Cyrious

Huh. Ok then, is there a setting somewhere to turn them back on, or is this a "code's not there anymore, you're SOL" type deal? Welp, found the setting, got the countdown back. Still liked the pips though. Maybe a future version of the mod can override the stock countdown text with them.

I seem to have run into an issue where the Countdown Text (the pips, i also tried editing the config to text according to the instructions) bits do not show when approaching a maneuver node. I'm not sure if its a bug with the mod itself or it having an issue with other mods/squad's code instead. The mod itself IS working, I've seen the Geosync, time to entry interface and SRB burn time indicators, but not the one that's arguably the most useful, the pips themselves. Looking at the log doesn't show any errors (so far as I can see) of the mod spazzing out or otherwise glitching, so I dunno what is going on. Any ideas?

Built and launched this thing a couple days ago. Figured I'd make a bit of a shift in how I handle things getting crew to and from craft within the Kerbin system. Normally, what I would do is send an expendable rocket with the crew pod/craft on top to the destination station/ship, let them do their thing, then fly them back. Obviously this has the flaws of using more resources and materials, not to mention having to design and launch a new rocket each time I want to send a Kerbal somewhere. This is my solution to it. Instead of launching a crewed craft directly to the destination, I instead launch a spaceplane to the station (500km might be too high though for round-trip spaceplane flights), drop the kerbals off, then use nuclear thermal inflatable crew pods (in 3 or 6 man varieties) to shuttle them further on. Liquid Fuel is fairly easy and cheap to manufacture in space, so keeping an ample fuel supply set up for the pods will be a simple affair. Just in case though, the station comes equipped with a basic LF/OX/Monoprop fuel supply for all types of visiting craft. To the left and the right on the C-arms, past the centrifuges, there's 5 docking ports, 4 opposing ports and 1 in-line port. The opposing ports (8 in all) host the 3 man pods, the 2 in-line ports host the 6-man (or larger if I really want to use the 2.5m class inflatable pods) pods. The spaceplanes dock to the arms holding the pair of 3-man inflatable globes. The Clamp Sr ports are for large rigid craft either coming from kerbin or in from the muns. Not shown here, beneath the station is an octo-girder port so I can attach a fuel module to it for additional onboard capacity. As for the pods themselves: Thats the large pod. And thats the small. Both pods use either 2 or 4 mini-NTR engines (750 ISP) for propulsion, come with remote control, and have enough range to get anywhere within the Kerbin system and back. And since I dont have to worry about silly things like re-entry, I can optimize the design for space ops. The one big issue I have with these engines though is that the little buggers run very hot, and thus radiator mass both on the pods themselves and on the vessels they'll be working from is required. Fortunately, all of my stations have radiators on them, so dumping the waste heat after arrival is a trivial matter.

I'm back! Got distracted with other games but now I'm back to playing KSP. First thing I did: go into the sandbox save I have setup and build a system-wide comm network, well, the primary elements of it at least. I went a little bit overboard on the redundancy, main save will be even more so. Here's how I got it set up. System is split into 2 halves, Inner (Moho, Eve, and Duna) and Outer (Jool, Sarnus, Urlum, Neidon, and Plock). Every planet within their own half is linked to the next planet further out, and the one further in (ex. Eve has links to Moho and Duna). Every planet has a direct link to Kerbin. For the outer system they have backup links to Dres, which then moves on further in to Kerbin. I should have set up the inner system with direct links to Dres as well, but eh, I'll get around to it later. For planets with 1 moon, its a simple point to point dish link between the main relay and the moon sub-relay. For planets with more than 1 moon, I do the same chain linking + direct link to master relay I do with the greater system. Eventually, there's going to be 3 tiers of commsat: Master Relays: Connect planetary subnets to each other and Kerbin. Dominated by massive satellites/stations (Sarnus' relay needs a whopping 8 of NFE's 500EC/s Blanket arrays to generate enough power, with the support structure for clearance to match; getting that one out on the real save is going to be an interesting exercise unto itself.). Typically no more than 1 per planet. Sometimes equipped with omnis, but usually use a short/medium range dish keyed to point to the active vessel. Moon Sub-relays: Connects the moon subnets to each other and the local Master Relay. Smaller than the master relays, and dont have the dish range to get out of the local planetary system. Are always equipped with omni-antennas. Always 1 per moon, only omitted if the SOI is too small to effectively support one without losing it to the parent body or having the game eat it because it's too close. Equatorial sub-relay ring: Around the equator of each body, 3-4 Omni-only satellites link to each other and the local Sub or Master Relay. If the target body's SOI is too small for them they're omitted. If the target body's rotation is fast enough, they're placed into stationary orbits. I am using RemoteTech, as it gives me a greater level of control over how my network is set up and ran. Certainly more of a pain to set up, but it works out in the end I think. Now, you might be asking why I chose Dres for the backup relay links. My answer: Its there, might as well make it useful. The higher than normal inclination relative to the rest of the system helps keep a link running as well. The system I built on the sandbox save is meant to essentially serve as the prototype to the network on the main save. Edit, neglected to add: Speaking of relays and other craft, I also launched this around Kerbin on my main save. It is the craft for my Eve/Gilly exploration and setup mission. It contains: The mothership itself: ferries all other craft alongside it. Power is provided by a mix of solar and the nuclear reactor at the center of the vessel. Propulsion is provided by 6 argon ion engines, 3 of which are throttled down a bit to keep within the power envelope. The Eve lander: Has a full fairing shroud and heat shield on it. Deployment will be from very low Eve orbit just outside of the atmosphere, and the onboard thruster package in the shroud will bring it in. 2x R.a.T.S: mapping and resource scanner probes 2x Dedicated sub-relays 6x Equatorial commsats BTW, if any of you ever get the chance, try playing on a large screen, it is leagues better than doing it on a 19" screen.

Yep. It does however help to check staging BEFORE you press the big red LAUNCH button Meanwhile, I'm busy doing yet more ore runs to the station. The tedium mixed with showing up at each endpoint of the journey and seeing the respective base/station is on fire again is... interesting. Then again, the base/station constantly being in a state of overheat is why I went absolutely overboard with the cooling in the first place.

Most likely. At least he didn't use the Whirlijigs to do it, or go on EVA and slap them directly onto the reactor casing.

I blame Harman. He keeps using the ISRUs to cook his burritos.

This is apparently what happens when I have something still hot core-heat wise (I think) on the station then run off to go do an Ore run. The off-line resource management dumps it all into the station without taking into account the massive amount of radiator area I have, and when It loads up again, the entire station is a good 200-300K hotter than what it should be at this distance from Kerbol. Its why I did a major upgrade of the cooling system to the 8 monster radiators, so that every time I came back from a run while I had left something on the station hot, it would far more rapidly dump the heat. I figure a 12x increase in heat rejection rate compared to before would help things a bit. Maybe I should rename this thing Hades Station, and use the floodlighting to get a nice red-orange glow going. Edit2: Cooling definitely works. On arrival and deployment of the main radiators, I had a peak radiation flux of well over 600MW. By the time I finally docked it was down to 65MW.

This is what happens when I have a major thermal event on my station. Note the 600MW of heat rejection in progress. Edit, it actually gets bad enough to the point where the heat shield on the crew capsule starts consuming ablator.

Just making another cargo flight to the station. I went and burned all 20k units of ore already up on the station to fill up the fuel, monoprop, and lithium tanks. Now I get to spend what I send up on converting into nuclear fuel, both for the reactor (as I launched it empty), and for sale on kerbin.

Yes I did. There's 6 modules there: The Core module, which contains crew quarters (for the ever critical engineer and a pilot), the fuel storage module (worst one to get up in terms of awkwardness), the Ore storage module (not much better as it was the heaviest), the processing module (by far the most expensive due to the uranium reprocessors), the docking bar (which has room for up to 7 cargo craft, 2 of which are currently docked), and the power/cooling module. I spent something like 3 and a half million funds getting it up into space and another 1.5 million getting the Mun-base feeding the beast built. On the plus side, I no longer have to deal with launching a ton of fuel alongside my interplanetary craft. I can launch them with just enough to make it to the Mun, then use the cargo craft to transfer fuel over.

I upgraded the Fuel station's Power and Cooling module. 2 reason for this 1. I had no major method of power production during the night cycle and thus had to stop production while in the shade. 2. This: Thats my entire station running in excess of 500K, with the radiators saturated in their output. I got tired of coming back to the thing only to find the heat had freaked again and turned the whole smash into a sauna. Solution: Moar radiators. Like, an unholy crapton more, plus heat exchangers on top of that (I think the exchangers come from the Radiator pack that is supposed to accompany NF-Electrics). In addition to the original 10MW core heat capacity of the 8 XR-1250 Radiators, I added 8 DF-8K Graphene radiators, adding another 64MW of core heat rejection capacity and something like 1.5GW (Thats Gigawatts) of total heat rejection capacity to the station. The heat exchangers will (hopefully) help draw heat away from the rest of the station and into the monstrously huge radiators, allowing thermal pulses to be shed faster. Both the XR-1250s and the DF-8Ks are directly attached to a heat exchanger in pairs. Each heat exchanger also has surface mount radiator panels attached to deal with smaller heat pulses that take too long for the big and hueg panels to get to work on. All in all it comes out to almost 80MW core heat rejection and ~1.7GW total heat rejection. Overkill? Yes. Do I care? Nah. As for power, I stripped most of the solar arrays off the design, leaving 4 for standby and light power generation. The batteries were also removed, as both the local power storage and bulk power generation has been taken over by a 2000EC/s nuclear reactor. This solved multiple problems, including night side power generation and not having enough power to run the entire station at full bore. As a nice little bonus, I managed to trim 20 parts off the total count, because this thing is a laggy monster and every little bit helps.

Today in KSP I learned that the heat system can be quirky if I leave everything on while I'm away from the target vessel. 147.8 Megawatts of heat outflow, and they were saturated for a good couple of minutes before temperatures base-wide began to drop. So, no more leaving the drills, ISRUs, and reactor online while I'm away. Things tend to get toasty as a result. Oh, and if anyone knows what this Z-fighting bug is and how to fix it (only kicks in if I've been switching back and forth between vessels and generally moving about. If I start the game and go straight to the target, it's unnoticeable/barely there.), I'd be quite grateful.

First flight of the ore hauler! A 3.75m class Kontainer (10,800 ore), 4x Quad-Round Kontainer tanks for propellant, and an RE-I5 Skipper as the engine due to the enormous Munar launch mass of almost 200 tons. Empty of cargo this thing could probably make it to Jool and back, but fully loaded theres about 1100m/s Delta V to play with. Oddly enough, refueling is done on the ground, as once I've offloaded to the station, there's more than enough fuel to get back down on the ground without having to do on-orbit processing. Not my best design IMO, I miss my Novapunch engines.

I completed construction of my base. Let me show you its features! In the middle, obviously we have the command and living quarters. An Astrogation module serves as the command, while a "Shelter" Hab module serves as living quarters. To the foreground-left, the U-shaped structure is the primary landing zone for cargo ships. Directly opposite of that, illuminated by the spotlight is the crew landing zone, currently empty. To the right, we have in clockwise order: The rather disgustingly overbuilt cooling module (we're talking 16MW of core heat rejection, I could cool everything down here and my previously shown fuel station with that kind of cooling power and not saturate the radiators. Needless to say, as it stands its spectacularly overkill) The refinery module (4 ISRUs and a Whirlijig, plus a slightly bigger fuel tank for extra on-site storage) The Reactor module, providing the bulk power generation needed for when the base is active (MX-3S FLAT Reactor, throttled to 27% so I'm not generating too much excess power). The reactor module is also equipped with additional nuclear fuel and waste storage, and emergency radiator panels just in case. And of course, the humble Karbonite power stack to provide idle and overnight power. In the near background-left, we again have the KAS/KIS storage warehouse. Behind that, we have the massive block of drills, 48 of them in total. To the background-right, we have the primary Ore/Fuel storage module, 25,600 units of Ore, 5040/6160 LF/OX. With a LV2 engineer running the show, I can fill that Ore crate in less than 90 minutes game time. I can literally land the ore transport, fill it to bursting, take off, dock with the station, offload, undock, and by the time I've landed 1-2 orbits later, that crate is full again. Base cost about 2 million to get up here and assembled. Once I get on-orbit uranium processing going, I'll make that back in very short order. In the far background, we have the now-obsolete V2 ore Harvester. Once its finally full, a kerbal will install some standby solar panels on it, after which it will launch to the fuel station, drop off its ore and nuclear fuel, then boost into a graveyard orbit or land on the mun for the final time. Couple interesting things that occurred while getting this thing fully and stably assembled. For one, I had to fight a weird form of Z-fighting before I finally figured out the rather time-consuming trick (reload the game) to ensuring everything didn't pop apart. Was rather frustrating to come land with another module only to find several parts of the base had disconnected. Another thing I ran into is that the base-legs when not on the core module are Kraken-bait. I had them on the previous model of radiator and reactor modules, and every time I would add something to the base, the reactor and radiator modules would jump about 10-20 meters into the air. Note, thats about 600k in hardware trying to escape or otherwise smash itself to bits on the ground, with the bulk of that being the reactor and its fuel. I had to launch another reactor with different legs and additional fuel storage, land it, disconnect the old reactor, link it to the new reactor, transfer the fuel and waste over, disconnect the old reactor again, fling it downrange to make a nice quarter million crater (since I couldn't use it for anything else), then reload the game so I could stably link the new reactor to the base. Was rather upset at having to waste that kind of money.

It got updated?! OMG YES! And yes, that is the mod I was talking about. I might have to end up re-configuring my Mun-base so it doesn't rely so much on the Tower lights for general floodlighting. Hopefully reducing the number of pylons and ground bases I need with KAS/KIS to set them up will reduce the tendency of my base to try and pull itself apart. But yeah, I know what the 2 lighting types are possible, I use another mod (Stack Inline Lights) also for general floodlighting of stations and ships, and it uses the point source. Causes a noticeable bit of lag on super high part count/polygon spacecraft, but the lighting effect especially in the dark is oh so worth it. My suggestion to allowing them to be changed in-field is mainly due to the fact I have to deploy the tower lights with KAS/KIS, and its impossible to set the colors once they're in an Inventory space.

Got drills? Theres 48 of them there, and let me tell you, getting that down where I wanted it at 10FPS SUCKED. On the plus side, once I get the power reactor, storage bloc, and cooling radiators installed, I'll be able to begin production. Lets just hope it doesnt tear itself apart.

Well, right now, I'm designing the drill sled for my Mun base. It however has the small issue that it clocks in at about 70 tons unladen (48 drills + landing legs and basic structural hardware, power and cooling to be provided by other base modules), so now I get to figure out how to land it next to my base. Thinking about doing a skycrane to get it down. Speaking of the base, heres a slightly outdated pic of what it looks like so far: Center is obviously the Control module, hosting a Pilot and an Engineer, with room for plenty more. The craft to the left is the KAS/KIS transport barge which ferried the bulk of the gear to the site. The small module to the back-right next to the light is a small Karbonite power stack (2 drills, a Karbonite generator, and a small tank for a buffer) I built on-site to provide overnight power, as apparently the site in question is not only rich in ore, but Karbonite as well.

Awesome little mod here, although I'm only really using the tower lights for general base floodlighting. It does however lead me to my question: Would it be possible to make tower orb lights so they spew light in all directions instead of mainly down? There was this one inflatable globe light mod way back in ye olde .23 ish i think it was that was based off of the inflatable lights used in the movie Sunshine, and I loved those things to death. Problem is, they required a special plugin to work properly, and the required plugin for them never got updated to a newer KSP version. On top of that, KAS split into KIS and KAS, which broke its compatibility with that as well. Don't get me wrong, the tower lights definitely work for my purposes and definitely beats building my own lighting towers using Stack Inline Lights and some I-beams, I just want a little more variety in the general floodlighting area. And while the thought is on my mind, I has another question: Why is it we cannot switch lighting color types when "out in the field" (not in the VAB)?

Yeah, I'm seeing that when I move the ship to the launchpad ramp; it'll bottom out the legs closest to the pad but keep the legs further away longer. Question now is why it doesnt accept leg extension commands either before or after hitting the autolevel while on a slope. I cant do something like put one base frame in the middle then use smaller frames on outriggers, then hit level to get all legs at the appropriate angle, then use the height adjustment slider to get all legs into contact with the surface.

Question: Are there any known mod conflicts that would cause the base frame legs to malfunction (specifically, not respond to settings set in the context menu)? Spawning the legs fresh from the VAB partially extended then hitting autolevel just makes them completely retract.

Got a bit of a backlog of work done, but for the immediate thing, I am experimenting with KAS/KIS and a tower light from a mod I found. With KAS/KIS, and these nifty tower lights for general floodlighting installed, I do believe it's time to begin construction of my mun and minmus bases. Among other things I have gotten done, I've deployed 3 commsat networks (Moho, Ike, and Duna) and sent the science return pod for Moho back to Kerbin. If everything goes well with that I can get away with a direct-entry attempt with it. Oh, and update on the Duna manned mission component: I'm effectively out of fuel (Station is bone dry and the mothership only has about 200m/s for the nuclear thermals.) and ain't getting more until the tanker/expansion ship for the Duna station shows up next window. So now the prime crew and their companions NOT being abandoned stationed at Duna are going to be stuck at the red planet for quite a bit longer.

I suppose a quick and dirty fix would be to go into the CommonResources.cfg file in Community Resource Pack and set both Depleted and Enriched Uranium transfer modes to Pump instead of None, but that does have the potential to horrifically break something. Kinda dont want to blow up or otherwise ruin a rather expensive space station. Edit: Did some more experimenting, the switching transfer to Pump works for Enriched Uranium. Also, for some reason, instead of using Depleted Uranium for waste fuel, its using Depleted Fuel for the waste, which is under KSPI-E in the CommonResources.cfg, and I know I dont have Interstellar installed.

Yeah I saw that when I was digging through my own files. In my main career file I had a lv2 engineer for both space and ground attempts, and since I'm only trying to move Enriched Uranium around its not that big of a deal he's not lv3. I've also tried in a sandbox save I have specifically for when something needs testing/has gone wrong, and using a LV5 engineer there has produced the exact same results.