LongbowEOD

I recently elected to cancel a series of contracts I'd taken from the very fun Fine Print mod that were bugging a bit. I was ok with the minor loss of funds and rep, but apparently Gene did not agree. Good Kod, look at that. His mouth departed his face to express its disagreement with my decision.

Howdy and welcome aboard! Good luck with your mod! The world can always use another good resource manager.

Howdy and welcome aboard! Those are some great colonization efforts you've got there. As for your questions, I'm no expert, but maybe I can help a bit. If you can't time warp fast enough from a 100-km orbit, try controlling a vessel that's landed on the same body. You should be able to use maximum time-warp. Moho is one of the hardest bodies to land on, so if your ship can set kerbals down there, it can probably set them down anywhere. Tylo will still be another difficult landing. So big and so airless. Maybe find a Delta-V map you like. I use this one: http://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/1iw30a/a_more_accurate_deltav_map/ If your computer can handle a tremendous launch vehicle, go for it. It's not strictly necessary to rendezvous and dock in space, but doing so does open many doors in terms of specializing craft for certain missions, which will get you further in the long run. All-in-one vehicles are a handful, and I think it would be a bit of a master class in KSP to manage a kerballed Eve return with one ship. Having said that, I'm sure somebody's done it, probably over in the Challenges Forum. I'd say you're best bet is 2 or more vehicles.

Well, the fact that the AR202 can be used as a great lightweight rover "command pod" for one. No pesky torque, low mass, low power draw. Personally, I also find it difficult to build a small rover around any of the stock pods or probe cores. Or then for medium-sized space vehicles, use an Inline Advanced Stabilizer + AR202 instead of an RC-001S RGU: same mass, lower power draw, much higher torque. I like this combo for a small orbital tug.

Clean KSP 0.24 (32 bit), MechJeb 2.3.0 Release, Windows 7 (64 bit) The "orientation" of the AR202 case seems to have changed from previous versions that I remember. When controlling from the AR202 case, it appears that "up" is pointing out the right-hand side of the case. So if I want the AR202's directions to match my pod's directions, I have to mount the AR202 on the left side of my craft. Is this a new feature, an old feature that I'm mis-remembering, or a bug? For clarification: http://imgur.com/EviQThM I'm controlling from the AR202 case, and as you can see, it believes "up" is east and "down" is west. According to the pod, "up" is south and "down" is north in this orientation.

I must have angered the kods, because today, of all the days, Steam has started regularly crashing Windows for me. Every time I even try to start it up, BSOD. So I'm in the exact opposite boat. I think I could deal with a delay in downloading 0.24 from the KSP Store. But I have no end in sight for this Steam crash.

I sent a kerballed mission that captured an A-class into Kerbin orbit. I was going to put it in a low orbit coplanar with Minmus, but then noticed that I'd captured it into a retrograde orbit, so I scrapped that plan and just left it there. And I have 3 robotic missions underway to redirect impactors: one D-class has been deflected with plans to capture, the other 2 missions (to another D and an E) are still heading to their rendezvous. Probably won't finish any of those missions now tho.

So in 0.24, recovered fuel, oxidizer, and monoprop will now get you money (back). Know what I'm thinking? Kethane refineries. Burn that stuff down to fuel or monoprop (oxidizer is waaaaay cheaper from the video) and recover your tanker back for instant fund injections. Oil barons.

It was a long time ago (0.13 or 0.14 probably), but the basic memory remains fairly intense in my mind: Landed on the Mun, took off headed back to Kerbin. Finished a (probably highly inefficient) TKI burn with a perikerb of somewhere around 60km and 0 fuel remaining. This is back before EVA, so "get out and push" was not an option. So the only option was to sit and wait for the wisps of atmosphere to slow it down. I forget the details, but it took something like 10 orbits to reenter, and the kerbonauts wound up spending something like 3 Earth weeks just going around and around.

I aligned it during the launch. Waited for the launch window and then flew my gravity turn toward about 100°. And then just guiding it up keeping an eye on my Az and inclination.

I launched my first (of this particular 23.5 save) mission to Minmus yesterday, and I think the gods of Kerbin are smiling upon me (and pilot Merming Kerman). 4444 m/s delta-V expended to reach parking orbit, 0.000 eccentricity, and less than 0.03° from my desired inclination. I call that pretty good for a hands-on ascent (OK, I let MechJeb fly the last 90 m/s for circularization).

Despite playing since 0.13, I've never left Kerbin's SOI with a manned mission. The only planet I've even sent a probe to is Duna. (But it was a good mission! 2 independent survey probes for Duna and Ike, and a Duna rover!) I fly all my missions with MechJeb. I suck at building spaceplanes. I managed an SSTO, but it is an unwieldy behemoth with no actual utility (no docking, no probe delivery, no fuel for orbital maneuvers except deorbit).

That's actually what led me to this problem in the first place: MechJeb, at least, does NOT add the mass of these massless parts. Oddly, I was not able to find the "PhysicsSignificance = 1" line in the Small Gear Bay .cfg file.

So I'd long heard that certain parts, such as struts and landing gear, are functionally massless. That is, they have a mass listed in the VAB or SPH, but that mass is not calculated when physics take over. Is there a comprehensive list of parts that have this feature? I ask because I just noticed that the small science experiment packages (seismic, temperature, gravioli, and air pressure) seem to share it, which was news to me. I'd been using experiments to try and balance out some of my designs (using m4v's excellent RCS Build Aid), but it was anomalously not working. I did a bit of poking around to find some parts that might be massless, but this list is not comprehensive (or necessarily even correct). So far I've got: FTX-2 External Fuel Duct Both RCS Ports EAS-4 Strut Connector Cubic Octagonal Strut Octagonal Strut OX-STAT Photovoltaic Panel Illuminator Mk 1 and Mk 2 Communotron 16 and 88-88 (but the Comms DTS-M1 does have mass) Small Gear Bay Double-C Seismic Accelerometer Presmat Barometer GRAVMAX Negative Gravioli Detector 2HOT Thermometer Is there something in the part configs that makes them massless?

I just upgraded to 2.2 (build 213) from 2.1.1.0 (build 197). 213 has an odd problem in the VAB for me: if I add one of the new SLS engines (the 2 3.75m engines or the 2.5m liquid-fuel booster) it breaks the Delta-V calculator. The calculator does not update from that point forward, even if I remove the SLS engine and add any other engine. I switched back to 197 and the Delta-V calculator works correctly with all engines. Anybody else experience this?

Same problem here, NecroBones.

Ah yes, the mole of moles always gets me. Something about imagining a small planet of lukewarm meat, wrapped in a literal fur coat. Convecting plumes of meat and gas bubbling up from the interior.

My headcanon is that "mun" and "Mun" mean the same to kerbals as "moon" and "Moon" mean to us, respectively. They call Laythe, Vall, Tylo, etc. the Joolian muns; Ike is the mun of Duna; and so on. But anytime they refer to "the Mun" it is understood they are talking about the larger mun of Kerbin. Just my $0.02.

It mentions KSP and everybody's favorite, the Tsiolkovsky Rocket Equation! http://what-if.xkcd.com/85/ How fast do you think Jeb could hit a golf ball?

Because of the single-parent "tree" structure KSP relies on, subassemblies can only attach the exact same way you built them in the first place. If you built top-down and removed a subassembly booster, that booster can only have an attach node at its top, to attach to the bottom of some other payload. You might try the Select Root mod, which might allow you to reorder a craft (make it "bottom-up" from "top-down"). Also, it's probably poor form to post an entire craft file into the text of your post.

Heh, I just added these details to my sig a few days ago.

Vote #4 for "Oviraptor" here!

The node you're trying to buy has 2 prerequisite techs. You have to unlock both of them before the higher level tech becomes available. Unfortunately the tech tree doesn't explicitly show you what the other prerequisite tech is, but you can usually guess by the relative positions of the techs.

I just brought home a mission with at least 10 gravioli experiments stored in my lander can. You can't have completely identical experiments though. So 1 experiment per instrument per biome, including that, for example, "in space low over the Mun's Midlands" counts as different from "in space high over the Mun's Midlands" counts as different from "in space high over the Mun's Highlands." At least, it counts as different for the Gravioli detector. Different instruments have different effective biomes. I did also notice that the Goo Canisters (and I assume the Science Jr.) say they will become inoperable if you take the data out. Ed- Clarified instruments and biomes.

This was fun. I designed a rocket with a shifting thrust vector. It pitches up at launch to get out of the thick layers of the atmosphere, then as the fuel burns off, automatically leans back over for a gravity turn and horizontal acceleration. With no control systems whatsoever! Ain't physics cool? For the record, the rocket is 5 (maybe 6) parts: Nose Cone, FL-T400, FL-T800, LV-T30, LV-1R, and maybe the nubbin from a fuel line. Total downrange distance: 345km