Kyrt Malthorn

When I read that in the changelog I just about squealed with glee. I've clicked the dang 'show navball' arrow about 14 trillion times.

I had Kasper Kerman the other day.

Not too derail the topic too much, but... why do you use vernors? Regular monoprop RCS get better ISP and while yes, most craft designs usually carry much more LF/O, I find I rarely need more RCS than lander cans already store - no extra tank mass needed...

What mod is that? 'Cause with landing gear being...problematic... I might be in the market for a different kind of flying machine. Anyways, I finally started for reals on a big undertaking career mode with oodles of mods that I promised I'd play with once 64bit KSP/windows was a supported thing. They are too many to number, but the important ones at the onset are Engineering Tech Tree, KScale64, and Kerbal Construction Time. And AutoRove, thankfully a patch that works. Which means I've got a BIG world and a good deal more realism going on than normal games. I fired the stock veterans. This story calls for new heroes of kerbalkind. With KCT, researching tech tree nodes takes time - and ETT has a LOT of nodes. So I made a rover with parts I was getting in the first round of unlocks anyway, and "cheated" it in with MagiCo's ship save splicer. Kerbalkind has emerged from their vault-cities beneath K2 and have begun to explore the strange surface world. The precursors left them vast stores of knowledge and technology - but hardly anyone knows how to use it. Kyrt Kerman (yes I edited the name) was one of the first explorers on the surface, settingout to reach the western edge of the continent. After his long desert trek, he listened to the President's speech, rallying all fellow Kermans to explore, expand, and reach further than ever. The announcement of new a new research and technology development program was announced shortly thereafter. Kyrt Kerman was called up and asked if he was interested. The project's home base was, per the recommendations of the Precursors, equitorial and coastal, though nobody fully understood why these things were important. Kyrt had some ideas, but to get there he'll have many kilometers yet to travel! Now that I write it, self-insert seems tacky... Edit: Imgur album embedding does NOT work on the forum like it used to... the heck?

I was looking for any sign of flickering with the stock part w/o tweakscale and didn't see anything. Making me think it might be either the graphic / detail settings you're using, or your texture got mangled somehow. If you're on a steam download, you could try deleting the part texture and then verifying files?

I had never seen this before. I like it!

Yeah, I noticed long ago that the donut tank has a better fuel to tank mass ratio... (And my brother still wonders why I go for the tiny engines tech node so early). I have tweakscale in one of my installations and decided to see if I could replicate the issue... At similar sizes to your rescale, I was definitely seeing a sharp line in the texture, but there wasn't any Z-fighting / flickering. Standard scale donut tank has the same hard line if you look closely. Assuming this isn't some specific combination of texture options you're using, I'm guessing tweakscale does something extra with the textures?

It's a fancy way of saying "if this engine isn't getting any fuel, it won't run anymore". The only engine that might be an unexpected scenario, is the jet engines - because one of their fuels is intake air, and in the rarified upper atmosphere they may not get enough air to keep running. Have you seen there is a seperate forum section for Gameplay Questions ?

If you have a craft that's very heavy, the LV-N will be more fuel efficient. But they will be long burn times, unless you have a lot of LV-N's, which often defeats the purpose. The LV-N is a niche engine: heavy craft that need the efficiency and can afford to make all their maneuvers at low thrust.

Is that clipping inside a Poodle engine with tweakscale at work?

I just picked up Frosted Kerman.

Gee I wonder who tipped you off! ^.^ Thanks man!

Welcome to the game and the forums @classicaljazzman! Others here have dropped some great suggestions, allow me to add my two cents. I am very like you in that, desiring a less limiting game experience, I thought science mode was right for me. And yet, the prompts from contracts in career mode are so helpful! Here's one of my solutions: When starting a new game, when you choose the game mode, you also choose the difficulty. If you do a custom one, you can change a lot about how career mode plays. For instance: crank up the Fund Rewards. This will make the cost of your rockets a non-issue. If you also drop Fund Penalties, you lower how much everything (except rocket parts) costs - this includes the cost of hiring kerbals and upgrades to your facilities. You can easily start the game with more than enough funds to upgrade everything to max tier, and then you're basically playing a science mode game with contracts. Oh, and if you drop the decline penalty to nothing and reputation penalties as low add they can go, you won't have to worry about rep either. (And all rep does is affect how often you see contracts with a higher number of stars, I.e. more challenging, high cost/high reward).

So I had an unexpected crash during launch. It's a modded installation, and I'm hoping I can track down the source because these are my 'barebones' mods. I'm running: - Environmental Visual Enhancements - Kerbal Engineer Redux - PreciseNode - RCS Build Aid - Sensible Screenshot (+MagiCore) - Kerbal Alarm Clock - Waypoint Manager All latest versions to the best of my knowledge. A couple haven't been updated to 1.1.3 but appear fully functional. Thing is I've had a couple crashes like this, and if consistent I'd like to track down a root cause if possible. Error has occurred with completely different craft, and appears to happen while the game is doing some transitions from atmospheric to space flight (I was right on the 70km mark). This crash not only stopped the game, it completely locked up my computer and forced me to reboot manually. Log:

Congratulations!

Found the pic with Google, looks like someone else was trying to figure out where the 'bottom' of the drill was, too.

Maybe this will help? The upper section of the extended drill's telescopic (extending) pole is considered a "solid" object. The lower half (and the drill head) are visual only and can clip into the dirt. The seperation between these sections is a visible downsize in the pole's diameter. You can right click on drills in the VAB and view them extended, and plan their placement based on your landing gear height.

Looking back, it was probably the probe I sent to Jool back in 1.0.4 (the version I started with). It aerobraked in Jool's atmosphere and visited each of the moons (orbit only). Honestly it was a kinda sad design - ion engines running on just three gigantors, a fuel cell that ran out very quickly, and an RTG. I spent a lot of time with it - between the design and the looooooong burns. It was just satisfying that I'd gotten there to see the moons of Jool 'in person'. I'm looking forward, though. I shall return!

I got back into KSP because my brother was still playing, we chatted about it often and his excitement re-energized me. ^.^ Setting goals for a career or series of missions can help me not get bored - that way I can tailor things like fund and science returns to the gameplay I actually want instead of doing countless random contracts and get tired of them. I browse the forums often - see what other people do. When I see something someone managed that was really cool or very challenging - well there's a goal I can work toward, doing something similar in my own style. Another option is to look for some game-changing mods, if your machine can handle them. It doesn't have to be a full suite of RSS/RO to really change the way the game plays. The possibilities are endless.

It seems to me if using KAS cuts down on part count heavy solutions, it would be more than worthwhile. Also KIS is recommended - if nothing else having this mod lets kerbals on EVA remove parts from craft which are no longer necessary. It's very handy for when you forgot to add a KAS pipe connector, or retrofitting pre-existing base modules to use them.

Don't know if anyone's suggested this yet, but one thing I like doing is, after matching planes, in map mode create a maneuver node right next to the closest spot in your orbit to that of the target's (I.e. the general region your intercepts and close-approaches will happen.) Then hit TAB. This changes your focus to the maneuver node and you can scroll in to see how close you're orbits really are. Ignore the node itself and tweak you're orbit to get right on top of the target's.

And I still have more to learn about this mod! Maybe figure more of this stuff out, I'll do a more extensive tutorial on KSPI-E.

I sorted by mass intending to find the lightest cooling solution and was amazed when just one of the smallest radiators was overkill. Didn't look right to me either, but the really really big radiators were apparently scaled down correctly and I would have needed tons of them. For the purposes of this demonstration, they were very ugly on such a small ship. Hit F1 to take a screenshot at any time in-game (F2 disables the HUD if you don't want to show it). You can then upload these images to any free image hosting service - http://imgur.com/ is popular because it can embed slideshows, no account required or anything. Just copy direct links from the image service (the URLs end with .jpg or .png) into your post and they'll appear, else use the "Insert other media" (lower right of the window when you are posting) -> insert image from URL, this popup window will recognize the URL link to an entire imgur album and embed the whole thing. Nah, I think you'll be fine without any Near Future stuff. If I understand it correctly, all the power output and power requirements are scaled by the same factor, so this exact setup should get you the same results. ....Except for radiators. Currently the small ones appear to be not scaled down with the rest of stuff, so they're OP in my build here.

Hmmm... I could possibly... maybe this weekend.

Oh good, I learned something today. Handy to know for that far-off day when I reach warp capability in a career mode game when I might want to conserve my supplies of D-T D-He3 fusion fuel for a long mission. Edit: Also realized my fusion reactor was running on Deuterium and He3, not Tritium.