Vanamonde
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Posts posted by Vanamonde
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'Warning: this vehicle makes frequent impacts.'
'If you can read this, your fate is also sealed.'
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Oh my god. Who\'s flying the ship?!What you can\'t see in the picture, because kerbals can\'t blink, is that they are actually sleeping. -
I still have trouble staying oriented as well. There\'s up on the screen, up on my instruments, and up relative to the local world as well. Very confusing, especially when you\'re flying backwards for a deceleration burn or landing. I like to put some clearly visible part, like a fin, over the windows on my capsule so that I can tell at a glance which way is 'capsule up' or 'instrument up.' Then pitch-up will turn my ship in the direction of my fin, pitch-down away from it, and of course yaw-right and -left are to the right and left of my fin. In this otherwise radially symmetrical ship, for example, the curved fin is pitch-up:
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No hurry. Thanks a bunch for doing it at all.Give me a couple days, though.Okay, now I can visualize the video. Thank you.
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AAARRRGH! Pant! Pant! AAARRRGH! I just spent 3 hours trying to rendezvous. It can not be done! You guys who think you did it just imagined it! The attempts drove you insane, and you were delusional.
Kosmo-not, I\'ve read your instructions 3 times and I can\'t visualize them. Is there any way you could make a side-view sketch?
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Science bulletin: close examination has unlocked the mystery of the dark green patches on the surface of Minmus.
They are dark green patches.
Also, a nice view of the Murky Way from the northern lattitudes of Minmus.
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It occurred to me while I was posting. Relativity says acceleration is acceleration, regardless of the cause. ;DI highly enjoy the example you used.By the way, when I was talking about how hard it was to be precise, I was thinking of my attempt to use this method to dock with another orbiting ship. It wouldn\'t be that hard to make a reasonably round orbit this way.
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I did consider several reasons I might be off, including the sidereal/synodic thing, but I confess it never occurred to me that Mun\'s 'altitude' might be measured from Kerbin\'s surface, since that\'s not a useful figure for orbital math. It\'s always the obvious stuff that one overlooks. So is the map\'s altitude surface-to-surface, surface-to-Mun-core, or what? And if I follow Mun at 542.5, will I approach or draw away or just sit there?
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The distance covered (circumference of orbit) divided by the speed has to equal the time required, if the speed is constant, which it would be on a circular orbit. If the figures given by the game\'s map info are correct (and they may not be, I don\'t know), that comes out to 36.676 hours. (I\'m not trying to be argumentative. I just find this stuff interesting.) Your method is the more sophisticated one that works on different kinds of orbits, but in this simple sub-case where the orbit is circular, shouldn\'t my geometry come up with the same answer?
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I calculated it by dividing the circumference of its orbit by its stated orbital velocity, which yields 36.696 hours. It works in this instance because Mun\'s orbit is circular; its altitude is a constant 11,400km. I\'ve noticed Minmus\' orbit is inclined a bit, but I haven\'t watched to see if it\'s eliptical.
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Which ones? I\'ve left at least 45 myself. If we were all playing in the same universe, the place would be coated with them by now.a moment of silence for those poor fellows stranded on the Mun
I\'ve come to believe that this is why I\'m having so much trouble landing on Mun. I touch down ever so gently, then one of my spring-loaded legs snaps back and sumersaults my ship, which rotation the SAS doesn\'t stop until I\'m upside down, and then I land on my head. I\'ve tried switching to fins for landing gear, and then my ship doesn\'t flip, but the fins crumple and it falls over. I\'m experimenting with strut reinforcement. (After they fall off, the fins explode, which cracks me up. What? Are they made out of dynamite?)Anyone else feel that those landing legs have some spring in them? -
I honestly don\'t know if it\'s fun, because like I said, the computers of the time really couldn\'t exploit its potential. I was always just in awe of the idea.
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SimEarth was a pretty nifty idea, but you still could only tinker with the course of earth history, not come up with something new. SimLife? Now THERE was an incredible idea. 1) Make some creatures. 2) Allow them to evolve. 3) Alter their environment to see how they respond. Unfortunately, the concept was decades ahead of its time, and more than a few score critters on your planet swamped even the most powerful processors of the era. Heck, that would be an ambitious thing to try to do now, let alone in 1992.
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Monolith means made of one stone, not that there is only one of them. There are also triliths. Such as:
(Can somebody explain to newbie how I attach that link to the text? It doesn\'t seem to work like the boards I\'m used to.)
Like this?
Okay, thanks Mr. 111. But actually I wanted the word trilith to be a link to the pic, since most boards I frequent prefer that method. Do the mods here care? (Thanks for your patience, guys.)
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By the way, I just tried it, and the capsule returned safely. Well, it would have if I hadn\'t botched the trajectory, anyway, honest! Fuel wasn\'t a problem. In fact, the thing can get airborne on RCS alone. And then I loaded my quicksave because it\'s just too satisfying to have the ship sitting there on Minmus.
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Return? Who said anything about returning? You have to crawl before you can walk.
I\'m just elated about doing something right as a break from slamming into Mun for 3 days. -
I pronounce Mun as 'Throatwarbler Mangrove.'
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There\'s something I\'ve been wondering about. Strictly speaking, every object in orbit is following its own great circle path, which means no two orbiting objects can stay precisely parallel because their paths will intersect at 2 points each cycle. But how precise is KSP\'s simulation? I have been wondering about ejecting something like a decoupler, matching its velocity precisely, and then watching it for a full orbit. If everything works ideally, it should drift gradually away for the first quarter of an orbit, then come right back and bump into you at the halfway point. I haven\'t had the patience to try it, but as long as you\'re going to be floating around anyway, why not? (Of course, one\'s ability to precisely match initial velocity has an error margin probably as big as the whole experiment.)
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I made it too! So sweet, not just for its own sake, but because it\'s the first time something has gone right since I landed on Mun 3 days and about 12 Mun crashes ago. I still haven\'t had a successful second landing there, which is why I got frustrated and light out for Minmus for a change of pace.
My flight plan to Minmus... well, I got lost. I\'d love to see a trace of it, because it probably looked like a moth heading in the general direction of a porch light. But guys? Mun is WAY THE HELL harder to land on. After all the practice I got wrecking there, Minmus was downright easy, and I did it on my first attempt. Hint:
It\'s gravity is so weak you can support your ship with reaction thrusters, which respond much faster than main engines.
I don\'t think any other game I\'ve ever played has given me this intense a sense of accomplishment.
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Still no second successful landing. The one thing I\'d most urgently like to see changed right now is to have the altimeter indicate height above ground as well or even instead of height above sea level. It\'s just one too many things at a time to fly backward, watch vertical speed, watch horizontal speed, and keep checking visual perspective on the ground on the main display. In my best landing attempt I touched down so gently that I couldn\'t figure out why my altitude had stalled. By the time I realized my fall rate had reached zero because I was on the ground, my ship was already falling over. It landed perfectly intact, just lying on its side. Ugh!
Meanwhile, do I understand correctly that right now the three kinds of SAS module are functionally identical? And as for the 'small hardpoint' allowing fuel flow, might that have something to do with the thing I mentioned about my inner engines using up their fuel before my outer engines? Or is it only the duct that actively pumps fuel, and the other things that say they allow fuel just allows you to stick engines and RCS thingies on them?
And it happened again. Vertical speed -6m/s, horizontal drift 7.7m/s, touched down light as a snowflake, gently bounced, and then abruptily in mid-air flipped 180 degrees and crashed on its head, NOT due to the initial impact. Are landing struts springy or something? Is one of them possily tapping the ground and sumersaulting me? Would I be better off using fins as landing gear, as I\'ve seen in some videos?
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'Well, the first 11,399,990 meters went just fine.'
'Maybe we could put it back together?'
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Confused newbie here. What is that purple line? Is it something I\'m supposed to have by 'default,' or is it from a mod?
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You can change the order that things are called upon by adding them in order like you\'re suggesting, but you have to be REALLY careful that you\'ve moved everything that needs to get moved, and the really nasty part is, if you later alter your design at all, the components get automatically flipped back to their original order, and you have to manually move them all again.
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Well, there is kind of a way to do it, but mostly in theory because I don\'t think you can be precise enough to do it in practice. Put yourself in the orbit you want but going too fast, point your nose straight toward the center of the planet, and burn precisely enough to prevent your altitude from rising, while continually altering attitude to stay pointed at the center of the planet. In effect, you\'re artificially increasing the gravity of the planet to make your chosen velocity the proper one for an orbit of that altitude.
But the one time I tried it was a miserable failure, because of course being even a little bit off either on throttle or attitude means drastically cumulative effects to your total velocity.
To return or not to return?
in KSP1 Discussion
Posted
At first I was so happy to land alive that I just left the guys there so I could come back and marvel at my achievement. Now if I land in a place that turns out not to have nice scenery, I take off and practice coming back to Kerbin. Otherwise, I leave them there so they can pose for postcards: