Kyrt Malthorn

I like. Have you thought about adding ISRU processing and mining drill sounds?

I really, really should have known that. There are some days I hate gravity, hehe. Also, just thinking out loud here, the model looks pretty enclosed. Apparently the poor Kerbals didn't read the warning labels that came with the packing slip. The future of KSC is glowing! Anywho, thanks! And I hope when 1.1 rolls out it's not an utter nightmare to update this. And may I just say, I love KSPI-E, really appreciate your work carrying the whole mod forward. I adore the attention to detail and realism. It takes me a while to get used to all this, but I love every minute of it.

I'm half and half. I'm still playing with a 90% stock experience, KER and Alarm Clock, that sort of thing - still working with stock parts and capabilities. But I'm very interested in mods, and will get into them eventually. I've tested a few on the side... okay maybe a lot.

I apologize if the answer is staring me in the face, but I'm rather confused here. I have a gas core reactor that doesn't seem to want to operate at more than roughly 10.3% output. I noticed this problem on a starship I was building that was to use a gas core reactor for power; I wasn't getting nearly as much as the documentation said I should be getting. So I built a test setup on Kerbin. So I see that it's only got an output of like, 2%. I glance at your chart and it says the MINIMUM usage is 20%. Uh oh. So I theorized I must not have enough USAGE to maintain the reactor in a normal state. So back at Kerbin I built a mockup to test that theory. What I have: insane amounts of ore and an empty Lf/O fuel tank to match, and 8 (yes, eight) stock-game ISRU's running the LF/O processes, as well as the Liquid Fuel and Oxidizer independant processes. So, 24 stock game ISRU processes concurrently; the whole point is to simulate massive power draw. A "control group" pebble bed reactor was able to power most of them with nothing odd intervening. So off with the pebble bed reactor, and hook up the Mk1 gas core reactor. STILL not working? It's output is hanging right around 10.28%, still under the listed minimum, and it struggles to power even 4 out of my 24 ISRU processes. The only thing I can think is, do I need more radiators? But I'm not generating waste heat... at all. All my testing has been on Kerbin, and I've NEVER seen waste heat show itself. I'm not moving so it's not the buoyancy affect. The core temperature is not as advertised. It just can't seem to get up to its minimum operating temperature. Did I accidentally make a molten core nuclear reactor instead of a gas core, or what??? EDIT: Additional info ... KSP 1.0.4 KSPI-E 1.4.7

Launchedmy first true mothership and assembled its three sections in orbit today. Also broke my tonnage to orbit record by at least double.

I built a biodome with stuff inside for Val to explore. Major kudos to the development of Civilian Population, if you ask me. I love the models' detail. Maybe with 1.1 the game will be able to take the performance hit from running so many mods and I can actually play with stuff like this regularly. For now, back to the less-modded original installation...

I developed a new Mun lander but held off launching it because I was so close to unlocking a new science part. When I unlocked it I began the mission! Got to the Mun, set down (which took a while of relearning - Minmus spoiled me.) Then, only then, did I realize I forgot the science part I delayed it for. I lost all semblance of patience, stuck the science part in Bill's inventory (KIS mod) along with a screwdriver, stuck him in a lander can on to of a skipper engine, enabled infinite fuel cheat and sent him to do what should have been done in the VAB. Round trip to the Mun and back in 10 hours. Also.... all my airplanes anymore land with parachutes because I'm lazy and awful at landing.

As requested... Red ball is the dry CoM from RCS Build Assistant mod - so the CoM doesn't travel very far forward at all. As for flying without SAS: I flat out forgot to turn it on the first time I lifted off and didn't realize until several seconds into flight. So, as of reworking the rear landing gear, it performs the same with and without SAS.

Thank you!!!! I placed them flat and offset them to where they needed to be, and added another pair. No more bendy gear! And it took off successfully! It kinda had to be helped by the drop-off at the end of the runway but I could probably improve that by letting the engines throttle up while the brakes are on. There will be more tweaks, but at least I can get it into the air to try things out. But hey, even the ACLS (Advanced Cheapsake Landing System) works!

Actually my CoM is so far back they're further forward than they really need to be. In the top down view the four radial mounted parachutes form a box around the average between CoM and dry CoM, while the front gear rest underneath the furthest-forward set of wings. Twisted landing gear maaay be more of an issue here. I thought I lined them up perfectly in the hanger, but... But THAT might well be perpetrating the issue. I will say I've used canards up front on several designs, but I tend not to like them so much for my designs aiming for high stability at 4x time speed. Also the CoM is SO far back that it would make it hard to get my CoL behind it. This is what I get for clustering three Mk2 cross-sections to form the main body... It's main body is also so much lower in the back that it's already tilted up as far as I can get it without offsetting the nose landing gear way below the body. Crossing fingers, I'm going to mess with the aft landing gear. Also, thanks for the album how-to!

I'm sure this happens a lot... I'm in career mode, building (non-space) planes with the basic jet engines. I've built some that have been beautifully stable at 4x speed. I just unlocked some Mk2 parts, and I'm trying to take the next step - a two-seater for heavier payloads. It's been a learning experience for building heavy aircraft, a stepping stone as a player to building spaceplanes of my own design. My new design has plenty of lift and probably too much thrust, but I'm having problems getting it off the runway. It likes to bounce from side to side and eventually flip over. Here's my current design: Top down. Side profile. I made DARN sure the payload was symmetrical. The only things off the center axis at all are physics-less parts. Maybe I overdid it with the engines but I haven't gotten it off the ground to care yet. Since I can't figure out how to embed a whole album in a post at the moment, here's a link to it. I've tried everything I know/can find on the forum. The landing gear are straight as I'll get out - they're even strutted. The main body is strutted. I've tried stitching the wings together and to the main body in case their wobbling is affecting things. I've added reaction wheels. All to no apparent avail. If I could just pinpoint WHY it's giving me a phantom bounce that escalates to flipping out... P.S. All parts and aerodynamics involved are stock. I have Kerbal Engineer vessel window up in case that helps anyone diagnose what's going on. The torque it shows should all be the tail fins, so it's vertical, not horizontal. I've double checked everything was added with symmetry.

I set down my first ever mining / refining operation on Minmus! Big milestone as a pretty new player.

I'm curious about the balance of tweakscale in career mode currently. Specifically in the area of scaling engines. Stock game seems to me (a relatively new player) to have a pretty decent balance of engines. Pretty much everything has a niche, a compelling reason you'd want to use that engine over anything else depending on the demands of the craft's situation. I've experimented with tweakscale, so far just briefly - because I've seen it's required for a lot of other mods that interest me. My impression is, with tweakscale the only engine stats that matter are ISP and whether it has the TWR to get you off kerbin, and the latter only applies briefly. For example... In my current career mode, I'm using the Rockomax Spark on a lot of my probes because of its size. It is surpassed by a scaled-down Terrier, which was available earlier. Terriers, which I used over Poodles in favor of their low mass, are no match for a Poodle scaled to 1.25. Ants are AWFUL, scale down almost anything to replace it - where previously it had the great advantage of being incredibly light, now almost anything can be better. A Twinboar has the same stats as a scaled-up Reliant, just has some fuel too. Scaled-down Mainsails have ridiculous TWR for teeny little things they are. Basically, once off Kerbin and toodling around space, why would you use anything other than a Poodle (or Terrier until it's unlocked) scaled to your needs, ever? Seems like it makes things too easy and eliminates the niche engines' usefulness. (EDIT: LV-N's, to answer my own dumb noob question. But there again, you can scale down an LV-N and mitigate their biggest drawback - weight - trading waiting through longer burn times for greater efficiency than is possible in stock game.) Don't get me wrong, it's great for aesthetic, and I love the concept of this mod, though right now I'm looking for a mostly stock experience. Has anyone played with Tweakscale in career mode who could perhaps bring a different perspective? Further edit / maybe a bug: How come the Oscar B scaled up to 1.25 has 144 units of liquid fuel and proportionate oxydizer, while being the same size as the T100 which only holds 45? It has 0.2 dry mass at that size, the T100 is 0.063, but the physical size difference is nowhere near that ratio.

This seems to be what I'm experiencing. I was incredibly distraught when, while testing my first rover in career mode (and only my 2nd or 3rd rover design ever) it was showing me heat guages on the launchpad and exploding within seconds. I found from the flight log that a couple cubic octagonal struts in the center frame of the rover were overheating first. Yeah, some metal beams in the middle of my rover away from all the science, batteries, and anything remotely volatile, exploded. Which made no sense. I re-built the thing one piece at a time, testing each time to make sure it wasn't causing a repeat issue. It seems to be BETTER now, even though I've done nothing different except place those struts and parts near them manually instead of symmetrically. Now it only blows up at low time warp. 5x or greater is fine, it explodes at 2-4x normal speed. Which sucks because I'd really like to time warp roving around the Mun. So off I go to rebuild it, again. I hope a better solution comes along.

Now THAT is one of those super useful tidbits that makes joining this forum worth it.

Thanks for all the responses and thoughts, constructive and snarky alike. Lot of things to think about in future station construction. While the "Dont Move the Station" argument has merit, especially with larger stations I would think, in defense of rolling the station it IS more efficient if the station can turn with greater RCS efficiency (or better yet, reaction wheels) than a big fat tanker can maneuver around it and turn around and get moving towards it again. As a relative beginner I would have a harder time pulling that off, I think. Oh, and maybe the station SHOULD be called Motion because it's screaming along at 2280 m/s (5100.21 mph) above the planet's surface. We really ought to purge the notion of things in space being stationary. That's Surface Dweller Thinking and contemporary sci fi.

Hello all. I'm hoping to get some ideas for space station designs. I'm realatively new to the game, but I've figured out a lot so far. (Okay, I used lots of tutorials and the wiki to give me a boost.) One of the ongoing missions I'm currently running in my career mode game is an orbital space station, which I'm using as a "gas station" as well as a staging area: I have a few ships that I simply want to live in orbit, and docked at the space station seems a natural place to keep them, and re-fuel them. Naturally I need to deliver fuel to my station with tankers from the surface too. My problem looks like this... Outlined things so others can make sense of it. Green= My station at present. Blues= Ships presently docked at my station. Yellow= Incoming tanker. Red dots= Docking ports in use. In my standard docking proceedures, once I kill relative velocity and matched my orbit to my station, as I'm approaching slowly from a few hundred meters, I switch to control my station, turn on lights and such for convenience, select "control from here" on the docking port I want to use, and turn the entire station so that the crosshair is in line with the target indicator. My intended port is now facing my incoming tanker's. Makes life a lot easier if I can control the station's orientation so my tanker doesn't have to work harder, and it can deliver more fuel. Problem: my station has become an absolutely uncontrollable BEAR to turn with ships semi-permanently docked to it. I HAVE to use RCS because my reaction wheels (ASAS, the one with 15 torque.) aren't cutting it. I had to shut off the docked ships' reaction wheels because they were fighting each other so badly the station would never stop wobbling and threatening to tear my ships off their docks. (And of course, my station is incredibly inefficient with mono now because I hadn't bothered to line up the RCS directions at.) My major concern is the docking port as a structural weak point and the wobbling/bouncing kinda killing any attempts at re-orientation. I know I'm wordy. All this to ask: does anyone have any inventive station designs that somehow balanced docked ships with center mass/means of control, so that they aren't jerked around a lot? Some ideas I already had but not sure are feasible: - Multi port docking. (Or Clamp-o-tron Sr. - I haven't unlocked that yet.) Pros: greater docked stability. Cons: this would add deadweight to my ships - why carry extra ports just for the time it's going to be mothballed? - Inline docking. Everything that's there to stay has a docking port at either end and they dock in a gigantic pole so at least one axis (roll) remains easy, my ports for tankers can be mounted radially so that's all the rotation I'd really need, let the tanker take care of the rest. Pros: simple. Cons: if I want a ship out of the middle of a pole I have to reconnect the ends, and a pole of ships is unwieldy. - Don't leave things docked. Pros: solves the maneuverability and structural issues completely. Cons: Lot harder to manage and remember who got a fill-up and who still needs it when I launch my next tanker. Does anyone have designs that offer more stable solutions?

Greetings, Kerbonaughts! I'm very new to KSP. I had heard about it before from a couple places, finally got curious enough to try a demo. Loved it! Been playing 1.0.4 since a couple weeks back and it's just so engaging. I had already been researching space travel just for fun, so I brought a halfway decent understanding of the math (or at least factors) behind rockets and orbits. Learned a LOT playing KSP. LOVE IT. Mostly I've been playing career mode with some fair accomplishments - a successful manned Mun landing, an LKO space station, working plans for a longer mission to Minmus with a science lab, lander, and tons of extra fuel. (Clearly I have too much time on my hands.) As hooked as I am on the game, I get the sense that the game's community is really great. I'm kinda inexperienced at jumping into forums, though, so... where do I plug in?