Corona688

What mods do you use? I suspect the repeated crashes and hangs are related to those.

http://burningsmell.org/ksp/KSP4.xls This does not handle xenon, RCS, or nuclear engines, just LFO with a bit of boosters nailed on. What it can do is straight staging, asparagus staging, twisted candle staging, droptanks, or most combinations thereof. How to use it: Set the payload weight. All the way in the upper right. Tell it what engines you'll be using. See the big green "engine inputs" area? Set engine to "thud" to pull up a thud's stats above it. Then set 1 for "atmo" if you'll use primarily in-atomsphere or 0 if primarily in vaccuum. Then tell it how many of that engine it will have under "# Engines". Describe the stage. "Staging inputs" is where the magic happens. You put 1 where you want engines to fire, 0 where you want engines doing nothing, and -1 where you want engines ejected. You can see that at "liftoff", every single engine will fire, because this is an asparagus lifter. But no particular order is enforced, so you can calculate straight staging just as easily. Set the stage name. They don't do anything, they're just for your own sanity. Input LFO for the stage. Right beside "staging inputs" you see "LFO" and "Solid". The liftoff stage has 2880 LFO, meaning its intended to burn 2880 fuel then throw away the empty tank. It also has 5200 solid from two kickback boosters. Set the "fudge" value. This is a lift-off thing. How much delta-v is wasted in low-TWR and atmospheric drag? I roughed it with 0.5 for 50% at liftoff. I might figure out a better way, at least there's a place for it to go. Example: "The Refresher". Because why not pick a rocket which exposes gaping problems in my spreadsheet. This is more or less the rocket shown in the spreadsheet. Payload weight is 10 tons. It has four sets of engines: A single skipper, a pair of thuds, another pair of thuds, and a pair of skippers. The thuds are two independent sets so they can be ejected independently. Liftoff: All engines fire. The skipper, the thuds, the kickbacks, everything. In my staging, that's a 1,1,1,1. All couplers have fuel crossflow enabled, with the bottom tanks burning first. Bottom-most stage has 1440+720 fuel. You might notice a problem already: A kickback burns an entire minute, my bottom LFO stage does not. In truth, with crossflow enabled, that wasn't a problem though, just wait longer. Sustain: All the thuds remain burning, but the kickbacks and skipper are thrown away. There is 1440 fuel in this stage. That's a 1,1,-1,-1. Circularize: A set of two thuds are thrown away, the remaining two keep burning. 1,-1,0,0. This is more like a 20-ton-to-orbit booster, much to my surprise, which technically halves the cost per ton. And technical which saves you money is the best kind of technical.

Module A has finally, finally, FINALLY arrived in orbit around Minmus. With it I should be able to simultaneously satisfy about 4 contracts - build a base around minmus, explore minmus, plant a flag on minmus, etc, etc. Not pictured, a rocket rover rover already enroute to the surface. Also, figured out a way to fuel long-distance things. They'll pay me 40,000 to do a simple LKO rescue. For that I can send up my super-long-range rescuer, which includes a ton more fuel, dock it, and keep that fuel for other use.

Made a lucky pair of high-speed encounters: I was on-course to rendezvous with a kerbal to rescue in 1h30m, then Proto Station some hours later. Switching to their wreck, I realized it would pass Proto Station by 7km in 26 minutes! My rescue craft burned 240m/s to get there first and accomplish the entire flight plan in one swell foop. That's the fastest I've ever flown a spacesuit anywhere...

Autostrut + parts offset inside other parts can cause phantom forces. I suggest putting parts inside little bays instead.

I dare you to beat my worst mission ever, a rescue where the rescuee got spaghettified...

Near the beginning of the game, when every craft is a custom job, I head straight to the VAB. Once I've got a library of ships built up, it's much faster to head straight to the pad and dial up a '0T rescue bot pro' or '2S Relay Two' than load it up in the VAB.

Two passengers of the Eyelander squint and try to see the flag they watched the pilot plant half-an-hour ago. The other four passengers really wish they'd bought better tickets. This is the first mun-touring system I didn't have to get out and push for. The lander's 180 fuel is just enough to drop from a 15K obit, land, and get back. The tug's 720 is just enough to get to the mun, circularize, leave the mun, recircularize around Kerbin, and rendezvous with the fuel platform with just 50m/s to spare. [edit] The "rendezvous" occurred at 100m/s. Everyone survived but I'm adding another 360 fuel to the tug.

The craft was entirely hypothetical. They were still working out the math for highest delta-v. Those seem fitting. Seems less ridiculous to me than plain asparagus, since it only pipes fuel for the little engines, not the big one.

Eh, the manual part hasn't become annoying to me yet. This is far less manual work than necessary for the weirdest of my craft, where I fly around frantically transferring fuel and adjusting thrust limiters percent at a time to keep them balanced The term was invented in a topic about enormous ion probes. Empty xenon tanks are a lot of dead weight so it makes sense to ditch them periodically, but how to do so when you only have one engine?

What's left for me to do? Banana staging is when you throw away the core of your craft, usually a big droptank, and keep the "peel". This is just staging.

Made my first "by the numbers" asparagus superlifter: Using thuds lets me stage it normally while fueling it asparagus...ly. All engines fire while only the bottom tanks drain, eject, at the appropriate time, rinse, repeat. As drawback, engines don't run out, you have to watch tanks. The ultimate goal is to place that satellite in a really eccentric solar orbit, so I took along lots of fuel and went up retrograde. Target was 4km/s for a 9-ton payload. Payload ended up being rather heavier than that, requiring a pair of kickbacks and a really direct ascent curve, but it made it to retrograde orbit with significant leftover fuel on top of that in the payload, so I was in the ballpark. Manuevering with only a pair of thuds is really weird. if you only have a pair it may be good to just lock their gimbals.

Oh god. I briefly worked in (well... got pushed into kicking-and-screaming) small desktop publishing and understand all too well. "Why does our ad look bad", because you sent us a 500x200 gif, your website had nothing better, and you ignored us for two months straight. Too late now.

"What should happen to stages of two docked craft" is a pretty tough question. Every "good" way I can think of ends up being good for a few of my designs and terrible for the rest. Just rehecking everything seems to be the way to go.

I've seen your mod before and always considered it interesting. I am not trying to insult mods, just clumsily asking if it's a feature of the game engine or an extension of it. I see your point and agree. A delay/echo might actually sound good when firing 12 decouplers, which is the one time we don't of course. I've got my own sound mod going on, just sticking to config-level modding since that seems the least likely to break in the long term: Sorry, I wasn't trying to be negative. I just wanted to know if it was a game engine feature or a game engine extension.

I hope it still counts, that asteroid may not be class B anymore It's tough to make these profitable. You need to make big changes in a big rock's delta-v without hauling up a good fraction of its own weight in fuel, not even ion drives are that magical. If you catch it far enough away, though, you've got plenty of time for interplanetary billiards, which you play by almost-but-not-quite hitting the other balls. Gravity slingshots can slow you down, too (or, rather, speed up the other direction).

So, you actually can't, someone needs to invent it?

You can? How? As I've been doing audio modding anyway...

Nothing amazing, just a spreadsheet: It can do straight staging, droptanks, and asparagus just by changing where you put 1(engine burn), 0 (engine idle) and -1 (engine eject) in the green grid on the lower left. It can't do boosters, yet.

That would work. If you teleport ships around it doesn't really matter whether Duna's in phase. What if you want to cooperate on a project, though?

KSP career mode does have an endgame of sorts, "the ultimate contract", which you get offered when your reputation is really high: Visit every single body in the system with the same craft. I've never seen it before, but this time I plan to play it until I do.

The problem remains: How to handle Timewarp. He's on Jool, you're on Kerbin, how to meet? Unless you just teleport ships around. I guess time doesn't strictly need to be synchronized. Little things like the place of planets in the sky might be different in his save and yours, but if you're in the same SOI, the physics shouldn't care.

It'd be tricky, but possible. The way the game puts ships on rails is helpful. Many of the needed changes would also be useful in single-player games, too. How I'd do it: Keep KSC time and ship-time separate. Time at the KSC is always "present day". When a ship goes on rails, it goes into "ship time" and stays there. This means you could launch a Jool probe, timewarp all the way there, then return to the KSC a few hours after launch. This would be useful in general, not just for multiplayer. This bit has to be built first, everything else hinges on it. Put a scrollwheel for time in the tracking center. This is different from time-warp. It can show where craft will be in the future. It cannot scroll back past KSC time. Allow the "fly" option for ships in the future. You can set the tracking station six months ahead then jump into your Duna lander, which will timewarp six months automatically for you. There would be restrictions on this. Once you've flown something at T+1Y, you can't change your mind and fly it at T+6D. Add "co-op" option. This would be available in the tracking station when a connected player is flying something in your future. If anything you own is in their SOI while they're there, you can jump into the same context. Add a "watch" option. Other player's objects, including ones not being flown, could be viewed but not flown, kind of like debris. This could sometimes be annoying. "Hey Jake, would you watch that debris for me? I want it to burn up" How would timewarp work in "co-op"? Slowest player chooses. If I set 50x and you set 10x, we get 10x. This lets any player pull both from timewarp if they see something amiss. There are a lot of corner cases and if you look too close, things won't be quite right. You could land on Duna, wait 2 years, and see someone's inert base mysteriously appear, leap into the air, and crash the game. You might drop out of co-op without warning when changing SOI. Kerbals might die, ressurect, and zombify. It would be very silly and Kerbal, hair-pullingly frustrating, and hopefully very fun. It will probably have to be a mod. If it's a good enough mod they might want to make it stock someday. "Someone else is there" is a pretty good reason. There's not a lot of reason to do anything in creative-mode minecraft but when multiplayer's involved people go crazy.

Blackout bars? Is that a stock thing? I've never noticed them. I support the majority of these ideas! For "never auto-board kerbals", I've noticed that when the root part isn't a cockpit, it may forget to board a pilot, so that's a possible workaround.

Early sketch concepts for the VAB included a skycrane to move around parts. That would be awesome, but might get in the way? Unless it went transparent like fairings do.