Eric S

There's actually nine biomes, four of which are various flats. Flats, Lesser Flats, Great Flats, and Greater Flats. On top of that, you have Highlands, Midlands, Lowlands, Slopes, and Poles. Personally, until someone throws up a color coded map, I'd suggest using ScanSat to map Minmus. Some people have posted the resulting map, but it's not as useful as you'd think as it's not really color coded, it just looks like it might be. You have to mouse over each of the areas in game for it to tell you what the biome actually is.

The process you describe doesn't require a lab though. An EVA'ed kerbal can remove the science from all the stock science parts (I've got a few mods with parts that this doesn't work for) and place the results in a capsule, no lab involved. A wonderful process if you're playing career mode with Deadly Reentry, it's nice to be able to return just the capsule.

Heh, just when i thought he was learning something, "Now I need some girders!" I know he's known for other stuff, how many other times has he said "I give up, I'm going to do the tutorial after all."? I get why he wouldn't for a live stream, most people would find that boring, but it was necessary in this case. Still cringing at his idea of a gravity turn. Started off with a 90 degree turn at 10k. This failed to get him into orbit, so he tried 20K. This failed by a larger margin, so he tried even higher. Eventually overcame the gravity turn inefficiency by overbuilding. A very kerbal solution :-) Though yes, I was about evenly split between having fun watching him learn and wanting to shove him out of the way and yell "THIS is how you do a gravity turn!"

... that when arranged in the right way, get called "stock fairings" by some people. It might make the craft look more aerodynamic, but they're not functionally fairings. On that we agree, I'm just making sure that people understand that FAR does not simulate air flow, so just because it looks like a fairing doesn't mean it will function like one.

Which doesn't change what I said. I was clarifying the statement that "Anything under a fairing or inside a cargo hold does not produce drag." The actual statement should be "Anything under a fairing or inside a cargo hold that FAR recognizes as such does not produce drag." and there have been enough (usually temporary) exceptions to that to note the condition, including the entire category of fairings made out of structural panels.

On the hitchhiker module? I see a few problems with that. First, it means your hatch isn't accessible via ladder, unless you're moving the ladder too, which puts you right back in the same position. Second, for optimal use, RCS quads are placed at 90 degree intervals, and guess what, those windows are 90 degrees away from the hatch, so they're still going to get hit. Finally, why would they replace windows with hatches? If they were going to do that, they probably would have done so before they took the time to set up an IVA view for that part.

I went with TAC for the sole reason that I was duplicating the mod setup that Scott Manley is using for his Interstellar Quest video series. I've heard that it's the hardest of the bunch, but I haven't verified that, I just know that having life support consume electricity makes your early career mode flights very interesting. Assuming you don't have batteries and don't stack multiple capsules, a single mk1 capsule has just enough electricity for 20 minutes of life support, assuming you use your electricity for nothing else and don't have an engine with an alternator. Yes, that means suborbital flights until you unlock batteries. You can get credit for orbital flight, you just don't have the duration to do an actual orbit.

Bigger problem with forcing the MK1-2 pod to have a symmetric hatch/ladder location is the positioning of RCS quads. Unless you want to lose about 30% of your RCS thrust, the quads have to be placed at the compass directions of the craft, which looks wrong if you're running a ladder down one of those directions, and if you use any parts that have hatches in line with the ladder (hitchhiker or lab modules, for example), this can lead to you accidentally placing a quad over a hatch, rendering the hatch unusable for egress from the module.

Right issue, wrong solution. the hatch/ladder of the hitchhiker module needs to be rotated to match. The problem with moving the hatch/ladder on the Mk1-2 pod is that then you're giving us few choices in how to deal with the fact that the RCS quads are going to want to be "under" the ladder for efficiency. For the most part, this is just a visual thing, since the ladder can still be used with the RCS quad in a position that would appear to block the use of the ladder, but if your RCS quad placement calls for placing the quads at a height that would put them over the hatch instead of the ladder, if you try to EVA a kerbal out of the hitchhiker, you get told that the hatch is blocked. As much as the non-symmetrical placement of the hatch/ladder on the MK1-2 command pod bothered me at first (yes, I posted forum comments about not liking it at the time), having to place RCS quads in positions that would cause inefficiency would be worse.

Provided that FAR recognizes the part as shielding the contents. That's not a given, and since FAR doesn't try to simulate the craft's airflow it has to be recognized in order to work. In fact, originally FAR didn't recognize procedural fairings. I don't remember which was changed to fix that. I think the same thing happened to the 6S parts.

Yes, though it doesn't behave quite like it. You can shut down your fuel use (and usually your electricity use), but you can't really shut down life support unless the craft is unmanned at the time. It's an additional constraint which does provide a little more challenge beyond just "think of it as extra fuel." If I blow a planetary transfer, without life support, I can just fast forward a few orbits until I actually do intercept the planet. This doesn't work if you're playing with life support unless you're using a mod that allows a full, 100% efficient closed system. If everything goes according to plan and the plan was accurate, then yes, it does simplify down to just another "fuel" to bring along, but the penalties for things not going according to plan or for missing something in the plan are much more severe. But let's be honest, if everything went according to plan and the plan was always complete and correct, this would be a boring game. On the other hand, I do agree that it should always be optional if made stock.

Three things that are confirmed, not sure about anything else. First, resources are handled a little differently, making it possible for engines to more effectively use the last bits of IntakeAir, for example. It used to be that turbojets wouldn't take fractional amounts of intake air from multiple engines, now they'll take every last bit of IntakeAir from every intake if necessary. Second, engines now throttle down automatically if there's not enough of every resource needed. The most easily noticeable affect of this is that you can no longer turn off all your liquid fuel tanks to dump oxidizer, as the engine shuts down as soon as it's out of liquid fuel. The way this affects spaceplanes is that turbojets will automatically downthrottle rather than flame out (if you're using a single engine, I'm not sure how this works with multiple engines). Finally, the IntakeAir resource displays in a different way. The amount of IntakeAir displayed is how much is left after the engines use however much they needed. This means that it's harder to judge if your engines are about to flame out, but easier to judge if they need to be downthrottled. The IntakeAir will read 0.0 as soon as the engine(s) can consume all of the IntakeAir you're brining in each tick, at which point they haven't actually flamed out yet, but they won't be running at full throttle either, unless the IntakeAir was exactly as much as was necessary. This isn't a change in efficiency, though it may make things look like they're more efficient or even bugged.

That is my understanding. I EVA pick up results all the time, and I always get the full turnin amount. I've never reset the goo/jr afterwards, but I doubt that will change anything.

Not sure I'd say "you're missing the point" (not you, the "you" you were talking to), but I also think it won't be quite like this when career mode gets finished, or at least scope-complete. Right now, every mission is focused on getting more science because that's all we have to do. When we're worried about budgeting and reputation on top of that, I doubt we'll be as narrowly focused on maximizing our science return. I doubt we'll pass up any science on a given mission, but the mission won't be directed strictly according to what science points we can earn.

The first time I'm aware of the devs talking about tweakables was over a year ago, and in a context that relates specifically to what's being debated here. Someone suggested that to be more realistic, the atomic engine shouldn't use oxidizer, just liquid fuel, and the devs responded that they didn't want to do that until they had tweakables in place so that they didn't have to come out with two versions of every fuel tank. When people started asking about tweakables, they gave switching landing gear and such in the VAB as another use for it. Dual mode engines came out of nowhere compared to this, the first time I saw anything official on dual mode engines was about a month ago when it turned up in the tuesday devnotes summary. I don't think this version of tweakables is what they were referring to there, because if it was, they would have changed the atomic engine over to use just liquid fuel. If they did switch over the atomic engine with this version of tweakables, it would be one heck of a nerf to atomic engines because of the increased dry weight of using bipropellant tanks and just not filling one of the two tanks. Basically, one of my simple atomic engine probes I made a long time ago would lose over 1100 delta-v even after I added more fuel tanks to make up for the missing reaction mass.

It's not the engine, it's the other changes, and those affect the turbojet engine as well. Spaceplanes across the board have gotten a whole lot easier in 0.23.

Actually, the VelocityCurve isn't the same, the RAPIER tops out at 2200 m/s, but the Turbojet tops out at 2400 m/s. From the turbojet .cfg atmosphereCurve { key = 0 1200 key = 0.3 2500 key = 1 800 } velocityCurve { key = 0 0.5 0 0 key = 1000 1 0 0 key = 2000 0.5 0 0 key = 2400 0 0 0 } From the Rapier .cfg atmosphereCurve { key = 0 1200 key = 0.3 2500 key = 1 800 } velocityCurve { key = 0 0.5 0 0 key = 1000 1 0 0 key = 2000 0.5 0 0 key = 2200 0 0 0 } So identical atmosphereCurve, but one value different on the velocityCurve.

Agreed on both counts. Service modules are the only place where this is that much of an issue (referring to wanting tanks that don't conform to the regular fuel types, not just the balance) because you either wind up using parts other than the fuel/oxi tank that are larger than you need, or radial mounted stuff which doesn't look right when you're trying to make an aerodynamic craft, or use part clipping to put the radial stuff inside something else. I'm loving nothke's S6 Service Compartment mod for Service Modules, but it would be nice if it were stock. EDIT: On further contemplation, I think that the shortest 1.25m and 2.5m tanks are the only ones that should go so far as to not be restricted to current fuel combinations. Yes, swithing fuel types and maybe ratios on all tanks is fine, but adding a third content may not be in all cases. The idea doesn't work if someone wants to take an orange tank and fit in a little monopropellant, batteries, life support (if and when it gets added to stock), even I'll admit that that would be too close to procedural-everything-but-engines-and-capsules. The devs haven't directly commented on this in some time, so it's possible that they've changed their mind enough that this isn't what they're doing.

I haven't seen this unless I accidentally had two goo or mat-sci results from the same location, which is the same behavior you get with EVA reports. I'll pay more attention next time.

That's definitely possible, and I've been thinking about it for the last few days, and I think that might actually be easier on both play balancing and new players. You could do a pulldown list showing all the variations of the tanks, their max capacities, and if it changes, the dry mass. We'd lose the ability to top off the tank if we weren't using the standard fuel balance for that variation, and while nice, I think that's a reasonable loss as the only time it would matter is if you have different types of engines feeding off the same tank (or a dual mode engine). Without it, you could still vary the max capacity and dry mass, but it would have to update as you moved the ratio slider, which may come as a surprise to people that aren't used to it.

The Science lab was a nice idea, but I think the execution needs a little more work. Prior to the science lab coming out, I was feeling like my space program was a one-man show. I had maxed out the tech tree 7 or 8 times, and Jeb was the only kerbal that ever got off the ground. Sadly, I don't think the science lab is going to change that.

Do you have any mods installed? some mods didn't cope with 0.23 very well, and emit a lot of errors, which have to get handled, which takes time. You can check this by hitting Alt+F2. If you have the same message over and over there, you probably have an addon that's spazzing out because something changed.

That's correct, in fact one of the reasons I'd like to see this is to get more variety in fuel tanks for jets. That's been my opinion as well, though I'm not sure I'd say that it's clearly not the final product.

Just to be clear, atomic engines currently run off of both liquid fuel and oxidizer as you said, but after this change, it would run off of just liquid fuel, not some special atomic fuel. Atomic engines work by using the heat produced by the atomic pile to heat up a gas/liquid to the point that it expands enough to provide more exhaust velocity than burning the fuel would have. So, in order to make the atomic engines work the way that they do in reality (a goal the devs have expressed a desire for), we would either need to have duplicates of all the fuel tanks with no oxidizer but more liquid fuel (something the devs have stated that they want to avoid), or we use tweakables on the existing tanks. If tweakables can't be used to increase the amount of liquid fuel in a tank, just to reduce the oxidizer, thats a nerf to atomic engines because it means we have less than half the reaction mass that we have from the same tanks now, but all the size and dry mass. The dry mass may not sound like much, but if you look at some of the number crunching that's been done concerning how much delta-v you can get out of a given engine, the dry mass plays a very large role in the max delta-v you can get out of any particular engine in a single stage. Basically, the solutions to this would be: 1) to leave everything as it is. This goes against the dev's goals. 2) to change the engine but leave the fuel tanks as is. Big nerf. 3) to change the engine, increasing its ISP, leaving the fuel tanks as is. That would be hard to balance and wouldn't feel very realistic. 4) to duplicate all the fuel tanks in "liquid fuel only" versions. Again, this goes against the dev's goals. 5) to allow tweakables to have greater effect over the contents of a fuel tank. Obviously, none of these situations beats all the others in all ways. #5 is my preference, because I don't think of our designs as being entirely made from off-the-self components that can be in no way modified. Most of the people that object to #5 here tend to say that #4 is the proper solution, but that goes against the stated dev goals, though it is possible that the devs have changed their minds on that subject.

That's probably a mistake on the part of whoever created the radial version of the LV-1 (Claire?). At one time one of the devs said that they intended radial engines to be inferior to stack mounted ones because it's easier to find places to stick radial engines. This was explaining why the mark 55 had the same TWR but much lower ISP than the LV-T45.