[[0.25]KSP Interstellar (Magnetic Nozzles, ISRU Revamp) Version 0.13]

Thanks to Scott's recent video spotlighting the mod I've decided to get around to installing it. So far all I've accomplished is building a basic ship for SCIENCE! (named, obviously, the KSS Thomas Dolby) and tinkered with. The info in this thread has been a pretty useful quick start guide but I clearly need to devote a lot more time to it. I'm totally loving the potential of all the possible rocket/fuel/reactor combos. Great work Fractal, and everyone else for the info!

Edit: PS, I especially want to commend the author for the excellent texture and model work on the parts. Looks great!

[[0.21] Simple Part Organizer (v0.250)]

Holy crap. You, sir, get the Awesome Kerbal award for making my life a ton easier. Maybe now I can finally (re)install NovaPunch. Also, there used to be a part search bar thing back in 0.18 or 0.19 I think? Not sure what ever happened to it, but a bit of searching might turn up an easy way to do name search if the code is available.

[RoveMax XL3 Wheels]

Hey, thanks for the quick response.

Apparently the wheels aren't considered attachable surfaces, nothing can attach directly to them except as the destination for struts. As such I've had struts linking from tanks, girders, etc to the wheels and that holds them in position better but doesn't keep them from breaking with what seems like a small amount of force. Mechjeb says the vehicle masses just under 50 tons (empty), and maybe that's the problem. I'm kind of worried how it will manage when I've got 64,000 liters of kethane in there, even just with the Mun's gravity.

I'm still experimenting with this, and I've found something that helps a fair bit but isn't a complete fix. I switched to using a few quantum struts (I know, I go nuts with the mods) to hold the wheels on and they seem to do a better (but not great) job. Also, I removed almost all the default struts and put a few strategically-placed Q-struts to keep things flexible but not floppy and it works a fair bit better. I can get on and off the runway at 6-8 m/s without any catastrophic failures. It's a bit jittery, but I vastly prefer jittery to exploded. I think I'll mark the thread as answered for now barring major changes or revelations.

[RoveMax XL3 Wheels]

So, i've been trying to build a kethane mining rover of the friggin' huge variety and I'm having a heck of a time keeping these XL3 wheels attached. Either they fall off or whatever they're attached to falls off. I've scrapped the project and completely rebuilt it 3 times and whether I attach the wheels to girders, structural panels, directly to the tanks (16kl kethane tanks, orange tanks, w/e) even girders attached to tanks, they stick going up or down the side of the runway and things fall apart. There's a pic of the current version here (http://i.imgur.com/nCIjqe3.jpg), it's completely stock except for the kethane parts and a couple of decorative bits. I have no idea how to make it work, struts don't seem to help other than to keep it from driving like a puddle of jello. It needs to be sturdy enough to handle the newly extra-cratered mun surface on potentially long drives, and it's not even handling the runway on Kerbin with empty tanks. The project is at a standstill because I really don't like most mod wheels.

Anyway, any help/advice is very much appreciated.

-Libra00

[Designs for Boats]

Without resorting to mods, the key to boats in KSP is to make sure only wing parts are in the water, and oriented correctly. Probably the best place to look for design inspiration is in the various boat race challenges, if they still exist. But basically you want to build hydrofoils rather than traditional boats. You want a reasonably long, reasonably wide stance for improved stability, and you want to build it in such a way that anything that isn't a wing is lifted out of the water. I'm not sure how the gravity on Laythe compares with Kerbin, so it may require some testing to figure out how long your foils will have to be.

The upside to this kind of design is that it can be very fast (I have designs that can exceed 200m/s in the water). The downside is they can be hard to steer (keep your control surfaces out of the water or they break off pretty consistently at speed), unstable, and if you're going long distances they seem to have a proclivity for speeding up as fuel drains until either parts fall off or you suddenly leap out of the ocean, lose lift, and crash back into it. If you want something that isn't quite so fast it's possible to build hull-like shapes out of wing parts, but every attempt I've ever made has had bad stability issues.

Also, as for mods, the pontoons from the firespitter pack are a little buggy for me. If you use the gear bays anywhere in them (to allow it to drive on land) they tend to bend and warp a lot where the gear bays connect to other parts.

Anyway, hope this helps.

[The MachingBird Challenge!]

I'm starting to think it's required after all. I can get up to 2200 without too much effort (6 intakes, 1 engine, same as always), but I cap out at like 2204 or so. That's not even on the charts. I added an extra 2 engines (no new intakes) that I fire at 25km but it seems all that does is foul up mechjeb's altitude stability so it rapidly goes past 30km and then suborbital. I forgot to add a solar panel to keep attitude control so when I came back into the atmosphere I was backwards and broke up. I figured super lightweight would be the way to go, but it looks like I'm gonna have to air-hog it.

[The MachingBird Challenge!]

Yay, another challenge I can get behind! First effort (literally 10 minute slap-together of parts, and most of that time was hunting through the mass of mod parts I have for the stock bits) got in the neighborhood of 2180 before I ran out of fuel. Time to add drop tanks! Also, I'm curious, I see loads of planes here with 3 or more engines and hundreds of intakes. Is that required to get into the ludicrous speed class? I did ~2180 with a single engine and 6 intakes (and mechjeb for very, very fine control.)

[Hi]

Hey, I'm new-ish to the forums, though I actually signed up some time ago, I've been lurking until recently. Started replying to threads and such so I figured a WA post was in order.

Anyway I've been playing KSP off and on since around 0.13 or so, I'm still pretty awful at it, but I'm having fun so it's all good.

[What other games in beside KSP you plan and what game you want play in future]

I was eagerly anticipating XCom until I found out the multiplayer is deathmatch only. I'm a big, big fan of coop. Also waiting for Mechwarrior Online although some of what I've heard doesn't sound too great and I'm pretty burned out on MMOs.. it's Mechwarrior, I'll give it a shot.

As far as city-building games I kinda grew out of the SimCity phase a while back and moved instead to games like Pharaoh, Caesar, and Emperor. However, I tried Cities XL and it had the same kind of social aspects that I wasn't really fond of, so I'm pretty much done there. I keep looking for a modern Railroad/Transport Tycoon though, something modern, with enough detail to do some fairly complex things, but not just crazily complicated. No joy.

[Am I the only person?]

I've not landed on anything, at least not in any way that doesn't involve an explosion. My first attempt at interplanetary travel was aimed at Duna, but I warped too fast and overshot and figured, what the hell I'll go to Jool! My intercept was horribly disfigured, and given my IPV stage was designed for long slow burns it took me forever to get into a proper orbit. Sadly, it was a polar orbit at like 2 million km or so. After struggling for half an hour I managed to flatten my orbit out just in time to intercept Laythe, only when I time-warped to get closer I realized I was travelling in the wrong direction and there was no way I'd ever have enough thrust, not to mention fuel, to orbit the moon.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is: Screw it, slap some burners on and go for broke, the worst that could happen is you'll have a great story to share.

[ION engines]

Slightly late here, but: There are a couple of mods that include ion engines. The one I use is the Deep Space Mission Pack http://kerbal.net/mod.php?id=4. It requires the Electric Energy plugin which it links to on the kerbal.net site. With the recent addition of the nuclear reactor (energy gain: 5, vs solar panels' ~0.3) it's quite a bit more viable, especially since I was having a LOT of trouble getting any kind of charge out of solar panels. Once in a while I'd get a trickle charge briefly, but most of the time not so much.

The problem I have really is, I suppose, lack of orbital construction. Trying to build an interplanetary vehicle that carries a porta-nuke, couple batteries, a rover (DEMV ftw!), and a lander by which to deliver the rover, I have a hell of a time getting it into orbit. I even installed NovaPunch and slapped a beefy 5-meter rocket under it and still ran out of gas with an apoapsis of around 45km.

[The Dragster Challenge!]

I stumbled upon the challenge via random youtube KSP videos and was immedately hooked. This is an awesome idea!

I didn\'t use pure stock (novapunch & random other balanced stuff), but I managed to get up to 304m/s without major effort. Sadly I have no screenshots, but I used 0muffins0\'s general design to start. It took a lot of tinkering to get the landing gear just right so it didn\'t swerve too much, slapped a canard on the back and 4 drag chutes so I could accelerate for as long as possible.. I\'ll call that victory.

Edit: Another few hours of tinkering got me up to 435m/s. I added 2 1m aero decouplers (though I didn\'t use the decoupling feature) which allowed me to put 6 M50 325 thrust engines on the thing. Had to reinforce the hell out of the body and engine pods, added 2 more chutes, tinkered with placement a LOT before I found something that didn\'t misalign the sled when braking, moved and tweaked the landing gear again (mounted them wider, but also a bit taller to prevent chute deployment from flexing the body into the pavement) and finally a pair of winglets at the front, angled down slightly, to help keep it on the road.

It\'s amazing how tiny little changes make a huge difference at such high speed. The winglets not only held the sled on the road better, but made it a lot more stable, slight changes in auxillary engine pod angle massively reduced stresses on the body that made parachute breaking impossible, and even paring down the strut count to bare minimum made a 10m/s difference on the top speed. All those low-drag/lightweight components that I thought were fairly useless turned out to be massively important.

Hell, win or lose I learned a TON about the game and I had a blast. Thanks.