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maltesh

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Everything posted by maltesh

  1. Ultimately, what making significant time pass in the VAB winds up promoting is the "Do your building in a separate save, test it there, then move the craft file over when it's ready," style. Which is a tactic I've been using since 0.17 brought multiple saves into existence, and I imagine is already somewhat common.
  2. I can't seem to find a scan of the full page, unfortnately. However, in the post where Klopchuk brings the concept to the attention of the KSP community he states: Edit: And then, of course, there's the question: If you're using seven identical boosters, and aren't pumping fuel the way Klopchuk says Tom Lodgson says Ed Kieth's proposal says, why would you be only dropping two at a time?
  3. I usually don't set a starting orbit higher than 150km, because 150 km will take a 20-minute slavish node-burn without dropping your spacecraft in the atmosphere, and any spacecraft that /needs/ a 20-minute burn is probably sufficiently stocked with delta-V that it can eat the losses to get it to that altitude. That said, 7-10 minute burns are more the norm for my travels. I generally use the Protractor mod, as I've not yet found a better mod to constantly show my closest-approach to the target. If I'm going to do a twenty-minute burn, it's generally Mechjeb to hold the course (and to give me a true reading on how long the burn is going to last, the in-game UI sill lies about it fairly often), and Kerbal Alarm Clock to let me know 30-60 seconds before it is scheduled to end. I then watch Protractor until my closest-approach stops getting closer, and kill the burn. After which, I plot a mid-course correction.
  4. Build something in the VAB that can hold your current complement of astronauts. Assign the current complement of astronauts to seats in the vehicle. No need to actually send the vehicle to the launchpad. Click on the button that says, "Go to Astronaut Complex." There should be new applicants there now.
  5. I suspect that the Rich Pournelle maneuver involved more ion-drive burning after Mars Departure to bring the Ares back to Earth time to keep everybody alive. In which case the MAV winds up in deep space, and probably doesn't intercept Earth. They /might/ have been able to avoid the final resolution if they'd had him launch earlier, but I guess they wanted to minimize time lag on remote piloting, or something. Edit: Also, another vote for the Audiobook. It's the most entertaining audiobook I've listened to in years. Was a little dissatisfied with the "This is why what's about to happen isn't anybody's fault" expositions. Mutes the surprise on the "What's about to happen" a bit, I think.
  6. A .rar is a type of compressed file, like a .zip file is. Windows doesn't extract .rars by default, the way it does with .zip files, so if you're running windows, you'll need a third-party program for that. The one Lifehacker Recommends, and the one I personally use is 7-Zip. Installing it will allow you to right-click on .rar files and extract their contents, so you can put them where they need to go. " This How-to-Geek article is fairly thorough about it.
  7. It will also reduce the performance of your stock jets, so if you have designs that rely on those to perform their functions, you'll either have to remove the "B9_Aerospace-Squad_Jet_Balance.cfg" modulemanager config, or redesign the vehicles.
  8. Each probe brain has a label on its "back" side. And the letters are oriented so that "Up" for the letters is "Up" for the probe. No, this isn't actually explained anywhere in the game; the only reason I know this was because it was mentioned in one of the streams Squad did in the 0.18-era.
  9. In 0.18, I stumbled across Kerbal Alarm Clock, a now rather well-known mod that allows you to set alarms for all sorts of occasions, and as a result, allows you to manage multiple vessels at one time. And it pretty much revolutionized my playstile. Instead of sending one vessel at a time to the Mun or minmus, I'd throw one after another. Kerbal Alarm Clock also taught me to dock quickly, because I'd often find out that, after pulling off the rendezvous, I'd have maybe three minutes to dock before a spacecraft somewhere else in the Kerbin SOI needed to be dealt with. And it also meant that I never had time to leave the Kerbin SOI before the next update landed, as enough time didn't tick by for me to reach even the first transfer windows before I wiped and began anew. And yet, across the gulf of space, cooly and without sympathy, I viewed Duna with envious eyes, and slowly, but surely drew my plans against it. And in 0.21, I went there. And I got everything into orbit and assembled the stations and made some landings. And then 0.22 landed before I could set up the return trip. 20 spacecraft is /entirely/ too many to deal with all at once. Twelve. twelve is fine. I haven't been back to Duna seriously since then.
  10. If you rotate the strut pieces so that they're flat-side-out before placement, you can often use them to strut together two stack-attached pieces of the same diameter, without any extra parts..
  11. When in Physical Warp, KSP does a stepwise physics simulation, where it works out where your spacecraft is, calculates the gravity and other forces on your craft, assumes that all such forces will be constant over the next timestep, and moves the spacecraft appropriately. After the timestep, the new velocity and position are used to project where your spacecraft would be if it went into a perfect Keplerian elliptical orbit based on its current position and velocity. But since your spacecraft is not actually /traveling/ a perfect Keplerian Elliptical orbit, but instead making a lot of tiny jumps that /approximate/ one, the projected orbit (and thus the projected apoapses and periapses) will change from timestep to timestep. It's not a big deal, it's just an unavoidable consequence of how the physics engine works. If you want to actually /travel/ a perfect Keplerian orbit, you'll need to kick up to 5x time acceleration, (colloqually refered to as being "on rails") and you'll see that apoapse and periapse don't budge when that happens, but you're also unable to make your spacecraft /do/ anything.
  12. Plant a flag. When I was routinely Spaceplaning, I'd plant a flag at the east and west ends of the runway, and Target whichever one was closer to help me find the runway.
  13. Under stock Aerodynamics, you won't even need parachutes.
  14. Many experiment locations will also have more total science available to an experiment than a single return will bring back. So, often, Transmit + Return > Return Alone > Transmit Alone .
  15. It would have to be my Cheddar-Class landers. I started building them shortly after Scott Manley's Reusable Space Program revealed to me just how incredibly good the LV-N was as a landing engine, and once I switched over to reusing landers instead of doing one-time landings, it became my go-to lander for Munlike worlds and lighter. The lander has about 2.5 km/s of delta-v, which gives a lot of freedom for landing on Minmus-like worlds, and reasonable freedom for Mun-class worlds. The class is named because using Radial attachment points to clip the red-hot bells of the LV-Ns into the cryogenic fuel tanks is a bit cheesy, and as a result, every Cheddar-class lander has been named after a cheese. The one on the left is probably the prototype STV Cheddar. Others have included the STVs Caravane, Bergkase, Herve, Limburger, Passendale, Brie, Gruyere, Muenster, Neufchatel, Roquefort, Port Salut, Tilsit, Feta, Casu Marzu, Mozzarella, Gorgonzola, Parmesan, Ricotta, Jarlsberg, Velveeta, Fileta, Emmental... The primary difference between the 0.19 version and the 0.90 version is the use of the Clamp-o-Tron Sr Docking port on the top instead of a Clamp-o-Tron. This allows the lander to automatically draw fuel from a Rockomax-Jumbo based Cantanker, which I typically launch with the lander. As a result, I've sent Cheddar-class landers to Gilly, The Mun, Minmus, Ike, Dres, Pol, Bop, and Eeloo. The 0.90 verions also has an RC-001S 1m probe brain instead of the Probodobodyne OKTO-2, and has modulemanaged 20 units of KAS Storage into the Landercan and 40 in the Hitchhiker.
  16. He does /now/. However, Interstellar Quest began on November 3, 2012 when v 0.22 was the current version, when all the science parts were reusable, and beamspam could effectively extract all the science from a location. v0.23, which changed that behavior to the way things work now, was released about a month and a half after the first Interstellar Quest video.
  17. Even the old Kerbal-X was fairly good at pulling off a one-way trip to any of the KSP worlds that had atmosphere. Back in 2013, I flew a Kerbal-X to Laythe with the assistance of Kerbal Alarm Clock for timing, Kerbal Engineer for delta-V, and Protractor for close-approach information.
  18. The file's called "B9_Aerospace-Squad_Jet_Balance.cfg", and by the looks of the zip files I still have lying around, it winds up in /Gamedata/B9_Aerospace/ Remove it, and you should get your Stock Jet Performance back.
  19. I had a similar experience with my aerospace planes not making it to orbit. As it turns out, I'd installed some parts from B9 Aerospace, and B9 Aerospace comes with a modulemanager configuration that reduces the performance of the stock jet engines significantly. Is it possible that something similar has happened in your case?
  20. They would work, and would be a bit better than Hydrogen balloons. The problem is building something large enough to contain enough vacuum to lift something useful, with a shell both light enough to lift, airtight enough to keep air out, and strong enough to keep air pressure from crumpling it in an instant.
  21. Going to go a bit semantic here. The requirements were "Waiting less than 5 minutes in maximum time warp for a interplanetary transfer window." not "Waiting less than 5 minutes in maximum time warp for all interplanetary transfer windows." By the initial statement, it's definitely possible. And at any rate, even if the next Duna window is the full 233 earth-days away (And Duna's windows from Kerbin are the most infrequent ones from Kerbin), if your game is truly running at 100000x time, (230 days)/100000 = 3.31 minutes.
  22. Perfectly possible. On average, you're 17 days from a transfer window to Moho. If your game is truly warpin at 100,000x, that's about 0.24 minutes away. Heck, from a completely new game, the first transfer window to Moho is about 5 earth-days away. If you're setting your destinations by the next available winodow, instead of looking for windows to the destination you've decided to go to, you'll easily wind up waiting less than five minutes on maximum warp. Now if you've decided to go to Duna, well, yeah, those windows are about 230 days apart, Though there's one on about Day 60, which is about 1 minute from the start of a new game at true 100000x.
  23. It's not particularly difficult, if you're willing to spend a lot of time doing it. I wound up doing it back in 0.20. You just need to spend a lot of time doing it. Did a Hohmann Transfer out to about 130 million kilometers from the sun, dropped off the payload then reversed the orbit and timed my return to hit Kerbin's atmosphere. Since I had about ten minutes of fuel left on return, I spent it all in the last ten minutes or so before I hit the atmosphere. I hit the atmosphere at over 26 km/s relative. The re-entry flames for the pod never were much more impressive than this. Haven't redone the flight since, but I imagine it would be even easier, currently.
  24. MB-Ruler is a Windows-compatible on-screen ruler with protractor capabilities, and was free for personal use, last I looked into it.
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