Hremsfeld

Unsolicited/too late financial advice here: KSP is fun and all, but it's just a game. If you need to live beyond your means to play it, then don't play it. Needs such as food and shelter should always come before wants such as a game about little green astronauts.

Hey, Fractal, the good idea fairy came to visit me: Is it possible to make it so the generators etc only produce electric charge, but if a ship's making more than 1000 electric charge per second in total from all sources the extra automatically goes to Megajoules?

The way an Alcubierre drive theoretically works is by compressing space in front of the drive and expanding it behind the drive. It doesn't actually provide any impulse, but it means that a ship moving, say, 2km/s in its own reference frame (needs a better description) could be moving 302,000km/s in the reference frame of Kerbin - to an outside observer, this breaks the speed limit that is c, but internally they're subluminal. The point I'm working towards is that, if you were to use this on Kerbin, the edge of the atmosphere would be a lot closer, but you still wouldn't be moving. Also the planet would probably be destroyed, which is bad. Antimatter exists naturally, a few atoms at a time, in planetary-sized magnetic fields and possibly thundercells. What the antimatter collectors do is harvest these particles and move them to a storage container for later use. Stronger magnetic fields will mean more anti-particles, hence Jool and the Sun being great places to harvest them. Magnetic fields themselves fall off with the inverse-square law, which means that if you double the distance you are from the center of the field, the strength of the field is reduced to one-quarter, so collecting from lower altitudes is more efficient. However, I'm guessing that at lower altitudes the magnetic field itself pushes away the particles, so you want to find the sweet spot where the Antimatter Flux is highest; as ratzap pointed out, that's at around 900km on Kerbin and probably right where its own Van Allen radiation belts would be. For the first: Yes, very much so, the only problem would be getting it back to Kerbin. Also, in a move that should surprise absolutely no one, it's a wonderful place to put a solar farm. As for making exotic matter, I don't think I've got the latest version installed, so you may want to either wait for another answer, check the documentation if it's in it, or try things until it works. Cheers!

enwp.org/UF6

The first crewed capsule is automatically filled with kerbals in .20.x; if the root's a probe, and then you place a three-kerb and then a one-kerb, you get three kerbals. If you go probe->1->3, you get one kerbal. Version .21 will allow you to choose where to put kerbals, and therefore where not to.

Because of its license. You can get it out of the OP.

Might be a dumb question, but when you switch to rocket mode, are you closing your air intakes? They provide substantially more drag when open than when closed. Also, if you still have a lot of liquid fuel but run out of oxidizer, you may wish to replace one of the inline liquid-fuel-only tanks with LF/OX; if all but one already are, try replacing that last one. Jets don't use much liquid fuel for the time they're active, so you can easily use a main tank.

Yeah, I'm not sure why it was champagne-corking when it was just sitting on the launchpad; I've had denser objects behave themselves just fine. I guess it is a mystery. I figured, if I'm going to config-edit something as ridiculous as a Zubrin into existence, it was a case of go-big-or-go-home, so 90% enriched was the obvious choice. The mass change sounded good, though. Also, I'd blatantally disregarded significant figures for my vacuum-Isp calculations. Using a few formulae found here and there, I came up with a 479,543s specific-impulse...The atmosphere one was a 100% genuine Rectal Extraction Figure. Either way, smoothly adjusting the throttle is key to avoid having an engine fly through the cockpit; Interestingly, MechJeb can throttle it to the point of an acceleration of a few hundred tens of millimeters per second, so this thing can land, lack-of-legs be damned. Double Edit: Nope, the engine goes straight through terrain. Ah well, it's a fast trip back. If you want to show off Hohmann vs. Brachiostochrone, I cobbled this together:

You could simply open the .cfg file in the Squad folder, make changes, and save. Alternatively, copy the file to your RandomFolderName folder, make changes there, and save it with the same part name. If you know you're never going to use the vanilla version, just overwrite what's already there; it's easier that way.

I believe this is the case. I can't say for sure, because I don't have them, but I think I read that in a discussion somewhere. In other news, I tried config-editing the KSPX large nuclear engine to be a Zubrin drive. The results were...interesting. Doubly so because I just now realized that engine power in .cfg files is in kiloNewtons, so this thing's 1000 times more powerful than it's supposed to be. Oops.

Bingo. If a ship is in another sphere of influence, you can just point antennae at the relevant S.O.Is and it'll work fine. If it's in the same S.O.I but out of antenna range, you have to have the relevant ships point at each other.

Idea: Docking ports. One on the launchpad, one on the bottom of your tanker. You'll unfortunately need to make it a VTOL tanker, rather than a more conventional truck. However,if you park atop the pad such that your docking ports connect, it should do the trick. I just thought of this now, so I haven't tested it; what I'd done before is "launch" another launchpad with a bunch of fuel tanks on it, sitting atop a truck, and then I detached it from the truck upon driving off the original launchpad.

No. He means that you outright shouldn't use the Communitron antenna on a probe-only launch; If you extend it so that you can actually get into orbit, it will fall off. If you don't extend it, you'll go out of range 2km up. If you stick another antenna on there to get you up, what's the point of having the Communitron?

I've got it installed, too. I just finished mapping Moho, and, well, note the resource counts on this large screenshot with an unreasonable number of mechjeb tabs. If I change to showing the location of Ore, the hex map will change to display only Ore; this map is not a Kethane-and-Ore map, and it is not a Kethane-union-Ore map, it is strictly a Kethane map. To me, this is preferable.

That made me laugh more than it probably should have. I agree, though; the communitron being destroyed if open and virtually useless if closed on ascent isn't a good place to be. I modified my .cfg to have it work to 100km when closed; I like your 60km (or 50, even? When are solar panels safe?) range better, because you have to actually deploy them.

I noticed something odd a few minutes ago when I was filling up. The map only updates when on rails, i.e. if you're sitting at 1-4x with drills out, the quantity listed in a hex will not change. However, as soon as you go to 5x or higher, it will continually show the changing amount in the deposit.

Oh! Okay, I just misunderstood you. Thank you for the clarification!

Use the latest dev build, there should be a link in the OP.

Question: The location of deposits isn't changing from night to day, so could you please share your reasoning for hiding data on the night side of a body? Or, if I completely and totally misinterpreted what you were trying to say, what did you mean? I mapped Moho yesterday, and could see the hex grid fine, whether I was on the nightside, dayside, or inside of the planet.

I said this quite a few pages back, but what I've done is just reduce the conversion efficiencies; Instead of ConversionEfficiency = 1 for Ore->Metal, I use 0.25. This is still very ore-rich regolith, but it's not perfect conversion. Metal->Rocket Parts is more efficient, so I set ConversionEfficiency = 0.9

Download/reinstall 1.9.8, select the parts in the editor, delete them normally, uninstall 1.9.8 If you're trying to get them off a ship that's already launched, you'll need to make a backup of your persistence file, and then delete every mention of a MJ1 part out of your main persistence file. This means deleting the parts themselves and references to the parts where other parts attached to them/were attached to them.

Those parts no longer exist. You transfer by docking/otherwise attaching the two vessels together, or using the quantum fuel/lazor transfer systems. The control item is just plain gone, as the parts have their own functionality. Edit: I don't feel like double posting. The update from 0.7 to 0.7.1 requires an 0.7 save, right? I've been away for long enough to have not gotten 0.7 before the hotfix, so my kethane save is version 0.6.1; will this be a problem, and if so, how do I fix it?

On the topic of resources overlapping (or not), might I suggest that scanning only displays "Last Deposit" location and size for the resource currently being displayed? For example, if I have EL installed and go over an Ore deposit, my Kethane map will say there's a deposit below me of a certain size, but obviously not show it due to the resource difference.

Stick a few docking ports on there, practice your pinpoint landings, and call it a day?