Kenobi McCormick

While true, good luck fitting a decent amount of science equipment on a vehicle built with a short wheelbase. That's one of the rovers I've built in career mode using these slidey wheels. It's virtually unflippable, even at 40+m/s, but due to it's relatively long wheelbase it can fit enough science gear to harvest entire nodes worth of science at once. So there is plenty of reason to have a long wheelbase in KSP. It's also worth noting that that thing is bloody heavy. A hair over 2 tons last I checked. Need some carbon fiber chassis parts around here.....

Yeah. Would make building larger rovers around these a bit easier.

Oooh, nice. Can we get some stack attach points on these things as well as surface attachment?

No, you can't. You can move boosters and such that way, but not an entire vehicle. Trying to move an entire vehicle via subassembly breaks EVERYTHING.

Why wouldn't they be? These and the F/S wheels are awesome. They've rendered Squad's rover wheels obsolete as far as I'm concerned. I haven't used the vanilla ones in two game versions now.

Heh. As an interesting aside, I find it rather funny how hard we as a society try to protect kids from the language they use to refer to each other behind our backs. I've never met a kid older than 6 or 7 that didn't already know most of the major swear words and didn't already use them when the adults aren't looking.

More or less. I was also referring to the absolute speed cap for propeller driven aircraft of around 85-90% of mach due to the prop blades going supersonic and losing all of their bite as well as the altitude gradually causing them to lose efficiency. I figure these engines should provide a more or less constant thrust right up until you start hitting extremes, at which point performance drops like a rock. That'd seem pretty close to how they worked in WW2 from what I understand. Close enough, anyway, for kerbal aerospace needs.

Of course, of course, the R2800 and R4360 are absolutely massive. I figure they could be used on particularly heavy craft in multi-engine configuration while still getting reasonable speeds(Say 175-200m/s ala B29), or in a single-engine application where you want to be hitting 75% of Mach straight and level without touching a jet/rocket. Still not quite equal to jets but definitely a viable alternative just the same. I wonder if it'd be possible in your plugin to make the thrust of piston engines taper off as speed increases and prop efficiency plummets.

Contributed quite a few, mostly to solar and Joolian landings. Stuffed a few Top Gun references in, too.

They are rather weak, but they seem to be realistic as well. They're modelled after single row radial engines, probably circa 1930-1940, which only made about 500HP or so. Compare that with the 2500+HP you get out of the most basic of turbojet engines and it all makes sense. Real world you'd never see more than 250MPH out of any aircraft using them, and indeed, that's about how fast I could get an aircraft to go when using them in KSP 0.21. 250MPH feels like an absolute crawl in KSP because we're used to jets that can barely fly at that speed. Landing at 110m/s, which is what Google tells me is equivalent to 250MPH, is entirely normal for us. I imagine that's why the FS bomber wings have so much lift, KSP aerodynamics don't really allow flight at such low speeds with the vanilla wings. My solution shot game balance in the face, but I just doubled their output. They suddenly became a very useful and very viable alternative to the basic jet engine. I do wish Snjo would toss in some better radials though, something like a Pratt and Whitney R2800? And maybe a bonkers R4360-like for those really heavy propjobs?

I haven't yet installed the rockets themselves, but I did pluck the rover parts out of the American pack. The old moonbuggy works fine, though a top speed of 8m/s is a bit too slow for my tastes. The new one, however...I may just be missing a dependency elsewhere in the pack, as I did merely install the parts pertaining to the rovers and nothing else, but the pod for it crashes my game. No matter, the chassis works, and I built this on that chassis instead:

So will the GenII DEMVs come with their own wheel sets to use as well as being able to use the vanilla/other third party ones?

A hot jupiter would make no sense whatsoever. Hot Jupiters tend to throw all the inner planets into deep space on their way down to their low solar orbits.

Eeloo was destined to be a moon of the second gas giant from the day it was concieved. They put it in its current orbit to see if they could get the same sort of resonance that Pluto orbits within working.

Back in 0.13: Mostly just screwed around with rockets. No serious gameplay. Eventually got bored and wandered off to radioactive wastelands instead. Late 0.16: My SO brings KSP back to my attention, pointing out that the mods are WAY better(Rovers!). I decide to get back into KSP. I fire up 0.13 one last time and manage to randomly chuck together something that was orbit capable, and that sold me on buying it. 0.17: Finally buy it. Went bonkers with the mods. DSM, Cart mod, DEMVs, MechJeb, hell I even built a munbase out of a shipping container! 0.18: Docking? DOCKING! I abuse the hell out of docking and the DEMVs even more. Less reliance on DSM this time around, instead modifying the stock ion engines instead. This was also the starship era, based around the MPSS Nautilus mod, a nuclear reactor mod and some upscaled ion drives. 0.19: Top Gear: Kerbin. 'Nuff said. 0.20: Starting to get bored again. Major content updates had given way to minor content and bugfix updates at this point, and I was running out of things to do. Though, the Kerchelin tires came out, so I did more Top Gear: Kerbin. 0.21: See 0.20, but now I'm powersliding around the newly crater'd Mun. 0.22: Career mode sees me with something to do again, so I've been pretty heavily playing that. Still basing my space program around manned rovers though.

I don't think it is. IT could use some changes but right now the difficulty feels more or less right where it should be. Sure it's possible to minmax your way into maxing the entire tree in two or three launches, but most players aren't going to do that. Besides, you want it to feel like a WoW grind?

Yeah that's a good idea. The current settings are a bit overly aggressive with damping steering input, and just in general steering lock. Here's the steering curve I use: steeringCurve { key = 0 35 key = 15 25 key = 30 25 key = 55 25 } Keep in mind I also drive with a 360 pad, so I can command as much or as little steering as I wish, but using that section I have enough control to throw my rovers into an on-command powerslide pretty much at any speed they're controllable at.

And thus lies the inherent issue with KSP's wheel model. I want a proper traction model too, but until the devs figure out a better way to model wheels this will be the tradeoff we have to deal with. I suppose a workaround would be a CFG setting for forward grip and lateral grip, but that requires dev intervention as right now the traction settings are stored in the model itself.

Yeah that's what they're built to do. They're designed so that you can slide around, a side effect of KSP's wheel model is that allowing you to drift around the space center also means you can't really sit still/climb steep hills. Some rocket boosters solve the climbing issue nicely, and some landing legs will help greatly with parking. That's what I usually do.

Wrong. Mechjeb can and will prevent overheats just fine. It will ride the fine line between explode and not exploding, giving you the most performance you can get without overheating the engine to the point of failure.

It's a bug with how KSP handles heatsinks. Basically if the center of mass of an object is too far away from a heat producing object attached to it, as is the case with a Mainsail attached directly to a Jumbo 64, heat doesn't transfer properly.

To be perfectly fair, so were you. Instead of shouting like they shot your dog you could have just said "I'm fine with the content we have now, but I'd love these bugs that are, for me, game breaking to be fixed."

This is what I meant by a bigger radial engine. I wouldn't say no to some Merlins or Allisons either, but IMO they fit fighters far better than they do bombers. Stonkin' huge radials fit bombers best.

This makes me want to set an Orion into a retrograte Laythe intercept somehow.

Flies pretty sweet. I'm pondering how I'll get it into orbit now . I am having a couple issues with these parts though. 1: That engine is too damn weak. We really need a larger, dual row radial for the bomber. At the stock 45kN it would only just lift off. Top speed was 135m/s, and takeoff speed was about 95-105m/s. With any sort of payload it flat out would not get enough lift to fly, and when it was airborne it had to fly with about a 15 degree nose up attitude to maintain altitude. I bumped the power up to 110kN from 45 and the bomber flies like an absolute dream now. Takes off nicely even with a hefty bomb load, flies at about 175-185m/s at full chat, and level flight is achieved with just 2-3 degrees of nose-up. 2: Helicopters don't seem to behave themselves. I tried one. Balanced it according to the guide. It constantly wanted to nose down and would not sit level for some bizarre reason. Shifting the center of lift 3-4 inches forward and suddenly it's pitching up uncontrollably. Maybe they need FAR to fly right?