Sean Mirrsen

The thing about FAR is that it's not balanced against the rest of the game. What I'd like to see is a version of FAR with variables tweaked so that a typical well-built stock rocket takes as much effort to get into space as it does in unmodded KSP. Take... I don't know, Kerbal X. Or really, any simple orbiter, built with aerodynamics in mind (i.e. with nosecones and such), and see how much delta-V it expends getting to orbit - then take FAR, and tweak it so that the same orbiter takes as much delta-V to get into orbit. When balancing, it is important to find something to balance against. Balancing against the real world, when you have a planet with the same surface pressure and gravity, but ten times less size and atmosphere than Earth, is just not going to work. The point of FAR is to make design matter and add realism to aerodynamics - not make the game easier by any stretch. But in doing what it does it makes rockets stupidly overpowered. Tuning the rockets down is not a solution - they are balanced against the masses they must lift, for vacuum as well as atmosphere. The solution is to tweak FAR in such a way that it makes a well-built stock rocket rise to space as easily as it does in stock KSP, and make worse designs perform worse - not the other way around.

Just tried it myself with a proper re-entry......then with a silly re-entry. Um. Something's definitely amiss here. I think it ties into the whole business with the parachute doing funny things when KAS'd. When I load the quicksave with the kerbal out next to the ship, carrying the parachute, then if I place the chute on the ship, the ship flies off and disintegrates. If I drop the chute, the chute disappears and the kerbal loses all RCS traction - drops out of physics, essentially. Because Kerbals aren't completely immune to air resistance normally. This must be a side effect of that.

The radial parachute is absolutely impossible to use, either in space or on the ground. On the ground it clips into the floor and pops off, causing an interface error where it doesn't count as detached. In space it causes the suit's RCS to become useless until it is dropped - any kind of directional movement becomes impossible as the kerbal starts spinning out. The only way it can be used is if you are on a re-entry trajectory, in which case you can get out, grab it, and deploy it. The drag from the parachute is greater than that of the kerbal, so it actually meaningfully contributes to slowing down. In order to properly re-enter you have to have a really shallow trajectory though. You can't re-enter hard, because you will not slow down in time. On that note, perhaps KAS can have a sort of a deployable re-entry chute? A compact pack that opens high in the atmosphere as a drogue, and opens fully at 500m as normal. No need to even let it be radially attachable, except perhaps as a tiny probe chute.

Ships connected by pipe are one craft as far as the game is concerned, so they can be strutted together.

If sandbox has all the features of the career, including story and cutscenes, is it really sandbox? The tech progression and science reports are part of career, as will be part and crew purchasing. Having them in sandbox is superfluous. You are free to do what you want, not limited by anything. But it is customary for games that feature both a challenge/career/story and a sandbox mode to have extra rewards for progressing outside of the sandbox. In playing sandbox, you already have access to everything and can do anything, including science. But those little science reports are the extra rewards for people who take the challenge of career mode, with its research tree and upcoming part budgets and things. It doesn't make sense that people who take the more challenging route up are not, even if in a silly and gameplay-irrelevant way, rewarded for it.

Be container-portable and EVA-placeable. Contrary to popular belief, it isn't really practical to install a winch on every craft you send into space. I am personally quite irritated by the huge size of the winch GUI, and using context menus isn't always easy. So you might end up in a situation where you need a tow cable, but have no winch. However, there is hardly ever a reason not to have a container or two, especially on manned missions. These hold a variety of bits and bobs for repair, resource transfer, and the occasional rocketbike assembly. Having a few cable anchors present is a more lightweight alternative to a full winch, and requires no power - ultimately allowing, for instance, a Kerbal, to pull something, either in space or on the ground.

You know, I just remembered something I really wanted this mod to have when I was mucking about on the Mun. You have the deployable struts, and the pipes, but I think there's one more thing. Tow cable. I don't know if pipe can function like that, but I'd really like to see either a mini-winch (with like 10m range) that can be deployed via container, or a tow cable connector that would attach and link like a pipe, but would function as a winch at rest - i.e. the length it is deployed at would be the rest length, and the craft would then be linked, but not docked, allowing winchless but manned rovers/rockets to tow things like debris or trailers.

The reaction wheels were the result of the ongoing change, removing "magic torque" and replacing it with a proper mechanic. Not for the purpose of realism alone, but to keep the game internally consistent in its approach to realism.For non-probes, and non-interplanetary craft, the change barely matters. You can construct an orbiter using the most basic parts, and the last thing you'll run out of is power, because your LFE generates power, and nothing but the reaction wheels uses it. You should also keep in mind that realism is not binary. It's not even a simple sliding scale, not with something as multifaceted as a space program. You can have realism in parts behavior and general physics, but there is nothing to dictate a given progression of technology as "more logical" and "making more sense", since we only have our progression of technology to compare it to. Kerbals are aliens, in more senses than one, or two. Much more than just the visual, that's for sure. They can have absolutely different values systems, and of course vastly different history of progress. Probes first or manned first, decouplers before boosters or the other way around, any way is equally logical, and it's only a matter of choice - in this case, the choice is made in regards to game progression.

I use a reverse bi-elliptic transfer through low Sol orbit. That is, slow down till the ship drops closer to the Sun, then pick a point to accelerate from (since you go around the Sun pretty fast, you get at almost any angle), and look for the intersect with the maneuver nodes. The rules are the same as with regular ship rendezvous. Go lower to catch up, go higher to fall back. It just takes more delta-V on the interplanetary scale.

One solution is to manually disjoin your base before leaving it. If you have no connecting pipes between major craft, there should be no problem.

Or like I said, leave the generic results in. "The crew record their observations", etc. Career is more of a story mode, so it would make sense that you'd only get special flavor content there.

So I've been sorting out the mess of a rescue mission I made to the Mun, which required first one replacement Kethane mining craft, then another (as the first one crashed, but the pilot EVAd and survived), and then it required a probe mission with some containers of connectors and spare parts. And as I was lugging the containers around, connecting pipes and replacing broken solar panels, I suddenly vividly remembered a different game. While Moonbase Alpha seems to be rather more (in)famous for its ingame text-to-speech function (aieou aieou), the general feeling of performing repairwork on the Moon that it possessed, seems to have translated into KAS very well. Well, sans the timed precision welding puzzles. Unless trying to put a solar panel onto the side of the pod while flying past it on RCS counts. What I wanted to say was, great job on the mod. Hopefully there will be a way to resolve the current ongoing problems, the "ships linked by a pipe count as one craft" problem in particular.

The science points can stay. However the custom funny experiment texts should remain locked to career mode. I say this because a lot of people will stay in sandbox because career will not attract them in any way. If sandbox mode only gets the "generic" experiment result texts, the player may be persuaded to try the career mode for the various funny things said in experiment reports from different faraway bodies. Getting somewhere distant with a science ship will then become a reward for the player in more ways than just science points, whereas sandbox mode is just made for screwing around - it is its own reward.

Their first rockets are supposed to be suborbital. They get a decoupler pretty much as their first tech upgrade, and keep getting them as tech advances, I don't really understand what the problem is. Stack decouplers are the logical first step to separate the capsule (it would have taken at least one trip to space and subsequent landing to recognize the need for such a thing), and they get a radial decoupler as one of the items on the next tier, and that's just the default. For a small inconvenience, you get a much better entry point for rocket construction, as decouplers and staging aren't exactly simple matters to a layman.

I don't think the stylistic choices clash. Your mindset is just too far anchored in reality to think differently. Kerbals aren't like Orks, but they do start with their first rocket components "found lying by the side of the road". A kerbal's idea of a space program is getting a kerbal to space, not getting something to space. So the very first thing to go into space shall be a kerbal. It just goes from there, an approach to rocketry wildly different from the usual. KSP isn't meant to be a simulation of running a space program or bringing a nation - a human nation - into space. It is a game about little green men and their attempts to get off their own little third rock from the sun - it's hardly supposed to follow the exact same steps that humans made for their own. For instance, perhaps Kerbals don't have the technical know-how to make probes. They know how to make a rocket engine, but a remote-control or robotic unit just doesn't enter their priorities until they see a need for it. Finally, you are forgetting a very big thing. Modding. Let the game be what its creators want it to be, please, and you will have what you want it to be with modding, as long as there are enough people thinking the same way as you do.

I think it's one of the radial decouplers.

For you humans, manned missions before probes make no sense. For Kerbals, rocket science begins with Jeb and a rocket. Kerbals starting their space program with probes would make exactly zero sense.

There is also the bug with attached parts not functioning. In the case of attached radial engines, not functioning even after save/load.

You could attach a parachute to it, and attach the container cradle to a docking port. Paradrop the container and the cradle as one unit, then it should work. Maybe you could even attach the container itself to a docking port.

Since apparently this is a good thread to show off interesting KAS creations, here's something I dubbed the "emergency rocketbike". Source material: One command seat, one RCS tank, three RCS blocks, stuffed into two small containers. Plus one Bill Kerman. Result: Needs balancing, but is pretty neat. Also, this looks hilariously awesome. And this apparently works. Very, very good update. Now if only we could get a compact version of the UI...

Put an orbital tug way beyond its intended range and got it stranded on the Mun. Then designed a VTOL tanker-rover to go get it back. That was yesterday. Today is going to be fun.

I've got a problem with KAS. Namely, the attachment function won't work. The message appears, but the attachment cursor never activates, so things like the mobile radial attachment ports are useless, and there's no way to, for example, attach a magnet or hook manually to somewhere. I've got no other mods besides Kerbal Engineer. Also the other functions of the winch system are rather... inconsistent in how they work. Is there a detailed instruction manual on how to use the various functions? The guide in the OP (technically something like the third post) is fairly general, and doesn't detail the exact usage parameters for everything.

It's kind of the whole thing that it doesn't auto-rewrite. The VAB and the SPH are the same thing, essentially the same system, just with a few different settings and visuals. You will likely note that, when you load a craft you've made in the SPH, into the VAB, then edit it and save it, it does not become loadable from the VAB. Not the new, updated version. It gets saved into the same place it originated from, because that "type" tag, SPH or VAB, is what gets decided when the craft is first created, and never again unless you change it.Quite simply, I would say, it is because this is never supposed to be an issue. Never meant to be an issue. The subassembly system that we're getting officially in 0.22, and have had for a while with the Subassembly Manager plugin, is bridging the two construction buildings enough that you never really need to move .craft files. I really suggest you try out that plugin. It's a much better way than juggling and editing .craft files in Notepad.

It seems that KSP controls that can be bound to an axis, use a virtual axis that smooths out digital input, much in the same way flight and RCS controls do. If brakes were boolean, your rover would topple over pretty much as soon as you pressed the key. The landing gear on your aircraft would tear off from over-strain, because KSP uses a simplified friction model. Call me delusional, but I see no such sharp deceleration. I've yet to actually perform !!SCIENCE!! on it, but so far that was the impression I got.Should probably do some experiments on that front.