quazarz

There seems to be a bug with deploying the breaking ground deployables with EVA construction mode. Every time I have tried it, the unit becomes completely inert, can't interact and can't pick it back up. The proper way to deploy is to take it into the kerbal inventory and click the arrow in the bottom right corner of the items icon. An unfortunate side effect of 1.11 is that you can't hold your jet pack and a deployable at the same time so it's pretty tedious

That's interesting. Although I'm using shrouded rotors so it doesn't seem like this will work for this particular craft. Also I wonder ( I'm on vacation and just thinking about KSP, otherwise I'd just try it) if there's any reason I shouldn't be using 8 blades instead of the 4 I'm using now. Would that give me double the lift? IRL I imagine it would add turbulence, but is KSP capable of simulating that?

Very helpful answers, thanks to both of you. It's going to take me a while to integrate this info. Props are way more complicated than I thought. Good to know, I was trying to reach one of the high peaks behind KSC by launching up as fast as possible and hoping the momentum would carry me up, and kept losing all my V and stalling just a few meters short.

Hi, I'm having fun building quad copters, I got a pretty nice one that has a 83 minute flight time, lifts 20 tons in payload, and flies well up to 3.5km on Kerbin, any higher than 5k and it stalls and crashes. Without using the cheat menu to adjust the conditions on Kerbin, I'd like to know how to figure out how well it would perform in the atmosphere of other bodies. My intuition tells me that it would fly on Eve, likely at a much greater altitude than on Kerbin, but would not fly on lathe or Duna since both have such thinner atmospheres. But I don't know enough about how atmospheric density and weight affect the thrust of the propellers to have any confidence in that assumption.

I have tried a ton of different techniques for surface docking. The fewer things you have to pay attention to during the process, the easier it is. What I have learned is easiest is having one single button that switches on the anti-gravity thrusters when I'm within docking range and then I don't have to think about anything else except RCS at that point. It's a little bit of extra time spent configuring things in the VAB in exchange for a massive simplification of the process that is performed repeatedly and with marginal tolerances. Experiments like these are useful for learning other things about the game, too. Having this tool allows me to do some other neat things... I still prefer to use RCS blocks because it keeps the fuel types separate. That way I know exactly how long I have to hover since the dV to fight gravity is constant, and I don't have to worry about verniers eating into that budget. With 28 RCS blocks and empty tanks, the fuel hauler I showed moves around just fine, and with a Mk3 monopropellant tank, I can burn it all day if I'm feeling impatient. I didn't really do anything to demonstrate how maneuverable it really is.

because the TWR of the main engines is about 35 on Minmus with the fuel tanks empty. There's not enough granularity in the adjustment to get it accurate. I'm also just experimenting with a bunch of different techniques for surface docking and using weak aux engines that can only function with low fuel was one of the things I wanted to try. Just never liked vernier engines. IDK why. the RCS blocks make more sense to me. I'm confused by this question because it sounds like that's what I did.

Nice, I am just figuring out quadcopters today for missions to Eve later. I still don't understand how best to control the blade pitch but right now I have the deploy angle being controlled by the main throttle, between a range of 35 and 83 degrees, with constant max rotor speed. Reaction wheels only for pitch/yaw/roll. Is there a better way to do it?

I used to avoid the game when I thought it was *more* focused on the Kerbals. But now I am playing, and I really like them for their character and also their utility. I play career mode and I have something like 60 kerbonauts enlisted, all but 5 of which are living all over the kerbin system, mostly in surface or orbital stations. I think it's a great feature that they don't require life support, I know people like to mod that in but having the kerbals living inside the equipment makes it feel like there's more purpose to it all. Being able to EVA and manipulate the environment is big, and utilizing the different specialties gives me a reason to have them stationed around where they may be useful in the future. I voted 3.5.

I adapted my fuel hauler for use on Minmus and got this nice cinematic short video of the station docking. For the docking procedure it is lifted by only 2 auxiliary "Spark" engines, that only have enough thrust to allow the rocket to hover when it has less than 2% fuel capacity remaining. I use fuel valves to drain fuel if it lands with too much weight for the docking. As always, stock career, manual piloting.

This might be what is happening. It's very nearly mirrored across the horizontal axis so I don't think it's a thrust misalignment, there might be some milimeter level differences between top and bottom. I am not sure exactly how I am supposed to read/utilize the "center of lift" indicator but I tried to place it squarely on the center of mass. I will experiment later with moving the fuel tanks towards the front since they are all pretty concentrated towards the rear. Also have way too much air intake based on what you are telling me.

Cool, thanks! I did manage to get one working yesterday using a mk2 fuselage, 3 whiplash and 4 nuclear engines. I was trying to use rapiers but I didn't like having to balance the amount of oxidizer, always seemed to run out too early to get anywhere really useful. With the nukes, it's a long climb but I can get up to orbit with 2k dV left in the tanks... if it doesn't flip and slam against the atmo on the way up. That's the biggest thing I'm struggling with now, is getting that to stop happening. I took it to Eve for my first ever fly-by after refueling it at the Mun, super inefficient trip but 4k dV made it happen.

I only just started playing with air-breathing engines yesterday to build an SSTO and was building everything on the assumption that "units" just means units/second. The reality seems so much more confusing. Is it because air intake is dependent on other variables like velocity/atmosphere? Can you extend the altitude that the engines are effective by adding more intakes?

That's really cool, I had seen that feature on the Remote Guidance Unit but I didn't realize there was also this way to do probe control.

I agree with what you said here:

[snip] This thread derailed because people were making this argument: However, tourist contracts are much less lucrative than just about any other contract type over the long term. This is objectively false, and I used data to made my point why. I agree that everyone should just play how they want, but it didn't start as a discussion about the variability of play style, it was about the value of tourist contracts within the Kerbin system versus any other type of contract - and no one made a convincing point that I was wrong. [snip]

Got my first successful docking with this MASSIVE fuel carrier to a base station on the Mun. I wanted to build a fuel carrier with the S4-512 tank and this was a great success. Total capacity 28.5k LF (+O), reached 15km Munar orbit with 22.5k in the tanks, with 2k reserved for re-landing and maneuvering back to the station.

Are you trying to transfer the item to the Kerbal's inventory first? Kerbal inventories are extremely restrictive, but while you are in EVA construction mode, items do not need to pass through the inventory, just take it from its storage and place it straight on the vessel. I know I have handled much larger items than a command seat on both Minmus and Mun surfaces. Although I do agree to an extent, I think the worst effect of the update is that you can no longer carry a deployable science unit (breaking ground parts) and your jetpack at the same time. The jetpack takes up so much inventory space that most items that you CAN hold preclude you from having the jetpack equipped. I would rather have one inventory slot than two that effectively functions as one.

No it didn't, I'm not the one who started that discussion. I was just talking to people who came to my thread while waiting for a more helpful answer.

[snip] All of the infrastructure that I built also satisfies other contracts for building outposts. I take contracts to build things that will benefit me in the future. [snip]... my play style, which is to optimize my network of equipment for maximum contracting efficiency. That, in my opinion, is the point of career mode. And if you start changing the rules to do that, like you do, then you lose. But that's just my opinion.

That's really interesting, I want to try that. How do you plan it, starting with the Minmus ejection?

Station construction contracts are fairly rare for me. Tourist contracts are very common. "Return on investment" is about more than just a percentage of the cost of materials. If I spend 160k on a rocket that completes 10 contracts with 19 tourists and earn 5 million, that's better than 20 contracts that can all be completed with a single satellite, or even 3 contracts completed with a single orbital station (which is apparently the maximum). You only need enough fuel to land on the Mun for refueling... to get everywhere else...

Why does "taking a lot of clicks" mean anything? Isn't the whole point of action groups to... group similar actions and save the user the hassle of clicking a lot?

You're right that one or two MPLs around either of Kerbin's moons can just finish the tech tree. In that case, I feel that two clicks versus one button press is a very marginal difference. My interest is in stuff like this, far beyond the completion of the tech tree.

It seems really weird to me that you can't. Also can't assign "Clean Experiments." Both of which I think are the most useful things to have assigned to action groups for the part.

Have you tried this yet or is it just theoretical? Because the deployable parts all have too much mass to carry more than one of them at a time.