swjr-swis

There should be separate categories for spaceplanes and rockets. There's much too big a gap between those to just lump them all together. No need for additional categories, but I'd be very interested in seeing the leaderboard mention how recoverable each launcher is (the % of recovery cost shown by the game; screenshot of launcher sans payload in SPH/VAB and screenshots of recovery of each stage should be provided if doing this). I'll be watching this one, and will likely participate - with a bit of delay, this week is going to be a busy one.

Today, after seeing a proud @T116 post a creation of his daughter, I felt inspired to boldly Go(tm)... and so I did. Craft file: https://kerbalx.com/swjr-swis/Wonderful-Plane-Nr2

Some people spent today building big things; me, I kept it small. Some comments reached us that the FakeJeb2 was found lacking a brain. Not entirely surprising, since I never gave it one (would have been very surprising to find out it spontaneously grew one; but I digress). So I sat down with the team and had them reassess what could be done to add a probe core, and still maintain the overall kerbal weight and outline. The team came through with the FakeJeb3:

Mushrooms, huh. Well, that goes a long way to explaining kerbals' willingness to get into our contraptions...

The different tools for extracting a ship from a safe file have varying degrees of success, depending on the craft. I don't know anything that will work guaranteed. But you do get plenty of opportunity to see the ships 'live' - you could just remake them. Or...

Only because ship building had already moved towards metal hulls before projected air power was even a concept. If'n those slackers would've hurried up and figured out (so arrogant to call it 'invented') the mechanics and potential of flight earlier, we might've seen the first aircraft carriers made of wood.

Once more, Valentina ignored her ToDo list, after spotting an interesting aircraft (@HyperDraco's Draconic Sea-Fox F). She asked the team in the lab if they could make some modifications, and they delivered the DSF R4, a SWiS reinterpretation of the concept. They did try to warn her that it wasn't tuned and ready yet, but off she went to do a River Run... She'll have plenty of time to evaluate the performance before she tries again.

Really like this one a lot. The way you did the cockpit, the overall lines, the handling at low speeds. I had a blast with this one. Thank you. This has all the looks and handling of a high-performance supersonic jet, it deserves being able to do so! Also, the Z-fighting in the wings makes me jittery after a bit . So I tried to see what could be done about those things. This is what I ended up with: https://www.dropbox.com/s/zh9wkjy08bvloxn/Draconic Sea Fox R4.craft?dl=0 It's all yours to do with as you please, or I can upload it to KerbalX with link and full credit to your original, whatever suits you. I think it still keeps the looks and maneuverability of your original, but it's capable of mach 4.8 now, and is supersonic within 40 secs after take off. Also, it can make orbit! Using some of the Ox tank space and emptying LF to 60%, it can steam right up to a 80x80 km orbit, with enough left to return and some LF to spare in case you come up short of the runway. Not sure why anyone would want to take a carrier jet to orbit, but there it is. Few screenshots:

That's pretty fancy in my book. The low detail of the screenshots makes it a bit difficult to appreciate fully, but it looks like you put a good bit of work on the command island. I notice you chose to use wing sections. That likely makes it a lot lighter than something out of Mk3 sections, like most of us do. Does it have a tendency to lift off when you get a bit of speed? How do you power it? What are the blue-ish domes fore and aft of the island? We crave details! C'mon, sell this baby to us.

We still want to see! There's a large range of considerations when it comes to carriers. We're all just trying out designs here, and sharing results. Don't be afraid to ask questions. I have no trade secrets - I'll gladly share any of the techniques I used, if you think they'd help you. I think you'll find the same for others.

Do you have enough funds to pay for the ship? I think it shows a message saying when that is the issue, but I don't recall right now. Look at the numbers in the lower left corner of the screen - it shows two numbers, the top one is how much your current vessel costs, the bottom one how much funds you have. If the bottom nr is bigger, you can't pay for the ship and it won't launch (assuming a career game). Also possible in career: if you built a ship that has exceeds the dimensions, nr of parts, or weight limit of the VAB/launchpad. Yet another is if you loaded a ship that includes parts that you have not unlocked yet. A 4th reason can be that you left a ship on the launchpad (or even a single part... a launch clamp?). It could also be caused by a memory leak. If you've had the game open for a while and launched and reverted a number of times, especially in the newer versions, it eventually gets into an error state. Just save your game, exit, and restart the game.

Probably too late, but just in case: before you do anything else, try to make a quicksave, or a named save: F5 or Alt-F5 on PC. If that won't work either, it is okay to close just KSP, no need to shutdown the whole computer. On PC, Alt-F4 will do this. The game will close immediately without saving, but if you cannot save anyway that's not a worse result than you already have. The craft file themselves are always saved to disk when you launch, even if only as an 'auto-save' craft file. When you restart KSP, try to look for that in your ship list before launching anything else, otherwise it will be overwritten (it's always the same name). The getting stuck without being able to revert, return to VAB or menu, or even closing KSP, is a recent bug that has been reported several times already, but so far I've not seen anyone mention an easily reproducible case, which makes finding the cause difficult. I do notice however one clue in what you describe: They made a change recently in the debug menu to allow overriding the safe minimum altitude for cheating to orbit in, but they had it enabled by default. Obviously that was not what they meant to do, as it results in what you just described. It was corrected in 1.12.2 - you could upgrade to that, or just disable it in the cheat orbit window (remove the checkmark).

Strictly speaking this was done two weeks ago, when I updated the Praying Mantis... but I forgot I had done some recording that still needed editing and publishing. Nothing spectacular. Just one full size aircraft carrier, launching from the KSC runway... and returning to it.

Having missed this the first time, I had to go through the whole thread to see what had been said before. I think I still find myself in agreement with your very first summary, with your current amendment of having drag calculated and applied not to individual parts, but to the whole ship outline, as long as such parts are still connected to the ship. Apart from a slight computational delay at the moment of calculating what that outline would be, that has to be a marked improvement in physics calculation while in flight, and should render a more accurate representation of aerodynamics as we intuitively 'know' from every day. Also, please kill 'cannot deploy while stowed' entirely, with prejudice. Please.

Ah yes, my naming 'standards'. Many of my craft end up named something like 'Comet ST1e1b' - the 37th saved iteration of a plane named Comet, type ST1, fifth concept, first variant, second tweak. My craft folders get cluttered with those, due to obsessively saving almost every single tested iteration in case KSP decides to randomly screw up the very next tweak. The basic idea is to rename whatever my final iteration is to the actual name I thought up for it, based on its looks or purpose or an obscure reference or whatever... but since I hardly ever actually stop tweaking, that last step hardly ever happens. The purely 'practical' (?) aside, the only other common denominator seems to be a remarkable absence of a common denominator. A sample from just one of my savegames: 3.6t / 3t / 2t - Apparently I was in the process of rapidly iterating a minimal mass Juno/Spark based spaceplane, and not feeling like scrolling through the list much. Buzz Flightfear - My note: "how small can a plane be", on a single 0.625m fuselage, single-wheel (!) plane with an EAS for the pilot. DinnitRead 2 - Note: "For a challenge at some other forum, asking for 'efficiency'. Lots of preamble and fancy words. Me, I just slap something together." I think I was somewhat puzzled why some people felt making a fuel/cargo-efficient plane in KSP requires a PhD in scientific vocabulary. Gojira 3D - An entry for an endurance/speed challenge asking for planes using a single Goliath engine (I think). Juicer 1 - A no-frills spaceplane to lift a full orange tank to LKO. LL COOL J - Apparently an acronym: "Lady-Lake Cryo-Oceanic Observation Laboratory for Jeb" (according to the description text I gave it)... and for the life of me I have absolutely no recollection whatsoever what this was meant for. NervOS 3 - One kerbal from KSC to LKO and back on a single Nerva. Said kerbal must've not felt too confident about riding a nuclear reactor to space when asked for a name. LongNeck McLongNeck - An SPH contraption of 146m high, from the looks of it designed with the actual intention to make it lift off from the runway... expect I can't imagine it ever came even close (I tried loading it - it's a wet noodle). Uhm - The description: "Uhm..." I stared at this thing from all angles for 10 mins. It doesn't seem finished, but looks like someone killed an Mk3 commercial liner and then made a fireplace rug out of it. I still can't think of a better name, or description, than 'Uhm...' Granted, the fact a great deal of my KSP play time occurs due to chronic insomnia may have something to do with some of those names.

Hi there. Thank you for reporting this. I'm glad to see you already succeeded in uploading this craft in the mean time. There's a complicated update ongoing at the moment, and very limited RL opportunity to tend to it. There's a slightly higher chance than usual of site errors or services needing to be restarted. In almost all cases though, it's a temporary error and you just need to retry a bit later for it to work.

Hollywood would have us believe that one is just to walk in. What could possibly go wrong, it's just another day in the Deep Sea...

Or just build a low tech plane with enough pitch authority to pull out of a steep dive. Craft file: https://kerbalx.com/swjr-swis/LT-HiG

Right-clicking on the robotic part brings up the Part Action Window (PAW). You have to look carefully, cause there are a lot of buttons and sliders, but one of the buttons is labeled 'locked', and will toggle between locked and unlocked state. Bear in mind that there is a known bug with robotics parts slowly drifting off their locked state, apparently when starting/stopping time warp near the craft (not sure if also when loading a craft). Locking doesn't help this.

Yes, it's reasonably safe to assume that was the date you started that career. It should've been created automatically, with the two contained folders SPH/VAB, when you created your first craft in that career. Since normally nothing else is created/deleted in that folder, the date should be left undisturbed from that moment.

Since sleep wasn't happening, I spent another night with the team in the SPH, intent on wittling down that ToDo list on the whiteboard. Instead, we ended up playing with some left-over parts and carbon composites... and test flying the result. I blame a not-further-to-be-named mad scientist for planting the idea. Mutter. Craft file: https://kerbalx.com/swjr-swis/SWiS-Starship-1c

It's the vibrations, you see. It's frozen icecream (mint!) after all, a suspension. The vibration liquefies the surface and the miner gets swallowed whole. After it sinks, the still surface refreezes and regains its normal structure, and it's like nothing was ever there... More seriously: surface structures have long had a tendency to randomly disappear. There's a ground anchor in 1.12.2 now, which might help prevent that. In EVA construction mode, place one with a docking port, and try to maneuver/land your miner with its own docking port on top.

In space, nobody knows where the ceiling is.

Well yes, because inertia is a thing. Energy will need to be expended to make mass A start moving over distance B and stopping again, and vice versa.

Found the log for that session: https://www.dropbox.com/s/y70nyvl9aca2i02/Player-prev.log?dl=0 I added the link to the OP.