Dweller_Benthos

Duna or Bust! http://www.youtube.com/user/kurtjmac (Mostly bust, lol)

I've had the map go snowy, but I thought it was due to running out of electric power. I don't try to timewarp beyond 100X, that seems to just be asking for it.

I just have them all set up on an action group. I don't necessarily want them scanning all the time.

I've seen that as well, I just turn off the auto SOI alarm until I'm out of range of the planet. Not sure if there's a way that the mod can predict that type of orbit and compensate for it. Yeah, that's what I ended up doing, many more struts. Struts all over the place. As for a RTG, I've never used those, and have yet to research them in career mode. Might come in handy, probably get those next time I have enough science.

Oh, I had plenty of those on this last ship, but due to how the ship needed to be designed, they are all on one side of the ship, and that side was facing away from the sun. Since it was in a solar orbit between Kerbin and Duna, it would have taken a long time to swing around to the other side to get those panels facing the sun, and by then I'd have missed my transfer point by a large margin. This is one of those error-plagued missions. I'm trying to put a rover on Duna, and the design flaws are just showing up all over. After wrestling with a decoupler between the lander and rover that likes to disconnect when the parachutes open, I found that when I do get it to survive that until landing, it still hits the ground a little too hard and the rover is a little too close to the bottom of the lander that the tires all pop when it touches down. Back to the drawing board as they say....

That's been there for a few versions, I think whoever at Squad does the terrain added it just to amuse the people running mapping mods like this. Probably added in version .18 or .19 as I recall.

Yeah, it's almost always the active craft. I posted that mostly as a joke/rant/vent at my own stupidity, lol That mod looks interesting, and probably more suited to what the situation calls for. Or, I could just not be a derp and remember to do it myself, heh.

Science High Over the Sun! http://www.youtube.com/user/kurtjmac

Interesting thread. Of course, since I do almost exclusively unmanned missions, there's no one off planet to survive the coming apocalypse. My sandbox game, which I haven't run since career came out, has a bunch of probes around most of the planets and moons, but nothing habitable. I was in the middle of building a station in LKO but it only has fuel tanks and nothing much else, no habitable modules. My career save isn't much better, a bunch of unmanned probes and debris in various places. The only thing habitable is a 3 Kerbal Mun lander that I left there when it ran out of fuel. Sent a robotic lander up to get them and returned it to Kerbin, so, yeah, they are pretty much extinct. Might make for a cool game challenge, though. You have X number of game years (2? 5? 10?) to get as many Kerbals off the planet before the disaster happens. Sustainability of colonies subject to interpretation. Without mods, there's no way to gather resources, so just getting a habitat module to another planet/moon would be enough for a basic game. Running mods like kethane to gather resources would mean a more "realistic" sustainability factor. Once there is more resource gathering in the game, you could add things like manufacturing new habitats and getting a larger colony going with a "breeding" population with enough individuals to ensure a large enough gene pool to keep the population thriving.

I have the bad habit of forgetting to deploy my solar panels once I get into orbit, or even more frustrating on a long interplanetary transfer. Result: dead probe in space with no electric power but plenty of undeployed solar panels. I don't suppose there's an easy way to add a "low electric charge" alarm? Say once charge gets below 10% or something? Anyway, it was just as well, because I had a Duna rover halfway to Duna when it ran out of power and I reverted to VAB to add some more struts and then realized there was no way to transmit from the rover, I had forgotten to add any type of antenna. Ooops.

Even more Science! http://www.youtube.com/user/kurtjmac

Ok, so a nice wide spread of evenly spaced tick marks means an orbit that is more efficient as far as getting the whole surface covered in the smallest amount of time?

OK, just how I figured it then, you have to be at least 750km out for the HI indicator to go solid green. All right then, next question, the blue and orange tick marks around the equator on the big map, are those resonance nodes or something (whatever they are called). Where if you have them nice a spread out, you're getting the best mapping bang for your orbital buck, as it were? Seems when I had them clumped together, I kept getting gaps in the scan.

I've got a question, I have a satellite mapping Duna, orbiting about 740km. It only completed the Hi scan, which I guess is the SAR altimetry (on the big map, only the HI marker is in green when I move the mouse over the map, the rest are grayed out). the thing is, on the small map, the LO, HI, BIO and ANOM scanners are listed in orange. The BTDT is gray since I don't have one on this because it's an orbital and that would be useless. The marker that's blinking orange and green is the HI marker, but your post mentions that this means that it shouldn't be working because the satellite is too high, but it seems that it's the other way around, the scanners marked with a steady orange are not working, and the blinking one is working. Or is there something else going on? I'm going to lower the orbit to 250km to get the lo res scanner and the biome / anomaly scanner to work. I'll see what the markers do then. OK, just completed a scan at 250km. Map is 100% so all the sensors are working. The LO indicator is steady green, the HI, BIO and ANOM sensors are flashing green orange. On the big map, LO, HI and ANOM are green, BIO is red (no biomes on Duna). So the TL;DR is, what exactly does the flashing of the sensor indicators mean in the small map? Does it mean the sensor is working, just not at an optimal altitude? Something like: Steady orange: out of range. Flashing orange / green: in range, just not optimal Steady green: in range and optimal ???

Science on the Mun! http://www.youtube.com/user/kurtjmac

Yes, it's the one just off the runway a few hundred meters. I see now that when you activate the instruments, it is included in the structures list you can scroll through, very cool. I hadn't tried the instruments button much, because all my other probes are in orbit and that window just shows your altitude then.

Pretty proud that I seem to have a handle on more precise landings, ones that are more than just "getting to the ground any old place" type landings. Using SCANsat to home in on the Armstrong Memorial (OK, yes, I used a mod that gives the location) I initially landed within a few hundred meters, then a short hop over the hill to a closer encounter. Then, I hopped over to the next crater south looking for the monolith anomaly, but couldn't find it, even though SCANsat said it was there. Got Bill out to walk around, and sure enough, just like the pyramids, it's under ground. Planted a flag there so I'll know where it is if they ever fix this bug.

Just noticed that the monolith just north of the KSC doesn't show up on scans? I have a rover parked next to it with a BTDT probe and still nothing. Is the monolith too close to the KSC itself to register as an anomaly? I'm pretty sure ISA showed it, though it was hard to tell with that as you couldn't zoom in. Has the game changed where that monolith isn't considered an anomaly anymore?

Point at the big map, right click. I think. Something like that. Keep right clicking to zoom further.

I thought backspace was the default abort button? Whatever you set in your abort control group, that is.

Science will be done! http://www.youtube.com/user/kurtjmac

This is epic, I'm going to try this immediately. Well, as soon as I get home from work.

I recently did the same thing with my mapping probe of Eve. Ran out of fuel right in the middle of setting up the polar orbit for best mapping. Had to use the RCS from there to get the last 5 degrees of tilt and to circularize, which meant a lot of time holding down the "H" key, lol. And a few F9's if you know what I mean. Next time, more fuel, but it's weird, my science lander on Eve landed with plenty of fuel left, pretty much same design.

Awesome, as always. Thanks.

Get the Kerbal Alarm Clock mod and never miss another maneuver node. Indispensable add-on, IMO. As for my failures, the most recent was the "forgot to add a decoupler between stages" foul-up. Was sending a probe to Eve for science and was just about to run out of fuel on the lower stage, then realized there was no decoupler and the probe lander was stuck to the last ascent stage and had used all of the fuel it had because it was considered one big rocket. It's now floating in a weird orbit just inside Kerbin's and has been renamed "Lost Eve Mission". It seems every save file I have has at least one spacecraft floating around after something went wrong.