Blu_C

Precise Node appears to be mostly functional. There are reports of it throwing NRE's, though from the sound of it the problem seems to be somehow linked to the lowest level of tracking station.

EDIT: Ok, from what I can see your main problem is those boosters. They are too high up on the rocket. Simply moving them farther down will give you a HUGE boost in stability. Your problem is likely that as they burn out their fuel the center of thust is moved ahead of your center of mass, which makes for stability problems on a rocket without control surfaces while in atmosphere (in vacuum it tends not to pose a problem). If you don't wish to move your huge boosters you can also try adding some fins to the main center stack.

You can also try adding control surfaces angled away from the main craft (be sure to disable them in the VAB though!). That way when they are released the aerodynamic forces catch the control surfaces and peel the boosters away.

The problem is with how the heat shields assign their mass currently. The part somehow adds its mass to the Center of Mass instead of simulating the mass where the part is actually attached. This causes huge stability problems for some craft (especially with a smaller number of parts), making them likely to lawn dart. There is already a fix for it in the mods section, and there will likely be a hot patch coming out in a week or two (the devs tend to be pretty good about releasing hotpatches pretty fast when serious problems are uncovered with a new release).

Nope. Other than using the engines in the conditions they were made for. I'm not actually sure precoolers actually do anything other than provide intake air. Standard Jet Engines are mostly for use at low altitude and low speeds. At higher altitudes/speeds their power drops off significantly. The turbojets are weak at low speeds/altitudes, but once you get above around mach 1 begin to pick up thrust impressively and can function at much higher altitudes (beginning to get rapidly weaker somewhere after about 18k above sea level). It actually isn't difficult to create an aircraft that will blow up from aerodynamic forces using turbojets.

You need to put collected science in the lab to make it generate science. It will gradually generate science over time based on what science it currently has inside of it. In the long run this will produce more science than if you had retrieved/transmitted the experiments normally. In order to put science inside it collect science as normal, then have a kerbal take the data from the part containing it and put it inside the science lab.

Are you aware that you can assign regular control surfaces to behave as air breaks as well? Using the actual airbreak part is unnecessary, you may want to consider using some of those instead.

This has been posted elsewhere: Does this video help at all or are you still having problems? Seeing your rocket will make determining problems much easier.

What type of engines are you using, out of curosity? Different types of engines now perform significantly differently at different speeds and altitudes. You will notice that standard jet engines are MUCH weaker when going at mach speeds or at high altitude. With Turbo Jets you need to be going fast before they really kick in, and to operate above ~18k above sea level requires a fair number of air intakes (I suggest at least 2 ram air intakes per turbojet, if you can swing that). From there a lot of it seems to be a problem of climb angle. If you are too shallow then you pick up too much speed in the lower atmosphere and will blow up. Too steep and you don't have enough time to pick up speed, not getting the full benefit of your air breathing engines. The sweet spot depends on the exact plane, but try experimenting with something between 30-55 degrees. If you get it right you should be able to easily reach around 1,000m/s before flaming out with an apoapsis of over 60km (and with some experience getting sub-orbital is pretty easy). No matter how many air intakes I put on the engines always seem to flame out somewhere between 30-40km (though they lose a significant amount of thrust as you climb above 18km) so try to account for that. You'll probably want to activate your rockets before the turbojets completely die.

You should check out the key bindings. It is probably possible to rebind the keys for docking mode in there.

The way heat shields are handled atm is less than ideal. I expect there will be a patch coming out shortly (a week or two at most) to deal with issues players have uncovered that the beta team missed. For the moment you can try doing things like attaching air breaks to the capsule to give it drag which will slow it down before getting to deep into the atmosphere (making heat shields less necessary or irrelevant) and applying aerodynamic forces which will help keep it properly oriented.

You can sort of achieve this by using struts to 'stitch' together multiple wing parts and cause them to behave as if they are held to each other. Beyond that nothing exists in the stock game.

Most likely your rocket is simply traveling too fast for the altitude it is at. Above around 10km (sea level) Mach effects turn into re-entry effects. So long as parts aren't actually exploding due to heating you are fine. If it is bothering you try throttling back slightly, as you may be over-thrusting. It isn't a huge problem, but does make your ascent less efficient due to drag losses (ideally your craft travels at exactly terminal velocity while in atmosphere, though in practice such precision isn't at all necessary for most KSP rockets).

Modular Fuel Tanks is the mod you are looking for. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/64117-0-90-Modular-Fuel-Tanks-v5-4-3 Currently the mod is completely broken I believe.

You can also use the modular fuel tanks mod change the tanks to pure LF (once the mod updates anyway).

My guess would be it is simulating shock heating effects. As you go faster the air in front of you compresses more, and using the friendly formula of PV=nRT we can see that as Pressure goes up so too must temperature in order to keep the equation balanced (both n and R are constants). At some point the heat gained from friction is significantly less than the heat gained from shock heating. How accurate that spike is I cannot comment on, however it is true that aircraft which are designed to travel at especially high speeds do have problems with heating. In fact, as I recall, the SR-71 was designed with many gaps in it's structure since, once in flight, the plates would expand as a result of heating and create a seal (as such, the thing was leaking fuel on the ground and had to be refueled shortly after take-off).

It could also have to do with the fact that KSP's logic for measuring the fuel in a stage is currently sketchy at best.

Huh, is AVAILABLETHRUST new? It isn't in the documentation I've been using at http://ksp-kos.github.io/KOS_DOC/.

No, it does not. MAXTHRUST is independent of the throttle setting. It is simply the maximum thrust a ship is capable of producing at any given moment. Thus you can cut engines, throttle back, or what have you without it staging.

I had this exact problem. The solution (that another suggested) was to instead stage when the current SHIP:MAXTHRUST < the maxthrust at the beginning of the stage. Here is some example code: SET maxT to MAXTHRUST. //remember max thrust for staging. //program foo. IF MAXTHRUST < maxT { LOCK throttle to 0. //Prepare to stage. WAIT 3. STAGE. SET maxT to MAXTHRUST. //Re-initalize maxT. WAIT 2. //Wait for stage seperation. LOCK throttle to 1. } EDIT: I should probably note that this logic assumes you will have an engine activated for every stage of the program, and that you won't be using engine-less drop tanks. The program merely assumes that if the MAXTHRUST of the craft has dropped then some engines must be out of fuel. I also haven't tried it with fuel breathing SSTO's, though I think it SHOULD work for them with a little re-purposing.

I have another quick question, does VESSEL:TERMVELOCITY return the correct value when used with FAR? The documentation mentions that using the ATMOSPHERE:SCALE structure with FAR returns an incorrect value, I was wondering if VESSEL:TERMVELOCITY is more accurate or if it is also off.

Quick question, because after reading a bunch of documentation on how RUN works I haven't seen anything that indicates this directly. I know that when you RUN Program(args) the arguments get passed to the program called. My question involves the reverse situation. Is there a way that after the program is finished running it can pass a set of arguments back? From what I've read on the github documentation there is RETURN function for called programs. This suggests to me that I would need to use DECLARE to set arguments I wish to return as global variables. If that is the case is there a way to release global variables?

Thanks for the help. Ended up fixing it with the following code (that in retrospect I suspect is better than what I had originally since it should work with SRB's too): set maxT to SHIP:MAXTHRUST (logic foo) IF SHIP:MAXTHRUST < maxT { lock throttle to 0. STAGE. set maxT to SHIP:MAXTHRUST. WAIT 2. lock throttle to TVAL. }

I have just started using kOS and am building a fairly simple launch script and am running into a very strange problem. Everything works perfectly up until the current stage runs out of fuel and the program goes to stage. At this point for whatever reason the staging logic never happens. Here is the code I've written to handle the situation: if STAGE:LIQUIDFUEL < 0.1 { //Stage fuel exhausted. lock throttle to 0. stage. wait 2. //Wait for stage separation. lock throttle to TVAL. } Note that this snippet of code happens inside the main (and only) while loop that runs for the duration of my launch, which is why it doesn't have PRESERVE. In any case, I do not think the lack of PRESERVE is the cause because it isn't even staging once. From what I can tell, for some reason KSP or kOS (or both) is misreading the amount of fuel remaining in the stage. I was able to verify this by looking at the resources with the STAGE ONLY flag set. For some reason the value of fuel always includes the current stage AND the next stage. Initially I thought this was because of some faulty logic dealing with radial stages and tried to rebuild using only vertical decouplers which worked for my first test run, but then after redesigning the initial lift stage I found the problem returned. Has anyone else encountered this problem? Is there a solution or a problem with how I am approaching staging code/building my rocket which causes the issue to occur?

Well, now don't I look stupid. I must have changed it by accident. Thanks.