Tyko

Does this affect the physical characteristics of the planet - i.e. does it spin actually spin slower meaning the benefits of an Eastward launch are actually reduced?

Yes to more music...Maybe we can help on this. I'm sure there's more royalty free music out there that would fit with KSP and broaden the library. What if we suggested royalty free music that we come across and maybe use in our personal playlists - then we provide that list up to the Devs for their consideration I expect they don't want to devote the time to combing through music, but if we give them a head start with suggestions they might be able to incorporate them. Another option - there are lots of music hobbyists out there...some may even play KSP. What about a contest for original music with the award being inclusion of their music into the game.

There's a conflict between FullAutoStrut and Kerbal Attachment System's Harpoon and Grapple parts - if the Harpoon or Grapple is autostrutted to the craft you can't shoot it using the Eject function on the winch. It shoots out a very short distance and freezes there. removing the autostrut from the KAS part fixes this. You can turn it off manually of course. On the next update it may be helpful to blacklist those parts from FullAutoStrut's function.

A workaround I've used for this is to mount supplemental liquid fuel tanks on top of my SRBs with Fuel Lines or adjusted fuel priority to make sure they drain by the time the SRBs are expended

To add on regarding standardization - In my current build I've been following more of a ULA Atlas V model in which I keep the same core and vary the number of boosters to accommodate different mission requirements. It's worked pretty well.

Hmm...I've been a lot more successful with launch TWR of 1.4 - 1.5. It seems like a higher TWR reduces my overall DV budget to orbit and that kind of makes sense because I'm not spending as much time in my initial ascent off the pad where at 1.2 I feel like I'm wasting a lot of fuel doing just slightly more than hovering. Is my understanding incorrect? Why would I choose a lower TWR? The lower would allow for a lower engine weight, but increase the amount of fuel I'd need for that initial ascent, wouldn't it?

If you're using KER it includes a readout of the slope at your target landing point - this is really useful. I actually built a small custom window - positioned right above the Navball that reads out slope, vertical velocity and height AGL. This places all my key metrics together at the bottom of the screen and makes landing a lot easier.

DMagic's Orbital Science mod actually includes over a half-dozen new rover/lander experiments

I'm not sure about a more structured storyline, but it would be fun to have little cutscenes or maybe mocked up front pages of newspaper whenever a World First was completed - first orbit, first landing on moon, first landing on mars, etc. Also when a Kerbal dies. Extra points if the news article or the footage in the cutscene included details drawn from the your actual landing - pic/footage of the landing, dynamically including the names of the Kerbals and the ship that was involved After I made my first Mars landing the game just kind of trundled on as if nothing special had happened...It was a really exciting moment for me and it would have been more exciting if the game gave me some feedback

One thing to check that might not be related to the bug... The mining drill model has three parts that descend when it's deployed. The bottom two are the bottom shaft with the drilling head and the telescoping drill shaft above that. Both do not have colliders and can freely enter the ground. The next part up - it's mostly yellow and it cantilevers out from the craft - does have a collider. So, make sure that the drill is mounted high enough that the arm that swings out doesn't touch the surface.

Cool idea! it wouldn't look quite smooth, but structural panels could be used for the sides

A couple of other points: Make sure you're in Surface not Orbit or Target The more steep the angle of descent the less fuel efficient your landing is, but the easier it is to judge your landing site and make correction. The fuel efficiency loss can be small, it just depends on the gravity of the body you're landing on. It's less efficient for the same reasons that launching straight up is less efficient than a gravity turn. The lower your orbit the less energy you have to kill off before you land. High TWR is really helpful. a TWR of 4 (within the gravity of the target body) or more gives you a lot of margin for error With all that in mind, here's my process for safe and sane landings Start at 100km orbit (or whatever is appropriate for the target body), this usually lets me time warp fast enough that I'm not waiting forever to get to my first burn. on the opposite side from my landing zone I execute my first burn to bring my PE down to 15-20km over the landing zone a quarter orbit ahead of my landing zone I execute a short burn to drop my descent path to just past my target landing zone - maybe 5 - 10 degrees past it. I also will make in minor plane changes here if my landing zone isn't exactly on the equator. drop maneuver node just before you landing zone and plot a deceleration that puts on you on a 45 - 60 degree descent path. You want it pretty steep - again, this is a little less efficient, but gives you a much better chance of controlling your landing spot. Execute the burn and as soon as it's complete, close the maneuver node, make sure you're in Surface mode and set SAS to Retrograde. From there it's just a matter of riding your descent curve down and using thrust to brake. Using BetterBurnTime mod is great here because when you're in the terminal phase of descent it provides a readout telling you seconds to impact and estimated burn time. The estimated burn time is pretty conservative too, so it makes it easy to judge when to burn. A suicide burn - waiting to the last possible second and burning full thrust - is the most efficient, but really stressful and doesn't leave margin for error. I prefer to slow the craft down 100m or so above the surface and then creep down at 10m/s or so from there. If you're using RCS like @Geonovast suggested it's pretty easy to use RCS to scoot your landing spot around from there while essentially hovering on your main thruster. Hope this helps!

Yea, you're probably right. I'm kind of hoping they release 1.4 a few months before Making History to give modders time to catch up before the DLC comes out.

I tried that, but I wasn't seeing asteroids around all of the bodies, only Mercury. I'm not sure you can use multiple Flyby params within a single Asteroid group. I broke it up into separate asteroid groups and was able to get some success. Here's a config for just Earth and Mars - I temporarily took out the mainbelt asteroids so I could see what was happening better.

LOL...I read through the notes and didn't see that it supported RSS

Ah! I misread. That makes a lot more sense. I think I'm going to try using the same probability. The min/max Duration component I wasn't sure about. One possibility is it's setting the duration time to transit the Earth SOI. I'm just guessing though. Anyone know?

I'd like to add another asteroid set that intercept Mars in the same way the current asteroids intercept Earth. I thought I could just add another section to the Asteroids.cfg in the RSS folder. I'm confused though because in the Asteroids.cfg the Earth intercept rocks have an SMA min/max that doesn't seem to match with the SMA for Earth. From asteroids.cfg: Locations { Around { Body { body = Sun probability = 50 reached = false semiMajorAxis { minValue = 314155528451 maxValue = 523592547418 } Earth's SMA doesn't fall within that min/max range though. according to Earth.cfg: semiMajorAxis = 149598261150.4425 What would the SMA min/max be to create intercepts with Mars? Thanks!

If you're doing this all the time it might be worthwhile to create a quick new part by scaling down the 3 rung ladder to something more the size of a handhold. Maybe 1/4 the size and 1/16 the weight.

On option is to bring up a bunch of the short 3 rung ladders. The kerbals can bolt those to the side of your craft near where they need to work. When they're done, just unbolt the ladders and move them

I found a workaround for this that works consistently - An asteroid doesn't get a seed value until the first time you get within physics range of it. Once you're in physics range the game generates a seed that shows up like this in the Persistent File: MODULE { name = ModuleAsteroid isEnabled = True seed = 5109506E+07 AsteroidName = Class A Test 1 prefabBaseURL = Procedural/PA_A currentState = 1 stagingEnabled = True EVENTS { } ACTIONS { } UPGRADESAPPLIED { } } If you do nothing, that Seed number will randomly change when you reload the asteroid. Here's the workaround... In the tracking center - note the name of the asteroid. It'll be ast-XXX - You can change the name now if you want to. Complete your rendezvous with the asteroid, but don't actually attach to it. Just get within physics range. Slow down your approach so you're within a few hundred meters, but not about to collide with it. save and exit the game Go into the Persistent.sfs - Always a good idea to make a copy In your fav text editor do a Find on the name of the asteroid and scroll down to the Module listed above. Change the seed to any 7 digit number you choose. - I've just been lopping off the "E+07" portion and leaving the rest of the number as generated. So my new seed # will be 5109506 Save your Persistent file and reload the game Finish your Clawing maneuver on the asteroid. PROFIT!

I'm trying to use the harpoon to anchor a ship to a small moon so my station doesn't float away. I'm having 2 problems and wondering if others have found answers: It's hard to get the right tension on the cable once the harpoon is anchored - too little and the station tends to float a bit, too much and the craft starts jittering and explodes - is there a way to set the max tension on the retract option so that it doesn't pull the system to the breaking point or some other trick? Maybe due to (1), but I'm having a 50/50 success rate on my anchored ship exploding when I reload it from the Tracking Station

@Targoesh I had the same problem. It turned out to be an issue with auto-strutting. I had a mod that automatically auto-struts the whole craft. The Harpoons were being auto-strutted to the craft and this prevented them from ejecting. Turning off auto-strut on the harpoons solved the problem Thanks @IgorZ, your suggestion that it was a joint reinforcement issue led me to think of trying auto-strut

I'm trying to make a huge asteroid - 10km in diameter weighing 600 quadrillion tons. I've figured out how to put the asteroid where I want it. I've also been able to increase the mass. So far so good. Does anyone know how to scale it? I upped the mass, but the size didn't change. I'm looking for the line(s) in the config that specify the actual size of the model. As a side note...If I scale the asteroid 10000x or whatever that is, will the colliders scale too. In other words, will the surface as depicted be close to the touchdown point for a claw? Thanks!

Update: I've tested all of the planets and moons for SOI issues - I used alt-F12 and set the orbit of a small probe to the lowest allowed by the game. Using this I jumped through every stellar body in the system. Only the 2 moons of Mars are an issue. Deimos almost works. it's more round and it's possible to F12 into orbit. The orbit is only 632m though and there are a number of mountains higher than that, so it's not a safe orbit, but at least the game dropped me into the SOI properly. Unfortunately the SOI is 2K, which isn't even enough to clear the mountains, so it too has issues.. Deimos and Phobos... Evil Martian potatos of doom!! EDIT: I can tweak the SOI settings for Phobos and add an SOI line for Deimos and increase the SOIs. I changed the SSRSS_Kopernicus.cfg with some test SOI sizes. They'd need to be altered to be accurate. I just made some changes to make sure there wasn't another config somewhere that was overwriting the SSRSS config. Here are the changes I made - Changes are Bolded within the rest of that section for context

I don't have specific changes for each planet, I'm using a fairly straightforward rescale config as shown in the Spoiler below. SSRSS has the following info for Phobos: @Body[Phobos] { @Properties { %displayName = Phobos^N %sphereOfInfluence = 9059 } } I'm assuming that SOI number would scale along with the everything else, but perhaps not. My full rescale config: EDIT! Yes, the SOI is reading as 2km in the Tracking Station - same as the Eq Radius - there's my problem. This doesn't even match the SOI listed in SSRSS which is set at 9059. So, something's messed up here.