EpicSpaceTroll139

I find ion engines to be great in sandbox and science saves at least. I've sent probes to Moho and Kerbals to Eeloo using them. I'm not sure whether I'll use them in my career, considering how expensive they are. They also seem to be just barely usable for aircraft on Duna, although again, they're expensive. My latest design gets about 20 meters to the

Considering this, how long did it take you to tweak the reaction wheel authority to get it to be so accurate? Was there some kind of calculation you did to figure out what you needed?

This is absolutely insane. Well done. What keeps it so well synchronized?

Ok, so I've been looking through the kOS documentation, and as far as I can tell this is not a thing, but I figure I'll ask in case anyone has a workaround. What I'm looking for is a way for kOS to get the length/width/height of my vessel. Whether it does this by looking at the craft itself or by looking at the craft file does not matter particularly for my purposes, but I suspect if it exists, it would use the craft file, since there is this line (the 5th if the description doesn't use multiple lines) there that is formatted like this: size = width, height, length. At the moment I have two very-WIP codes that this would be useful for. One is a script for manipulating the rotor of an otherwise stock helicopter, for which it would be useful to have the script know the exact length of the rotor blades, for a better approximation of tip speed. However, the more important application is in a terrain hugging program. My program is able to obtain predictions for the terrain height along the path of flight for the point directly underneath the fuselage, and this is usually reasonable for very small planes, however for medium to large size planes, it would be useful to know the distance to my left and right the wingtips are (which would presumably be width/2), as it does no good for my fuselage to be kept above the ground if my wing slams into the side of a mountain.

I seem to recall seeing a post somewhere a while back that demonstrated that Jool is just barely visible as a few green pixels. I am extremely doubtful of any planets other than Jool and Eve being visible from the surface of Kerbin with stock visuals.

I hope to see this turned into a giant mechanical kraken.

I designed and did some testing of a new light fighter jet. I put it together in less than 10 minutes and it is outperforming other fighter jets that I spent days tweaking. Not sure if this is great or if it means my other fighter planes are just bad.

Errr... how did he die from that? Couldn't you just drop parts once you got to the sea floor? I also could have sworn there was a key that let you drop stuff... like... L or something

If you have KAS, you can have your Kerbal grab a boat anchor. It works as designed. If you're playing stock, you might need to stick a seat on an oar tank, fuel tank, or set of steel plates and ride that to the bottom. Or you could make a submarine and EVA at the bottom.

@sal_vager Best of luck in your travels! Since I first started playing KSP, long before I even got a forum account, I could always count on finding a helpful post from "that guy with the smiley ball avatar" that would answer almost any question I had. This forum would definitely not be what it is today without you.

I might just take a try at this, perhaps with one of my lighter single-main-rotor helis. Quick question: Do we need to actually shoot the VTOL per se, or just destroy it somehow. EG: Can I, say, attach a lance to my heli and spear/flip it off the building?

If Kerbin's nuclear materials supply runs out I'll know who to blame lol. How many NERVes are on there?

Interesting, I've never had problems with autostruts on wings. What kind of phantom forces did you get?

Just be careful where you drop the capsule. I won't forget once when I had a pod land on a mountain, then go tumbling down the side to it's doom.

@LordFerret Yah I'd have to second @DarkOwl57 on using override on the friction settings. With that kind of landing energy you need your brakes giving all they've got.

I did some stuff in my career save. First off, I returned lander + nuclear drive, the Knewton I IMV(Intra-Munar-Vehicle) section combo from its proving mission to the Mun. You can see there is the stub from a broken solar panel just visible at the bottom of the nuclear drive section, a scar from a mishap during launch. Luckily it doesn't need all three panels. It could probably even do fine on one. I later attempted to return a Firepillar booster core from the orbit it had been sitting in for a few weeks at that point, by carefully aerobraking it over many passes, trying to keep peak heating as low as possible. It barely made it through. Other things have changed too apparently, because after all that careful guidance, when the parachutes opened, all the expensive parts (the probe and control bits on top (don't ask me how), and the rocket components on the bottom) ripped off and plummeted to to destruction on the surface, leaving the cheap structural adapter and parachutes lazily floating down, which took a few minutes. Note that I returned this thing successfully numerous times in previous versions. I also tested a new airfoil on my generically named Pelican II exploration/cargo plane. Anyways, back to the Knewton. I rendezvoused with a spaceplane waiting in LKO, planning to ferry the Kerbals and some science back to the surface. I got within 50 meters, and was about to match velocities and transfer Kerbals over. And then my game just... stopped... It didn't stop responding, it didn't crash, it didn't throw an error... it just... stopped. As if I had hit the pause button. Luckily I didn't lose more than a minute or so of progress, and I was able to transfer Val, Jeb, Bill, and Miltine over and reenter with several hundred science in the trunk. Hope I haven't bored you to death Planning to have more in the way of fun shenanigans next time. What kind of speeds does it land at? Are the friction and brake settings on the wheels set to maximum, and are you using reverse thrust?

Nope. You need to use some kind of image hosting site like imgur (note that you don't need an account to use imgur).

Ok I'll make an entry with a slightly modified version of my E-50B Triton heli. It's got unneeded equipment (mainly a mk3 crew cabin and several tons of fuel) and my piloting wasn't perfect, so I could probably improve my score at some point I mounted seats on a cubic strut frame to the port sponson, so they're easy to access. Also reduced the fuel load somewhat to increase speed and reduce response time. I might have removed more, but I discovered the rotor system doesn't like strong maneuvering with low weight. I need to investigate that Rauuun! Gaoooow! Geeht to da choppa! Quick takeoff with engines in full get-the-fudge-out mode Stopped at runway at 2:09. I guess I get "This is a Backpack? Then where's m-" bonus for -25 seconds, resulting in a final time of 1:44. Bloopers:

(+_+) mobile y u do dis Anyways, I feel like engine out system is hard make work well. On one hand, the new percentage system helps make it applicable to aircraft with any number of engines, and helps to (somewhat) reduce incentive to spam unneeded engines for points. But on the other hand, it gives the same amount of points to, say, a quadjet aircraft with two engines out as to a twinjet aircraft with one engine out, even though the quadjet is contending with a scenario which is (theoretically) far less likely than that that the twinjet is contending with. To demonstrate the problem, let's do some math. However awarding points linearly for each engine isn't great either, as it incentivizes the spamming of engines for large numbers of points... Catch 22 I guess

Is it pitching up while just hovering or while moving forward? If the latter, you are likely experiencing something called dissymmetry of lift, which is when the advancing rotor blades are moving faster through the air than the retreating blades, and thus getting more lift. Due to gyroscopic precession, this can manifest itself as the helicopter trying to pitch up as forward airspeed increases. If it's happening during hover, idk what's causing it, but either way, moving the rotor backwards slightly should help.

THAT IS FREAKING AMAZING!

I may finally have a somewhat reliable configuration for the E-50B It seems that adding stub wings and thus reducing the disc loading in high speed flight allows it to fly at over 100m/s without fear of RUD. It still blows up if you pitch down significantly though. Currently trying to figure out a way to make that harder to do. Anyways, testing of the Saturn S-IC stage is going along nicely. Not sure if I'm going to build new larger engine bells or not. What do you folks think? Do they need to be larger?

So apparently my engineers have taken up the Sunny D motto of "Unleash the Power of the Sun!" I may have added a few zeroes to the RGB values of a light in the craft file. As a follow on, I modified a coaxial helicopter to do some experiments to test the limits of KSP light physics, and in the process made a craft that would probably be voted "most likely to cause an epileptic seizure." For this reason I did not leave the safety bubble with it. Followed by the interestingly slightly less eye-hurting multicolor version. This should probably be put on my "bad idea" list.

So I was playing in DMP. Snikersnee made a grave for an AFK player and put it on a rocket. I investigated. Grave count +1.

Did more testing of my S-IVB. Turns out I need to stick a really tiny Terrier engine in the bell, because the fairing overheats and blocks the thrust of anything placed in the throat. There's no need to worry about the thrust, I have my ways of fixing that, but the exhaust plume is going to look pitiful. Took the name "Spitfire" a little too far. (Turbine elements overheating in rapid succession created a stream of explosions) Tried to perform an experiment to determine if the aeroelastic divergence property of forward swept wings is noticeable in KSP. Results were inconclusive, as both wings kind of failed around the same time. I also realized that I had gear attached to the forward swept wings, possibly affecting their behavior. Finally went back to doing some stuff in my career save. I'm a little disappointed that some kind of slight heating changes between 1.2.1 and 1.2.2 have made it so that my expensive 3.75m FirePillar II core can no longer return from orbit intact. But on the bright side I figured out that I don't have to send an emergency mission to attach an antenna to my contract Mun base, I can just leave one of the microsats (3 are hitching a ride to Munar Orbit) attached to it. Even if the sat doesn't have enough dv to reach its required orbit from the surface, it's much less expensive to launch a new one of those than some contraption that attaches an antenna to the Mun base. I'll add pictures of this when I can. On a side note, I should really write down what I'm doing in my career save somewhere. It's been so long since I did anything in it that, for example, I see a spaceplane in orbit with one Kerbal in it, and wonder whether it was getting ready to deorbit or to pick up more Kerbals from somewhere. Anyone else had this problem?