Zacspace

One of the things about spaceflight that KSP doesn't really capture well is on the spot problem solving and it's one of the things that makes for some of the most exciting stories in both sci-fi and real life spaceflight. in KSP as it stands, if you encounter a serious problem it's because you engineered it into the vehicle before launch, and the only thing to do about it is either lose the vehicle or save scum and maybe pull off some kind of ace pilot move to save the day. if you don't encounter a mission-ending problem, you probably won't encounter any problems at all. There's mods for random part failures, but having a lottery decide that you lose the game for no reason kind of sucks. I think failures that are theoretically salvageable rather than total loss of vehicle, or at least failures that result from pilot error/calculated risk would be a neat thing. Like, say every part starts out with 100% chance of working properly, but then using it wrong increases it's odds of failure. Trading paint between your space shuttle and your space station increases the odds of thermal protection failing, landing on the nozzle of your engine maybe reduces efficiency or alters it's thrust vector or just gives it a chance to blow up. Maybe pressurized parts could have their reliability effected by pressure cycles, like real aircraft, so the first flight of your SSTO is perfectly safe but the 10th runs a certain risk of decompression. I think an engineer should be able try and make in-situ repairs on parts either pre or post-failure with the former being most effective and that colonies could do more involved repairs. With a system like that in place you could intentionally roll the dice with part failure for some in-game benefit. Maybe Bill can retrofit the NERV to give higher thrust/efficiency in order to make that burn you miscalculated, but at the risk of a meltdown. Or you could increase signal range on an antenna by cannibalizing radar equipment, but in doing so you lose altimeter readout and ranging for rendezvous. Hopefully I've managed to get this across well enough.

Try as I might, I can't seem to make the launchsites work, they just insist on teleporting themselves hundreds of meters underground, so I'm throwing in the towel. Here's the base I posted earlier in case somebody with better luck wants it and can get it working: Laythe Equatorial Outpost

Assuming by extraterrestrial, we're talking about Mars and not a sci-fi earth-2 type planet then we're probably talking about a city entirely within one structure or number of connected structures. Essentially an arcology. (or a shopping mall)

These are looking pretty much like what I'm after. Thanks

if you're starting out, start with PLA. High quality stuff too. Printers can be finnicky enough without having to control you the extra variables of low quality or exotic materials Carbon fiber, metals, and wood filaments exist, but they're just plastic with those things in it. They don't typically confer any structural benefit. The strongest filament you'll commonly find for an FDM printer is ABS. It also holds up best to high temperatures like you described. The drawback is that it requires your printer (and its power supply) to be able to produce and handle the high temps involved in printing it. You'll also want an enclosure for the printer to keep the entire print volume at a consistent temperature, and finally, printing ABS produces toxic fumes, so a workshop or something to put it in is a good idea. PETG is a middle ground if I recall correctly between PLA and ABS, basically a slightly stronger PLA with slightly higher/more precise temperature requirements. TPU is used for flexible prints. If you're just doing model making, I'd recommend a resin (SLA) printer, if it's something functional/mechanical I recommend regular old wood or metal.

Before seeing this thread I thought there KK bases were all made completely in config files or maybe Unity editor. It's a lot more accessible than I expected. Now that I know I decided to try and put an outpost on Laythe. The Kerbals in my career save have had a continuous presence on the planet for nearly a decade, I think it's reasonable that they'd at least build a runway and some buildings in that time. Still a WIP, I just realized that it's not actually aligned to 90 degrees, and I can't seem to get launchsites configured to behave consistently. I kind of want to put one on Duna too, but I feel that regular buildings don't really make sense there.

I might be having the same problem as the SophieBrink. Any time I define a static as a launchsite and reload the game it gets moved a few hundred meters away and under the ground in my case. The transform remains where I put it, but the model and the point where the vehicle spawns will be underground.

Bummer Thanks for taking the time though. Also, in case there was some misunderstanding, what I meant specifically was that I used the last version before upgrading to the current version. Actually, I installed/uninstalled 1.2.0 a few times when it was current because it was really cool, but the terrain colliders made my planes and rovers non-viable. I brought it up in case it was the difference between 1.2.0's terrain and 1.3.0's no-terrain that was the source of the problem. My craft exploding and the change in behavior versus stock are both things I encountered with 1.3.0. Thanks for the heads up. I didn't even consider how the forum itself would handle it. I'll keep that in mind.

Sure thing! Sorry to trouble you. It's probably worth noting that I did use the last version of Parallax with the terrain collisions on. [snip] After this run, I loaded the game again without Parallax installed and loaded one of the vessels that previously exploded. This time it started about 100m above the surface.

I'm noticing that since installing this, any landed vessel I load up clips into the ground and explodes. Is this not for use with an in-progress save? I haven't noticed anyone else having with this problem in this thread or the git issues. Also, this mod is incredible. Between this and scatterer I can barely believe I'm looking at KSP. Fantastic job!

A hard bluescreen over something like that suggests a problem with your computer somewhere. Power delivery to you graphics card maybe, but who really knows. having that happen suddenly while you're coming into view of another vessel can corrupt your savefile, but can also corrupt the filesystem on your PC's storage device. You might want to run checkdisk, especially since the crash messed up other things on your computer. Other than that, if you can get into your save file at all, try reverting to a quicksave.

To repair your save you'll want to locate the persistent.sfs file in the save's folder and delete it. Then you'll want to look around in Backup, as the guy above me mentioned, but also in your quicksaves to try and find the most recent .sfs file. They're all in the same format and valid game save files. Once you have one, go ahead and copy it and replace the persistent.sfs file we deleted earlier with the copy. Once you've done that, you should be able to load up the save without issue on the version you last played it in, or any later version. The game auto-upgrades save files to the format of the current version if it's older, but the format hasn't changed much and mods don't really bother it typically, so there shouldn't be any other issues.

I've worked out the kinks with the giant mobile base I posted earlier and put it up on Kerbalx. Turns out the secret was more wheels, surprising nobody except me I'm sure. KSP 1.12.1 and it's nerf of the Rovemax M1 was also a great help. Keeping the rover together at it's new top speed of only about 50m/s has been much more achievable than the previous 75. It's also what prompted me to add more wheels since the climbing power of the M1s was reduced by nearly two thirds. I came for the torque and stayed for the not-dying-in-a-spectacular-shower-of-explosions. It doesn't look all that different so I'll spare you the pictures, but here's a link: Exoloper Mobile Colony I have a version up with a launcher and landing system but frankly it's trash. How do you guys tend to land your huge rovers? Brute force?

I'm not super sure if this is the correct place for a simple module manager patch, but I have one that I feel is pretty useful. Does the following things: allows you to enable differential steering on all stock rover wheels that don't have it normally allows you to enable regular steering on the rovemax m1 wheels. New behavior is disabled by default in the editor. This patch doesn't de-stockify your vessels as far as sharing them or uninstalling the patch goes. it's basically a no-drawbacks upgrade for the wheels. Google Drive link Let me know if I did this wrong. Pics, presented as commensurate compensation for clicks: The license of the thing: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

We've had workarounds, and missiles in a rocket game are kind of a no-brainer. You're right. These are smaller and you can just stick them on though. Plus you can fire them more than once without getting your brain sweaty and engineering a reloading mechanism. Finally, I'm pretty sure the low impact tolerance of the decouplers makes them want to explode instead of whatever you shoot them at. I could be wrong though, and I couldn't tell you if the fireworks are any better for that. There's some speculation that the shells are indestructible so maybe.

Woah a whole thread happened. Yeah, I'm reasonably certain it's the impact of the firework object itself that causes damage and not the explosion. I suspect that the shots could be made more reliable by running at higher framerates (so just go buy a new CPU, easy right?). But really with how much of the playerbase spends their time recreating military vehicles, some kind of weapon in stock is long overdue. This'll be huge for console players if they ever get it.

I haven't seen any discussion about it yet, but I just stuck a fireworks launcher on the front of a jet and blew up the VAB with it. It didn't work when I shot it at low speed, but coming in from the island airfield at nearly 300m/s I took a few more shots really just to see how the fireworks would react to being launched at high speed and to my surprise the VAB collapsed. I bet stationary weapons could be made by KAL overclocking the launch velocity, or at worst light vessel editing. Basically, BDAc is stock now.

They nerfed the big wheels just as I was getting into building huge rovers I'm not as disappointed about not being able to hit 300km/h anymore as I am about not being able to drive up steep-ish inclines. I hope Squad buffs the climbing power of rover wheels in 1.12.1 before disappearing into the night. Everything else about the update is pretty hype though. I'm going to use the heck out of those solar panels, and the lights on the revamped docking ports are such a nice touch. I'm already noticing things loading faster. Even the rover wheels that I was just complaining about behave noticeably better overall, they're just wimpy.

Max level engineer both times, but the mobile base's drills were able to feed 8 converter processes instead of just one (and the converters were able to run 2 processes each without overheating which I don't think they're supposed to be able to do) I was in an area with lower ore concentration too for that test. That's not even all that was weird about it. I hope KSP2 is better documented. I'm guessing those cargo bays on your rover have landing thrusters in them? Your rover looks like it's even wider than mine, I bet getting it to the mun was trouble.

Not to take over the thread or anything, but I took the concept from my last post a little further. At the risk of stating the obvious, it might be a little too large. I was able to solve a lot of survivability issues with my Heavy Refueller and it's pretty safe to drive fast now, but this monstrosity still goes nuclear if it encounters certain the terrain in just such a way sometimes. I suspect it's seams in the geometry of the ground that are doing it. it's a shame because apart from suddenly crashing into nothing it preforms really well. It can drive all over the crawlerway out in front of the VAB with no trouble, reach 75m/s on flat ground, and it's ISRU gear is inexplicably much faster than the refueller's despite having the same set up. I apparently have no idea how resource harvesting works. For anyone else building ridiculous things with the rovemax wheels, I found that tipping them forward (or is that backward?) 5-10 degrees increases the angle of slope you can survive encountering at speed all the way from "none" to "some".

Use autostruts to stop big orbitally assembled craft from flopping around. You can enable them in the options, I don't think they're on by default. One they're on you can even apply them or change them in flight. As for just how to use them, since I see people sometimes say their craft are even explodier with autostruts; strut things together that are as far apart as possible because the strength of the connection doesn't weaken with length. Also don't just autostrut every part, you need to leave some parts less rigid to absorb vibrations, otherwise they'll build up and shake your craft apart

I was pretty sure I didn't have an answer for this one, but now I've thought about it. I'm quite sure that currently KSP's buoyancy calculations are based, if not entirely then at least mostly, on the part's drag cube and mass. That's why fairings and service bays can be made so sinkable. Is it possible that the Buoyancy parameter is a deprecated hold over from the pre-1.0 ocean physics? It would explain why stock parts seem to omit it entirely. Oceans behaved much differently in prerelease. Might be worth combing through some very old threads.

I'm pretty sure it's confirmed that colony buildings will be destructible. I hope they count as the same kind of thing as vessels so that I can knock over a building and then launch it into space or turn it into a huge rover. Bonus points if KSC itself abides by the same rules. I know we can build VABs on other planets in KSP2, but bringing the VAB would have a whole different energy. I'm also hoping that colony parts can be used in spacecraft editor or vice versa, mostly for the same reasons.

It seems like the knowledge keepers from the old days have mostly gone from the community. It's a shame, but bound to happen, we are coming up on the game's 10 anniversary after all. as for the rhino thing, I didn't mean that as a dig. it's not like you're quickscoping noobs with an aimbot or anything. I just know you know how to edit configs.

I'm like 90% lurker even when I'm active here. This is the rare topic that I can contribute to meaningfully while still being able to explain it adequately and (hopefully) not come off as a know it all jerk. I've also been toying with the idea of putting a runway on Jool lately so that stuff happens to be fresh for me. Maybe the Jool 6 will become the new KSP end boss. the part that's made root at the time of your vessel's construction is what it's all based on, doesn't even have to be a command point. There's a video on youtube by stratenblitz (I think) where he abuses this kind of stuff to stack a bunch of segments on each other across the canyon on dres, making a bridge. Each segment is a separate vessel, so it's more work but I think that's probably the direction the wheels in your head are turning in. I suppose somebody with a lot more patience than I have could make a space elevator or something like that