phoenix_ca

KW has weights? I have it installed and haven't seen any.

This is the best idea since the Large Hadron Collider. I'm all for it; every mod should use containers like these. The proliferation of nearly identical but slightly different parts is actually a pretty big issue. In some places, like with TAC, you could cut-down the parts cost of the mod to nearly a fifth of what it is now. That's a massive, massive improvement if it can be used more commonly, given the 3.4GB(ish) limitation on memory. Even when Unity finally gets updated to 64-bit, these will still be a great idea for memory conservation (just because you have lots of memory doesn't mean you should get lazy with management of it), and keeping the parts menus clutter-free. On to questions. Does it have FAR support? Specifically the conic tanks. B9 Aerospace would be nice to see support for. Also MKS (which has piles, and piles, and piles, and piles of parts, all with the same models ). I'm also curious to know how texture packs would work with this. There are some really nice texture packs for TAC, one of which I use. It might also be useful to tie-together tank type and texture. That would, perhaps, lead to fewer possible mistakes caused by user-error. Or tie it to multiple textures, but limited so that one couldn't accidentally make a xenon tank and label it as a liquid fuel tank.

I was just yesterday wishing I had those old test weights from some other mod I can't remember. This is oodles better, being one part. Thanks!

Well, that or you can fiddle with TWR on the lower stages so it's a bit below 2, slap MechJeb on it, and then set an ascent profile starting the turn at 5Km (or even less) and then muck with it from there until the profile only has a very shallow turn in atmo, finishing the rest in space. Takes some finagling but I've had good results. Even just forgetting the autopilot and instead using the navball guidance is a boon, especially for newbies. I sure as hell got the hang of FAR a lot quicker being able to use it.

Well herping derp derp derp. I should've figured that out. Still no idea how to remove the blasted landing indicator though, not without going back to the space center. O.o

Is there any way to remove a landing target from the UI once it's been placed? Or is the only way to do that to unfocus the ship? Further, why does the orientation of the MJ part matter so much? I'd like to stick it on the side of a command pod or other sloped surfaces, or sometimes even stick it sideways so that I can cram more things on a probe, but it wreaks havoc with the navball. It also changes the headings of the navball. It's entirely too easy to place an MJ part on a rocket and have it try to run itself into the ground thinking that sideways is up, or that north is in fact south.

Any word on when MechJeb 2 support will arrive? I do like this mod, but calculating terminal velocity by hand for every rocket and plane to program the ascent computer just...doesn't appeal to me. >.<

I also just stumbled across a use for it in the TC, with asteroids. Being able to plop-down some alarms for when an asteroid will hit Kerbin or near misses would be nice too.

My only pet peeve about this mod is that the correct altitude for each scanner isn't clear. It's not even really vaguely alluded to in the descriptions. Low, high, it's all relative. A very easy solution would be to write-out the values in brackets at the end. I did this myself to my parts files for my own sanity. Example: Scanner 1, RADAR altimetry sensor, end of description reads "(Min: 5 Km. Max: 500 Km. Best: 5 Km.)".

I look forward to seeing the TAC wedges. Would make for some nifty resupply carriers. Small ones...it'd be very hard to justify the increase in parts and consequent physics calculations on any sizeable ships.

Ah. I was convinced that was a bug. It'd be nice to set the transfer alarms while in those views.

There are two major considerations regarding speed on liftoff and orbital insertion. The first is gravity losses, and the second is drag losses. Go too slowly, and you're losing more energy than necessary to gravity by staying low so long. Go too fast, and as was mentioned, you waste energy trying to push through drag. DRE doesn't actually directly effect these considerations, other than really punishing you for going way, way too fast. If you install something like Flight Engineer Redux or MechJeb, you'll be able to see a readout of your gravity and drag losses. The key is to push the rocket only fast enough that your drag losses aren't greater than your gravity losses, balancing the two more-or-less evenly. MechJeb will do that automagically if you use the ascent computer.

The only place I see the "Add" button in the alarm clock window is in flight mode. Everywhere else (Tracking and Space Centre) the window doesn't have an add button to let me create new alarms. Is this normal behaviour?

Too popular for your own good. (Thankfully we can still just yoink all the files from GitHub.)

Why not use the real shuttle alarms? http://www.policeinterceptor.com/navysounds.htm You could re-purpose a lot of those, perhaps use the shuttle fire alarm if parts explode. Master and minor alarm could potentially be used for almost everything else. All you really need to do is call attention to the fact that there's a problem so that the user directs attention to the annunciator window. Too many different sound alarms makes it difficult to remember which one is which, leaving the user just going back to the visual reference anyway. My bugbear with the plugin is that in aviation, alarms that require immediate input from the pilot don't just sound and wait for the pilot to figure-out exactly what's wrong. It sounds an alarm and then gives a voice instruction that directs the pilot to take action. Two notable examples are the Ground Proximity Warning System GPWS and Traffic-Collision Avoidance System (T-CAS), but nearly all emergency alarms come with verbal output too.

I'm still alive. o/ I'm just not very active. (I promise to pick-up the high-res mapping project sometime in beta perhaps; just when the planets aren't so damn malleable. )

So, I smushed together an image made from tommygun's, ramipro's, and my own data. The master file is now 2.85GB in size (that's enough to have caused OSX's Finder to throw a fit, meaning I've disabled automatic file preview. O.o ). Here's the result, a 3600x1800 image. Note that this is 1/10th the resolution of what a complete image of Kerbin would look like. We can do better, a lot better. I was happy with this though, namely because you can start to see null cells on the right side. (Crunching this thing through interpolation would take a lot of time for little reward, so I opt to prefer gathering more data over doing that with my CPU time. O.o ) Changing the colour map is a piece of cake and can be done very, very easily. As can adding contour lines (though I'm having a tad bit of an issue getting GRASS GIS to export multiple raster layers to one file...I'll figure that one out eventually), which would be helpful since this map doesn't actually clearly depict sea level.

I'm on a potato!

Gotta say, the Learjet has always had some darn nice planes. I'd imagine that thing is quite fun to fly. Not exactly a giant bus in the sky. And yes, I second the sentiment of, please, don't forget you aren't a Kerbal. lol

You're definitely a madman, but where there's a will, there's a way. The thing is...you'd probably need to smash a lot of asteroids and maybe even a planet to build such a thing... The concept reminds me of the Earth Torus from X3:TC. (Which I know is based of the previous theoretical discussions positing such a torus, but the one in X3 is a splendid visual. Shame it went boom.)

Right, so, back to the OP... Funny. If I may make a suggestion though: Slice the comic image into its panels, then put those slices on the page. It'd make for much greater support for any mobile device that uses element diamensions to determine zoom. (iPhone in particular...I do wonder sometimes why webcomics of all things dont tend to do this.)

We're currently tossing together data from ISA MapSat to make a large high res raster map. (Sorry for my being distracted and not putting up what we have so far guys! >.< ) It should actually be (sorta) easy to tweak the colour map so it provides a view that's more like a simple 2-D map without major elevation data. Putting in the names of things would just require some photoshopping. Or GIMPing. Whatever.

*nods* kinda like guns. They're all just tools, and we do know how to operate them reasonably safely. For the same reasons I don't want everyone and their dog to have a gun, neither do I want everyone and their dog to have a nuclear reactor. Things go wrong, people die. And that's just inefficient.

Well neither are all that far off. The benefits of the standing-wave (it's depicted in media as travelling but...oh nevermind). It is a form of fast breeder, sure, but it eats up the plutonium so fast that it'd be crazy to try to extract it. After running, you're left with enough U-235 to start ten more of the things of the same size. As I understand it though, it'd be cheaper to operate and maintain than conventional fast breeder designs, for various reasons. (Okay so liquid sodium isn't the nicest thing to mess with but still.) As I said, main benefit is that they can use the crap we've already mined and is just sitting about using space. Astor China and India, of course they're into nuclear. They have a LOT of people, and tiny increases in an individual's average energy consumption means a huge overall change. They need cheap energy, and lots of it. There just isn't any conventional "green" energy source that can deliver.

It's similar to a fast breeder, yes. Enough that the company is looking for a test country with a fast breeder reactor to do their testing in. Similar, but not strictly a fast breeder. It's a different beast.