Deadweasel

I see what you're getting at with the planet details, and you're right: it would take a ton of power that most people don't have to simulate active conditions on planets, but to your later point regarding simplified physics, Unity isn't going to be able to do that sort of detail. Harvester has been working on a neat process to get more details out of a surface, as currently all of the surfaces on the planets are simply hand-painted height maps, which results in fairly low details (seriously, would you like to paint an entire planet's-worth of interesting topography? It'll take months for one person to produce the kinds of details you're talking about.) That said, again, planetary bodies don't really have physics applied to them on a system-wide scale. None of the orbiting bodies have any influence over one another. The flip when transitioning from one sphere of influence to another is abrupt and instantaneous, which is why there are no lagrange points between Kerbin and the Mün, for example. Because of this, and because none of the terrain details are loaded when at a distance, it should be possible to have just about any layout you can imagine, though I would think overlapping spheres of influence might just result in the birth of another kraken. Here's a direct rip of what's loaded and running in the game, with one Kerbal standing on the runway, and nothing more: That's a decent chunk of the planet's surface that's in view of the camera at the time. The player location is in that tiny square with the black artifacts in the lower right frame. The KSP itself occupies a teeny tiny corner of that square. The rest of the mesh is composed of two layers. There is the general planet's spehere, and directly on top of that is another layer containing the topography. In the upper left frame, you can see the KSP's deep red quad, and the rest of what's in the camera's view is produced outward from there. Notice how the mesh gets larger and larger as it gets further away from the origin point. The game is showing progressively less detail the further you get from the camera's point. Here's the important part: At the time of this capture, the Mün was at a point in its orbit where, if it were being rendered at all physically, it should have been visible in one of the views of this capture, yet there is no other mesh visible, demonstrating that the game does not load and maintain objects beyond a certain point. After that point, it seems they're little more than a 2D texture in the sky. Anyway, all this is to show that hugely improved terrain detail and more and varied worlds are absolutely possible, it just takes a lot of time to actually create it. "Rome wasn't built in a day", and all that.

Where does that assumption come from that it would require vast amounts of computational power to add more planets to the Kerbal universe? It wouldn't require tons of power to have a bunch of additional planets, seeing as how they're "on rails" and exempt from physics calculations, and the terrain meshes only load when within a certain distance of them, similar to how the ships themselves load. Moreover, the whole idea behind FTL is that it would make the distances between star systems possible to traverse, but that doesn't mean exploring the local system would become trivial, because theoretically you couldn't use such a drive in the local system anyway. I'm all for FTL, and I wouldn't mind skipping the actual travel time in order to make other systems additional "scenes" in the game, as the Kerbol system is now. It would be fun if it were a little more complicated to set up the transit between systems though. No reason it should be as easy as plopping a couple of maneuver nodes and burning.

You've got a bit of inception going on there.

Does an orbital dock count as a craft? It's got RCS control.

Don't forget to enclose your image link in tags, or it won't show up for anybody else.

Just another example for BigNose and crew to see their work in-action! This is an orbital dock I built to provide some source imagery for my story (see banner in sig). Blue nav lights are doing their sexy thing along the deck, though I'll likely double them up to increase the effect. The shuttle carries crew recovery pods that are ejected in atmosphere. When the abort is hit, the pods fire away from the shuttle core, deploy chutes, lower landing legs, and enable the amber locator beacons (visible on the windows of the crew pods) I don't think any of the ships in my fleet are without at least two of these awesome lights!

[TABLE=width: 1280] [TR] [TD]Decided to build a complete revamp of Macey Dean's Vulture class carrier, as I was using it as a starting point to create images for one of Far Horizon's docks. Unfortunately his Vulture wasn't big enough to accommodate my shuttle, so the work became less revamp and more built-from-scratch (though I did keep the Vulture's original core to build off of. Now I'm wishing the Aviation Lights mod actually allowed for sequenced lights for the nav guides (blue lights) on the deck![/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE]

[TABLE=width: 1280] [TR] [TD]Decided that I wasn't really satisfied with using Macey Dean's Vulture carrier as a quick and dirty method of getting the source images I needed for Kerbal Khronicles, especially since it couldn't fit the shuttle I had already built for future screenies for the story. So... I made my own, using the only the minimal core infrastructure from the Vulture, and completely re-tooling the entire hangar. Quite pleased with the results, but this thing is almost completely cosmetic. It has no maneuvering capability, and will come apart like a house of cards on the planet surface (it's only intended to represent one of 10 shuttle dock facilities that were part of a much larger generational ship). You can see the Vulture's original crew container doors above and below the docking port, and the edge of one of the lander cans near the "floor". Still need to tweak the light layout a little bit, but eh, later. The "launch" sequence of these pictures is actually reversed. Between the dock and the shuttle, there are around 800 parts in the vicinity, which drops the fps to about 10; barely enough to get them docked, and that's while using Romfarer's docking port camera (not easy to get many viewing angles of the port alignments when the structure is enclosed). Anyway, next stage is to fire up Ye Olde Whack-a-Kerbal(e?) and start damaging the dock a bit. After all, it's supposed to have been broken off and set adrift after the ship it was part of exploded. [/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE]

Wow... Man you're only shooting yourself in the foot by being a little too awesome at this. I mean, dang, I almost want to start pestering for one! (but I won't)

Do they speak english in What?

A word of advice, for those working with four-corner rovers and using the stock wheels: If you want to damp down the flipping on turns and brakes, do the following: Lock steering on the rear wheels (cuts back on tendency to flip in turns) Disable brakes in action group for front wheels (drastically reduces forward flips when braking) With four wheel turning, the vehicle wants to turn around its center, and tends to turn too fast, resulting in a roll-over. On low-gravity surfaces, unless your center of gravity is BELOW the wheels' center of rotation, you'll flip forward when using brakes, UNLESS the braking force is only coming from the back of the vehicle's direction of travel. Hope this helps!

And now we know where she went after the super relocation program was ratified.

If $Boamere{$Badass=11}; Any chance of snagging the .craft for this? I really like the look of it.

It's all in how you envision what's happening. When you "Control From Here", watch your navball to see how it changes, which will give you an indication of which direction the "capsule" is facing. If it was aligned properly when it was put in place, the only change you should see is the ball flipping 180 degrees, so the docking port becomes the "nose" of the ship. From there, ignore the visual cues you've built into your ship (capsule placement, wing direction etc) and just keep thinking of the docking port as the front of the craft. The RCS system will switch to reflect this as well, so control shouldn't be a huge change. ...that is, unless your docking port is rotated off-axis, so that one side of the ship is now "up" relative to the port, which will make translation control a real bugger. >_<

'Tis but a scratch!

Some of my favorites from the latest Khronicles entry. .

Well the earliest version noted is from after the forum crash, (see Changelog on page 1 of this thread), so it would seem going by the datestamp on your .rar that you were running with 2.0 or earlier, since it was uploaded December of 2012. If you're having troubles currently because Steam auto-updated your game, just snag the latest version from Spaceport, as it has long since been updated to work with .20.x.

Hahahaha!! "What just happened?"

You know what would be really cool... I noticed the IVAs of the B9 cabins have interactive computer screens that let you toggle some functions that are already controlled through keyboard anyway, but what if they could show a miniature version of the map screen instead? I know that's likely more pain to implement than it's worth, but it seems like that would have been a more helpful display.

...and off we go! "Kerbal Khronicles - 03 - Ghosts, Part I" is now live. I'm trying a slightly different layout, as I discovered I was often losing my place from line-to-line while reading in such a wide format. Please let me know if you find this a help or a hindrance.

It's a robot character from one of the stories in Heavy Metal, an old animated film made by MTV and released in 1981. The movie was a series of vignettes that told the story of an evil entity that had been influencing civilizations for eons, and those who had arisen to fight it. The robot was voiced by John Candy, and is in the story called "So Beautiful and So Dangerous", about a couple of alien stoners who accidentally abduct a busty woman who is wearing the Loc-Nar (the evil entity) as a gem in a pendant. It's an interesting and memorable film, featuring some gorgeous animation and featuring a soundtrack composed of (of course) heavy metal tracks by well-known bands. However, just because it's animated, do NOT assume it's safe for kids. There's nudity, blood, violence, sex, and blatant drug use featured in the film. It's one of very few animated films to be rated "R", and would probably have gotten "NC-17" if it had been released any later. Anyway, when I saw your rover, that robot was the first thing that came to mind. EDIT @Aragosnat: Note that it is not anime, in that it has no relation to Japanese animation. In fact the animation style is more similar to the old He-Man cartoons, but of course with a much higher level of quality and many more frames. That said, it's very similar to some anime out there, in that it features adult themes and breaks the "cartoon" stereotype for animation in the US.

It's called Rollkage. Get it here: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/rollkage-1-0/

I don't think it's a desire for an exact match, so much as trying to find a reason to justify its (the Kerbol system's) existence in the first place. Some folks have a hard time accepting something at face-value. They don't like simply nodding when somebody says "Here's a star system. It exists (in the game). It's sort of like the one we know, but it's not, and that's the way it is." That said, it's not a bad thing for folks to be reaching for the similarities. It highlights the people who are doubters; who question the things they're handed and expected to accept as-is. Yes, it's annoying at first glance for those of us who just roll with it and have fun, but try not to let it get to you, and do realize that it comes from the drive to question things that seem obvious, which is a very good quality we as a species seem to be losing, lately. The Wright brothers were told they were crazy, DaVinci was crazy, and that human flight was impossible. "We don't buy that," they said, and now here we are as a result, traveling in the sky to the other side of the globe in a day. The doubters are humanity's greatest source of ideas and progress.

...or, if it's that important, look into what's needed to KEEP what you've done while still checking out the new stuff (eg: copy the install folder elsewhere/rename it before grabbing the new stuff). Shoot, I have so many mod-based ships now that if this next update messes with the mods as well, I'm definitely going to be keeping a backup to play with until the mods catch up. The trick is getting some of the newbies to actually think ahead before they pounce the latest ohh-shiny.