Chris97b

Well as one of the people who tends to do that perhaps I can shed some light on the why I use stage recovery, so I prefer to stage any boosters while my periapsis is still ever so slightly negative, as that ensures that the spent stages will return to Kerbin and be recovered as opposed to becoming space debris. I tend to use shallower, almost single burn to orbit launch trajectories, so for me an ideal ascent involves using just a small bit of the orbit stage to finish the initial launch burn (typically 50m/s or so). Basically this lets me maximize deltaV from the booster, while still dropping it with a negative pe. In order to do this, I need to separate the capsule while still atmospheric, typically 50-55km. I could launch in such a way that I clear the atmosphere before separation, but that would leave me slower at ap, and require more fuel from the orbit stage to circularize. I have been meaning to play around with tweaking the decoupler parameters on the fairings to see if I can make them separate more cleanly but haven't had a chance yet. As a sidenote, I think most real rockets actually ditch any payload fairings somewhat early in the launch phase (around stage 1 sep IIRC). Speaking purely theoretically there has to be some crossover point where the weight penalty of lugging a giant fairing around actually outweighs the drag penalty of leaving your payload hanging out in the breeze. I have no idea how to calculate what the point would be exactly, but I suspect it probably varies from one rocket to the next.

Anyone know if the Unity GC is multi-threaded? If not, would it be possible to shuffle the GC off onto its own CPU core by way of prioritization? Or does it just run as a part of an existing thread? Sorry if this is stupid, I'm a professional network geek, but this is getting into territory where I have no idea what the heck I'm doing

Well I'm not certain about the chute issues, but I can tell you that using FOR[Modname] is generally a bad idea unless you are the mod author/maintainer. Reason being, that tells MM that you are creating [Modname] which would cause all sorts of issues if that runs when FAR isn't installed. Just my $0.02

Just FYI, it looks like there's a fork of Civilian Population that's been ported to 1.1.2 It's still fairly experimental, but it seems to me like this would be a really good addition to the challenge http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/140127-112ckan-civilian-populations-revived/

Outstanding, I've been hoping that this mod wouldn't die. Great to see that someone is getting this one going again. Can't wait to test it out

Well I for one would be happy to trade some RT advice for some MKS tips Jool can be tricky if you're going for a high efficiency (read: as few satellites as possible) setup, I've seen it done with 6, but that was subject to periodic blackouts due to occasional eclipses. (https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/3gave9/voila_my_jool_remotetech_network_it_looks_a_bit/?) The way I've always handled it personally is to lob a pair of relays into highly eccentric (80,000km x 250km) polar orbits around Jool, with long range dishes back to Kerbin, and a pair of short range dishes for each moon (in the case of Pol, C88-88's). Around each moon I have another pair of relays, with omni antennae to connect down to the low orbit satellites (typically a few omnis in equatorial orbits, and Scansat scanners that double as omni relays in polar orbits). Pro tip: Toss an extra C88-88 on your relays and point them at active vessel. You'll be glad you did once you start running inter-moon transports around the Joolian system It's fairly inefficient in terms of the number of satellites, but it's actually not particularly expensive and it's essentially hands-free 100% uptime and darn near 100% surface coverage once you get everything setup. I have a pretty nifty system I use where I stack all of the satellites I need for each moon on top of a single booster, which minimizes the number of flights to Jool I have to deal with, and is reasonably inexpensive (around 350K funds per launch on the pad, less if you recover the booster stages). I don't have anything setup around Jool yet in my Jool 500 career, but if you want I can try to grab some screenshots of what I'm talking about.

I've been having the stuttering issue pretty badly, so I figured I'd give this a try. Basically what I'm seeing with this mod is the game stutters every time the GC runs, no matter how fast I set the GC interval. Basically if I set it very low, the game simply stutters every time GC runs. If anything, faster GC has made things worse, as it means the game stutters more frequently.

It wouldn't be bad at all, just add in the VAB cost of the ship. Obviously this would screw with the scoring, as the cost of the booster required to orbit the ship wouldn't get taken into account, but honestly in looking over my spreadsheet so far with recovering stages I'm actually spending very little in the way of funds to get to Kerbin orbit. (Last example: Cost of payload: 208,216; Cost at launch: 368,434; Recovered from spent stages: 121,111.87; Net cost into low Kerbin orbit: 39,106.13) Less than 40K net funds to orbit almost 150 tons is peanuts compared to the overall cost of the program. This kinda goes hand-in-hand with my idea of an EPL category too though. As long as you're comparing apples to apples it doesn't really matter how you calculate the scores, as long as everyone is on a level playing field I still haven't started designing my colony ship yet, but I will almost assuredly be using EPL to assemble it in orbit. Part of the fun for me in this is designing a Jool program that at least seems somewhat realistic, and a massive colony ship in my opinion should look like it was assembled in orbit, with bits and bobs sticking out everywhere. A ship built to operate exclusively in a vacuum should *look* like a ship built to operate in a vacuum As a sidenote, this has been really fun so far. I've got 10 ships staged for a Jool transfer window coming up in about 30 days, and every ship I launch it seems like I come up with ideas for 2 more

Hello All, I've been chasing a series of very strange nullrefs from the Contracts system for the last couple of days, and it looks like the issue is related to RPM. Specifically, parts which include the deprecated JSITransparentPod module are causing a number of very strange behaviors with contracts. Removing the JSITransparentPod module from the part resolved the issue, as does removing RPM. Tested on RPM 0.26.0 in KSP 1.1.2 x64 with no mods other than RPM and a single modded part for testing. The issue is easily solved for me via a MM patch, but figured I'd leave this here in case anyone else is having issues.

Finally found the issue here, apparently it's related to the Transparency feature which used to be a part of RasterPropMonitor but has now been moved to its own mod. As near as I can tell any parts including the deprecated JSITransparentPod module will cause this issue if RPM is installed. In my case it was the USI Karibou rover that caused the problem, but it's possible that any part using the old RPM transparency could have the same problem. Just thought I would leave this here in case anyone else has this issue. Thanks again nightingale for the help and pointing me in the right direction

Yeah, I figured as much. I'm definitely not convinced that CC is at fault here, since initially I tried removing CC and that made no difference. Problem is, I have nearly 100 mods at play and reducing it down to the bare minimum didn't seem to make any difference, I was still seeing the issues with the stock contracts system. I sort of suspected that perhaps something had set a flag in the savegame which was confusing the contracts system, but I'm just guessing at this point. That's interesting that a part mod may be at fault, I hadn't considered that. I don't really understand the stock contracts system all that well, but I assumed that parts didn't really matter to contracts much, other than the whole "must have an antenna and be able to generate EC" types of stuff. I recently added a crapload of parts, and that would make sense. I initially didn't post the full logs because they're freaking huge, but if you want to take a look, here they are: https://www.dropbox.com/s/vdsutw0x2x16fp3/KSP.log?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/yeq38tabp4bnw88/output_log.txt?dl=0 Thanks very much for your help, I've been bashing my head on this one for 3 days lol

Hello All, I seem to be having a very strange error when recovering a vessel which seems to be related to Contract Configurator. When trying to recover the vessel, the recovery window shows up only for the kerbal in the pod, and I only get the reputation for recovering the kerbal, no science or funds from the pod. If I go back to the tracking station, the pod is still there, and if I switch to it, the kerbal is back in the pod, as though nothing happened. I am seeing the following errors: http://pastebin.com/Z1Buyw4V Interestingly enough, this sounded like an issue with generating a stock contract, so I used CC to disable *all* of the stock contracts. This fixed the recovery issue, but I do still get some nullref spam in the logs: http://pastebin.com/GPShgCyY This is using the latest contract configurator (1.11.5), but I was seeing the same issue with the previous version as well. I would really prefer not to be stuck with *all* of the stock contracts disabled, and while I could always disable them before recovering a vessel, this deletes all of my active contracts. Any ideas?

Somewhat back on topic, for anyone else pining for an updated Science Alert, I stumbled across this mod which was just updated to 1.1.2 and seems like it could help as a temporary replacement for the warp-kill on new science: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/80379-112-biomatic-biome-sensor/

Aah interesting, I may have to play with the deepfreeze idea. I was planning on using it anyway as I didn't really want to think about life support for a massive colony ship. That may just make the stock hiring do-able. As far as EPL, yeah with stock EPL it would be a bit overpowered, but I'm using MKS as well which makes the EPL resource chain far more of a headache, so I don't feel like I would be cheating too much by using it I hear you on CiviPop, that was an awesome mod and absolutely perfect for this type of challenge. I keep hoping one of these days it will get updated, but I'm not holding my breath.

Hmm, this sounds like quite an interesting challenge. Though I would agree with the posters above that the requirements seem a bit oddly specific. I would say rather than specifying things like X number of satellites around each moon in Y orbits, it would be far more interesting to just say "Must have RT installed with signal delay enabled" and leave it up to the user to decide how best to handle that situation. In RT for instance, near 100% coverage of the Joolian system is entirely possible with *far* less than the 8 satellites per moon you specify. I think it would be interesting to leave it up to the user whether they would rather have a smaller network but take the chance of occasional blackouts during mission critical maneuvers, or opt for a complete 100% uptime network at the expense of more hardware and launches. The same is true of things like resource scanning satellites/rovers and intra-Joolian transports. I would think it's enough to say "Must have a life support mod installed with perma-death enabled". Life support for 500 kerbals is absolutely going to require heavy ISRU and hauling things around between moons, and I think one of the interesting aspects of a challenge is to see how different users approach the problems. If I manage to build my setup in such a way that I only need to ever lift 10 tons off of Tylo, should I be penalized that my Tylo transport can't handle 25 tons of cargo? Or rewarded for designing a system that doesn't require that much heavy lifting? I would also think it would be fun to add an Extraplanetary Launchpads category as well. With EPL I would be interested to see just how few launches from Kerbin you could get away with, and I think that would add a very interesting dynamic to the challenge. You would constantly be faced with the question of whether it's better to launch a massive expensive rocket from Kerbin, at little to no resource cost other than funds; or build it in-situ at the expense of massive amounts of resources. Obviously scores for EPL enabled games are in no way going to be competitive, so I'd say make that a category all its own There are a *ton* of quality of life mods that aren't on the list that wouldn't give any kind of unfair advantage (Capcom, contract packs, docking alignment indicators, Part Commander, those sort of things). I would respectfully suggest that rather than maintain a list of approved mods, it might be easier to just disallow the obviously cheaty stuff (warp drives, KSPI, 0 prop use engines, that sort of thing). Also with respect to cheaty things, I would be interested to get your take on savefile hackery for things like SMA alignment on RT satellites and adding kerbls to the roster (cause screw hiring 500 kerbals with the stock mechanics, and KSI placement hasn't updated for 1.1.2 yet). Would you consider this cheating, or no? I am definitely going to give this a try, but to be honest I will have quite a few quality of life type mods that aren't on the list, and I'm thinking about maybe going with EPL as well, just to see how that goes. This would disqualify my score of course, but honestly I don't care about a score, I just want to try out the challenge

Be careful with which side of the target satellite you are coming up on. The target markers show you not only what your separation will be, but also where the target position will be when you get there. There are 2 possible positions that will give you the correct separation value, one ahead and the other behind the target.

To the best of my knowledge RT doesn't add any contracts. The 3 and 4 satellite contracts you are referring to sound like the ones that come from the Remote tech contract configurator pack If that's the case then I would say just remove the contract pack until you're ready for them

Civilian Population was perfect for this, but doesn't appear to have been updated since 1.0.4, and the thread has been dead. Too bad really, I would love to see that one brought back.

I have had the same issue on and off with the flight computer going "past" a maneuver node since 1.0.5 It seems for me like it's an issue with unbalanced lightweight probes. My most recent example was a small (<1t) probe with a scansat scanner slapped on the side (read: horribly asymmetric). SAS and MJ could handle it just fine (it had sufficient torque to offset the COM asymmetry), but the flight computer seemed to get confused as it got near the end of the burn. As the flight computer was unable to hold the maneuver node attitude, the attitude deviation increased until the node was behind the probe. At that point the computer seems to just hold attitude and continue to burn until the probe runs out of fuel or the command is cancelled. I'll try to put together a craft file which reliably has this problem using stock parts if I can, since as of now the only file I have requires the Scansat parts.

Hey all, I seem to be having a strange interoperability issue between FAR and the NRAP procedural test weight mod. With FAR installed, I am unable to resize the test weight in the VAB. The slider works, but the size of the weight does not change. Removing FAR solves the issue. This is 100% reproducible using only FAR and it's dependencies and NRAP. Tested on KSP 1.1 x64 with the following mods: FAR Version 0.15.6.1 MFI Version 1.1.3.0 MM Version 2.6.22 NRAP Version 1.5.1 The logs don't seem to have anything relevant, but included just in case KSP Log: https://www.dropbox.com/s/vdsutw0x2x16fp3/KSP.log?dl=0 Output Log: https://www.dropbox.com/s/yeq38tabp4bnw88/output_log.txt?dl=0 Has anyone seen this before? If any additional information from me would be useful please let me know and I'll grab it Posted on both mod threads as I have no idea which is likely to be the issue. Thanks!

Hey all, I seem to be having a strange interoperability issue between FAR and the NRAP procedural test weight mod. With FAR installed, I am unable to resize the test weight in the VAB. The slider works, but the size of the weight does not change. Removing FAR solves the issue. This is 100% reproducible using only FAR and it's dependencies and NRAP. Tested on KSP 1.1 x64 with the following mods: FAR Version 0.15.6.1 MFI Version 1.1.3.0 MM Version 2.6.22 NRAP Version 1.5.1 The logs don't seem to have anything relevant, but included just in case KSP Log: https://www.dropbox.com/s/vdsutw0x2x16fp3/KSP.log?dl=0 Output Log: https://www.dropbox.com/s/yeq38tabp4bnw88/output_log.txt?dl=0 Has anyone seen this before? If any additional information from me would be useful please let me know and I'll grab it Posted on both mod threads as I have no idea which is likely to be the issue. Thanks!

RangeModelType = Root