Buster Charlie

Spacedock/CKAN Upload?

Please post on Spacedock/CKAN?

Thank you for your mods and support! I eagerly await!

Any chance of a Spacedock/Ckan update?

Any chance for a update to Spacedock/Ckan?

I agree, i'd love to see this back up on CKAN

Any chance of a spacedock/Ckan release?

Any chance this can get uploaded to spacedock?

Okay I thought I posted about this before but I guess the kraken got it, so here it goes, apologies to KAC for stealing the screenshots from it's manual. What I propose is a new UI element called the timeline, a multi function tracking center and map view utility that combines functions of KAC, warp control, mission updates, and yes even multiplayer warp control. Now i'm not an expert UI guru, so i'm sure this whole idea could be made much cleaner with context sensitive displays and such, but essentially it should be handled like a video/audio editor track that you can 'scrub' and change the scale of on the fly to suit your needs. Okay the First image shows a fairly low time scale, You have time markers, you have the zero line (but you can scrub left or right to view different sections if you want) A mouseover (see Kerbal X) an icon will show it's time or more details. The actual timeline should have pretty basic icons to keep it from getting too cluttered. You can compare the icons on the timeline to the ones in the KAC window. On the far right you see an arrow, this could signify user created maneuver nodes or alarms that are off screen in the future. In this case the SOI and transfer window alarms. Maybe in the real UI you'd just mouse over the arrow and it would show the details in a text popup. One of my ideas for multiplayer timewarp would be to integrate it into the timeline, in addition to hotkeys (which could be treated like the game 'defcon' where the game runs at the fastest speed of the slowest player), you'd be able to que up warps (similar to KAC or mechjeb warp helper). In this example, the player (blue bar) qued up a warp 20 minutes from now to some point in the future, but the 2nd player (purple bar) wants to warp sooner (looks like around 12m30s) but the green bar represents the agreed upon overlap, so thats when it will warp. So maybe the purple player can go get a sandwich. ;P This Shows a longer timescale, Since the alarm clock is so close to zero at this time scale, there should be some advanced info on it, maybe it blinks red with a timer indicator under it, since at a 3 hour gradation you'd never be able to tell when a 3 minute timer would pop just by looking. Again mouseover shows more time detail. In this example our Transfer window is still way out, so it's got the right hand arrow indicating it's off the scale. In this example you qued up a warp 8 days from now till around 18 days, and since player 2 wants to warp to the foreseeable future (Boy are they mad at you!) You're entire warp is approved since it overlaps, note we won't necessarily track warp in the T minus part of the scale since it's pretty pointless, but I guess you could. Final picture shows the last idea. And this is we could have context buttons (see transfer window icon lower left) That would show non user-created info on the timeline. In this example we're dealing with year scale timelines, so our SOI transfer and alarm clock are Red flashing since they're happening sooner than the lowest gradient, and since the alarm is happening sooner, it's time is displayed, and once it pops, the SOI transfer time will show instead, possibly the alarm would blink since it's happening within 15 minutes, and the SOI would be less dire because it's still 1 day out. So this example shows something you could do with mission info (Launch, staging, part heating, destruction, failure, landing, eva) with the proper context button. But in this case we'll use Transfer window (but you could do SOI, whatever) So say you click the transfer window button, now it'll show a dot for each Transfer window upcoming from your current location, maybe a pop up key will show a different color for each body. But in this case we'll use muted green dot for every planet with an upcoming Transfer. In our example we clicked Duna, note that Eeloo is below it (the muted green dot under the bright green dot) because they're nearly the same time window. Since we selected Duna, in addition to showing it's nearest transfer, it now projects out the next 4 transfer windows (represented by bright dots that fade from green, to yellow, to red) So you can visualize the time scale of the Kerbin Duna transfer in context of your other markers, alarms, etc. In this example I further demonstrated the Warp overlap Mechanism, both players have layed out warp ques, but only the agreed upon areas are going to warp. I suppose the player could hit the warp hotkey when they are within player twos warp que and it'll just automatically add say 5 minutes of warp or whatever till they run out. If there is going to be 'surprise' warp, there should be some 10 second warning in which the other player can change their mind, so you can change your mind. Anyway So this is the Summary: Timeline, different time scales and positions selectable by player. KAC functionality built into it, place alarms by clicking on timeline, select context buttons to show all SOI, Transfer windows, closest approach, AP, PE, etc. Place an alarm just by clicking icon. Mission Timeline also shown on this with context button. Icons to represent evens, so Launch Icon, Stage Icon, Landing Icon, Recovery? Park failure icons. Mouse overs show details, Possibly multiplayer support with a muted or different color to optionally show the other players launches, disasters, etc. Also if there is life support, this would be a HUGE factor also, big indicators to show estimated life support range, warnings for specific flights. Easier Time warp, just click and drag on the timeline, it'll warp during that time segment. Maybe time warp hot keys just add an automatic time segment to the timeline, the longer the segment, the faster the warp Show upcoming Transfer windows, SOI changes, AP, PE, etc based on context menus. Anyway i'm done, what do you think?

Orion Environmental Impact Naturally, some people freak out when you tell them about a rocket that rises into orbit by detonating Two! Hundred! Atom! Bombs!. But it actually isn't quite as bad as it sounds. First off, these are teeny-tiny atom bombs, honest. The nuclear pulse units used in space will be about one kiloton each, while the Nagasaki device was more like 20 kt. And in any event, the nuclear pulse units used in the atmosphere are only 0.15 kt ( about 1/130th the size of the Nagasaki device). This is because the atmosphere converts the explosion x-rays into "blast", increasing the effectiveness of the pulse unit so you can lower the kilotonnage. So we are not talking about zillions of 25 megaton city-killer nukes scorching the planet and causing nuclear winter. Some environmentalists howl that Orion should never be used for surface-to-orbit boosts, due to the danger of DUNT-dunt-Dunnnnnnnn Deadly Radioactive Fallout. However, there is a recent report that suggests ways of minimizing the fallout from an ORION doing a ground lift-off (or a, wait for it, "blast-off" {rimshot}). Apparently if the launch pad is a large piece of armor plate with a coating of graphite there is little or no fallout. By which they mean, little or no ground dirt irradiated by neutrons and transformed into deadly fallout and spread the the four winds. There is another problem, though, ironically because the pulse units use small low-yield nuclear devices. Large devices can be made very efficient, pretty much 100% of the uranium or plutonium is consumed in the nuclear reaction. It is much more difficult with low-yield devices, especially sub-kiloton devices. Some of the plutonium is not consumed, it is merely vaporized and sprayed into the atmosphere. Fallout, in other words. You will need to develop low-yield devices with 100% plutonium burn-up, or use fusion devices (with 100% burn-up fission triggers or with laser inertial confinement fusion triggers). The alternative is boosting the Orion about 90 kilometers up using a non-fallout chemical rocket. Which more or less defeats the purpose of using an Orion engine in the first place. Remember that Orions are best at boosting massive payloads into orbit. Most of the fallout will fall within 80 kilometers of the launch site. You can also reduce the fallout by a factor of 10 if you launch from near the Magnetic Pole. When fissionables like plutonium undergo fission, their atoms are split which produces atomic energy. The split atoms are called fission fragments. The good news is that they have very short half-lives, e.g., in 50 days pretty much all of the Strontium 94 has decayed away (because 50 days is 58,000 St94 half-lives). The bad news is that they have very short half-lives, this means they are hideously radioactive. Radioactive elements decay by emitting radiation, shorter half-life means more decays per second means a higher dose of radiation per second. The fragments that come screaming out of the detonation aimed at the sky are no problem. They are moving several times faster than Terra's escape velocity, you will never see them again (Terra's escape velocity is 11.2 km/s, the fragments are travelling like a bat out of hell at 2,000 km/s). The ones aimed towards Terra are a problem. The fragments can be reduced by using fusion instead of fission pulse units. The fragments can also be reduced by designing the pulse units to trade thrust in favor of directing more of the fragments skyward. A more sophisticated objection to using Orion inside an atmosphere is the sci-fi horror of EMP melting all our computers, making our smart phones explode, and otherwise ruining anything using electricity. But that actually is not much of a problem. EMP is not a concern unless the detonation is larger than one megaton or so, Orion propulsion charges are only a few kilotons (one one-thousandth of a megaton). Ben Pearson did an analysis and concluded that Orion charges would only have EMP effects within a radius of 276 kilometers (the International Space Station has an orbital height of about 370 kilometers). So just be sure your launch site is in a remote location, which you probably would have done anyway.

everyone interested should read this here: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist.php#id--Pulse--Orion Yes I know this has some 'sci-fi stuff' but the whole page is written as a resource (I think) for people creating more scientifically sound sci-fi, so they have a lot of hard data and real resources. (I THINK) It covers some of the issues of radiation and fallout, it's worth a read and it answers a lot of the questions and concerns being asked here. edit: @Bill Phil beat me to it.

I feel like the game really comes into the 'cutting edge' feeling when you have life support restrictions on duration, logistic issues like that. And having to have some light probe infrastructure. For example I like SCANSAT a lot, I feel like this needs to be stock to some degree, and even space based telescopes for similar reasons. FOR EXAMPLE: If you have a telescope focused on a body, it'll slowly research, all the info we know and love, the orbit, the mass, whatever, what if it was a complete mystery? What if the planets actually were slightly randomized, or each solor system didn't have all the planets, or in the same order. What if in career mode you had such a 'discovery' mode. You use ground based and satellite telescopes to scan for planets like you do for asteroids in asteroid day? The longer you watch and object, the more ways you watch it, the better equipment you dedicate to watch it, or the closer you watch it all dictate how long until you have a complete picture. What is the orbit of this planet? What is the temperature, the gravity, any atmosphere? ANy oxygen? Can you land on it? Diameter? Atmospheric extent? Lowest orbit (watch out for those mountains!) Escape velocity? Once you remotely gather info, you can run computer simulations. Make these VERY crude, think 1980's video games, wireframe, solid color renderings, low frame rates. Make it look VERY retro, low res. This way, the simulation dosen't take away from the awe of actually exploring a planet for the first time, but you can still test out your lander, rover, jet without dedicating a mission. Then comes stage 2, you send probes, or even manned flybys. Satellites in orbits, scanners, orbital science, anything you do adds more details and info and more accurate simulators, more readout data. Science altitudes, synchronous orbit altitudes, whatever. More in depth biome explorations, anything to give you a sense of actually exploring for the first time, a new world. Of course you can just send out jeb in a rocket on the first day, hurtling into unknown space, and maybe if you're lucky you'll intercept a planet on the first try! But i'd go so far as to say you wont even see SOI intercepts on your map screen unless you've done some basic research, so make it very hard to do any exploration blindly, just like real life. I dont know how good completely random planets would be, and maybe the Mun and minmus would always be the same, but I think if you had a larger set of stock planets that would be placed in different orbits and characteristics, I dont know what the game engine is capable of doing.

Okay quick question. I'm trying to download AmpYear, It's listed on spacedock, it's listed in Ckan, but it's still trying to download from kerbalstuff. Any suggestions?

All good points, my basic premis is I enable reverts and quicksaves because sometimes a bug in KSP or a crash cause me to lose crew or mission and that is unacceptable. I tend to err on the side of quicksaving to save a crew ,because im sentimental, but I also because of the practicality of early career where you're really hurting for money. Also I noticed how much it tanked my reputation and I realized I couldn't play with 'realistic' casualties and ever expect to have a positive reputation. Sometimes I'll revert because of a simple oversight that's just annoying and not 'exciting failure. For example if I adding a subassembly messed up the staging and the rocket decouples the launch tower, and just slams into the pad and explodes, i'll revert, or if there is a bug in the VAB that causes a part to randomly fall out (had this happen a few times). But in my eyes, i deserve to lose a crew for stuff that is my fault and is realistic in the game context. For some reason I had a kerbal outside my jet while crusing, and she fell to her death, it wasn't a bug it was just me being dumb. Or more hilarious was on EVA on a suborbital, and realizing the ship was deorbiting, and using the EVA pack to try and catch the ship but it kept on getting further and further away, I was chasing it james bond skydiving style, alas right before I almost reached it, it really started hauling ass and the kerbal and ship were lost. Or how about just a really dumb ship design that turns into a snake and breaks in half on takeoff, it's not a bug, it's just bad ship building, If I really wanted that crew to survive I hope there is a launch abort system! But really ,the reason I WANT to play with consequences (But not so much that it destroys the game) is because of situations like this: I built my first SSTO MK2 space plane, it after many failed experiments that didn't get into orbit I made a MK2 liquid fuel only SSTO with LV-N for orbital maneuvering, I Was so full of Hubris that I said "Now to make a REAL cargo space plane". SO I build this giant monstrosity, I can't remeber if it was using MK3 or MK4 parts, I think MK4. Long story short, It's climbing and climbing higher and higher, everything seems fine, untill... it wont climb any higher, this thing can barely turn at all, and I want to say around 30 or 40k it starts tumbling hard, it's just uncontrolled stall death spiral, Not enough command authority to recover any control i'm just dropping like a stone, thousands of kilometers fly by as this giant monster of a ship just tumbles to the seat... But then... slowly I start to gain control, i've stopped the tumbling but i'm still falling like a rock, i'm stable but aiming straight down, 3000k to impact! Slowly... so slowly.. i'm just nosing up a tiny bit at a time, still falling fast, and finnaly with just a few hundred Kilometers to go I level out an start climbing again. So in reality, It was almost certainly going to be a messy death for the crew, through some luck and some skill I recovered it, but if I just played it as a simulation, or just revered at the first sign of trouble, I think I would have sold myself short. So for me part of the fun of the game is life or death challenges, sure i'll revert if it's a really cheap annoying bug or a simple oversight (like you said I don't really want to do a full flight checklist) but I just wish there was a way to have the financial restraint of career mode, where you need to mind the cost of a ship, it's mission, limited parts unlocks, without being too worried about failure. I'm not looking to have a kerbal holocaust, I just want to play it straight, and sometimes you loose astronauts, but just because people die in space, the mission goes on. Early air travel and commercial airline flights were very dangerous by todays standards, I want my early attempts to have casualties, it'll be a good motivator to invest in surviability and unmanned drones. On the other hand, I don't want to go bankrupt buying crew that cost more than a rocket. BACK ON TOPIC! I'm, all for non-grind based difficult as mentioned! There are a lot of ways to add challenge without it being too grindy. Make take inspirations from some of the user made challenges, stuff like open ended air speed records. Records hit with points assigned for parts count and vehicle cost. So take a lot of the stock missions, add modifiers. Set air speed record under 30k, beat your previous record, beat your previous record without rocket engines, beat your previous record with a jet that costs 20% less than your record breaking jet. Set reentry speed record, beat rentry speed record with a ship that weighs 20% more than your previous record breaking ship? I dunno maybe simple stuff like that, it's open ended so you don't have to accept or decline it, and you can do it at your own pace. And maybe some of the part test missions could include that? Instead of 'test X rocket on the launch pad, or over the mun' it could be 'set need land speed record with X rocket motor' or "launch payload of X tons (where X is 25% more than your previous record) to to 100k circular orbit. PS, I found career much easier to learn the game on, I do find the complete parts list intimidating at first, im sure now after so many hours it isn't as big of a deal, but at first I liked the simplicity of focusing on a few parts at a time, and really getting to put new parts through their paces.

I don't really want a simulator in that regard because it doesn't seem any different than reverting. I've had some situations where I thought I was doomed but managed to save the crew, so I kinda like the challenge and loss, it just feels very artificial to avoid any failure, but it's hard to play career that way and sandbox doesn't interest me.

I just wish there was a way to play career without reverts or quicksaves, and not end up with no kernels or negative 10000 reputation. Call it Soviet game play style, everything is like normal career, but you're always flush with fresh "volunteers" and nobody really cares if they die. I tried to play card core mode, but I just ran out of pilots.

How about real life ksp space race? A two player coop, maybe even a land game within a family? Each of you have your own career and space center, and you both try to out space race each other. Purposely depriving skylab or mir onto the opponents space center will result with ano asteroid being deorbited. ... Or how about you have a kernel clone, or hell another solar system, so the game is actually about sending interstellar probes and maybe Co colonizing outer planets together. You don't have to invade and subjugate the inferior red or blue kerbals.... So besides the fun of sending a nuclear tipped ground hugging cruise missile powered by a open cycle nuclear ram jet into the other players base, I can think of tons of fun that I could have with just one or two other players with voice chat. Doing multi-player space missions, someone drives the rover, the other person runs supplies, someone man's the base or whatever.

I vote for some variation of KISS, just because it's also a catchy design reminder.

I've tried to do a a search to see if this has been mentioned, I saw some similar suggestions but nothing exactly like this so I figured I'd throw it out. The biggest roadblock seems to be how to handle time warp sync? I've seen suggestions about time lines that sync up, but there are issues about interactions, I've seen talk of a master time warp, im sure a thousand other ideas. This got me to think about defcon, which had consensus warping between players, the game ran at the fastest warp of the slowest player requested warp. Then I started thinking about requesting the tracking station could sort flights by maneuver node. So what I suggest for single player, and by extension multiplayer, is the tracking station/map view have a time line running along the bottom, it has a user selectable time scale, and can be scrubbed back and forth (and maybe double click recenters it) to view past and future events. There would be a filter function to keep it from being too cluttered. it would record mission data (liftoff, stage seperation, recovery, failure) like the flight recorder window currently in game, obviously filterable. More importantly it would visually represent future maneuver nodes and events. Stuff that kerbal alarm clock can make a maneuver node off of is represented with an icon. So SOI changes, atmospheric entry, closest approach, ap, pe, an, dn, etc. Pretty much any on rails eventhe for the selected craft could be visualized on the timeline. So basic functionally is you could click and drag on the future time line to select a block of time you want to warp through, or like KAC I guess you could do manual data entry. But as a bonus you could just select a marker or any point on the timeline and add an alarm marker. So far we just have a pretty interface to view events and alarms but I think you know where I'm going with this. So in a hypothetical multiplayer game, the issue of how to handle time warps with two or more players. I'd start with when a player creates a warp selection on the timeline, the other player (s) would see this as a different colored warp selection on their timeline, and they could select it to approve it, when the time comes it would warp, with maybe a countdown warning so players could abort it for emergency. But the best part would be, if two players selected overlapping warp selections, it would automatically authorize warp, since both players have consented ahead of time. As far as using the hockey warp, I suppose that could automatically place a block of warp time on the timeline, say 1 minute real-time at whatever warp speed is selected, so the other player could consent simply by also tapping their hot key. That's the basic idea, I know it involves a new function, but at least it rolls up maneuver node planning, alarm clock functions into it as well. Thoughts?

Would there be a way to do some wikia style listing that the community can edit?

Gee whizz guys, I'm sure I can find some formula for predicting the position of planets, why do we need a map view to hold our hands for us? We just need a compass and a sextant or something. Seriously, when was the last time someone seriously suggested that adding up numbers, possibly doing unit conversions, writing those numbers down, exiting a video game, opening a Web browser, preforming algebra, then writing down numbers again, and repeating the process, was a legitimate alternative to core game functionality? I deal with unit conversions and stuff like that in my day to day life, I don't find it fun or relaxing to do this in a video game, even if it is trivial.

Maybe I'm late to the party, but if recovery /landing isn't part of the criteria then it's kinda like build a suicide mission? And wouldn't parts burning off count as staging?

I like this idea a loy, nobody would be "forcing" you to do it, it seemed like a supplement to the existing funding methods. Also I'd like to see more colonization stuff like @RoverDude is working on made stock. Then part of your income could be Elon musk style space taxi. Instead of contracts asking you to build useless crap, or space tourists asking for pointless missions, imagine a contact that says 15 new colonists want to move into your station on Duna, provide the living space and infrastructure for a 5 year contract with optional renewal. So you only get requests on colonies you already established, you get paid for the trip and a deposit on the return trip, you get paid for a set habitation time, maybe in monthly or quarterly installments with a down payment for initial supplies. And if all goes smoothly, you may get indefinite habitation. This actually ties in with the op, because what do the colonist do to pay you? Maybe some of them are independently wealthy, maybe some are writers, or others research scientist, maybe they film movies. Maybe they're miners and they mine mcguffinite themselves, maybe they manufacture products, who knows. Point is, they'll need supply runs. I'd suggest allow the player to fly cargo supply and resource return missions them self for maximum profit, if they find it fun, but also allow for an in the background automated delivery system, the player won't make as much, but they won't have to baby sit.

It might also be a better way to explain why you can't Eva in early career mode. Maybe Ithe would give the option to hire cheaper crew who are just mission specialists who don't EVA, but work in orbital science labs. And you can pay to upgrade their suit/training for Eva if needed. It would bexpect nice if you needed a better suit to survive on Eve for example.

Love this mod, have only used it so far for hover landing tests near the launch pad. If I had a set of space tugs that could dock with a space station, and wanted to move an entire space staton, would this mod compensate for the asymmetrical layout of the space station thrusters (on the docked tugs)