Axelord FTW

The issue is the wording used in the image you provided, which is what people tend to focus on. The starburts exhaust is, in fact, quite gorgeous. Looks are inconsequential. I'm guessing this conversation would be better developed if you had tackled the subject directly. i.e. whether or not the starburts exhaust will be damaging to nearby components and, if not, why.

Recovered the Jool mission crew. The Moho rover has roved and done stuff. The Duna lander has landed and did lander things. The Dres probe is still in transit, which is now the only ongoing mission left. I decided to add to the Mun orbital station, just so I can build stuff in orbit outright. Kinda forgot to transfer some of the leftover fuel from the lifter stage but no biggie.

I think I remember seeing something like that too before. A cursory research indicates that the original dinky toy release was blue because 'kids don't like green toys' or something. Market research... In other news, TOUCHDOWN! I proceeded to get about 2500 blue dots before I broke a wheel and flipped the thing on its head. Damn incline must have been near 90% steep.

I had a metal thunderbird2 toy when I was little. "Les sentinelles de l'aiiiir!" Great show.

I keep underestimating Moho. Got a contract for surface feature scanning on the planet and launched a rover from the Mun base. So, I slapped together a few extra LH2 tanks and sent them up from the Mun to link up with the transfer stage. I'm going WAY overkill, because screw tight margins! Four extra tanks should be more than plenty. All four were sent up and kicked up to the parking orbit of the main craft, which is sitting in a circular obit between the Mun and Minmus. Four lifts, four kicks, four encounters, four matches. All at the same time, with judicious use of the alarm clock system. He's the first that got there.

Yeah, my Jool mission is NOT going well. One of the two solar panels got fugged by a wanton winged nut and the ship was barely breaking even in EC with half the radiators stowed. I now had to do the escape burn in many steps. Burn, stop, retract radiators, wait for EC, charge up engine, deploy radiators, repeat. The crew is snagging all the science it can but only Tylo got a fly-by out of the moons, and it was 'high' above the world. Kind of a bummer when your first real exotic-engine driven craft turns out to be a glorified space-Pinto. Anyway, the return time was not ideal but once I get closer to the sun I will be able to burn through what's left of my dV to get a kerbin encounter and probably a capture. I tell you, as soon as the crew and science gets recovered, that piece of junk is getting the ol' straight-down reentry treatment. In other news, the Mun base is now finished. Went for a wider design this time. Nothing more exotic than EnUr and Li will be produced there. The crew transferred over and the original factory was scrapped altogether. I didn't even transfer any of the resources.

Seems like my antenna and contract issues solved themselves after removing one mod, though I can't be 100% certain that was the actual fix. KSP be buggy at the best of times after all. My Joolian mission has hit a snag, however. I forgot to add either enough RTGs or a proper reactor for power generation, and the solar panels can't keep up with the lab's upkeep when in use, and the craft has not even passed the orbit of Dres yet. Worse, the ship's negative EC production meant the Deuterium tanks were left uncooled! I caught it early enough that the total loss of dV isn't a total mission killer, but unless I plan everything perfectly I will not have enough to scan(sat) the surfaces of every Joolian moons (which requires low-ish circular, quasi-polar orbits). I'll have to do with fly-bys for some worlds, and only scan one or two moons, before returning. I also slapped together a Moho Explorer and a Dres Explorer probe and sent the first of the two already on their way... Actually, that's not quite right. I VERY rarely go to Moho, and the first probe I sent up Kerbin's gravity well was actually short of dV, so I repurposed it for a Dres mission. I finally redesigned the transfer and probes and launched it anew, and this one is truly gonna get there and achieve orbit. Hopefully. Oh, and I also sent the first real craft from the mun factory into orbit (sub-1ton relays don't count), thereby fulfilling a contract at the same time. It's a simple EL-station core. I really like launching off moons with SRBs. It's kinda orkish.

Yeah, NSW is the... birdy. As for what the engine, it can't be pellet-driven considering the large spherical tanks. The large radiation shield is a hint, but what exact flavor of exotic drive we can't say.

Considering the first reply, by me, is almost seven years old, it's fair to say this thread was very deeply buried.

immadumb and put the wrong antenna on the eve probe. It got there alright but was out of control range. Otherwise, landed the first factory on this save on the Mun, thereby completing a few standing contracts also in the process. Got some issue with the antenna on the base showing 'blocked by aero shell' or something, though. Even a small probe with its own antenna it created soon after had the same issue. I'll try to fix that next. P.S. Went for a new design on the main lifter stage for the engine. Not even close to being more efficient than just using a single, bigger engine, but it's kinda cool.

Got a rover up to the Mun for a seismic survey contract. Currently got three ongoing missions. A probe for Duna and Eve, and NFP-driven manned mission to the Joolian system.

It COULD work as a simple % modifier for hab-resource utilization. It kinda breaks down the moment you realize comms are still instantaneous, and that once the ship has slowed down the game-elapsed time still match. I'm a big proponent of light-lag for probe control, so I can imagine it would be funky to implement.

Started playing around KSP a little bit, again. Did a bit of cleanup, getting rid of most of the GU planet pack since my save is nowhere near the point of going interstellar yet anyway.

With the PC I built early this year, my new limitation is no longer part-count and size (though I gotta be careful to keep part count reasonable) but wobbliness. What I'm more concerned about is how well huge ships will act under stress, how stiff they'll remain under off-axis thrust (even keeping gimballing to 1% on HUGE ships can induce enough torque to create a death wibble).

Some of the trusses seen on the larger ships shown are 1:1 equivalents to NFC parts. The parts might not have been ported outright but 'likely inspirational crossover' doesn't really cut it. At 9:30, those are absolutely 5m annular trusses on the right.

Before doing any of that, I suggest just upping the number of radiators. Unless you are looking at very tight dV margins (which you shouldn't since, you know, FFT engines are ridiculously efficient/powerful), nothing stops you from using one more radiators. Other than antimatter production, and fusion reactors, it's quite easy to keep everything cooled. Never had issues cooling anything, and this includes VERY large groundside production facility with 6+ heat loops.

Spotted quite a few parts made by Nertea in the latest KSP update on youtube. All in all, congratulation on your previous works, and godspeed on everything that comes next!

Ramping up to bigger and bigger crafts. Still smoother than Bill Cosby switcharoo game. I've been fine tuning my i5 12600k up and up too, which (probably) helps too. I can now start making offworld factories, but I lack the Kerbal mass to do it, and of the few poor souls I do have, none are higher than level 2, and most still at level 1. I let a few stupid engineers go (curse the rescue lottery) so now I gotta keep an eye on the astronaut complex and snatch the shmart ones.

Nah, I'm done. Not even gonna bother pasting the applicable definition of virtual, what would be the point?

No no, you got it wrongs. Red paint makes it go faster. That and speed holes.

~[snip]~ Anyway, L4 and L5, in particular, are HUGE zones. You cannot use patched conics to 'simulate' them without giving them vast spheres of influence. They cover over 40 degrees of arc together, from the main parent's point of view (look at the trojans for an example of this). How can you implement anything that would cover a thousand times the volume of Jool's current SOI? That's why my idea of how to implement them boils down to 'No,' unless you switch to n-body. Patched Conics is antithetical to the Lagrangian system. They are considered virtual points in space for a good reason; that they only exist in relation to other gravitational bodies. Until you can get two bodies to influence your craft at the same time, they cannot exist, and any approximations will fall short of portraying how they really work. Now THAT would be missing the point. P.S. Fixed earlier mistake, I meant L4 and L5, not L2 and L3.

Ain't trying to be a jerk about it, but 'it'd be cool' is probably the worse reason to try and introduce something into a game like KSP, which relies HEAVILY on function being greater than form.

The thing is, LPs aren't actual places. Only stable ones are L2 and L3 L4 and L5, which can be achieved by carefully placing a craft there by hand anyway, and the other points are unstable so they would be very limited in usefulness. I see no point in duct-taping their existence in a patched conics system. Whatever solution you come up with, they aren't actually Lagrange Points until you switch to n-body (at which point they become emergent anyway). I don't think they can be implemented, because the only way to do it is to ditch patched conics entirely. KSP used patched conics for the sake of simplicity (computationally speaking, and in terms of gameplay). It's kinda wrong, but still 'good enough' for the purposes of showcasing orbital mechanics (which is one of the main aspects of KSP). You could also say Patched Conics is lesser by omission, but still valid. Can't think of a system where LP could be introduced without being flat-out wrong, which would go against the spirit of KSP moonlighting as educational content. You'd simply be creating space-magic anomalies.

Woooo yeah baby! Now that's what I'd been waiting for! That's what it's all about! GPU is on, which mean KSP again! I'm borderline nervous going on about it, because actually getting the card was kinda sketchy (Chinese TPS on newegg don't have the best reputation), but drivers respond correctly and direct benchmarks yield appropriate results. EDIT: Man, it runs REALLY well! I know this is barely heavier than two farts on Gilly, but I DID crank up every visual and graphical settings I could to max, not to mention I'm not running the game at 1920x1080 anymore!

The line between getting a fifteen pound aircraft with dozen of m2 of lifting surface flying around a gymnasium at mach 0.0008 and getting one of those into orbit is wide. Really wide. Your-mom tier wide. Also, that 'ion engine' is a very far cry from what is used for spacecrafts. It doesn't even use on-board propellant, and would face the same issues as trying to get a propeller airplane in space. There ARE other, exotic avenues to reaching space, but that's just not one of them. P.S. You CAN get a fully Ion driven aircraft to orbit in KSP already, but it's borderline insane.