swjr-swis

An excellent mod indeed, but not a solution for stock players like me. KerbalX (and by extension the directly related Craft Manager mod) has my undying support, but it's not a solution to the issue I describe. Aside from the obvious impact on rapid prototyping and iteration of craft designs: Finish iteration 123 of craft to the point of needing a live test Save craft Open craft manager Upload craft to KerbalX (which has a few substeps of its own, left out for simplicity) Close craft manager Exit to main menu Load career game Open craft manager Search and download the newly iterated craft Load it into the game Launch, test, record observations of what worked or didn't, and what still needs improvement Exit to main menu Load sandbox game Edit craft Rinse and repeat.... for easily several dozen iterations in a single session It would also end up cluttering uploads with endless series of unfinished iterations of craft files.

The answer to your question is right there in the text you quoted: So there are, in fact, limits to the stock sandbox mode: You cannot manipulate or even see the research tree since R&D is locked, which makes designing craft for a very specific set of unlocked tech nodes and parts difficult. Funding and strategies are unavailable, which makes it difficult to design craft that stay within specific monetary limits. Missions are unavailable. Which means I cannot easily test craft viability for specific mission types. The above limitations force me to reference external sources to keep track of what parts are within the tech/funds limits I am aiming for, and I am forced to exit the save entirely and load up the career one to test run my designs with specific missions. It's like being offered a theoretical open world RPG... but with quests, crafting, and skilling disabled. There ya go, knock yourself out. Hence my own version of a sandbox: a career mode game with an appropriate cheatmenu-sponsored injection of funds, science, rep and facility levels, to be able to do ALL of the above things, truly without limits. I've not used the actual sandbox mode of the game ever since.

It's not a toilet. It's the access hatch to Spaceship Kerbin. Have you never wondered how new recruits keep arriving to the Astronaut Complex?

I'd rather see them spending their free time on running a virtual space program than on becoming a virtual crime boss. But hey, that's me. Now get off my lawn.

A few things that come to mind just reading through the text: Hmm. I need to see more details on this one. One the one hand rewards based on free-form exploring of the world and the technology sounds like a good way to go; on the other hand, I don't see much gain in removing funding altogether... that will definitely lose an engaging aspect to the game. To me it sounds like they're repeating one of the -in my opinion- mistakes of KSP's sandbox mode: not really being a sandbox by virtue of arbitrarily removing certain aspects of the game (research, funding, missions). Please give me a game mode that gives me ALL of the game's options to play with as I please. Start a career game in KSP, cheat-menu yourself your own choice of starting funds, science, rep, and facility levels, et voilá, an actual sandbox. Make this a default game mode in KSP2, please. KSP has two pause buttons that I know of: F3 (flight report) and Esc (in-flight menu). Or do they mean something else? Not sure about this one. We now have an engineer's report that warns us of areas to improve on *before* launching the rocket. Getting this *after* seems like a step backwards. Kerbals already have individual G-force bars in their portraits. I currently can (and regularly do) 'produce one incredibly complex component in the VAB and simply attach it to an even larger rocket through symmetry rules' with subassemblies. And assuming 'size' actually means cross-section (because literal size would be a rather chaotic selection of parts), that too exists in the stock game already. Why are these being listed as new features? Seeing as 'science mode' has been touched less than a handful of times in my 15k+ hrs in KSP, this doesn't sound like a good change, but I need more details. Yes, because in space flight everyone gets a ribbon just for trying. "Failure is not an option!" becomes "Failure is entirely impossible, so let's just do whatever." I never once touched a youtube video to learn anything about the game (just play the game!). Inevitable? I highly doubt it. No physics degree here. I did not find it a particularly difficult UI to learn to use. Could use more tooltips and/or a more comprehensive help system - the KSPedia was a nice addition, but it needs some form of context-sensitive connection to the game, better organization of the articles, and more content (things I could've expanded on myself if they'd just used an easily edited format, but <shrug>). I'll wait to see the actual UI in use. One thing a lifetime of gaming -and general computer use- has taught me: just because *you* think your interface is 'logical' means very little to *my* way of using your game/software. Think 'customizable UI' please. Let me be the final judge on where it is 'logical' to have each flight or build tool, or if I want them showing at all. That's how you win me over. That could be helpful. Can't wait to see how the game decides 'what went wrong'. KSP2: "I'm.. not sure what you're trying to do." Me: "I'm sure you don't." <happily continues building and testing my recreation of an Indiana Jones jump-the-gap-in-the-rails mining cart roller coaster> I want those portraits gone. Please please tell me that portrait placement is entirely optional and I can remove them and put some *actually* important flight information or controls in that spot. Kerbal portraits should be -at best- a peripheral feature. The staging stack always being on the same side adds consistency, I like that. I'm not attached to 'time warp', but 'time zoom' seems particularly incongruous. If you can't come up with something better, let's leave that one alone please. Please tell me that I can entirely remove the time controls -or any UI elements at all- from the bottom center spot. That spot needs to provide completely clear vision of the ground for any kind of precision landings. I don't even want to mess with transparency levels or anything like that. Completely clear. Painting our rockets will be nice, if we're allowed to do it comprehensively and consistently. Blueprint orthogonal views sound like a really nice addition. Saving a workspace instead of a craft... hmm. So we're abandoning the current craft file format. No more out of game craft file editing? Built-in trip planner sounds good, as that is definitely a gap in current KSP and likely one of the main reasons so few players venture beyond Kerbin SoI. Overall, they're adding some nice things. There's also some questionable claims in this stuff, which make me wonder about the dev team really being 'seasoned Kerbal fans'. I'm also seeing things that I really do not like and hope are either entirely optional, customizable, or just simply not there in the actual release. Wait and see.

Just a slight correction: floating origin. The difference is significant.

https://kerbalx.com/swjr-swis/MassFraction-Rocket-D1b With a recoverable rocket: https://kerbalx.com/swjr-swis/MassFraction-Rocket-D2 But why stick to just one... https://kerbalx.com/swjr-swis/500t-LKO-Lifter

Quoted as Best Advice in this thread. (Not to belittle @Hotel26's excellent description of how it can actually be done, but considering the tools we get in the -stock- game, the outright silly choice of marooned parts, and the almost-guaranteed abysmal return of investment, I quickly learned to completely pass on the 'recover debris from X' type of missions.)

I suspect that the change to remove downvotes has inadvertently affected the 'Remove from this hangar' slide-up field at the bottom right corner of the craft thumbnails, right next to the voting arrows. It's just barely visible right now, you have to hover right at the bottom edge and it won't slide up to become readable. But when clicked, it will ask if you wish to remove the craft from the hangar.

While I would usually recommend taking @bewing's advice, this is one area where I feel people keep holding on to 'well-known' design wisdom that has been proven wrong. Yes Mk2 can be draggier than other crosssections, if one ignores other much more important design details. In particular, when the plane is built with proper angle of incidence on the wings, allowing its body to stay pointed close to prograde on cruise, drag is minimized and an Mk2 body has hardly any influence anymore. Proof of concept, a science explorer aircraft using an Mk2 body and Panther engines that can circumnavigate with fuel to spare even on less than full tanks. Cruise: Mach 2.77 (825 m/s) at 19-20km. Provide enough wing surface, some angle of incidence, keep CoM stable and CoL close, and you have most potential performance issues solved before even tweaking your design. Note that I even included some notorious drag-inducing features in this plane (radially attached intakes and a ladder), and huge wings, but the plane still has no problem going supersonic. All depends on the build. The above plane can climb at a 45 degree angle with afterburners on and you can wait until reaching cruising altitude to level out, by which time you're already going supersonic. Or you can let it take off and climb to cruise altitude all by itself without ever touching the controls. I'm not even really fine-tuning with this, everything is placed and angled in (fine) snap mode, which makes it easier to replicate in your own designs.

Some people are, but note that it's not straightforward to get them working on KSP. From what I've read here in the forum, it's recommended to use certain mods to get best results. Me myself, I use keyboard and mouse, and no mods, so I design my planes to work with those.

Mk3-body plane using Whiplashes, cruises at 20-22km @ 1150m/s, can completely circumnavigate Kerbin with fuel to spare... and it has cargo room: https://kerbalx.com/swjr-swis/Transport-3a Look specifically at the way the wings are placed and the CoM/CoL locations. You can replicate similar performance with Panthers and Mk2 or size 2/1 bodies, although it'll be a slightly lower cruising speed. (This plane is an evolution from an original by @Hotel26, so definitely check out other designs from him). A panther-based flying wing that can circumnavigate cruising at Mach 2.5 @ 22km: https://kerbalx.com/swjr-swis/Flying-Wing-Starboost88 Looks very different, but you'll notice the wing placement and CoM/CoL are very much alike. If'n it works...

While I appreciate a good showdown of water contraptions... this is now derailing the purpose of this thread quite a bit. Can we move that particular exchange elsewhere (and maybe leave a link here, for those of us wanting to monitor or participate)?

You can't upload any mods to KerbalX - it's only for uploading craft files.

I explained how it works. They only ever detach from one place - the side with the intermittent line, which is also the side you originally attach them with. That's it. There's no process to reverse, it doesn't literally 'switch sides', it will always detach from that same side of the part. Ok. If you are getting different behaviour than what I explained, I suggest you share the craft, or take some screenshots or record a movie to upload, because this is not how those parts work in the stock game. Are you using mods?

I no longer have all my long-going saves on my disk, but going on what I have now and what I remember having seen before, the persistent.sfs sizes have been anywhere between a few KB to a bit over 100 MB. Remember that the persistent.sfs keeps a record of every craft currently 'flying' in the save, including all parts and part modules that mods may add. I think persistent file size is much more influenced by how large (in terms of parts) your loaded craft are, and if you're a mod user, how many mods you are using and how many part modules those add to your craft. I have saves that have been going for years that are still under 5MB in size, while I've seen freshly started saves that immediately ballooned to 20+MB due to just parking a set of huge 1500+ part stations in LKO. So you might need a bit more information than just the size of the sfs file, if you want to be able to compare things or meaningfully search for root causes.

I need to see your marketing pitch for this one. Seriously.

I don't press D. Or S. Or any of the keys really. I design and build my rockets and spaceplanes to require no manual steering input getting to orbit. Rockets get pre-tilted just slightly towards the intended orbit so simply switching SAS from Hold to Prograde at the right speed/altitude is enough to closely reproduce my intended optimal gravity turn. Spaceplanes get enough lift to take to the air by themselves by simply throttling up and disengaging the brakes, and their flight envelope is designed to fly in a straight line up to the flight/altitude point where SAS is switched from Hold to Prograde. In both cases, I try to limit required input to staging, setting SAS modes, and activating action groups, which can be described -and timed- very specifically. This helps with the cycle of launch testing, observing, and tweaking, and results in very simple usage instructions for shared craft. That said: I do compulsively rotate my rockets away from the default so they never have to fly 'sideways'. Mostly I fly them dorsal side up, but occasionally ventral side up feels more appropriate. Sideways is just plain wrong.

The hardpoint/pylon always detach from the same side: the side you attach them with when you first place them. In other words, not the side you attach other parts to after they've been placed on the craft (like say, a booster fuel tank). What may of course happen is that if you attach docking ports to the parts that would be detached, and then dock with said port to another craft, and that craft's control point happens to have priority... the hardpoint/pylon may end up on the "wrong" end. You will however notice that even then, when detaching, it still detaches the same side of itself: from where it was originally attached when first placed. Btw, there is a visual clue to this: there is an intermittent line painted on the explosive/detachable side. This will alllow you to always visually recognize which side of it will detach.

I find this a very difficult challenge to respond to. Not so much because of any alleged lack of intellectual brilliance, naturally - it is my innate and almost insurmountable humility that constantly stands in the way of any attempt at marketing my clearly underappreciated inventions. Since however you make so vehement an argument in favour of inflicting my genius upon this audience, I find myself out of excuses. I shall thus elaborate. Kerbalkind has been testing new contraptions of various degrees of land, sea, sky and/or space-worthiness since World-First Record-Keeping Society's first record-keeping efforts lured the ancestral orange-clad heroes out of their societal distancing. Traditionally this has always been achieved through the brave and unending efforts and sacrifice of those brave few kerbals who would volunteer their very existence towards this noble cause. Many, many kerbals have paid the ultimate price in pursuit of science and achievements to impart on us such magnificent pearls of infinite wisdom as 'We should always check our staging before launch' (statistics say, we most probably didn't), 'We probably didn't use enough struts to sufficiently rigidify this contraption' (not a matter of statistics so much as an almost mathematical certainty), and 'It might not be wise to rely on parachutes to land safely on an airless body' (didn't we already learn the answer to this one from -several- previous excursions? yes, yes we did). Observing the continuous kerbal plight of putting life and limb on the line in the pursuit of craft design perfection, and after relentless pleading from local insurance companies, I decided to put my considerable intellectual prowess to work on finding an alternative to the kerbal test pilot. Only pure stock parts would do, of course, while keeping proportions, mass and deformation characteristics as close to the original as possible. Thus and without further ado, FakeJeb Yourstruly Inc (aka FYI) presents: The Kerbal Stunt Dummy (Mk 2) Unfortunately this forum no longer allows the embedded album format the advertorial for the FYI KTD2 was originally designed for, so I can only ask interested parties to follow this external link to fully experience our marketing efforts for this magnificent and verifiably indispensable product: Please click here for the full imgur album. Please click NOW.

Just a short message to my fellow explorers, new and veteran alike: reports of my MIA status have been greatly exaggerated. The main sponsor of my Kerbin travels went out of business and as a result, my explorations were interrupted quite rudely by my sudden need to seek out new sponsorship. It's been a bit of a hassle and I'm not out of the woods yet, which will keep me grounded for a bit longer, but I am currently schmoozing up to a new source of funding so hopefully I can restart my travels soon. I'm glad to see our ranks have been growing in the meantime, some of them quite active too. Welcome to all, and keep up the good works!

From what I've seen, it's because the KerbalX code tries to auto-identify parts and match them with the mods it has indexed before, and it can only match parts to one mod. When the exact same parts are used in more than one indexed mod(pack), whichever comes up first while matching will end up listed on the craft page mod list. I guess alphabetically, that modpack gets matched before BD armory? Or it may just be the last mod(pack) it matched gets to be The One from that point on. The real source of the issue is of course that someone has released a modpack that bundles BD Armory with BDDMP (some multiplayer plugin, I presume?), likely against BDArmory licensing, and placed it on a dropbox for download. People (maybe just that one person, it only needs one) have then used it in their craft then uploaded it to KerbalX, and the KX code then does its thing and indexes the mod it didn't know of before.... and now the BD Armory parts are getting matched with that modpack on craft pages that use BD Armory parts. I'm not sure if @katateochi can do something on the site to prevent this from happening, without crippling the site's part/mod auto-indexing, and forcing manual updates for new parts and mods from that point on. Unfortunately, it's not up to KerbalX to issue take down notices for potentially license-breaking mod(pack)s; that's up to mod authors. The mod pack in question got itself listed in CKAN. I don't know if the admins of that can track back who published/listed it. This is the only reference I could find, on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/APModpack-0.1.0 It mentions some names. Not sure it that helps in addressing whoever shared that pack.

In conjunction with 'control from here'? One of the valid and frequent use cases of docking ports: as additional latching points for cargo in a cargo bay/fairing. You want the code to automatically find and very quickly enable and dock such pairs as soon as the craft loads on the launchpad or runway, to secure the cargo before it has the time to misalign as gravity and possible other forces are eased in. A very similar situation would be space stations that use multiple docking port pairs to latch station sections together (a stock way of aligning sections), although the savefile preserving docking status may already prevent the issue there. As for control from here: this is not always used when docking. I make, fly and dock craft that have the intended docking port in the 'wrong' place or orientation for it to be the controlling part during a docking maneuver. I want to continue to be able to do this.

All I wanna know is... does it have glowy lines on the surface?

It's okay to say it: I was simply wrong. I corrected my post on the matter.