CrashTestDanny

Thanks guys - FancyMouse's solution is perfect!

In my career game I have all buildings fully upgraded (I think), including the mission control building which says that if has no limit on active contracts. So why is it that I can never seem to get more than 15 anyway? Once I have 15, it stops offering any more. So now I have 15 active long duration contracts (about a year until I finish the first of them) and can't get any more until I complete or cancel these... Why? Thanks, Danny

Dude - 3250 is with you flying it - not me... But I'm not complaining; this craft has the bank account to handle the mission you specified and come home with 800 or more to spare (with me flying it). While 800 does not get me a Munar insertion, landing, and ascent, it certainly gives me that fat margin that I love so much... And if I want to add to the mission, I know where the kickbacks are stored! Danny

Here's an example of the issue I'm having - this is with one of the Expanded parts, but it's similar with the 5m tanks. Direct link to the shot on imgur: http://i.imgur.com/MWnPYuN.png Danny

Check my math post - 2700 is probably pretty accurate. and that being the case, you flew a much better ascent than I did. The 5k that MechJeb and KER reported for my flight was really more like 2400. But 2400 is plenty to do the mission that Rune built the ship for. I think the best improvement you could make if you want to orbit with more delta-v would be to attach a pair of kickbacks to the wingtips! Danny

Can I change/add to my response? Thanks! Click-through in the editor. I've just finished putting together a 50-billion (or 420) part monstrosity weighing in excess of 10,000 tons and notice that my staging is not quite right. Of course, said monstrosity fills the screen and then some even though I'm zoomed out as far as I can. I go to move something from one stage to another or to rearrange the stages, only to have the editor think I have picked up 250 parts and then tried to attach them to a part with 8x symmetry, so my 420 part behemoth becomes a 2200 part leviathon (which proceeds to crash the game when I try to undo). My career game being up to about 40 flights is taking about 8 minutes to load right now, so that really diminishes my enjoyment of what is otherwise the best game I have ever played (for me anyhow). Please fix the staging click-through asap... Danny

Thanks for the advice guys - I will definitely try out some overclocking before updating my GPU. Sounds like going to one of the newer CPUs with six or eight cores might also be a good option (if I just have to spend money), yes? Thanks again, Danny

umm... never mind about the missing parts - my own stupidity there... it's been so long since I've had any tech to open up that I didn't think to check R&D. lol! The weird shimmering big orange + SpaceY paint thing is still an issue. If that's not clear let me know and I'll put the new version back in and get a pic for you. Danny

Hey Necro - thanks for the mods first off! Hope you saw my party barge in the spacecraft exchange - made possible by SpaceY parts! I've been running v1.0.4 from back in August with no issues, but downloaded 1.3 today and all of the 5m tanks started looking very bad - like they couldn't decide whether to look like big reds scaled up or to have the paint job that you put on them, so they were kinda switching between both. Went back to 1.0.4 and that went away. At the same time, I grabbed expanded to play with some big toys. Unfortunately none of the 7m tanks showed up although I did find some of the engines for expanded and the 7m probe core and the 5m SB. So I guess something I have is not playing nice with your stuff. I know I probably haven't given you enough to work with, but any ideas?

When I get over 200 parts, frame rate starts to go down and timer turns yellow, which I believe indicates that physics simulation rate has gone below 1:!... At about 250 parts, I can count on crashing 2-3 times before I finish whatever activity I was doing with said ship... And I like BIG ships! Danny. I mean really big - like 350 parts is where I'd like to be STARTING! - - - Updated - - - I am running Win 64 bit... anything I can do to stick with that?

So I have a halfway decent computer... it was best of the best a couple years ago when I built it, but this game and one other are beginning to cause issues for it. I believe I know the answer to my question already but wanted to see if any experts wanted to weigh in. I currently have a 3.4 GHz core i7 on an MSI MPower Max Z87 MB with 32G of PC 12800 DDR4 RAM. I also run a Samsung evo 840 1TB SDD. As far as I can tell, right now I could only make very small improvements jumping up to the next versions of any of these items. My video card is where I think I will get the most improvement in KSP's performance. I currently run a MSI GTX 780 graphics card, which until now has been beautiful. But with the ever increasing demand on resources from games, it's beginning to have challenges keeping up. So my question is, do the experts agree that upgrading my video card to say a GTX 980 will have a significant impact on my performance? Any other thoughts greatly appreciated! Thanks, Danny

Lag, 3 crashes per hour when I get over 250 parts on a ship...

Hey - have you double-checked resources while that problem is happening? I did when I encountered it on a recent design and noticed that I was out of electricity because my solar arrays were in and my fuel cells were off. I flipped on the fuel cells and that provided the defecit so the engines would all run while the ISRU was running... Anyhow, thanks for the craft! - - - Updated - - - Here's a couple of albums showing my latest shameless hack of someone else's design... Did I mention I only steal from the best? and here's the thread I posted about it... Danny

Very nice base - congratz!

One quick note - the d/l file only has one solar array but your reference photos show two. Is that intentional?

I agree about the name - plus a foil is a quick, fast, and light weapon - just like this ship.

That's not actually something I would bank on in a spaceplane. The number changes without any fuel usage and I haven't quite figured that out. Yet... Especially since it went up after moving fuel around and locking the tanks that the Rapiers are directly attached to... Let's calculate it ourselves and see... ln(Mstart/Mend) * Isp * 9.81 ought to be simple enough, right? Mstart looks like 23.258. Mend looks like 17.050. (current mass, dry mass from the readout). Isp of the Nerv is 800 and there's only one of them... so ln(23.258/17.050) works out to... ln(1.36410557...) = 0.310498955... that * 800 is 248.4 and multiplied by 9.81 is 2436.8... I must have missed something... I'll try to figure it out later... lol... Danny - - - Updated - - - Ok - I think I partially understand what MechJeb is doing here. First, if we add in the Isp from the Rapiers, we get a whole lot closer to MechJeb's numbers (4200ish), which is clearly wrong since the Rapiers are paperweights until we return to an atmosphere. The 2400 I calculated is still a little high because some of the fuel is reserved for the Rapiers during said return flight. It seems that neither MechJeb (reports false numbers) nor KER (refuses to report) understand which fuel is going to go where, which probably means that the crossfeed and/or fuel pump mods and/or KSP are not reporting something correctly... but analyzing code is too much like work for me - I'm just gonna fly it and see what happens. I think my delta-V budget for landing on Min, then escaping Kerbin and coming back via the Mun should be under 2k anyhow, right? Let's see... Insertion 160, landing 180, ascent 180, escape (Min) 160, escape (Kerbin) 20, return 90... that's 790 - I have 2400... I can do it with three or four little mistakes and still be able to glide in... Sounds like a plan, right? Danny

Very nice! Love the built-up trusses... How do those probes work? Got a craft file to share? Danny

Beautiful as always, Cupcake! Danny

That's my official Flight Test report: Wow. That's what I'm looking for in a spaceplane!! 4894 delta-V on LKO. Headed for Min now... Danny - - - Updated - - - LOL! Love it! Danny

Ok Wow... I just SSTO'ed this thing first try. Made it to SubO 72k x 44k with 4920 deltaV left. That means 4700 left after circularization... wow...

You must have started looking at it right after I posted it! Shortly after that I noticed that and rearranged the album on imgur... Here's a smaller album with better lighting. This is after the almost disastrous, but completely successful Munar orbit and Minimus transfer burn... Danny - - - Updated - - - ... or maybe it's still messed up??? That's weird since it seems to be in the correct order on Imgur... It's also been trimmed down on Imgur, but oh well - I'm not gonna waste time trying to chase that - got rockets to build!! Danny

I'll try to get some on Minimus - sorry about that... I almost lost Catelyn and Kurvy a few moments ago and learned a valuable lesson. I fired her up to leave the Mun with her tanks up to about 3k delta V and a trace of ore left. The initial ascent to 8km went fine, but suddenly she started spinning like one of the engines had gone bad. I took her off auto-pilot, killed the engines, regained control, and started trying to complete the circularization manually, but the same thing happened. I recently picked up GoodSpeed's tank balancer and had the fuel tanks balanced, but the ore tanks were way out of balance. So I fixed that (balanced the ore tanks) and tried again, but still got the same result... WTH!?!? This time all tanks were balanced but then I noticed I was out of electric. I had a fuel cell array started up just to make sure I had juice, but I was still out and not getting any. Dark side of the Mun so solar doesn't work here. So I checked the ISRU and sure enough it is running trying to convert that last bit of ore - and sucking up the electric. I know I read something about how engines deprived of intake air shut down in order of placement or something and I figure the same thing is happening here. I had just enough electric to run some, but not all of my rockets. So I shut down the ISRU and tried again and no more problems. So the lesson I learned is shut down the ISRU before taking off! Danny - - - Updated - - - Thanks Cupcake! Means a lot coming from such a creative designer! Despite and (tongue-in-cheek) disparaging remarks I might have made about your Pickaxe (all due to jealousy I might add!) I love your designs. They are sleek and unusual while still being incredibly functional! Danny

I was cruising the miners thread earlier today and a ship that looked a bit like this one caught my eye. So I put together something with the same basic outline and then set to adding my touches. I believe credit for the original ship goes to algwat, who posted the pic in the miners thread. Everything past that original pic was my doing - I hope you guys like it! I found this Big Beautiful girl in a thread about miners and knew immediately that this was quality! Sure, she was under-utilized and under-appreciated. She had a Mk-3 command pod on top for the guys to just party in. Some other hardware I didn't recognize was stuck up there too, but she looked like too classy a lady to leave that way. So I took her back to my hangar and worked with her a little bit and here is the result. She sports 8 drills that can run virtually free in the daytime thanks to 8 Gigantors. At night, turn on her 8 fuel cell arrays and each one can power a drill. Make sure your highest level engineer is operating her so that you get the bonuses, She only has room for one Kerbal and she's looking for the right engineer to spend her life with! On the ground, her eight drills can bring up an incredible 3600 units of ore per hour, filling her ore tanks in less than three hours! The on-board ISRU will need about 7 hours to fill her fuel tanks. Running drills and ISRU simultaneously for 7-8 hours should result in full fuel and ore tanks (assuming drill output is 1. for your actual time to fill tanks, divide this time by your drills' ore extraction rate, so if your drills are putting out 0.5, the time to fill ore and fuel will be 14-16 hours). A cozy living space is provided for her special Kerbal in a Mk-1 lander can. The airlock opens to a convenient walk-around balcony and ladders provide access to the surface or the top docking port. Off the ground, 12 Thud engines provide her impetus while 16 Vernors provide 6-axis control. She can get where she's going and turn on a dime (whatever that is)! She is powered by Gigantor solar panel arrays in the light or by fuel cell arrays in the dark. She carries her own ISRU, so you can spend all of that fuel on landing and be confident that you'll get home again. Want to go visit every rock in the system? This Big Beautiful Lady can take you almost anywhere (Don't try to land on Eve, Tylo, Laythe, Jool, or Kerbin). You might manage it on Tylo, Laythe, or Kerbin, but there would be no margin for error. In vacuum, fully loaded with fuel AND ore, she has 1840 delta-V. Without the ore, she packs 3300+. If you launch with full ore tanks, get to orbit and convert all that ore to fuel, you'll have about 3k available, so your total budget without refueling is over 4800! Where can't you go with 4800 delta-V to spend!? TWR on Moho is 1.95 - enough to get you to a rendezvous at an orbiting refinery, space station, transfer vehicle, or whatever. Two axial sr. docking ports allow her to join up with a space station core and integrate into the station, adding her thrust and control assets to the station. Four shielded docking ports on her arms allow smaller craft to dock around the axial core. Ore capacity: 8700 Liquid Fuel capacity: 11340 Ox capacity: 13860 Mass: Dry: 60.585t Wet: 188.246t Laden: 275.246t Thrust: Atm: 1298.364MN Vac: 1440.000MN If my long-winded description of her has in any way diminished your appreciation for this fine lady, then my apologies to both you and her. Without further ado, I give you a rising star among miners, Kurvy Miner! Downloads: Kurvy Miner alone Kurvy Miner +LV Danny. Let me know how you like her! - - - Updated - - - I cut that album down to 33 images. Note 2100 delta-V left after landing on the Mun. The LV got me to a Munar Periapsis of 19km with about 50dV left in the LV. Took about 250 to circularize and about 900 to change plane, deorbit, and land. Landing was uneventful. It was about 60m away from the target, but I think that is mostly because of the lower than normal starting orbit (I usually shoot for 28k). But obviously, this craft is just easy to deal with - I hope you guys enjoy! Danny

Sweet looking ship! Have some more rep - I know you need it!