LameLefty

ASIDE: I've never used CKAN because of far too many comments just like that. Screw it; I play the game. Every few days I scan through the Mod Releases forum to see if anything I use has been updated. If so, I update it - manually. I have 24 mods installed at the moment and it STILL easier to just do it this way than worry about what CKAN will or won't let me update, and then trying to track down why some buggy mod which CKAN thinks is up to date is crashing my game.

By contrast, KSP 1.1 has been very stable for me on my Mac since the first public betas through 1.1.2 ... I've had exactly two crashes in what ... five weeks now? Both of those were mod-related.

This was my MKS base on Minmus back around 0.90 or so, I think. I was playing around with it in a Sandbox save and no life-support mods. Man it was pretty! Might have to get back to these mods again, come to think of it.

Okay, just as an FYI, this map appears low to me or rather, very highly idealized. Yesterday I launched a lander to a 60km Duna orbit from a landing site at exactly 600 meters above mean sea level. The lander had ~1405 m/s worth of dV at liftoff and need up about 85 m/s short of the circularization burn. I had 1.7 T/W ratio at liftoff so excessive gravity losses wasn't an issue. It's also possible my ascent trajectory wasn't optimized for Duna (I used the latest dev version of MechJeb to fly it). But yeah, I'd pad these numbers quite a bit. I saw another such "subway map" like this that shows needing 1450 m/s for the ascent to 60km circular from Duna, which is within 35 m/s or so of my experience, and well within the range of error flying an ascent.

Yeah, before this gets locked, let me say this: I am 26 years out of college this year. I am a licensed professional in my field, with a very long, broad experience base. I recently read some anonymous review of my employer on a famous internet employer-rating site. What those people wrote is NOT in any way comparable to my personal experiences in my 2-plus years at my current gig. So yeah, take the anonymous comments and complaints with a LARGE crystal of sodium chloride.

Yes, I am seeing this inaccuracy in transfer windows as well. My guess is @TriggerAu is just recuperating from 1.1/busy with real life and will address this as soon as he can. In the meantime, I'm using MJ's advanced pork chop plots feature to plan transfer burns, but that's not a replacement for the nice window that says "Gee, my window to Eeloo opens up in a few days - time to start designing a mission!"

Hmm, that's weird. Well, I don't generally go looking at my logs unless my game has an issue so now I gotta go check yesterday's session ... I was off work for the day so I spent almost all day playing KSP without any hangs or crashes. I've got a good number of mods installed (21, plus the stock Squad and World Cup folders) and my KSP executable was pushing 5 gigs after playing all day. Anyway, the results: in a 47.4 MB Unity Player.log file, I have 92 references to VesselViewPlugin but no errors at all. Similarly, in my 18.9 MB KSP.log file, about the same number of references to the plugin but again no errors. (NOTE: Playing on a Mac so my log names/locations may be different than Windows).

Yep, that is correct. I've been running it since the start of the public 1.1 betas and it's great: runs smoothly, handles larger craft more efficiently, lets you finally break the 3.5 GB memory wall, and most important it's stable. I've had exactly two crashes since the start 5 weeks ago or so, and both were mod-related per my logs.

Last time I played around with surface bases, I used RoverDude's MKS/OKS modules from his Kolonization System ... Worked great! It's been since about 0.90 or thereabouts, I guess, but the last time I tried them you didn't need to use any life support/consumables unless you wanted to.

Still working here. *shrug*

There was no challenge offered. I merely pointed out that in Career, a massive standing army of kerbals comes with a cost, so my crew of several dozen represent a significant investment in both time, funds and opportunity cost (*). (*) Simplified, this is the concept that having invested that cash in those crew, I'm giving up on using that money for other purposes, like launching more probes to other biomes, expanding an existing station or base without a contract to do so, etc.

In my Career save, hiring another Kerbal is now well over half a million funds each, and it goes up with each new hire. I've had plenty more in early sandbox games, especially back in the 0.19 - .23 timeframe when I basically considered them expendable crash-fodder.

With every new major version of KSP, I check to see if AviationLights has been updated, because my big design quirk has been to aways use proper red/green Port/Starboard indicator lights on my vessels (especially crewed vessels and probes designed to dock with or otherwise interact with crewed ships or stations). I also try to standardize my action group numbers as much as possible - 1 is always my deployable solar arrays; 2 is for my AviationLights; 3 is for any radiators - if installed; 4 usually runs all scientific instrument tests at once; I can then choose to keep the data or reset any individual instrument with the Science popup; etc.

This. On every level. I've been playing this game for 3-plus years and while I HAVE cobbled together a system that could do it in the past, it required Kethane (before Resources were in the game), landing a miner-refinery station, landing a specialized tanker truck for refueling with KAS pipes, and a LOT of time in-game to refine Kethane into LFO and then refuel the lander. About the time I had finally gotten things tested to run the refueling missions for the crew I had stranded on Eve, a major change happened (probably the 0.90 update but I don't remember) and I just gave up. Now if I do an Eve landing again, it will be planned as a permanent surface colony from the outset, with no plans or hopes of returning, ever. Too much darn work and not enough fun in return for me.

With the new heat/thermal changes in the last several updates, I seriously doubt aerobraking into the sun is gonna work very well these days ... I'd like this idea more if it was platform-agnostic or a web app.

Or if you're on a Mac which doesn't "merge" folders like that, just extract the .zip file, open the GameData folder inside, then drag and drop the JSI folder into your KSP GameData folder.

Thank you, sir! I'll give that a try this afternoon. EDITED TO ADD: Okay, couldn't wait. Works great with 1.1.2 and the latest RPM - thanks, @RealTimeShepherd!

Admittedly, I am still determining how stock resources work. The last time I played around with ISRU stuff semi-seriously was with Kethane, probably back around the 0.23-0.25 days. But it seems to me that with all the thought put into attempting to balance power consumption, heat production, drilling and conversion efficiency and part mass, that obviating the need for most battery capacity and/or fuel cells and simply using a set of magic Gigantor arrays to power your driller/refinery makes craft design very simple - too simple probably. No need to worry about night time power at all, in fact. With so much thought RoverDude put into Karbonite and now the stock Ore system, I can't imagine this one would be something he'd consider just one of those things to ignore.

Wow. I searched the tracker for Gigantor and Minmus and got s bunch of false hits that weren't relevant. Anyway, I'm amazed this one is still around, especially with all the semi-public bug squashing going in since late March. With stock resources now, this is a crazy powerful exploit.

Nope. Works just fine.

Huh. Now I need to do a general forum search, I guess. If so, this is a big one not to get patched, as it allows an incredibly easy hack/exploit of the stock resource system. EDITED TO ADD: Yep, you're right. This is a HUGE bug for it never to have been fixed, nor for anyone to have not noticed it and beaten it into the dirt during the 1.1 pre-release betas (yes, I searched the bug tracker before I posted but didn't see anything).

So has anyone else run across this? I was testing a design for a Minmus lander/driller/refinery vessel and realized I was never running out of electrical charge, even throughout the night. So I right-clicked one of the Gigantor arrays and it seems that Minmus is - evidently - transparent to sunlight. Now, I have a good number of mods installed so before I go uninstall them one by one to see if this persists, has anyone else run across anything similar and if so, did you determine what was causing it? Or is there some bug with Gigantor arrays and Minmus?

Test it how? I'm not sure the BadS flag actually does anything but control facial expressions during nutty explosions. The best way to know is just open your persistence file in a text editor and do a search for "BadS" and see if it's set as TRUE for any of your kerbals.

This. ^^^ Setting a 35km periapsis is pretty low for spaceplane entry. Remember, the way orbits work, the velocity of a craft orbiting very high is actually quite low; that's why a tiny deltaV can produce such large changes in an orbit. The same object orbiting very low will be moving very fast. So setting a periapsis at 35km, absent any atmosphere, will mean your spacecraft will be moving THAT MUCH FASTER as it hits the lower part of the trajectory as compared to a craft with a higher periapsis, like for instance about 50km. That means there's just that much more kinetic energy to shed via friction as compared to an entry trajectory with a higher periapsis. So if you set a low Pe and then try to use your wings to counteract the natural tendency of that initial trajectory to forcer you lower into the atmosphere, you're not only greatly increasing the stress on your craft, you're also forcing your craft to go faster, lower in the atmosphere than you otherwise would AND trying to turn that kinetic energy into heat via drag than you otherwise would as well. True. However, a 90 degree bank isn't really necessary or desirable - banking during entry helps if you're trying to aim for a landing site when your entry trajectory is off-track from the runway heading you need, and it does help shed kinetic energy (speed) so that you're not breaking Mach 1 at sea level while you try to plant your wheels on the runway! How many banking turns you need depends on how far off-track you are from your intended landing site, how fast you're going when you get down into the <30km altitude range and start really FLYING as opposed to bullying through the upper atmosphere, and how far away you are linearly from the landing site. If your craft has turbojets or something like RAPIERS in air-breathing mode and enough fuel to cruise, you can get away with a lot more slop in the precision of your entry targets, but that's another subject. Anyway, banking to steer your trajectory toward the landing site rarely needs to be greater than about 45 degrees. That's plenty for a fast, very wide turn.

I think there are (or were, in past versions), a couple of other "Easter egg" type kerbals with the BadS flag - basically a handful of hard-coded guys you'd get randomly as your game goes on with stats and names honoring a few real-life astronauts. I don't know it they're still in the game, however. For what it's worth, I just opened my current Career persistence file and searched for "BadS." In addition to Jeb and Val, I found several others with the flag set as True: Aldlan, Lubald, Stauna, and Danlian (Yes, I have a lot of kerbals in my game right now!)