Eric S

The bigger problem with the medium legs is the minimal clearance. Most pictures I see around here and on reddit of a lander sitting on it's engine bell with the landing legs up in the air are using the medium legs.

Just fixing two critical bugs. They fixed the png loader using too much memory, and they found a workaround to the linux scrollwheel issue. They admit that the workaround isn't perfect, but is better than it was in previous versions of 0.20

I should have been more specific, those were problems I had seen with MJ in conjunction with FAR. Without FAR, MJ doesn't exhibit any of those problems, with FAR, the first one was quite consistent, though I haven't tested recently.

Mono-propellant tanks don't follow this rule, and I'm not sure how they scale. The 2.5m tank has a dry mass of about 13% of the fuel mass, but both of the other tanks have much higher percentages, in the 37-47% range. I suspect that these tanks are scaling their mass on their surface area, but even that doesn't quite line up, though it's close.

The problems I've seen: MechJeb will do full throttle ascents, since it doesn't see any air resistance. You can get around this by playing with the max accelleration value, I think. MechJeb will have problems with reentry predictions, since again, it isn't seeing any air resistance. MechJeb can have problems with non-aerodynamic craft. Well, to be honest, people can too. If you turn too far off of prograde with a craft that has to much drag up front, the craft will try to flip around. The ascent profile in 2.0.X looks like it would play nicer with FAR, at least. As to 0.20, I can't speak for the 1.9.X branch, but yes, 2.0.8 claims to work with 0.20

You're misinterpreting the wiki page. The torque that SAS applies is only used to stop the craft from spinning. To quote the wiki page: "Whatever you choose to call it, it makes the ship stop spinning around." I'm not sure how many other people have tested it, but I have actually tested it, and I know I'm not the only one. SAS modules will make you stop spinning faster, but if you need to change your heading, they do not help. Anyone that says that SAS has no force of it's own is wrong, but that's not what maltesh and Jason are saying. The point we're making is that the force that SAS has can only be used to do one thing, and that's to stop the craft from spinning. If you actually want the craft to turn, SAS will not help. Edit: At one time, SAS acted like you think it does. It no longer does, and hasn't since... 0.17? Maybe earlier.

KSP fuel tanks don't correspond to reality very well. With very few exceptions, all the liquid fuel tanks have a dry mass that's a fixed percentage of the mass of the fuel they carry. 12.5%. An FL-T200 tank carries 1t of fuel, so its dry mass is 0.125t. A jumbo 64 carries 32t of fuel, so its dry mass is 4t. Linear scaling. You can argue that that's not right, but if you balance against stock parts, that's how it scales.

This. They all report the same torque values in the VAB, but that value is lying. It's the value of rotPower in the part.cfg file that matters, and for that, all of the manned pods have at least 10 times as much rotPower as any of the probe cores.

Ooh, good point, we need to add more users to argue what the proper scope of the mission is.

After flying a helicopter built with Firespitter, I realized that capsule recovery was going to be a royal pain if I tried that. My current plan, which I haven't actually tried, is to use Hooligan airship parts and KAS winch parts to do recovery. It won't move as fast as a helicopter, but it still moves faster than a rover, and if you use solar panels and electric props, your pickup range is limited only by your patience. Biggest problem is you'll need to use the fixed solar panels or RTGs, as the animated solar panels won't survive even slow airspeeds.

And a whole bunch to debate the quality of the light bulb vs their expectations, with at least one person insisting that a properly designed lightbulb will never burn out, have zero defects during manufacturing, and cost no more than a typical budget light bulb and one insisting that on kerbin, light bulbs ship from the factory pre-burnt out, so that the original bulb was working as intended.

I've seen a lot more people that don't understand that since KSP turned up on Steam. I don't blame the Steam community, however. Basically, when KSP was just on KerbalSpaceProgram.com, it was hard to arrive there and not realize that the game was still in development, and while you were buying the released program, you were being given access to the game while it is still in development. And most people understood what that meant. Not everyone, but most seemed to get it. On steam, however, it's more in the presence of finished games, so not everyone is noticing the category it's in or the details, so they think they're getting a game that is either finished or nearly finished. If nothing else, it's higher profile now, so even if the same percentage of people don't get it, there's more people that don't get it just because there's more people. With the 0.20 release, there were bugs. There have been bugs in every release, though this time it feels buggier than usual, mostly because of the nature of the changes that came. Very few parts and features, it's more the game infrastructure that changed, and your average game player isn't as likely to notice that as they are new things to do, so it seems like we got almost nothing, but that almost nothing brought a lot of bugs. Some people saw it that way, some went farther to say that the testers fell down on the job because the devs never should have released this version with all these bugs. On the other hand, there's also people that aren't being severely affected by these problems wondering what all the fuss was about. You can't judge how many people are in each camp based on the forums. As a WoW dev once put it, judging the health of the game by the forums is like judging the health of the nation by the health of the people in the hospital. As people on the forums started reporting issues with the 0.20 release, there were people who were upset and angry that the devs had let them down, and some of those people were quite vocal about it. There were people that were happy with what they got. And there were people who were disappointed, but trying to figure out what the problem was. The impression I had was that there were more in the first group than the third, but that could easily be that the third was going about it quietly while not everyone in the first group was. I still gave what advice I could to anyone that wasn't just raging. It's a game, the point is to have fun. When reading some raging post, though, I have to admit that I at least think "It's an alpha. If you want a polished, mostly-bug-free experience, find something else to play until this game is released, or at least into late beta." Not out of hostility, but out of honesty. It's a game and you should be having fun. For the record, I've seen all of one bug that a dev said shouldn't be fixed, and that was as a joke because they found it fun abusing the bug. If I remember correctly, it was the youtube video about a kerbal stuck in an odd position but still moving, set to music from "Saturday Night Fever." I've heard a lot of things that people say the devs have said, but lets be honest, that kind of stuff gets taken out of context or misremembered so much that I always take it with a grain of salt. Sort of like one of the conspiracy theory videos I watched on youtube. Fully half of their "evidence" consisted of quotes out of context, not really meaning what they wanted it to say. We're all here because we enjoy the game, and many of us are quite passionate about it. I don't think anyone here wants the game to be bad.

Would copying the vehicle to the SPH and launch from there work? The mission timer starts as soon as you have control of the craft if you launch that way.

Ummm.... this year, yes, number one, with dwarf fortress in #2. All time? Not even close, World of Warcraft by a very large margin.

QFT. If I do a loop, what's going through my mind is "how much delta-v did that cost me?" I've been paying close attention to rocket launch failure videos on youtube, and almost every rocket that blew up in flight is preceded by what appears to be a launch profile deviation. I don't think many of those explosions are accidents, they're the result of range safety hitting the abort button. And it even resets the universe back to the start so you don't miss your launch window!

I recently learned that someone actually proposed asparagus staging in real life about 15 years ago, so it wasn't invented here like some think. Then again, it took over 65 years for propellant crossfeed to make it into a heavy lift vehicle (first envisioned in 1947, and the Falcon Heavy is the first to really use it that way), so saying that it's not used currently in real life isn't a sure bet that it will never be used in real life, though there are issues and less benefits to it, as discussed in the other threads.

Be aware that for many mods, just make sure that there's a scale= line in the config, if it's not there, add scale=1. That seems to fix a lot of the nodes that shifted inside the part with 0.20. Not sure if that's your problem, as I was seeing a few mods that exhibited this problem before 0.20.

Since others have already pulled up a few clips on youtube, I'll just point out that the word "randomly" doesn't belong there. You may not understand why the rocket decided to pitch end-over-end, but there is always a reason. If you install far, you'd better install some fairings as well, or you'll be limited to aerodynamic payloads. You also need to adjust your ascent. A non aerodynamic payload risks shooting yourself in the foot while using FAR, and the traditional "straight up to 10k, pitch to 45 degrees" under the same conditions is basically carefully aiming at your foot before pulling the trigger. The less aerodynamic the top end of your craft is, the tighter you want to hold to the prograde during launch. Even with aerodynamic craft, I don't pitch more than 10 degrees or so off of prograde if I've got FAR installed.

Yes. I'm not sure what the proper scaling for breakingForce is, but you do need to manually adjust it.

Very much this. Without knowing just how they're going to balance their reentry heat against reality and/or game challenge, we really can't say how much of an effect this will have on aerocapture/aerobraking. With DR installed plus a heatshield, I did a Duna mission with return, and pushed things on the duna end (9km periapsis, straight from transfer orbit to landing in a single pass with no engine braking), and then on the return end did a single pass aerocapture maneuver that had me in a 500 or 800 km apoapsis orbit of Kerbin in a single pass. The surprising thing? The heatshield never showed any heat on either aerocapture maneuver. Just to test it to make sure I hadn't blown the DR install, I reloaded a save game and tried it again with a slightly lower perapsis at Kerbin (about 1500m lower), and not only did the heatshield register heat, it blew up less than 10 seconds after registering heat. Something to keep in mind is that as has already been mentioned in this thread, Kerbin reentry tends to happen at a third the speed that it happens in real life on Earth, so in order to make it an issue in Kerbin, reentry heat actually has to be worse than it is in reality.

The size of the stock atomic engine is 1.25m not 1m. That would still give 240 thrust instead of 150, however. I think the Mainsail also gives up a lot of ISP to achieve its TWR.

This depends on just how the devs balance reentry heat. I did a round trip to Duna with Deadly Reentry, went straight for an aerobrake landing (9km periapsis) without burning off any of the transfer velocity, and never got a heat bar on my heat shield. Similarly, on return to Kerbin, I aerocaptured into.. can't remember, 500 or 800km apoapsis with a 35 or 36km periapsis, also without a heat bar. Then, just to make sure that I hadn't messed up the DR install, I reloaded the quicksave that I took when I hit Kerbin's SoI and tried a periapsis that was 1.5-2km lower. I figured I'd see a heat bar and get a better idea of just how low I could get my apoapsis in a single pass. Well, I went from "Ooh, look, finally a heat bar!" to BOOM in well under 10 seconds. Something to keep in mind is that a normal Kerbin reentry velocity is about a third of that of a normal Earth reentry velocity, so they're going to have to make it worse than reality for there to be any challenge, and the balance is just how much worse they decide to make it.

As near as I can tell, it's still needed, as the base "drag components off of a ship and reconnect" behavior hasn't changed between 0.19.1 and 0.20. If you drag a set of components off of a ship in the VAB, only the originally connected item's nodes are active when you try to put it back on. I'm pretty sure subassembly loader was just faking this, so if you can't drag things off and use any of the connectors, I doubt that addon will be able to change anything.

Depends on what I'm doing and what mood I'm in. Sometimes I fly stock just to make sure that I haven't picked up any dependencies on mods. Sometimes I use so many mods that a player that only played stock wouldn't recognize most of the ship. I definitely use the HOME mod for any bases, and I'm really looking forward to HOME 2. Kethane and ISA MapSat make me feel like I'm actually doing something in space instead of just being a tourist. I tend to grab engines that are balanced well against stock engines from just about anywhere, because it always annoys me having to jump through hoops to get just the right amount of thrust for a given craft when you've got some HUGE gaps between engines. It's better now that we have the Skipper engine, but there's still enough of a gap, both above and below that one, to be annoying. I also tend to grab huge fuel tanks from mods for my mothership-craft, because sticking with stock tanks means lots of tanks which means lots of lag. Or I could tone down my overly ambitious plans, which I do on occasion, but I tend to have more fun with the disgustingly big missions. I might use the Firespitter stuff for solar powered UAVs to roleplay having recon assets attached to a base or colony. EDIT: And for my really creative moments, I'll grab Damned Robotics and Kerbal Attachment System, Robotic Arms pack, stuff like that.

That would be theoretical limits for a single stage rocket. With staging, you can certainly do better. Heck, I was at 13K delta-v purely with stock chemical rockets trying for one of the reddit weekly challenges, and I could have pushed it farther.