swjr-swis

It's tradition, Vanamonde. Kinda like when we get together over the camp fire once or twice a year and tell each other silly horror stories. Please leave us our traditions.

No, it can't retract, inflating it was made a one-time action by design.

What happens in KSP when due to this there are two parts with identical names? The last one loaded wins? Or does it give an exception and not load the second? I'm off mods for the foreseeable future, but this sounds like the perfect mod for KerbalX users. I like the idea. I am willing to set up a second install to testdrive this, whenever you get to that point. You can get more views/responses from those in the know by posting this question in the plugin dev section of the forum. I'm not strong in the C# force, but I would expect it to be the same code as for HTTP requests, as long as you already did the SSL/certificate negotiation (which as I understand it, is a separate step). But don't trust me on this, ask some actual expert. Please no. He just upgraded it to use https not too long ago. Let's not take a step back again. KerbalX doesn't require login to download crafts, which I like, but it does need login to upload (necessarily so, to identify the user and upload to their account). Any website doing logins should use https, period, and when it's already being done for the logins, might as well make it site-wide.

The KSP Ladder-Drive, the most fuel-efficient engine in the game, driving Kerbal expansion over the solar system since v0.18. A video showing it in action:

Or not. I'm in pure stock mode these days, so no mods. That's ok though, the flags work for me and I can keep a reasonable glide slope with just the distance and the altitude indications, good enough to land any of my flying contraptions safely. Even with hard to fly stuff, like @Rocket In My Pocket said, KSP stock is very forgiving; a reasonably survivable approach tends to amount to not much more than 'try to keep most wheels pointing approximately at the planet at the time of touch down'.

I tried to make a matrix board type of thing once. One to make some huge visible thing to be seen from far out, and two to see if I could make a kind of switchable sign (action group based). I found out that despite the overall size of the board (half the width of the runway), the lights would still not be visible. There appears to be a disappointingly small cut-off distance at which the lights are simply not rendered anymore, probably much like @Van Disaster experienced. Also, the black rim of the lights would at one point completely overwhelm the bright shining part, despite the surface area ratio suggesting the opposite, which likely has to do with that shader thing. The real killer was that lights being an EC resource consumer, that many lights placed together ground the game to a halt, making it perform at SPF instead of FPS level.

This has been my method in stock games for a very long time now. Basic but it works, especially because the game identifies them with markers that can be seen up to 99km out. The overlap/alignment of the markers can be used to align from a very long way out, and from 50km or closer, they start showing the distance live. Very useful. The only problems I've noticed with this: Switching craft anywhere within physics bubble distance of the runway will switch to the flags too. Not a huge issue if you expect it, but can be disastrous when unexpected and in a quick-reaction scenario. For some reason, every so often, one or more of the flags get moved off their spot. Sometimes it's caused by flying a craft very nearby them, other times by the blast/exhaust of powerful or grouped engines, but in some cases I load a savefile and it's already happened without identifiable cause, and I just find out because the flags end up tens of km underground. Easily fixed by just recovering the now useless flag and placing a new one; a bit annoying but I guess real flags sometimes have to be replaced too, right? This method does little to indicate a glide slope. Once the markers start showing the distance you can use that and your altitude to calculate your own glide slope though.

This particular bit could add something interesting, some incentive to visit and settle the other planets and moons. It could become a bit of a mini-game of its own. To make it work, the different resources should be required by something in the game. Perhaps different types of ores that are not found on all planets/moons, that yield different basic materials when processed, which in turn are needed for getting access to and creating higher level parts. The most remote and difficult to reach ores would have to be reserved for end-of-line parts that don't block getting to those remote places (else you have a catch 22). Maybe parts for large decorative main colony bases specific for each planet (small airless moons, easy/low-grade inflatable structures; Eve, something that can withstand atmospheric pressure and high gravity; Jool, a floating base; Kerbol, a very heat resistant low orbit station; etc). Or perhaps much more simplified, certain combinations of ores yield the basic stuff needed for this new food processor part to produce a new line of snacks the kerbals like... the more difficult to reach ores make the better snacks. I'm sure others can come up with better ideas, but I think it all comes down to: there needs to be a demand for those biome specific ores/goods, or there would still be little incentive to invest time, funds, kerbals and effort in getting them.

I didn't even know I needed one of these, but now I want one...

I've gone back and forth on this. I have played extended times both with and without mods. When I did use mods, I used a LOT; I still have some older versions archived with 160+ mods on each (some even from when 64-bit was unofficial and actively boycotted). There are some amazing mods out there. I do not use mods anymore, at all, and I feel no urge to load any. It is amazing how much more time I gain to actually just play and enjoy the game, when I no longer have a need to try keep up with mods (it loads a whole lot faster too!). KSP is quite an awesome pass time without a single mod loaded. Some bugs and shortcomings can be annoying at times and can make me long for moar or better, but the game reels me in every time anyway. And despite wild claims to the contrary: everything in the game can be done successfully without mods. In fact, people routinely come up with things to do in the game that no mod provides for. The Sandbox is real - long live the pure stock experience.

.. to an increasingly accurate approximation.

TL;DR: stock currently doesn't give us the information we need, for reasons unknown and unfathomable. Perhaps taniwha's work on orbitals for 1.2 will resolve this for us, but for now, hope that some mod gives you the indicators needed, or prepare for a lot of effort for an inaccurate approximation. There is one thing we know: in KSP, there is no inclination of planets/moons themselves, only of their orbits. In other words, all planet/moon ecliptics are at 0.0 inclination relative to the solar system ecliptic. So you really just need to find the Asc/Des nodes of your current orbit. Doesn't KER have an indicator of 'time to ASC/DES'? Go to the map view, focus on Minmus, check the time to ASC/DEC and then quickly hover over the orbit to place a maneuver node at a place ahead of you that is as close as you can get to that time. When you check again you will likely be a few secs off, but now that the node is placed, you can drag it along the orbit to a more exact location. A few secs off is acceptably close though. Now your node is at the right *time*, all you need now is to burn normal/antinormal as appropriate close around that node. You may need to do a few burns, but keep using this node trick node to time it. Visually and in pure stock, you can approximate it by focusing on Kerbin and using Mun's orbit as the perfect 0.0 inclination guideline (or a bit easier but slightly more inaccurate: Duna's almost perfect 0.06 inclination, which you should be able to target from around Minmus and highlight yellow). Rotate your view until Mun's orbit is as close to a flat line as you can get. Now, the farther away you are from ascending or descending from Kerbin's ecliptic, the more inaccurate, so you will want to rotate to where the Minmus orbit intersects right through the center of Kerbin and Mun's 'flat-lined' orbit. That point will be very close to the ASC or DES nodes through Kerbin's ecliptic. Time warp to get Minmus close to that location but still a bit ahead of it (you may need several burns if you are 6.1 degrees off, so allow some time before Minmus moves on too much from that point). Now focus on Minmus, align your view so Kerbin is behind Minmus and at its 'center', with the flat Mun orbit slashing Minmus in half (Minmus isn't perfectly round, so again, some inaccuracy inevitable). Now time your burn appropriately normal/anti-normal at the time of passing through Mun's orbit line. Try to visually get your orbit as flat-lined and parallel (merged is best) with Mun's orbit as you can.

For some of us, the time will finally have arrived that we are very literally (and still just as unverifiably) the center of our own private universe...

I am guessing you mean 'besides the set of moving parts we already have' (inflatable shield, wheels, landing gear/legs, opening doors on bays and ports, extendable antennae/panels/radiators, drills). A few sizes of hinges-in-one-part would be very very welcome, as well as extending & retractable girders/trusses, agreed. Personally I would also welcome some inflatable airbags and habitats/corridors, and some sizes of one-part propeller engines.

I wish you luck on this task: I left EDS/HP after 13 years of service and despite very diligent and daily farming, I never completed my personal list of internal acronym definitions. Or TLAs for that matter...

Glad to see you found your own solution; those are the best learning experiences. But I am left with a question at these two statements: How did you manage to make the throttle 'automatically set to 0', after you had already had it at more - enough to make it all the way out of the atmosphere?

I feel like I've been suffering heat death all this week already (and yes, it is feeling like forever). As for my thoughts on the stars: I think they're purdy.

Hmm. If you're at the point where you consider a completely benign site like KerbalX listing your mods as something bad, and interpret my reply as hostile... I don't know what to say, buddy. It may actually be best for you to consider stopping. It'll be a loss to those who use your mods, but seriously, this is a game, it should be a pass time and fun to do, and your voluntary work on your mods should be something you enjoy, not something that burdens and stresses and pushes you to alienate your fellow enthusiasts. I am sorry to see you have come to this point, but I am not the enemy you seek (thank you for accepting that much at least for KerbalX). I need to point out that I am not the one asserting or assuming any 'rights' here. If anything, I was pleading for some common sense. Clearly I failed. I realize you meant this as a sort of threat, but the above statement immediately reminded me of the following stand up scene - hopefully a bit of interjected humour can defuse the situation a bit: I am glad we agree on the one decisive matter in this exchange, because he absolutely is. Exactly why your request dumbfounded me, and why I felt the need to stand up and plead for a reconsideration or a compromise, even at the risk of being the lone voice speaking up. I'm glad he found the words I obviously didn't, proving in one more way why he and his work deserve our support. Find a way to keep joy in what you do.

En weer vertrekt er één met de noorderzon. Zucht. Het ga je voor de wind, KasperVld.

Seriously? You're casually asking for a potentially big coding effort, making the site slower, use up more memory and adding potential for more bugs, for something that does not benefit you in any way (unless your mods being less known is what you're after). KerbalX.com is not about mod distribution, it's about craft files. It automatically identifies mods used in the crafts uploaded to the site, because that is one of the services of the site - it identifies the parts the craft are made of, and what mods they are from, so that we can know what mods we need to have installed if we want to load up a particular craft. When a craft uses parts of a mod you don't have installed, KSP will not load the craft - so this is essential information for a craft sharing/hosting site. Since KerbalX has no way to know if and/or when a mod will or will not include parts, it does an effort to identify all mods, even the ones that currently have no parts (but one of yours apparently does have parts). To accommodate your request, he's going to have to figure out a way to add some kind of toggleable exception to single out your mods so they are skipped when auto-generating the mod list. Again: the site does not enable installation of mods, it does not provide some alternative installation method, it is not circumventing your preferred manual installation method. It is just identifying them, naming them, and linking to your already public distribution point. People will still have to look up and read your installation instructions and manually install them. It is no different than if they clicked the link on your forum thread. We need the site to identify the mods by name, simple not naming is not a workable alternative - a craft file that lists (mod-not-to-be-named) will remain unusable since KSP cannot load the file without the mod. If your issue is with the link to the zip file, is there some workable compromise, maybe a link to your forum release thread instead? In this context, can I please point out the inherent slippery slope of asking/demanding others to stop linking to data and information one has made public themselves: https://savethelink.org/ https://openmedia.org/en/right-link-risk

That implies wheels and/or landing legs. Be advised that either of those can currently cause phantom forces, especially if there is any clipping, and there's not a whole lot one can do about it (dev notes tell us we can expect fixes in 1.2). So much truth, it deserves repeating. Payload in a fairing is not automatically secure. Try attaching a few cubic octagonal struts radially to the fairing base, offset them up along the inside edge of the fairing, then strut from those to the payload. Just keep in mind that the cubic struts attached this way will remain perfectly rigid in their position relative to the fairing base, so keep enough clearance for later separation.

*breathe* I find your lack of imagination disturbing. *breathe* Why not stations, or bases, or rovers, or flying bricks, or crazy rivers, or statues, or cows, or trebuchets, or trebuchets launching cows, or pitch forks, or piston engines, or TIE fighter, or constellation class starships, or ...? You don't know the power of the Da.. I mean, the KSP sandbox. Use the force, dude.

Actually it's exactly the other way around: try keep the heaviest part of the rocket as high up a possible (not easy because fuel drains from the top first), and the draggiest parts (fins) as far down as possible. This keeps the rocket pointing to space. If you already checked the CoM indicator in the VAB, with full tanks and empty tanks (!), then you may be having an issue with a bug in the game that sometimes causes engines placed in radial symmetry to not all provide full thrust. Are you using one of the adapters that go from one to multiple attachment nodes? If yes, this may be your issue, and I don't know that there is a solution to it currently, other than not using those adapters. A picture or craft file may allow people to help better.

KSP 1.1.3 introduced a bug to the code that turns on the EVA lights: it's not entirely broken, but it only intermittently reacts to the key, and the more is going on on your computer, the more difficult it is to get it to register that you hit that key. Eg. if you have more mods running, or if you are trying to record a video of the game (so it can be stuff external to the game) it becomes even harder for the game to 'see' that you hit the key and turn on the EVA lights. So it's not specific to any mod you have loaded... it's just hard in 1.1.3 to get EVA lights to react to the key, and harder the more stuff you run.

Ze hype, eet ees troo!