softweir

I am afraid that customisation of Kerbals (which applies to their suits) is on the What not to suggest list. Therefore it is best this thread goes south. Sorry. It would be a good idea to rad that and the Already Suggested list! Keep suggesting!

As The Destroyer pointed out, reaction images are prohibited. We had a bad time a while back when many threads degenerated into nothing BUT reaction images, making it impossible to find the useful stuff buried in amongst them. @AncientGammoner - wild, WILD mod - I hope we see lots more "useful" decals!

Please see the Sticky thread at the top of the forum - "What not to suggest". Random failure is one of them! Random failures won't be put in the game. The reasoning is that this rarely improves interest value, but but frequently causes undue frustration. All failures will be due to player error. Please don't be discouraged, there is plenty of room for suggestions, just be careful to check the stickies before making your. Many Thanks!

Gentle-people, can we see more civility towards each other. Some of the criticism in this thread was a bit too strong! Also, arguing about Real_world science doesn't belong here. You can take that to the Science Labs!

@KerbMav: No possibility you have an inverted command pod, mechjeb or reaction wheel unit anywhere? I managed a spectacular recreation of the recent Proton rocket failure by having an inverted inline reaction-wheel unit in the stack, managed the same by putting a command pod upside down and deciding to look out through its window instead of sticking with the main command pod, and MechJeb can do wild tricks if one of its units is misplaced and has been the subject of a Control from Here input.

One TV extravaganza, and one movie. The TV was the moon landings - I saw it live on TV, late at night, when I was 7. That feeling never left me! And the movie was . (And .)

I have to agree with both camps! Yes, this is one of those games where the player's experience of it changes enormously as their experience grows and they master the basics and then the subtleties of the game. However it is equally true to say the game itself has changed, and a player coming to it fresh sees a VERY different game from the very early days in both style and content. Back in the days of 0.8x there were no such things as landing legs, nor was there any place to go to in order to land! Orbiting and going home were all you could expect. Kerbin's terrain was a crude placeholder - a basic sphere with minimal contours that didn't rotate (so one side was perma-day and the other perma-night) and landing on the night side was inevitable, bug-induced death! With absolutely minimal content we were forced to focus on kludging ships together, using fins for legs and whooping it up if we managed a decent sub-orbital hop and got back to the right side of the planet in one piece. Not to mention there were no game saves or time-warp, so every mission lasted only as long as a game session. And there were only three Kerbals. (Not to mention: C7 had yet to put the "aero-" into "aerospace"! ) To put it in a nutshell - the game was so basic and tiny it fitted in a nutshell! It is a testament to the brilliance and originality of the concept that it was so immensely enjoyable, so hard to master, so fun to fail at and so very, very challenging. Nowadays the scope and complexity of the game tends to hide that essential, core brilliance. But it is still there. The game still challenges the player to learn about rocketry and aviation in a way no other game does, even though it wraps it up in a much wider range of auxiliary game mechanics. As for the "feel" of the game... Personally, I have to admit I hardly ever look at my Kerbals during flights these days, so the charm has (for me) faded. It came back in buckets when Dan Rosas added so many new animations and all those cute groundcrew, but after a while I started to forget to pay attention to them and get back to the core game - making rockets and sending them places. That will never get old.

Is it the weight, or is it the drag on the fairings? Generally, if a rocket tips over in flight then it's because there is too much drag at the front and too much mass at the back.

I build Abort systems onto all my manned launchers, if only for "the look of things". I don't often have to use them now, but if - every once in a while - I do then it feels so cool to be able to rescue the crew without hitting Escape and reverting.

That's a VERY tough scenario! As you say, it is easy enough to rescue the Kerbal, but rescuing the craft can't really be done with stock parts. However, if you are prepared to consider using a mod then it is fairly easy. The KAS mod (Clicky Here) is one mod that can enable a suitably equipped craft to refuel another craft, as is the LAZOR mod (Clicky Here). KAS provides a multi-purpose winch which connects two craft and allows fuel to be pumped along the cable (and can be used to tow other craft and many other things), while LAZOR has many different "lasers", one of which can be used to transfer fuel. However, what I think you will find is that even with all the mods in the world you will end up leaving some fuel tanks on the Mun. It is extremely hard to create a craft that can take a load of fuel down to the surface of the Mun, refuel another craft AND get itself back up into space! May I also suggest that for this scenario you use MechJeb to guide your landing. Once you have seen how MechJeb does it then you can do it yourself, but spot-on landings such as are needed for refuelling are very hard and need a lot of practice first. If you don't want to use an autopilot then I suggest you rescue BIll and leave the craft until you are much better practiced at precision landing!

Exactly correct!

Wheels can break and remain in situ: unlike solar panels, they show a damage model. I appears the game mechanic has been extended to solar panels, but the extra mesh hasn't been included. Kerbals can repair broken wheels. I wonder if that is true for panels?

So, perhaps have a single "Precision" button that toggles between coarse "where the heck is the docking port" and fine "almost there, just wanna fine-tune"? OR, read the input sensitivity (CapsLock) status - when the player switches to fine control, then switch to fine display?

Might I make a suggestion? The velocity indicator is useful, but I feel it could be improved if it were replaced with a lateral/vertical drift indicator. At present, movement forwards/backwards "scales" the velocity indicator (because, of course, it is a form of direction indicator), so the slower you are moving towards or away from the target, the more sensitive the velocity indicator is, and it is hard to judge how much correction you need to make to kill drift. If you scaled it so 1m/s laterally/vertically moved the indicator to the edge of the display then that would be about right for most docking manoeuvres.

And over this goes to the Science Labs forum, where all Real-World sci, tech and space stuff belongs!

Hello and welcome to the forums! Your earlier post won't have shown up because you are new here and your first 6 posts have to be vetted by moderators before they appear - it's an anti-spam feature, and has kept a lot of spam off the forums! You can use either Steam or the Kerbal Store, it's up to you. I guess that Squad will probably get more of your cash if you download from their store, on the other hand Steam is extremely reliable and convenient if you are already a Steam user. Have fun! Richard.

Real-world space/science/technology topics such as this really belong in The Science Labs - so over it goes!

Glad to see it's out!

We need more detail! Maybe you could post a couple pics of your rockets, better still a video of a launch attempt.

You pretty much came up with HOTOL. That was a concept for a sub-orbital spaceplane that would have used liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, liquefying most of the oxygen from the atmosphere during the early stages of the flight. One of the suggestions was to start with mostly empty LOX tanks and fill them with excess O2. Since nitrogen is the dominant gas (by mass) of air, you will have large amounts of it to deal with! Better, perhaps, to use the liquid or chilled N2 to pre-cool the incoming air so less liquid H2 is needed to liquefy the air, and you will have a more efficient engine that burns H2 and pure O2. Also, you don't mention any ideas for coping with all the solid H2O and CO2 that will be formed. That's a pipe-blocking issue! The HOTOL engineers appeared to think they could deal with that issue, but as it never got beyond the concept stage we have no idea if their proposals could be made reliable.

It's a mod that plays random "chatter" sounds.

Is it possible you accidentally clicked on the speed display? Doing that cycles it through the Surface, Orbit and Target modes, so if you are docking then clicking it can switch from Target to Orbit. This has caught me out a couple of times! If you did then clicking on it again will restore the Target speed mode. Ninja'ed!

A lovely mod! I am so going to be using this a lot! The only improvement I can suggest is that you tidy up the .zip file folder format to conform to the new standard. It ought to look like this: DockingPortAlignment_1.02.zip GameData NavyFish ReadMe.txt PluginData Plugin DockingPortAlignment.dll [*]Parts (If you had any!) [*]Source That way the player can drag just GameData to his KSP folder and Windows and Linux will merge the new GameData with the old without fuss. (OSX users have to tell OSX to merge, ratehr than the default overwrite.)

BTW, a lot of mod makers add FAR config lines to their parts so they work well with FAR. Stock parts don't need this, because FAR supplies values for them from its own data files, but there is no way FAR can do that for mod parts! (If a mod part doesn't have FAR config data then FAR has to guess and can get it very wrong. If a player uses such a part the they often have to experiment to add FAR values to the relevant mod parts.) KSP ignores any config entries it doesn't understand, so parts with FAR entries in them work perfectly well without FAR!

The use of Shift and CTRL annoyed me so much I changed throttle-up and throttle-down to use "+" and "-". And from then on, I would throttle up ... ... and wonder why nothing was happening.