Maverick_aus

Update: The Flippin' Craft I've been doing some tests with my Elcano vehicle, and have reproduced the flipping several times now. It was not, it appears, due to the wheels hitting the beach at 4x warp as I had feared, but occurs offshore, both at warp and normal speed but always right after dropping or raising (clipped) gear. Others have had issues with craft flipping, and floating (http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Deep_Space_Kraken#Wheel_Kraken), or experiencing phantom forces with clipped wheels in 1.1.x (http://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/8920) The first time (as logged in the mission report), did not damage the craft. <no pics> The second time (no damage): http://imgur.com/a/KrVOR Third time (no damage), actually floated up, raised in the air and moved very slowly down over about 10 seconds: http://imgur.com/a/sXgmT Fourth time, I was fiddling with the gear like crazy trying to reproduce it. Gave up eventually, and seconds later at 4x warp, smash-BOOM! Obliterated! It was coasting along low 20s m/s, then phantom forces accelerated it to 146 m/s! http://imgur.com/a/FBWmD (From this state I could still view the map, so it wasn't the Universe Eating Kraken, just dead-KSP-vehicle-limbo.) These all occurred with the actual DT Elcano vehicle (which I had just recovered to the correct orientation- haven't yet written up the mission report), immediately after (later that day), and reproducible very easily. It's interesting that many, many times on this journey, the wheels have been lowered and it's been fine up til now. I'm wondering if the particular instance of this craft in this save is corrupted. Or perhaps it's simply more susceptible to the bug in particular conditions. The decision here is as follows: either carry on with this craft and leave the wheels up, until absolutely necessary (land bridge), or air-drop a third, fresh vehicle. If the latter, then I may slightly change the spec and de-clip the wheels. But I don' really want to have to do all that, after so much 'support work' recently and so little actual exploring. More testing should resolve this... [Ah testing...what CAN'T it do?]

Sounds good, thanks mate.

Thanks Claw, Yes, the orange route. (Sorry if that was not clear). Your judgment on the red route confirms what I suspected too - and why I decided against it. Thanks for the clarification, and sharing your thought behind the ruling.

Hi @Alchemist, looks like you're having fun on your voyage, naming your spots imaginatively and all. We've done similar progress, but going the opposite way! Having recently completed that desert area Claw is talking about with the diamonds, I absolutely agree. Also, my 2c: Additionally if you are going through that area I would recommend not cutting off the bay, but going to the spot marked as red circle #3. Also red circle #1 is a lovely spot (Geschosskopf's favourite). Red circle 2 is one of my favorites - a series of lakes and bights worth checking out. Also re: the island you are talking about, 'Orange Arrow Island', I just circumnavigated it as a break during a rescue mission for my stranded Elcano vehicle and mapped it roughly from aboard the ship! This was something I've wanted to try doing, and my 8 year old son was home sick, so we did it together, as a sort of learning exercise. He knew about the compass points, but learned a little about headings, degrees, angles, topography etc. We had a great time. It's both our first attempts at shore cartography. See below if interested. [Legend: b= beach, ^=hill] I've got to say, it's a pretty rewarding experience. I think I'll keep doing it, starting with smaller islands. Perhaps there's a KSP challenge in there somewhere... PS: for reference: PPS: Excuse my 'chicken scratch'. It's just my mission log. Hmmm. Thanks Claw. Curious, is this exclusive? Ie are other navigations possible to qualify for the MM? As you may recall, I'm planning on a mostly sea route, along with an over-land section for the sake of the Elcano challenge proper. But would this doubly qualify, for the MM as well? Ie my Orange Route:

Ok. Thank you for explaining that. I'll have a play

In terms of precise numbers...you use KER? If so, Thermal tab. If not, no idea in stock, sorry. If you mean rough temp guideline, then have you noticed a little 'progress bar' appears next to the part telling you how hot you are? These are pretty helpful, as they kick in once your reaching critical temperatures, but hidden otherwise. However if you're heating up at a rapid enough pace, by the time they've appeared it can be too late to make a change to your flying/reentering. If you're not seeing these perhaps they're turned off somewhere in the settings. Cool. Retro. Grew up with those, haven't used a CRT for while. Nothing inherently wrong with them though. In broadcast video engineering the highest grade monitors used were still CRT's as the LCD couldn't reproduce accurate enough colours for grading. (that was a few years ago, and I've been out the game, it may have changed...). Isn't it just a matter of matching the OS and game's output resolution with the monitor's native resolution? Hmm, that's a worry. What did this look like?

Ah. Thank you for that. I'll check out the thread.

Hi Fengist, Just thinking about your mod. I know it's early days, and as you can see I've had a lot of fun with it as is. So if you left it like this, no worries at all by me! But may I make a suggestion? If I had my way, I would be able to puff steam out of that smoke stack the entire time (not just in atmo). I realise it requires intake air to run the engine. Would it be possible for you to make a part which bottles intake air for space travel (or underwater)? Or should I simply be using your steam-in-a-bottle version of the multi-tank? (didn't try this - just thought of it).

@Flamingo That's funny! Aeroplane skills, by the way. @Brikoleur Yah it IS. Hi and welcome aboard the phenomenon that is KSP! And welcome to the forum, a source of amusement, encouragement, guidance and fellowship, (oh and arcane, pedantic arguments! ) From the looks of things your first mission ended in perfect Kerbal style. Permit me to bestow a brief KSP welcome blessing: As you sail the seas, space and sky May your DV be high, Your Krakens gentle, And your Kerbal's survive. G'day @capi3101, I'm relatively new around here on the forum, (but been playing a while) but welcome back! It will be interesting to see what you think of 1.1.x . I too have recently returned to the game after a long hiatus. I'm not sure if you'll notice the performance change from 1.0.x to 1.1.x given you've got a new rig to try the game on, which is ironic. I noticed a huge improvement as my poor laptop was just managing to run the game prior but now is much less laggy, and can even run with 1/2 textures, 'fast' rendering, and full ground detail and scatters. The performance optimisation has made all the difference when your right on the performance cliff like me. But allegedly the devs have been continuing to improve and clean up the code base too, with junky stuff taking up memory being reduced as modules are re written, so should be more performance gains round the corner. In the land of 1.1.3 we're all struggling along with bugged wheels. Not a modeller but understand it's to do with the mesh colliders on the wheels in the new version of Unity. They keep thinking they're smashing into other things. On the upside, Squad have redone the water physics, so that it's MUCH easier to create water-going craft, including sea-planes, and ships. Not sure where thermal stuff was up to when you last played, but believe there will be new learning for you there too. Anyhoo, welcome back to the fun and see you around.

Presenting... ...Funk & Wagnall's Steam-Powered Moon-Boat! 1. Working up a good head of steam... 2. Fire all the boilers! 3. Don't need these... 4. Or these... 5. Or these either... 6. Ah, starting to look like a real "ship of space". 7. Ah well...we don't have any sails anyway! 8. Beautiful dawn at the Big Green Ball of Ice Cream 9. And... 10. ...Landed! Steampunk on the Green Moon! Whole album here: https://imgur.com/gallery/J8EIA PS: Sorry for the spoiler spam. Still trying the figure out the best way to lay things out post-imgur-album-embeds.

Maybe has nothing do with it, but I did mention this mod to sal_vager a couple of weeks ago when he was asking for TOTM recommendations. Also, I haven't found whichever issues you're referring to. Everything seems to be usable for me. Great mod. Thanks for your work in maintaining it, @linuxgurugamer & @Deimos Rast !

My pleasure. All part of the service at Funk & Wagnalls Steam-Powered Moon-Boats - "you build 'em, we bash 'em". 20m eh? Hmmm. A steamy taste of things to come... I've got to say, at the beginning I saw your concept as a bit of novelty, and probably not really my thing. But soon after beginning to play with your parts, I find myself completely freed of the self-restraints of 'realism' and Serious Aerospace, and am getting lost in the imagining of the weird and wacky. Pure, unbridled fun. Thanks for enabling it!

Very sorry to hear that, mate. Stress is a nasty one. I've had some periods with high stress and a general anxiousness most of the time. I hope it starts turning upward for you.

Oh dear! For such small obstacle to hold you up! Good luck with getting around this one.

Behold! Steam-punk rocket! Get to the water! Compress that water! Boil it, boil it, boil it! And....steam-powered rocket! Yes! Uh...then the rocket-fuel actually ran out.... And we made pretty patterns in the sky...

Ta. I'm having fun with it. That's the secret <facility undisclosed> testing site, so I can't tell you too much. Although the production version ought to be ready soonish. Suffice to say, I've already done one air-drop (and very recently), so I'm trying something different. Simply dropping in another vehicle, felt very poor form and a waste of a perfectly good, albeit upsidedown, vehicle. Jeb and Berthy, in communication with mission control decided, surely, we can salvage this! We need to at least try! Plus, to be honest, I'm looking forward to the cruise. Hopefully this will remain a support ship, and can follow along behind in case of future shenanigans. Yes, the crane so far is pure IR Model Rework (apart from the deck chair and iron girder, obviously). Quite. Let's say that mission control has handed down STRICT new SOP for the water-to-land transition.

Hi mate, This is looking very good. Congratulations on realising your inner conflict onto canvas. I tried making a steam-powered (well at least -puffing) rocket, which went ok. Couldn't get the steam going. Assume I need to be sitting on the water... Then I tried making this plane...Found it hard to get it to fly. Give me more time.... Yes I will try making a ship, don't worry. Oh and a minor issue here with your MiniAVC methinks...

Hey @The_Rocketeer, how's the prep going? Haven't seen any updates on here for a while. RE: Your mapping qn. Was looking at Telemachus, and had a thought. It integrates with Kerbal Maps so you could display your position on map once every while if you wanted to. Alternatively, there may even be a way of exporting that as an image so you don't see it yourself - one of those following your journey could add the thread comment with the map. Just a thought.

Good work. Very entertaining watching you go. Couple of queries: -Is the dish functional? -That plane is hilarious. Why so many engines? -Very high flag-planting frequency - why is that? And I love this shot: That is a mean design, @Chemp.

Yes, although as I said above, partially my own fault I think. Thanks, Claw. Plans are afoot, courtesy of Fengist's recently updated Maritime Pack (released our hours ago, yay!), IR and KIS/KAS. Now that I've said that, and you can all figure out what I'm up to, this teaser is a bit redundant I suppose...

You're welcome. I've enjoyed our chats together, and given the similarity of our craft and paths, I thought it fitting. And I thought to name the hilly feature nearby so it's a compatible naming instead of a replacement. Also, once I figured out what your nick means, I couldn't resist the pun! Well, since you ask... Usually the craft cruises comfortably at 4x warp. Then, when preparing to go land-lubber, nearby the shore say around 30m depth, I drop the gear and drop the pace for a gentler beaching. (I had tested at 4x beaching, but thought it best to be as slow and safe as possible, and not tempt the Kraken). Embarrassingly, I wasn't keeping to my usual procedure and left the drop out of warp too late. I think the front wheels hit bottomed out whilst still at 4x, then I believe as the physics 'caught up' on the change back to 1x, it got a massive jolt and flipped. I couldn't figure out a clever way to incorporate it in the narrative so I left out the details, not to mention, it was at least 1/2 operator error.

Days 7 & 8 - Progress...? Having just commissioned the replacement vehicle Dolomedes Triton R1, Jeb and Berthy set out again. On today's agenda: a brief stop over at a cove of some repute, followed by making some serious knots of progress. After visiting a cove of some favour with a certain, ah, ballistic player... ...Pun intended.... ...To make up some knots, the crew opt for the direct sea route over and above the more regular shore-hugging navigation. The crew keeps a looks out for the land in real time. Jeb looks out from the cockpit, scanning the horizon with his 'binoculars' (mouse wheel zoomed in). Land ho! Happy at the progress, of nearing the western end of this 'continent', at the next stopping point, just before beaching, the craft flips! Unbelievably, this is second major craft 'malfunction' with in two days. Although 'malfunction' is not really the correct word. I think Jeb and Bill did a fine job on the design. Let's blame the Kraken's return. At least she didn't eat the entire vessel this time! Just flipped it on it's back. Desperate, the duo decide it may be possible to flip the DM under its own power, so igniting the auxiliary jet engines for additional thrust, they attempt to manoever to the nearby bluff, to the east. The sharper angle of this beach-cliff may enable more friction and so hold a fulcrum point on the nose, and so help the ship over. Nup, they can't control the craft enough to even get there. Hmmm. KIS/KAS time. To be continued... Nothing wrong with that. I totally understand not wanting/being able to shift something already in progress. I've just, after many hours of fiddling and testing shifted my career into 1.1.3. I decided it was worth the upgrade as the performance benefit from 1.0.x to 1.1.x is a deal-maker, after being totally burnt out on lag on my little laptop.

@Overland Have you seen this? Fengist, very imaginative. And thanks for sharing on the OP. You're an interesting and inspiring person to get to know. I too am navigating how to juggle the desires of the artist and the engineer in my head.

Hmm. Very cool. The Indigo vaguely comes across to me as the baby brother of astrobond's B.O.B. (Bunch of Bananas) ship.

@Cupcake... Brilliant video and KSP engineering!