Opus_723

Umm, I may have....umm....killed Valentina. She rode our shiny new quadcopter, courtesy of Breaking Ground, up to about 5km before the batteries died (got plenty of lift after tweaking the blades, but those new motors eat up charge fast). She ejected on the way down, and deployed her parachute.... Then the pilotless screaming, whirring mass of blades caught some wind and changed direction, barreling down behind her and ripping her parachute to shreds before a rotor blade, still spinning pretty fast on inertia, caught her helmet and just *flicked* her toward the ground at 100m/s. Poof.

Rotors aren't ideal for propellers, but I got a quadcopter up to about 2km before the battery ran out. Don't think I'm going to be able to live out my fantasy of lifting a rocket into Eve's upper atmosphere though. EDIT: Hmmm, tweaked the rotor blades a bit to get more lift and slapped some more batteries on, got up to 5km easy. Might be hope for this thing yet. Quadcopters are definitely doable with the rotors. Now I just have to figure out how to steer.

Having a blast with the new parts, but I seem to be encountering a bug, or maybe I just don't understand how this all works. Haven't figured out how to replicate it consistently yet, but sometimes (often!) between VAB and launch my tracks that I made for the controller part are disappearing. Which is a real pain as I then have to remake all of them. Currently using lots of hinges on 4 separate controllers to make a "blooming flower" solar array. I have like 11 hinges on each controller, and the play button on all the controllers action grouped to custom 01. Sometimes this works BEAUTIFULLY! But occasionally after I fiddle around a bit in VAB, everything's working good, then I launch and the controllers have forgotten all of their tracks. It might have something to do with the fact that I've been using symmetry to edit all of the tracks (apparently if you attach controllers using symmetry and edit one, they all update their tracks accordingly, which is nifty). I know without being able to replicate it consistently this isn't much help, but I thought I'd leave a note in case anyone else is having similar issues. If I figure out how to replicate I'll do a proper report. But man, when it works it is a thing of beauty! This DLC is fantastic and I haven't even left the ground. EDIT: Figured it out. I don't think it's a bug, I just wasn't using symmetry and robotics the way it was intended, I think. If robotic parts are added by symmetry, just click *one* of them to add to a single controller. This will automatically apply the track you make to its symmetrical partners. What I was doing that the game didn't like was applying symmetrical controllers to the symmetrical parts and then editing one of those. This will also work sometimes, but it seems to make the multiple controllers "forget" their tracks after one launch. Another technique that caused problems was adding all of the symmetrical parts to one controller. In sum, when you want multiple robotic parts applied in symmetry to follow the same track, just add *one* of each symmetrical component to a single controller, and the game will take care of the rest. I didn't expect it to work that simply, so I tried to do it more manually and it caused problems because it was anticipating the simple approach.

I know the force law is different than for a point mass, but it shouldn't be too crazy to add a "Hookean" sphere of influence, unless the code is a lot more spaghettified than I'm assuming.

It would be pretty cool if they just added the major stable Lagrange points (Kerbin-Mun, Jool-Kerbol) to the solar system as orbitable spheres of influence in the current patched conic system. Then we could park asteroids and stations around them.

I'm curious how high a helicopter can get on Eve before launching a rocket-powered upper stage.

Wouldn't that just be a bunch of individual Hype Cars though? Possibly all going in different directions? We need to make sure our collective hype is coordinated in the same direction, with a narrow cross section, so that we have the maximum possible hypementum and force per area in order to break through the paywall.

Yeah but.... STOCK DELTA-V!!! These are glorious times when the old ways are cast aside, and we bare our jubilance... nay.... our hype! For the world to witness!

I tried the demo, got a crew capsule stuck in orbit, then designed my own 'claw' out of extendable landing gear, rendesvous'd and 'docked' with no RCS, just a terrier and a reaction wheel.... After spending hours accomplishing that, did some googling and learned that the full game had docking ports and RCS and IMMEDIATELY BOUGHT THE FULL GAME.

My biggest hope for the game is simply that the other planets get an art pass that leaves them with as pretty and varied terrain as Kerbin. I want my Valles Marineris, the cliffs of Miranda, etc.

No need to get weird about it, it's just random.

Is anyone around here experienced in hobby rocketry? I've been thinking it would be a lot of fun, but I have very little expendable income for hobbies right now and it seems like a spendy one. I saw that one amateur group actually managed to build a suborbital rocket, which was really inspiring! But I'm stuck with match rockets for now I think. Does anyone who launches rockets have any good stories have any good stories or advice to newbies who are interested?

I'm disappointed in the delays as well, but I wish people would stop comparing modern projects with the Apollo program. NASA used to have ten times the budget they have now, and most of it devoted to one project, as opposed to dozens. It's a whole new reality now.

You can do the exact deltav calculations with numbers provided by the stock game. I just use the calculator on my phone. I've never really found it very time-consuming. Honestly, all I want is a button to drain and refuel all of the engines in a stage all at once instead of using all the sliders. And that's only because I've never been motivated enough to calculate how much fuel weighs and write it down somewhere. It's not exactly rocke... *Ahem* Rocket science isn't actually that hard? That doesn't sound right...

Did this forum disappear? That link worked yesterday but seems broken now, and I don't see the forum on the main page. EDIT: Never mind, not sure what happened but it's working for me now, must have been mistaken.

That would be amazing! Imagine actually docking with a space station that's actively burning up and collapsing in the upper atmosphere. I could never do it, but I'd have fun trying. I wonder if people will come up with a way to integrate kOS (never used it myself, don't quite know how it works) to automate some other vessels to do things without the players' input? I'm also imagining using some kind of stock weapon to "shoot down" the player, forcing them to crash land on an alien world, if that's possible. I'm pretty sure that at least the BDArmory people will be able to pull off some cool things like that.

Does anyone want to share their incredibly overhyped, wild, probably not possible ideas for missions they want to make, or is everyone going to keep them secret until the release? I for one want to basically recreate the movie Gravity, starting the player on EVA at a space station with a carefully spawned debris cloud in a crossing orbit (I worry a reverse orbit would entail such high speed collisions that the Kraken would be summoned), but I'm not sure my computer would be able to handle all of the debris. So maybe someone else should make that. Someone would have an amazing computer with tons of visual mods and beautiful explosions, though. They would play it and make a video, and I would watch it and it would be glorious....

I would honestly just like more varied terrain. More canyons, cliffs, mountain ranges, craters. Kerbin, the Mun and Minmus are alright in this regard, but the rest of the planets are quite flat and featureless. Duna in particular, as almost everyone's first interplanetary trip, is a bit disappointing. I just want something like the Valles Marineris. Maybe some actual glaciers instead of white ground. One or two grand features like that on each planet. That would make my whole game. I think textures are secondary to this. If I had more cliffs I'd be buzzing them with ships, racing down canyons, and base jumping Kerbals. That's what would actually make planets more fun.

Thanks Elthy! That's exactly the sort of advice I was looking for. Could you maybe clarify by means of an example what you mean by "the cheap ones" with regards to a mainboard? I don't plan on messing with overclocking, so that sounds great. Also, what precisely do you mean by the "efficiency" of the PSU (is there a particular number you're looking at?), so that I can look for something better?

I'm getting ready to attempt building my first PC. I've got a part list that's just a slight modification on a Logical Increments build, but I would still like to trim down the price some more. I know very little about this stuff, so I thought I could get advice from some more knowledgeable folks on how to build something of *roughly* this performance level for the best value. I don't care if it ends up sacrificing some performance, I just picked this out as a rough ballpark. But I don't really know all the pros/cons of, say, using a cheaper motherboard, or whether I can skimp on the cooling or not, or whether there is another graphics card with better value and only slightly worse performance. That sort of thing. It's just the "Excellent" build from Logical Increments, only I picked out a cheaper case and I found a slightly cheaper version of the graphics card at Best Buy that had good reviews. Also, if I have made any mistakes (anything weird about the different graphics card, or maybe that case won't fit certain things well?) please let me know. https://pcpartpicker.com/list/QFNjPs Thanks!

First fuel tanker went up today! It's been awhile since I launched Atlas, so it was good to see it in action again! The fuel tanker launched carrying only a small fraction of its fuel capacity, which was just enough the get to the Mun on its own. To rendezvous with the station in a polar orbit, we only barely captured on the first burn, letting the tanker swing out on a long orbit and then perform a plane correction to align its orbit with the station's. Then it was just a matter of circularizing and performing a Hohmann transfer to the station. The view approaching the station was just awesome. And that's our first tanker! The station's not terribly symmetric yet, but we have actual fuel storage capacity now! This is meant to be a liquid fuel tank, although some of the parts can store L+Ox mix in a pinch. But we've only got Sisyphus L in operation so far, so we couldn't bring up oxygen from the surface anyway. Now at least Charon has a fancy station to refuel at rather than docking with Sisyphus itself. The point is, between Sisyphus L, Tower Station and Lupus Station, we now have all the functioning parts of a liquid fuel supply chain! Our next task will be a quick and straightforward one: there's no reason to leave Sisyphus L drifting out in space anymore, so we'll dock it to Lupus Station and transfer its remaining fuel. After that, we'll go ahead and outfit Lupus station with its second liquid fuel tanker, as well as a monoprop pod, to bring the liquid fuel supply chain to full capacity.

And now for the first mission of the resumed space program. Today we moved Lupus Station to Munar orbit! I think originally I had planned to attach the fuel pods and then drag the whole thing to the Mun. But I've decided, upon reviewing the crafts in the VAB, to redesign the fuel transport system, so I decided to go ahead and bring the station to the Mun while I work on that. I originally planned to have fuel pods that could be picked up by a tug and transferred from one station to another, but I've decided that, given the sheer size of the fuel pods, it would be more fuel-efficient to add some engines and RCS to the pods themselves and convert them into full-fledged fuel tankers. The redesign is actually progressing quite quickly, but I was eager to post some new pictures after the long hiatus, so I'm going to go ahead and document the transfer of Lupus Station to the Mun. After entering a circular polar orbit of altitude 20km, we ditched the tug, crashing it into the munar surface. And now Lupus Station has become my very first space station around a body other than Kerbin! Our next task is to make the station functional as a fuel depot by launching and docking at least some of its accompanying fleet of fuel tankers. Then Sisyphus L will actually have some work to do! I'm really glad I'll actually get to see this project through to completion. I had big plans for this setup, and I'm dreaming up new plans as I go. My hope is that the results will be quite grand.

My apologies to anyone who was vaguely interested in how this turned out. I was having a lot of fun working on this project, when unfortunately, my laptop got dropped and the screen was destroyed beyond repair. I dejectedly tucked it in a box and made a mental note to try to recover as much of my stuff from it as I could later, as I was getting ready to move to another state around that time. I've still been playing KSP off and on, but it has felt a bit hollow this year. Sandbox has always felt too directionless and overpowered for my taste. I don't feel like I should go to Jool until I've gone to Duna, etc. But I didn't really have the heart to start over on a new career either. Especially the fundraising. So I was a bit bummed, to say the least. In all the rush of the move (and starting my Physics Ph.D.!) I almost forgot about the old laptop, stuck in a box that sort of went directly to storage without getting unpacked because it was full of semi-useless junk. Today, however, I finally dug out that old laptop, and through a lot of trial and error clicking blindly around the dead parts of the screen, managed to get my old save file onto a thumb drive! I just booted it all up, and it all still seems to work on KSP 1.3! There was a harrowing moment when Tower Station, upon loading, jumped about a meter into the air, but the shock absorption was enough to keep everything together upon landing. So what I'm saying is... I'm back in business! Lupus Station is still orbiting Kerbin, and I expect to resume Operation Underhill shortly, although I might make some tweaks to the original plan since I have become a bit more experienced at the game since earlier this year. Look for an update soon!

Hi, I'm starting a physics PhD in a couple of weeks and the department has awarded me a (generous) chunk of money to spend on academic supplies as I see fit. I need a new computer for school anyway, as my old school laptop got dropped one too many times, so I thought I would spend part of the award to try building one to get more bang for my buck. For school/research purposes, I would like a computer that can crank through decently heavy Mathematica code (or compile in other languages) so that I'm not so reliant on school computers. I figure that gives me a decent excuse to build a good gaming computer while I'm at it. I pretty much only play KSP, but I would love a machine that would let me run a lot of mods, including visual mods, and build high part count ships without lagging much (my old laptop could pretty much only run stock). I would also like to try a few more recent, more traditionally "pretty" games, but that's not as much of a priority as running physics simulations for school and really maxing out KSP. My budget for this computer is $1,000, including peripherals (I would like a nice monitor, but I'm fine with a dirt cheap mouse and keyboard, which I already have), but not the OS, which I think I can get heavily discounted as a grad student. I know enough about computers to know what all the parts do and roughly how they work, but I don't know anything at all about specific parts/series/brands. Could someone suggest a parts list?

Speaking of the Falcon legs, I was wondering if this is a bug, or just how the colliders work. I realize they're not really intended to be used at this angle, but... I really want to.