Ace in Space

Whiplash. Yep, that was my first thought too.

The new rockets are fine, I just can't stand the new jets. They sound like a dialup modem being murdered and made me want to land my plane ASAP just to not have to hear it anymore. But maybe it's just me. Or maybe it's just the particular jet I was using. I haven't tested to see if different jet engines sound different.

Now, I don't play GTAV, but I can't help but feel you're comparing apples to oranges. First of all, as far as I'm aware, mods are not a super-central pillar of GTAV like they are in KSP. Secondly, in the release post for this patch, they even said that they appreciate the role of modders in the community and will continue to support them. Does that sound like something they'd say if they planned to start suing the pants off modders? Third, I don't think "telling them to back off" is necessary - see point one. Mods are central to this game. They are well aware that trying to shut that down would absolutely kill the game. Fourth, this is nothing really new - almost all, if not all, games out there have some kind of "just so you know, we own all your mods and we can sue you if we feel like it" type clause in their EULA, even if they have a strong active modding community, because such things are necessary to cover the company's butt, legally speaking. The modding related changes in the EULA are most likely there because someone on their legal team thought of some loophole whereby, under the old conditions, either they could get sued, or someone could do something like (and I'm not a lawyer so I'm not sure if this was ever possible, but it's an example) making a massive overhaul mod and then selling it and making thousands of dollars off it. Basically, it's there in case a legal issue comes up and they need to be able to point at their EULA to protect their butts.

And what exactly do you intend to "win"? What battle is being fought here? What exactly are you protesting? If it's just "the EULA is super scary and restrictive now!" I'm afraid I have to tell you that the EULA was scary and restrictive before. It was just worded slightly differently. The EULA is no more draconian than it was before. All EULAs are draconian. They're just covering their butts legally.

Fire effects last night: Fire effects today, same plane:

This. I've been in enough communities and seen enough of these "sky is falling" reactions to EULA tweaks to know that they never actually mean anything for the playerbase. All EULAs are draconian, because that's the nature of legal contracts. They have to cover every possibility in a very precise way. It's almost all technicalities, and almost never gets enforced on the normal members of the community. It's mostly there just to cover their butts in case this legal situation or that one comes up.

Okay so most of this is pretty nice but I have a couple comments. Does that mean that any crafts currently using these parts are still safe right now but must have the parts replaced or the save file will not be able to go forward when said "later date" comes? No. Literally the very first change I noticed after updating the game is that jet engines now sound absolutely horrendous. My ears are begging you, please change it back for the love of all that is holy.

I've made the ridiculous plane even faster, and way cooler! Behold, Galahad II. It goes just as high and runs just as efficiently as Galahad I, but looks way better. It reaches a top speed of 1350m/s, and more importantly, it sustains that speed without anything blowing up. Look at how happy Jeb and Val are. This is like Kerbmas come early for them.

I stranded a kerbal before I even reached Mun. Very first time I successfully achieved Kerbin orbit, Jeb ended up stuck. I spend the next four or so real life weeks trying to recover him. And then he later got stranded again... coming back from the Mun. Granted, not even remotely his first trip to the Mun - it was (ironically) a rescue contract for some kerbal who'd gotten stuck on the surface at an awkward location. But at least that time Val rescued his sorry green butt without much trouble.

Same. I've made trebuchets for giggles - err, would that count as a land-based artillery station? One of these days I'll probably build a castle, too. My space program needs more medieval technology! I think pretty much everyone is going to have a different answer to question 2.

I, uh... accidentally built a ludicrously fast plane. This morning, I made an excel spreadsheet of all the "basic" science in KSP (in other words, excluding such... shall we say, "dubious" situations as "splashed down in the desert" and the various KSC biomes). Through this, I found that I was actually missing a few for Kerbin, which I thought I'd already finished - mainly the biome-specific "from space" experiments for EVA reports and gravity scans, as well as the atmospheric analyses in the upper atmosphere. Well, that was a bit of a challenge, because all planes I had to date didn't reach the 18km boundary to the upper atmosphere, and rockets tend not to stay in the upper atmosphere for very long. So I set out to build a plane that could sustain flight at 18+km, so that I could fly it to other biomes and pick up the atmospheric analysis data. This (and, well, not looking entirely stupid) was my only goal. My first attempt was poorly balanced and kept flipping, and ended up unintentionally buzzing the control tower before banking sharply and slamming into the ground, destroying most of the plane (the cockpit, and Valentina by extension, was fine). So, I threw it out, marveling at how bad I am at planes, and started from scratch. My second attempt was very successful, if a bit underwhelming to look at. On its first test flight it controlled quite well, flew to 18km without complaint, and turned out to be much, much faster than intended. So I took it back to the hangar, added some airbrakes, configured the action groups, and took it out to collect data. It has good fuel efficiency, it's more stable in flight than I expected, and it turns fairly well for something so fast. It cruises comfortably at 18-20km at speeds between 500-700m/s - though that was with me attempting to keep it from going too awfully fast so I could actually use it for its intended purpose. After swinging by almost every biome, landing at the north pole, and recovering the vehicle and its data, I decided to launch it again and see just how far I could push it. Turns out, really far. It reached a maximum altitude of just over 25km, and it reached 1320m/s before the nose intake exploded (the rest of the plane held up fine). Holy cripes. I've decided to call this plane the Galahad, in accordance with the knight theme I've been using for my planes (Paladin, Cavalier, etc). Though it was really, really tempting to break the pattern and call it the Phoenix, because tell me this doesn't look like a diving hawk made of fire: I think I'll fiddle around with this plane a little more. It lacks rocket capabilities right now but I think it has the potential makings of a spaceplane. I'd also like to see if I can make it look a little cooler.

Posting a little bit early today, and also including some of last night's events (I didn't have enough progress to be worth posting about at the time). You may recall that I sent the original four on a mission to land on Duna a while back, which was successful overall, but failed to achieve the stated goal due to a shortage of fuel. The final stage did not have enough fuel to land and take off again, and return to Kerbin, but it had enough to do one or the other. Well, they weren't very happy about that. They were told they would be landing on Duna, and now that the infrastructure's in place to allow it, by George, they are going to land on Duna. Incidentally, as I was combing through the offerings at Mission Control in preparation, adding to the growing hoard of Ike and Duna related contracts, I saw something very interesting. A mission called the Minmus 4 Rally, which required a new ship be launched and fly by Mun, Minmus, Duna, and Ike. Well, the plan was to update the Ruby slightly, so it would be a new ship, and I was already going to be visiting three of those four anyway (Duna, obviously, and required pit stops for refueling at Minmus and Ike). And because the plan was to refuel at Minmus, I could basically spend as much delta-V as I wanted before that point, as long as I could still reach and dock with Jade Station, and it wouldn't make any difference. Turns out flying by Mun on the way to Minmus is harder than it sounds. In the grand scheme of difficult things in KSP, it's probably pretty low on the list, but it still caught me by surprise because it sounds absolutely trivial until you actually try it. So I spent quite a bit of time last night fiddling with maneuver nodes, but eventually found a rather elegant path. I actually overshot the red maneuver node - was a bit too overzealous on the time warp. This turned out to work in my favor, though, because I hastily plotted another node up around the top-ish of that green oval in an attempt to recover the mission, and that one achieved the same effect for a quarter of the delta-v. After filling up the tanks at Jade Station, Ruby 4.0 continued on its merry way. Since I had plenty of time before the maneuver node, I decided to do some station maintenance on Minmus and Ike. Produced fuel, flew it up to the stations, etc. I've decided that future versions of the fuel truck should have headlights. On Minmus, with its pastel colors, you can always see what you're doing, even if it's dark. Not so on Ike, and I assume, most celestial bodies out there. So that'll have to be tweaked for later missions. Serena, the engineer on Onyx Base, also hitched a ride up to the orbital station on the fuel lifter on one of its round trips to level up at the science lab, which brought her up to level 3, so hopefully she'll do an even better job of running the base from now on. And finally, I brought the science lander down to the surface of Ike for the first time, and the design works quite nicely (Jade Station has a hopper rather than a rover due to the low gravity on Minmus, so the rover design was untested outside of KSC). Driving it around on Ike in IVA mode also feels weirdly retrogamey to me. Anyway, it picked up a respectable amount of science and shuttled it back up to Onyx Station, where I sorted out the least valuable experiments and shoved them into the science lab to be researched, and left the rest in the science container. Once I was done with all my maintenance, I went back to Ruby and proceeded with the Duna mission. Rather surprisingly, it all went without incident. The parachutes worked surprisingly well; I swapped out the drogues that had been on the original design's fuel towers for full-sized chutes, which was a good choice, I think. It certainly looks neat when deployed, at least! The flag, in accordance with my traditional first flag protocol, bears a pun on its plaque: "I duna know what to write here!" (The first flags on Mun, Minmus, and Ike, if you care to know, respectively read: "Jeb was absolutely over the Mun to be the first Kerbal here!", "Without an atmosphere, this flag will remain in mint condition", and "We like Ike.") After finishing up on Duna, Ruby intercepted Onyx Station and docked to it with something like 10 units of fuel left. Once again, the goldilocks rocket. In addition to fuel, Ruby picked up the experiments stored in the Onyx Science Lander, so they could be returned to Kerbin. From there, the triumphant astronauts returned home - they even got a fireworks show on the way in, courtesy of the discarded rockets, which seemed to delight them. They splashed down safely and returned to KSC to be rewarded with a ridiculous sum of money for the completion of several contracts and a boatload of science, with which I proceeded to unlock the entire rest of the tech tree. I'm not entirely sure what I want to do next. On one hand, I have picked up a contract to build a station or a base or some-such at Gilly, and Mission Control seems to want me to go to Eve, because that's the next Record Keeping Society mission, so I grabbed that too. On the other hand, the former doesn't expire for like 40 years, and the latter will last forever. And I've heard enough horror stories about Eve that I think I should probably leave it well enough alone for the time being and explore in the other direction (i.e. go to Dres). Speaking of Gilly, I'm not entirely happy with all the mission designations I've chosen, including Gilly's. If you've got suggestions, feel free to pitch them.

Well, I was very pleased to find that the broken terrain seemed to have fixed itself when I loaded my save today. Also, I can confirm that it was indeed the lack of an engineer that made the mining base run poorly - although now it has some power issues, despite having more solar panels than you can shake a stick at. I'll add fuel cells for the next model, since it basically has infinite fuel. Anyway, today was mostly spent running the fuel lifter up and down to recover stranded crafts. At one point, the fuel lifter "collided with Duna" and exploded violently.... while over 3000km away from Duna. Reloaded and continued on the exact same path and nothing went wrong. At this point I've basically accepted that Duna bears a dark curse and the occasional breakage of reality is a normal event within its sphere of influence. Based on the grins of the crew members, I'd say they have as well. "What was that?!" "Oh, that was just a dragon gnawing on the roots of the seven-dimensional tree that binds the universe together. It's been quite a nuisance around here, but what can you do? Can I get you some more koffee?" So despite the glitchiness and initial problems I have actually succeeded in fully recovering the mission! I put all components for Onyx Station into the desired orbit (including flipping the orbit to go the correct way around) and assembled the parts, so the station is now fully functional. Also, I've arranged the comm sats into their constellation around Duna, where the four of them provide coverage to just about every spot on both Duna and Ike. The mess is finally cleaned up!

The funny part is, I work in the software industry, and at work I'm rather well known for being a bug magnet, because I find so many strange and obscure glitches in our products. I'm not even a QA tester. I just bump into them by accident. It seems my abilities extend beyond my own company's software. Speaking of, I'm kinda regretting putting my base on one of the dark patches of Ike. My monitor is one of those that has a glass cover on it. That means that whenever I'm playing something dark, I get reflections. Makes it nearly impossible to see what I'm doing. But right now that seems to be the least of my problems.

Today. ಠ_ಠ Today was a weird day. I started off with the long, slow 4.8km drive up the hill to the fuel lifter. Docked as normal, transferred fuel. Saved the game and went to have dinner. When I came back, I went to undock the truck.... and the button didn't do anything. Everything behaved as if I were still docked. I could click on parts of the fuel truck, I could select the undock button (again, doing nothing), the map and vehicle switch didn't recognize the truck... but if I extended my landing legs, the lifter sat up nicely without the fuel truck following, as if it were not docked. Reload. Same problem. So I tried extending the legs before undocking, so the truck would fall off (I figured it must have been clipping because of the ground). That's when the strangeness began. This is not an explosion, though it's hard to tell from the picture. The truck's main body is simply floating off into space, very slowly. The thing in the foreground is the structural fuselage/docking port that sits on the front of the truck, which simply... detached and began floating in the opposite direction. It phased right through the fuel lifter and continued on its merry way. The radial attachment port on top of the truck (where the crane had been attached during transit) simply remained fixed in place. I don't even feel justified calling this a kraken. It didn't feel like being attacked by a monster. More like physics had just gone out to lunch and forgotten to put a sticky note on its door on the way out. Reload. I tried turning off the brakes and spinning the truck's wheels backwards before undocking. Kerbin, we have a problem. Ultimately, I had to reload the previous save from before I docked.... and had to make the long, tedious journey up the hill again. I docked on a different port, just to be safe, and that all worked fine. Then it was yet another tedious drive back down the hill to the base. I arrived to see this. Ugh. This exact same assembly works fine on Minmus! I'm thinking the problem must be the fact that I haven't got an engineer on base yet. So I shut everything down to let it cool and decided to use the time to do some other maintenance. The lifter actually can carry more fuel than the truck, and was low on monoprop for docking, so I used the new load of fuel to fly it over and land it next to the mining camp. Then I can top off the tanks and fill up the monoprop without having to drive a long distance. Then I launch the lifter to go rescue some stranded crafts. My first target is the fourth and final base module, with the engineer on board. Well, it's worth noting that all the crafts I brought into Duna orbit happen to be going the opposite direction from Ike. I've now learned my lesson about which direction to enter orbit from, but there's nothing I can do about my current situation. Thankfully, the fuel lifter is efficient enough that it could actually flip its orbit around and intercept the other crafts as normal. So I do that, dock with Serena's module, fill up the tank, and I have so much fuel left I figure I'll intercept a second module and fill that up too before I go back to the base - but that's for tomorrow, not tonight, so it's still in orbit. Instead I figured I'd wrap things up for the day by landing Serena's module and officially finishing ground construction for the base. She enters orbit of Ike, gets ready to drop onto the landing site, and... wat. Getting rather annoyed with the glitches, I decide to proceed with landing anyway. If I'm lucky, when I load the save everything will be fine. I'm going to be very unhappy if that's not the case. But that's for tomorrow. And just when I think things can't get any weirder... WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS MISSION?! So much for the view. I'm not gonna be happy if that's still there when I load my save.

Well, I mean, if I were stranded on a distant planet for a year and a half, I'd probably end up babbling constantly too. Does that qualify as... a spanner in the works?

Began construction of Onyx Mining Base today. I started by landing the fuel tower and mining rig - I don't remember why I didn't land the converter module at the same time (probably had to do with making good use of daylight), but I'm glad I didn't. As I was retrieving one of them, I had a realization. A 10 degree incline doesn't seem too bad when you're driving haulerbot around on it, but it's a whole different story when you're carrying a base module. It was very precarious and slow. So I decided to drive downhill a ways from the originally selected site toward a small plateau that seemed flatter (though, unfortunately, was in the opposite direction from where the fuel lifter had landed). This plateau turned out to be 2-3 kilometers away, and it was a long, slow drive. I almost tipped a couple times but well timed activation of the landing legs steadied the thing and I was able to keep going. Eventually I got to the new site and decided that yes, 5 degrees is much more palatable than 10. I liked the spot well enough, so I set the tower down, and repeated the process with the mining module. I hooked those together and started it mining, then set about landing the converter. This one didn't require a long drive because I touched it down within a couple hundred meters of the new base location, so I was able to hook that one in too and get it started while I drove the fuel truck over from the original location to the new base. So now all critical components are in working order. Man, driving the fuel up to the lifter (the thing marked as 4.8km away) is gonna suck though.

I am very pleased to report that the most critical phase of my attempts to save the Onyx Station mission has succeeded! Step one was to put the scanner in polar orbit so I could look for a good spot to put the mining base. I found a few nice hotspots right on the equator, so the next step was determining which one of them to use. Good old haulerbot has to be one of the first things in on the base anyway because it's necessary for the assembly of modules, and it just so happens to have kerbnet access, so I put it into orbit and used the altitude scanner to find a decently flat place within one of the hotspots. Turned out, the first one I flew over happened to be pretty flat. It was on a slight incline but relatively smooth, so I dropped haulerbot down to mark the spot. So now that I had a designated site, it all came down to whether I could get the fuel truck and the fuel lifter down in this area. It turns out I was not quite correct in my estimation of fuel. Through abuse of quickload/quicksave and lots of trial and error, I determined that that the fuel truck was just short of having enough fuel to land, and I knew the lifter couldn't spare any more. It was close enough that I even tried flipping it over and lithobraking with the crane, but even that wasn't quite enough. So things were not looking good. No truck, no fuel production, no mission recovery. But then I said, "what about those non-critical crafts in orbit?" I checked a few, and found that the Science Lander had a good amount of fuel left. Thus, Peter Kerman bravely sacrificed his ability to land his craft in order to save the mission. I had to lighten the picture in photoshop because this docking took place right behind Ike, so it was dark. With the extra fuel, I was able to land the fuel truck with just under 60 units of fuel left, surprisingly close to the site I picked with the haulerbot; and from there the truck could drive over and park next to it. That was on the second try. The first time, the truck landed safely but managed to flip over somehow and was stuck like a turtle on its back. I drove over with the haulerbot to give it a shove and flip it back over, but apparently the kraken didn't like that, because both rovers went flying away in a random direction at warp speed, spinning wildly, and then exploded. So I loaded a save and tried again, and this time landed the truck upright. Then it was the lifter's turn. I was totally right when I said I was cutting it real close with the fuel. So close, in fact, that I wasn't able to burn retrograde quite as long as I would have liked and still have enough fuel to touch down gently. It ended up landing about 2 kilometers away with only 18.46 units of fuel left. But that's fine, that's what the fuel truck is for. So I guess the hardest part, or at least the hardest foreseen part, is over. Next step is to land the components for the mining base and begin construction.

It's just that those are generally not the people posting on the forums. It's the ones who build thousand-kerbal replicas of the starship Enterprise and take them on a grand tour of the whole kerbol system who are more likely to be active on here. Gives a very skewed perception of reality and makes you feel like you're the only one who sucks. When in reality, you're one of the legions who suck, and probably have a good number of them beat... you just can't see them because they're quiet.

Now, you might wanna sit down, because what I'm about to tell you might shock you. Rocket Science, it turns out, is hard. But you know what? KSP has a steep learning curve. I'm just getting to Duna too. Also, I haven't even attempted Eve yet but from what I've heard, it's surprisingly hard. I spent the first few real life weeks of playing KSP just trying to recover Jeb after my first successful Kerbin orbit stranded him. Those weeks were spent trying and failing to build and pilot a craft to just rendezvous so he could EVA over. Now I can rendezvous and dock without much thought. You'll get better.

Thanks! I considered trying to capture directly into Ike orbit, but then I looked at the massive train of incoming crafts and decided I'd have enough on my plate without trying to figure out where the moon would be in relation to its planet for each of them on top of it all. So I decided to park everything around Duna and then go from there. For the innermost orbits, you answered your own question. I wasn't sure exactly how close was dangerously close, so I decided to play it safe (better the orbit is obnoxiously high than low enough to accidentally eject). Of course, I was trying to eyeball it getting all those crafts into roughly the same place, without being able to see any of the other crafts when setting up an intercept, so there was a bit more variation in the initial periapsis than I intended. Most of them I probably could have pulled the orbit in tighter than the initial flyby height, but I decided not to bother spending more of my precious fuel than necessary until I had nailed down the next steps, because sitting in really high orbit doesn't do any immediate harm. Also, a couple of them I simply overshot on the initial intercept - particularly the first couple crafts in the wagon train. That relay on the ridiculously large orbit was the first one in, and got hit the worst. Then there were a couple that couldn't really pull the orbit in much tighter because of fuel constraints, so I said "eh, it's an orbit, right? That's good enough until I can clean this up." TL;DR: It looks like a poorly-planned mess because it is a poorly-planned mess.

Yep! I made sure I had about an hour between each craft reaching its maneuver node - closest one I had was 15 minutes apart. Even more so when actually entering Duna orbit - slight variations magnified and I ended up with 3 hours to a day between each of them. After finishing the burns to set them on an intercept course, I went ahead and did some maintenance on Jade Station; the recent string of spacecraft needing refueling had left the station's tank almost empty, so I topped that off. During the last round, the fuel lifter ran out of monoprop. I docked it anyway - while my dog was pawing at my arm wanting to be scratched, no less. I was pretty proud of that. Once I was done on Minmus I went back to managing the Wagon Train. Astoundingly, all of them made it to Duna orbit safely! But that doesn't mean everything went without a hitch. A few of the craft, while they are now safely orbiting Duna, don't have enough fuel to reach their actual destination (orbit or surface of Ike), and the launch window has passed, so I can't immediately send assistance. Luckily, most of the stranded craft are not immediately necessary for the mining operation, in that I can still plonk a drill, converter, and tank down on the surface of Ike and get to work. The only exception was the fuel truck, necessary to move fuel from the mining base to the lifter, and therefore, necessary for making use of the fuel I produce. I find it rather appropriate that I was involved in that earlier discussion of the merits of processing ore in orbit vs on the surface, because this situation ultimately led to me discovering an unexpected benefit to processing on the ground and lifting the fuel to orbit. You've all made very good, valid arguments in favor of lifting ore, but this cemented my personal preference for lifting fuel. A craft designed to lift large amounts of fuel into orbit without too much loss and then dock to another craft to transfer that fuel, it turns out, also makes a great makeshift emergency refueling rescue vehicle. When the lifter got into Duna orbit, it had a little more fuel than I'd been expecting, and was pretty close to the fuel truck's orbit. So I intercepted the truck, docked to it (albeit not in the way they were intended to dock to each other), and transferred some of that extra fuel over. Both crafts are cutting it pretty close with the fuel levels right now, so I'm going to have to be real careful getting them onto the surface of Ike, but I think they can both just barely make it now. Assuming I can get them both onto the surface, that right there saves the whole mission, because I can assemble the critical parts of the base, start mining, and use the lifter to carry the produced fuel directly to the stranded crafts. No external rescue launches required - if it works. Not quite according to the original plan, but that's my new first step to cleaning up this mess. Mission Control must be a very stressful place to be right now.

Land fuel lifter next to mining base. Get distracted by gathering a surface sample and planting a flag. Take off and dock with orbital station. Notice failure to actually pick up fuel. What? I don't have attention defici-ooh shiny!

Oh, thanks for the correction, then. But my point about skimming off the payload still stands, since you're gonna end up lifting something into orbit no matter what. What's better than a payload that lifts itself? Honestly, I just put a giant orange tank with docking ports on my station and called it a day. I refine ore on the ground, lift the fuel to orbit (with a small portion lost to skimming), and dump it in the tank for storage. I guess what this shows is that there are many ways of running a mining base, and there's no one right way to do it.

I have several things to say, based on lessons I learned building Jade Base. Test everything on Kerbin before you launch it. Landing legs on multi-module bases = kraken bait. Also they will make it harder for modules in your base to link to each other. What I ended up doing, which is working quite well, is to use the engines the modules flew in on as legs - they have landing legs but only to reduce impact on landing; when they settle into their final position the legs retract and they sit on the engines. I would absolutely recommend this method. Unless all of your bases/vehicles are manned, you'll want to set up some communications satellites in a constellation around minmus so you don't lose control of remote operated craft every time your base faces away from Kerbin. Test everything on Kerbin before you launch it. It's probably a better idea to process ore on Minmus and lift the fuel up to an orbiting tank than to lift ore and process it in orbit. Your lifter can't skim off the top of the ore during flight, and I believe ore is heavier than the amount of fuel it would produce. On the topic of lifting fuel to the orbital tank, I recommend having a "truck" of some sort that can drive fuel from the surface base to the lander, rather than trying to dock the lander directly to the base. Test everything on Kerbin before you launch it. My preferences is to do a modular base: build it in parts and dock 'em together on Minmus. At least, that's what I did. But see my second bullet point. Also, if you're docking parts on the surface, you'll need some kind of vehicle to do so. Some people use sky cranes to drop the parts into place. I use a small rover with a docking port on top to pick up modules and carry them.