Hagen von Tronje
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KSP2 Release Notes
Posts posted by Hagen von Tronje
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The memory cap. I'd like to use about three times the mods I currently have.
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There are only so many sources of excess heat:
- The LV-N engine
- Being close to Kerbol (the sun)
- The kraken!
- Assorted mod parts
Unless I'm having a brainfart and forgetting something, that means that if you're playing stock and not using nuclear engines, if your craft is getting hot enough to show bars* then you're either in close orbit around Kerbol or orbiting one of the inner planets, or you're experiencing bugged overheating.
A lot of old tutorials mention drills generating heat but this is no longer the case, as least from my experience. Doesn't appear that ISRU or any other machinery does, either.
This also means that in a stock game, the only thing radiators are useful for is extra low TWR nuke stages with truly epic burns, since it still takes quite a long time for nukes to heat up enough for radiators to even do anything at all, much less be necessary.
*As mentioned above, showing bars means doesn't mean danger, bars show at 40% critical temp. Worth noting that craft being heated by the sun will reach equilibrium, and there is no damage caused by long-term heat exposure, so your Moho satellite could be at 60% critical temp permanently and it's just as good as if it were room temperature.
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That brings back some memories! My learning curve from back in the .18 demo. I followed NASA's progression as I learned how it all worked and every milestone felt like an awesome achievement. First spaceflight, orbit, rendezvous...
The king of them all was when I first set foot on the Mun
http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g13/GoSlash27/KSP/Lander1_zpsf1b814ca.jpg
^ Still have the pic.
http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g13/GoSlash27/KSP/WayBackMachine/FirstSpacewalk_zpso7oa3fid.jpg
carneyvich, you have some serious "awesome" in your future
-Slashy
Love it!
My first ever landing, and first ever screenshot. This is honestly one of the greatest feelings I've had in gaming:
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And so it begins. Having tasted the fruit of achievement, how can you resist the temptation to go to the Mun, then land on it...and then who knows?
Welcome to the brotherhood.
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This gets said a lot, but an SSTO doesn't have to be a spaceplane. Rocket SSTOs are significantly easier - easy enough that several times I've tested lifters that turned out to attain LKO in the first stage alone without particularly aiming to do that. They're also straightforward to recover - most any rocket engine or fuel tank will have more than enough heat tolerance to deal with reentry from LKO without a heat shield, at least on normal settings.
I love me some spaceplanes, but if I'm actually trying to build something in orbit, I'd rather just save the hassle and use a rocket tug. I like spaceplanes for personnel transfer though, that's just a simple rendezvous so I'm ok with being a victim of style for that.
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A middle ground option is to "cheat" width by using girders or I-beams, possibly buttressed by struts, to place your legs far out from your lander core. This will still create additional drag on launch and you will still have to compensate for that, but it will be far less than if you designed the whole lander to be a pancake.
An example:
Sorry it's a bit dark, shot was taken in on the Mun's north pole in a place with very little light, ever. But you can see it's landed on a really severe slope, and zooming in at the bottom of the tanks should show you the legs on the end of girders, giving it a much wider base without increasing drag cost all that much.
However it's also worth noting that to this day I don't gravity turn Munshots, I wait until the right time of day and launch straight up, then make a correction burn if really needed. This is mostly because it takes a fraction of the flight time to execute and I'm lazy like that, but it has the nice side effect of minimizing the time you spend experiencing drag at all, so you have some flexibility in what you put up.
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Old braking charts defintely won't work in 1.0 or later as the Aerodynamics was overhauled. As already said, lifting bodies and Airbrakes will give you a bit of control during a descent. It may take some trial an error though for now. There's some math, and I expect a new version of the charts will make the rounds eventually, but even that will be tricky since air drag has far more complex factors in the density and temp profile of planetary atmo's, and there's huge variability now based on your spaceship design...one one chart fits all solutions are probably going to be harder to come by.
I suspected this might be the case. Guess this gives me some impetus to develop semi-glider Eve delivery systems!
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I get weird effects like this sometimes too, and like you say, it's typically a prelude to a crash, so I assume it's glitches caused by impending OOM crash.
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Gotta be a bug. Just a wild guess, maybe the contract is going by radar altitude? On water/explodium seas that would register the floor beneath.
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Other - I launch flotillas.
I used to just launch a lander, often a ridiculously big lander.
Now I prefer to design a mission around several vehicles/structures/probes with a broad goal, find a way to pack the stuff I need, put all of it into LKO, then do however many transfers during the launch window, with massive ships getting priority for "prime time" launch and light probes getting the more expensive front and back end.
That might be no more than a lander/rover combo or a lander and orbital fuel supply or return vehicle, or it might be an array of satellites, power plant, rover, plane, refinery, storage, living quarters, science, SSTO lifter, skycrane, you name it.
One advantage of this that isn't immediately obvious is that you can make complex bases with much reduced part count, especially because I use KAS to construct some things after landing so I don't use two docking ports and however many wheels or other gear/movement apparatus for every segment I attach, driving part counts through the roof. You can design an intricate base with deluxe facilities for a fraction of the part count, which is great because it leaves room in the physics bubble for vehicles to pull up to it without tanking your framerate (maybe leading to crashing into the base
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Stock Eve SSTOs are now a thing.
Yeah I saw that thread shortly after saying SSTOs from Eve haven't been done.
Which only makes it that much more impressive, is that the first one you've seen?
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If you dont want modded, no one said the ssto cant change in space/refuel. Simply leaving a tank in space with docking ports, so extra engines could be left in orbit for duna, then used for eve would work/look cool.
Have you seen a single all-stock Eve SSTO, spaceplane or not?
I looked, because I was curious. I found lots of arguments over whether it's possible, but not a single example of a working model, much less in 1.0.4. If you know of one, I am genuinely, sincerely interested, so please share.
EDIT: Further digging, I found this:
http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/132211-Eve-SSTO-Limbo/page3
The ONLY all-stock Eve SSTO I've ever seen, and everyone seems duly impressed by it so I would guess it's a first (or first published).
That is, at least, a jumping board to possibility.
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Why are there a bunch of multiplatform games that didn't even originate on PC? GTAV, top ranked PC game? I mean, of course I disagree with a lot of the picks and don't care that much about that, but you'd think at least they'd stick with games primarily known as PC games, not just games that one day got ported to PC. Why not throw in FFVII, Ecco the Dolphin, Mega Man X, and Super Mario Bros, all of which got PC ports?
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I recently shipped a few toys to Eve for my "colonists" (they are totally not stranded, they live there now
). I'd only landed on Eve once before, and it was a wild ride. Learning from that mistake, I simply sent additional aerobraking measures, to ensure I don't burn up on entry.That worked fine, no problem there. But the issue I'm finding is that it's really quite difficult to land with precision. On a non-atmospheric body, precision landing is as easy as bringing your trajectory down low over the target, killing horizontal speed, then proceeding with a standard issue landing like you would any other day of the week. Duna's atmosphere doesn't seem to be much impediment to anything, and on Kerbin you really only care so much - after all, if you land 20km from KSC rather than 2km, who truly cares (unless it's a landing challenge, but that's on you).
Obviously that method isn't so great on Eve, since LEO is 3000m/s+, way more dV than I think most would like to spend, and you "aim" from 90km+. Aerobraking makes it difficult to aim, since the change in trajectory will be in largely outside your control. After are dozen or two attempts, I got within a few km of the landing zone, which is fine since I have ground vehicles; I got a little feel for it (else I would never have landed where I wanted), but it felt too much like luck.
Is there some secret to this? I found an old (2013) aerobrake landing chart giving Pe values to place over landing sites, but I have no reason to think the old values still apply. I've tossed around the idea of a "cargo plane" delivery system that could fly/glide to the destination after deorbiting, and while that sounds cool to make, it strikes me that there are some obvious payload limits and launching difficulties with such a craft.
Anyone mastered this and want to share?
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Champ put it very nicely. Hohmann transfers work best when you burn at the opposite node of the one you wish to change, so if you want to raise your Ap, burn at Pe. Leaving orbit = raising Ap higher than the body's SOI.
I personally find that it does feel much more "commonsense" when you think of orbits not in terms of where you and your destination are, but where you're going to be. The plain ol' stock maneuver node actually does a surprisingly good job of making this transparent, especially with patched conics, one reason why I advocate for flying by hand rather than MJ, I have learned a lot of things, even things I already knew in my mind but had never truly visualized and absorbed until attempting them myself.
Another nice commonsense corollary is that if you want to avoid thinking too much about this, make your orbits reasonably circular whenever possible so you can plan based on desired transfer window and angle without the complicating factor. At least, I don't think there's any reason that's a bad idea - though I wouldn't waste dV correcting, when creating an orbit I aim to make it close to circular for this reason. Maybe one of the gurus knows better than I do and will tell me eccentric is better and I'll have something to chew on.
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Doing it stock and you can tell yourself, you can repeat that achievement on any updates version of KSP without worries of mod following the KSP updates or not.
You can tell yourself that, but it won't be true. A number of perfectly usable designs in earlier versions are complete bricks in 1.0.4, and for a wide variety of reasons.
I'm not sure I'd consider it "half the achievement" to use a purpose-built part rather than a physics exploit with stock - or do you think radial intakes actually make great boat bottoms in real life too?
On topic, Duna and Eve are pretty much opposites in terms of flight. On Duna, it's very easy to go very fast, as the atmosphere is so thin that drag is practically a nonissue, but stopping and landing is unbelievably dangerous due to the bumpy terrain and poor opportunities for braking, and in-flight maneuvers will feel somewhat floaty even with a ton of wings and control surfaces. On Eve, maneuvering is a snap (you can literally yaw into turns and have it work out fine) and you can brake on a dime (just don't flip!), but don't expect high speeds close to the surface, as the drag is just outrageous.
Also worth mentioning that in stock, rocket engines are the only thing that will operate on Eve, and Eve's atmosphere utterly murders the effectiveness of rockets. I don't think I've ever seen anyone claim to have SSTO'd Eve with stock parts.
The big engine choices for extraplanetary planes seem to be Firespitter/KAX electric propellers (perfect for Duna, thin atmosphere means supersonic props!), and the nuclear jets. I like the one from the Mk2 expansion, it uses enriched uranium and is not good for much on Kerbin but works great on Eve. The props work fine on Eve too, just don't expect high speeds at low altitude.
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Every cockpit and crew cabin has a PC with KSP x64 and a bevy of mods installed. That and snacks is all they need.
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I had a plane built and wanted to send it to Duna for testing before reading this, to see how well I could design something for a planet I've never visted. Now that I've read your guide, I see my guesses were not too far off the mark!
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I sent it glued to the side of a big rocket with a radial decoupler (the ugly bits after decoupling are removed by save/reload) then flew it in like a spaceplane. It uses two Firespitter electric props and performs like a stuntplane on Kerbin, but is a bit floaty on Duna. However, this was anticipated - I tested by flying into the upper limits of Kerbin's navigable atmosphere on the assumption that Duna's thin atmosphere would not be terribly unlike those conditions.
Flying is different, feels almost like a hybrid between atmospheric flight and orbit, because you can pretty well flip around and do straight retrothrust maneuvers and actually get results, especially at higher altitudes.
I should also mention that I find the electric props get hot, especially as atmosphere thins, which is why I used Randazzo's fantastic active heat management system, giving me actively pumping radiators that won't break off in atmospheric flight or create needless drag. You can really get going fast though, Duna's thin atmosphere lets you go supersonic on props!
But landing is definitely the real challenge IMO. Dunatian terrain is very unkind to planes, the low gravity means less downforce for the wheels to engage the surface (probably a major reason why wheel brakes feel so worthless), and just like you say, low drag means lengthy stops. My design packs a parachute in the rear shroud (not shown deployed because this was sent unmanned just in case it was a total failure, it can now fly to wherever my kerbals land and pick up a pilot), but reverse thrust on the props seems to work well, although using that to stop with precision is not easy. I'll probably go with the chute once I have kerbals to pack it.
Still getting the hang of it, though. Really great guide for an environment that is hard to test for!
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The final leg of my Kerbin Elcano is up, completing my circumnavigation of the home planet!
I'm already making preparations for Duna, and Eve to follow. Duna will be a pretty nice base and a whole new rover design, and Eve is going to be something special I have cooked up.
Fengist,
Kerbin completed, just getting your attention.
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Updated with part 8 of Kerbin.
...and this concludes Kerbin! This one is a bit faster paced, to be perfectly honest there's not much to see on a continent that is almost endless grassland. Still, I actually find one of my roughest moments to date by getting lost in the hills and nearly losing my mind once and for all.
Kerbin is hard, by the way. Anyone who says this challenge is easy hasn't tried it.
I've already got a complete Duna mission en route, so I hope the next installment will be in the near future now that I have a little more time to spend with KSP. Thanks to everyone who follows my challenge, let me know what you think!
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Mod till it breaks. Then start customizing and modding your mods.
I have an inherent need to customize everything I touch.
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Hi,
In my experience, if you want craft that operate well with physics warp, especially x3 or x4, you pretty much have to design and test it around that wish, and it may just not work the way you want it to. For the reasons given above, any time you warp you are playing with fire. When I design rovers, I often want them to operate safely at x2 or x4 warp so I bugtest it around that, which is counterintuitive and not much fun and sometimes compromises designs, but you pick your poison. Keep in mind my rovers are typically built for circumnavigation...
If your timer is flickering, you're getting physics inaccuracies, which is of course the root of your woes. You can lower your part count or try different configurations but in the end atmosphere or other physics considerations may already be enough to make for your problem.
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Two planets with life in a star system is plausible, make mars larger and we would probably have it here. Because of impacts is an good chance that they would share biochemistry.
However you will not get two advanced civilizations in one solar system as it would require extreme luck, time from radio to probes is less than 100 years. had mars had intelligent life we would have sent an manned mission some time ago and the chance that the two civilizations is just 1-200 year apart technologically is very low, you might find someone at the stone age.
One exception, put two stars in far orbit around each other, have one civilization come first but this slows down, perhaps goes mostly VR as the matrix is more fun.
Have an second one be more adventurous and active and they travel to the other star and do first contact.
Now we don't know how old an civilization can get. However if you have two planets with life you can afford an catastrophe who destroy life on one planet.
An independent asteroid civilization will also serve as an backup here, in this cases it would be hard for it to destroy itself.
Possible but harder. This is far more true if you manages to go interstelar,
Ah, but not every planet/life combo would necessarily be like Earth/Mars or any variant thereof. Who can say how different environments and species would develop technology, and how that would play out into their fate?
Consider also that a species could vary in its willingness to take risks for progress. Our own space programs came (and still come) at not insignificant economic costs and risks to those involved; another species might be far less, or far more, willing to endure those hardships - to say nothing of where they'd prioritize space exploration as a science at all. An alien race could conceivably have devoted very little of its resources to space technology yet be unassailably more advanced than us in surface technology.
But as I said, any given scenario is highly unlikely. The great thing is that the universe is so vast that somewhere, at some time past or future, something we think highly unlikely almost certainly took place (though what exactly, we will probably never know!).
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[Spoiler] Easter Egg Stocktake 1.1.3 Done
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