Corona688

This is my Minmus fuel depot. The orange tank on right is a "banana tank", a self-motivated shipping container. They're reliable and efficient, also well-balanced enough to land on my mining vehicle. I tend to send them where I want them instead of vice versa, making the station more of a crossroads than a dump. That may change if I have to build anything especially large.

So that is not just a return craft but an entire lander? Crossing my fingers for you, but depending on parachutes on Duna is generally a recipe for heartbreak.

Oh. Um. Why does your ascent vehicle have a drillomatic and rover?

I like it! But there must be more to it. Where's the tanks? Where's the retrorockets?

Sorry to butt in again, but I just found out something crucial: Radial-out, on the ground, is "hover-mode". It's crucial for stabilizing precision VTOL craft, especially anything which needs to land within meters of its target. This also puts their targeting features in a new light. So I think that's what the large probe cores are intended for: Medium and large landers for hitting waypoints, assembling bases on the ground, etc. The OKTO2 and HECS2 can also do this, but require containers or fairings.

Stop the presses! Radial Out is the "hover" setting. Radial Out is the "hover" setting. Why didn't anyone tell us this!? And just yesterday I was thinking "Ugh, centering it would be easier if this stupid purple mark wasn't always there".

No such thing as passive stability without atmosphere, not without any drag to buoy you down. I don't think angled engines does quite what you think either, the thrust vector just adds up to down, though you might get some effective increase in gimbal range. What, seriously? Why doesn't it move --- .. well okay, but shouldn't it -- okay, maybe not, but -- if the -- with the -- ...! Arrrgh. That's brilliant! That should be stable as long as you're moving around at well under surface velocity. If it works the way I think it does. Which would mean it wouldn't work at the poles, but they're a silly place anyway. Time to research those big probe cores I guess.

Landed on a docking port on the mun. THAT WAS SO MUCH HARDER THAN MINMUS. I nearly ran out of everything on the way down. The sideways drift was wild, to the point it was hard to tell when I'd actually docked! The problem is, you cannot aim PERFECTLY upwards on a probe's navball, causing a minute sideways thrust proportional to what you're using to hover. Since the mun has 3 times the gravity of minmus, that's 3 times as much drift while hovering. And if you don't constantly fight this drift, it'll snowball into a sideways 3m/s that you'll never stop on target. Next time I try this, I'm bringing verniers. MORE POWER!

P.S. When I say "point straight up", I mean STRAIGHT UP. Any slight angle off becomes a slow drift that will become unstoppable if you let it accumulate long enough, That's what's happening when you steamroller straight past your target sideways - you've gradually accumulated a sideways 4m/s drift and can't possibly stop in time. You'll end up fighting it with RCS most of the way. The higher the gravity, the worse this drift is. Anywhere but Minmus, you'll need more RCS punch than you would in space.

More information required.

When I do docking-from-orbit I do it in several phases. Rough intercept, just by eyeballing and nodes in map view. I don't aim to land on the target, as much as do a low flyover directly overhead which intersects the surface some distance past it. This can get you within 10km, surface-wise. Deceleration, killing much (though not all) of my velocity near/overtop the target. I burn at 45 degrees or so, so I don't end up too short. This is also a good time to correct your course if your direction is off. Straight-line distance should be less than 5km now. Sustain, pointing straight up and applying enough thrust to keep the prograde marker a little above my target. This can get me within a hundred meters. Hover, killing all velocity and getting my engines to as close to 1.0 local-g as I can manage. Docking, hovering on 1.0 local-g thrust and using RCS thrusters to move me around. If the target isn't visible on navball you'll have to watch your RCS thusters in the live view and rough it in the right direction until it is. Do yourself a favor and practice this on Minmus, where you can hover for tens of minutes at very little cost.

Dr Who is old enough to have had several completely different target audiences from inception to modern day. The modern version is cringy by way of over-catering to its fanbase.

I too. I don't think you're understanding what I'm saying and continuing on without it... What I'm pointing out is that the gaming culture as a whole has changed. Expectations have grown. Small shops have been squeezed as we demand more and more for less and less, while big shops take fewer risks than ever, churning out the same garbage on repeat. KSP wouldn't have been made in the old-fashioned development model. Too big a risk to hope that an intimidatingly-technical single-player explosive flying midget simulator could find a mass audience. You could wait a year and let others do it for you, for about the same effect as the old-fashioned model. That's usually what I do. I don't care about preorders or getting in early unless I find something really interesting. The alternative is sky-high AAA prices. (Which AAA games abuse to the point of breaking, of course.) Gamers demand so much now.

Exactly. That's apples and oranges since PC gaming has never been that way. Wrong question. Try, "how long can you study before you run out of air"? Console games are created on life support supplied by a big company like Nintendo or Sony -- Indie games have to publish or asphyxiate. It's not a problem if you work for free. A few big outfits like Accolade tried the console model on PC, but it turns out that People don't ENJOY paying console-like prices for PC games It's hard to get consistent results when your customers aren't using 100 million identical gaming units So they had to lower their standards somewhat.

No offense - you really don't remember what it was like in the day. Computers were changing so fast that you'd buy a game and just have to hope it would work. If it didn't, you'd return it, or upgrade your computer, or move around your memory & driver kludges until it worked. This was normal. This magical time when bugs were fewer and better-behaved only really happened for cartridges. Even then, the bugs weren't quite as few or well-behaved as people rosily recall now. People have been shrieking about their saves being eaten since saves were invented.

I remember those days. They sucked. Bugs still existed - we just couldn't complain about them. Looking back on it, a few of my old favorites are almost unplayable by modern standards. The instant publishers found an efficient way to publish patches, they did. That's in part what the shareware revolution was about. Also, expectations were so much lower - If a game didn't work, we'd blame our computer and move on.

Haven't seen a mod that improves KSP's graphics without insanely bloating the performance requirements. Music, they could improve without as much bloat.

Just the popup would be nice, though, and might actually be doable.

And in case you doubt they ever actually flew this thing, look here.

First, agreed, it's all about the slicer, whether it will understand a model generated in this manner. You're not really supposed do to that. Sometimes it can work, sometimes that generates internal defects, sometimes the process breaks down. It's not reliable. Netfabb corrects errors - it can't remove flaws. If there's 5 problematic polygons preventing your model from being a proper manifold, netfabb might fix it. If your model is 27 intersecting STL's jammed on top of each other, it's not going to be a proper manifold. Garbage in, garbage out. The only tool I've seen which does a good job of jamming different meshes together is OpenSCAD, because it does it the mathematically hard way, not the quick and easy way. It will take a hell of a long time, and eat up gigabytes of memory trying, but if the meshes are valid, will probably work.

I've brought six full orange tanks to orbit: And reached orbit in nothing but a trashbin and a pair of spiders. I've built off-kilter shapes to reduce dead weight: I've changed panes of flight midflight for easier packing. I've built ships entirely out of space junk. If it looks stupid and works, it might still be stupid, but also worked.

That's a good start, though I should note that "file compatible" does not mean "actually works". It almost certainly just dumps the raw meshes without combining them, which is going to be very hard on a 3d printer and generate a print with lots of weird voids.

And so it is: The "11J Prograde Runner" has been assigned to move passengers to and fro Minmus. I'll make another, less ad-hoc, for mun service.

Assembled every piece of functioning orbital debris into one glorious katamari: The "stretch-limo" in front, assembled from a passenger tug, lander, and discarded piece of station, is especially interesting. Now that I have a fuel service running on Minmus, it may be a decent courier.

I wouldn't want to have to do it on the mun. You should try it on Minmus, you can hover for freaking hours for almost nothing. Another way to cheat, math+thrust limiter on engines for near-perfect hover.