Vanamonde

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.'

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.)

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.

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?

'Well, the first 11,399,990 meters went just fine.' 'Maybe we could put it back together?'

Confused newbie here. What is that purple line? Is it something I\'m supposed to have by 'default,' or is it from a mod?

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.

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.

So far the game is roughly imitating the 60s US space program, but might the tech tree and campaign mode do more? Say, start with Sputkerb, work your way up to manned flights, etc., past modern times, and on to something like HAL and the Discovery?

On the Mun: 1. Alive. 2. Upright. 3. Intact. [move]Woo hoo! [/move] Didn\'t even break a leg.

Thanks. Any thoughts on my lander flipping? I was wondering if it might be an SAS glitch, the way spaceplanes sometimes dive strongly to the left while rolling for takeoff. As a test, the record of my glorious achievement:

Found my old ships and deleted them, but still can\'t track down my screenshots. Anyway, first non-catastrophic Mun landing! Well, sort off. It\'s upright and the guys are alive, but I tore off one of my engines and can\'t take off again without spiralling. The problem was that I touched down gently and seemed about to settle, when my ship suddenly sprang up and flipped 180 degrees. It did that twice, with the engines and RCS turned off. And I don\'t mean it just bounced on the legs, because it did that too but less violently, so this flip is something else. What gives? Meanwhile, could some nice person explain to a clueless newbie how to post screenshots?

Okay, that seemed to work. My ships are listed in their folder and I can delete them, and my screenshots are showing up in their folder. I did lose my previously saved ships and flights in progress, but those are easy enough to replace. Thanks. But where the heck did my screenshots and ship saves go while Windows was squirelling them away? I\'d like to clean those out, just for tidiness\' sake. Hmm. What do [glow=red,2,300]glow[/glow], [shadow=red,left]shadow[/shadow], and [move]marguee [/move] do? And [tt]teletype [/tt]?

I\'ve tried several searches and can\'t find what you\'re talking about. Is it as simple as making a folder and moving the game\'s files?

That\'s what I thought, thanks. I overlooked that. Thank you, I\'ll try it the next time I can get a plane to touch down without crashing, which may be a while. I tend to nest trios of liquid fuels in a hexagon-like minimal space to reduce drag and keep thrust directed through the center of mass, and yes, the engines do run through their fuel fastest in the center and slowest at the outside. If I give the rings 2.5 tanks/2 tanks/1.5 tanks, they run out closer together. I currently have 9 lousy spaceplanes and 26 rockets of varying ineptitude. But the VAB directory is empty and the SPH only shows the autosave from back when I had the demo.

I wanted to tell you how happy I am with this game. I bought it a week ago and have spent almost every free minute with it since. For years now I\'ve been complaining about all new games just follow the same few genres, and how sick I am of just shooting an endless succession of monsters, and the way the games never get any smarter or more challenging and yet I have to keep upgrading my graphics hardware just to play the same tired old games under a new name. And I gave up buying new games (I wait to get them on sale as cheapies) because nobody bothers to debug the things properly anymore, and I\'m tired of paying $50 for the privilege of serving as a game company\'s unpaid beta tester. And then Universe Sandbox (which I also like a lot) directed me here, and I find somebody IS making original game concepts. Somebody IS making a game fun and constructive and not just mindlessly violent (though this newbie does still kill Kerbalnauts at about the same rate most games kill monsters). Those somebodies have also made the game look absolutely gorgeous despite the fact that the whole thing is not much bigger than some game\'s save files. And in an era when the big companies think that a game crashing every few hours is still good enough to sell to people for $50, I\'ve encountered fewer bugs in your $15 alpha version. One thing that I really love about KSP is that you haven\'t dumbed it down to appeal to a wide market, but it\'s still cute as hell. The planet is pretty and I look forward to the day when my little astronauts don\'t look terrified all the time, but it took me 4 hours to get my first ship to orbit, and then 3 more hours to do it again. Getting my first ship to orbit gave me more satisfaction than most entire other games I\'ve played, and it\'s still fun to get there. And I was awed by the intricacy of the game mechanics when I made one of my rockets fly faster and higher by REMOVING a couple of engines. I love little touches, like the way the surfaces of the moons don\'t reveal their details until you get a ship there to actually look around. That touch was entirely unnecessary, but adds so much to the fun of playing the game. This might just be the greatest piece of entertainment software I\'ve ever played with in 21 years of computer gaming. I do have some newbie issues, though. Questions: How much of a factor is air resistence, and do things like nose caps actually improve flight performance? Why do engines near the centerline burn fuel more quickly than engines on the same stage that are situated farther out? What causes a ship to flex along its length from a ) shape to a ( shape and back again, and what\'s the best way to prevent it? I\'ve seen that it\'s more of a problem with longer ships, but once it happens, neither SAS, fins, nor gimballed engines do much to reduce it, and I seem to just have to change the layout of the ship. Is there a way to delete my old ship designs? I\'ve tried clearing out the ships folder, but not all of them are listed there. Bugs? I\'ve found that a spaceplane safely touched down, throttled down, with engine turned off will never slow down to less than about 21 meters/sec. Might this have something to do with the fact that I\'ve never actually managed to land on the runway? When right-button rotating the view in the VAB, the screen can hang for a split second if I scroll past the right screen edge, and twice on the map view screen, the same mouse/button action has twice caused the game to lockup so that I had to task manager out, though it ran fine again when I restarted. Suggestions: I would like a comment field on my ship design screen so I can write memos to myself on the virtues and vices of my designs. Before components begin to cost money and crews die permanently, the game needs a dummy payload so that I can test new designs without sending a flight crew to their deaths. Thanks for a wonderful gaming experience! And I just discovered that I can\'t find my screenshots taken since I upgraded to 15.1/2. Where did they go?