OrbitalManeuvers

I don't use contracts but this is really interesting to me for the mechanics involved. But I can tell I have a big gap somewhere in my smooth brain. My (clearly flawed) understanding has been that -if you launch due east- your LAN is basically fixed for that launch site, because you'll always cross the equator at the same point, the same distance from your launch site. So, if you wanted to change your LAN you'd have to change your launch angle, but what if trying to move the LAN results in the incorrect inclination? Are you supposed to change direction during ascent after crossing the equator?

WAG: you recently installed KSP Community Fixes?

sorry for butting in .. i looked at your screenshot and can't see what's wrong? You have the B9 group collapsed so I can't see what's in there, but other than the collapsed group and the fact that you have a couple mods I don't have, your PAW looks the same as mine?

Well, not wanting to disappoint anyone, I took a stab at this. The results were exactly as expected for not knowing anything about wrangling asteroids! I honestly had no idea what this would involve but here I am with 3400m/s, and my TWR is probably around 4. AND THEN I GRABBED IT But I think you know that with 7m/s I wasn't moving that thing anywhere. So, I proudly present the final moments of my first asteroid: Thanks for tuning in

Honestly, ME TOO. I fear I may be a bit smooth-brained for this, but maybe with some help. I've already spent a minute in the tracking station and with a craft in orbit, and neither MechJeb nor I have any clue how to get to this thing. This one happens to be a Class H. It's currently zipping along at 14km/s, and is about equidistant from its Pe now as to when it will impact Earth, so should be about that same speed. Welp, time to hunt for some tutorial videos!

Haha ... I kinda figured my hopes were too high. DANGIT. At least I had something that looked dramatic in the tracking station!

So this is my first post to this forum, and not what I had planned. But I think I have discovered an interesting situation, and if I'm seeing it correctly, I think it might make a fun mission report. Can you help me figure out if this is what I think it is? Tonight was the first time I've ever tracked an asteroid. The second one I selected is shown below (I resized in the post, but I think you can click for full size?) If I may point out the obvious: the asteroid I'm tracking is the yellow orbit Earth (KSRSS at 2.5x) is the blue orbit the asteroid has an encounter with Earth shortly after its periapsis. wut wut. Here I'll zoom into the encounter. Notice there's no Pe marker on this orbit? Zooming in farther... So, unless I'm mistaken, there are 111 days until the potential end of our species? Obviously I saved this game under the name Deep Impact as soon as I saw this. I have questions! Is this common? Does this seem interesting? Do you think it'd be fun to ... errrrrm ... IDEK? I have zero exposure to the asteroid mechanics in game, and have no idea what happens when an asteroid intersects - I assume the asteroid just disappears? But does something actually enter the atmosphere? Clearly I would need to be flying in the area at the time. Or on a boat. Anyway - please share any thoughts about this potential(?) mission! And honestly, if this happens every 3rd time you start a new game I'm not gonna be that into it Thanks!

There's a fun baby brother in KSP, too:

From Kourou, when the first and second stages are spent, I have an Ap of 110km and a Pe of -1km, with TTA of 1:30. A circularization burn costs 1300m/s, and the SRM has 2600m/s. So for a nearly equatorial launch and orbit, it's well overpowered. Do you get similar performance from Kourou? Wondering if the inclination is really that expensive? (I've ditched KSCSwitcher so I only tried from Kourou) btw, the texturing and modeling on this mod are outstanding! The LM-2A seems to have a UV issue on my machine, but everything else is gorgeous.

I had considered posting something on Reddit to point to this, as that's where I see the most tutorial questions. Just wasn't sure that was my place. But if you don't have a reddit account, or don't frequent /r/KerbalSpaceProgram, I'd be more than happy to post a message with a link here. There are definitely folks who would benefit from this.

Maybe your launch pads just need to be opened? In the VAB, click the KK icon - might take two clicks to get the UI.

I've returned to help myself since I finally got time to dissect the black terrain issue outside of the VAB - it's caused by the presence of KSCSwitcher when you also have SigmaDimensions for the rescale. The parts of the 2.5 config that are triggered by KSCSwitcher actually created two defects for me: the black terrain outside the VAB, and also, all the built-in KSP statics at the KSC were floating about a meter above the ground. That too is fixed by removing KSCSwitcher. There's probably a better solution than removing KSCSwitcher, but I am wholly unfamiliar with the cfg code in those sections. Hope this helps someone!

I recommend reading the manual. Page 15 addresses this topic explicitly. The link is in the OP.

Do you mean like solar system scale? If so, it's quite good on 2.x already. In JNSQ this gets to a 150km orbit with ~650m/s remaining.

Sorry I don't really have a solution for you. But, I don't have this issue, so I can give you the version numbers of what I have installed. Kop=1.12.1.60 (from plugins/kopernicus.version), MFI = 1.2.10.0 (from DLL, no .version file) Eve = 1.11.5.1 Scatterer = 0.772.0.0 (version number from Windows directly from the DLL, no .version file). DOE = 2.1.1.6, Planetshine = 0.2.6.3 My Kop build is from right before they started working on the land scatter and sinking into the terrain issues. And my scatterer version is an older build, too, on purpose.

Thank you for contributing these. I checked them all out today, and they all looked and worked great. The ChemCam piggyback on the NavCam is really neat!

oh oh oh yes this is correct! haha ANOTHER project I did was learning how to write a plugin, and I did a prefab for it, thus TMPro was a thing then, but shouldn't be for parts!

lookie Basically, I started over. I knew the PartTools linked in that old wiki was wrong, and found that same updated page, but somehow I downloaded the wrong link from that page (the older one). So that fixed the problem with assigning the KSP/Diffuse shader to the material, and I kinda knew how to do the steps after that, and viola. Blender 3.0 seems to have Mesh selected by default in the FBX export. It also has other object types selected, so it's a good reminder that you either need to unselect what you don't want, or delete them from the blender scene/layer/idk before export, which is what I'd been doing anyway. In Unity, I used a built-in box collider, which I added as a component to an empty game object that I added as a sibling to the model, under the Root parent empty. Did I need to do that, or could I use Add Component to put the collider on the Root empty that I have anyway? So none of my numbers are right (and the model is turned around from what I expected) but these are all details that just need to be ironed out now that the process is a bit more clear and working. Also, I read elsewhere that TextMeshPro should be removed and reinstalled. I did try to do that, and I'm not 100% it worked correctly, but I don't even know if that was necessary, or what TMPro does. For anyone else reading this, one of the big gotchas is in the installation of PartTools. The wiki says you can just unzip it into the Assets folder. Not true. Once you do that, you must locate the part tools object in the project view, click on it, then in the inspector you click Open. A new window opens and lists all the stuff in there, and you click Import. Then in the project view, find PartTools/Lib, and click on both of the items there, and for each, turn off Validate References in the inspector pane, and hit the surprise Apply button. @wasmlThank you again for loaning some brain cells to my fight, it's very much appreciated. I've been on a quest to try the workflow of Blender -> PS -> Unity/cfg -> KSP. This contributes to my life goal of knowing a little bit about a lot of things, and l'm learning less and less about more and more, until soon I shall know nothing about everything. (Thus the crappy model, crappy texture, and crappy cfg - I know just enough to get them to work, but not enough to get them to be good!)

I do. WF doesn't do solids and I have lots of engines that don't have WF configs.

Thank you for helping. You're right, there isn't one, and creating one comes later in the steps I have. But I tried creating one at this point and it doesn't improve anything. All of the KSP shaders fail with the same error - this AutoLight.cginc file has a reference to '../CustomUnityShadowLibrary.cginc' and I don't have that file anywhere in the project. If I switch the material to use a standard shader, it works fine and projects onto the model. I don't know if AutoLight.cginc isn't supposed to be included in the first place, or if I'm missing something. Not sure if the message in the bottom right is related.

I have some observations from some testing and fiddling. Maybe something I found will be of use to someone. Here goes: This is 1.12.3. The green light is an outlier in that its animation works, although it never turns off. None of the other animations work. None of the lights produce any light in the VAB or in flight. I know next to nothing about modding but I looked at the cfgs and noticed that the lightName param has two values. I have the luxury of having hundreds of other mods installed across multiple installs, so I grepped to see if any other parts did this too, and none do. So I edited one of the lights to have just one value for lightName, and using either PointLight or Spotlight changed the VAB behavior, though it's still not as designed I'm sure. Using only PointLight gets you a small internal light turning on/off, and using only Spotlight gets you a light that does rotate and does illuminate the environment, but I don't think it's quite right ... not sure what's it's supposed to look like. When I did get light to appear with using only Spotlight, it was white. Anyway, so it seems there's a difference between the green model and the others, and there's something up when declaring multiple transforms for lightName that causes no light to appear at all. Very nice models btw!

That was a lot of help actually My next challenge, in case anyone has any ideas about this. What I've done is created a new material, selected KSP/Diffuse, then selected the image file, which leads to the shader error at the bottom. I'm following the wiki page here: https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Tutorial:Making_an_asset_from_start_to_finish which I expected to be out of date, and it is. I've tried to work around the parts where the instructions just don't match up with what's on the screen, but when I encounter errors later on down the line like this it makes me wonder. edit: btw, I started from scratch since my last post. Every step I made sure that things were errorless and working as closely to the tutorial as possible. But I crash and burn here at this step.

I look for excuses to fly the Delta IV Heavy. This is one of them:

Been excitedly waiting for the Delta IV Heavy launch stand to film a little project. Here's a test render of the intro...

yep it works on 1.12