carolyn

Yes, KJR helped greatly. But because of those earlier collapse issues (and VAB/Kerbal issues), I had gone to 60% where I still get some disconcerting wobble with KJR (but no collapse). So I was concerned about going to 100% where the already-large mass/thrust would be multiplied by 5. I didn't want my kids and I to take time building nice spacecraft, only to find they would just go splat. Glad to hear KJR is up to doing 100% scale. Yes, I realized the atmosphere would have to be thinned or something to make reduced-scale work. But wouldn't engines, fuel, etc., be fine if you scaled all part masses and all engine thrust to the cube of your length scale, leaving fuel and Isp alone? By my math, that would work. Of course that's moot if 100% is where everything is going, but for "academic" purposes, I'd like to know if I'm wrong.

Sorry if I sounded negative, because they've done great work! But just going by what I found after installing it and looking through the parts, it appeared that the scaling issue had not been addressed much, and that (along with a bundler) was the issue I was talking about. I know it's a WIP, but since I couldn't find good information about where things stand on this issue, I asked about it here, with the intention of helping with scaling if help was needed.

Well, that's what I had gone by mostly, as well as searching the word "realism". But imho, it ought to be easier for people who just want to install-and-go and get consistent parts, and I want to find who is working on that and help if there is something I can contribute. Thanks for the tip about the VAB, but what about the kerbals themselves, have they been scaled so they aren't 2.5 feet tall? And it's great that people have managed huge rockets, but I don't think I'm alone in having trouble with heavy things just collapsing on themselves. It just seems, to me at least, that there's a lot of advantage to scaling to around 50-60% length and 12-20% mass, keeping things in the range Squad intended. Is there consensus on this? Is 100% the standard for realism, or the goal? I've heard about 64% as well. Thanks for that -- besides the scaling thing, a bundler is the other half of the project I'd hoped was out there. I'll check it out, and contribute if I can.

This is very ambitious! Like many, I've thought about the N-body issue, but Squad seems pretty firm about keeping things on rails. Please don't throw snowballs at me, but maybe they are right -- after all, this isn't Orbiter. Going "off-rails" would really complicate things like time warp. BUT.. perhaps something can be done near-term to get the one thing we sorely miss with the current patched-conic approximation -- LaGrange points. It might be possible to put LaGrange points themselves on rails, as well as the (non-elliptical) orbits around these points. Imagine each LP having a little SOI you could fly to and orbit. Sure, it wouldn't be numerically perfect, but this is KSP. The computational load would be greatly reduced vs. N-body, and time warp, etc., would still be possible, preserving the kerbally gameplay feel. Thoughts?

Hello! Long time since I've posted, but I want to bring up a topic that, from what I've managed to find, hasn't seem to have been addressed... My kids and I have been KSP players since version 0.13, and to make things interesting/challenging again (as well as educational), I've recently have been trying to assemble the right set of mods for (somewhat)realistic modelling of our solar system and real-world rocket technology. Sure, we could jump over to Orbiter, but there's nothing like KSP for creativity and having fun while learning.. Science! Although I'm in IT (a C# developer, btw) and no slouch in such things, I found this to be quite a challenge to set up, to put it mildly. So I can imagine that for most players who haven't spent many hours tweaking KSP and/or reading the forums, getting going with this would be just too difficult now. From what I see, one main issue is that there isn't a place online where you can go and get step-by-step instructions on what to do to get a good realism setup. Information is scattered, and the info that's there is full of lingo and acronyms that people (like me) who haven't been forum regulars have to muddle through to figure out. The other main issue is that the realism mods, particularly those with scaled rocket parts, are now woefully inconsistent in scale and performance with respect on one-another. (No offence to the mod developers -- you've done marvelous work.) Most seem to be either still on "kerbal scale" or at 100% scale, which is just too big to make anything practical within the confines of the game. So I've started to take it upon myself to go through each part (stock,KW,Nova,etc) and re-scale them based on real-world engines specs, etc., to about 60%-by-length, and 20%-by-mass/thrust. It's a lot of work. It would be great if a group got together (especially if important mod developers got on-board) to come up with some standards for scaling/etc to agree on and start to work towards... and also to put-together a friendly easy-to-find instruction page for installing a standard set of realism mods known to work together correctly, for people who just want to play realism without spending hours on setup with inconsistent results. Has anything like this been done? If not, would anyone like to join me in starting to organize this, or at least helping with the part scaling work? Thanks!

P.P.S: It was the source code link on your post #13 that was bad. I just checked the O.P., and the links there are good. Thanks!

Bernierm, even before reading your reply, I took a closer look and came to the same conclusion: it seems it's not a capacity issue after all. It just looked that way because (1) the error given was an "index out of range", and (2) the error occurred when I put everything I had in my AddOns folder, and "everything" happened to include a couple misbehaving parts that I didn't use much anyway. You get this error if the directories / .cfg's are not 100% setup correctly for every part. Perhaps helping the user out by checking for this and giving a helpful error/warning pointing to the naughty Part would be the best thing for this program right now. At least you could check if the directory structure was right and that the part.cfg file exists and has a good "name =" entry. I'd suspect bad file setups are causing most if the crashes users are experiencing. Btw, I haven't tried the latest update, nor looked at the source yet, so maybe you've already addressed some of this. As for issues with the persistent file, it hasn't seemed to give me any problems so far, but I tend to keep mine quite clean. Perhaps after getting your update, I'll try cluttering it up to see if anything happens. As for .dll manipulation, I guess it isn't a huge deal because they take up relatively little memory. It's really more of a clutter issue. The tricky part of doing this (as you've no doubt realized) would be examining each .dll to see what module(s) they handle -- if that's accomplished, the rest is straightforward. Keep up the good work! P.S.: I just tried your source code link, and it's broken... FYI. Cheers!

Nice work -- just what I was looking for, thanks! I was thinking of programming something just like this until I found yours. However, there are a few issues to address: Most importantly, you get an out-of-range exception when there are a huge number of available mods/parts. ("System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException: Index was out of range. Must be non-negative and less than the size of the collection. Parameter name: index. at PlanoTron.AddInData.ScanAddInData(String kspLoc, String addInLoc) ) You should probably increase the capacity by a factor of 10 or so to be safe. Also, it would be nice if the ability to handle the plugin dll's was added. Finally, please post the source code so others can contribute. As for me, I've been a .NET / C# developer for about a decade and would be happy to help. Again, great job!

Hello, This is my first post, so first of all, I'd like to say that my three kids and I all love this game. It's clean, fun, educational, and definitely mom-approved. :-) Anyway, we've downloaded a number of addons, but the computer we use is a bit short on memory. (I agree something needs to be done about the way *all* parts are loaded in memory at startup.. Maybe load "thumbnail" versions unless/until actually used at the VAB or in a persistent ship?) As a work-around, I was hoping this addon manager I've seen mentioned a couple times would help (see: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/showthread.php/2526-Suggestion-Add-on-Selection-and-Challenge-Scenarios?p=26965&viewfull=1#post26965 ). But this and nearly all the forum links are broken (argh!). No name of the manager was mentioned, so I can't even search it. All I know is that it used to be at "topic 997". Can anyone direct me to it? Also, is there a way to find old threads here by their former topic numbers, so we can manually overcome the broken links? Thanks! - Carolyn