adinfinitum

Huh, that's an interesting quirk, glad I know that now

Changing to a satellite and switching back seems to have fixed the problem, of course it was also night this time and it is KSP after all, so that coulda fixed it too, who knows. This is the first game affecting bug I've had so far in 1.0.2, but there's just something about how the game feels with no reverts and quicksaves that's really made it a dozens times more compelling for me. I feel like it adds to the whole space program feel, I can be as careful as I can designing a rocket, but if I got too confident and it flips on takeoff with no escape, 4 kerbals are gone, its a tragedy in funds and life, but like the first Apollo mission, bad stuff happens sometimes.

I've tried without SAS, but I'll give it a try with turning the gimbals off. I'm just glad the 1.0.2 load time is so quick, I'm playing without quicksaves or reverts so the only way to bring the craft back to life is ending the game with task manager and restarting. Edit: I'll try moving it too if I can maybe I can roll it somewhere since I'm on Minmus

Well I'm glad you guys like it, it was a nice challenge and change of pace trying to squeeze every bit of L/D ratio out of that plane that I could, while still having it look glider-like With how high that get's it up, I might actually be able to get some pretty good range out of it, I definitely want to give that a try.

I've got a mining craft landed on Minmus that wants to shake itself to pieces anytime I try to liftoff into orbit. Here's the best pics I could get, can't get up to turn it around without explosions... This is in the middle of the second mining trip it's made, full ore tanks both times. No shaking at all happened the first time, I was able to land, mine, takeoff, and transfer the ore my orbital refinery. This time however I cannot seem to do anything to get it into orbit alive. I've tried taking off with everything deployed, nothing deployed, only some things deployed, and nothing has been able to stop the inevitable explosion. The only difference is it has slightly less fuel this time than the first, because then I finished up my transfer stages fuel while landing. I know a few of the parts are clipped together, but it's nothing the VAB wouldn't allow, and no more than some of my other ships.

That's pretty much my favored playstyle, and I wish we had a ceramic heatshield option instead of only ablative. I tried using a heatshield without ablator because the max temp is listed as 3400 degrees. After looking at the heat debugging info it has almost no thermal mass with no ablator, so I'm not sure if it hasn't blown up because it actually works the way I thought, or if aerobraking just isn't that stressful on the craft. Here's a pic, although not a very good one. Just ignore the station piece it's pushing around, the ship is the fat one with the tiny neck. I haven't taken it out of the system, but it returns from Minmus and aerobrakes at 32-33km regularly. It's probably got enough dV to return without aerobraking, but that's just so inefficient.

Any particular reason? I don't really know the pros/cons of .dds vs .png, so I'm just curious.

That's kinda similar to how I see it, at least with the Jeb being old enough to have an adult niece part. He's just been around so long he's gotta be in his 40s, at least, while Val is in her mid 20s. So she's up and coming, and he's getting ready to retire

Well with the way the heat works now I only get heat glow on my NERVAs, and that's after running them 3-4 minutes. I haven't had a mainsail get heat effects yet, the majority of the heat they produce either goes into the atmosphere or into the thousands of liters of fuel in an orange tank. I'm not sure what temperature exactly the heat bars show up, but its a percentage of the max heat of a part, so with engines thats 600-800 degrees.

Are you trying to get it as close as possible to pre-1.0.x behavior or going for a realistic engine temperature? Either way, I don't think the best way to go about it is to change the overall generation factor, but to mess with the conductivity in the part config. Lowering the specific heat of the mainsail would probably accomplish about the same thing also.

Other than getting the large docking ports at the end of the tech tree, there's not much that would make the actual hub of the station obsolete. As long as you keep things modular it'll be easy to upgrade, like switching out a 1x6 solar panel array for a gigantor panel array, switching to larger fuel tanks, etc.

Welllll, I mostly just use them because they're free, once I get pretty well along in career I like to put them in a station or base where all the other astronauts can hang out with the original pioneers, if they've survived that long. In this game only jebediah is left, and that's only because he's stuck in solar orbit right now...

All the engineers at the KSC are always so occupied with how to fit more boosters on their rockets, and how to get out away from the atmosphere as fast as possible. However, one kerbal didn't fit in with the rest. She didn't understand everyone else's obsession with speed and power, so she took it upon herself to create something that was the very opposite. The result of all her hard work was the Albatross, a one-seater sailplane that, instead of fighting the air, embraces it! I made this plane to try and see how well a realistic looking sailplane could fly. Since there's not really a way in stock to have a tow plane or a winch launch, I went with a couple of small rocket boosters to get it up in the air. The best glide ratio I was able to get is about 12:1, which is rather pitiful compared to a real world sailplane. Flight notes: The plane is designed for stable flight at around 50m/s, on takeoff this means about 10 degrees nose up pitch, and for gliding it will settle at about 5 degrees nose down. The ailerons do double duty as speedbrakes, pressing the abort key activates them and allows you to descend faster. If you want to taxi after landing, make sure you disable the brakes before you come to a complete stop, otherwise there's no way to get it rolling again. Albatross Download Update: Thanks to the work of FlipNascar, we now have a tow plane for the Albatross! Albatross+Tow Plane

I'm not sure on the specifics of Jool's atmosphere now, but as far as aerobraking is concerned, it's pretty much trial and error now if you don't have any mods to predict your path. It depends so much on the design of your ship, for example, when doing Minmus returns, some of my ships slow down enough to land with a periapsis of 38 km, and I've got another that takes 3 passes at 33km just to get it's apoapsis down to 300km.

That part doesn't bother me, but the thing that does bug me about the heatshields is that the attachment node is so far below the physical part of the heat shield.

Like a couple others have said, its just the activation that matters for the contract, not the actual deployment of the chutes. I always set mine to deploy at 0.5 for Kerbin, and I haven't had any trouble with them burning up.

I would definitely recommend an orbital tug, another benefit being that you end up with less parts on your lifting rockets, because all the maneuvering equipment is already up in space. Less parts means less weight, which means cheaper launches, if you're playing career.

Hm, I can't check for sure right now, but I want to say the drill is in one of the 550 science nodes

I'd say that was probably the cause of your problem. For future crafts I would just build up from the floor of the service bays and not stick anything on the ceilings. Sometimes its a little harder to build inside the service bay that way, but if you build outside and then stick it to the floor it works pretty well.

Did you have anything attached to the inner ceiling of the service bay? Whenever I do that with the 1.25m one it causes the same kind of shaking

I'm pretty sure the thermalMaxIntegrationWarp is the highest warp speed that heat movement and dissipation is actually calculated. I'd noticed when watching the heat on my nuclear tug that above 100x warp the temperature didn't seem to change, but I never looked into physics.cfg to see if it was actually a setting. I'm not sure what raising it up to 1000 would do to your game though.

Those sound like good changes to me, hopefully they make it in the game sometime.

It's definitely some sort of bug, seems to happen to me most often just after leaving an SOI.

I really don't get how you could forget to throttle up to 100% at the beginning of launch. Launch sequence is almost always CAPSLOCK, T, Z, and then space. And definitely seconding this, idk why the navball is closed by default in map view.

I thought about it a little more, and do you think its distance based instead of velocity based for target tracking? Since prograde/retrograde flipping happens at low velocity, and the situation where target marker flipping is when you're close up, it'd make sense to do it that way.