GarrisonChisholm

Someone clearly needs to layer a physics-breaking number of parachutes on a Mk1 Pod and drop it onto Duna, and see if it descends ridiculously slowly!

My practice was 8-fold symetry, 3x with radial chutes, on a large lander with 4 bodies. I *think* that would trigger the issue, yes? :?

Mm, I don't think this is the case, unless these numbers are new to 1.2. In my 1.12 (?) game I know that a MESS of parachutes will Still get me killed on Duna; thrust required for safe landing. I am sure my last design (pictures somewhere on What Did You Do Today?) used over 100 chutes, and I was still going 60 m/s when I did my first lithobreaking test.

Eeloo as an inner moon of Sarnus (OPM) actually to me makes the most sense. Plenty of theoretical tidal heating there, not withstanding the 1/10th physics "reality hole." I just managed to successfully land a probe there, but missed my target- I wanted to be within meters of a rift.

Bravo, Huzzah, and a mighty Well Done. This is exactly the kind of thing that I really enjoy from KSP, people's creativity and their unique twist on things. A delightful piece of pie to focus on when the horizons beyond one's home perhaps warrant ignoring for one's own peace of mind. But, like I said before, there had Better be a next project !!! And remember the curse of the modder; once you start story-telling, do not add anything new, no matter how shiny and wonderful it is! For the universe, it will break. To lofty goals and welcome hearth, a fond farewell, and never death.

@Perotis, to your original point, the "sag" in interest that you identified is something I encountered too. My solution was to set the science values lower and play with a mod that required life support, which prolonged my next (current) game's region of interest. Additionally, I am using the Valentine System mod which adds a second system 10Gkm away. This is not "reachable", per se with my current technology, however it encouraged me to build a large orbital radio telescope (RPd) so I could allow/justify their investigation in the Tracking Station. If you are playing career with slow science acquisition, life support requirements for manned (balled) missions, and mods which add additional destinations, then "game fatigue" is simply a natural byproduct of saturation. Likely putting the game down for a while or re-starting it would be your next logical step. I will likely play my current game out for a ridiculous span of time, until I A) upgrade my PC or B) learn of a new development which is so paradigm shifting that I simply must start anew. However, there is no law that says you Must Kerbal. Everything good in moderation, even Kasper would have agreed to that.

*tap* I've been away for a good while (family), but maybe there is a new batch of brains which might conceivably breath life into these ideas yet. If not, the sands of time will swiftly settle 'or it again, I'm sure. All my best to everyone!...

I had to step back in to also bid farewell. Though life has become stressful enough that my forum time has waned to a wisp, I always enjoyed following this thread and getting its updates. Even, even, the Komisar commenting on my commute to work, and LAUNCHES ESPECIALLY TO MAKE MY OVERNIGHT SHIFT TOLERABLE. I am grateful, Komisar! ...and there had Better be something new down the pike...

"Your papers... are in order."

This is an example of one of the rare cases when someone's avatar perfectly reflects the enthusiasm of their comment. :] Gosh, it would be nice if I could roll a plane down the runway at greater than 35 m/sec...here's hoping!

A simulation Still I hope the above link works- the Imgur posting option I was used to seeing is no-longer present for me. (:?\ Suffice to say, the above link is to an Imgur photo of my screen during a second attempt to load my Duna Flyby craft into the KER simulation screen. It took FOUR HOURS to go from the VAB to finally appear on the pad. I "zoomed" out (it took over 2 minutes) to finally see the whole rocket, but after 10 minutes of 1 frame per 2 min "settling", an audible "boom" spurred me to grab my cell-phone and take this shot, as I was entirely uncertain F1 would grab a screen-shot. The scene shows the 2300 ton rocket an "instant" (frozen, actually) after it began Rapid Unplanned Disassembly. The issue is apparently with the Service Module. The Supplies for the 1200 day mission are stored using a Cubic Octagonal Strut, with one pack mounted on each facing and another on each corner. This central COS then had 8 identical COS's mated to its periphery, and then the outer ring off-set inward so as to fit inside a 2.5m shell. This whole ring was duplicated 8 more times, meaning 225 parts were compressed to about 60% their nominal diameter and then stacked on top of each other 8 times, what with the empty fuel tank which, off-set, served as the Service Module shell, means that a 2.5m x ~8m section of the ship contained over 1800 parts. Physics apparently does Not Like This. The booster is a 7.5m main, and should (on paper) get 6 Kerbals, 1200+ days of supply, and 1100 return Dv into Duna orbit, however the current Supply assembly (however cleverly I may think it contrived) will need to be re-thought. It appears my space-saving notions will not, if you'll pardon the expression, "fly".

Tonight I finally got back to my Astronaut program! The 6 of them (The Four +2) have been spending most of their time supporting the robotic missions which are slowly visiting every region in the solar system. There have been a few balled landings on Mun & Min, but the science rewards were flooding in in such a deluge that the astronaut program has spent the vast majority of its time on the ground. Their single highlight last year was completing a long duration test of our life support systems by orbiting the moon for a year. Much (and Mulch) was learned, and many of our design opinions informed. The long duration craft was hideously ungainly and would have been fairly perilous to send on an extra-planetary trek. Our new long duration craft has dispensed with the "progressive" avenue of supplies, and instead is relaying on sheer life support packs. So, after a "draft" crafted was built and simulated and failed upon, a new craft was designed to keep 6 people alive for 1296 days, which means, yes, 1296 100kg Life Support packs. The new rocket was completed in a VAB which grew more and more inefficient in its processes as the work progressed, and the 2300 ton, 2400 *part* craft was finally loaded into the simulator for a test. ...and, as I left for work 90 minutes later, the computer was STILL trying to load that rocket to the launch pad...

"Have no fear citizens of Kerbin ~6,000 litres of Aerozine/NTO will be dispersed across such a wide area you will hardly notice it!" ...I can't help but think that this language must have been borrowed from a certain Ussari Kommisar...

Good evening Bob. A question- I've started going back and watching Gateway and Odyssey again, and something you say in the beginning of the first Gateway episode makes me wonder; is there a Further back beginning to this story that was chronicled/experienced, or did you just have this germ of an idea and then came up with back-story for Gateway?

I played stock for 6-8 months also, but once I "mastered" (i.e. "No Longer Sucked") the basics I added them. KAC, KE, OPM, and the Planet Nine mod are - to me- now a Must. I also want to be able to explore more.

Jeb, Gene, Bob and Val continue to strum their fingers and mumble about "launch windows approaching" while Bill distractedly refuses to build anything because his new blue-water navy Dreadnought construction game has rolled a critical success on its Distract skill...

Good evening Bob! I just want to say thanks for taking the time for everything to look So beautiful, both rockets and planets. I play on a glorified toaster, graphics at Minimum, so your YouTube videos are the closest thing I will ever see to how artistic and stunning both sun-rises and stagings can look. I hope you'll at least pass by all 9 planets with a probe over the course of the series to illustrate how awesome these planets can look. Keep those beauty-shots coming! Will you ever do a Planet Nine mission? (obviously a few decades down the road when Earth discovers Planet Nine)

I have to agree with you Kuzzter. I am actually looking forward to what story I might need to craft in my head to make sense of these senseless things when I stumble across them. - however, to this point I have Not, because I refuse to go "looking" for something that should be found by utter accident. If no device or contract (I don't think I've DL'd those mods) will find it for me, then the only anomaly I am going to know about is the monolith by the space center. "Hm, a monolith from our ancient fore-bearers it must be. Ah well, there's nothing spooky about it, its just archeology." A place for Gene and Bill to stroll over to on their lunch break and coffee. I made a special flight to see the pyramids, I figured something that significant would be known the world over, and wonders are to be seen. But I have not stumbled across a single other anything, ...and I just can't wait to very organically one day discover that I need a far greater tale to tell my Kerbal's story than the world first expected.

@Shania_L *TOTALLY* loved this one. I swear, I must be a total engineer wannabee at heart. Thanks for doing this! Very enjoyable, and a very cool insight into your process! gc the Condemned (swamped by work such that good hobby pursuit time at work has been lost- how unreasonable!)

Upon experimentation by @ShotgunNinja, thanks to @Felbourn 's insights, we have found that it is possible to 'trick' the science system into delivering science at new regions, however this has the unfortunate side-effect of the game not recognizing new additional biomes, for example meaning Science Alert would not register them, and the game would never "tell" you that you were in a unique region of space. Over the weekend I had thought of another work-around, though I'm unsure of its repercussions. What if a second body was placed at the heart of Kerbol, of diminutive size and zero gravity, with its atmospheric layers clamped down to near zero, but its Low Space would be our Kuiper Belt region (~ 1Bkm to 2Bkm), and its High Space would be our Heliopause/Interstellar Space (~2Bkm+). What repercussions would this have, and could this give us new Science *and* Biomes both? I am a theorist at best, and a certain amount of silicon intimidation and the immense load-times for testing and re-testing mod changes make me an impractical executor of such an attempt. However, if someone would happen to hit upon a "Ghost Body" solution to creating additional space science *and* biomes, the "prestige" of the developed mod would rightly be their's. I hope someone is able to poke around with this in Kopernicus and test it out. As a last point, in searching for my own thread, I see that @NERVAfan first proposed this concept a couple years back. I hope we can find a solution that will give birth to all of these Voyager dreams.

Actually, it may be functionally a non-starter, because even, say, Ussari analyzing surveillance photos of Shania's craft would be based on the presumption that the time-lines are similar, even if we permitted ourselves the fantasy that the two states could co-exist while never appearing in the other's story; no Appolo/Soyuz from the two programs could ever occur. I think my thought was based upon the potential for fun and insight on the mere interaction of the voices and hardware of the two programs. They cannot really coexist however, so the entertainment value of the two will likely need to be entirely separate...

I use Stage Recovery, and appreciate that it is just not an automatic "cash in pot" solution, but involves random factors for success.

I think it depends on how SOI is defined. It will work if you LEAVE a bodies SOI by passing *below* its LowSpace threshold. Then, OuterKerbol could be the "parent" body for Heliopause & Kuiperbelt, and when a ship gets below that it would be in Kerbol's HighSpace. Though, this would toss in the monkey wrench of what is appropriate for the "ghost" body's gravity- zero, or would it need to have equal gravity to Kerbol?

Hm. Alright, so they won't show as Biomes, but *scientifically* there will be unique science to gather in specified regions. This is good progress, and good to know, but there are a few issues we should figure out; Will KER recognize a new biome has been entered? Will Science Alert (or comparables) trigger? This strikes me as a modder's conceptual jewel, so if we script something it should work with popular mods. Will "world first" contracts trigger, or are they dependent upon Biomes or SOIs to trigger? These two points are key, because while it would be neat to collect the science, I think a lot of folks would feel they'd been jilted if the game didn't "recognize" that a new region/area had been reached. Over the weekend I had thought of another work-around, though I'm unsure of its repercussions. What if a second body was placed at the heart of Kerbol, of diminutive size and zero gravity, with its atmospheric layers clamped down to near zero, but its Low Space would be our Kuiper Belt region (~ 1Bkm to 2Bkm), and its High Space would be our Heliopause/Interstellar Space (~2Bkm+). What repercussions would this have, and could this give us Science *and* Biomes both?

A novel notion, but one that I think should be avoided, for two reasons. One, when this thread was in its hey-day of visibility over the winter, I actually *did* directly reach out to Kasper about it, which at the time and after the fact decidedly felt improper. He did not respond, as were he to field requests for mods all day long he would be doing nothing else between breaths. It is why there is a process in place for mod consideration, and I firmly voice that we should respect that. I opened a proper "request for Mods" thread in the add-on section, and if 100 people express interest it will draw more notice than 20, and perhaps one day be evaluated for consideration. 2ndly, the Mods area has a very distinctly posted "do not poke the bears" notice, and I'm *pretty* sure tugging the coat-tails of Kasper is tantamount to poking a bear. @ShotgunNinja, I am surprised but delighted you had results from your experimentation, though I do not understand how it could be possible given what I have learned about the system. Could you expand upon it with "talking to beginner's" detail? If it will work, maybe a proper mod-fix is only a post or two away; though I still do not know how it is possible. - Illumine me!