LameLefty

Great, and while you're at it, make it compatible with Windows, OS X and Linux. Let us know when you're done. That's one of the very great joys of KSP - plug-ins and mods are Unity-based, not OS-based.

This is excellent news to hear! One of the things that I wish is that landing could have an option something along the lines of "Descend Under Parachute Only"- basically a user-clickable option to instruct MJ to calculate a deorbit burn, execute it, and then just use atmospheric drag and parachutes to land, saving fuel for ascent only. I can sort of kludge something similar with staging and using the "Abort" button in the auto-landing sequence but it sure would be nice if there was some way to automate this.

Add me to the list of those with landing problems lately. Tried to land a ship last night at a flag I have planted about 2.5 km away from the pad at KSC that I've designated as the landing field. There was nothing unusual about the landing; it was from a regular 100 km orbit, inclined maybe 2 degrees after returning from Duna. First off, the MJ didn't deploy the chutes until I was down to under 12 km. Then when the lander was still about 8 - 9 km up, it became apparent it was going to overshoot the landing field by a couple kilometers. MJ began a "correction burn"; in doing so, the autopilot titled the craft up around 90 degrees, almost perpendicular to the velocity vector, to try to correct. At one point the it was actually tilted up greater than 90 degrees while hanging under the chutes, trying to make that correction burn. At that point I got alarmed and tried to abort the auto land but just as I did so, my craft broke apart. The lander can snapped off the rest of the lander structure. Fortunately, there were enough chutes attached to it that I was able to land safely and recover the vessel but clearly something was amiss in the landing sequence. First of all, I don't understand why it missed the landing so badly; the vessel mass, the number of available chutes, the engine thrust and fuel load were all available, and this was a very easy west-to-east landing approach. Second, having missed by a couple kilometers while hanging from parachutes at 8 - 10 km above the targeted landing site, why was MJ so aggressive in trying to "correct" when the vessel clearly didn't have the lateral cross-range while under parachutes necessary to make it, to the extent that it broke the lander? When does MJ think to itself, "This is as close as I'm gonna get" and just put the thing on the turf rather than keep trying to correct?

Just tried this version today and made sure to follow the instructions ... wow! When KSP is running on my system it typically uses in the range of 1.5 - 3.5 gigabytes. With this plug-in, my game right now is running at 755 megabytes.

I'm looking forward to seeing how this gets implemented. I'm sure there will be quirks and ways to "game the game" but I'm optimistic it'll end up giving us an interesting new angle.

Ah, just another milk run to the Mun and back. What could go wrong?

My Contracts department will be calling to arrange terms immediately, sir! (And thanks for the career-minded versions!)

Moho is a stone-cold ***** to get to and return from; the low orbit means a very fast heliocentric velocity; it's got a small SOI, and the high inclination just means more dV is needed on top of everything else. I've never landed a crew there but I've been able to land a probe and orbit a crewed mission and return (but only by sending an unmanned tanker to refuel the expedition ship). It seems like I need about 1,400 m/s to get on the right general trajectory, a few hundred meters per second more to tweak the close-approach distance once I'm out of Kerbin's SOI, and then as much as 3,700 m/s more to brake and enter orbit once I get there. And then a few thousand more m/s to get home again! So here are some things to try: build bigger than you're used to. Nukes have great ISP but lousy thrust so cluster 3 or 4 of them radially around your transfer stage; add drop tanks that feed the core. You can drop them once they're empty to save the mass. If you're willing to take the time, stage an unmanned fuel tanker ahead of time; use that tanker as a practice run and source of fuel to help refuel for the run home. As soon as you've left Kerbin's SOI, play around with maneuver nodes along your projected trajectory to tweak your approach. It's hard but it can be done!

Yeah, it's got an AMD Radeon 6490M, but only 256MB of VRAM. The integrated card is only an Intel HD3000.

Yes, it's realistic. Generally speaking, first stage engines are not capable of starting themselves and rely on ground systems to do so: they have ground-supplied pressurants to pressurize fuel and oxidizer tanks, and some also require ground systems to begin spinning turbo pumps. This is not universally true but it's very common. Others still require ground-supplied fuel and oxidizer tank pressure but spin up turbo pumps with helium, which is a limited resource. Still others, such as SpaceX Merlin engines, use a number of "charges" of a set of hypergolic compounds called TEA-TEB (Google it) to start (they're responsible for the characteristic green/yellow flash on Falcon engine start; check YouTube for videos). Air-starting an engine in flight is another problematic issue; LH2/LOX engines can use spark igniters but you still have to be able to spin up turbopumps and/or pressurize the flowing propellants. Here is how the J-2 engine did it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocketdyne_J-2#Start_sequence Note the time limit between starts; wait longer than about 6 hours and you couldn't restart it again even if you have the fuel. For kerosene/LOX or other fuels, air starting has its own issues. Kerosene can't get TOO cold or it starts to gel and won't flow properly. It also subjects engine parts to fouling and sooting from combustion products. Again, you need a way to get the turbopumps spinning good and fast. Unlike LH2 which will warm and expand into gas very easily, thus starting to flow naturally, kerosene is a liquid and has to be pumped. The best way to get the pumps spinning quickly, and thus fuel flowing quickly at flight pressure into the combustion chamber, is hypergolic start cartridges.

I'm using 6-7 on a 3 year old MacBook Pro running OS X 10.9.1 ... I'm not seeing anything like that.

Actually, I've seen a number of ship designed with off-axis engine mounts where the thrust doesn't act fully along the x-axis of the design. In those cases, a perfectly "normal" ship will correctly have a different result shown for dV if the box is or isn't checked. What's more, "cosine loss" is both mathematically correct and what real aerospace engineers use to refer to the issue.

I'm thinking the initial implementation will be a lot sooner than a year; the Devs have already said that they want the gameplay essentially complete for 2014, which means that money and all that it entails will have to be implemented sooner than December of next year. There will need to be at least a couple versions to make sure there's no way to "game the game" (like transmission spamming for Science in 0.22) and become infinitely rich in like two in-game months, for instance. I'm betting some rudimentary money stuff shows up in 0.24, even if it's just a large wad of seed money to start your program and a regular monthly budget to keep it working.

You have to be <200m to set the docking port specifically as the target. There is an add-on mod called "Targetron" that gives you a list of all ships/crafts on screen that you can use to set as the target, and for whichever ship you select, you can target docking ports individually if they have more than one.

Once you unlock the first probe cores, the basic build functions will appear (delta-V calculator, etc). As you unlock various unmanned tech levels, additional functions become available. By the way, not to rag on you, but this info has been repeated DOZENS of times in this thread alone since shortly after 0.22 was release back in late October. A forum search would be your friend.

Great news! I'll look for the update. Since the tech tree of my new 0.23 save will be done soon I'll be able to make use of these as I build out the solar system infrastructure with stations, bases and kethane mines. I should note that I love your MOMS series too, and looking forward to using them once my current tech tree is complete.

Holy crap, it worked. I swear I TRIED that before but maybe I was clicking on the EVA crewman (Krewman? ). I tried again just now and it worked! Thanks!

Can science data be transferred OUT of a command pod and into another? I would have thought so but I can't figure any way. Here's the situation I ran into: I sent a crewed orbiter to Moho to get Science!â„¢ from the crew and EVA reports, as well as Goo and materials data while orbiting. I knew it wasn't going to be able to land so I didn't design the craft with any landing provisions. Upon completion of the science goals, I sent a crewman out on EVA to get the results and store them back in the command pod. A tanker rendezvoused, refueled the vessel and they left for home. Upon returning to Kerbin, they met up with a Kerbin return vessel to go home but now that they've docked I see no way to get the science gathered back home, short of trying to crash-land the Moho orbiter and then recover the debris (if it survives) from the Tracking Station. Is there any way to salvage this boondoggle I've made?

Love to see these but a note for folks, like me, who are trying to use them in Career Mode. Even the smallest of these uses the Rockomax-64 large orange tank and the large circular probe core; so you pretty much have to have almost completed the Tech Tree to use 'em.

Bumping an old thread here (and I SHOULD know the answer but ...) I generally don't bother with downloading others' .craft files so I've never run into this before. However, I just downloaded Wayfare's updated Munshine series of lifters but I'm hitting this brick wall. In my case, my Mac is NOT hiding the file extensions, it's simply confuzzled about the file TYPE. It thinks the .craft files are UNIX executables and there's no easy way to change it that I can find. I tried setting .craft files to always open with TextEdit but that didn't fix the problem. KSP still doesn't "see" the downloaded .craft files when I put them into the proper folders. Does anyone have any suggestions? EDITED TO AD: Gah, I'm a moron. After exiting my save I decided to try the .craft files on a separate save. This time I tried them in my .22 save with a fully-complete tech tree. Turns out the smallest one of these boosters uses the Large Probe Core and I haven't unlocked that node of the tree yet in the first save I tried these on. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along, move along ...

That's entirely untrue; I have a bachelor of science in aerospace and mechanical engineering and was the aerodynamics engineer for our senior design project. Those concepts are necessary if you're going to computationally model lift, but to analyze, understand and make us of it? Complete rubbish. Hardly anyone in mainstream aerospace design even thought about lift in those terms until the 70's/early 80's when supercomputer computational capacity got good enough to do detailed CFD. Before then it was all Bernoulli, wind tunnel and experimental flight tests, and LOTS of iteration. In fact, NACA (the predecessor organization to NASA) did so much experimental work on wing and airfoil design that they published volumes of "standard airfoils" with all the standard coefficients tabulated out. Aircraft designers routinely picked a basic airfoil from the catalog and designed their aircraft around it.

Wow, your new tanks and struts look great! I can't wait to give them a spin. I am already a huge fan of your engines and use them in almost all my higher-tech missions to anyplace much further away than Duna.

Relatively simple ideas to add to gameplay: * Customization of crew uniforms, please. Perhaps rookies get white or light blue pressure suits, veterans other than the Big Three get gold, maybe with their names texture-mapped on the helmet or something like that. If they've landed on another celestial body, maybe they get gold astronaut wings on their pressure suits or some other indicator. * Mission Reports to go along with the Science Archives; I know this data is already kept in some form in the persistence files for every save. So a place to look back and see which probe or ship first visited an SOI, the first time it was orbited, the first time it was landed upon, etc. Maybe with a few other details (lowest and highest orbit altitudes, whether the ship or probe was damaged, any crew lost, etc).

I managed my first probe visit to the Jool system in my 0.23 save. After entering Joolian orbit, I arranged a Tylo encounter; whipping around the moon's north pole, I ended up in an orbit with a periapsis very close to Lathe's orbit; a small orbital correction later and I was entering Laythe orbit. Unfortunately, after entry interface I realized I had a design flaw ... Fortunately, I was able to arrange a safe splashdown and still obtained all the Science!â„¢ available by transmission.

This thread is the poster child for "Entitled Gamer Syndrome." Jeez, people, want some cheese with that whine?