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Everything posted by LameLefty
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Yep. I adore that mod. I desperately hope it gets ported to KSP2. In the meantime, it’s hard-core, old school “pushing” and “pulling” the velocity vector marker onto the target marker. Satisfying but so much slower and less precise and efficient.
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This afternoon's adventure was to return to Jool and orbit Laythe. Made it with a tremendous about of dV to spare with this little probe, so I'm likely next time to send a probe lander. I have to say two things: first, the new cloud and terrain features for Laythe are spectacular. I love the lighter color water in the shallow, coastal areas, the dune textures, and the mountainous regions. Second, the current maneuver node UI and inability to display local conics makes all this a lot harder than it should be by KSP1 standards, even doing it all manually without the help of MechJeb or one of the maneuver node tools.
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Circularizing orbit from Kerbin
LameLefty replied to thewhitemetroid's topic in KSP2 Gameplay Questions and Tutorials
KSP2 seems to calculate the resultant orbit based on estimating the burn over time (which is much more realistic than stock KSP1, which assumes a simplistic instant acceleration applied at a point). So to get better circular orbits, you will have to add some radial component, either radial in or radial out, depending on your initial apoapsis altitude and whatever periapsis altitude you ended up with when you stopped your burn. The higher your initial Ap, the easier it is to get a good final orbit because it is likely to require less radial component to get close Ap and Pe values. -
Among other things, I visited Dres. The visuals alone make this lonely dump-of-a-minor planet worth visiting now.
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Even the rudimentary recording systems as it is currently implemented is … interesting. Most of my flights, after a safe recovery of the crew, show absurdly high maximum G forces. A standard orbital flight will almost always show about 138Gs. One was well over 1,000Gs. That alone to me indicates that there’s some seriously buggy physics math in the game someplace and probably also helps explain why ships fall apart, and phantom rotational forces causing ships to spin uncontrollably, etc. Assuming that data is valid, of course. Recording all that data in high fidelity tick-by-tick might be very useful for a development/debugging perspective but it will completely overwhelm local storage in all but the simplest save file.
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Just hoping the way rings are made gets changed over time
LameLefty replied to mcwaffles2003's topic in KSP2 Discussion
If you’re running some idiotic forum joke, let it go. Dres has been in the game since 0.18 and I’ve visited it multiple times in KSP1. https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Dres -
Just hoping the way rings are made gets changed over time
LameLefty replied to mcwaffles2003's topic in KSP2 Discussion
LOLwhut? Dres has been in the game since the beginning. It’s got rings now, but it’s not a new planetary body. -
Almost certainly no orchestra involved. Very likely the composer, a good set of DAW hardware and tracking software, and a bank of hardware and/or software instruments. But in any case, get to Duna. The music is fablulous. Conversely, the music in the Jool SOI is very plaintive, almost yearning. I wonder what that's all about?
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SAS And Reaction Wheels Are Useless
LameLefty replied to Scarecrow71's topic in KSP2 Gameplay Questions and Tutorials
In the rockets I've been designing, SAS has been fine WHEN IT WORKS. During several hours this afternoon, at one point reaction wheels and SAS just stopped working at all. The only cure for that was reloading an earlier quicksave, after which they worked again. And other time, they were working right up until I had the rocket point towards a planned maneuver node, then the spinning started, an absolutely uncontrollable and increasing roll rate. Reloading quicksaves didn't help. I had to quit the game entirely and reload. After that, the same quickload files I had tried earlier were unaffected. -
Is it still there in KSP2? I visited a few times in KSP1 and built a base there years ago, before Science was even added to the game, but I don't think I ever went back later on.
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Thanks for the updates, @Nate Simpson As for all the other noise, sheesh ... So. Much. Angst. Life's too short to waste time posting and rehashing the same anger over and over again. Let it go for a few days, wait for the first patch, reevaluate. Spring is around the corner in the northern hemisphere and there's more important things in the world to worry about and to look forward to.
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SpaceX just did it last night, in near-real time, to suppress the results of a faulty sensor in an actual honest-to-$DEITY spacecraft. So very focused software development CAN occur very rapidly, for very well defined hardware, very well defined software, and under very well controlled conditions. None of the above applies to KSP2 at the moment, and never will because the universe of possible consumer computer hardware is fundamentally indistinguishable from infinite.
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I’ve had no problem with “Delta Heavy/Falcon Heavy” style rockets with crossfeed from boosters to core stage, but those are the only kind I’ve tried. I have not tried a true 4 or more booster design.
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That should not matter - the nodes are for planning purposes, period. Suppose I had a transport in orbit near a propellant depot and wanted to go somewhere else. My vessel knows its own velocity (direction + speed). If I want to move that vessel from one trajectory to another, the amount of delta-V is ALL that matters. The whole "course of the burn" over-complicates things greatly (*) for a simple transfer orbit, especially for simply planning and "spit-balling" (e.g., "Can I even do this at all?" type questions). And again, this is irrelevant anyway, because my vessel had propellant and showed dV in the staging list. (*) I did the math BY HAND with discrete time steps, approximating the solution to the equations of motion by integrating the changes of velocity with the changes of mass and velocity on paper with an HP calculator in college almost 35 years ago. So yeah, I know what I'm talking about here.
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First off, incorrect. My dV indicator showed thousands of m/s available, along with the propellant necessary. Second, even if true, that would be TERRIBLE UI design, Planning a maneuver should not depend on having the propellant necessary to effectuate that maneuver. In fact, you can already do that - create a maneuver with a large enough magnitude and the Map view will show something like NO FUEL at the the approximate point that you run out.
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I had a brand new (to me) issue with maneuver nodes today when I got a probe in Jool's SOI: the just stopped working. Oh, I could place a node anywhere along the trajectory through the SOI that I wanted to, but no matter what I did with any of the six axis handles, the trajectory didn't change at all. I had to resort to pointing along the pro/retrograde axis, the normal/anti-normal axis and the radial in/out axis, then burn while watching the Map view to adjust my orbit. I tried multiple saves and reloads and even quitting the game entirely and reloading from scratch, but it made no difference. They are just completely non-functional for me.
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So, not only does the Maneuver Planner go totally useless if you flip between Map view and normal control view, it *also* seems to reset itself if you hit F2 to hide the GUI for a screenshot. When you return the GUI, the bar is full again. More fun with nodes - last night I had planned a Jool transfer burn, saved my game and quit. This afternoon, when I first loaded the save, the Maneuver Planner widget correctly showed how much dV for the burn would be from the leftovers on my methalox lifter core, and the rest would be via my hyrdogen-propellant SWERV stage. However, after changing to Map view before I even started burning, the per-stage info disappeared, and after I started burning, the dV indicator bar didn't move at all. So I reloaded the same save and this time the Maneuver Planner did *NOT* show the per stage info at all. I even quit the game entirely and reloaded but it made no difference. Anyway, after getting to Jool's SOI, suddenly I can't plan maneuvers at all. I can place the node and drag the axis handles around, but the predicted trajectory never changes. I had to revert to pointing pro/retrograde, normal/anti-normal, etc. then going to the Map during the burn to watch the orbit change. Even after multiple attempts to save and reload, maneuver nodes just ... stopped working. I haven't yet tried launching anything else to see if it's a Jool-specific issue or if the entire save is fubar.
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The stuck-staging bug was fixed for me by putting decouplers into their own stages. But there’s a probably-related staging bug where after staging, your active stage shows no propellant quantities and 0 dV. Sometimes quickly “jiggling” the throttle up and back down quickly will get things working but sometimes I have to press the space bar or click the green button to get things sorted. And hope I quicksaved before it all, because if I accidentally double-click, I’ve just staged away a full set of tanks and engines …
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Has Anyone Tried To Rendezvous In Orbit?
LameLefty replied to NeoMorph UK's topic in KSP2 Gameplay Questions and Tutorials
In KSP1, I would use MechJeb to set up rendezvous phasing orbits and fly them precisely, but once in close it’s all manual with Docking Port Alignment Indicator. I miss that experience in KSP2. -
A Twitter thread on terrain rendering performance.
LameLefty replied to Chilkoot's topic in KSP2 Discussion
It’s on par with a real-world Falcon 9, but … F9 has one of the worst “fineness ratio” (lenght/diameter) of any operational rocket ever designed; F9 requires pressure stabilization of its structure and will collapse under load if tank pressure control fails; and F9 as a MUCH smaller fairing that Matt’s rocket. That rocket also had a heavy/complicated rover inside mounted horizontally IIRC, and I don’t think any rocket with that much mass hanging off the end inside that large a fairing would ever do well in an atmosphere. -
Has Anyone Tried To Rendezvous In Orbit?
LameLefty replied to NeoMorph UK's topic in KSP2 Gameplay Questions and Tutorials
Yeah, and it’s a real pain in the ass since the encounter icons are small and unintuitive, and since the closest-approach numbers don’t actually appear without a mouse-over. Once you get an approach, however, it’s not really any different from old school KSP without mods - using the navball prograde and retrograde velocity markers plus the target marker, and thrusting around to “push” or “pull” the prograde marker toward the target. I do very much wish that the navball Velocity gauge would used signed values when in Target mode. It will give you the absolute value of your approach or departure rate, but without signs, you have to keep glancing to the screen to see the distance and figure out if it’s getting closer or receding. It the velocity numbers were positive or negative you would KNOW whether the you’re getting closer or not. -
A Twitter thread on terrain rendering performance.
LameLefty replied to Chilkoot's topic in KSP2 Discussion
Yeah but … his rover rocket video last night was infuriatingly BAD. He has a massive weight inside a giant faring cantilevered off a long and spindly rocket. I’m an aerospace engineer by education and early career - that kind of rocket has NEVER worked well in KSP until recent years’ patches that artificially amplify the strength of joints far beyond what a real rocket structure would tolerate. No a real rocket wouldn’t all apart at the staging joints, but it WOULD crumple like a long skinny tin can, and then blow apart in a conflagration as the propellants escaped the pressurized structure and mixed uncontrollably. Had Matt spent less time fighting with his long skinny heavy-nosed rockets and built something shorter with side-mounted boosters, he’d have had much better luck getting to orbit. -
Yep, and not just for planetary or moon encounters. They’re terrible for orbital rendezvous planning and trying to dock with a target vessel. The fact that closest-approach numbers aren’t visible full-time is right up there with the decision to not show Ap/Pe numbers without a mouse-over. This is a baffling and retrogressive UX design decision.