OdinYggd

Turning it off was considered, but decided against. There's enough forum moderators active right now to keep up, and it isn't as bad as we thought it would be. Probably taking time for word to get out that the forum is back. The true test will be tomorrow around 6PM EST when word has gotten around and lots of people are online.

Yes. There are several moderators active right now making sure that the queue is tended to, since it is seeing unusually high volumes of posts because of all the people re-registering their accounts.

He's been running around like Bill Kerman without his helmet on all week trying to coordinate the recovery effort and still keep the staff posted. And computers can be very temperamental when they are being pounded on 24/7 by thousands of game fans. Ultimately the server broke in a way I didn't think was even possible, we were lucky to get this much back from what was left of its corpse.

It's still not a server, and would crumble under the strain. Assuming that your internet connection could keep up. Squad is using a dedicated server in a specially designed facility to protect it from power outages and damage while providing it with direct access to internet trunk lines for the highest possible speeds. No household computer can match that without being sent to such a facility.

I don't think this would help. Your laptop would burst into flames from the phenomenal power required to handle this forum, and your internet connection would keel over from the strain. Squad has a lot on their plate at the moment, and plans are being implemented to prevent this from happening again.

Most of the administrators are exceedingly busy right now, and I don't know a a way for moderators to modify your join date.

Not a whole lot really. Though I did manage to deploy a 3 node geosync array of remotetechs in less than 1 real world hour, I think the most I did in the past week was launching some mapsats.

Radiation in space isn't as big of a deal. Space itself is already full of that, cosmic and the like flying about the cosmos. On the surface of the planet the atmosphere protects us, but once you go past the magnetosphere the only thing between the charged particles and ionizing photons of space itself is the tinfoil of your ship's hull. The problem is the extreme risks of launching a functional nuclear reactor. Now if we could figure out a way to launch a reactor in pieces and assemble it safely in space, it would be well suited for powering stations or making interplanetary cruisers. Then each ground launch is only carrying a few containers full of components and fuel, which in a worst case scenario would fall into the ocean still inside a sealed container for safety. But leaving the ground using nuclear power? I don't think the gains are worth the risks.

In the 1960s nuclear power was all the rage. Surely atomic propulsion was the true path to space exploration, and nobody knew or cared what it might do. Then we had Three Mile Island, quickly followed by Chernobyl. Not only did people learn really quickly what these reactors would do if things went wrong, but they also found out that the government hadn't told them how dangerous anything involving nuclear fission really was. We had intentionally covered up much of what was learned from the Manhattan Project in order to ensure that public outcry would not prevent us from using the bombs in wartime if needed. The biggest thing is the fallout risk. If a reactor blows while atmospheric, it means global consequences. Naturally the environmentalists and anti-nuclear lobbyists complain too loudly for this to ever be allowed again. Even under normal circumstances, one little leak in the heat exchanger and your 'clean' hot gas exhaust is now a nuclear disaster site. Plus the reactors themselves are very sluggish to respond to control variations- a feature not found in the Kerbal LV-N engine where throttle response is instant, and are even harder to 'store live' than it is to keep a fuelled rocket on the pad without things going wrong because of the extreme conditions involved. However, NASA regularly launches their RTG units aboard unmanned spacecraft, and in the past did indeed fly a functional nuclear reactor that is currently stuck in a parking orbit with its core subcritical after ejecting one of the required neutron reflectors. These are nothing more than a subcritical mass of plutonium pellets inside a welded-shut container, which is in another container, which is surrounded by thermocouples for electrical generation, which is in yet another container for safety and protection. A number of RTG units are currently safely on the ocean floor after the satellites they powered fell out of orbit and burned up, but the RTG itself remained sealed and splashed safely, sinking before anyone could come across it.

If anything what you should do is go to the very edge of the sun's SOI, then burn retro till your periapsis is perhaps 50km, and sundive from clear across Kerbol's SOI. Assuming enough remaining delta-V and your ship does not collide with a planet or break up, that would be about as close as you could possibly get using stock parts or normal mods.

I tend to do enough damage just leaving the launch pad without 1600 tons of rocket fuel going up in smoke. Trying to do this on purpose sounds like it'll be all too easy.

When atmospheric, Zoxygene is drawn from the planet's atmosphere outside the vessel. Like that, the ship can exist almost indefinately without ever running out of it or of power. Press O while on the launch pad. You'll see the gauges move, the power draw will go up by a factor of about 60x, and if the power supply can't keep up it wil rapidly consume all of the stored Zoxygene. Mind you, the kerbals won't suffocate- Zoxygene can still be obtained from the atmosphere. Now if you torture test them in this manner while in orbit, the mod will indeed kill the kerbals. I had a ship last night that was using a Fuel Cell to keep the batteries charged while in-flight, drawing power from my landing stage. Well, I get halfway to Minimus, and my low zoxygene alarm went off. I check, and not only has my level dropped to 0, but the fuel cells burned up all of my lander's fuel while I was in time warp on my way to minimus. Seems like the most practical way to power this for flights of any length of time is to use either a solar array with large batteries, or just use the nuclear battery units. Fuel cells just eat up tons of fuel when going any further than LKO.

Something like this. It would be closest to what a nuclear warship or submarine is powered by and use the same flowchart as a PWR type reactor, but the heat exchanger for the secondary system heats propellant for thrust instead of boiling water for a steam turbine. Alternately, it uses a CANDU style reactor vessel with extra tubes inside to heat the propellant without having to circulate through the primary system. Incidentally this also makes it easy to dispose of the "cold" heat from it- use a second heat exchanger to make steam for ship electricity. Then your 'idle' engine takes the place of your battery packs and solar panels, greatly offsetting the weight of the shielding on the 'crew' side of the unit.

The low thrust only means that compensating design measures are needed- for instance my Skynet series ring station simply had it's four LV-45 engines replaced by a group of 7 of these to end up with more than twice the fuel efficiency with only a slight handling penalty. The Skynets only use their engines anyway for changing orbital altitudes, I really could have left it as-is but I sometimes do send them on their own from LKO to Mun or Minimus. Just use them in groups if your craft is too large to be propelled by only one. It doesn't take much to assemble an engine array out of 1 meter parts and tack it on where the older single engines sat.

Yeah, I did notice that. Mine are placed horizontal, on stage release they are ignited to blow the stage away from the rest of the craft. A couple of times I've looked behind me while staging and seen the released tanks spiralling around in the sky like bottle rockets with no tail. Shortening the separatron burn duration would probably correct this, since they just need to kick the stages away not drive them into their own orbits. Even with the separatrons though, the ejected tanks more often than not do slam into each other. But at least like this they are far enough from the main craft when they do that the explosion is just an afterthought.

I flew a rocket that used only separatrons last night. It went over 10,000 meters. What I did was took 1m structural fuselages and stacked them with decouplers onto a mechjeb pod. Then 8x array mode, place 3 and group the stages on the lower edge of each structure. Build like 12 stages of this, and the result was a rocket that actually would fly surprisingly well, using only separatron power. It woudl fire a set, and when it died, drop that structure and ignite the next set, onward up the line till it was only the capsule and one stage left. I should probably make a screenshot of what this ship looked like, since it was rather cheap but performed surprisingly well. Came up with the idea whilist very bored trying to make a SRB-to-Orbit design out of boredom, which I also succeeded in making. Also the separatrons are amazingly helpful for my large radial-staged boosters. A lot of times when using more than 4 or so 2 meter long tanks in a stack, they'll slam into the side of the rocket when staging. Putting 4-6 separatrons on them to fling them away from the rest of the rocket, the craft neatly sheds it's outer row of tanks and continues without hesitation. Previously the tanks didn't always fall away from the craft, and more often than not collided with it after release.

When I was playing it without internet access? The machine I run it on is currently in quarantine due to a possible virus, so it has been completely cutoff from the outside world. Seam in the Skybox seems a likely theory though. I've seen that kind of phenomena on other games- patterns of dots and dashes on terrain features or in the sky where the scenery rendering glitched a seam and allowed the background color or ambient lighting color to show through.

Ah, so that's why all of my rockets seem to stop moving further away once they get beyond a certain distance. Right now, the KSP Universe is effectively the size of Kerbin's SOI, as nothing beyond that exists.

I just observed a pecular phenomena of similar appearance. In my case, I was orbiting Kerbin. Two identical craft within 1KM of each other, as I attempted to rendevous them and use a docking mod I picked up a little while ago. What I saw was a single pixel that went from just above the edge of kerbin across almost to the left edge of the screen, then doubled back before going upward and vanishing. I don't think KSP has provision for shooting stars or any of that- and even if it did I was in a stable 100km orbit, too high for such phenomena to be visible. Initially my thoughts on this thread were that the GPU memory had simply glitched a couple pixels, but seeing a similar blip that was actively moving I am not at all convinced that is the case anymore. Whatever it is though, it is probably a warning sign of a software issue that we have yet to identify the source of. That or it is the Kraken itself lurking in the darkness, waiting for a ship that flies too far away from Kerbin to prey on.

I should get a docking mod going and get set up for this. Already I have a few sungrazers that carry a high enough delta-V to approach the sun with a comet-like orbit, it wouldn't take much to dock onto these for a freight train.

Oh interesting twist. I expected him to be stuck in some odd high elliptical orbit, but he literally went to infinity and beyond. Using a spacedock like this might end up a significant handicap because it means I have to launch from orbit and then intercept him, although it does make the return somewhat easier at least because I can return him to orbit and land normally. We'll see what I can do. I just perfected my landing craft, so as long as the Albatross can reach him without using up the landing fuel I should be able to get him and go.

Why flush one? As long as the craft has one in it you can still fly it. Tell the other two to get off while on the launch pad so there's plenty of room for Jeb. Also is Orbital Construction allowed in the modded class? I could see this done really easily using that.

Never had this problem before, but for some reason during rapid acceleration (We're talking close to 10G here) my aerospikes literally fall right off, instantly causing the craft to flip over from the unbalanced thrust. I've basically got about 16 aerospikes running from about 4 cans of fuel and the rest of the craft structural fuselage, resulting in a thrust-to-weight ratio that makes even Jeb think twice before taking the controls.

I'll see what I can put together for this. Have some ideas for how to put as many engines as possible onto a craft for utterly breakneck accelerations, of the potentially explosive kind.

Mechjeb's landing mode works on the Mun, and also on Minimus when you get that far. It's not tied to any specific planet. Most of my mun landings, both manned and unmanned, have been mechjeb landings with manual thruster control to push the craft away from any surface hazards- like other ships in the same area.