fourfa

The seven-segment display is genius!

For what it's worth - I'm playing NCD but with reverts and saves turned on. #1 - my Mac install has a bug where contracts sometimes insta-fail when accepting, wiping out all rep and funds. I flatly refuse to put time into this game without the ability to revert this bug. #2 - I find this game fun and a good use of my time when I can revert, and I do not if I can't. I have proven this to myself enough times that I don't need to keep testing it. Your mileage will vary. So I come here to this thread to get inspired by others and share things I learn, but not to document for badges and leaderboards as my setup isn't compliant with the agreed rules. No big deal to me! I'm finding NCD + reverts to be great fun, super challenging, lots to learn, but not grindy and unpleasant. Anyway on to the sharing - there were some questions about fragile KSC science rollers being too risky. How about these armored rollers, protected by 8x clipped girders: I had tons of luck with these, no explosions. If you don't have batteries yet then you might need multiple runs to cover the whole KSC and all the microbiomes. The second one was particularly good at spending a lot of time just barely off the ground, to collect those elusive "flying low at [KSC microbiome]" crew and temp reports. Re: crewed Minmus landings - I succeeded with this simple design. Burned straight from Minmus intercept to a mountain landing (Lowlands biome however), then burned from surface straight to Minmus escape heading directly east (about 400m/s burn) with enough dV to adjust for 45km Kerbin periapsis plus.... 15m/s left over. Okay, that margin might be too narrow for safety - but as I've recently learned, this twin-Thud booster is considerably less efficient than a single-Reliant, so there is probably +100m/s margin there. Heck, you don't really need the science box either (capsule was taken from a version with a Science Jr below the decoupler, and I had a Goo explode on a previous mission) Another tip I've learned recently for early Mun flyby missions: setting your Mun intercept Ap inside the Mun's orbit will put you in a prograde pass, Ap outside the Mun's orbit will give you a retrograde pass. Now with normal KSP, maneuver nodes + patched conics, that retrograde pass can be tweaked ever so gently to give you a safe free-return trajectory. Never going to happen in Caveman, and I usually end up with Pe buried deep in Kerbin or up high halfway to Mun - both requiring expensive correction burns. The prograde pass however will slingshot, throwing you out higher. At that high Ap (and correspondingly slower orbital velocity), corrections are VERY cheap. The downsides: 25+ day mission instead of ~2 days; and if you set your Pe at the Mun too low (like 6km) you can accidentally get a slingshot out of Kerbin SOI... Just inside the Mun-low 60km boundary is always safe though. EDIT - another tip I forgot: the '#' on right click menus in VAB/SPH switches from quantized sliders to numerical input. I often find when building boosters, that a particular tick is over the 18T limit, but the next tick down is considerably under the limit. Switch to # mode, and you can type in any arbitrary number and slowly converge on exactly 18T. Just grab your calculator and remember that the right amount of oxidizer is 11/9ths of the LF quantity. It's a small tweak but sometimes it matters...

Do I spy tiny solar panels on the work lights? So they just work anywhere, and don’t have to tie into the science power system?

I'm sure this isn't an original approach, but I've been having tons of fun with it in my early-NCD run: the Biome Bomber. A ballistically-deployed steerable glider, for targeted early rare-biome science collection. Pilot in front, scientist in back, fly over the desired biome and pop chutes. I was able to hit the island runway, landed/splashed Deserts, and splashed Grasslands on the west coast of Kerbal Africa (WSW of KSC). That was enough to finally earn the Science Jr, and refit the Bomber for materials bay collections (nice gentle 4m/s descent with 3 mains). A few different configurations: * PS: not for suborbital flights; the fins will burn off. I don't even have Stability yet! I'll try suborbitals once I get the AV-T1 wings, for Badlands and polar targets.

In career mode, at level zero, engineers and scientists cannot activate SAS. It’s possible this is the situation our new-to-KSP OP is in

Go ahead and try it, if you think it’ll work. You might find that admin strategies effectiveness scale with reputation, and in harder versions of caveman, rep is extremely hard to come by.

Topping this up as I’ve been playing caveman style on a laptop while the beast PC with all the mods is in storage. Great way to make the most of minimal computing! I see DLCs are discouraged but not prohibited - interesting as the Bobcat makes an outstanding lifter engine with excellent ISP both at sea level and mid altitude. Tons of thrust and could easily carry more than 18t, if you’re assembling drop tanks on it. Speaking of assembling, I’ve been wanting to try holding a large upper stage in the air with launch clamps, then driving an 18t first stage under it, then drop-bombing the upper stage to dock on top of the booster. Anyone tried this? Every time I’ve tried assembling things with wheels onto things held by launch clamps, kraken forces and explosions have been the result; this might be a simple way around it. And easier to incorporate regular decouplers above the docking ports than the wobbly side-mounted tanks that don’t decouple right

Looks like 1.10.1 fixed this particular issue: * Fix Mk2 Lander cans open door action being missing.

DIY fix in the meantime:

Seems at this point they are not planning to fix it. There are patches for a DIY fix here:

Wait wait wait... before we fix this - can this be used as ballast to make submarines sink? Gotta be the densest part in KSP

OK, so a lightweight mod called CabinHeat or something that uses SystemHeat as a framework. Makes sense.

Forcing complexity on stock-parts gameplay. So at a minimum, without radiators the inhabited parts get hot and have temp gauges show up. At the outside of the spectrum, eventual overheat and explosions. Good question, I hadn’t thought of it in those terms

Looks fascinating, can’t wait to try it. How compatible would this be with making stock inhabited parts require cooling, in simple proportion to number of seats? Could it be as simple as a custom patch adding a systemheat module?

Also, if you just wait to separate the three pods until you’re through reentry and mostly falling vertically, all three will then stay within the 2.3km fine-physics bubble and function properly

Try this: https://github.com/shadowmage45/DockingPortToggle

Built a Mk3 cargo plane to fly around Kerbin using the 1200K airliner parts (Goliath engine, jumbo wings etc). Managed to make it fly over Mach 1 so it suffered a lot of heating and red-hot wings, managed by radiators. Landed, Bob got out to do some science, removed helmet, boarded a chair in the cargo area, and exploded from overheating. RIP Bob. Note to astronaut office: do not remove helmets while deployed

Another option re: docking ports. Doesn't remove the ports after use like Konstruction, but makes the CPU-heavy scan behaviour toggleable. When toggled off, the ports should be no more laggy than any other part. Worth a try, see if it makes a difference on an existing station rather than have to launch a whole new one with Konstruction parts https://github.com/shadowmage45/DockingPortToggle

I've been spending a lot of time flying helos with counter-rotating mains set up for standard cyclic pitch and roll, and ducted fan unit on the tail for yaw control. Tail rotor turns full speed, blades deployed at zero degrees, yaw in collective. No KAL, no reaction wheels, nothing complicated. Flies like a helicopter to me, and happily delivering loads in career. Not fast, to be sure - like 80m/s max over the surface and somewhat fiddly matching the collective main rotor pitch to the angle of attack in flight. MUCH easier with an analog flight stick, so I can hold constant AoA. I built some compound designs with jets for forward thrust, and can get up to high subsonic speed. There's a pretty usable happy medium in there somewhere. Just wondering what "toy quality" means to you here.

@KingDominoIII Kinda surprising results. The RTG seems to have strange drag. When node-attached inline, the part behind it gets very high drag, almost as if it still has an open node (my sounding rocket reached orbit with 628m/s of delta-V remaining). But the drag penalty of just surface attaching it isn't bad - in fact it's better than the inline test (flying the same fixed trajectory, reached orbit with 683m/s). Worst of all is surface-attaching the RTG, then putting Small Nose Cones on its open front and rear nodes (reached orbit with 288m/s). I also tried the Very Small Nosecone from Breaking Ground (445m/s remaining), and the Tiny Nosecone (680m/s). What this tells me is that inherently the part doesn't have high drag at all, the extra mass penalty of nosecones don't offset whatever bare drag penalty it has. So I revise my original advice - you should surface mount and offset it. It won't be shielded from drag, but it hardly matters, and it probably will be less draggy than the solar panels you want to get rid of.

Check the contract carefully. If it says “measure the temperature above X meters” guess what, in orbit in outer space counts as “above.” That’s often an easier way to do it. Put a simple probe in a polar orbit, and you can knock out “above” contracts all day long for profit and no new cost (just a lot of timewarping). Unfortunately it’s often worthwhile to check these contracts in the Tracking Station to see how far away they are if you’re looking for things near to the runway. Would be nice if mission control had a map, or you could see contracts from the tracking station (but there are maps mods for that)

Should be OK? Though there are some parts with weird drag no matter what (for instance the tri-structural adapter last I checked) so I don't want to swear. I'll check it out later since I know it can be kinda tricky to parse the data in the AeroGUI

Oh the hidden counter rotating cowl prop is genius!

There was a brief period when motors came out in BG, before the propeller parts got added. Using the stock aero parts, it was a big struggle to get much power out of elevons and basic fins with the inherent motor speed limit of 460rpm (and this was true for krakentech mechanisms before BG too, the true unmodded speed limit is something like 500rpm). For example this nastiness only got max 85m/s top speed. When the props dropped, they had these disconnected magenta vectors. It’s a hack of sorts - the game treats them as having a much larger aero surface than they really have, by applying the force at a much greater distance. That greatly magnifies their force when spinning relative to regular parts. The result in a similar craft was more then triple the top speed with lower part count. edit - as for other questions, I’ve noticed many cases where shielded parts in cargo bays also throw red drag arrows, but the amount of drag actually applied is zero. Seems to be complex or broken rules about red vectors

Neither. Clipping parts visually out of the way does not ever eliminate drag. As for part 2 of your question, yes open nodes cause increased drag, but mis-matched nodes are just as bad or worse. For instance, if your plane is Mk1 part -> RTG -> Mk1 part, you’ll have huge drag at both the 1.25m-to-0.625m and 0.625m-to-1.25m nodes (the RTG is 0.625m or Mk0 as the game sees it - look at the diameter of the green node before attaching, these tell you what matches) The correct answer is service bay, cargo bay, or fairing. That is the only way to eliminate drag entirely for your various service parts. All my SSTOs have one, and I test carefully that the parts inside are actually shielded from drag (it’s quite easy to have a part that looks like it should be shielded actually be getting drag). Try alt-F12 -> Physics -> aero -> show aero data in right-click menu (something like that), then right-click the part in question. Aero mods like FAR change everything but since you didn’t mention it and are asking here instead of the FAR thread I’m assuming you’re playing stock