jool. In my case, everything with less than 2400k tolerance needed to be stowed inside a cargo bay. I was able to descend with a very high angle of attack, almost perpendicular. I did have a small heat shield on the nose which takes the brunt the heating by far, even when the rest of the plane is hitting the airstream just as much. The shielded docking port is slightly less tolerant, and possibly not enough for the new role that nosecones have in 1.05, which is to take 90 percent of the heat. Forget about airbrakes, they are for subsonic flight now.

After looking at the stats, it looks like the panther is very efficient without the after burner, and just as efficient as the whiplash with the after burner on and almost as fast and 2/3 the weight. It might work well actually.

I bet you have some action keys set to close the intakes in an unexpected way. Depending on your test environment, sometimes the toggles on the rapier mode switch and the intake closure get out of sync if you've made a lot of changes in the SPH.

You need to go really fast to get to orbital speed. I haven't tried the panther yet, but it might be helpful in reducing the needed rocket fuel, but since the afterburner mode is inefficient, I can't say if it's better than full rockets. I can tell you it will be more challenging than building a normal high-tech spaceplane, which already takes some practice, because you have to build it right and fly it right. If you've already done that, it might be a fun challenge, but at mid tech there are better ways to accomplish the mission. If you want a cheap way of rescueing Kerbals from LKO, you might find it a lot easier to build ssto recoverable rockets.

I think it tells you the version on the intro screen. A lot of the stuff is subtle other than the new parts in the VAB.