CrashTestDanny

It doesn't seem to be fixed in the version I have... but I am looking forward to the new and improved version like everyone else! Danny

whoah... rep'ed and dl'ed. That thing is awesome! Danny

Pickled, there's a 7.5m probe core that has fantastic torque and is (IMHO) better than a 7.5m external reaction wheels would be... Danny

wow - that ship is very cool looking... I may just have to steal it! Err... I mean trade you some rep for it!! Danny!

Awesome! Great Job! Danny

wow - very nice, even if not fully functional... Danny

enquiring minds want to know... did it help? Danny

just noticed the paint schemes! Very nice! Time for a stealth tanker! Danny

I love this mod - it's very useful. I have K, Mun, and Min all 95%+ mapped and it is very helpful for ruling out bad landing sites. What's a little more difficult, IMO, is choosing good ones. To that end, I was wondering if there is some tool to help with the data reduction - to identify or filter location based on certain attributes (like biome, slope, resource concentration, etc)? Thanks, Danny

So it's a C plane... very nice... are those radial intakes you're using as flotation devices?

Red Iron Crown is correct - after launch and rendezvous I had 500 m/s left. I then refueled at my station at 150km and had 4k to spend on my Mun/Min/Sun tour. Danny

Ladies and Gentlemen, It gives me great pleasure to introduce my latest creation, FatSSTO. She's Fat in name only. With a TWR of 1.83 and 4k [Vac] delta V on Kerbin's surface, she'll get you to LKO (tested at 84k) with over 500 delta V to spare. She carries 16 passengers and after refueling, she can go anywhere with her 4k delta V. In the attached album I launched directly to rendezvous (84k) with a stranded Kerbal, at closest approach (about 60m), I EVA'ed the stranded Kerbal over to FatSSTO to join the tourists and trainees on board. Sorry I didn't think to take screen shots of the ascent, but I got the rendezvous... I then rendezvous'ed with my LKO 150 Von Braun Ring (from Rune - thanks Rune!) and took ALL the fuel it had! From there I went to the Mun and landed at the Neil Armstrong memorial to satisfy half a dozen Mun and Minimus course/rally contracts (this batch of tourists got lucky!). Then I re-orbited Mun and am transferring to Min - about 2k delta V left. At Min, I will land, plant flags, take off, escape Kerbin for as short a time as possible (ahead of Kerbin's orbit this time!) and then return to Kerbin. This ship is awesome if I do say so myself! She is fitted with plenty of chutes to land safely, and makes an excellent rescue, tourism, and training shuttle. Enjoy! Download the craft HERE Danny

In case anyone is curious, I did try running KSP from a RAMdisk. I thought there was a possibility, however slim, that it might improve load times. I was disappointed that there was no perceptible improvement in save file load time (which currently takes 3-4 minutes with 40 flights in progress...

I don't think there's really any question about this. Since OP says LAND on the target body then ascend from target body to return to Kerbin, Mun is much more expensive - like 600 deltaV to land and another 600 to take off. The maximum plane change cost for Min is 340. Use this delta V map for reference: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/96985-1-0-4-WAC-s-Delta-V-Map-continued-2-2-(Aug-13th)-Swash-transition Min total cost to land from Kerbin surface is 4670, while Mun is 5150 - a difference of 480 in favor of Min. And if you do your plane change to match Min on the outbound leg instead of doing it in LKO you will save a lot also (and it's not always needed as someone else pointed out. Lots of times I just burn a little normal or anti-normal to get the intercept without matching planes and then take care of it in the capture. With Min's low gravity, all that is cheap compared to Mun. The thing that keeps me from using Min more is the 5-8 day trip. Danny

And you left out it's gorgeous! Danny.

I actually studied this stuff for 7 years at the University of Arizona. It's hard and taking some time to get it doesn't make you a dummy. Especially considering we're talking about a game, not a college program or a job where you would probably have more time to spend on it and more motivation to complete the hard stuff. That said, here's what I think you should probably understand first about orbits and orbital mechanics. First, you should know that every orbit is an ellipse. That's not the three dots you put in a sentence to indicate a pause or an unfinished thought, it's what happens to a circle when one side of it is longer than the other . Where a circle has a single point as its center, an ellipse has two foci (foci is the plural of focus) which are sort of analogous to a circle's center. In fact, a circle is a special case of an ellipse where both foci are at the same location. The defining characteristic of an ellipse is that from any given point, the sum of the distances to the foci is constant. There's a whole lot more to know about ellipses, but that's probably nearly all you need, but maybe some trivia; ever wonder why the game talks about "conics" or what a conic is? It's because every ellipse (and therefore every orbit) is a slice of a cone, hence the term conic. Trivia for you and me, bread and butter for someone who writes software that deals with orbital mechanics. Every orbit is an ellipse and the body that is being orbited is located at one of the foci of that ellipse. That's it for orbits. Kepler's laws will give you some more detail and plenty of math, if you want to look them up. They were originally published in 1609 and 1619 and were meant to explain observations of the motion of planets, but they apply to spacecraft as well. Now on to orbital mechanics, which is the term I am using to describe the manipulation of a spacecraft's orbit. There are three axes along which you can apply a force to change an orbit. Each has a positive and negative direction. The first is "prograde" and its negative would be "retrograde". The second is "normal" (not an observation of its mental state) and its negative is "anti-normal". The third is "radial" and it's negative is "anti-radial". While you can burn in a direction that is not exactly one of these, the result of any burn will be a vector which can be broken down into components that are entirely in one of these three directions. "Prograde" means in the direction of movement, that is to say tangential to the current orbit at the position of the burn (we're kind of assuming that burns take no time, which we all know is not true, but it's easier to get us close to the right answer by making that assumption). When you burn prograde or retrograde, the effect is always to change the orbital altitude at the opposite side of the orbit. If you burn pro/retro at one of the two apses (periapsis and apoapsis), then only the opposite apsis will be changed, increasing if your burn was prograde, and decreasing if your burn was retro. If you burn between the two apses, then the apsis ahead of you will increase while the apsis behind you will decrease. This will also roll the orbit, bringing the periapsis closer and pushing the apoapsis further away. Burning normal or anti-normal is used for changing the plane or inclination of your orbit. When you burn normal the point on the opposite side of your orbit from the burn stays the same, the points halfway from your burn to the opposite point will raise (prograde side) and lower (retro side), changing the inclination. You really need to know that 1 - the best point to change planes is either the AN or DN and 2 - the cost at AN and the cost at DN are only the same if your orbit is perfectly circular; if you are returning from a moon (like minimus) and want to enter a 0-inclination orbit of kerbin, you want to do it as far from Kerbin as you can, and that means you do it as soon as you enter Kerbin's SOI - you could probably do it by planning your ejection angle from Min perfectly, but when you're in Kerbin's SOI, you can see it, which makes a world of difference when planning. Finally, a radial burn will push your orbit toward the apsis ahead of you (anti-radial pushes it toward the other apsis). If you are burning at an apsis, the radial burn will first rotate the two apses 90 degrees and then push toward the apsis ahead or behind. If you push far enough, your trajectory can become sub-orbital. Now what you (and the rest of us) have to do is learn these types of burns and the impacts they have on orbits in order to combine them to achieve our desired outcomes. Again, this is not easy; if it was it would be boring, wouldn't it? Also note, that sometimes (often) you have to wait for the right opportunity to do what you want. For example, Minimus' orbit is inclined 6 degrees, or -6 degrees depending upon which side of the planet she is on in her upward side of her orbit. If you are in Kerbin orbit, simply changing your inclination does not match the plane. Matching the plane can only be done at the AN or DN. Of course, if you match planes with Min from a circular Kerbin orbit, you are wasting a lot of delta-V on that maneuver. The much less expensive way to do that is to perform your transfer burn and then match planes at the AN on your outward leg, then fine-tune your transfer to Min and your insertion burn after the plane correction is completed. Eventually in this game you will need to have an understanding of these things, IMO, and a better understanding than I have, even. I'm sure I'll get corrections about some things here... However, I found that MechJeb's Maneuver Planner does an excellent job with most things here and will easily get you anywhere within Kerbin's SOI as well as Duna, Eve, and Moho. Catching asteroids is still a little tough with MechJeb. I highly recomment MechJeb as the essential mod for anyone who doesn't care to learn this much about orbital mechanics. But having studied it for so long, having dreamed of it my entire childhood and pined for it since the day I left the aerospace industry (22 years ago), I think everyone should love doing this stuff! Hope this helps - feel free to reach out to me if you need any clarification. Danny - - - Updated - - - This is very similar to the way Gene Kerman walks you through the rendezvous section of the docking tutorial. I highly recommend the docking tutorial - you will come out of it knowing exactly how to rendezvous - and dock! The ship I use for these rescue missions now is actually just a klaw on a probe core with enough engine to orbit it. I don't even use RCS cause you don't need to translate when klawing. The return section is fitted with a bunch of airbrakes and chutes. I've used it to land 20t+ successfully. I bring it down pointing retro as long as possible, but it's usually a little too top heavy to maintain that attitude in the lower atmosphere. This rig has not failed a single rescue or recovery/salvage mission yet. Danny.

So Rune - how did you land on Min? I thought I saw you said something about landing with RCS, but in my tests that does not seem possible (and was almost disastrous!). I ended up coming down tail-first on the nuke and was a little worried about damaging it when I laid her down on the gear, but it turned out ok... departure was a little interesting as the RCS could only raise her to max rotation angle (as defined by main wheels to the first point on the tail to touch ground)... Vernors or puffs on the bottom might make a belly landing/departure more doable... Danny

well, I'm clocked up to about 4G right now and I think that's the most I'm getting. The issue does not seem to be thermal - I'm running temps lower than 130F under load which seems to be pretty good. Performance-wise, the game seems to be doing better when I'm running sub-200 part-count ships, but about the same when I go above 200. At 300+ it becomes unbearable. Really looking forward to 1.1... As I mentioned previously, I found that openGL improved stability at the cost of performance, while I found that Direct3D 11 improved performance and stability over Direct3D 9. I have had a couple crashes under D3D 11, but nothing like I was having under 9. I did move my physics rate up to it's highest setting (.12 if I recall) and that has also seemed to have a marginal impact, but only on sub-200 part-count ships. I would sure like to know what the guy who says he likes 1500+ part ships is running!

I figured out that KER and MechJeb both do the calculation of delta-V a lot better if you shut down the engines that are not in use... Danny

Actually, I have the 4770k. I just really didn't want to spend my time learning about overclocking. So many other interesting things to do - like build bigger rockets!

When I get the base clock over about 103 it stops before loading the OS and the bios comes back and says the overclocking failed. What kinda stuff do I need to do? Danny

ok, so based on all the advice here I went out and did not buy a new computer I tried openGL, and stability was GREATLY improved, but performance on my GTX780 suffered in this mode. So after reading the 64bit thread I discovered there was yet another option to try; -force-d3d11. I turned that on and it seems to have made some marginal improvement to performance while not de-stabilizing the game. I have not seen a crash since Saturday! Yay! I also did some overclocking, but my CPU doesn't seem to tolerate much of that. I guess the next thing is to see if I can speed loading times by putting stuff on a ramdisk...

I didn't even know I had IFS. Probably something CKAN did to me. Anyhow, thanks a ton for your help in finding that! Much appreciated! Danny - - - Updated - - - and the final report is that after removing IFS, my issue (just this one, tho ) is resolved. You rock! Have a rep! Danny

Removing cache did not help. I am seeing the issue on all of the 5m and 7m SpaceY tanks... I put my log from last restart in my dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/s/fmox4z20b7umcbf/KSP.log?dl=0 Danny

Thanks - does that correct SpaceY expanded also or will that be a separate fix? Danny - - - Updated - - - Really appreciate all your work on this - these 5m and 7m rockets are awesome! Danny - - - Updated - - - Hey man - sorry to be "that guy", but here is what I am seeing with 1.3.1. Firespitter is installed. Danny