suicidejunkie

Space Cowboy, riding his factory to Minmus

What's the difference? Its a digital number directly proportional to your reputation.

Landed a bit rough on mun with a mining ship. Ended up somewhat bellyflopped and a little bit exploded, and not enough gyro to stand up with. Engineer + Power Screwdriver = Solution Take things apart Put 'em back together. Some may call it ugly, but if it gets a Kerbal home alive, it is pretty. In this case, he's not going home, he's going to continue the mission and refuel the space station and upgrade the mun-minmus polar comms link.

Heh, neato. That last image looks like a bird trying to swallow a fish way too big for its throat.

If you hit '.' in atmosphere, you'll get physics warp of 2x. What you're requesting is exactly the same, but with the number set to 1.25 instead of 2. I'm not sure about fractions between 1 and 2, but something along the lines of Better Time Warp mod would be a good start.

Open the KCT button, and under VAB or SPH scroll down to between your construction queues and your warehoused ships. There will be a full width button saying "Recover to X". When you hit that, your vehicle will be removed, and it will be added to the warehouse list with a cooldown timer just like if you had chosen 'rollback' for something on the pad. Once the recovery timer expires, you can edit, refuel, and repair, then launch it again as normal.

Why do you need fast production? I find just a few drills with a mediocre engineer is enough to stock up 200t fuel tankers much faster than they can cycle from Minmus to LKO and back. Most of the time goes to carefully approaching the base; pumping the pre-converted fuel across is nearly instant after that, and the base has 7+ days to make 20k more units of fuel in the background If it isn't a fuel depot, just a research station with some gas powered rovers, you need even less.

Why use solar at all? Instead, power the drills and the converter using the fuel cells! A decent engineer and a somewhat respectable mineral density is all you need to turn a profit on the refining process, and that surplus can be used to run the lab.

This sounds exactly like the 'Cobra' maneuver I use to bring my spaceplanes out of orbit... except you've got roughly 10x the atmospheric pressure that low down, so you're braking MUCH more efficiently. Blowing away all your horizontal speed for some vertical speed allows a safe landing, but isn't good for going to orbit.

Just because it is a one way trip (for now) doesn't necessarily mean it is a suicide mission. If you add some greenhouses, you can turn it into a permanent colony! Alternatively, give them 10 years of supplies and pick them up when you hit max tech.

I wouldn't call it a bug, as I suspect it is working as expected. The course based on the control point is quite useful in many cases. For example, when you are docking and you 'control from here', the important bit is the motion of your docking port (relative to the other docking port) and CoM motion isn't really important. For the situation you are looking at specifically? You can use it to accurately fling payloads using an electrical launch system 1) Have a station with a heavy central mass and a long arm with a claw or docking port. Use stretchy battery strings for more fun. 2) Set an action group to release the claw/port. 3) Dock a payload, and spin up the station. Set 'control from here' on the payload. 4) Watch the map view to see when your payload's trajectory is at the desired parameters. 5) Press the release button and fling your payload on its way with free dV. If you have a fuel depot and assemble a 1km long truss with the claw at the end, and then spin it up to 10rpm, that's 1km/s tangential speed (if I did the math right) and you can fling things from LKO onto escape trajectories using your gyros. (plus some occasional re-boosting of the station to keep it out of the atmosphere) Trade off the long truss for higher spin rates as desired.

I've got 5.2.95 Maybe it just needs more granularity to handle cases with less storage? I had only the tiny smelter's storage at the time. (though I have since built some 1000 class tanks to bolt on) The entry that is listed first in the popup is the one that will run first, and stall the later ones. I just tried poking around, and found that all you have to do for this one is swap the order that the ExConverter modules appear in the .cfg If the scrap metal conversion appears first in the .cfg, it appears first on the popup menu, and hogs all the resources.

There's something off about the catch-up code when returning to a workshop craft after time away from it. I have a tiny auger, tiny smelter and the workbench tower, so the whole operation is limited by the auger. Steady state operation leaves the smelter stalling at 15% ore->metal and 60% scrap->metal, with the workbench also stalling on input at some percentage I don't recall, but producing more output than is being consumed by the launchpad. However, upon returning to the shop after a day or so away, it updated to: - Zero metal - 100% full ore - 100% full scrap - Rocket parts dropped by quite a few tons I presume it is trying to do all the updates in one step (or not enough steps), rather than iterating over a few cycles to allow for production and consumption to alternate, like the stock ISRU does. I suppose I can mitigate it with more storage, or babysitting it, but it would be nice if that wasn't required. PS: Would it be possible to reorder and prioritize the scrap->metal conversion over the ore->metal conversion? This is good for when metal storage fills up. Scrap metal gets generated for "free" while making parts, but ore costs energy from the augers. it is much better to let the augers stall out, than to have the scrap bin overflow

This is probably getting a bit off topic, but you're probably right. I've got a set of control fins for canards, so it has a lot of authority within about 20 degrees of prograde, but beyond that, it is perhaps overly stable Fuel isn't an issue, since the orbital depot has 300 tons of it with Minmus tankers queued up. In all fairness I should be landing with *full* tanks to make a profit on the trip!

Well, I do start out at 90 AoA at 70km, but the control surfaces can't really do anything in that regime and the cockpit gyro gives up pretty quick, so the rest of the trip down is pretty close to 0 AoA until it is time to slow down, I don't worry too much about the target zone, as 200 LF will take you a long long ways using a whiplash when you get to start the flight at 20km & 1200m/s. Having to turn around if you overshoot into booster bay is definitely expensive, so I tend to aim roughly for the east side of the desert and cruise over the mountains. If I really do it wrong, there's plenty of land to set down on, and an automated KAA mining rover can always come by with a can of fuel to finish the trip.

For my spaceplane, I put a pair of puff thrusters on the nose, so there's less need for control surfaces or fuel balancing. A speedy 0 AoA descent below 40km to minimize heating, and then a quick pitch up to 60 and bleed the speed down to 1600m/s where the external shock temperature is safely below the part limits. That would be the cobra descent plan. I aim for 40km, hit 35km, and should probably go lower, but that's deep enough to work for me so its all good. Those nose thrusters also come in handy for the almost-tail-landing-->nope-its-a-belly-flop move to get it wheels-down on Minmus for refueling. Also for popping the nose up to take off from Minmus. Most of the mass is at the engine when empty, so during the flop move it pivots nicely with the nose having all the speed. The thrusters then arrest that just before the gear touches down.

I once accidentally clicked EVA on the portrait of an engineer who was sitting in the cabin. The airplane promptly shattered like an egg as it hatched a Kerbal.

Just ran into a small bug. Got a contract to launch a station into LKO. It needs the standard basics of antenna, docking port, power, and 5 kerbals. ... But one of the requirements is literally "Have a part on the vessel" I checked the save file, and what it really wants is an orbital dock component: PARAM { name = PartRequestParameter state = Incomplete values = 0,0,0,0,0 article = a partDescription = part vesselDescription = vessel partNames = ExOrbitalDock moduleNames = ExLaunchPad }

Yeah, this is all why it would make a good poll question

I note that for the pilots and scientists and particularly stupid+brave engineers, the productivity is negative. Do they contribute that negative productivity to the work of a quality engineer (by pestering with questions and calling meetings and such)? Are they intelligent enough to just sit back and stop "helping", or do I need to tell them to wait outside while Bill works?

Better question: Why aren't you using 64bit already? It doesn't cost you a dime to upgrade your OS.

I noticed that the capsules have a productivity factor stat, but no button to start/stop making parts. Is that intentional? (EG: to force use of the construction workshop somewhere on the craft) I'm looking to find the minimal set of parts required to bootstrap a space program from a single vehicle stranded somewhere other than Kerbin.

I wonder if you can do it via KAS. The largest storage containers are big enough to hold a launch clamp, and I've wanted to test if they can be attached in situ to power a base on some other planet (such as Eeloo) If you put a ship into a 69km x69km orbit so you're flying, and then EVA enough engineers to attach the clamp, what will happen?

I'm not sure why my network isn't working here. Any ideas? My orbiter at Minmus has line of sight to the polar relay, and all the relays beyond chain through to the mountains west of KSC. If I switch to the northern relay station just east of the EVA (8 links north from KSC) that gets a green connection link to KSC, but the data doesn't seem to flow any further today, despite the link lines all touching. Edit: Oh! Does a relay need to have an active control component? The plane has comms equipment, but no probe core.

As far as I can tell, you are changing the planet to match what your sensor reads, rather than vice versa. It is a subtle, but profound difference.