Tyko

I kept forgetting whether it went low to high or high to low. I finally remembered by thinking "high priority" = "high numbers" and something that's high priority is something that gets done faster

I hate changing planes...especially in Dallas/Fort Worth and Philadelphia

Got it...the distinction between "were procedurally generated" (by Squad and are now permanent) and "are procedurally generated" (by the KSP game)

Which craters on Mun are procedural? I haven't noticed any changes. Over the past several iterations of KSP I've landed near the same small formations numerous times.

I noticed that on Mun and Minmus. It moves too...slowly. Time accelerate and watch the dust swirl. Super cool

helpful hint: if you google "KSP [any mod name]" the first hit is usually the KSP forum for the mod. Googling "KSP Karbonite", in this case, gets you there. I use that a lot if I hear about a mod and want to read up on it.

Karbonite offers an additional type of resource along with a new fuel type and new engines to burn it. It even offers the option of extracting Karbonite from atmospheres - which is kinda cool. For people looking for more diversity it's a great option. If you don't feel like you need more diversity to enjoy your game, then it's your call You might want to check out the forum page for more insights:

I've noticed that the stock navball tends to be about half a degree off - when I'm flying at 90 degrees, as shown in the numeric indicator below the navball, the direction marker is usually sitting just left of center on the 90 degree line - closer to 89 or 89.5 degrees. Is that fixable using this mod?

How would I build an estimate for the DV cost of intercepting and then slowing an asteroid down to a Kerbin orbit. There are two numbers that I'd need and I'm not sure how to get either 1) the asteroid's speed at PE over Kerbin and 2) the asteroid's mass. So far I've thought that I could rendezvous a small tracking probe first. If it could Claw onto the asteroid I think that KER would give me the total mass of probe + asteroid.

I've always been an avid space fan and love 3D modeling. I've tried many games that enabled me to model and use ships and have wanted one the relied on "newtonian physics" rather than sci-fi space travel. KSP by far offers the best balance of real-world physics and engineering concerns with a very high level of playability. I get most inspired by building something that looks/feels right and flying tight/efficient missions.

my current save I dropped science awards to 50% and then added DMagic Orbital Science. This gave me more experiments but still reduced my net science rewards well below 100%. I thought it might increase my grind, but it hasn't really. What it has done is make me pick science purchases really carefully. For the first time ever I'm going to do a series of unmanned lunar missions before sending a manned capsule. In previous saves I've had the points to just send manned missions and it's been kind of fun to plan some fairly low tech science missions to unlock what I need for manned launches.

The problem is that to make the time "meaningful" it has to be so long as to require time warp. Why not increase power requirements? This ties back to core concepts in the game of building ships to meet your mission goals. The option of trading off weight for science gain is pretty straightforward and doesn't require time warp to work.

Check out @Poodmund's signal strength calculator. In the upper right corner of the spreadsheet you can change the range factor settings to match your lower setting and it will recalculate ranges for you

@CaptRobau said that he's working on some configs for stock antennas to address this. Check out in the last two pages of the OPM thread

@Laie - didn't see that batteries had a flow priority I'll take a look. thanks!

The spread angle setting changes the angle at which the chutes are spread relative to each other. At a 0 angle they are almost completely overlapping while on a setting of 10 the chutes are spread far enough apart that they might not even touch each other.

Is there a way to make fuel cells work as a backup? I was hoping that power consumers would pull from batteries first and the fuel cells would only kick in when power was critically low. In actual usage it looks like fuel cells start generating power much earlier and are wasting fuel.

Docking was the hardest thing I've had to learn so far in KSP (gravity turns are the second). Both of these are tough because there's a ship design component and a piloting component. If your ships aren't balanced properly they end up "fighting" your control inputs. As others have referenced, getting your RCS thrusters balanced around your CoM is the first step.

Since time penalties aren't really game-friendly, another approach would be to increase the EC cost as signal degrades and THEN remove the ability to send partial transmissions - make it all or nothing. This would require that you included enough batteries to send the entire transmission. That would seem to be a decent way to show impact of low signal strength without reducing the end quality of the data sent.

I had an odd experience. I downloaded the demo and tried it. When I couldn't find basic data like DV and TWR and realized I'd have to keep a calculator around, deleted the demo. I'm not opposed to math or critical thinking, but the idea of requiring users to run calculations on a separate computer just felt like a huge miss and I'm a bit of a stickler for user experience. A few months later my nephew told me he was playing it using the KER mod. Once I tried that, I was sold and I'm well over 1000 hours now.

Thanks for the data! I'd kind of thought this was the case - it looks bad anyway knowing that making my rocket look 'prettier' also has aerodynamic benefits is great.

I did some testing on this as well and the less spread the two chutes have, the faster the descent velocity. On a craft with a falling rate of ~7m/s, changing both chutes by one step (7 to 8 for example) seems to vary the falling speed by .1(ish) m/s

hmm..good idea. Integration into stock might take a while, but an automated version of @Snark's mod might be able to detect when an antenna would break and retract it. It's kind of like how the new Parachute Open When Safe mechanic works. Not sure if it's code-able that way.

hmm...I'm not sure if the Stock sats would offer you Outer Planet coverage with just one ring of relays. It might actually take two hops. I guess my fav thing about OPM - at least early game - was the chance to send out low tech Voyager-type missions. I love that Planetary alignment at start of game gives you some great transfer windows starting around Day 80 for the OPs.

with CommNet and relay sats RCS is a great way to manage the orbits of lightweight satellites. I had a lot of fun setting up sets of 3 relays satellites in equidistant orbits around Mun and Minmus. The sats only had RCS and it was a (relative) breeze to get highly accurate orbits.