Eric S

I'm not sure if you did this, but there is some vector that needs to be part of the 3d model that tells unity which way the engine exhaust goes so it knows which way the engine thrusts. I've read about it in the tutorials, but haven't actually tried it yet.

Not so much negativity as experience with large scale building in the current game engine. At this time, you can't even come close to making a 1km long craft that doesn't shake itself apart. Theoretically possible, but I'm pretty sure that it would require developer involvement as I don't think that modding can really create new sets of physics rules, just push the existing rules in possibly unnatural directions. Given that developer time is a finite resource, I can think of many other things I'd want before this, not to mention that you'd have to convince them to do it to begin with, since it's probably outside the scope of the game that they have planned out. He didn't, though he was working on one. Whether it would work or not, for what kind of an orbit, how much payload, and what kind of payloads could handle the acceleration would be a separate discussion (and one I'd be interested in, but it would be off topic in this forum).

Unlike a Mun trip, doing the separate lander/orbiter for Duna makes sense, but isn't necessary. I did this for the 40th reddit KSP challenge carrying a heatshield. Fuel margins were tight, but doable. Fuel margins are wider on my next Duna mission, but I'm using atomic engines for that mission.

Yeah, I was just reading a news article where SpaceX announced TODAY that they were moving the Grasshopper testing to a New Mexico test site where they will have more room to test (higher allowed altitudes, larger ground area), so this doesn't sound like something that isn't flying again.

Stand alone command pod addons are rare. There's cbbp's Dragon capsule, the srf command pod, the high visibility command pod, a handful of lifeboat/escape craft. There's quite a few part packs that have command pods in them. There's the HOME Start pack, with a 2 man pod. KSPX has a 1 man lander command pod, a 3 man observation pod that can function as a command pod. The MPSS Nautilus + Fly pack has some pods, if I remember correctly. The B9 Aerospace pack has several pods in it. There's a couple of other packs out there with pods, and while I can remember the pods, I don't remember where they came from.

In the news tonight, some engineers from Kerbal Space Control were seen visiting the local McDonalds and ordering a small fries and four MegaGonzo size drinks, to go. Witnesses claim that when asked what soda's the engineers wanted, one looked thoughtful for a second and then said "Jah, I see how ve could use the cups. But leave zhem empty so zat ve don't have to clean zhem." In other news, we're told to expect a light rain of french fries in the morning.

Two things to be aware of on pendulum rockets. First, as has been pointed out, KSP doesn't know how to deal with vectored thrust from engines mounted above the CoM. If you mount them there, make sure you lock the gimbals. Second, contrary to what a lot of people think, pendulum rockets are not more stable in terms of always wanting to point up.

It depends. Some missions, I plan out so meticulously that I've got less than 500 excess delta-V for the entire mission. And sometimes, I'll have a tested and functional Eve ascent vehicle and I'll decide to take it to Laythe just because I've never landed, let alone returned, a kerbal from there. Usually I go for something in between. Sometimes I'll go with a 100% untested ship, just to see if some odd idea works. Sometimes I go with a ship where I've meticulously tested the individual parts, I've just never tested the combined results, and sometimes I specifically fly a ship that I've already flown because I know how it will work. I guess it mostly depends on my mood and ambition at the time.

Some capsules were designed to allow for what's called a shirt sleeve environment. At least one required it. One of the big differences between the early multi-astronaut missions of the US and the Soviet Union was that the latter had a capsule that didn't have room for an astronaut to wear a suit, and they lost a crew because of this. I think it was Soyuz 11 that lost pressure during reentry and the crew couldn't suit up. I'm not sure, but I think just about everyone at this time has their astronauts in space suits for the actual launch, and possibly the reentry. Almost everything I've read on the Apollo mission has mentioned the astronauts getting strapped down inside their suits because they had to be very tightly secured.

Yup. That seat comes with a built in decoupler and parachute as well. So I had to stick one on top of an SRB and let Jeb take it for a ride. There is at least one other seat like this, though I don't know where it is. There's also one non-functional seat that someone uploaded as a preview, but if anything came of that, I haven't heard about it.

Yes. They can repair rover wheels by standing close to them while EVA and right-clicking on the wheel. You can also repack parachutes and extend the solar panels on a dead satellite this way.

Before the great forum oops, someone had a signature that perfectly summed up why. To paraphrase (my memory isn't as good as it used to be): "I like to think of Kerbals as space-minded vikings. They don't go to heaven unless they die trying to get there." I'm assuming that there's a clause in there for dying while coming back from space as well. A more general way of saying it would be "I'm fine with dying doing something important to me. It's dying because I forgot to look both ways crossing the street that would suck." Though I can't say I'd be fine with it, but at least I'd mind it a lot less. A parallel in reality. We've orbited several of the system's celestial bodies, actually landed robotic probes on Mars, we've got a probe that has left the solar system by most definitions, and yet, ask anyone what NASA's biggest achievement has been, and they'll tell you it was the moon landing. We had done flybys of Mars, and the soviets had even had failed attempts at sending landers to Mars before we landed on the moon. When I look back on my missions, the manned missions just stick out more. Heck, my mothership to Jool had a crew of 12, even though I never had more than two of them outside the mothership at a time, and in fact could have flown the whole mission unmanned. I also think one factor that affects this that isn't present, at least not yet, in KSP's manned missions is that a manned mission can do more science in an hour than a probe can do in a week, in most cases. An astronaut doesn't need to wait for hours while ground control figures out the best way to walk around an obstacle to pick up a desired rock. From what I read, typical rover mission travel distances are messured in meters per day, and it's not a big number, because many movements have to be planned out and checked for anything that could go wrong. An astronaut is also more likely to be able to do something that wasn't forseen in the original mission plan. See an interesting rock and you want to see what's inside it? If you're lucky, a rover's manipulator arm might be able to deal with that. An astronaut could easiy find out, and if noone thought of sending a hammer, they can improvise by grabbing a bigger rock (though probably after checking to make sure there are no sharp edges to tear their suit on). Rovers are getting better at autonomy, but they've still got a long way to go to catch up with the autonomy of an astronaut in a space suit, let alone an ordinary human without one.

OK, I think everyone has covered the MechJeb/KER delta-V issues well enough. ON this step, you can reduce the amount of delta-V required if you're willing to aerobrake when returning to Kerbin. In theory, that would be the entire 860 that it took to go from kerbin orbit to the transfer orbit, but I don't like to cut my fuel margins that close.

http://nathannifong.com/FairingFactory/

Of those you can land on, correct. Jool destroys most ships that try to land there (not a bug, an intended effect to represent the pressure) which is why rryy put it last.

K^2 is correct, though when I try to explain it to someone without a physics background, I simplify it to "you gain velocity as you enter a gravity well. If you then speed up before you leave, gravity has less time to reduce your velocity, so you don't lose as much as you gained on the way in." The actual math though, has to do with the non 1:1 relationship of delta-V and kinetic energy.

Ah, you want fairings, not a capsule. Several mods include fairings (KW rocketry, probably Nova Punch, and many others), and there's the Fairing Factory for full on custom fairings.

Before any answer can be given, you need to define worst. And mod too, while we're at it, but mostly that's just asking if we should include craft as well.

It was mostly a combination of experimentation backed up by reading tutorials when I couldn't work it out myself. My last suborbital flight had an apoapsis a third of the way to the Mun, so I figured my gravity turn wasn't aggressive enough and read up on what it should be. Once I got to orbit and could play around with it a bit, I experimented with asparagus staging and going to the moon. Let's just say that after an evening or two, I decided to try someone else's rocket, and it worked. I've since picked up enough that I fly my own rockets, but I still think that was a necessary step for me just to sort out the "Is this a rocket problem or a pilot problem?" issue.

Umm..... one of my mother's favorite stories to tell about me was when I was four, I apparently told her to write NASA a nasty letter for not inviting me along on the Apollo-11 mission. I didn't stop collecting space books and such until 9th grade or so when I saw my first computer (a TRS-80 Model I). Yeah, KSP is like returning to my forgotten childhood :-)

Wait, you thought the hand-holding was for your benefit? *snicker*

Noone's directly telling you you should use mods. Your choice to use a mod or wait for the developers to implement whatever it is you want is your own decision. They may tell you that some mod gets around a problem, or if you want to do some particular thing, you need a mod. The point we're arguing is this one: At which point, you really sound like you're telling us that we're playing the game wrong, we'd all be so much happier if we couldn't play with mods. How active do you think the forums would be if there were no modding community? I don't know by what amount, but it would certainly be less active. I would have come here, accomplished everything I wanted to do, and then I'd take off, only coming back to check on official updates until an update came out that I was interested in. Instead, I'm here on a daily basis, reading a lot of interesting stuff, mostly because I like following what's going on with a lot of mods, some of which I don't even use, I'm just interested in the concept. Most of the threads I follow are in the modding forums, and many of the threads I follow outside the modding forum are still heavily influenced by mods. If it weren't for the modding community, Squad probably wouldn't have even hired two of it's new employees because they wouldn't have ever been aware of them. Sure, they could have found employees elsewhere, but this way, they get employees that care about the game before they even get paid to care. And they get to see their work before hiring them, in a way far more relevant than happens in most interviews. Some of the mods have small communities of their own, from two and three man dev teams plus users to the guys that are doing a model of the ISS in KSP. I already see stock-only challenges, and reddit even does a weekly one. I don't see these being significantly more popular if we were all forced to play stock. It might even reduce the number of people doing the challenges because they're off playing other games waiting for an update. So all told, I have to disagree. I don't think we'd benefit from improved synergy nearly enough to make up for the loss that the modding community has brought to this game.

How does that change the fact that developer resources are limited? You're saying that every part that should be in the game should be in the game, about a game still in development. How many things got done first as mods, then later done officially? Even the Squad developers have said that they prefer to focus development on things that the modders can't do well enough, rather than reimplementing what they did well enough just because it should be in the stock game. Sure, eventually they'll have the time to get all the things done that they feel need to be in the stock game, but even that isn't saying the same as that they'll have everything that should be in the stock game. Not just the brainstorming. Sometimes something doesn't work out until you try it, and the devs can see problems that the modders ran into that they might not have been able to predict during brainstorming. This could potentially save one or more iterations of prototyping, looking for issues with the prototype, etc. Good software developers learn from other's efforts and don't subject themselves to NIH syndrome.

Not explicitly, but you listed preferring the challenge of stock KSP as your number one reason for avoiding mods. Not as your reason for avoiding overpowered or imbalanced mods, but all mods. And the other reasons are things I can get behind. I even mentioned something very close to one of your other reasons in my own post. And did I tell you that I thought you said any of those things? No, I didn't, and I apologize if it sounded like I was implying that. I went after one logical fallacy, and I should have done a better, less flippant, job of that. I'd rather you disagree with me because of sound reasoning than agree with me because of a logical fallacy. I'm not immune to that, so I don't mind it when people point it out in myself. I'm very much a "find the fun wherever you find it" kind of person/player, even when where you found it confuses the heck out of me. The only reason I'm (overly?) sensitive on this is because it colors the opinions of people that don't have any facts to form an opinion on. Most of the new KSP players I talk with fall into two categories (note: the proportions don't mean anything, as this could be viewed as a bit of a self-selecting survey). There's the players that load up on mods, sometimes to excess. There's the players that avoid mods like the plague, despite never having tried them, just because they've heard that mods take the challenge out of the game. Yes, there are players that try mods and find they like vanilla better, and I'm fine with that, since it's an informed opinion. The whole "I'm better than you because I play the game the way it was meant to be played," while sometimes annoying, is a separate issue and one that I would rather not stir up, other than pointing out that it exists in response to the "or anyone else" part of that third quote. Noone's said it explicitly in this thread, but I can assure you that I could point to several examples of that prior to the great forum oops, including one person going so far as to advocate that the devs should remove the ability to mod the game altogether. Trust me, I get why you went off when you felt like you were being attacked. While your post didn't feel like an attack, there have been posts that felt like a personal attack that basically read that all my efforts mean nothing because I use mods, despite the fact that I make an effort to avoid out of balance mods and parts. Most of the time, I just let it roll off, another uninformed opinion. But some times, you just want to stomp the logical fallacy flat before it infects yet more players. If the developers had enough time to do everything that the users could possibly want as soon as they wanted it, you MIGHT have a point. We don't live in that universe. In the case of not-unlimited developer resources, there will always be something that the devs haven't had time for. You're saying that I shouldn't be able to play with moving parts because the devs haven't had time to do their own robotics functions? Even if it's something that the devs plan on doing, having the modding community do it first gives the devs a look at what kinds of things worked and what didn't, reducing their development time. And this is a bad thing in your mind? I have to disagree.

To get around the lack of jets, I experimented with an electric prop-driven UAV on Duna. I was thinking of providing one for the colony/research station I was planning, as a way to better map out the area in the immediate vicinity of the colony. The UAV could get off the runway at less than 20 m/s on Kerbin, but had to hit about 100 m/s on Duna. I never did manage to land the UAV on Duna without enough damage to prevent it from taking off again (well, if there was a way to push it back on it's wheels, the one that faceplanted and then stood on its prop could probably take off).