Corona688

Quickly made a much better (slightly) aerodynamic VTOL, the Q-Wing. The engines (four Junos) are angled 22.5 degrees back from vertical so the plane can tilt upwards to gain aerodynamic lift without actually pointing its engines backwards. It can easily make it to the Insular Airport, land, turn around, and land at KSC again in one flight, at speeds of up to 100m/s inbetween the two. As proper for a VTOL, landing is a nerve-wracking adventure every time, more or less a switch from aerodynamic flight to intentional stall to suicide-burn.

Built a VTOL. It doesn't quite do what I was hoping, the fins generate zero lift due to their placement and the fifth engine in behind messes up its balance, but it flies.

There's also the "precooler" part which is pretty much a stock slap-on turbine.

What are you doing with your planes? I can't make that happen on purpose in 1.1.

So they just have a hard time reaching speed? Seprotrons

You're right, I forgot about mods. There's always the one mod you love which doesn't update for 6 months. You could suggest this as an addition for the 'stock bugfixes' mod.

Are they really breaking from aero forces or overheating? There's an option in there somewhere to adjust heating.

Have you tried out the 1.2 pre-release? Your mod might not be necessary.

The only time I've seen my orbits crawl around was when I was in a <10km and highly circular orbit around Minmus. The apostasis visibly moved as I watched, not so much decaying as shifting. But it didn't make a huge amount of difference for the few minutes I stayed in it, waiting for the landing site to come up.

Why not slap on some verniers?

Just that mods can give you more uses for a bigger space station (kerbal engineering, repair and move parts) or make you need more things to keep it going (life support). Otherwise, why build large?

We still don't know what his craft even looks like yet... For all we know it could be a single SRB with canards at the front.

Once in a blue moon, I still check for an ending to the jeb cliffhanger.

Eh... Until now I'd never seen anyone complain that Squad didn't break all their saves and ships. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

Fair enough. One gets a skewed impression reading the dev threads.

We'd all prefer a magic happyland where saves are compatible for all eternity no matter how drastically the game mechanics change, but I had to give up my 0.8.5 ships eventually. Meanwhile, my 1.1 ships are working as well or better in 1.2. I haven't rebuilt anything -- or rather, carried on the same design progression I was doing in 1.1. So far I've found no break-the-world changes. If anything it's a relief. Squad really can't win, can it? It's a large part of the game. You don't have to redesign but were probably doing so anyway. And now, having given people what they wanted, physics improvements and game expansion for the existing game, everyone's angry and screaming for the new parts which would break their saves. Do they want to start over? Do they want to rebuild everything every update? Squad really can't win, can it? The main difference is choice. I have the choice to continue my 1.1 save in 1.2, expand it into one using commnet, leave as is, alter my ships to 1.2's more accommodating wheel physics or use as-is, etc, etc. I don't think having this choice is a bad thing.

Focusing behind the kerbal when they leave on EVA sounds pretty obvious to me. Not sure it's even worth the bug tracker -- it's kind of a no-brainer that people would want it. It's not always that easy to determine what "behind" means in all situations. If your ship's a stack of 5 tanks, relatively easy, if it's not, how to get a view that doesn't obscure your kerbal? Not zooming when they board could be a problem -- the camera view is always fixed on something, and when they board, the something ceases to exist. 1.2 supposedly is a step towards allowing you to focus on part of a craft though, which sounds close to what you want if not quite. Focus on the cockpit / chair when they board, rather than the center of mass. EVA uses a different camera mode and flight model, too, which may be forcing the switch.

I think Squad should have kept their mouths shut about the new parts. In all the anger about porkjet being "held back" we're forgetting everything we hated in 1.1: Jinky wheels. Glitchy physics. Poor performance. In short -- nearly all the stuff 1.2 fixes. If they have to break compatibility, it's nice to have the fixes first.

This is misleading in some ways, speed is not the only thing that matters. Stationary weight alone can break a wheel. So the truth is somewhere inbetween.

The new parts are different in more than just appearance. The LV909 now includes integrated tanks, for example. I suspect save incompatibility.

There's a bug in 1.1 which generates wrong horizontal forces when a craft is on an incline. It's meant to stop it from moving when friction is sufficient but sometimes does too good a job. The devs reported it squashed for 1.2. I first noticed it on Minmus when I realized my rover was spending 3/4 of its time rolling downhill, even on a return trip. This was probably exaggerated by my rover's unicycle design... Landing gear is squirrely in 1.1 in general. The medium gear seem the least glitchy for me, I've (almost) never had those do the runway dance.

I'm not as certain 1.2 will be compatible. If we get Porkjet's new parts, which are different from the old in way more than just models, I suspect not. The prerelease seems compatible for stock saves so far.

I think it's more to do with mods... Without mods, there's very little point in launching anything much bigger than a science pod, a fuel tank, 2 docking ports and a pair of gigantors. If you see a station with 19 gigantors on it it's almost certainly using mods, what else would they do with all that power?

Once 1.2 goes gold it probably WON'T be compatible -- porkjet's new parts are way different from the old ones. For me, the The 1.2 prerelease, with all the same parts as 1.1.x, has been compatible so far. I was able to plunk in an old save and load it without issue and fly some of my old craft. The new communication features defaulted off, and took some digging to find in the game difficulty options, but nothing exploded when I turned them on (except that some of my craft were now too far away to operate). I play stock.

I prefer to have vertically oriented stations which you can dock to on the north and south ends. Docking becomes a whole lot more predictable, just get the target the appropriate north/south end of the navball and the rest is easy. I use the north end for crew and the south end for equipment.