Ty Tan Tu

I am really not very original. Probe for unmanned crafts Shuttle for a ship designed to transport resources or Kerbonauts, usually from the surface to a space station and back. Space Station for a craft that is going to stay in orbit Rover for - well rovers Base for ships that lands and are staying there Driller for mining operations Tanker a subset of rovers used to move resources from miners to say shuttles or bases. So, lets say you are setting up a base on Minmus to fuel a mission to Duna. I have: Probe Minmus I (An unmanned satellite in a polar orbit around Minmus to identify areas with high resources.) Probe Duna I (An unmanned satellite in a polar orbit around Duna to identify areas with high resources.) Space Station Kerbin I (Space Station in a Low Kerbin Orbit) Space Station Minmus I (Space Station in a Low Minmus Orbit.) Shuttle Kerbin I (The craft that takes supplies and Kerbonauts from Kerbin to SS K I and back.) Shuttle Kerbin to Minmus I (It just shuttles supplies and Kerbonauts between SS K I and SS M I.) Shuttle Minmus I (The craft that takes supplies and Kerbonauts from Minmus to SS M I and back.) Rover I (The rover to explore and move Kerbins around the surface of Minmus.) Minmus Base I (Habitat for the rough necks manning the mining operation on Minmus.) Minmus Base II Electric. Driller I Rocket Fuel Driller II Rocket Fuel Driller III Mono Fuel (All on Minmus.) Tanker I (Just an unmanned rover to move fuel from miners to shuttles.) Space Station Duna I (The Mother Ship that is going to take you to Duna.) And then repeat for Duna....

On March 17, 2018 Vanguard I will have still been in orbit after 60 years. It should stay in orbit for about another 180 years, but with global warming, the upper atmosphere is cooling and dropping a bit, so it could potentially be longer.

I once had Jed break off one of my solar cells. The weird thing is I could not even see the debris on the surface, but Jeb still managed to tripped over it. It made me laugh. Jeb was smiling too - but I don't sure he realized I was laughing at him not with him. Maybe I was a jerk for laughing at him, but he broke my solar cell. Do you know how cold it can get on Minmus when your battery runs out during the moon's long nights before the dawn finally arrives? Neither do I, but maybe I could hook up an IoT thermostat to change the temperature in the room to match the temperature in the game...

That most be some kind of a bug. I am sure it will get fixed in the next version. :-) You never mentioned you were using the Clamp-O-Tron Jr. I am sure that made it a bit harder for you on your first attempt at docking. Anyways, Cheers!

NavyFish has a Docking Port Alignment Indicator mod that can help. It is not an auto docker, but gives you a good display to help you move in the right direction when get that close. https://spacedock.info/mod/543/Docking Port Alignment Indicator

Another tip that might help you is limiting your engine's thrust. If you right click on your engine you can limit the trust. It will give you finer control in adjusting your inclination. With practice you should be able to get it to NaN, which I think stand for "Not a Number" meaning dead on zero. As Plusck says, don't worry about the node for inclination. If you right click on the AN/DN chevron the numbers will stay visible. Wait until you are almost right on top of the AN/DN chevron to fire normal/anti-normal. Docking was the hardest thing I had to master in KSP. When I finally did it the first time, it freaked me out. BOTH ships raced away from me. I was like "NOW what did I do wrong." Then I realized "Oh, they are docked." When you get there, savor the moment. Then separate the two ships, let them drift a bit apart, and dock again using RCS. Pretty soon you will be launching ships off of Minmus' surface straight up to your space station without having to orbit at all.

I suppose it depends on which Mods you are talking about. The early Mods in England were really very much akin to the American Beatniks, although somewhat more snazzily dressed. They were into Jazz and R&B. Granted the street fights, and out right riots, that broke out between the Mods and the Rockers in England in the early 60's were ugly, so I can see why some might have turned against the Mods back then. But that is ancient history. I think we can all agree that the Retro-Mods of the late 60's and 70's, that brought us bands like The Who and the Jam, were pretty cool. Let's face it, Quadrophenia is the ultimate Mod opus. Perhaps a lot of the prejudice against Mods stems from a misunderstanding of the later Skin Head Mods of England that is confused with the American Skin Head phenomena of the 80's. The English version of Skin Head Mods grew up in ethnically mixed neighborhoods and were into Third World Rock like Reggae. They were very inclusive - unlike the American version. Or are we talking about different Mods?

My very first ship never got off the ground. It was a sandbox single Kerbonaut MK-1 Mercury type rocket with one FL-T400 Fuel Tank, a LV-T45 "Swivel" Liquid Fuel Engine, some cool fins and a parachute. I did not even put any staging on it. that was still a mystery to me. It was just suppose to go way up until it ran out fuel, open the parachute and float back down. On the launch pad I looked around the screen and what 'Huh, I wonder what the EVA button does?' I pushed it, and Jeb was standing on the landing pad at the bottom of the rocket. Pretty cool! But I could not figure out how to get him back in the command module. That is when I discovered the 'Esc' key. This time I left Jeb in the Mk-1 and pushed the space bar. The rocket lifted off the launch pad with a spectacular display of rocket flames - and the parachute opened. The rocket was flipping around totally out of control when I remembered the Esc key.

I am in a bit of a weird situation in that I am using what would be considered laptop hardware in a desktop box. Here is my real life experience. Over the last few moths I have done a series of up grades, one forced. After my hard dive started to crash I replaced it with a SSD. The only real difference I noticed was faster load times in KSP. Next I added a second 8 megs of ram stick to the single stick 8 megs I already had (still using the on board A6 graphics). I got about a 20% improvement in the GPU, but the CPU did not really appear to have been helped by the extra ram. Benchmarks leaded me to understand that the on board graphics was still my bottleneck. My KSP clock was always green so I was not dropping physics frames. My last update was a Nvidia GT 1030. It is a SFF case with a sub 200 watt proprietary power supply that is not easily upgraded, so it was the GT 1030, or nothing. I got another 20% increase in GPU performance. At this point, KSP is bottlenecked by the CPU. With something like a life support mod, KSP drops down to about 30 FPS. Self sustaining bases with all the bells and whistles tend to be high part counts, so I am not sure if it is the part count or the mods. I don't really have to worry about heat concerns, so I am not sure how this translates to laptops.

56.7 million meters per second?

The head poking out of the top of the light is a nice touch.

Actually I didn't, I just made a bad assumption that since it only came with a single 8 meg stick of RAM the motherboard and the CPU were locked to only do single channel. I jut ran CPUID, and it says that I do indeed have duel channel memory. Thanks for making me check! It was a happy surprise.

Just following up on my previous post. I used the built in winsat in Windows 10 as a quick and dirty benchmark (scale of 1.0 - 9.9). The original AMD APU A8 8600p with 8 gigs of RAM and the on board A6 graphics had a graphics score of only 5.1. After adding 8 gigs of RAM, for a total of 16 gigs, my graphics score went up to 6.6. And finally with the addition of the Nvidia GT 1030, the graphic score went up to 8.1. As I suspected the old Element TV I am using for a monitor did overscan and I had to reduce the resolution by about 6% down to 1014. So, to compare apples to apples I ran KSP in a 1280x720 window. Using a ship with 60 parts I am getting an average of 58 fps, with a low of about 45 fps (but with one weird glitch where it went down to 25 fps). Where I did notice a difference was when switching back and worth from map mode. Before there was a slight hesitation, but now it is very smooth. Another thing I noticed is that my fans do not kick in anymore. When launching a ship, my fans use to rev up. Now they do not. Which I think means my APU is running much cooler now that it does not have to render graphics too. The only other graphics intensive game I have to test with is Dear Esther (basically because I could not run newer games and so do not own any). I ran it in full screen which happily did recognized my resolution was 1014 not 1080 and it ran flawlessly. At this point it looks like I am bottlenecked by the CPU and the single channel memory which winsat gave a score of just 7.5. But the system is run cooler, which is a very good thing.

It is only November, so you still have plenty of time to order your Goats In Trees 2018 calendar.

In an attempt to make my meager computer usable for a bit longer, I have started to upgrade it a bit. I started with a AMD APU A8 8600p with 8 gigs of RAM and the on board A6 graphics. Oddly enough KSP is very playable with that, although I do keep mods to a minimum. I upgraded the RAM to 16 gigs. I ran 'winsat formal' on the Windows 10 box and found that my video performance increased by over 20% . I had not expected that. If anything I thought the CPU would be helped not the GPU. I have ordered the Nvidia GT 1030 which will arrive tomorrow. It was really the only choice I had. I have a 240 watt power supply in a SFF case - not to mention the fact that any video card better than that would just be bottle necked by the CPU anyways. I am not expecting that it will make a huge difference in KSP, but I am hoping that I will be pleasantly surprised. I am seeing videos of people run Witcher 3 in 1080p with acceptable frame rates with the GT 1030. I am using a TV for my monitor and am a bit worried about overscanning. I know I can correct this if it happens, but I would not really be running in 1080 anymore, and I think Unity is going to try to still do the 1080 anyways. So I might continue to run KSP in a 1280x720 window, but hopefully (keep my fingers crossed) with more mods and most of the bells and whistle enable in the graphic settings. What do you think? Am I going to be pleasantly surprised or disappointed?

Crap! I thought the universe was suppose to collapse back on into itself, and I could live the life of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Game - 30th Anniversary Edition

I guess I am more circumspect than most. Unless it is a planet I know well, typically I send a probe to scan for resources first. Next I send a unmanned rover at a promising location and troll around the surface for a suitable spot (flat is high on my list of suitable). The next step should be to land a miner so that I will have fuel ready for a home trip back to Kerbin, but the truth is I am usually chomping on the bit by then and send a lander connected to a orbital space station command module. To answer one of the other questions, I love traveling to another planets. It is still exciting. But I do sometimes find the prep work tedious, at least for my big space station/lander. I am still horrible at lifting fuel off of Kerbin with any type of efficiency, so I have a fuel mining base on Minmus. At first I thought it was cool connecting a fuel rover to my miners and transfer the fuel to a shuttle that would deliver it to the mother ship ( I have it down to 90% efficiency). But when it can take four or five fuel missions to fuel your big mission, it can get a bit boring. I suppose I should explore the mega delta-V mission from Kerbin direct to a planet. I am probably just thinking about it wrong, I am using solid fuel boosters to compensate for the weight of the liquid rocket fuel I want to get in orbit, but I can run into aerodynamic and heat issues...

Yea, it could be not be much more buried if the tried. Fortunately for me, in Windows 10, it shows up as a Frequent Folder in File Explorer. But you can always put a shortcut on the desktop. Right click on the .GameData. folder, go down to Send To and in the next menu click on 'Desktop (create shortcut)'.

I hate to be the voice of reason, because I am really enjoying the humorous answers in this thread, but isn't it just suppose to be lens flare?

I was thinking that it was intended to work in tandem with USA-276. The Thursday launch window for Zuma would have had USA-276 right over head, and both launched into LEO at about 50 degrees. The Falcon 9’s first stage for the Zuma will fire its main engines for around 2 minutes, 16 seconds. That is the shortest first stage burn to date, but just one second shy of the mysterious USA-276 launched in May. I was sure they were trying to put them into the same orbit. But now with the launch dated moved to Friday - I am more confused than ever. But even still, I think your British guy might be on to something. But with that being said, the developers of the SR-71 were more than happy for the press to speculate on the strange goings on, because their wildly wrong stories were more creditable than any of the cover stories they could come up with. :-)

My first visit to a near Kerbin asteroid did not go well. I was only going to go out to it and see what it looked like. It was going to be a short mission. Check out the asteroid, see what it looks like and assess what would be needed to capture one, and then return to Kerbin. At first it WAS going well. I intercepted the asteroid and using RCS to stay close to the surface, I was getting really close-up looks. But I guess I got too close, because as the asteroid rotated, it crashed into the ship. There was a big explosion, but when the flames cleared - Jeb was still there. I had lost the engine and fuel tank along with two RCS engines. The ship was hopelessly crippled. By then the ship was already racing away from Kerbin and it was too late to launch a rescue mission. The orbit took the ship out close to Duna. For the next two years the crippled capsule would float through then uncharted space before a rescue mission would be launched. Radio contact would be lost in a matter of days...

I have not run into any major problems. When it was first released, a couple of my installed mods broke, but that happens with every update, and even those were fixed in like a day. It seems to me they might have changed how planet coordinates are calculated. When I first used MecJeb to land, it was off by 50 Km! Not 50 meters, not 500 miters, 50 Km! But that has a fix too. It seems like I have heard some grumbling about rovers, but I have not noticed any problems with my designs. In short, make sure you have the latest version of your favorite mods, and I think you will be fine with 1.3.1. But I will wait until others weigh in.

I never have thought about it. I have always imagined that Kerbin's allegiance were to junk yards, not nations. But I have built a big base on Minmus, so maybe 'The Republic of Minmus Lowlands and Lesser Flats'. ™* Motto: "Gas, Snacks and Restrooms (request key at cash register)." I think Douglas Adams' novels might have corrupted me in the way I think of this game... *(A subsidiary of Zik's Towing and Refrigerator Parts Industries. Some settling may occur during shipping. Your mileage may vary. Void on Eve.)

I find the LV-N "Nerv" Atomic Rocket Motor rather useful when moving asteroids around. The part I never seem to use is the M4435 Narrow-Band Scanner. The M700 Survey Scanner is usually good enough, but I will often land a rover with a Surface Scanning Module to find the best place to land.