Eric S

At the very least, do a rover somewhere before thinking you're done. Like I said in my first post, I've done all that and more, and the weekly reddit challenges are still fun because they're making me do things in different ways, to approach problems that I've never dealt with before, etc. And to be honest, the most fun I've had in the last few months was last night, building rockets using just the seven parts you start career mode with. That made for some very interesting design limitations.

That's very much the case. The early science returns are going to come from what the devs mentioned about there being a science return on recovered craft based off of where the craft went, since there are no starting science parts. Still, it's possible that the early techs will be cheap enough that one LKO and return flight may unlock enough to make a trip to the Mun far more viable. Number of rockets wider than they are tall in that thread: 0 - you're still safe. Well, there is one rocket that went wider than tall during ascent, but it wasn't wider on the launchpad. My first LKO mission using the starting career parts looked quite traditional, as do many of the craft in that thread. And to be honest, the more reaching designs there weren't supposed to be practical. If your only science return prior to science parts is based on recovering the craft, then a one way trip to Duna using just the initial parts has got to be the stupidest mission ever as far as progressing in the tech tree goes.

While I'd agree that I'd rather see a GPU-neutral alternative, Unity is already using Physx, it just isn't using a recent enough version of Physx to use GPU assistance. Yes, the first versions of Physx were CPU only, and that may be what he was referring to.

Yup, not even close to sleeping, so here's a few things I learned while doing this. SRBs are a pain for circularization, which is why I gave up and went with a liquid last stage. When your options are to do nothing or burn 2500+ m/s of delta-v, you really have to take the idea of circularization as a guideline rather than a standard. My SRB-only crafts could escape Kerbin's SoI easily enough, but there just wasn't enough precision to be able to hit the broad side of a gas giant. I have no clue how people can do SRB-only trips to the Mun. While you can surface attach SRBs to other SRBs, it turns out that that idea has problems. Basically, the surface attached SRBs can only distribute their heat to the center SRB, which is already hot, so it's not taking it very fast. When I did that, I found that the radially mounted SRBs were overheating and exploding before they burned half their fuel. I could get around this by mounting something on top of them, even just a parachute that I had no intention of using. Attaching all the SRBs to the bottom of other SRBs for four or more stages tends to produce ships that do kraken imitations, since you don't have struts to connect them. The reason I was using a girder to mount the radial SRBs was to get them far enough away from the main stack so that when the center stack exploded, they didn't take out everything above them. In fact, that was probably the major engineering challenge, as it took multiple tricks to achieve that. The girders also served as heat sinks/radiators, so I didn't have to put anything on top of the SRB to keep it from exploding. I'm pretty sure my next trick is going to be to use girders to make landing struts, and attempt a round trip to Minmus. I'd have to find some more delta-v to land and return from the moon, even with aerobraking on return, and I'm not sure where I could come up with more delta-v. As is the first stage was a bit low on TWR, if I added any fuel to the top stage or added another stage of SRBs, I'd have to go to more than 3 SRBs per stage, increasing the difficulty of avoiding rapid unplanned disassembly. And then I'm going to start practicing free-return transfers to the Mun and Minmus, so that my first science missions can be in really wild places. :-) Oh, yeah, and definitely disable Chatterer before attempting this. I'll miss Chatterer, but until they release the version where you can turn off the battery usage, you'll kill your batteries in a single orbit. I still find KSP fun, but I can't remember the last time I had THIS MUCH fun playing KSP :-)

I have no doubt that someone will trump this quickly, and Manley will probably land and return, but I just had to get this out there before they commit me to an asylum because of my hysterical giggling. Probably not a fair entry, I let MechJeb launch the craft because I couldn't manage to get the staging precise enough and still keep the ship on track for reaching orbit. Notes: As I said, I let MJ steer the ascent because the staging had to be stupidly precise. Because of the lack of decouplers, I had to destroy the stages as I went. However, on the lower four stages, because of the girders, the SRB would shed heat faster than the engine above it could heat it up unless the lower SRB was still burning. Also, the radial SRBs had a tendancy to take out everything above them if I destroyed the center SRB too soon. It was literally a matter of a fraction of a second either way meaning I wasn't going to space on that attempt. The girders on the outside of the radially mounted SRBs were to make sure that the SRBs pitched away from the craft instead of into it. That helped a lot, but as I said, if the SRBs had too much burn time left, they still managed to take out other SRBs on their way. The two extra capsules were unmanned and were there to provide extra torque, since other than torque, this craft had no command authority. Wonder how much research it's going to take to send a rescue mission to Duna? :-) Alarm's going off in less than 8 hours, and I'm easily an hour away from unwinding enough to even think about sleep.

You know, this was the first thing i did when I saw that tech tree. Managed to establish a low orbit, outside the atmosphere but definitely not above 100km, about 300 m/s left, noticed that chatterer was killing my battery, and realized that I was going to have to deorbit before I did an actual orbit just to make sure I had enough battery to steer. Landing wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, except that I used a bit too much engine and the parachute decided I didn't need it anymore at about 50m off the ground. Lots of those little tanks made a fine crumple zone, though. Had I realized that someone would post a challenge of it, I would have taken screen shots. As is, I'll probably do it again after I disable chatterer.

I suspect that's an LV-30, not an LV-45, as vectored thrust is probably researched. But other than that, I agree completely. I did it with an LV-30 and fewer tanks. Might not have landed safely, but those tanks do work well as a crumple zone. Probably wouldn't have needed to do that, but I accidentally used too much thrust to break, and the chute went poof. I'll definitely uninstall Chatterer if they don't release the version where you can turn off the battery drain by then, though, I think Chatterer will eat through the Mk-1's battery in about the same amount of time it takes to do one orbit.

To do multiplayer right would be a major project, even for the devs. I'm behind them on this, finish the core product first, then decide if multiplayer is really worth it.

Well, if you're going to stick with that, then you're reducing your options on finding interesting stuff to do. I'll be the first to admit that some KSP mods are overpowered, but for the most part, the common and popular ones aren't so much, especially the ones that give you more to do or require you to alter the way you do it rather than just giving you more parts. For example, one day I was in the mood to try something simpler but tricky, so I settled on installing RemoteTech, and then launching a three-node communication satellite constellation using a single unmanned ship. RT requires you to be able to communicate with unmanned craft in order to control them, so most people put up their first satellite network with manned ships. I wanted something more challenging, so I found two ways to put up a three-node constellation in a single unmanned launch. If you're going to ignore that content, then I'd suggest taking a look at the weekly challenges in the KSP subreddit. Most of them don't allow mod use, so they should all be within your reach.

That's close to my theory, Jebediah isn't a name, it's a title, think "Head crazy-fearless person."

Depends on what I'm doing with them. Fractions are pretty common for me as intermediate steps or if variables are involved. On the other hand, if it boils down to a number with a fixed meaning, tables are much easier to sort and compare results using decimal notation.

The inner planets were all known for thousands of years, and even Pluto and the larger moons were known before Sputnik 1. The smaller moons were a different story, and we're still finding them. In fact, the rate of discovery had been accelerating, I'm assuming as either a matter of us using more advanced technology or as a result of our attempts to map more asteroids and such, though thinks look like they're slowing down, probably because at this point I think most of the things we're discovering are too small to consider moons. Wikipedia has a writeup on the discovery timeline. That said, that was only an example. Until we see more about the science parts, how they work, and how they change due to the tech tree, I'm not sure we're in a position to really make suggestions like this. I'd like to see more types of missions, but some mission types may not fit into the game well. EDIT: fixed URL, I was apparently still thinking in terms of xterm where you don't have to hit ctrl-c to copy when I did that.

I was thinking more MST3K.

Not sure how far this bit of culture has traveled, but the second entry is also a clue as to what BERTY will do if upon arrival, the crew refuses to cooperate. Time to show the crew mind numbingly bad movies until they give up and cooperate :-)

Not very hard if you either follow a cookbook-like recipe, or have an understanding of what you're trying to do with it. Assuming your craft is fairly normal, you could use the Ascent Guidance part to get your ship into orbit, at which point you'd target another planet and use the maneuver planner to transfer to that planet. For most targets, you might need to adjust your inclination to match the target at this point, I'm not sure if MJ2 handles that automatically. Upon arrival at the other planet, you would use the maneuver planner to set your periapsis, then set your apoapsis. And you're in orbit of another planet, assuming MJ2 didn't get squirrelly on you. Sometimes MJ2 does the wrong thing, and in those cases, it really helps to know what is supposed to be happening so that you know when to abort an execution. Depending on which you catch onto faster, piloting or navigating, you can also set MJ2 up to create the maneuver nodes that will execute those maneuvers (except landing and takeoff, those aren't done through maneuver nodes for the most part) and then execute them by hand, or set up the maneuver nodes yourself and let MJ2 execute them. I'd recommend continuing to push on learning both, you'll get a better feeling of accomplishment out of it that way. Eventually you may get bored with one or the other, at which time you can go back to letting MJ2 handle that.

Prepare to never feel the same again about the existing HOME stuff. Sadly, HOME2 wasn't fully functional last time I looked at it, but imagine having a center hub that instead of having three expandable parts depending on which module you used, has 4 slots for what you want to put there. He's got a work area, green house, airlock, and fuel storage so far. Let me see... Figures the Youtube would be easier to find.OK, looks like the parts for HOME2 are included in the 0.21.1 version of HOME 1.0.5, which came out a little under 2 months ago, which explains why I couldn't find a HOME 2.X download anywhere.

Just once. I was trying a different rendezvous method that would waste less fuel. Instead of killing relative velocity and then burning towards the target, I'd burn perpendicular to prograde, just enough to nudge the prograde vector back on top of the target. And you probably see this coming, but I got a little focused on aiming and not focused enough on my distance to the target, so I had a rather spectacular moderate-speed collision that meant I now had to send up a rescue mission to recover both crews because the station was no longer habitable (lost the solar panels) and the craft I was docking to it lost engines and its parachute.

In the stock game, there's an atomic engine (similar to the NERVA engine that was testfired decades ago) and an RTG, which is a type of electricity generator that gets used from time to time in real space missions. The engine has a very high ISP but a very low TWR, so it's mostly used for interplanetary transfers. RTGs get put on craft when solar panels would be less effective or just too much of a pain. In 0.21, that's about it. In 0.22, they may get more functionality that ties into research, but I haven't heard anything on the existing science gear with regards to research and the tech tree.

Judging by how things tend to go in my life, I'd have to say that my plans are irrelevant. I wouldn't be anything as interesting as patient zero, but even if the initial outbreak was half a world away, I'd still be in the double digits.

Not true, those that don't gain from what you're proposing lose developer time that could be spent on something that could potentially be of interest to more people. As I said above, this would require code changes, and probably not simple ones. In order for this to work the way you want it to, the very foundation of "on rails" craft would have to change, because "on rails" implies a fixed orbit baring SoI transitions, collisions with planets/moons, or craft deletion from being too low in an atmosphere while on rails. That's what it comes down to really. I don't see this being of enough interest to enough people to be worth the developer time necessary to make it work. This isn't "I don't want to have to correct orbits all the time" or "I don't want to have to lift my satellites higher so that orbits don't degrade" though I'm not going to dismiss those as valid issues either.

Even with the restrictions in place, there's no reason these modders can't just plop their new parts down on the very first tech node to become available. With 45 nodes and 160-something parts, it's obvious that nodes can have multiple parts. I'm not saying that the devs should change their minds on this, just saying that this isn't a valid reason to support them sticking with their current idea.

This part is correct. This part isn't. If the part doesn't have the line in the config file making it dependent on a node in the tech tree, then the part is not available in career mode.

I'm also fairly certain that mod parts can attach to nodes other than the ones reserved for mods. If your mod is an engine slightly different than a skipper, then having a separate node in the tech tree for your almost-skipper would be silly, just have both engines dependent on the same node. It's pretty obvious that the existing tech tree isn't one tech for one part, since the number of nodes that they've discussed having in the tree is less than a third the number of stock parts in the game.

It wouldn't work this way, as OdinYggd stated. If you don't have the craft focused, it's on rails, and if it's on rails, there's no forces acting on it, it just stays in its existing orbit. Placing a force or decay on that orbit would break the whole "on rails" concept the way it's done in the game. So basically, just increasing the top level of the atmosphere wouldn't achieve the effect you want unless you focus on the craft for those months it would take, and anything beyond that would mean an amount of work put into the game for a "feature" that most people wouldn't care about and would hardly have unanimous support among those that do care about. I just don't see the addition of this idea being worth more than the cost and effort of doing it. I can see that there is probably no feature that would have universal support among the user base as being worth the time and effort, but I'm sure that there are many things that would have a better return for the effort invested.

I've done a balloon launched non-SSTO and have considered but never tested the electric propeller idea. Getting 6Km/sec delta-v out of a rocket without dropping the balloons/wings/whatever may be hard to achieve. Which isn't to say impossible. I did this before the Cirrus envelopes were added, so that may change the feasibility. I got to about 25Km altitude on balloons, and it then took about 5-6Km/sec of delta-V to reach orbit. That probably wasn't an optimal ascent, however, since I was dropping the balloons and had to make sure that I didn't collide with them after dropping them. As for the propeller driven idea, yes, Firespitter has electric props. I've never tried using them to gain altitude for a launch, but I've dropped electric UAV style probes onto the celestial bodies that have an atmosphere. I've generally used the non-folding solar panels on the wings for power rather than RTGs, but with the way the propellers and RTGs are balanced, using RTGs is probably viable.