jf0

There is a 'maths trick' that came to be called 'Tuppers self referential formula', that when plotted, apparently appears to draw a picture of itself. But it is actually just a method of decoding a given constant into a bitmap image. given the right constant it would 'draw' any possible picture of a certain size. If you want to go from a 'number' to a bitmap, just take the bits that represent that number and interperet them as the bits of the bitmap. That is all a bitmap (image made of pixels) is. You will be dissapointed though, most will just look like random noise.

[quote name='juanml82']I use [COLOR=#0000cd]Mechjeb's maneuver planner[/COLOR] to figure out when the transfer windows are ... some without manually created nodes [COLOR=#0000cd]carefully edited with the Precise Node mod ... using [COLOR=#0000cd]Precise Node[/COLOR], I fine tune the encounter ... [COLOR=#ff0000]in part because the game doesn't allow more than 4x physics time warp below 8,000 meters and in part because there is no ghosting in the navball to indicate in which direction I need to turn to jump to the next spot[/COLOR]. [COLOR=#0000cd]The Waypoint Manager mod helps, as it shows the heading to the marker as well as the distance ... [/COLOR][/COLOR][COLOR=#0000ff]I also rely on either KER or MJ to check vertical velocity and time for the suicide burn[/COLOR] (not that Gilly isn't forgiving anyway). [COLOR=#ff0000]In any case, I have lift vertically and guess which keys I need to press to head towards the markers ... [COLOR=#0000ff] to see how well on course I am or not[/COLOR], as you can't point directly towards the marker because the moon rotates beneath you, as it should ... [COLOR=#0000ff]I use the Trajectories mod to plan the burns ... [COLOR=#0000ff]I need to aim to where the markers will be when I pass over (or beneath) them and not where they are when I adjust my orbit ...[/COLOR][/COLOR][/COLOR][/QUOTE] Yes, but actually you are playing the game wrong. You're supposed to do all that by trial and error. It would just be too realistic otherwise. At least that's what they tell me...

I did not care at all until one of my launches came within 200m of an orbiting booster debris. I've never hit anything, but came close several times. The problem is in career mode I had a very useful medium booster that I launched about 20 times, but its design was such that the 2nd stage would end up in low oribit. So I have heaps of those floating around. Also around mun things like: "Lander v1, Lander v1 rescue, lander v1 rescue recovery, lander v1 recovery rescue". I've also had two large space stations explode into tiny bits when I switch to them in tracking station, so i have a lot of debris. I dont want to remove it, because I like the added chance of colliding with it. But I dont want to add any more, so nearly all my boosters are now 3 or 2 stages where 1st and 2nd stage never make it to orbit, 3rd stage is either part of the payload or gets crashed into mun/minmus or escapes kerbin. I've tried a few times to capture and recover the debris, but its usually not worth it and occasionally results in disaster anyway.

Something that has always bugged me is that the vectors of the node are relative to the new predicted orbit, not the current orbit. for prograde/retrograde maneuvers it doe not matter. But if you drag the normal vectors, this will change the inclination of the new orbit, but also rotates the maneuver node vectors too! the node vectors would be more intuitive if they did not rotate as the predicted orbit changed.

[quote name='GoSlash27']Fr8monkey, This is a known bug. The fix is to attach your heat shield with a decoupler and detach it once reentry heating subsides. Best, -Slashy[/QUOTE] how is it a bug? heating and aerodynamics simulation has improved (more accurate). I dont think that it 'being more difficult' means it counts as a bug. you just need to be more careful about you trajectory. You can still successfully reenter from low orbit with a command pod+heatshield, and heating is not even a problem really, you can do it easily with 20 ablator. If your going too fast by the time you are too low, then your trajctory was too steep, if running out of heatshield a problem, your too shallow.

I understand what fisfis is saying: add the ability to edit custom action groups in flight. I second this, because also a way to view what the action groups are while flying could be very useful: did I assign engine shut down to 2, and abort auto destruct and explode seuqence to 3? or was it engine shut downt to 3 and explode to 2? It can make a big difference and this has happened before.

In career mode, there is a meter at the top with coloured bars, I [I]think[/I] it has numbers on it but they are too tiny I cannot read them. The main menu load game screen shows reputation as a percentage. The contract menu shows it apparently in the units 'gold stars'. In the strategies menu, it shows some arbitrary numbers in one place [I]and[/I] gold stars in another (eg produces 2.75 reputation ... setup cost 35 gold stars). I've been too scared to ever try any strategies, because I have no clue what so ever how the reputation numbers affect the coloured bar at the top, because I never learned how to convert between arbitrary decimal numbers, gold stars, percentage and coloured bars. Why can't there just be a single number, in the same units, everywhere for reputation points? This is even more important now that declining contracts apparently costs you one gold star: what does that even mean?

What I would like to see is a tweakable SAS. At the moment, in some cases, if your ship has a certain flex 'mode' (say a long thin rocket), this can make SAS unstable. It is not that the rocket is uncontrollable, because I can fly it manually fairly well, it is that the certain combination of SAS's damping/gain/whatever interacts with the ship to make a situation where it cannot hold it stable pointing in one direction, usually because SAS will saturate the control inputs. I think at least the ability to tweak some sas parameters in the VAB would be very useful. I don't know exactly how SAS is currently coded in the game so I am not sure what kind of tweakables to suggest. I know there are probably mods with improved SAS and I vaguely am aware that the developers said they dont want to add an 'auto pilot', but I think that now having the prograde hold options etc this does not seem like an unreasonable feature suggestion. It could be tech-tree dependant, or require a special, expensive, advanced sas module as a part for example. You might argue that SAS is really not an automatic module but more 'letting the kerbal pilot take control' (since it requires a pilot to work), so tweaking it would not make sense. But then neither would the fact that is sometimes very unstable... I would also like a way to see on the navball the actual setpoint for SAS when it is in stability hold mode. Not even necessarily to set it (I think this would be too close to autopilot), just to be able to see what direction it is trying to seek. Another simple UI feature I think would be great would be adding some display that shows your rotation rate (angular velocity) in each axis. Right now we have a little display both in staging and IVA view that shows the control input in each axis. What would be far more useful is to have similar displays that show your angular velocity in these axis. Anyway what do people think?

Ok I get it so the navball's reference frame is effectively a point on the surface of a sphere at your altitude above the planet SOI with 0 degrees pointing north. Ok but what I mean is how does the game choose north when it orients the ball? I guess the answer is the axis of the planets rotation, so that it appears to rotate anticlockwise when viewed from the north? Does anyone know of a mod for an inertial navball? If you are on the surface and want to launch for a specific orbit (otherthan equitorial if you are on the equator), the only way to do it is watch the orbit map and guess when you are lined up as you rotate on the surface. If the navball was in an inertial frame you could launch in the right direction by watching the ball rotate. It just seems like the wrong system to use for spaceflight, because all the information we use anyway with our maneuver nodes (target, prograde retrograde markers etc) are all on an 'inertial' overlay on the ball anyway! And it has always bugged me that there is no way in the game to plan your trajectory before you launch.

I have never really understood how the navball is oriented: Does its orientation change whenever you change 'sphere of influence'? So it is not fixed to the same orientation as when you launch, like a gyroscope, but always points toward down in terms of gravity? I guess this must be true since the brown half always seems to point toward the ground say whether i am on kerbin or mun also because if you keep the same attitude when in orbit the ball rotates as you go around the planet. So how does the game decide how to set the orientation of it when you enter a different sphere of infuence? Setting 'down' to the the center of mass of the planet only sets two axis, how is the other determined? This confuses me greatly when trying to takeoff from mun or whatever to go in a specific direction. This also would mean the navball for two different craft in different points in the same orbit would be oriented in different directions right? I am confused because I thought it was like a gyroscope with orientation set a launch but that cannot be the case...