JoeSchmuckatelli

... Or a parking lot. I want a place to deploy stuff I'm working on that is not the runway or launch pad. This has probably been suggested before, but it would be nice to be able to deploy my mining lander in a place where I can leave it, then go back to the VAB or SPH and deploy the fuel lifter and then deploy the fuel truck - and be able test whether the docking ports line up and discover potential problems before sending it all out to the Mun and beyond. Currently I have to deploy one lander at the launch pad, the truck at the flight strip, then drive it into the grass and finally deploy the second lander to test them all out... And then I have to recover the first two (no revert possible). This is workable but inefficient. What I suggest is a large 'yard' near the SC with several distinct deployment spawns so that the players can have several working prototypes 'in the world' that they can test prior to committing to the launch. Another feature might be a variable terrain course near the SC https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/24583/rover-ride-along-in-the-mars-yard-360-video/ https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/6329/dunes-obstacle-course/ /suggestion

Thanks fellers - i am gonna have to mess around with it later.

Good points - but then that's strongly a reason for a KSP2, nicht wahr? If they're going to try to add new stuff at this late date... that seems counter productive toward promoting the new title. It can't be merely - go to space and build bases (they're bloody difficult for us duffers). KSP2 should have a mix of what we have now, what we want, and hey I never thought of that; good onya devs!

Yep - there sure is. And it's also the core part of your first couple of hours / days with KSP! In fact blowing stuff up and failing gloriously is half the fun of the first few run throughs! Fortunately, there's tons of good tutorials out there. I'll suggest just this: if you can attain an orbit, try to have a reentry periapsis of no less than 30km 35-43 is probably optimum. If you've got a lander set up correctly with chutes at the top and the heat shield at the bottom, it should handle just fine. Watch your chute indicator and don't pop it until its grey. Hint: if you know that side-mounted science blows up on reentry, move it up toward the top of the lander pod.

How... exactly... would one know how to do this? I tried to picture me even doing 3 burns to Minimus' SOI just for practice... and my eyes crossed trying to figure out how to work that with a single maneuver node to ensure contact / perapsis. (or is that the problem?)

Is the ship driven by a probe core... And do you have an antenna extended?

I had to figure this all out again when I came back - so I feel Yer pain. As for the Mun and Minmus I don't think you really need to time it - with a 75-90k orbit you can get to either moon by putting your maneuver nodes in the right spot. Just plop down a node - pull the prograde marker till apoapsis is close to the orbit of your target and then drag the whole node around until you get a good perapsis (and then refine it). As for the other planets there is a few tutorials out there that can be found

Lets see if this works: https://imgur.com/jMD0E04https://imgur.com/jMD0E04

I've got my first big interplanetary planned. Just dropping by Eve for a social call, but I thought I'd also leave them a present. Lot's of folks over at Mission Control interested in Eve at the moment, so I'm trying to do a bunch of stuff in a single mission. I foolishly accepted a 'Build a 5 person Base' mission, which, sadly I did not read. It has to have 4k liquid fuel to count as a base. Which, seeing as I don't yet have a mining operation anywhere looks to be an expensive lift. Plus, I have to send a Kerbal on a flyby (thankfully I don't have to land a Kerbal). Plan is to launch the Base Lander (which has some retrorockets and parachutes... so I'm hoping it will land), and separately, Jeb with a return Mk2 capsule sitting on a NERV with a bunch of fuel. They'll dock and then Jeb will push himself and the lander down to Eve, hopefully not die out there in space, de-orbit the base, fly home and get a parade. So... the question: Having never used a NERV - I understand they handle weight well... but need long burns. Presuming I manage the heat correctly - do I keep the craft oriented toward the blue indicator the whole time or is it better to hold prograde and watch the map for the encounter? (Not done any really long burns, yet -- and I only recently learned of the Maneuver Mode feature, so...)

So -- inspired by your wall climber, I built something similar. Such an unholy abomination should not fly - but it DOES! I even undocked both the rover and flyer while flying and landed both (with chutes). Totally helped me get a mission done that had been bugging me (quartz). Thanks for sharing!

Truer words... I gave up trying to tweak it. Made an abhorrent looking plane based off of a Mk-1 cockpit that does everything one might ask for... ...except look like it should fly.

Yeah - if by MaxQ you mean 300m/s ASL & etc when you get the animation showing where your rocket / plane is going supersonic / dragging - those things. I'm not completely up on all the terminology. Also, re above: you can RMB on the Pe or Ap and the numbers will become persistent: really helps when fiddling with the maneuver nodes! Also works with ascending/descending nodes From your video: you can more aggressively tilt your rocket over to a full 10-15 degrees to take advantage of the gravity turn. Like at 30m/s. Also, it looks (to me) that you get going to fast too low; the drag lines I was talking about show up when you're still in the 3k altitude zone. When I see those, I throttle back to save fuel. IOW - you're going so fast in thick atmosphere that you're both fighting gravity and drag, and burning fuel to win. Also, by not getting fully into the 10-15 degree turn, along with your speed, by 6k you're still pretty much vertical attack - and not in a gravity turn, which carries out through your whole initial burn. The gravity turn usually burns longer, but your arc also becomes way longer (flatter) because you are actually converting some of the burn time in the atmosphere into lateral speed, not just vertical speed - which in turn means less fuel used to circularize. From what I saw, you're still in the burn straight up, turn 90 style, when you could be going up at a 'varies through 45ish' angle or so for most of the way. I can't critique the rest: you made it to orbit! (I like using maneuver nodes, but saw that you used the technique described by AHHans -- and it worked) EDIT - you can see a gravity turn in this vid. He attacks shallow (5 deg) but it works - you can watch the angle of attack during his burn.

So - if looking between what I write and what AHHans writes - go with his. But what I do as a duffer is switch between map and ship view for the first couple of moments - looking for when I see the white drag lines that show up @ 300 m/s to let me know when to throttle down the liquid fueled engine and to know when to expect the SRBs to expend (I generally ramp up the throttle just before I dump them). Then back to map view and watch my apoapsis and shut off about 75k, letting the rocket coast. Then I'm immediately opening a maneuver node at apoapsis to get the system to calculate a circular burn. When I see the perapsis is in space and I have an orbit I start driving the flight indicator pip to line up with the blue indicator. Remember - if you have Hold Prograde selected - your pilot will fight you so switch back to SAS... Then I calculate 1/2 the burn and start the burn at t- that number. It works. But FYI - AHHans is one of the guys I listen to for advice - so if my duffer method helps, great, but if you want to get gudder, look to him!

Bewing provides the correct answers... Also, FYI you can often click on the plus symbols in the mission tabs to see what you need to do to accomplish the mission. In my case I transferred kerbals from an out of fuel Mun lander to a return ship and missed the mission. The note said I had to return a ship that landed - so I got to fly another trip to complete the requirements

I struggled with this too - but it's pretty easy. If you are looking at a top down view of the navball before & during the first seconds of launch you should see the prograde marker dead center. When you get to 30m/s or so, if you pitch the nose to the east you should see the level flight indicator (if that's what it's called - the shrugging guy shaped doohickey) - that thing moves in time with your key inputs... But the prograde marker lags behind. So what you do is, somewhere between 30 m/s and 100 m/s is pitch the nose East about 10 - 15 degrees, wait for the prograde marker to catch up, and then you can manually keep the dot inside the prograde ball (for SAS only pilots} or click on 'hold prograde' (for better pilots) until you get ready for the circ burn (unchecked prograde btw) Saves tons of fuel

The smart guys are gonna want to know your build. I. E what your stages look like and what rockets you are using. FWIW - I'm at a mid-high tech atm and have a very easy lifter for @ 40 ton stuff. Starts off with a mainsail flanked by two Polluxes. Plenty of juice for the mainsail, btw - and with the Polluxes I often have to throttle the mainsail down when the drag gets high (which just means more fuel later). About the time I get to space I drop the mainsail and light off a Skipper (I think.. It's the big bell shaped rocket that starts with a S). Depending on the weight that stage is either still helping me get to altitude or doing the circularization burn & part of the destination burn. After that... My FuelTruck uses the Poodle and is very handy

Thanks guys - I'll look into Imigur later this afternoon when I get back on the computer. In the meantime, while I like the 'canards on the nose' suggestion, are there known problems with some of the elevons? Oh - and @AHHans, the plane used to fly great for me - no problem keeping the nose in the wind.. If anything its getting it to come out of it that I was fighting (slow turns before became slower to non existant after fiddling) - but what was weird about it was that level flight acted different from angled flight. Ex: I could flick A or D to get the plane to roll right or left and then pull the turn with S just fine as long as those maneuvers were in the horizontal plane. But if I angled down, S no longer wanted to pull the nose up.-which I'm guessing means my drag was greater than the elevons could handle ...although why this happened idk

I built a mid-level 'good' plane that flew easy, and frankly was fun. Any Kebal could take off, fly a mission and land it. It could weave the spires of the mountains west of the Spaceport at any speed. … So of course I messed with it, trying to 'improve' it. And now it's a brick. Sadly I can't post a pic b/c I don't have any of the file sharing accounts allowed by the forums. The original plane was a supersonic capable Mk2 based plane with 2 Panthers and 4 radial intakes. Its a very traditional design, swept wing with separate tail and two rudders (not a flying wing or delta - it looks reminiscent of an F-15). The only thing I did not like about it was the slow turn speed (note not rotate speed, that works great - its the turning by using the w to lift the nose part - i.e the ailerons seem good, the rudder seems good - its an elevator problem . So I tried changing out the Elevon 1s on the tail for Elevon 3s, figuring the greater surface area would give me more turn ability. I also pushed the wings forward to get the COL within, but still behind the COM, figuring that would help it. Everything works great - as long as the nose isn't pointed to the ground... When it is, the 'getting the nose up' part is very difficult now. FWIW - holding the 'w' shows the wing ailerons/elevators going down, while the tail elevators go up. -- Original design had the COL just kissing the back of the COM. COT is balanced on either side of and inline with the COM. It handles flat flying great. It can turn. It hates lifting the nose up. I've gone over all the tutorials again, and I can't quite figure this out; the plane should fly better than it did. It doesn't. Suggestions?

It also helps with navigation - seeing a completely blue navball often means that the 'activated' navigation target is not visible because it is in the brown portion of the ball. Of course, trying to land with a ball oriented for driving is exciting in its own right!

Took me a minute to figure out what I am seeing: those are all guided bombs with fuel clipped into OKTOs... Never would have thought of that! (Of course, I only learned you can clip parts recently). I'm guessing you could have done the same with dumb bombs and a slow fly-over / hover? Bunch of fuel tanks or something - well then you wouldn't have had the thrust... small SRBs?

Heh.

Ah - so what you're saying is that Val had a good idea, but we need to Jeb this thing up with MORE POWER! Sounds good!

I've got a contract to return science from my deployable seismic sensor. Despite the best efforts of One Star Scientist Bob, and his Two Star Engineer Alny Kerman in setting up a remote station to the best of their abilities, we're not seeing much progress. Val had the crazy idea to force the issue by taking an almost empty of fuel lander up to 500m and then launching it at Minmus (while she gently EVAd back to the surface with full monopropellant braking). Having survived, she ran over to see the results of her 'experiment'... Only to discover we're not moving the needle on the contract. While we got three messages (from the initial impact and two debris impacts) showing 0.34, 0.43, and 0.31 (which should in most gravity environments add up to about 1) science points transmitted back to Kerbin… we're not even 1% complete. … and so the question: is this one of those contracts that's just gonna need to be background noise? i.e. it's not gonna get completed any time soon? Also - if I level up my Kerbals and then come back to pick up and then re-deploy the science, will I end up setting my completion back as well?

Yup... Rewrite the physics engine is a whole different beastie than an 'update' . Reminds me of the days of Kit cars - you could get a body that looked like a Ferrari... But underneath it was still a VW Bug. Something I've recognized since returning is that there's a lot of great new content in the game now that adds so much to the enjoyment that did not exist back when... But every time I turn a corner there's something new that doesn't play well with something old - and that's gonna be a problem for getting and keeping new players for KSP2 if not resolved by a physics rewrite. I think @dnbattley nailed it in his post above. With the studio shakeup - fall 2021 was more likely even without Covid (as per the announcement @Alexoff linked to)

KSP 2. I quit so long ago I don't remember any particular reason for moving on... I just did. But months ago I caught wind that KSP2 was in the works and I remembered the game fondly - so I fired KSP up (mostly out of nostalgia) to remind myself what it's like & get ready for the next iteration. Found two things: *. I still really like the game (perfect quarantine distraction) *. There is a great community here still willing to answer my dumb questions