king of nowhere

this kind of thing is more common than you may imagine

I started naming ships when i started running challenge missions. I never named stuff in career except with a mission designation ("comet lander", "mun probe" or stuff like that), for clarity. Most of my names are given out of similarities; I look at the final ship, then wait for it to struck my fancy. In particular, I decided to use names of common objects for small landers; hence I had The Can, Stool, and Horseshoe. Also named for their shape are Arrowhead, Nail, Bolt, Wings, Flying Christmas Tree, Dancing Porcupine (this last one, a rover with landing struts jutting out from it to protect from impacts, gets "porcupine" because they look like quills, and "dancing" because of the way it bounces on the ground). Some other ships are named after the stuff they do, like Taxi and Trucker, ships intended for long range travel, to ferry around smaller landers. Or Not! Albatross, a seaplane I would have called Albatross, except it would have been too unoriginal. Or Digger, mining ships with drills, they dig. A bigger version (that never went past initial concept) was named Crater Maker, because it would dig so much that it would leave a big hole. Or Craplane, a plane that wasn't very successful. More rarely, I name ships after philosophical affinities. The Dolphin crew escape pods get their name from the fact that dolphins sometimes help shipwrecked sailors to shore. And FU Eve was my exclamation when i gave up on making an efficient Eve lander and decided instead to solve the issue with brute force. Home was the habitation module of a life support long term ship, because it was supposed to be a home for the crew for decades. And the ship was called DREAM BIG, a name that's pretty much self-explanatory. Finally, sometimes I sneak in literary references, generally to the work of Terry Pratchett. My current mothership A'Tuin is named after the great cosmic turtle; shaped as an inverted bowl with fuel tanks outside and crew space in the inside, protected from radiations, it is basically a turtle in concept, and what better name than A'Tuin for a turtle carrying life through the cosmos? I'm a bit put down that nobody commented on it, I was hoping there would be more pterry fans around here. Digger/Trucker/Wings was also a reference to the nomes trilogy. Sometimes I imagine a ship and I immediately know the name. Other times I leave the ship temporarily unnamed, and give it a name after using it. If still I have no ideas, I send some pictures to my brother, and ask him for ideas.

nice to know there is a fixed value, always, for every CB. my manual solution was, after seeing a couple of times that the switch always happened around 130 km, to switch sas from hold prograde to hold position at 129 km. knowing I can count on the value being always the same, i can do it other times too, with minimal losses

i have a spaceplane in the atmosphere of urlum. I am sending it to orbit. During ascent, I must hold prograde; drag increases a lot even for minor deviations. even doing my best by hand, i lose 20% more. Then at some random point I get high enough, and the game randomly decides it should use space as reference. So it switches from surface speed to orbit speed. THe problem with this is that urlum rotates at 400 m/s at the equator. Suddenly my speed gets 400 m/s added in the horizontal direction. This moves my prograde vector by 10-20 degrees. And the plane tries to realign with it, faster than I can manually stop it. By the time this happens, there is still enough atmosphere that the plane, now grossly misaligned with the airflow, flips and starts spinning randomly in the atmosphere, and before I can get control back, it's lost all its speed. Is there some way I can tell the game that if I wanted to switch the frame of reference, I am perfectly capable of clicking on the speed display myself, thank you so much?

earlier during the flight, i already opened and closed the cargo bays. Drag shown in the GUI was added and removed accordingly (circa 20 kN for the big bay, 5 for the smaller bays). as for lift-induced drag, lift is stated as 55 kN; could the lift-induced drag be just as high?

As my spaceplane is soaring in urlum's high atmosphere, I got curious about aerodinamic data. What I found out seems contradictory, now I'm trying to figure out how the various displays work. I opened up the aerodinamic display, and it's telling me my total drag, at the moment, is 77 kN. I decided to see which parts were more responsible, so I also activated the display in action menu here is the plane. 77 kN total drag from aerodinamic window, wings are 2.13 each. The inner wings are the same. Less than 9 kN accounted for, so far. Those SOA adapters are very aerodinamic, they make less than 0.1 kN each. The nose cones make 0.02 each. Those in the front and rear have similar values. All toghether, they are maybe 1 kN. 10 accounted so far. Those aerospikes engines are also very aerodinamic, 0.07 each. With 6 of them, we are at 10.5 kN total the cockpit and mk1-mk2 adapters are less than 1 kN each, other parts of the fuselage vary, there are 5 pieces in the fuselage, in total it's less than 5 kN. So far, we're at 16 - even approximating up all the calculations. I further checked the control surfaces, the other fuel tanks, none of them is dragging significantly. All together, there will be maybe 20 kN of drag accounted for. Less. I checked the parts inside the cargo bays, to make sure they are properly shrouded. So if looking at the parts menu one by one gives me a total of less than 20 kN, and the aerodinamic window is telling me 77 kN, where the hell are the other 60 kN of drag coming from? which of the two windows is wrong? are they even telling me what I think?

I am a bit put off by it listing a lot of dependencies, though. i worry about bugs, conflicts, and loading time.

duna's atmosphere is very thin. it is possible to fly in there, but not practical. The best ssto for duna is a normal rocket. Duna's atmosphere is a wonderful thing, in that you can aerobrake from interplanetary intercepts with little or no protection, you can aerobrake to land and even use parachutes, but you can also mostly ignore it when you leave. all the advantages of an atmosphere and none of the flaws.

I just looked at the reconstruction of the ISS thread, and i saw that the spacecrafts there are reproduced with an incredible level of detail, up to and including the stuff written on it. Up to, and including, having the pizza hut logo on the russian mission that had it. I'm sure there is no modded part with a pizza hut logo; this means there is some mod that would allow one to put any kind of image on their stuff. I always wanted to put stufff on my ships - not just the logo you pick from your flags, which is what the stock flags let you use. Can someone point me to whatever mod allows that? thanks

i have no idea if there is a way in-game, but copying the ship file from one saved profile to the other is fast, effective, and it has no drawbacks

kerbals can always be exchanged. As for fuel, it depends on the difficulty level. At normal, it can be exchanged. Any higher, it cannot.

high? lag is showing through the video. But i cheated: i moved very slowly while taking it, and then I sped it up. Between 2x and 4x. There are also a few times when the game stopped entirely for several seconds, and I excised those by careful editing.

My current mothership, designed for an extended OPM grand tour with life support and part failure. Built as a "dome" of fuel tanks surrounding the interior living space to protect from radiations

My OPM grand tour has reached Neidon. Some spectacular views. My congratulations to whoever designed that planet. first part, the injection burn of my mothership A'Tuin. It then went to Nissee to collect new fuel, and all the stuff needed to keep the greenhouses working A random pic taken from Thatmo landing, but Neidon is always protagonist Second part, sending the spaceplane Arrowhead inside the atmosphere. 6 darts are way overkill for a 50 ton plane, but with kerbalism there are malfunctions. 4 engines are needed, the other two are backup.

The game ends when you lose the will to keep playing. generally happens when you've done everything and can't think of anything more to try. alternatively, it ends when you die of old age.

that should already be done authomatically without need for you to do anything. when the battery is full, they will stop by themselves.

I did something that fit the criteria for a challenge: https://kerbalx.com/king_of_nowhere/Not-Albatross-space-seaplane as well as its mission report - which includes also other vehicles, link is for the part most specifically devoted to it:

another bug: I landed on nissee and i am trying to drill the ground, but the drill says no ground contact. though it's clearly not the case

so, the ideal Mk2 plane would have the fuselage perfectly parallel to the airflow. which, unfortunately, is not always possible, because it will depend on flight conditions. i almost want to make a plane with rotating wings so that it can adapt the angle of attack to keep the fuselage in the right position

adrian fartade, an italian youtuber science communicator, made a video where he was explaining rocketry using ksp. i immediately knew i wanted it

Part 8: Neidon the beautiful A'Tuin reaches Neidon after a long trip. The moons are explored, and Arrowhead enters in atmospheric flight on the ice giant. A'Tuin then sets to refuel on the smaller Neidon moon, Nissee. 8.1) If you can go to Jool, you can go everywhere 8.2) The longer trip 8.3) Neidon approach 8.4) Two moons and a rover 8.5) Fifty shades of purple 8.6) The asteroid on the way back

well, my goal is to make a plane that can land on various atmospheric planets, explore multiple biomes, and return to orbit. obviously it has very different optimization parameters compared to other planes, and a very important one is that it must be able to take off and land at low speed - good luck managing on irregular terrain otherwise. I'm going to experiment with 0 angle later, but that plane already has some difficulties taking off on laythe. so, i assume that if i had used some other kind of fuselage, those lines would have been red, or yellow, and i would have just accepted them as normal drag. but the game models that specific aerodinamic effect as lift, hence it gets a blue line, which is what confused me. huh. sounds like a nice idea. i don't want to know how the rest of the plane looks like, though smart idea, but not applicable to my case. heck, i was on neidon there, it has a speed of sound completely different than kerbin's. this one actually interest me. i never knew of this trick. I've always been stuck with 5 degrees angle as the minimum that i could control with precision.

no. i guess they are meant to be used like that. but then, i'm already using the minimum angle of attack i can make precisely with the wings (5°). Unless those parts are supposed to be used with 0 angle of attack. but everything i learned about making planes in this game cuncur that angle of attack is useful

We all know Mk2 parts are inferior to other parts in many respects. Here I found myself using them for the few advantages they have, mostly heat resistance. but at least, for all their terrible drag and mass, they are supposed to provide some lift. they help making the plane flight. that is, until i activated aerodinamic forces and saw this they are lifting downwards? not only are those dumb fuselages much more draggy than other parts, but they are also pushing my plane down? why? I swear, if I didn't need a pressurized cabin for 2, i'd have used anything else

update: i had this bug also on thatmo, after landing there. wheels worked normally for a minute or two, then they got stuck. using alt-f12 to move to another planet fixes things for a while, and i experimented driving a bit both on mun and on nissee. but trying to return to thatmo would result very fast in the wheels getting stuck again EDIT: new update: no, there is no regularity in getting stuck. I figured, since i could not explore thatmo, i would go around nissee, but i got stuck there too. the only thing i can say for now is that i didn't see this bug on any stock body