Deadweasel

*derp* Apologies... I didn't do any back-reading. I shall blame lack of coffee. Anyway congrats on the milestone!

I'm sorry, but when I read the original post, what I got out of it was not a rant against KSP, so much as a general complaint that it's all just too hard. Seriously, docking is admittedly a bit tricky at first, but it's not *that* difficult, as many hundreds of YouTube videos and forum posts will testify. It all comes down to knowing what to watch, and knowing how various controls affect a ship's velocity. Same applies for getting to the other planets. For the longest time I only went to the Mün because I learned the trick of firing off for orbital transition just as the Mün rises over the horizon. Then I got the itch to try something new, and I kept floundering trying that "brute force" method, so I did some reading on the wiki, looked at some videos, and learned how it all works. Floundered a couple more times because I was screwing myself up with the timing, but eventually figured out how my actions were producing the results I was seeing, made some adjustments to my assumptions, and now Jool is a cakewalk to reach. If you've been playing the game since 0.8.5, and assuming you've been playing each of the releases since then, and you still haven't had the proverbial lightbulb go off over your head, perhaps the real problem isn't with the game, but with your lack of willingness to learn how it's done. Watching videos means nothing if you're not analyzing them for information that fills in what you're missing. Nobody's going to just hand you the solution on a silver platter, because everybody needs to know a little something different according to their experience and current level of knowledge. Use some critical thinking skills, watch some of those YouTube videos again, and really watch and listen to what people like Scott Manley are telling you about these maneuvers. Also, fair warning: docking and performing orbital transits are not at all similar. Learning to do one will not automatically give you the ability to do the other. HOWEVER, learning to do one will teach you some critical concepts that apply to the other. I don't know what your current level of knowledge is, going by your post, but I'm going to make the assumption that part of your docking issue has to do with rendezvous in the first place. So here's some tips that will help with that: In the map view, set your target vessel. The lower you are relative to your target, the faster you are going relative to it. Conversely, the higher you are from it, the slower you are going relative to your target. So if you achieve orbit and your target is behind you, go to a higher orbit and it will catch up, and from there you can decelerate to shrink your orbit to meet it (takes a little practice to know when and where to start the burn). If the target is ahead of you, assume a lower orbit. Once you've gotten and reached a rendezvous point, you no longer need the map view. Your navball should be showing "TARGET" in the top display. If not, click it until it does. You are now looking at your speed relative to your target. The pink targeting reticules will show you which direction your target is from you, and the yellow velocity vector will show you which direction you are moving relative to your target. Point your nose directly away from the target (the pink indicator opposite the circular one that looks like a Predator laser sight) and burn until your velocity shows near zero. Then turn back toward your target and burn directly toward it, keeping your velocity under 100m/s. Keep the yellow velocity vector within the pink targeting reticule. If it drifts, you can correct it by remembering these "rules": When burning toward your target, the yellow velocity vector will be "attracted" to your current heading (you can "pull" it upward by aiming your nose above the target and burning a bit) When burning away from your target, the yellow velocity vector will be "repulsed" by your current heading (you can "push" it in a direction by pointing your nose away from it) The farther away your nose is from the yellow velocity vector, the greater the effect will be on your course when you burn Once you're pretty close to your target, say about 1,000 meters, point your nose directly opposite your direction of travel and burn to decelerate. Turn back toward your target, and now rely exclusively on your RCS system. Nudge the ship forward again (H) and watch your speed. Watch how fast it climbs. This will tell you when you should start decelerating. As you approach, your velocity vector will drift. Use RCS translation (IJKL) to "push" the yellow velocity vector to keep it on the pink targeting reticule. When you're close enough to see your docking point, right click it and Set As Target. Adjust your course to match the new targeting reticule's location with RCS translation again. When you're within 100 meters, kill most of your forward movement and start moving the camera around to determine your orientation relative to the dock. Get yourself as perfectly perpendicular to the port as you can. It doesn't matter if your nose isn't currently pointing right at it; you just want to be sure that when you do get to it, your coming at it dead-on. After orienting, go back to using RCS translation to push the ship in-line with the target. The pink targeting reticule will now be dead-center of the navball. Nudge the ship forward toward the port. When you're very close, kill your forward movement to under 4m/s, and you should end up docking nicely. This all seems very wordy, but if you read through this and experiment a little while, you should start seeing what I'm talking about. Eventually it'll click into place and you'll be docking like a pro, I promise. If this is still really confusing, and if none of the other available YouTube videos are still of any help, let me know. I would be happy to put together a narrated tutorial on how it's done, along with some pointers on how the various indicators on the navball behave.

Steve Buscemi's most memorable role to-date, imo.

Just enough to attract GreenPeace's attention.

From Page 4:

So what happens if you try to apply a completely transparent skin? Does it make their helmets vanish? ._@

I think Laythe is the only other world where jets will work.

I agree. There are far too many pawns. Ban them all. Kick them out of the stadium and revoke their contracts. No more sponsorship deals either. Stupid pawns.

@_@ Whoa, I got sig'ed? YAY!

Aha! Awesome.

It's like a KSP support group in here!

Unfortunately, no way to delete them that I'm aware of (unless you happen to be a mod), but in cases where I've dupli-posted, I just go to the redundant one and edit it to indicate as such. Usually something like --post snipped as redundant-- or --post removed for containing nuts--

You can go back and edit your original post instead of having to post more with corrections, you know.

Unless they're the dead horses that are FIFA and Madden, which will continue to be beat long after decay and scavengers have had their way.

To maintain the "purity" of the player "experience". *cough*EA*cough*

I discovered the shady realm of model "ripping". Initially I did it in an attempt to get a hold of a kerbal model I could start messing around with to teach myself "proper" modeling and rigging in 3D Studio Max. The idea was that I could produce a heavily modified derivative that could be used to create imagery for the story I've been working on. Then it dawned on me that while I'm having a hard time with organic modeling in that program, I already have some pretty solid experience with Sketchup, which is really sweet for mechanical/architectural stuff. Since 3DS Max can import the ripped meshes, and Sketchup can import Max's .3DS format, I realized I had a conversion path that would allow me to pull assembled ship models over to a program I know how to work with very well. Sadly Sketchup can't deal with the .dds textures that are produced with the rip, but that's okay because I don't want the final product to be an exact reproduction of the game model. If I did that, I couldn't (easily) produce the neat shine effects on some of those parts (the RollKage, wings etc). The initial model after cleanup (the ripping process results in two versions of the mesh, intersecting each other at an angle, so the "extra" parts have to be removed and the remaining final model aligned with the primary axes) After initial cleanup, the model is then further refined to remove extra lines and faces. When it's all ready, I can begin texturing the model using Indigo's (a third-party renderer) materials editor, which lets me bring in materials that have surface texture and reflectivity like the wings and RollKage "paint". Other parts get simple colors because they aren't expected to have special visual qualities to make them stand out. They can be considered to have been simply painted with a flat matte paint. From there, the model is copied into another model of an appropriate-looking hangar facility, complete with customized textures on the lights that Indigo understands to be actual light emitters. A little experimentation results in lights that are dialed in to the appropriate intensity and color for the scene I'm looking for. Indigo does the rest of the really slick work in producing the final render, providing the actual lights and reflections in the final image. Each render takes about three or four hours (with this particular complex model) to get to a point where I can consider it done. Since Indigo is what's called an "unbiased renderer", technically it would keep crunching almost forever, tracing light rays again and again, refining the image further with each pass that gets successively longer. As it proceeds, it fills in missing pixels which are called "fireflies", resulting from surfaces that are lit primarily from third-hand or greater light reflections. You can see them in the driving lights on top of the cage. And here's the result of allowing Indigo to have its way with the model overnight instead of just a few hours All in all, I'm pretty excited to have figured this out, as I can then start bringing in kerbals that have been dressed and posed the way I want them for specific scenes in the story, instead of doing simple crop-n-chop Photoshop images like these

They can't work because you can't just attach links to files that are sitting on your hard drive. If that were possible, you'd have one massive and glaring security hole going on! Easiest way to do it is to go to imgur.com Create a free account Drag images to the Images tab After upload, click one of the image thumbnails, click the Copy icon on the BBCode line in the window that pops up Simply paste here and it'll work like neo-techno-magic!

Hello, welcome, and WOW! THIS​, folks, is how one makes an entrance!

Discovered a (pretty hack-y) means of turning this ...into this!

Actually, yes, ascents are boring... IF you keep building sane and working rockets. This is not in keeping with the teaching of the Church of Jebediah. Start building less sane things, and suddenly ascents become fun again. In fact, the attraction could be compared to why folks like to watch NASCAR or hockey.

What do your directories look like? They should be under GameData/AviationLights/Parts

Um... wut. MOAR DETAILS

Not really possible to distribute those things, guys. It's one thing to extract them for use in your own artwork, but quite another to start spreading them around.

Toying around with translating assembled crafts from the game into Sketchup, then getting up to no good with a renderer that I'm coming to know pretty well these days