jimmymcgoochie

Sounds like you're looking for ScanSat- you can get maps of terrain height and biome for any planetary body you like. Once you've scanned said planetary body, it can also generate an overlay in map mode that shows the biomes for the entire planet/moon, plus a zoomed-in map that also shows the biomes and can folow your ship, plus a display that tells you what biome you're in/over at that particular point in time in real time. If you burrow down into the cheats menu (escape -> version information in the bottom right) there's an option to show biomes built into the game, which will save you some Funds and some time but isn't as helpful as the mod.

Generally speaking, adding parts won't wreck save files. Taking them out, on the other hand, almost certainly will! Friendly reminder- make sure you include everything in the probes plus GameData folder as the Firespitter bit is needed to change the textures, as I found out the hard way...

You're looking for Coatl Aerospace's ProbesPlus mod. That's a Xihe and a Landvermesser lander respectively, and there are alternative parts for each SCANsat ability in there too. Still works in v1.8(.1) as far as I can tell, it worked fine when I updated to v1.8 but I can't say for sure because I'm not currently using it in that version. (edit: someone else ninja'd me to it) You can also do it the hacky way and create a copy of the code from SCANsat (or the compatibility patch in probes plus) and point it at another part. Obviously you could do this for anything you like- a probe core, mystery goo container, solar panel, kerbal on EVA etc- but I'd say if you're going to go down that route pick a part that it would make (some) sense for. I did it for a rather obscure mod with a real satellite in it, then bumped up its pre-existing scanning to make it a dedicated mapping sat, which is more elegant than using a bunch of extra parts stapled on to a probe or ship.

So that time when I switched to a ship and it immediately glitched itself from about 10km over Kerbin's surface to outside the solar system at about half a million m/s in 2 seconds flat was 'a Kraken'? I see...

I've only been playing KSC for a few months, but I keep coming across references to "The Kraken" and how it would destroy ships/kill off Kerbals. Is it actually a thing? Was it something that used to exist but got removed at some stage? (I've only played v1.7.3 and v1.8 so maybe it was in older versions?) Or is it just some kind of Kerbal backstory type thing? ...Am I breaking some unwritten rule along the lines of 'never mention the Kraken' by posting this?

For some reason the rover chemcam doesn't deploy in v1.8, it seems to work fine in build mode but as soon as it's actually out in the wild it stubbornly refuses to budge either when I click the button or press the action group I assigned it to. I tried it on a clean game with nothing but TST and the stock parts but it still didn't work. The space telescopes seem to be working fine.

Near Future Construction might be worth a look as there are lots of docking parts in there including lateral ports that dock side by side instead of head-on and some ports that only dock at 90-degree rotation angles so your space station lines up properly instead of each section being rotated at a different angle. Not sure if they have larger sizes than the stock ones though. Just trawled through all the mods I've downloaded and Near Future Launch Vehicles has a 5m docking port in it, which is bigger than the largest stock parts but will come in useful if you're using mods with extra large parts.

How about E: Some parts have integrated heatshields e.g. on the leading edge/underside of space plane wings/fuselage pieces and the bottoms of command pods, you can choose how much ablator to include (if any!) as you wish- it's already a thing with the KV pods in Making History so there's precedent in KSP already- and also include the set of standalone heatshields like at present in KSP but with the possibility of some additional parts e.g. reflective heat shields as seen in the film Sunshine. Trying to 'paint' heat shielding onto a ship could lead to you missing an area that was at a strange angle and your ship and its crew ending up extra-crispy as a result.

Each mod is different, all I can say is try it and see. Delete one of the dependencies and see a) if the game loads at all, b) if you can load a save game which contains a vessel using that part or parts and c) if the part works the same as it did before. If you answered yes to a, b and c then you can leave the dependency out; if you answered no to any of them then you'll need to keep it in.

You literally delete them. Go into the folders inside the GameData folder for that mod, and delete the files. Note- you should copy and paste the mod into your KSP GameData folder and THEN delete them, so that you have the intact mod files stored in case you want to use the whole thing in future, rather than having to download it again.

I just downloaded this mod, but the reskinned Kerbodyne tanks are horribly mangled when I switch to the black and white look- it's like the original pattern and the grey and orange look from the 1.875m tanks are trying to be in the same place at the same time, and it looks extremely glitchy.

I've been playing KSP for the last few months and I think it's fantastic- the combination of sandbox-type construction and fairly realistic physics is great and I eagerly await the release of the sequel. Until KSP2 comes out, though, there are a few things that I'd like to see in the current game that would make a big difference without requiring a massive amount of work. I work in a software development team so I know something that seems 'easy' rarely is, but I've kept the list to fairly small changes or additions which are based on existing features to keep things reasonably simple. 1) Improved fuel tank paints. The standard 1.25m tanks have four different colour schemes, but one of those is plain white and the others don't match up particularly well (especially the little FL100 tank and its strange black stripes). The 2.5m Rockomax tanks only have two colour schemes to pick from- a black and white style that for the second-largest means white with a big corrugated stripe in the middle, or orange which does the corrugated thing to the second smallest tank instead. The Kerbodyne 3.75m and MH-specific 5m tanks have one colour scheme- ONE!- and it's a bit boring. The little 0.625m Oscar-B tank is likewise stuck with one boring grey paint job, and the surface-mounted orange tanks also have one colour scheme to share. The Making History 1.875m tanks are another story altogether- they don't even match each other! The A150 0.625m-1.875m adapter seems to use the same orange as the Rockomax tanks for some reason, which is a different shade to the other 1.875m tanks which is different to the 1.25m tank orange; the 'white' patterns aren't white (in some cases there's more black in the white pattern than the black and white one!) and some of the black and white patterns are visibly more grey than white compared to others, and don't match the other stock parts at all and what is with the A151 fuel tank having a thick black vertical stripe when none of the other tanks do? In addition, several of the 1.875m engines such as the cheetah or bobcat have bases that work fine with the 'white' versions of the two smallest tanks but are terrible with the other colours and tanks, especially orange! Clearly a lot of the tank designs are meant to look like old NASA rockets such as Mercury, Delta and Saturn or the Space Shuttle launch system, but this leaves very little scope for building anything else. Instead of this mishmash of paint schemes, I'd like to see a custom paint system that would let you pick from a range of different patterns including vertical and horizontal stripes of varying sizes, new patterns based on real rockets (there are a lot to choose from- Russia/USSR have plenty of rockets to pick from and India, China, UK and Europe- no political statements intended, I just like the Black Arrow's spiral paint- all have options too) as well as textures like the corrugated or tile-like patterns that already exist or even something totally new like polka dots or geometric dazzle camouflage, then choose the frequency of that pattern (how many stripes do you want? etc.) and then the colours using RGB sliders- I'd say stick to two or at most three options or the whole thing could get too complicated. Applying the pattern consistently across different sizes and shapes of parts might be tricky, but the result would be great to look at, especially on the Steam workshop and sharing ship designs/screenshots on the forums. Serial creators could use their own individual patterns to make all their stuff look the same rather than everything being white, you could use different paint patterns to mark specific vessels depending on what they're for/where they're going etc. and for pure creativity it would be a massive bonus. Being able to save a particular pattern and apply it to multiple parts on the same vessel at once and on new vessels would be required to make this feature useful- doing each tank individually would take so long that it wouldn't be worth it. This system could also be applied to the payload fairings which are similarly lacking in aesthetic appeal and which would also benefit from custom painting. As a quick fix, how about making the grey and orange patterns for all the different tanks use the same grey and the same orange? This is particularly applicable to the making history parts where there are several different shades of orange in use on different parts that don't match each other or the stock 1.25m and 2.5m tanks. I actually prefer the MH-style white with black highlights pattern to the 'dark' theme for 1.25m tanks, but they should all use the same white and the patterns should match up more closely. The 'white' and 'black and white' names for those tanks should probably be reversed as in most cases the black and white version is mostly white with a few small black bits whereas the white version often has large black patterns on it. 2) Docking alignment indicator in docking mode. I'm surprised this isn't a stock feature as docking is a pretty important part of building anything in space and is also quite hard to do (trying to keep the two ships aligned using target tracking will in some cases inexplicably target the wrong part so the ports keep moving away at close range, and target tracking isn't available in SAS without a highly skilled pilot or a later-game probe core/part in Career mode). A simple docking alignment mod is out there and is incredibly useful so a stock implementation that ties in with "docking mode" and shows where both docking ports are pointing and your direction of movement seems like a quick win. Another related beneficial feature would be the option of locking docking ports to set angles e.g. 90 degrees of roll relative to each other, or the ability to rotate sections once they've docked; either one would make building larger structures in space considerably easier. 3) Tracking station upgrades. I'm sure most people have done it: launch a mission to one planet/moon/whatever, go and do something else while it's on its way, then realise you've missed the planned insertion burn and your mission has been launched out of the target body's sphere of influence and potentially right out of the solar system itself, with no way to get it back without loading a previous save which could potentially undo several hours of gameplay. A warning of some kind in the tracking station, or even better when time warping anywhere including on other vessels, when something is getting close to a maneuver node would make it much harder to miss an important burn to put a probe into orbit, correct course or just pay attention to a ship as it's about to re-enter on Kerbin. Sure, there's a mod that can do something similar but you still have to set the alerts manually so if you forget or get it wrong, you're still going to miss that node. Also in the tracking station, I'd like the ability to rename a vessel and change its type without having to load it up. That could prove useful for something that has a shroud on it (I usually keep the shroud on for missions to Eve/Jool to better protect the rover/lander inside when aerobraking into orbit or to the surface) and save time if you've launched a load of missions with sequential names only to notice that there are two 3s or you've missed 11 and need to change a lot of names to correct the problem. Another useful feature would be to show remaining delta-V in the tracking station which would be useful for seeing if those 'move this vessel to a new orbit' missions are feasible. It would also be helpful to see the total required delta-V for all planned maneuvers in the tracking station and on the map as you're flying, so you know if the set of precise orbital maneuvers you have planned out will run out of fuel half way through (we've all done it, right? ...right?) 4) Aircraft improvements. The Mk2 cargo bay feels very cramped and doesn't work particularly well as a rocket-launching plane because you can't fit anything in except a 1.25m fuel tank and possibly some of the cheapy fins if you shift them inwards a bit and put them only on the sides. If the Mk2 parts were slightly bigger (maybe 10-20%) then there would be much more room to fit more useful parts inside and make using a plane as an alternative to a first stage more feasible. There's an obvious gap in the array of wing options too- there's no square Big-S wing, only a triangular one which isn't nearly big enough when used with the other Mk3 Space Shuttle-style parts. A square wing would make large aircraft fly, and look, much better than using the much smaller square/rectangular wing pieces. There's also an opening for a Mk3 inline docking module with the option of a regular or large Clamp-O-Tron docking port and possibly a Mk2 rear-loading cargo ramp to match its Mk3 counterpart. Something that could prove particularly useful on planets other than Kerbin is an electric-powered aircraft engine. It doesn't have to be massively powerful- something a similar size and power to the Juno jet engine would be sufficient- but being able to run on electricity would allow aircraft to operate where the atmosphere doesn't allow conventional engines to work. It would also have the benefit of being able to refuel using solar panels, fuel cells or RTGs meaning it could operate for much longer than a traditionally-fueled aircraft could. 5) Expanded deployable science options (for Breaking Ground) I only recently downloaded the Breaking Ground expansion but the deployed science array seems rather limited. There aren't that many experiments to use- mystery goo, weather, ionography and seismic- and they only work half the time because there are no batteries to store charge from the solar panels (the RTGs are at the very far end of the career tech tree). They also require a crewed mission to deploy them in the first place and generate science very slowly even when deployed by a 2-star scientist, which is the best you can do without venturing beyond Kerbin's orbit. I'd like to see more experiments such as a ground sample analyser with its own little sample collection rover, a telescope/observatory of some kind (better results with no atmosphere) and some kind of particle collector that catches and analyses dust (better results in atmosphere because wind will carry the dust but still functional without an atmosphere because dust gets thrown up by impacts). There's a lot of scope for expansion here! There's also the option of having a larger unmanned experiment control core that can deploy the modules by itself, much like the InSight lander deployed a set of experiment pods on Mars. This would obviously have a limited capacity and limited range of deployment meaning there wouldn't be much space to deploy the modules around the core and lower science generation rates than modules deployed by a Scientist, but the central core would have some power generation (enough to power at least 2 deployed modules should do) and communication (similar to the HG-48 module) abilities of its own and would be ideal as an advance mission which could then be expanded by a crewed mission adding extra modules later. One last thing- when trying to move maneuver nodes I keep ending up accidentally changing the radial in/out values instead because it can be hard to click on the central hub of the node, so moving the adjustment handles out a little bit more or making it one click to move, click again to adjust would be a simple but useful change. It would also be nice to have the ability to have the nodes snap and lock to the apoapsis/periapsis or ascending/descending nodes of an orbit rather than trying to make fine adjustments as the viewpoint constantly changes due to the movement of the vessel and/or planet.

Perhaps a more glaring omission- a 1.875m inline reaction wheel! An inline battery would also be helpful, but as for adapters- just use the fuel tanks and don't fill them with fuel if you really want a purely structural part. Why you'd want that when you can fill them with fuel is a mystery to me, more fuel is always better and the lack of a 0.625m to 1.25m fuel tank adapter is mildly annoying.

Some mods that add over-sized parts (5m+) will include probe cores and/or reaction wheels to go with them- off the top of my head Near Future Construction and Launch Vehicles both have large cores and possibly standalone reaction wheels to go with them. There are some heavy RCS parts in there too I think. Plenty of other mods I haven't tried will have them too, so look for mods that add large parts and check their contents- you can always add the parts you like and remove the rest from your GameData folder to avoid adding in a huge pile of extra parts you don't want.

Near Future Construction has parts that look like that and can be configured with different fuel tanks. There's a similar but tank-less (and possibly smaller) version where those big solar panels are attached and a lot of the parts on that ship look like they're out of the Near Future packs or others by the same creator. Cryo tanks has similar looking tanks but IIRC they had solid caps on the ends, and the picture doesn't.

Because 30 seconds of clicking is too much effort? Because over 20 different action groups to pick from (including gear/lights/brakes/abort and various control groups e.g. for powered wheels) isn't enough? Because you can now add, edit and remove action groups whenever you like?

If you're on steam there is a way to play previous game versions: - First, copy the entire Kerbal Space Program folder from your Steam folders to somewhere else e.g. desktop. This means you'll have a backup of the version you're on now and you can play that version if you like. - Right click KSP and click Properties - Click the 'Betas' tab on the window that opens - Where it says 'None/no betas' click on it and then select the version you want. This will then download and install that version of the game. You can save different versions of the game outside of the Steam folders, for example on your desktop, and then play the game from the application inside that folder as well as add any mods you like to one version where they work but not to another where they don't. The only thing you'll need to remember is that save games won't transfer between them, so you'll have to move them manually. There should be either an image or a link below to show you this- I've gone back to v1.7.3 to keep some mods working, but I copied v1.8 and can play that too if I want to. https://imgur.com/a/h2n6xVP

There are a variety of mods that offer additional parts; Near Future Propulsion does a series of ion engines, for example. Just bear in mind that when you increase thrust you also increase the energy consumption- so bumping the stock Dawn ion engine from 1kN up to 50kN will increase its energy consumption from 15/second to about 750/second! You can change that by altering the consumption values for fuels (electricity and xenon in this case) but I recommend using a proper mod pack with new parts rather than crudely hacking the existing ones, which could cause issues down the line when the game updates and overwrites it.

Um... Put them in an action group? You can assign them in edit mode, or in v1.8 anywhere at all, and just press the button you assign to deploy them. It's entirely do-able with the stock game, I don't see why you need a mod for it.

Um, try the lights button to the right of the altimeter? Alternatively try actually looking at your settings to find the relevant key binds...

I thought I'd found a mod responsible for the crashes, but I removed it and after a while the game crashed again while on Minmus. Not sure if the crash-free run with no mods at all was a fluke or indicating that something else is to blame now, looks like I'll be busy for a while. However, after playing with the settings I've fixed the blurry shadows (shadow cascades to 4 and they're nice and sharp).

@linuxgurugamer Nothing appearance-related, I've been using nothing but stock parts on this career and only a handful of mods none of which should affect terrain in any way. I'll try a pure stock session and see how that goes.

The new terrain is infuriatingly crashy. I started a new career due to Ar-mod-geddon and pretty much every time I switch to anything on the Mun or Minmus, or do an EVA, or land on them, the game will crash within a few minutes or even seconds. I've tried dialling the new terrain down to minimum (strangely there are 6 settings for terrain now- low, default and 4x high) and disabling scatters (what are scatters? those annoying rocks that keep popping up with the halos around them at a distance?) but it made no difference. There have been cases where the terrain would flicker as if there were shadows glitching across its surface, and shadows themselves seem to switch between massively pixellated and incredibly sharp without any obvious reason. It's either one of two types of crash- the game freezes, but pressing F5 to save seems to work and pressing escape makes the cursor change and stops the music as if the menu had appeared; or I get a Unity error page which has a loading bar that never goes beyond about 25%. Either way, a game reboot is required. Kerbin is unaffected by all these issues so I have to assume it's the new terrain to blame, which is a shame because when it works it looks fantastic! I can see the staging menu fine in map view but pressing space to stage does nothing, is that intended/is there a key bind I haven't set? I've had a lot of instances where dropping out of warp in map view would leave the ship unresponsive to controls and I'd have to go back out of map view then switch the probe core to hibernate and off again to get it to work (for crewed ships it usually wakes up again once out of map view). The ability to actually see the staging in map view is an improvement though, as is (re)assigning action groups on the fly, and the correction of a few #autoLOC_(load of numbers) which popped up every now and again. The new boosters look nice, but are quite expensive and too heavy for use with anything but a level 3 launch pad (pretty pricey when you turn the difficulty up to maximum) meaning they're only useful for later in the career and possibly a bit too far to the left in the tech tree- bumping them a node to the right would mean they got unlocked when you could actually use them. And now for a couple of things I'd like in the next update: - Custom paint jobs/colour schemes. The standard sets are a bit boring after a while, an editor with a base pattern (plain, stripes, hoops, polka dots..?) and RGB sliders for each colour would be a great way to make your rockets truly unique. Or failing that; - Additional paint schemes based on real rockets. There are plenty of historic NASA-type patterns but not much else- Russia/USSR, Europe (including the Arianes and Black Arrow), India and China all have a decent selection to choose from. The Rockomax and Kerbodyne stock tanks have 2 and 1 colour scheme respectively and the little tanks (oscar and the little orange round ones) have one each, it's time to give them an aesthetic upgrade. A square Big-S spaceplane wing. We have a triangular one, but using them with the Mk3 parts you'll need more than one on each side and they don't look or work right with just triangles stuck to each other, or by using the smaller and thinner square/rectangular wing planks. A square Big-S would complete the set and make building big spaceplanes/shuttles that actually look right much easier. On a related note- ablators on the Big-S wings for an authentic space shuttle experience without burning the wings off on re-entry would be nice. I'm relatively new to KSP but it's already my favourite game and I can't wait for the sequel! I hope that the issues I've mentioned above get resolved soon so I can continue to enjoy the game.

I'm having trouble with this mod. I've put various craft on different frequencies in different places, but I keep getting a strange bug where a craft will claim to be relaying through itself. Every second or so it will blink back to normal then immediately start again. It happened on both KSP 1.7.3 and 1.8 using stock parts. The connection lines on the map also blink at the same time in a rather unpleasant and distracting way.

@Cavscout74 v0.16.1 seems to have resolved the RCS issue and the Draco lander has appeared in the parts list. Would be great if that version could be pushed to curseforge