killernerd

oh, i remembered something else: I did manage before to get another space plane to duna. I was flying through the atmosphere when I noticed the mountain ahead of me was kinda way above my current altitude. Poor Bob, as the panic set in he pushed the throttles to full power. But to no prevail. Bob lost his life that day... I had a safepoint though, so i press F9 (which should've set me back about 5 minutes). The game freaks out. And I'm put back at kerbin, with some random air plane spawned at some random location at the ksc (somewhere in between the launch pad and the runway). There's no crew in it and it destroys itself immediately because it got spawned a couple meters above the surface. That would've been a funny bug if it didn't also cause about 5 of my flights to just disappear. All in a day's work As for the original post: There are some really nice suggestions here. I love ksp but I don't think i've ever had a harder time getting a spaceplane from point A to point B. It was a troubled flight from start to end. @Borsek: using the mun for a gravity assist is all good and well. But how do I do that if ksp doesn't give me a predicted path through the kerbol system after passing said mun? My orbital path simply disappears as the game was trying to predict my orbit around the mun and no amount of acceleration was going to change that. (that issue should be solved with Skyrender's solution though).

Me: Hey, let's get to duna. I got it set as a target and am now placing my maneuver node! Ksp's response: yeah, I don't really want to give you an estimate on your trajectory through the kerbin system. But hey, i got this really nice approximation for the mun! You don't even need to know where your orbit is going after that, the mun it is! Bad timing i suppose, my launch window just so happened to intersect with the mun's orbit. But really? Why does the rest of my orbit disappear from the mapview when i pass by another body? So I delay my transfer burn a couple of days untill the moon passes, making my transfer burn a whole lot less efficient in the process... I finally get my orbit somewhere close to duna and I'm on my way. When I leave kerbin's gravity well I go back to the map view so i can finetune for a duna approach. ksp: Oh hey, it's you again! Trying to get to Duna huh? I can give you a nice intersect with Ike. Much better! God damn those moons... ksp couldn't really help me here though, i was going to slam head first into ike at my current heading. But I still don't understand why it won't give me an approximate altitude for duna after i pass ike... So the only option I had really was to eyeball my altitude and hope i got it somewhat right. Not that hard, got my orbit to skim the surface so all is gud. Or at least, that's what i thought. me: approaching duna's gravity well. ksp: Oh hey, remember when I told you that you were going to get within 10km from duna's surface? About that... I miscalculated and you're going to miss it by about 2000km. Good luck though! OK, just need adjust my orbit a bit. Lucky me for bringing along enough fuel. But it does raise a question: why are the predicted orbits so far from the actual orbits? I've noticed this more, the game says i'll graze the planet at, say, 15km but when the game actually transfers me from one area of influence to another it'll suddenly give me a massively different orbit. Why? ok, ok. I got this. Orbit adjusted, I'll now enter the atmosphere and do some aerobreaking to get into a captured orbit. Alright, carefully apply some time acceleration. Careful. *finger slips* *plane flies through duna* ksp: ...... oh hey, i see you're on a escape trajectory from duna. Where we going now guvnah? Can't allow that time acceleration though, we're not high enough. It wouldn't be safe. me: ... time to quit.

I'm not that crazy... I'm not going to run it at 5GHz. If i can get it to 4.5 or so i'll be more than happy.

good idea to check the debug screen, totally forgot about that Heat buildup is not very likely though. RAM usage is not really an issue with 16 gigs. And I do believe i have the latest update, the one for .25 somewhere at the end of the topic. The issue with the welder mod is not that it doesn't work, because it does. The issue is that when I try to attach a welded part it doesn't want to be placed the way i want. It seems like it wants to attach through the middle rather than one of its edges. edit: allthough the welder mod does glitch whenever i try to weld a part. It does work... But i have to click on the "show weld menu" button to "de-glitch" it. edit edit: checked the debug window and the welder mod does spam me with NRE's whenever i press the weld button for a part. Perhaps that has anything to do with it? Other than that the logs are normal.

@Wolfedg: i considered the possibility of debris cluttering the ksc but i tried a landing on duna and had the same result. Unplayable fps. @oglommi: yeah, i know that large crafts can bog down your system quite heavily. But i thought this was quite bad for the amount of parts my craft has. with ~900 parts i figured it should at least keep steady at 15 fps but the longer i fly the craft, the slower the game runs. And then, when i come in for a landing, it just turns into a slideshow. I don't have it overclocked at the moment, primarily because i'm lazy... I do have the cooling (Noctua NH-D14) and the motherboard (asus rampage IV extreme) for it since I was originally planning to OC it. Perhaps i'll occupy myself with that next week since I've seen people getting this cpu up to a stable 5 GHz. And yes I realize that this motherboard is complete overkill for the cpu... I was originally going to get a 3960 but hey, .... happens...

I did find that ksp's physics engine is only single threaded. Perhaps that's what kills my fps? because my cpu is barely even touching 25% usage. And is it true that the unity engine is 32 bit only? Because that would suck... big time. Ksp would only be able to allocate ~4 gigs of memory. So perhaps it's because ksp is hitting its memory limit? And probably because there's only so much work you can do on a single thread. It doesn't explain everything but at this point i don't think there's much i can do. :c

@WOODY01: mods are probably not the cause since i'm only running 2 or 3 and they don't add alot of parts. (mechjeb, alarm clock and now that welder thingy) @boxman: i7 3820, 2x HD7970 (allthough ksp probably doesn't use crossfire), 16 gigs ram. So specs probably aren't the issue small edit: normally my fps hovers around the 100 mark.

tried that as well, no difference :\ Mind you that the in flight fps is fine, it's when i come out of "an orbit" around "a planet" to land that my framerate suffers and becomes unplayable.

I recently build myself a cargo plane/SSTO thingy to carry me to pretty much anywhere in the kerbin system. The tests i've done so far are pretty promising. It controls very well for its size and is so balanced that dumping it back into the atmosphere is child's play. I actually did the most boring re-entry ever, taking so long and slowing down so gradually that i never even got re-entry effects... But, as it consists of 900-something parts it does slow down the game. Initially it's very playable, 20fps when sitting on the tarmac, 15 once i ignite the engines. And it stays there. UNTILL I want to get back down again. The lower i get the slower the game becomes, eventually I end up with a slideshow in stead of a game. There's something about trying to land (loading the terrain perhaps?) that destroys the remnants of my fps. By the time i touch down it's gone down to approximately 3 fps. (Good luck landing a 16-engined (12 turbo jets and 4 nuclear engines) cargo plane on some rugged terrain on duna...) And this happens consistently, no matter which planet. But only if i've gone into orbit (doesn't really matter how high up, as long as ksp recognizes it as "space"). So, I did search around a bit but so far I haven't really found the solution. I increased the phsyics engine's "max delta time" slider. I tried lowering the terrain and overall graphical settings to minimum. I even installed that welding mod to try and weld some parts together but it doesn't really do what i want it to do... As soon as i weld, say, a wing it suddenly wants to attach from the center rather than its edge. so that's not useful... (unless i'm doing something wrong that is.) None seem to really help. Any suggestions?

so I tested it and there seems to be truth behind the "order is important" theory. did the intake-engine copy method, slapped on 2 extra intakes because why not and a couple of minutes later we were cruising along happily at 24km above the ground doing a comfortable 1.7km/s

that'd make more sense because that's exactly what i did. Attach all engines (using symmetry) then all the air intakes (again, using symmetry). I'll try reattaching all of the engines and intakes using the copy method. I'll post the results. It makes me wonder why they chose to use that search algorithm though. Surely they must've realized that the order in which the parts are saved can actually influence the craft's performance... (or perhaps they didn't?)

so i tried your theory but it doesn't hold up. If what you say is correct i should be able to get as high with only 1 ram air intake for each side. So one air intake is feeding 2 engines. But with that setup i flamed out at 16-ish km.

i see... Then how do you go about combining these flows? And how does that explain the fact it worked fine on my other craft (with a very similar design)? Also I did manage to get it to work by removing the left side intakes and reattaching them. It's an interesting point you're presenting though.

other than a complet reïnstall i don't see how i would go back an update so i could reupdate the game? There's certainly something strange going on though, i just tried to takeoff and my left intakes were giving less air than my right intakes. Somehow. It went away after takeoff but came back at 3000m causing one of my left engines to suddenly flame out and putting me in a deathspiral to the ground. (i did close the normal air intakes so i could test the ram air ones).

I'm trying out the new parts from the latest patch (which i'm loving btw) and took the time to upgrade some of my.... bulkier (read ugly mofuggas) designs with the new sexeh looking parts. What i'm pretty much doing is rebuilding the old design with these new parts, since i only really fly at about 20 - 21 km (more or less) I shouldn't need more than 1 ram air intake per engine. And on the old craft it works fine that way but on this design the engines will start flaming out somewhere between 5 and 6 km up (where the normal jet engines would start losing thrust). I don't know what's causing it, i have them attached to the new splitter thingy (reversed at the front) and it does show they're working (they are receiving airflow) but it's like they're not passing it through to the engines in the back. Any ideas? ps: i'll ad a screenshot in a bit. edit: screenshot: edit edit: apparently this forum doesn't like steam screenshots? here's the direct link then :http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=325449412

finally managing to land on another planet. Presses space and decouples the pod from the main fuel stage...

steam doesn't require an internet connection (just once to install and verify your game). It has this little thing called "offline mode". I don't understand all this hate for steam either. It's incredibly handy and you have your games with you everywhere you go. And I like to have all my games in one place so i transferred ksp to steam the moment it became available.

there are quite a few abbreviations and technical terms being thrown around here. Time to shed some light on them! Some might be very basic but i'm sure someone will find them helpful. Also: feel free to add your own! VAB: vehicle assembly building (where you build your stuff) LV-N: nuclear engine, typically efficiant but not alot of power RCS: small thrusters used for docking and maneuvring SSTO: Single Stage To Orbit, as the name suggests this is a vehicle that gets into orbit without using decouplers VTOL: Vertical Take Off and Landing, here too it is, as the name suggests, a craft that can take off and land vertically though without the use of rotors (so they're not helicopters) SASS: helps keep your ship stable, there are different kinds of SASS modules: standard: only counters the current movement (using gyros?) advanced: tries to keep your ship at the current heading and bank the avionics pack: used on airplanes and smoothens your input to help keep your plane under control pitch: how far "up" or "down" your nose is pointing heading: the direction you're going bank: how much you're leaning to the left or the right gyros: or gyro stabilizer in full, uses a spinning disk or wheel in which the axle is free to assume any orientation (from wikipedia: click!) LKO: low kerbin orbit geosynchronous orbit or geostationary orbit: Orbit at which point the earth (or in this case kerbin) spins at the same rate as you. This means that you don't move relative to the ground directly below you. periapsis: lowest point of orbit apoapsis: highest point of orbit burning prograde: firing your rockets while pointed in the direction you are going (accelerating basically) burning retrograde: the opposite, breaking using rockets aero breaking: using the atmosphere to slow you down without fully re-entering kinetic kill: using a vehicle to destroy another but crashing into it (TWR, ÃŽâ€v <- still have to look these up) I've run out of time for now but I'll add in more later. Add your own if you want or improve on mine of you see a mistake

Sometimes ships just suddenly blow up. And unless kerbal simulates failures 'n stuff you could say it's because of the space kraken. For instance I've had this one design that I've been using for ages. And it works flawlessly 99% of launches. In the odd 1% it blows up at either 5000-ish meters or after separating from the main stages while stabilising my orbit (and no, it's not hitting any of the debris). And then there's the physics warp that can blow up your ship. All these oddities and anomalies that can't (generally) be reproduced reliably fit nicely under the "space kraken" term if you ask me ^^

- wait until target is passing overhead - launch vehicle - aim for an orbit that's about 10-20km lower than the target's - fast forward untill you are almost side by side - set target on the map - burn prograde untill it gives you an intersect - keep burning untill the intersect widens again - wait untill you reach that intersect - kill all your velocity relative to your target - burn toward target - repeat the above 2 steps untill you are close enough - active docking mode - use rcs to get close to docking port - you'll dock automatically if you are close enough i don't think it can get any shorter than his

a couple of seconds. No mods but alot of debris and flights going on. (it helps that i have it installed on my ssd ^^ )

i have absolutely no clue. The only thing i remember was that at the time there was no mun and no other planets. Not even a spaceplan hangar, no map, nothing. You had to either calculate escape/orbital velocity yourself OR (if you were a lazy person like me) use something like this: https://gist.github.com/cjameshuff/1075144 So i don't even know WHAT drew me to it but it's a fun game and it cost me no more than 10 euros. Totally worth it imo ^^

i was pleasantly surprised. Currently downloading the ENTIRE game again since the patcher doesn't like my old installation for some reason. Aah well, it should be fairly calm atm since you're at gmt -6 and i'm at +2

get a pc :trollface:

i've done everything so far by hand. No mechjeb or any other helping tools. It's so much more rewarding when you finally manage to land on the mun/minmus. After that it sure is a very, very handy tool to use.