Zephram Kerman

Enjoying your lights on all my aircraft now. They had always looked half-nekkid without them. Thanks for fixing this! I was also hoping to use these as obstacle warning lights for the giant towers I make with Ubiozur's Welded Parts mod. Unfortunately, that type of light works differently. But perhaps you can help? I'm looking for a red interval light that can be seen from several kilometers away at dawn/dusk, but it does not need to illuminate anything. Something like the runway lights would be ideal. Any suggestions?

Look in the lower-right corner: one of the kerbals is Valentina. Way back in 0.13.3! I believe it's a joke, because it's pretty easy to edit the .sfs file to change the crew names, especially back then. For example, I have somewhere a screenshot of a rocket crewed by three names in my team. Good job, GregroxMun! You had me fooled until I thought about it for a while.

Did that once, back in 0.20 or so. That was fun. Basically a VTOL kethane drill/refinery with turbojets. This was before kethane had the generator, hence the semi-functional solar panels. We explored just about every island with this. If you are not uncomfortable with space planes, I highly recommend a similar plan.

Oh yeah! The poles are nice. Big, flat, and silky smooth. Great for space planes. If you can stack up something to get a bit of altitude, you can watch the other moons wobble back and forth just above the horizon. The terrain is quite boring for rovers though.

To find a site where Jool is near the horizon, try to figure the point on a Laythe map where Jool is straight up, then draw a circle 90° away from that.

Yes, but this is a new application of the old idea. Ports on both ends means the thing is no longer required to be physically at its parent object. I wonder if this is related to the new VAB offset tool?

Well now, that's pretty cool. With a bit of planning, you could have that arm inching its way all over a large station, carrying a payload from one end to the other.

It seemed like a good idea at the time...

It might be a file permissions thing. Unfortunately, I don't know Linux from spinach. But perhaps if you move /KSP to some other area... well that works in W land.

I finally managed to set a plane on the Kermansov! Without arresting hook cables, it's pretty tough to stop in time.

Inspired by the simple artificial gravity feature of the Mars Direct proposal, I used KAS to experiment with cable gravity. This is the second test, using a KAS pipe to make a rigid connection between the two halves of the ship. (The first test used the cable winch to be more realistic. Unfortunately, KSP is not intended to simulate cable physics, so there was lots of unexpected torque and precession.) Once the two halves were connected by the KAS pipe, I used RCS to spin up the system to about 4 RPM. The pipe is 50 m long, so I calculate the resulting force should be about 0.2 G. That's a pretty small result for such nauseating rotation; the next one will be much longer.

Seconded. The "unable to latch" thing interrupts the fun. Winches in real life have a part called a "fairlead" that guides the cable and hook into position automatically. That's a simple part, but I imagine doing something like this in software would be difficult. Maybe it could work in a similar way to the docking ports magnet thing?

Thanks! In the video, it's the pipe. In hindsight, I probably should have started recording with the cable, just to show the weird way it acts. Maybe next time. The rotation rate was very arbitrary; simply the maximum I was able to achieve with RCS thrusters and ASAS. You bring up an interesting point. How much artificial gravity is "reasonable"? I set 0.1 G as an arbitrary target. But, for humans, how much is needed to avoid physiological issues like muscle atrophy, bone density loss, constant sinus infections, etc?

Aha, I see I had the a/r inverted. Very rusty, indeed. Well, 1.89 RPM doesn't sound so bad. Thank you. If you're still interested, here's a vid I did yesterday while experimenting with the gravity cable idea. Spun up a craft to about 4 RPM. The KAS cable didn't work well at all; once spinning, the system would twist and then precess wildly. But when I used that cable temporarily to assist with installing a pipe, things worked much better. I suppose the KAS struts would do the same. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/78157466/CableGrav%20test%202.wmv Making the counterweight heavier than the crew area helped to increase the radius.

Meanwhile in the Zephkerbia Space Center, mission engineers are still dithering over the color of markers for their drawing boards. Not the most efficient interplanetary trip I've ever seen. It's almost as if it were designed by someone who hadn't played for months.... oh hey, welcome back! And, congratulations for reaching Vall.

Since I just now finally am experimenting with KAS, thought I'd try out the gravity cable idea in KSP. Wow, it's tricky. Not sure I would want to stake my real life on any cable. Anyway, my physics training has about 20 years of rust. Would anyone care to help with this? From Wikipedia: So if I want 0.1 G and the cable in KAS is limited to only 50 m, that means w = √r/a (What's the ascii code for little omega?) Therefore, angular velocity should be 22-ish. But, is that degrees, radians, or elbows? While 22°/sec would be only a little bit nauseating, 22 radians/sec would make for some really blurry screenshots. And 22 elbows/second, well that's just crazy. Also, bear in mind r is not the 50 m cable. It's the distance from center of rotation to the floor of a landercan. But let's just assume 50 m for now. Or, maybe I'll hack KAS to allow longer cables. Too bad the accelerometer in game cannot detect centripetal acceleration, only the acceleration of the whole vessel. So all of this can only be verified mathematically.

Wing tanks are one of those things that always seemed to be missing from the stock game. Yes, this feature should be stock. Thank you, Tortoise, for making it available in the meantime!

I have MJ 2.4.2.0; currently the default ascent path settings are: turn start 5 km turn end 70 km final path angle 0° turn shape 40% but you can simply turn on 'Automatic Altitude Turn', which seems to make an attempt at optimizing for you. AFAIK, the stock game atmosphere hasn't changed, yet. So I'm sticking with my preferred turn start at 8km, with slow vessels turning aggressively to go lower and fast vessels turning more slowly to go high.

@Scotius, Deddly, Brotoro: Awesome. Thanks guys! Now I have quite a bit of reading to do.

I was pretty sure I had read them all. But my memory is not so good and... uh... what were we talking about? Well then here I go back to the beginning. This might just be the first time one of my favorite shows went into reruns while still producing new stuff!

Still loving this thread. The fact that it is done using such a venerable save makes it even more impressive. You do KSP right. Just wondering (maybe I missed it) when the team went to Vall, did they visit Vallhenge? I've always been curious about that thing.

I've been fascinated by the idea of a turbine engine for use in non-oxygen atmospheres. (I.e. Duna, Eve... Mars.) After some searching, I stumbled onto a 1940s design called TurboRocket, which uses a bipropellant rocket as a 'gas generator' to propel a turbine. There's definitely room for this thing in KSP.

Hey, since all your songs are on YouTube, I think you should make a playlist. (Sometimes I just want to play all of them together.) "Hey," you say, "That's a good idea!" So I made a playlist of all your KSP soundtrack music so far, just in case you don't get around to it for a while. I intend to keep it updated as you create new stuff. Anyway, thank you for creating such wonderful music for KSP!

Bagelrabbit, that's good stuff! Sometimes I enjoy it when not in KSP. Here's my KSP playlist: Kerbals in Spaaaaace! Norman Greenbaum - Spirit in the Sky The Crystal Method - High Roller, Magic Carpet Ride, Vapor Trail Linkin Park - Session ELO - Steppin' Out, The Whale, Starlight Daft Punk - Solar Sailer Pink Floyd - Astronomy Domine The Police - Walking on the Moon many of the lovely tunes by bFusion/Abstraction: and this particular version of Beethoven's Symphony no 7 - 2