Mr. Scruffy

A while ago, i (half-jokingly) suggested a special merchandise item: Some cartoon-facade, looking like a space-capsules inside, with a rotatable lamp behind it, that would be connected to your comp and take the data from KSP at runtime to match the light-ambience of the room you are playing in with the one you are experiencing in the game, at any given time. Another idea of the same ilk would be KSP-controlled window-shutters.

speaking of which - yesterday i had a 0-effort redock. The two parts where connected on big ports and i wanted to use the small ones sitting on the opposite side of each part. So i undocked, rotated the first by 180°, then the other by the same, and as soon as the rotation was complete - zapp - reconnected. ´Neat´, i thought, ´my first successfull manual docking - hehehe.´ On topic: How about having this ´docking connection made permament´ as an EVA? You know, get a kerbal out to wield the parts together.

LunaTrick, you should seriously consider downloading, installing and using ´mechjeb´. It has (among many other functions) this neat ´maneuver node editor´, which seems to be exactly what you are looking for. It allows you to manipulate the next upcoming node in a seperate window without fiddling with the node itself on screen at all. As an aside, since you seem to have missed this: Holding the right mouse-button and draging the mouse along moves the angle of your cam - use that whenever things (esp the node-arms) stack on each other. Fiddling with the nodes does take some patience and a lot of zooming in and out (without the use of mechjeb) and maybe the occasional switch of focus, which is tricky by itself (double click a planet to switch the cams focus on it - but sometimes it will switch to a craft close to that planet, instead). If you still find it too hard to plan a maneuver directly from kerbin orbit to some other planet, there is always the dirty (and inefficient) workaround of first leaving kerbin´s sphere of influence in a rough direction towards the intended target and only plan the exact intercept course once you are orbiting kerbol (the sun): Involves less zooming and things become a little more intuitive this way.

Hmmm... last night i had Bill aerobraking around Kerbin after his 325 day trip from Duna. I noticed the following: Whenever he was approaching Kerbin he was happy - and each time he´d reach periapsis and rise again he seemed unhappy, sometimes even like going crazy, shaking his head back and forth like he had this mental disorder which makes people do that thing. I was like: ´Common, Bill, you´ve been out there for so long now - stay with us just a little longer. I promise: you´re less than 24 hours from home, now! You can make it!´

... of the same size (right?).

I must say: the prospect of having the kerbal pinnacle of space technology be the ability to ride nuke-explosions has a lot going for it... I mean, you´d work yourself through all these increasingly sophisticated and sort of rational parts to end up with this sort of hellride - very kerbal. I dunno, to me, it makes a lot of sense, that this would be, what they were dreaming of all along - the getting to places being more of a neat side-effect.

It would be nice, if auto-cam-mode told you which mode it is switching to, when it does switch. You know, standard message saying, for example: ´Switching to orbital camera-mode´. Likewise for the navball: ´Switching to nav-ball target-mode´, or something like that. EDIT: Thinking about it, i guess, there wont be these messages, but, in the final game, rather audio-snippets telling you this (or at least that something has switched, if your kerbalish is not that good yet).

I think this is wonderful xp-material. It shouldnt require really new mechanics - just a few parts and the pets as crew - and could be ´tagged´ on (and integreated into career-mode), once the game´s released, imho. Being it´s own expansion pack /dlc, the proper love could be invested into doing this: You know, like having different pets with different properties and have them all fleshed out fitting into the kerbal universe with the proper cutiesy aspect. The stranger sort of idea: Maybe, by then, KSP will be popular enough to strike beneficial cross-marketing deals. Like, you know this animal from ´cut-the-rope´ (demo came with my new laptops windows8, preinstalled), which you are trying to feed. That could be a kerbal pet.

Extent that to any reason input is ignored. Like timewarp. Like yesterday, i maneuvered around Duna with a multi-docked contraption bringing a station into its orbit. After a 180° turn, i had to go to the john and set the timewarp to a mere 10x. Came back and wanted to do some maneuvers, but the controls wouldnt respond. I was panicing, thinking the last turn might have been too hard for the docking ports. ´Let´s try to switch command pods and see if that helps´, i thought. But the pods wouldnt offer the option to switch. I was like ´OMG- i totally broke the ship!´ And just before my face would be covered in tears and snot, i figured i was in timewarp. D´uh. A simple message ´time warp is on´, in the style and place of all the time-warp messages, would have helped alot. So devs: Please add a message to all if-statements currently just returning for any keys bound.

Actually, my scepticism about the matter was more played than real to lure out some supporters - i would like such a feature very much, as well. You know, how you always hold the right mouse-button and drag it around when watching KSP-videos? Wouldnt it be wonderfull, if that actually worked (along with time-warp)? Still, it would indeed take a considerable effort from the devs to do it, and i doubt it´s anywhere near the upper half of the priority list. The filtering of data to record, the recording itself (file-format), and the front-end for viewing the flights all would need to be well thought out and coded. It´s not impossible i guess, but not trivial nor done on an afternoon either.

I think the tooltip idea would be the most practical. Most easy to use and implement. But it should only be active, when you are not holding any part with your cursor. What data it should display i am not sure: Maybe just the name, maybe more... But the name of the part would definetely be helpful at times.

´Pigs in Space´, but only this time send the frog?

I am not sure, but you might be getting them too fast. 4 mainsails seems like an awful lot of power for what they are carrying. Late in that stage, the orange tanks will be depleted, leaving very little too lift and most of it far on top of the rocket. My suggestion for the rocket displayed above would be: - Try something less powerful than the mainsails - augment with SRBs for lift-off if needed. - Try to lower that central coloumn so that it sits right between the boosters. Use seperators on the later, if needed.

Possible difficulty settings: - KSC at old location (non-equatorial) - tilt of bodies (a parameter for all bodies - moons, planets...- to be implemented, which when this feature is disabled is uniformly set to 0° for all) - Various causes for death of Kerbal (g-force, heat, live support?) - Physical weather-effects ... Instead of presets, i´d have each have a ´realism-rating-percentage´ - people who played subsims will know this: Turn everything on, and you get 100% realism, skip on an item rated with, say, 12%, and you will be playing at 88% ´realism´.

There´s probably a height limit at which you´d need a heat shield even when dropping in with 0 horizontal speed. You need a heat shield, because heat builds up as you slow down. If you go too fast - no matter which direction (except upwards, obviously) - , you´ll slow down a lot, resulting in a lot of heat. If you cancel all horicontal velocity too high up, you´ll gonna fall down much longer before you hit the atmosphere (or a significant density, relative to your vessel´s current speed and other properties), thus be too fast, slow down too much in the atmo, have a lot of heat because of that, and thusly need a heatshield. On the other hand, a vessel doesnt need to go down all the way to the ground in order to free fall straight downwards without getting toasted, obviously. Thus, their must be an upper limit at which a zero horizontal velocity nufflifies the need for a heatshield. This limit should be pretty much constant for any specific body, but probably varies for different bodies, due to their aerodynamic properties and the heat tolerance of their materials, mostly. The quesion is then, if any manmade body able to reach a stable orbit (implying a certain altitude) has aerodynamic and other properties that would allow it not to heat up too much by dispending the velocity with which it would enter the part of the atmosphere with sufficient density. I think we are looking for a certain velocity/atmospheric density-threshold here, which when surpassed will cause too much decelaration and heat.

I just realized: There might be a slim chance that the nebulas of interplanetary space are the fingerprints of god creating the universe - yet there is a bigger chance, that the nebulas on my KSP´s skybox are the fingerprints of me clumsely pointing out things on the display.

Cant help the OP, really. Just want to point out that he probably wants his shuttle to have more than one seat.

I´d like to give an estimate, by how many percent this picture would have been cooler, had you put on some green stuff, made the appropriate facial expression and put that com-window of yours to the lower right, instead of the upper left - alas i dont know any number that high...

Hahaha! That´s how i felt playing one of those X-games (those space-economy games): Like flying around in some sort of cosmic wheelchair. I never liked that game.

Okay, another one (since we are at it): What about the mentos/coke-drive? Say one mentos, 0.2l of coke, a container of the same volume with an opening of 0.5cm²?

Just when i was wondering if this was even possible... Yesterday, i built a moonlander and a seperate ´ground mobility unit´ (read: automated rover-base with docking module for a lander). Plan A is to be able to choose weather to land on the mun with either or both at once. Plan B is to be able to first send the ´GMU´ and land the lander on top of it, later. And during test preperation (the only part of testing my kerbals usually go through, skipping the rest of the test-phase, like, you know, going from thinking about test-procedures to actually executing them) i asked myself if what you did here was actually do-able. Thx for the answer!

This, plus kerbal health being affected by radiation.

1. I was replying to the post above mine, which does not refer to the OPs system. 2. One can think of SSD as one likes, but getting a 120GByte for under €80 will net you a lot more performance, even on Vista, than transfering to W7, which costs more than €80 (at least here in germany). Of course, doing both would be best (in which case you also have the second disc to save your data). I dont know who overrates SSD, but i know the difference from personal experience. To me HDs are like CRTs, now, and SSD are like flatscreens, if you know what i mean. That´s how i rate them. And since the post i replied to specifically mentioned loadtimes as a bottleneck in system performance, i thought, the advice for a SSD was proper. SSDs do have one pre-requisite though: Your MoBo should at least feature SATA3. Connected to a SATA2-port, they wont make much of a difference.

Ahhh, yeah, i dont do kethane, so i thought the landers would be much lighter than the base. On the high-altitude for the base: I think i said ´ If you can spare the fuel or know exactly when to catch your fall´ - i didnt mean to say it was cheaper fuel-wise, just possibly be easier to aim for your target. Well, if your landers are heavier than the station, than it ought to be the station switching incliniations according to the landers need. In other words, the station should move towards the lander, not vice versa, whenever possible. For decending it makes not much of a difference, so here it is the lander who has to move anyways, and there seems little point draging the station along at this point. But upon return, any inclination change should be done by the station and only the station, if possible and needed.

At OP: All the freaking time! About WW2, the financial system, and just general knowledge like the number of US states (amazing how many people think they were 52 of them, instead of 50. If you are short on cash or beer or something, it makes a great betting-lure to start talking about this, casually. Got a whole crate out of it once. Crates offer the additional advantage of including the pun of its bottles being as countable as the stars on the US-flag.) These topics would offer enough opportunities to be a smart ass, but when it comes to space, it gets really hard not be one. Like this one co-student (talking university, here!) once actually asked me what was bigger: The sun or the moon? Or just recently my best buddy advised me not to separate a stage of a completely fuel-deprived space-craft that i had let fly by kerbin on its return cause i had forgotten about it: Because, you know, heavy things fall faster... right? *rolleyes* He still keeps asking about how long something will remain in its orbit and the answer ´forever´ still seems to be taken as a snobby joke or something by him. But i shouldnt be complaining, cause after all, it´s me who knows nothing: About movie-stars or the proceedings of some fictional triangle affair on some soap opera. Also, i do not know the name of a single ´idol´ in any nation or who won the last european song contest. Damn it, i am so stupid, i can hardly name a dozen soccer players and assign the team they play in this year to their names. And, probably worst of all, i have never been on facebook or twitter - so how the hell could i possibly be well informed about truely important stuff?