joshblake

DarkMultiPlayer funds/contract/etc. career support is still in progress. No data is synced on that front right now, so you'll always get your own refund.

I've been working on improvements to science (and shared science, kethane, etc.) but now that .24 out first priority is fixing DMP for .24. A proper approach to shared kethane and other mods will require some more work and integration with those mods.

The v0.13 zip on curse includes various KSP assemblies that should probably not be redistributed. Looking forward to trying this out!

Maybe this requires clarification, but when I read this: I read that as the Forum would get to designate four teams (and the same for Reddit) but that's it for the whole competition, not four teams per challenge. It says one team is eliminated each week, but doesn't say the eliminated team's position can be filled in by additional teams. So what is all the talk of active and inactive teams, and selecting new teams for each weekly challenge?

Thanks! The markers are from Enhanced Navball.

I put a big soccer ball through a Munar arch from orbit: ...and survived! The explosions after the goal were from the flag and the rover parked at the arch. I'm thinking the engine thrust blew it out of the way, or some KSP glitch. My ship was undamaged, and at the end I recovered a stable orbit. The arch transit occurred at a true surface altitude of 38m with a velocity of 825 m/s.

I did a last minute burn in a direct asteroid rendezvous resulting in a closest approach of about 200m and coming to station keeping at 800m. Video:

Love it. Love it enough for ten characters.

Player-player docking is getting much better. At the moment (in dev, tested on d24be7b) there is still a positioning error. You and the other player will see different positions, about 40-100m off. This offset is constant, as in these pics taken at the same time: If you want to dock with another player, make sure the inactive target vessel just holds still. Also make sure you two are synced. Docking with a vessel with a player in the future can cause time-paradoxes and explosions or vessel deletions. Anyway, inactive player just hold still. Active player execute the docking. When it is done, one player will be in control of the docked vessel, and the other will become a spectator. I did a test docking with my alt login (each vessel has a player). It worked really well, no duplication of vessels. No explosions. No vessels falling out of the sky for no reason. Afterwards, I tested EVAing all six Kerbals and got some good screenshots. Also discovered EVA/Kerbal cloning was still an issue. Just look at the album:

Disconnect, type a new name in the DMP box, reconnect.

Going to have a GATU session with friends tomorrow afternoon. Any chance for an update before then? An EVA camera would be amazing. Looking at the stand alone map view mod as well.

Loving KSP TOT. Thanks for making it. Tried out 0.12.2 last night, now downloading 0.12.3 --> v100 prerelease. One thing I noticed is that the UI is very messed up when your Windows DPI setting is anything other than 100%. I'm running on a MacBook Pro with Retina Display with Win 8.1 Update, and usually have DPI set to 125%. The TOT UI had boxes in the wrong places, things not visible. At 100% it was fine though, but the setting is for the whole OS and requires a logout and login. I like the flow of solving the optimization problems. My background as a user experience developer is nagging me to make improvements to the UI. Don't have specific suggestions yet, want to explore more. Is the calculation engine in matlab able to be called from C++ or C#?

Here is my submission: MET: 35:28 Mods used: Mechjeb, Engineer, proc wings, TAC fuel balancer. Approach: A superjet named HyperLily II. Specs: 36 ram air intakes 5 Turbojets. 2 RT-10 solid rocket boosters to assist getting to cruising altitude (10km) quickly, then dropped. RCS Mk2 cockpit in "escape pod" configuration: separator and parachute. Pics: I messed up the first 1/3 of the cruise trajectory since I let myself get too high before correcting, and my velocity carried me up to about 50 km, starving the engines. I was trying to stay between 30km and 40km. It took me another 1/3 of the flight basically waiting to reach and come back down from apoapsis. This was helped slightly by a -50 degree pitch to increase drag and lower the apoapsis. Once the engines kicked back in, I re-established a superjet cruising trajectory and held around 31-33km altitude. I had to vary my pitch between +5 and -10 degrees to manage my vertical velocity, as my apoapsis was 70-80km at that point. I kept my vertical velocity 0 m/s +-20 m/s (which keeps the periapsis near me and the apoapsis constantly moving on the other side of the planet.) Beyond managing vertical velocity, I tried to balance air density so I could have enough air intake to for the engines to accelerate as much as possible but minimize the drag. Peak velocity was approximately 2215 m/s. Descent started at 230 km from KSC from altitude of 31.5km with a -15 degree pitch most of the way. Mechjeb Smart A.S.S. Surface hold was critical for this flight. I also used the TAC Fuel Balancer from the beginning so the center-of-balance didn't get all wonky relative to the center-of-lift as we burnt fuel. I kept the Spaceplane Guidance pane open just to track the distance to runway, and use the Landing Guidance pane to judge when to start the descent. Descent was flown using Smart A.S.S. and manually near the end. I will probably try again with a better trajectory. I could probably shave 1-2 minutes off with this jet. I also had more than enough fuel, although I didn't use as much as normal due to the altitude excursion and jet flameout.

Alright! I pulled up my half tank ship and modified it to have a half central tank rather than a full. (So basically identical to yours.) I also spent time refining each stage of the mission - launch, deorbit and aerobraking, and landing rocket, flying manually except when MechJeb really does a better job. Results - with a 7.5 ton ship (2.5 tanks - 1000 liters of fuel, starting delta-v of 3987 m/s), I achieved 71x71 orbit, then immediately did a minimal deorbit burn and used almost a complete orbit of aerobraking, and landed safely back at KSC with 7.27 liters of fuel remaining, or 72 m/s of delta-v remaining. This should either tie me and r_rolo1 for minimalist, or put me ahead slightly if you account for the unused fuel. or it didnt happen... <iframe class="imgur-album" width="100%" height="550" frameborder="0" src="http://imgur.com/a/vdWh1/embed"></iframe> This included two very small (2 m/s, then 1 m/s, total of 0.35 liters together) course corrections. The pics account for all uses of fuel. The landing was near perfect. I took screenshots just before and just after firing the landing rockets. I fired them by hitting the MechJeb Land button. (MechJeb was off during re-entry except for the course corrections.) Below a critical altitude, MechJeb Land will immediately fire full throttle until achieving the desired touchdown speed, then target coasting in at touchdown speed for the last few meters. That takes too much fuel, so I figured out I could mash the land button at an altitude of about 50 m and the full throttle with the distance remaining slowed me down enough. Once touching down, MechJeb cuts the throttle so I have remaining fuel. Doing the maths - the before photo shows my vertical speed as -108 m/s with 194 m/s of delta-v (with engine off prior to landing rocket.) The after photo shows me landed with 72 m/s delta-v remaining (with engine off after landing rocket shutdown.) The ideal landing would fire full throttle at the last moment with just enough time to reach a safe* velocity right at the ground. In my case, I used 194 m/s - 72 m/s = 122 m/s in between those two screenshots, arresting approximately 108 m/s of velocity. I suspect that I hit it slightly earlier than I could have and MechJeb coasted for a moment, resulting in the 14 m/s of excess fuel wastage. * Safe velocity meaning velocity which the rocket can withstand hitting the ground without destroying anything. I did try hitting the LAND button later, attempting 40 m altitude, but either that is too low, I hit it late, or the game glitched, and I destroyed everything except the capsule and MechJeb! Took a bit earlier than the landing (1km altitude) but Jebediah is a cool cucumber. Oops, burned the rockets too late and destroyed most of the rocket. Jebediah is a bit upset, but any landing you can walk away from... This landing mechanism would make for a good add-on or enhancement to MechJeb.

I'm curious about the viewing experience. Are all competitors going to be streaming at the same time? Are we supposed to pull up 10 or more different streaming windows in order to watch all the competitors? That will be pretty difficult to manage and will be bad on bandwidth. Also consider that even though it is live, individual streams may be 30 to 60 seconds behind other individuals watching due to different buffering times. I love the idea but I would think that it would be much better to do a championship format with 2 or maybe 4 at most simultaneous competitors. Have them scheduled and run them back to back, so pair/group 1 has an hour, then group 2, then group 3 for a three hour max session. This could even take care of the time zone issue for some if you had more than one session. The final champion could be either the best time out of any session, or a finals competition with the winner from each group plus an unannounced twist or additional requirement to change it up. The twist could be something along the lines of minimum mass of the lander, or return back to KSC, or rescue 5 stranded Kerbals (provided a starting persistence file with the setup.) Of course if there are only 5 people competing, this isn't as big of an issue to stream them all at once. Any more than that I'd prefer breaking it into groups. Also, listening to the competitors talking or voice chat among competitors would be awesome to listen in to. Skype maybe, and add it to the stream.

I used LoT on Duna the other day all the way in no problem. It looks a little different at the end than on Kerbin as it turns the ship extra just before touchdown to cancel the horizontal velocity. Actually, the first time I attempted this on Duna it was with a much too long ship with no legs or RCS, and it couldn't rotate the ship fast enough and crashed at low speed, stranding the Kerbonaut. The rescue ship was better designed and used LoT to land very close to the first ship. I turned on RCS to help it out in the final stage, a few tens of meters up.

Rolo: Good points. I'd like to explore this further but don't want to thread-jack this thread. If you started a new challenge thread around minimizing fuel usage to get the specific craft (your half-tank craft) to 70x70 orbit then land back to KSC, I'd participate. I did experiment with different ascent profiles within MechJeb and manually, but didn't find any that were more efficient than the default ascent autopilot settings. Not saying that there aren't, but I was focusing on repeatable MechJeb flights, for science. Your technique of mashing the throttle at the last minute sounds like the Soyuz "soft landing" breaking engines which fire at a height of 1m. Of course, Soyuz is under parachute at that time.

rolo: Nice. I see you used the good luck I wished you! One of my versions (Min Orbit Ib) uses the same tank layout. IIRC I was able to do a safe powered descent with that configuration; however, the total mass and drag is slightly higher due to the extra radial decouplers and dropping the half tank dry mass earlier doesn't make up for it. For this challenge, minimum mass rules so I went with the simpler configuration.

@antbin Thanks! It turns out that with 2.5 tanks (half tank in center, same design otherwise) you can get to orbit, but you can't get back to KSC or do a powered landing. This requires adding a parachute, which will actually hold the whole last stage; however, the additional parachute weight mean you can't get to orbit! @EndlessWaves: Thanks! Due to the parachute weight and how the stock tank sizes work out I think powered may be the smallest that can fulfill the requirements. @r_rolo1: Good luck!

Hi, This is my first post here. I was actually working on minimal rockets a few days ago, so I'm going to enter my "Min Orbit Ic" rocket. Achieve a minimum 70km x 70km orbit. I'm going for these distinctions: Minimalist record (8.7 tons per flight engineer, 8.6 per Mechjeb) High Efficiency award Safety Last award Bill Kerman was next in line to pilot and he's, well, not very good, so MechJeb pretty much ran the whole flight. Only add-ons used were MechJeb and Kerbal Engineer Redux. <iframe class="imgur-album" width="100%" height="550" frameborder="0" src="http://imgur.com/a/VqHym/embed"></iframe> On one of the early test flights, I had a dock collar and parachute as well and the landing back at KSC runs out of fuel at an altitude of 2m, so it literally was empty when it landed. (No parts destroyed by the drop.) After removing those I have a little extra fuel remaining but not much.