Sharpy

Probably one of Duna Elcano sessions. The entire thing took me like a week, I was sick, staying at home and playing KSP nearly all the time I didn't sleep. Putting some electronic music (Jarre, Oldfield) on, and just driving over Duna, trying to keep my speed within 18-22m/s (the trucky would get flippy when driving any faster) in 3x phys-warp, staying the night whenever batteries ran out for the night, planning the route using Scansat maps, stopping to pick science or screenies of a next anomaly or just a stunning piece of landscape, it was an incredibly tranquil experience. I believe I did put some >12h segments into the trip. Let me tell you driving through Duna dust storm with Oxygene 3 playing is some unforgettable experience.

On topic: bending is often creatively used. Various parts have various breaking force and various flexible bending force. You can prevent bending using autostrut and strut connectors (very rigid), or you can embrace it - the classic part abused for that is the Spider engine (the surface-mounted Ant variant) which has quite high breaking force but relatively weak bending/flexing force - so you can use it as a hinge joint. This is a vehicle suspension made using the Spider engines as hinges. (doing this currently requires hacking KSP to disable autostrut on wheels, which automatically autostrut to heaviest part(s) - so without the hack this trick doesn't work. But an alternative is trailer hitches from the Lynx rover. A set of parts that allows similar creative liberties without affecting core mechanics: And this is another "creative" use of the mechanics, using I-beams and struts (which, as I said are very rigid and strong) plus excessive weight: I even managed to simulate cloth physics using the stock bending mechanics: https://kerbalx.com/sharpy/Quilt

So, today, I saw a guy walking down the sidewalk, carrying a lamp shade. A classic 'cut cone' red lamp shade for a standing lamp, open top, rigid red material around. He was talking with a girl, and he was carrying the lamp shade behind his back. Don't ask me why, he just held it with both hands over his ass, wide side to his back, narrower behind. Thought 1: Seems like atmospheric nozzle. Jet engine probably. Thought 2: Methalox.

I've got some planet packs and now I'm not sure if some of the planets can be landed on, or will result in my demise the same way attempt of landing on Jool does. I'd prefer to find out not through dying though, and I'm really not sure where to look for this info. Some help?

I'll try that next time. The drive is from KSPIE (Interstellar Extended).

I was short some 20k science to get the Alcubierre drive, and I drained Kerbin and Eve dry of science, plus had both Jool and Sarnus explored by minilanders. What's left? Strip-mine Duna of all science. First, a scansat to map it and get all the orbital science there is to get. So I made a VTOL nuclear-powered airplane. Fun thing. I'm playing with KSPI, which severely nerfs all nuclear reactors - from other mods too. The Roentgen nuclear jet from MK2 stockalike would overheat like crazy, core meltdown within 20 seconds. It had limited fuel, limited lifetime, and the jet itself was just as underwhelming as originally. BUT. KSPI adds 'thermal jets' that use 'waste heat' for running... and Roentgen was so horribly nerfed with excessive heat production, that I just started it for some 10s after entering Duna atmosphere, to get it hot, then switched it off... and from then on I could fly using the thermal jets for free... by the end, after crossing Duna in all directions several times over it was hardly any cooler than after I shut it down, and the thermal jets operated at... excessive efficiency. At one point I left the plane unattended, going to the toilet, and found it with the trajectory going to a 300km apoapsis and maybe 100m/s from stable orbit. Most of the time I was operating it at 10-20% throttle. Landing in VTOL mode was quite challenging, as the throttle was rather sluggish to respond, but I visited all the biomes, all the anomalies, and... ...got my FTL tug ready. Then after delivering a dumb station to Valentine to finish a long-overdue contract, I spent over 2 hours trying to get my tug back into Kerbin orbit. Not easy to shed 22km/s of excess velocity using only gravity assists against Kerbin, repeated through warping from the system edge back to Kerbin atmosphere, over and over.

I began with 1.1 when tutorials were already good, and dutifully went through the basic tutorials for orbiting, launch and Mun landing. Then I started the science career and started flying right away. Took me a couple months to learn gravity turn, learn that you can set planets as maneuver targets (had my first Duna flyby done by then...) and to master docking (I could do it pretty early on but would take me hours every time). But other than that, touch and go.

Tourists should not be able to go EVA ever. There's a mod, 'Take Command' which allows assigning kerbals to command chairs on launch or transferring them to it. AFAIK in stock you'll never see a tourist outside a pressurized vessel.

BTW, you really, really don't need fancy stuff. There was a guy who sent a big rocket with a couple hundred small relay sats somewhere between Vall and Laythe Then he spun it up, and released all these probes, ejecting them all in random directions. Many fell to Jool or Tylo, but more got random gravity assists and were sent all over the system on random trajectories. Instant system-wide relay network!

Kubuntu 16.04.4 LTS

Got 0.13-3 running. FPS is still at ~1, but at least GUI is responsive - if I click something, I'll have it active come next frame or two. Didn't make it to orbit but got a good suborbital flight without killing my kerbals. Thanks!

Will try tomorrow... but doesn't WINE introduce an entire layer of overhead?

Thing is I'm getting the 1-2 FPS in scenes where physics doesn't matter - KSC 'choose building' view, main menu etc. Oh, did I forget to say 'Linux'? What's the oldest Linux version?

Relays work pretty simply - if the relay antenna is in range of KSC, any antenna (including relays) in range of the relay antenna is considered "in range of KSC" (and shares this property further.) Designing clever constellations of satellites that always "see" each other and at least one sees the KSC is a big exercise and a game of its own. For your purposes, you don't need that really. Now pt. 2. a craft with: a) a command pod with the "control point" property, with the required number of pilots on board (usually 1), b) the big probe core, and c) a relay antenna, provides the same functionality as KSC regarding relay networks - ability to control craft without pilot remotely; obviously first hop range depends on the quality of the relay antenna installed. It doesn't need connectivity to KSC - and it is controllable (because it has a pilot on board.)

With Tweakscale practically always the scaled part is worse than a 'natural' part of that size. The only exceptions are where said 'natural' don't exist in given size, or you don't care about the specific trade-offs. E.g. I almost always tweakscale RGU from 1.25 to 0.625 size. It's considerably more expensive but provides SAS modes Hecs doesn't, and gives reaction wheel just good enough for microsats (Hecs is too strong). And is way neater. I also frequently scale batteries up or down; Z-4k to 1.25 giving me a weaker, slimmer, lighter alternative to Z-1k. I definitely prefer to upscale Vernors instead of using several smaller. There's no 0.625m stock Vector, which makes extremely fun engine for lightweight launchers. The radially mounted Thud in its original size is not very useful, but tweakscale it to half the size, and you have a wonderful engine for small landers etc. Plus some things *just barely* don't fit right. The SPH/VAB trucky is juuust a little too narrow to fit MK2 parts in the back snugly. Scale them to some 85% and you get this.

Or you could send a couple *good* relay mini-sats on the way, or a 'remote control point' pod with a pilot, a big probe core and a good relay towards your engineer, to give him range.

Reposting this once again: I have a small creepy story to share. "You CAN'T pilot this thing, Jeb," groaned Bob. "I told you to use the autopilot." "Okay, okay, let's try again with the autopilot then!" "Do you really have to fly full speed two meters above the surface?!" "I've got it. This autopilot works flawlessly!" The speeder approached the tower, climbed above its upper surface, and moved slowly towards the roof. Then - everything went entirely dark and quiet. Bob could only hear his breath in the EVA suit. Bob stood up, reorienting himself. His vision returned. The old tower was gone. He spotted a silhouette nearby. "Jeb, is that you?" "Jeb?" "...Jeb?" "Mission Control! Revert Revert! Rever..." But Revert didn't help. The control tower was not the only thing gone. The other thing gone was the Sun. And all other planets. Morning would never come again. tl;dr: Throttle Controlled Avionics can't handle geometry of the old control tower as reference for altitude hold.

The idea is that 1 Atmosphere is the unit of pressure basing on atmospheric pressure in normal human homeworld (Earth) conditions at human homeworld average sea level. (meanwhile Pascal is Newton/meter^2 which is based on universal quantities). Not sure why g wouldn't follow the same rules; it is kinda inconsistent - it's gravitational acceleration on Earth. I guess one reason might be because specific impulse is closely tied to it and so your engines would all have a different specific impulse depending on the mass of your homeworld. (g is used as the conversion factor between mass (kg) and weight (N); specific impulse in seconds is the time an engine can fire producing thrust equal to weight of fuel used up in that time in Earth gravity.)

So, I'm stuck at a hospital, with my netbook and bored out of my skin. Intel Atom 1.6GHz, integrated Intel chipset, 4GB RAM, 1024x600 resolution. I tried installing KSP and it... uh, runs, kinda. All settings that are accessible through options set to barest minimum. I'm getting about 1-2 frames per second in VAB/SPH, even less just in general KSC view. Didn't even get to launch; took me over a minute to get a fuel tank node-attached to a cockpit. Are there mods or other tricks that reduce the system requirements / load below that? Get rid of the kerbals doing kerbal shenanigans on the floors of VAB/SPH, the fancy flickering lights on the walls there, whatever to make the game to run a little better...? Or maybe I should visit the thread about old KSP versions and get KSP 0.2-something instead?

Oh, now I recall... decided that LV-N is far too long for a stable landing and clipped it right across the lander can top to bottom. Conical tank, reaction wheel etc on top, three stubby landing legs (structural pylons) and just the tip of the bell nozzle sticking from below the lander can. The entire rocket was hardly taller than the engine. And I flew it a lot... poor pilot would likely soon die of cancer.

Yeah - that's why 'feature request', not a bug report or such. The feature would allow breaking another built-in editor restriction (the forced autostrut) - akin to surface-attaching node-attach-only parts, so I think EEX is the perfect mod to host it. Thanks!

Yeah. In every part of the craft you have the option to toggle between "autostrut:none, heaviest, root, grandparent". But in legs and wheels you see "Autostrut: heaviest (locked)" and can't change it. That makes vehicles like this one impossible without use of the select few parts that bypass the autostrut. (currently, the complete list of parts that allow that is 1. Lynx hitch, 2. Lynx flexible tunnel, and the new 3. trailer hitches from the beta version of KAS.) Had I used the classic stock hinges based on Spider engines, the above would never work, being completely rigid as every wheel would be autostrutted to heaviest without any chance to move it respective to other parts.

Oh, good. I was only using Aerospikes as RCS. 4 thruster blocks of 5 aerospikes each. Why, you don't put RCS on asteroids?

A semi-truck with low-bed was passing by, carrying two steam-rollers and the asphalt-laying machine, completely crowded front to end. Thought 1. What a masterful packing of payload. Thought 2. How would one put a fairing on that?

SC-62 is carryable by default. Drag it to inventory [tab] and the kerbal will wear it. Normally you can carry any item under the weight limit any distance in microgravity through a trick: get the kerbal on a 'flyby' trajectory by the part you want to carry in direction you want the part placed. Grab while flying, drop when close to the target point. You can't steer between them, just let your momentum carry you, so it's quite tricky to get right, but I've been moving quite heavy loads around Gilly that way. To grab even heavier items, gather many kerbals within 'grab' distance of the heavy item, 1 kerbal per ton, and have your designated 'carrier' (engineer) do the flyby. Only the 'grab' location matters, you don't need the whole group at the destination. (of course attaching it precisely where you want while flying quickly isn't all that easy, but hey, it's a game!)