Mic_n

I think the concept is that it's one craft. Technically, two single-stage craft are.. two stages Just personal opinion there, of course. Still a hell of an achievement, but I don't think that'd count as a single stage to Laythe or anything.. I put my new 1.x career-mode on hold earlier on to jump into sandbox and try some designs.. did manage to get what's basically a microlight you could probably launch a minimal science satellite with.. It's certainly more challenging than beta versions with the thrust from jet engines tailing off so much more dramatically, but it's still

Oh, also: SCRAMJETS That would solve a lot of the current complaints about spaceplanes without being too gamebreaking.. 'regular' jets to get you up to the current ~20km limits, then with enough speed up kick over to scramjets for hypersonics.. I'd suggest it'd require pairing with some form of dedicated intake, as well.. one that can track air speed as well as density. Too low a speed and too high a density (ie: you're too slow or too low) and the engine is 'flamed out' (so to speak..)

Landing gear with adjustable height. Keeping ground clearance can be quite difficult at times.. I'd rather not have to be building extended structures just to put my wheels in the right spot - that's the entire point of landing gear. It's annoying that we don't have the ability to use longer or shorter sets as needed.

They're paying for the data, not the ability to get that data.

How's Interstellar doing these days? There were some fun combinations to be had in that one, too... Warp drive (that still maintained your velocity vector between entering and leaving your 'warp bubble'.. meaning if you zip from one side of the solar system to the other, suddenly the planets are all going the opposite direction and you're in 'head-on collision' orbits that you're madly trying to slingshot your way out of... The antimatter and 'energy beaming' mechanism from that one provided for some intersting strategies though.. giant floating solar arrays beaming microwave power across the system and the like. I did enjoy that.

Don't think of it as launching someone's satellite. Think of it as providing the results of that satellite's flight. It may not be a comms sat that needs to be in place indefinately, maybe they just want some sort of survey done? You're launching your own satellite to perform that survey. Once it's done, it's junk. "Perform a flyover", if you will. If there are two clients out there want similar missions done, and you can satisfy both with one satellite, then good for you. I _also_ work for a telco, one that runs satellites (though I have nothing to do with them myself)... We don't launch the sats ourselves, but once they're up there, we do take over control. The ones in-game aren't that sort of setup. KSP sats are designed, built, launched, controlled, paid for and ultimately owned by KSP. Not the client. They're just after the results you can provide. NB: those comments are based on the older contracts - I haven't played enough 1.x yet to progress my career mode to satellite missions. If the things have changed significantly enough, I'll grant that some of that may not be quite so applicable any more.

I haven't used either of these, but if you're after aircraft, then Firespitter seems to be the de facto standard Also, KIS looks less like an "alternative to KAS" and more "some extra stuff to accompany KAS". KAS itself adding some incredible functions to the game. There's also Hooligan Labs and the more realistic (but less versatile/fun IMO) Procedural Airships mods, which are also fun for mucking around with stupid things.. Combining those with firespitter/KAX (and the nice prop engines they have), and KAS winches and hooks, and you can make giant floating air bases to launch rovers and things from.

Absolutely not abuse. In fact, I'd suggest if you're launching missions that only accomplish a single contract is a sign of poor planning. I could forgive it if it was your first Mun mission or some big milestone event like that, but even then you ought to be looking for suitable contracts you could achieve on the way. I was actually at the point of "mission planning" in earlier versions (haven't had much time to play of late), working out a mission profile that would allow me to satisfy four or more contracts over the course of a single brief mission.. testing parts at various envelopes while en route to the next... "ok, I can test that separator on the way up, need to be around speed X at altitude Y.. keep climbing but back off the throttle to keep the speed below Z where I can fire up that engine, cut it back off and decend down to then drop back and test this chute..." In the end: it's a contract. You meet the terms of the contract and are rewarded appropriately. There's no bonus for over-servicing it. Doing so is a waste.

Depending on how 'lightweight' you're needing to be, it can be handy to have a small emergency fuel supply that's outside of any normal fuel crossfeed - isolated from any engines or fuel supply. If you get into trouble, you can then use ctrl-right click to manually transfer fuel from it to an empty tank and hopefully get back out of it.

WHAT DID YOU DO?!?!?! The mind cannot fathom the sort of horrors which must have been unleashed to place Jebediah Kerman in that sort of state.

C17 is certainly a stubby little thing (designed with an amount of STOL capability and temporary airstrips in mind), but it's still big enough to lift an M1A1. That was one of the prime considerations in acquiring them.

The cargo plane is likely a C-17.. the RAAF bought a handful a few years back to be able to ferry our Abrams' (and other 'heavy stuff') around. In KSP-related news, I've recently been trying my hand at making a decent PBY-5a Catalina.. Firespitter and Procedural wings do the basics, I've got infernal robotics powered hinges to raise and lower the wingtip floats... Does pretty well with either land or water take-offs and landings.. Have been mucking about 'Space'ing it up with the interstellar mod.. props swapped out for electric ones, fueled by little fusion reactors, which also get to power some thermal turbojets and provide some leftover juice for plasma thrusters.. That side of it isn't so successful, though

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=1267&st=2 We had one of these when I was a kid in the early 80s.. Basically a pong console. My mother actually loves relating a story when they 'lost' me one time when the car broke down.. a quick search found me in the nearest arcade, pressing every button I could reach as I wandered around in my nappy. Yup, I've been at this for a while.

Yeah, I'd guess (and it's only a rough guess) that it's somehow clocking your gfx card up over what it's otherwise doing.. what you're getting on screen there is memory artifacting.. generally brought about by memory overclocks and overheating (the hotter it gets, the more susceptible the VRAM gets to errors).. Eventually your card is getting too hot and throwing too many errors, to the point where the whole thing locks up, taking windows with it... hence your need to ctrl-alt-del (edit: no, hard reset.. ctrl-alt-del generally won't even work then.. but I think you said that already) and the bios temp warnings. Geforce experience itself isn't causing the problems - the settings it's applying (which in theory your card _should_ be able to handle) is what's doing it. Given that you have a pair of 460s in there, I'd guess they've been in there a while... have you opened your case up and cleaned them up at all? You've probably got a nice little felt blanket of accumulated dust and crud stuck all over the heatsinks and fans. Give them a bit of a brush with something soft and a good blow out.. Worst comes to worst, try leaving the side of the case off - you might find it lasts a little longer. My guess though would be that one or both of your cards is on its last legs. Might be time for an upgrade. (boo! yay!) Geforce experience is just the catalyst that's showing it up.

Kurrens. because Kurrensy.

I made similar things - though I wound up making 'custom' solar panels.. make a copy of the default panel, rename it and just re-adjust the rescale factor, mass, etc and you can have 'big' fixed solar panels to keep part count down.. just make sure you scale the other values accordingly - I don't remember whether the actual power output automatically scales thanks to the larger surface area, but bear in mind that rescale factor is really just one dimension - in practice a panel with twice the rescalefactor should be generating 4x the power (2^2 for a 2D surface) but weigh 8x as much (2^3 for a 3D object)

That does seem problematic. Note though that the radial radiators like that (like the inline ones) are designed more for atmospheric use - they're not particularly good in space - you want the deployable ones out there. I'd also suggest a few 'fixed' solar panels in case of the emergency situations you're describing. Four of them (one flat on an end and another three in symmetry around the sides and tilted towards the other end) are enough to ensure that you'll get at least a dribble of power no matter how your craft winds up oriented. Nothing worse than having an otherwise perfect craft stranded without power.

Oh, also also: power transmitters/relays/receivers... any chance of getting some kind of trace of what connections are in play ala remotetech? So we can trace what sources we're picking up, what we're not, and how we might best turn the latter into the former?

Question about beamed power: Is there some way to 'pool' power received by arrays/MTERs? I've tried to use MTERs connected to thermal turbojets/rockets to create lifters, but it appears that in the same way that the dishes are directional, the MTERs don't all seem to receive the same power, meaning the engines don't all generate uniform thrust, meaning problem. Unless something else was going on I wasn't paying proper attention to, that is. Also, the precoolers.. I had some attached to the 2.5m intakes, but I have no idea how to get them working? there's nothing bindable in action groups, nothing on the right-click interface in-game, and they never seemed to come 'online' while my thermal turbojet got hotter and hotter and hotter. ??

yup - with interstellar, the big inline radial air intake (otherwise pointless, really) has been repurposed as an intake cooler. Takes up some power but can be attached directly to an air intake to cool the airflow down and prevent the high-speed overheats.. Apparently. Because I tried it on one of my designs and they never seemed to actually activate, and there were no controls to manually do so, so... not entirely sure about them.

one from a bunch of patches ago, don't even have this one any more. Designed to recover splashed-down capsules via a top-mounted docking port, there's a sort of gantry crane affair in there that can roll up and down an inclined ramp to allow for the different heights that varying capsules float at... this video doesn't exactly show it off all that well, since that capsule was pretty well aligned anyway.. but anyhoo.. And yeah, completely and utterly stock. (from Ye Olden Days, too) 50 odd tons of it, too.

No, it's supposed to be challenging, which for varying reasons, those sorts of challenges are. The issue here is that the 'challenge' part of it has nothing to do with challenging anything. Like I said, the sled is utterly redundant. The 'challenge' here is to build a rocket sled and then (thanks to the OP's rather arbitrary rules) make absolutely no use of it. If he wants orbital craft launched from a sled, then realistically you're looking at spaceplanes. What he's talking here is taking a wingless rocket, launching it horizontally and then turning it vertical with other rockets before launching in a standard 'rocket' profile. The sled is pointless. If you want a challenge that's about rocket sleds, make it about rocket sleds. If you want a challenge that's about lifting off from the horizontal without lift-producing components, make it about that. They are two completely separate challenges, though. It has the potential to be a decent challenge, but it's been made stupid.

I see nothing in Xeldrak or Markus' posts about "how this is a challenge", and I actually quoted Markus in explaining why it's broken. The only 'challenge' in the challenge is in something that is useless. You don't seem to be getting the issue: Your 'challenge' is about a rocket sled. The way you appear to want the challenge done, the rocket sled is utterly pointless. That's the problem. If I have the inclination, I'll knock something up to demonstrate later on. Again, to be perfectly clear: this is not intended as an attack, and I like your idea.. I just think it's a bit flawed

Unless something has changed in the last patch or so, landing gear are actually weightless in-game. The physics engine ignores them.

has anyone brought up that the Caber Toss doesn't actually have anything to do with distance?