vossiewulf

Thanks Tonka, appreciate the pointer.

@Nertea, thanks for the new features in Electrical, the UI for drilling down on power/thermal in particular is extremely useful.

SSTU, Blue Dog Design Bureau, Wild Blue Industries everything, Contares, Near Future everything And of course the most essential of all,

Thanks for the tip, I will try that. Out of frustration I had removed CLS, and was immediately able to transfer crew without problem, so it's definitely a CLS issue and it does seem to be an issue where it simply will not permit transfers through a docking port- I am not building in situ but launching each module and docking it. And all docking port hatches are open.

Um, yeah, never seen that. Also not sure how an edit ended up as a double post, while I'm at it.

Any chance you could add a separator option to the custom decoupler? There are relatively few separators and not sure I've seen one that has dynamic sizing.

Historian is great, I have it show the date and vehicle name, makes it easy to go back and remember the flight with those cues. For some reason I take lots of screenshots in KSP, this is helpful.

And more importantly, can I have some? It's been doing this since it moved into physics range of the station. I think.

Was away for 8 months or so, came back to find Angel-125 has been seriously busy with a cloud of cool new parts. I particularly like the Clydesdales, the mini rotating habs, and the giant mongo heat shield making them recoverable. They were exactly what I needed to build a crew transport vehicle of absurd capacity to serve a station of absurderer capacity while using USI/LS, so I'd have to rotate them periodically or spend all my team refreshing them in med bays. The station as you see it is only about half done, but two of the main habs were up so I decided to send up crew, this flight was carrying 40 something. The crew transport has a capacity of 77 and was perfectly launchable as a unit. Which means anyone who wants habs for a space station can have tons of hab space with a very easy single launch. If I could send this 77 version up no probs with a 7.5m launcher, 5m should be fine for a smaller version. Anyway, very nice work Angel, some more very useful parts and I haven't even tried all the new ground hab parts. Unfortunately this game is MKS/USI and they wouldn't really be compatible without lots of config surgery.

Can someone explain why I am unable to transfer crew from the docked crew transport middle left to the SSTU rotating habs? Each has no current crew and room for 35. Hatches are open, all module say they're passable, but as you see it won't let me transfer crew to any part of the station.

Sorry, no idea, I am hardly expert in KSP code, someone will help you here. Just saying based on general dev experience that this doesn't look to be an error specific to these mods.

That looks very similar to the error you just posted in Ferram, gui failing on filename unknown. Those are probably not caused by the mods themselves, there's something common they expect to be there that isn't.

Dual contra-rotating CFG-35 habs on this big station that's about half done.

That's one clear-dome, one-man pod away from a Spaceman Spiff mobile. I think this should be strongly considered also

Ah, thanks. I thought I had clicked around and it was staying small, which is why I asked. I will go try again.

Yeah, that's certainly fine also, I suggested spawning whole units as I thought that would be easier. But if you had a model with compartments for each canopy unit, you just make the overall model shape longer/wider by the number of compartments, and you could make the number of canopies it represents easy to see by drawing the compartment hatches on the front or with other markings to divide up the rendered model into units. So a stack version would be easy, but you could make it even more useful if, when specifying the number of canopy units, it gave you the option to make the parachute container longer or increase its diameter. Both would be useful. So that's all figured out now Hopefully they will go on the roadmap somewhere also.

One thing though, I actually wasn't suggesting placing the fake clones radially as that would be hard to do, but rather placing them all at the click spot, like you'd placed four radial parachutes right next to each other, and if you wanted to clone that around a stack, you'd allow the game to do that. Therefore all of the fakes should provide at most a very small moment arm, and if you place them vertically one below the other, there'd be no torque. Or has the jerk who complicates things figured out a way to screw that up too?

What's up here? I set it to 6.25 (and clicked a couple more times trying to make it bigger) and then was just clicking around through the fuel and variant options, and it collapsed into a singularity. With the standard tank variant, it's about as long as it is wide.

Sigh. I swear that somewhere in the universe is a guy whose only job is to make interesting things arbitrarily difficult. I really want to kick that guy's ass.

Not understanding this. I'm going to put one radial-mounted parachute, one part. Instead, I place one part but it appears (and functionally there is) four radial parachutes in a vertical line or horizontally or in a square shape. Still one part, but now I get the same visual and functional result as I would have if I'd put four separate parts on. For bigger vehicles I frequently find myself doing exactly that, putting on 20 parachutes in five rows of four parachutes. Instead, you could reduce that to four parts total. As I said, last param would be number of (in this case) radial parachute units you want to place, in our example you set it to five, go to the rocket, set radial symmetry to four, place your part and the end result looks like you placed 20 separate parachutes with one click. It would sure reduce the parts count on my rockets, being someone who tries to recover most everything. And usually when I do this, I don't mind the size of the parachute part, as I move them just under the skin of the vehicle. I say to myself that a booster designed to be recovered wouldn't have parachutes bolted on all over, they'd be incorporated into the tank top or base, and the important thing is I'm carrying the extra mass. It would be perfect if the tank got a little longer as a result. Well, that's something else you could do also. Add parachute recovery capability to the Magic Fuel Tank - have a button for "include 5m/s parachutes" or something like that, and then calculate the number and size needed based on the player's volume setting, then increase the mass appropriately and the length somewhat to account for the space needed for the chutes. Include the normal chute settings on the tank's context menu, and then you have to have the right number and size and type of parachutes to come out of the base of the stack at the right time. If you did that, including an option to have drogue chutes as well as landing chutes would help, plus an option to have the parachutes come out of the top or base of the stack, both can be needed. Well. except you'd have to make wild guesses as to the stage mass, unless you performed the configuration of the number of chutes needed at runtime after accessing the stage dry mass. But not sure KSP allows modification of basic parameters like that after leaving the VAB.

If I can stop building giant space stations everywhere for five minutes, yes I could open MAX and take a cut. And of course you have existing priorities, I'm just happy it's maybe in the queue somewhere, so no rush. Seriously, I think I'm losing control of these, the one I'm building now has a crew of 209, with USI/LS supplies for almost two years and hab time of almost 1yr/crew. And one gig EC solar without any of the 8 reactors running. I had to design a 7.5m orbital bus that will carry around 50 to make crew transfer even vaguely possible. Anyway, toward SSTU's stated primary goal, the heat shield should have a probe core, and doing so makes it literally a one-stop shop for all your heat shield needs, from bringing down giant booster sections safely to protecting all your surface-attached hardware on pod reentries. With, of course, the drawback that with its own probe core, internal mechanism, and bigger size compared to other stack size-specific heat shields, it should be somewhat heavier, deeper, and the petals will take up some surface attach real estate. No such thing as a free lunch. I'm not suggesting adding parachutes as they'd only be applicable to booster recoveries and there is too wide a range of required parachute power to practically fit them also within the heat shield. But you could also move another step towards SSTU's goal by SSTUifying a couple parachute parts, one stack and one radial mounted. They'd be selectable for drogue/landing, single/triple, canopy size, and number of canopy units, and support a wide range of canopy sizes with the largest being insanely big. You could add diameter increases and other option additions to the tech tree like you do with tanks/probe cores. The first three params would affect the mass/size of each parachute unit. The last parameter would instance any number of units, like you do with some of the tanks where you can instance 1/2/3 round tanks. When set to say four parachute units, the multiple instances would look like four separate radial parachutes, but actually be just one part. And I'm sure you'd insist on doing something groovy like having a choice to instance them vertically or horizontally or curved to follow a stack circumference, etc. If you could do that, two parachute parts total would be all anyone ever needed to handle everything from teeny probe recovery to battleship-sized booster recovery.

Yes, similar, although I was thinking one layer of petals that were narrower, and when then fold down they then get wider to fill the gaps. Yours is just another way to do it, but same concept. If you make it a stack decoupler also, that would be perfect. Thanks very much for taking a cut at it You don't mount the heat shield on the bottom, you mount it at the top, and the booster section goes in head first. Which is why the extra diameter is particularly important, it's required to keep the hot plasma from getting anywhere near the skin of the tank. Try to do that with a stack-sized heat shield, and the whole thing blows up. Besides the shield, each would get its own probe core and reaction wheels, and parachutes of course.

Here's how reentry goes riding in on the engines

Great! As mentioned, I think now it could be done relatively simply by using rectangular petals with a tongue (as in tongue and groove) that, once the petals are folded down, extends out of one side of each petal and into a groove on the next petal. Or they extend from both sides to meet each other. Some greeble and it looks like a fancy part that took years to design. For visual interest and a little more aerobraking you could fiddle around with the outside edge of the petals, adding a slight point to each one so the heat shield edge isn't perfectly round. Thinking about it a bit, I think it should expand maybe 20% of the stack core diameter, but petal length (and therefore expansion ratio) would be very nice as a dynamic parameter. Will definitely fill a glaring parts gap if you can make this work

FYI, unless I'm missing something, and I often am, neither the Variant nor Scale buttons on the DP-0 do anything.