Corona688

More rules I've realized I'm following: Never clip instruments, probe cores, or command pods. It's okay to clip things inside simple, structural parts, anything you could conceivably drill a hole through and not destroy it, i.e. clipping inside a nosecone. Clipping through a service bay is also OK as long as you don't clip through the doors or block their range of motion. Solar panel groups shouldn't clip through anything when extended, in any range of motion. (I use the 1x6 a lot more than the 2x3!) If you use bigger/faster communicators, still include a communotron-16, the big ones are fragile. Dish antennas should point towards unobstructed space. Never clip anything but the very outer parts of parachute packs.

The brakes are different from every other action group -- they are momentary. This is still true when you use them for anything else. This can be very useful for bang-bang control of lander engines: Hold B to fire engines, let go to shut down. No more need for finicky shift/lctrl fiddling when doing a finicky landing, just hit B to provide a brief pulse of thrust. Of course, if your craft includes actual brakes anywhere... Beware.

An external seat isn't just emergency control, it's also emergency lights (kerbal spacesuit).

Just here for the snacks, I take it

The GRABOID had its first success almost instantly, an easy intercept with a floating engineer then an easy intercept with Station B.

Not content with stealing all their personnel, I've decided to steal the lab modules I've been rescuing them from. Presenting the General Rescue And Burglary Operational Infrastructure Drone, or GRABOID. It's got about 800m/s dv not counting RCS, and features excellent RCS balance full and empty, a probe core, command seat, and both common sizes of docking ports. Should be able to rescue, move, and steal tons of stuff with it.

Snark isn't useful. What's your system, memory, video card, etc?

What's your system, memory, video card, etc? It's plainly worse for you than others. I haven't had a crash in days. But if I run it on my laptop, which has poor graphics and only 4 gigs of ram, it's not reliable. That is the biggest thing that can be done to optimize the game, I think -- reduce memory use. Some early design decisions, such as 'load every single part at start', no longer make sense.

Lately a lot of mine have been boring like 'Space Station Upgrade' and 'Rescue Pod'. There's still a few highlights though. Daredevil Pod -- heat shield, external seat, RCS, parachute, and nothing else. It only saves $200 and a tiny bit of weight on a mk1 pod, though, leading to: Hat Pod -- mk1 pod with parachutes, heatshield, and a radial RCS tank 'hat'. I want to equip the space station with a few. Muffin Man -- It's a suborbital missile. Wordplay on the 'Minute Man' missile. Munbird -- big multipart moon rescue / satellite / lander mission. Zombie Lander -- lopsided-looking and very minimal mun lander with materials bay

Interesting, they probably spread it out like that to avoid a logjam of downloads.

Sony North America and Sony Europe are independent companies. Just because one certifies a game for regional sale doesn't mean the others will. This is a very common cause of these delays.

Makes sense to me, space debris usually comes from an orbit similar to your own, so there's designated regions for disposal etc.

That's great. Again, you've taken the exact opposite meaning from things written just to make yourself angrier. Do you want to be angry, or do you want to actually solve this problem? If you want to help, you can -- but noise isn't how you do it. If you don't want to help, then don't. You'll just have to wait like the rest of us. Yes, work is harder than being angry. That's life for you. See you later.

Came to the conclusion that $200 wasn't enough savings to justify sending kerbals home in a chair strapped to a heat shield rather than a pod. Also, there's a big savings in part count.

*baffled silence* What did you think it was for before?

They've got rocketpacks, which you can turn on and off with 'r'. Then you use wasd to move them around in horizontal directions, lshift/lctrl to move them up and down vertically. Turn off the rocket pack before you tell them to grab a ladder.

Weight. The rocket equation is a tyrant and multi-kerbal command pods are horrendously heavy.

That is exactly the opposite of my suggestion. Keep testing. Keep doing useful things. And above all keep posting them on the bug tracker, the thing the devs built so people could bring bugs to their attention. Don't post that you're doing things. Post what you're doing, post screenshots, post files, post examples, post details. That's what it's there for. They notice it. That is much harder for devs to overlook than angry excrementsposts here and all over, with no conceivable use to them or anyone, in the wrong subforums of a forum they rarely read anyway. In short: If you want the bug fixed, post useful things, in the right place. If you're just enjoying your tantrum, by all means keep doing what you're doing, but don't pretend you're doing anything but embarrassing yourself. P.S. LOL at "vet". I remember bugs that could curl your hair.

I suspect so. They can interact with most parts on EVA.

The game is a memory pig already Updating procedural terrain isn't as easy as painting on it Not everyone has the best video card in the world, particularly their new console users Better planetary graphics don't give us anything more to do on one than take samples and leave They've got some critical bugs to squash

They're not about to put that sort of AI in the game, there's lots of situations where enabling hardware without asking you can cause disaster. Hilarious comedies of error shouldn't be the game's fault. One example, an ion craft in low Kerbin orbit making a long burn. Night happens, as it does, and the primary batteries run dry. The game reacts by opening your emergency batteries and dropping out of physwarp -- draining them instantly. Annoying but not the end of the world. 3 years later, you make an insertion burn into close Jool orbit and launch your first probe -- which tumbles away with 0.07/200 battery. Oh, right... The probe WAS the emergency battery, and gets used first since it was the root of your spacecraft. So, one solution is not god for all. It'd be nice to tell it what to do in an emergency. A 'power low' action group, maybe. Action groups -> power low, ion drive -> shutdown, battery -> enable, solar cells -> extend, voila. Foolproof. ...unless it decides to do so 5 seconds off the launch pad, but then it's just hilarious.

No longer a joke. It worked. ("hoggy darn" is a moon in a 50's scifi pulp.)

That's a really neat idea, and once the cargo bay bug is fixed I'd love to see it. Until then, probably impractical. Imagine the stayputnik hitting you with 'cannot deploy while stowed' when the antenna's on the outside. OTOH, the Stayputnik isn't a hollow shell either, it does things. Maybe one hemisphere is occupied and the other is free? [editing the edited edit] Acually, stuff on the inside of an unopenable satellite would be unusable without action groups.

It's an early-game part, like the RT-10. Removing it would make career mode a lot harder.

"Sleep mode" would mean turning off nonessential features, and a stayputnik has none. It receives signals from ground control, that's what it does, turn it off and it stops doing that. The ability of a lone stayputnik to turn itself off maybe isn't obviously useful, but don't forget the game's origins. In the early game which had nothing but kerbin, mun, and basic engines, we had to budget power just like we budgeted fuel. When probes got involved, we didn't want to turn them off but were sometimes forced to, if we ever wanted to use them again. One example -- orbital rescues. Without solar cells, your robot ship can't linger and correct for days on end. You must pick the right moment to launch, find a good 0.1km intercept ASAP, then turn off the probe. Your rescuee thus gets a live craft instead of a dead one. Another use -- remote craft where a kerbal will be sent to retrieve something later. If your VAB can't support enough parts to send everything to the mun in one big launch, instruments can be landed by robot and results grabbed by a kerbal on EVA after. That is, if you turned off the probe core, to prevent the batteries going flat. A Mk 1 has no life support -- a spacesuit is worn inside it which can sustain one kerbal for a good while.