OrbitusII

From what I did with Engineer last night the issue is only SRBs on radial decouplers, like you said. I was a little skeptical about how much deltaV I actually had on my Mun lander stage, but the LV-909 is one fantastic engine! Still, I think the calculation might have been a little on the high side...

So Jeb decided to go on a mission to Mun while the engineers at KSC are working out the issues with the 3-man-and-a-rover Munar rocket... And then he went to Minmus because he had lots of fuel... Nice view! Another "U mad bro?" flag? Seriously? Ok, not bad... What a troll.

Now that 0.20 is out, I've decided to go to Mun with a manned mission again! Mishaps abound in this tale of SPAAAAAAAAAAACE! Developing the Equipment First off, I need a reliable ship to land on Mun and deploy the rover I built for the mission. This is just a quick picture from my landing tests on Kerbin... Not entirely successful... Fortunately this was early in my testing of the design, all I needed was some practice with the actual landing procedure. (I have no Mechjeb or anything, the only plugins I have are the Subassembly Loader and Hyperedit; Hyperedit is only for simulations, mind you) This design seemed stable enough, so I switched out the probe cores (which I got the the same mass as the command pods to be used) for the actual crew pods. Next was the rover. A fairly simple design, but nonetheless effective. It turns on a dime and has a low center of mass, so it'll be perfect for the mission. I did some simulations to see how it would handle on Mun, but Jeb crashed the VR rover, so we won't know until the final crew gets it deployed. The launcher and trans-Munar parts required a little tweaking of the lander design (specifically adding fairings and some RCS blocks) but the design is primarily the same. Finally came the crew. Since I don't have much of a choice without Crew Manifest, it was random. The game tried to give me Ellan and two other wimps, so I said "No!" and loaded a new ship. These three seemed much more promising, despite Hanbert's low level of intellect, so I stuck with them as the final crew. The original three are now test pilots and administrators (a lot's happened since 0.18) so they won't be joining us on this mission. The Actual Mission The time had come to launch the rocket only known as "Mun Lander" (suggestions please!). The crew was ready, flight computers were started up and checked out, all that needed to finish was the countdown. The numbers hit zero, and the rocket took off. Slowly, steadily its altitude and speed climbed to about 100 m/s, and then BOOM! In the chaos, the parachute was cut by accident, so Duddorf popped out and repacked it, then Hanbert deployed it again, this time without cutting it. The aftermath: Fortunately the team survived, as did the rover. It might be a little beat-up, but this at least worked as a drop-test for it. ~500 meters and surviving is good... for a rover. As it turns out, the bottom center fuel tank on the launcher underwent too much stress for its pitiful structure, so it buckled and caused a chain reaction of explosions. The design team is taking this into account as they elimate that point of failure; these are the last engineers on Kerbin that haven't been fired by Puffin Technologies, so they have to get it right or else this space program will end! (ok, so not really, it's only the third batch of engineers) –––––To Be Continued–––––

Looks like I need to work on my accurate powered landings... At least the RLGA is working well! (until I land too hard... it's good slow landing practice!)

"Combobulating discombobulator" was my favorite.

Scaling the part down also scales the positions down relative to the world, so the hatch wouldn't be obstructed but your Kerbal would clip into the part if you scaled it down too much (although at some point the collider will be so small it doesn't matter). It looks like that's what's happening here, so making a version designed to be scaled down (move the hatch trigger out) would solve it. Such is the trouble with relative positions.

That might be a little thing we put in the description once Frameshift 2 is finished. We'll also be working on updating the part folders for 0.20's new loading system. I don't think we'll do that for Frameshift 1 since it'll be obsolete, but the rest will be updated as soon as we can do that.

Now for an actual progress update! Note how the distance displayed (Straight-up numbers in the log) is ridiculous. Reason? I forgot to convert the distance to AU from Kerbol's center... Thus the temperature is a constant -10 or so Kelvin, a ridiculous value for how close we are to Kerbol! (Not to mention that negative Kelvin is impossible, so far as we know...) It's a quick fix, so I'll have it fixed in a jiffy! Edit: And now there's the problem where getting too close to Kerbol (like within Eve's orbit) will result in a NaN error... Time to fine-tune the code! At least it's working like it should, though!

I really want that rover... It's so cute and yet effective-looking that it's gotta be good!

Meet KerbCannon 1.0, also known as "The Monster." Note how the image is at night– we don't want people finding out about this piece of hardware... Actually the guys down in VR just don't know how to make a sun. Meet Matsby Kerman, our VR test pilot. This might just be virtual reality, but he's still not sure about it... The launch procedure is too fast to be seen, so let's just go to the results: This is the best test so far– over 5.3 kilometers... Straight. Up. Nice view of Mun... but Matsby isn't so sure this was a good idea. It was an epic success! Don't worry about Matsby, I have it quicksaved (VR testing!) so he's not actually dead. 2.4 Gs is good, it won't kill you on launch, and while you can't see it, Matsby broke the speed of sound on his way up. Final verdict? The KerbCannon 1.0 is fantastic! For going straight up... Imagine this on Minmus! (I'll do that for kicks once Extraplanetary Space Centers is out)

That is indeed the issue, but I'm not sure if the Devs plan on fixing that soon. I really like the design and effectiveness of the modules! Craft files please?

No worries, I enjoy getting good feedback to improve it. I'll be sure to take a look at that article to find out what I can to improve the code. Exactly. It currently uses a floatCurve (same thing as the ISP keying) in the config file to identify what the efficiency is at what altitude. For example, you could make it twice as efficient at 0.5 atm than it is at 1 atm; while this isn't necessarily realistic, you can make it work that way.

Pre-release of the heat sinks have been out for 3-ish days, as of this post. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/29567 I'm currently studying for exams and finishing out this year, so not much has been done code-wise, but I have gotten the solar heating code written. It's currently being debugged since the only temperature I'm getting is -10 C; this will come out with the full release after Frameshift 2.0. As for Frameshift 2.0, I have the general idea for the plugin ready, all I have to do is add it into the Puffin Technologies dll file for it to be usable. General Idea: Originally I was planning on having the drive disable all rigidbodies on the ship, but that's a very bad idea (no physics? duh!) Instead I decided to have the drive apply a force to the entire vessel, not just the engine. This is very easy for me to do, so it'll be done quickly. Update Er, well, nothing really... Besides the fact that we are currently working on setting up a Puffin Technologies website! Not much news for that, and I'll post the link as soon as we are at a good point to publicize it. What the site will have is an update blog-thing for addons (I'd like to move the development "thread" to there once it's done) and some publicity videos once 3_bit gets time for that. I think I have an idea of what's wrong with the solar heating code, but I'll have to investigate the sun object I have the code finding... Either it's not the actual sun or the scene is scaled weird in Unity...

I like this one, lava would be a nice addition to the game. As to asteroids, they might not make a huge impact on travel to Dres, Jool, Eeloo, etc. but it would definitely add in some good ambience.

Needs dates for big events, like these ones: Under 0.17-0.20 (should be "0.17-present" but oh well) (3-20-13) The Great Steam Explosion, (4-11-13) Forum Apocalypse, (n/a) Squad Expansion Plan

The way the plugin works is not by the shape of the radiator, but by code. We could work on more accurate radiator designs if people wanted it though. For now we're just focusing on making it work, and that includes the powered coolant systems, more accurate solar heating, and all-ship cooling.

Puffin Technologies- Aerospace Research Group; originally it was "Puffin Technologies Space Division," but the guys down in marketing and/or legal had it changed to improve the face value of the company. The PT-ARG has had its share of failures (an entire engineering team was fired due to a fiasco with Tumbleweed 1 (Curiosity-style rover), some flight engineers were fired after Hopeful 1 landed on Eve, not Laythe) but it also has its share of successes!

This bad boy right here. The Hydra-13XMT, a monster of a launcher, looks BA and is pretty powerful (I don't know how it compares to a Mainsail, I just like the look). And that's a variation designed to launch large interplanetary probes. Overdone? Yes. Epic? Yes as well. Useful? That's up to the engineers and budget guys. It spins like mad though... and there's no way to defeat it, fortunately the kraken only treats it like a top, not food. Not really a spacecraft but my most useful craft for sure.

The good thing about floatCurves is that once they're defined all you need to do is give them values in the config file and evaluate the current value based on input from a float. If you look at my post on the previous page with the floatCurve information this'll make sense– all you need to do is define the time and value for each key in the floatCurve through the config file, then floatCurveName.Evaluate will take the time you put in and return the value for that time. It's your standard algebraic function and it helps minimize the amount of code in use, plus the code I posted above will automatically constrain the ISP and thrust values to whatever you set the min and max to. //in config file: MODULE { name = ModuleName isp { key = 0 400 key = 1 5500 } } You can use math to figure out what the thrust will be based off of the ISP value, but using floatCurves will simplify the code and your job immensely. I'd also use floats, not doubles. Sure, you can switch between the two, but using a consistent type to begin with will also simplify the code. Floats may have floating-point number errors, but they are used the most in KSP and plugin code. Your class also needs to be either a non-derived class or derived from PartModule depending on the purpose of this bit of code.

Heat sinks have been released! http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/29567

Auroras do stretch down below the polar regions on Earth, depending on the radiation levels and energy (EM radiation energizing the electrons that are part of the gas molecules) so with all of the radiation in the path of Laythe's orbit the auroras could stretch down to the equator on occasion. I'm not entirely sure how you would render those except as a set of planar meshes, so do some research to make sure you find the best way.

They will for sure once I get the all-ship cooling set up. All you have to do right now is enable surface attachment on the engine config files to allow you to place the sinks on the engine itself. Stack and all-vessel cooling should be incorporated soon, especially now that I have the solar heating and C# extensions finished and figured out.

Brought to you by Puffin Technologies Development Got overheating SRBs? Too close to the sun and your Kerbals are cooking in their crew modules? Then this plugin is for you! The heat sinks included will maintain (or attempt to) the same temperature as long as your vessel is physics-enabled. Notice: This plugin is currently in an alpha state and so is not completed. There may also be bugs and other problems that occur when in use, so please report any issues you encounter on this thread. Model Previews (not in use yet) Downloads Alpha 0.1 Source Code Spaceport has been acting up, so the links are to my Dropbox. Planned Features (currently being incorporated) More accurate solar heating (special thanks to Holo and ROFLCopter64bit) Powered cooling systems (with dynamic stableTemp settings using GUI) Crew life support (maybe; as separate download) Credits: Models: Mekan1k Plugins: OrbitusII Consulting: Holo, ROFLCopter64bit (thread) This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.

Proof that free software isn't the best right here. This was more of an experiment to get used to the fact that I'm not using paper/canvas or a mouse. I really don't understand why the software has smudging but no blurring... o.O Quality product for sure Working with layers, selections, and opacities also helps me significantly (I can't do a lot besides sketching without it), so even just using my iPad as a "graphics tablet" with GIMP is better than free software with a minimal amount of options. I can't afford a legit graphics tablet currently, so until that happens I'm stuck with the solution I've found (which is not what you see above ). Actually, sketching using this method would be good... I can design stuff here and then color it and add details on my computer... I've also never been the best artist (my sister got those genes) but I adapt quickly, so my art should improve over time... I'll take a look at those tutorials and use less smudging next time

I recently got a touch screen stylus, so here's some art I've made with free iPad software and my stylus (I'm definitely enjoying it more than a mouse). I know there's some software that will enable me to use my iPad as a separate monitor for my computer, so I'll probably get that soon enough. Jool Note that there's no layering or anything, so it's just a flat image. I also don't have a blur tool, but smudge served well enough for my initial attempt (no opacity or anything as well... As I said, I'm using free software ) I also forgot to crop the bottom out... :derp: