AHHans

When playing around with the new helicopter blades I noticed that they seem to have a rather sharp height ceiling. When my Eve-ascent quadcopter gets above ca. 5500m on Kerbin or 17000m on Eve then it dramatically loses vertical speed and then starts dropping. My old version from before 1.7.3 that used elevons as the lifting surfaces showed a more gradual behavior: it didn't ascent as fast in the lower atmosphere and lost vertical speed much more slowly when it got higher. So that it could de-facto hover at its service ceiling. With the new helicopter blades my craft ascends much faster, but then rather abruptly goes from ascending at 20 m/s or so to falling within a couple of seconds. Also there is no autorotation, but rather the opposite effect: once it started dropping the rotors slow down quickly. To get them to rotate again I need a lot of torque, much more than to "just" start ascending from a standing start. Which means that if I don't have rather overpowered motors (i.e. otherwise unnecessary weight) the craft is unrecoverable once it starts dropping. Has anyone else noticed this?

Nope. (Well, at least I didn't, although I tried.) A quadcopter with servos between the rotor and the blades as the collective and the blade deflection as cyclic does work.

Yupp, there is an option for that. Called "Advanced Tweakables" which can be found under "Gameplay" in the "General" section of the settings.

On this day 125 years ago, on the 25 June 1894 Hermann Julius Oberth was born in the Transylvanian town of Hermannstadt (today Sibiu in Romania). Instead of the traditional occupation as a vampire, he choose a career in rocket science instead. He was (one of?) the first to mathematically prove that multistage rockets can indeed escape the Earth's gravitational field and travel to other planets. In the 1920ies he was a member of the "Verein für Raumschiffahrt" in Germany, an amateur rocketry group, where he worked together with a young student named Wernher von Braun. After becoming a naturalized German citizen he worked on the rocket program of pedant Germany in Peenemünde between 1941 and 1943. After the war Oberth mostly lived near Nürnberg in west Germany. Eventually he came to work for his former student - the von Braun guy - on the US rocket program for some time. He retired in 1962 and died on the 28 December 1989. His legacy is tarnished by being a member of the new funded National Democratic Party (NPD) in west Germany from 1965 to 1967. In 1962 he caused a small scandal when he said: "I had hoped to find a rocket weapon that could smash the ignominious Treaty of Versailles. Unfortunately I failed." (translation by me...) at a public speech. To KSP players he is known for his effect on rocket efficency. Remember: always burn at periapsis! (If possible. Terms and conditions apply.) P.S. All actual facts are shamelessly copied from Wikipedia. So blame them if I got it wrong.

And with the passive seismometer from the Breaking Ground DLC you can have both.

My $0.05: I don't think that Squad is working on a new game. I believe that Squad is a very small company and that they use/need all their manpower for maintaining KSP. Having said that: I would be glad if they would be making a new game! I'n not really in favor of that. I see two alternatives for a "KSP-2": one would be more or less the same game, just "better". I don't see where KSP could be updated enough to make it worthwhile to have a KSP-2, while still being more or less the same KSP. In this case I would prefer if they would keep making incremental updates to the original KSP. The other alternative would be to make a different game. In that case I would miss having the original KSP being updated.

Or did you use autostruts onto or across the servos? (Autostruts to "grantparent" that don't touch or go across a moving part seem to work fine for me.)

Hi, welcome to the forums. In the pop-up text for a 5-star engineer (in a career save) it says: Provides repair skills: Repack Parachutes Repair Landing Legs Repair Wheels [...] So I guess scanning arms are not meant to be repairable. Like solar panels etc. (That also feels logical to me: if you break a delicate scientific instrument then it takes a lot more effort to fix it than it takes to fix a flat tire.)

Well, I could say "duh, that's the obvious way to get high torque", but the truth is that I didn't think of this myself earlier. And patent offices are littered with inventions that seem obvious in hindsight. Those who - like me - don't like parts clipping through each other can also use the interstage nodes of the payload fairings for one side. (You probably want to disable the truss structure.)

But how will Valentina get her "Planted Flag on Duna" achievement? (Ike is easy, I can just make two trips to Ike with my lander.)

Thanks for the feedback @5thHorseman, @Gargamel, @Cheif Operations Director, @Wjolcz. That's why I started this topic. But I guess we can lay this idea to rest now.

Yupp! I believe that was indeed the idea behind that: to motivate people to bring Kerbals of all three professions on the expeditions. An, no. The Engineer only gives a bonus to power production. Control and (afaik) Communications can be placed by anyone. Or you could "just" bring more power units (solar panels, or RTGs) and place them by a scientist or pilot.

It says so in the screenshot, in the PAW of the control station: "Total Power Needed: 2 Low Voltage" and "Total Power Available: 1" So your experiment station doesn't have enough power, and now nothing works... FYI: the amount of power that a solar panel or RTG generates depends on the type and level of Kerbal that places it: 1 unit of power if placed by a Pilot or Scientist of any level, 2 levels of power if placed by an Engineer of level 0 or 1, more power with higher levels of Engineers.

Well, I spent a couple of years working with engineers to get a radio telescope that does what we need it to do. So my perspective on that is somewhat different. What one could so in the game is to have different sensors (e.g. temperature-, pressure-, vibration-sensors etc.), "modifiers" (amplifiers, filters etc.), and data recorders that can be combined to create different experiments. E.g. a vibration-sensor + amplifier + long-term recorder can measure the natural earthquakes on a planet, but vibration-sensor + amplifier + peak recorder can measure the shock-waves from impacts. Hmmm... Maybe that would be an idea for the processing lab. Give the MPL a number of different equipment slots, that allows it to analyze different kinds of input data. E.g. an exercise machine, EKG monitor etc. allows it to process crew reports (study the effects of the environment on Kerbals). A mass spectrometer, IR spectrometer, and microscope allows it to process surface samples. Etc. It could also be simplified to be a "study Kerbals module", "study surface samples module", etc. You could also have storage for more equipment, so that the scientists can swap out the modules and reconfigure the lab in place. Well, it is an idea.

@fragtzack That has been in the game at least since 1.6 (when I started playing...). There is an option in the advanced difficulty settings "Resource Transfer Obeys Crossfeed Rules" (Defaults to off on easy and normal difficulty, and on for moderate and hard.) [...] What @mystifeid said! My addition to that would be that if you use the fuel ducts then you need two fuel ducts, one for each direction.

Yes, IMHO KSP aces this aspect. In addition to being entertaining KSP also gives me the impression of actually doing something in the background, and not just wasting my time by displaying *bleep*ing advertisements.

@GryMor Was that before and after the 1.7.2 patch? That patch fixed (aka: changed) the distribution of the surface features. The sandstone on Minmus is now much more plentiful, but I could imagine that the existing surface features moved with that patch.

There was a 125 bytes or so bugfix a few hours after 1.7.2, to fix an issue with Kerbals being uncontrollable on EVA.

A big part of the attraction of KSP is the ability to build your own vehicles. This works well rockets, planes, spaceplanes, ships, etc., but science experiments are somewhat "static": there are a limited number of experiments and they are run by simply pressing a button. Wouldn't it be great if you could build your own science experiments in a similar style? I don't have any good idea how this could be actually implemented (yet?), but I'd like to know your opinion. Do you like this idea? Do you have have a suggestion how this could be done?

Nope, the weather station is a part of the deployed ground science. Play the game? (SCNR!) To actually answer your question: the Breaking Ground DLC adds a lot more stuff to do on the surface of the planets and moons. Have a look at some of the videos on youtube. I believe that will help you more.

You probably already noticed this, but in case you haven't: the recent patch to KSP 1.7.2 (BG 1.1.0) should have fixed this.

The contract hasn't failed, so I don't think that the vessel was destroyed for getting too close to the Mun. But otherwise there isn't much more that I can tell you from the image.

The weather station is a part of deployed surface science, so not much use in a satellite. (And it needs a Kerbal to be deployed, so it's not much use in an unmanned lander.)

I tried with and without the Alarm Clock, both didn't work in the "old" version. But: Yupp! Same here! That bug seriously killed my enthusiasm (More than it should, is I'm honest about it. But hey, who says that humans are rational creatures, Kerbals aren't.) Thanks for fixing it quickly!

Just wait till someone builds a catapult powered by this. Have you tried making a yo-yo despin with a chain of motorless hinges? I imagine that would work.