LameLefty

Just a data point: I wanted to report that I too was having a lot of problems with the current version of Kerbal Engineer - stats not changing with parts added or removed from a rocket in the VAB, the in-flight display shrinking down to a single line with no data shown, etc. When I replaced Engineer.dll with the alternate single-threaded version posted a few pages back, all my problems disappeared and it's working perfectly again.

It finally struck me, after months of playing, that KSC needs some flood lights and perimeter lights around the launch pad. Every superb NASA launch pad photo you can think of has an analogous one taken at night with those spectacular flood lights. Launching a mission in KSC at night ought to have the same thing. For that matter, I'm sure spaceplane pilots would appreciate some runway lighting as well. I did a quick search for mods that might exist to add them but couldn't find to any. Anyone else feel that KSC lights would add to the game?

That's a pretty significant issue with the collision detection routines. You might want to report it specifically as a bug.

Today I decided to experiment with autonomous rovers. I picked the Mün as a nice close target to practice on. My first mission, Lunokkerbal-1 was an abject failure. The crack design team decided to start from plans provided by the lowest bid contractor, who predictably failed to provide documentation for the design. The Kerbals designing the launcher failed to realize that the lander/rover design included a mounting truss block on the bottom of the rover and decided to improvise. They mounted a separation on top of the lander and inverted it, then mounted the whole contraption on top of a basic asparagus staged rocket - two sets of two boosters, one set feeding the second, with the second set feeding the somewhat larger core, with a small second stage on top of that. Simple and effective. Unfortunately, the combination of assembly errors in the VAB and confusion among the ground controllers from the upside down lander led to a suborbital trajectory and a rain of flaming debris about halfway around Kerbin. Lunokkerbal-2 fared much better, at least at first. First off, the assembly crew must have gotten a good lunch during the off-shift, because they noticed that handy mounting strut block under the rover. So after it was uprighted properly and reattached to the booster, the controller crew confusion was prevented. Next, the earlier assembly errors were corrected (gotta remember to pay close attention to the placement of the correct Separatrons in the right places in the staging sequence). Rebuilt and improved, it was time to head to the Mün! Launching at the near-optimal phase angle, the mission looked great through the trans-Mün injection burn. Once we got into the Mün's sphere of influence, things went south. An orbital insertion burn was planned but when it came time to maneuver to the prier attitude and burn, nothing happened. After much wailing, gnashing of teeth, and scratching of little green heads, it was observed that despite being well-provisioned with solar panels, neither the lander nor the rover were equipped with batteries. The entire outbound leg of the trajectory was facing almost directly away from the sun. D'oh! So Lunokkerbal-2 is now looping around the Kerbin system in a highly-elliptical orbit. Barring a possible future collision with the Mün some months or years hence, that's where it will remain, a hazard to navigation and a monument to oversight. Lunokkerbal-3 corrected this flaw, and with gusto. The rover, the lander AND the upper stage of the booster were provisioned with battery packs, and an auxiliary articulated solar array was installed on the upper stage for the outbound leg of the voyage to ensure that the batteries remained fully charged throughout the voyage. Launch, orbital insertion and trans-Münar injection were carried out without a hitch. However, in their rush to correct previous errors and finally get an autonomous rover on the Mün, the ground crew missed the optimal launch window but tried to brute force it anyway. This resulted in an empty upper stage combined with a trajectory that had a fairly low periapsis over the Mün but on an escape trajectory rather than a stable orbit. In for a penny, in for a Kerbuck ... the ground crew decided to try anyway. The dumped the empty stage and tried to kill over 1,000 m/s of horizontal velocity and about 8,000 meters of altitude with just the four small lander engines. This did not end well; the remains of Lunokkerbal-3 are scattered over a 1,500 meter peak on the lip of a crater somewhere. Back to the VAB! The engineers tried the prevent this error in the only way they know how: brute force. The size of the booster fuel tanks was doubled. The core stage was increased in length by 50%. The fuel capacity of the upper stage was doubled as well. This time, the stars aligned and Lunokkerbal-4 made it into a nice stable low-Münar orbit with plenty of fuel to spare. Anxious to get their new toy on the ground, the controllers killed most of the horizontal velocity with the booster stage (still well-provisioned with fuel for the task) and began a descent from about 8,000 meters. The lander stage ran out of fuel maybe 20 meters above the ground but landed safely in the low gravity. Staging the now-empty lander was anticlimactic; lacking any fuel to fly away, the lander just sort of fell off the back of the lander, like the shell of a dead insect. It looks a little sad there, but our rover is FINALLY on the ground, safe and sound, ready to explore the region for suitable crewed landing sites!

D'oh!!! That was it. Turns out neither the booster nor the rover/lander I threw together had a battery. And while there were ample solar cells, I was on a trajectory directly away from the sun. When I told my teenage daughter about my mistake (she's watched me play a bit before) she responded appropriately: "Rookie mistake, Dad. Rookie mistake." LOL Thus endeth the Lunokkerbal-2 mission: a dead rover/lander and upper stage, looping endlessly around the Kerbin/Mün system in a highly elliptical orbit. Lunokkerbal-3 was amply provisioned with both batteries AND solar cells (including an articulated array on the upper stage) to prevent this kind of rookie mistake in the future. Unfortunately, I missed my optimal launch window and tried to brute force it. I ended up depleting my upper stage before my periapsis lowering burn near the Mün and had to use my lander's smaller engines to try to kill too much horizontal velocity. I might have made it except I came down in rough terrain and ran out of altitude. Oops. But try try again is our motto and Lunonkkerbal-4 landed successfully after riding a substantially larger upper stage all the way to a stable Münar orbit! Of course, in true Kerbal fashion, I killed my horizontal velocity at much higher altitude than planned; my lander stage depleted its tanks at about 30 or 40 meters above the surface. My landed survived the low-g drop to the surface, and staging resulted in a less-than-optimal separation event; it sort of just rolled off the rover and fell over, like the shell of a molting insect. But it's down. Huzzah!

Is there a some key combo that locks the keyboard entirely that I have hit accidentally (ie a gameplay "feature") or do I have a bug? I was sending a rover to the Mün and came out of warp about 1 minute or so prior to my braking burn and discovered after I hit F5 to Quicksave (or actually fn-F5 on my Mac) that none of my keyboard commands are working - no attitude controls, no engine thrust controls, nothing. My system keyboard itself is fine - the caps lock key button lights up normally, screen brightness and sound volume keys work, and all my other apps are fine. I quit the game and haven't restarted yet. I wanted to post this and see if what happened to me is some kind of feature that I didn't know about or if my game glitched somehow. Thanks. EDITED TO ADD: Answered now, see below. Thanks very much!

That was an excellent tale, well-told. Bravo, sir!

Just for grins, and because I had never done it before, I put a satellite into a nearly perfect 350 km polar orbit around Kerbin. Anyone happen to know the equivalent of GSO orbital altitude for Kerbin? I might try a sun-synchronous polar obit next.

Heh, I said the Atari wasn't my first computer. Mine was this (which was before the licensed Timex version): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81 I made do with the 2K of RAM before I saved lawn mowing money for the 16K expansion.

I suspect I was using a computer well before you were born, whelp. 9600 baud? My first modem was 300 baud, connected to an 8-bit Atari (which wasn't even my first computer). Kids these days ...

I was a year and a week old. My parents watched but I was too young. The first mission I remember paying attention to was the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project when I was about 7.

I have a Bachelor's in aerospace engineering, worked as a design engineer for a NASA contractor for awhile after college. Twenty-odd years later, KSP is how I pretend to stay involved in the field.

Even if you're a Steam user, you know you don't have to open/launch the game through Steam, right? At least on a Mac, you can just drag a shortcut of the game application to your Desktop and double-click to launch. So if you don't go through Steam, nothing will update without your permission.

My account was deleted as well but it was only about a month old and I only had a couple dozen posts. Oh well.