Kromey

LMAO! This cracked me up!!! Real-world lithobreaking!!

For millenia, for as long as anybody can remember or the history books can tell, Kerbals have been renowned for their extraordinary Kurm hunting. The Kurm, being somewhat like a little green burrowing fox, is difficult to hunt and track because it spends much of its time under the soil; thus, Kerbals are perpetually staring at the dirt, digging and hunting for their elusive prey. Until one day a young Kerbal, while digging after a particularly energetic Kurm he was hunting, suddenly found the creature -- now cornered against a large boulder -- turning upon him! It bit him on the finger, and the young Kerbal yelped in surprise (Kurms are not aggressive creatures, so this was a very shocking turn of events!) and lurched backward, tripping over an exposed rock behind him. Totally off-guard and already off-balance, he tumbled backward and smacked his head on another rock. Rubbing his aching head, this young Kerbal blinked his eyes repeatedly, trying to get the stars in his vision to clear. Until he realized that the stars were not, in fact, in his vision -- they were actually above his head! Amazed and bewildered, he stood up, and stared at the sky. For the first time in history, a Kerbal looked up. And lo! were the stars discovered. But that was not all! As he stared at the stars, trying to count them, sweeping his gaze across the sky, his eyes were caught by another one, much bigger yet somehow quite different from the other stars. And thus was Mun discovered. The young Kerbal immediately went and grabbed his two best friends, and brought them to the site of his discovery to show them. They were not impressed by the bright blue sky with the painfully-bright yellow circle, but their friend was so excited he yammered on and on and on about it all day. And then they saw what he had been talking about, and they, too, were mesmerized. The three friends set about on that very spot to invent the science of rocketry, so that they could go up and investigate these stars themselves. They soon realized rockets alone were not sufficient, and began construction on the KSC (at the time it stood for Krums Suck Cronk, but they later revised it to something that seemed more rocket-y). It wasn't long thereafter that the three friends oversaw the construction and launch of Kerbin's first ever failed rockets. (Eventually they oversaw the first successful one, too, but that was far less impressive.) The history books are already being updated to include these three visionary Kerbals: Jebediah Kerman, the first Kerbal to look up, and Bill and Bob Kerman, the second and third Kerbals to look up (they still to this day argue over which of them was the third, as neither wants to admit that they believed Jeb at all -- and who can blame them?). So, you see, given the storied history of Kerbin, it makes complete sense that they'd be flying rockets without having first noticed that some of the "stars" in the sky move differently, let alone determining that those are whole other worlds!!! Back to the topic: I was excited about SCIENCE! Now I'm even more excited about getting the Observatory and finding what's there to be found!!

You could use a cupola and call it your observatory; wouldn't have a telescope per se, but that thing gives you a a lot of window and the view looking at Kerbin's sky from it would be gorgeous! It's also what I'd use for a lookout tower.

This is the angle of the planet with relation to Kerbin, assuming the "corner" to be at Kerbol (the sun). In other words, from the map view, when you're zoomed out and can see the entire solar system, imagine drawing two lines: one from the sun through Kerbin, and the other from the sun through the planet you're trying to visit. The angle between those two lines should match the angle described on this chart. Or, simply hold this chart up to your screen, lining up the sun and Kerbin, and wait until the planet you want to visit is in roughly the same position on your screen as it is on this chart. Hope that helps. It took me a long time to grasp the concept of these angles in the first place, and longer still to comprehend why in the heck they mattered (or more to the point, why they mattered more than the relative distance between e.g. Kerbin and Duna, as it seemed to me that one would want to leave the former for the latter when the two are at their closest, i.e. a relative angle of zero), so hopefully I'm explaining them in an understandable way.

It's one of the 5 guiding principles of Kromey Kaerospace that no Kerbal is to ever be sent somewhere that he can't be readily returned from, right after "Failure is always an option" (which is elaborated to mean that mission failure is always preferable to endangering Kerbals' lives) and a mandate that all manned launches include an LES (something that's actually been missing so far because I simple lack the unlocked tech to implement one). (The other two simply mandate clear mission objectives and profiles before launch, and prohibit the dumping of nuclear material onto any inhabited world.) There's a million and one ways to play KSP; despite the apparent separation between "sandbox" and "career" modes, the entire game in either mode is, ultimately, a sandbox game, where you set your own rules and your own goals and play the game the way you want to play it. Some refuse to play without FAR and Deadly Reentry; some refuse to use MJ while others won't play without it; some insist on a pure vanilla game, while others have more mod parts than can be counted in a single byte (that's more than 255, by the way). Personally, I take great pride in Kromey Kaerospace's safety record (even though, owing to sheer lack of time, I've only flown 3 missions so far), and have even gone into my persistence file to disable re-spawning should I happen to lose any of my kerbonauts. I would never send a manned lander to Eve if I didn't know they could return to orbit and (transfer window permitting) then Kerbin within minutes of touching down. Anyway, all of this is to say: Go for it. Play the game the way you want to play it. If stranding Kerbals on Eve's surface or casually exploding them just for the heck of it is fun for you, then by all means do it (and then please upload the YouTube videos so that rest of us can enjoy your hijinks!). If, on the other hand, you can't stand the loss of even a single Kerbal, then certainly ensure their safety and their ability to always return from whatever mission you send them on. Note: Kromey Kaerospace reserves the right to amend its principles for the purposes of establishing indefinite-duration colonization of extra-Kerbin worlds; guidelines to ensure the safety and health of all kolonists will be drafted before any such mission is undertaken.

This is awesome, thank you! I've never left Kerbin's SOI before, but I'm hoping to make my first expedition to Duna before too much longer, and this should no doubt improve my odds of a successful encounter!

Yeah, you Europeans are way ahead of us. And I don't just mean po-dunk Alaska, but the whole of the US! The Lower 48 (as we call the "contiguous 48 states") can get faster plans (although not as fast as what you've got there I don't think, at least not generally), but around here the fastest option I have -- for huge amounts of money that I don't have! -- is 50 Mbps. http://www.gci.com/internet/plans

So if I'm seeing this right, there's a docking port above the command module's RCS tank? The whole thing together lands on Mun (or wherever), takes off again, transfers back to LKO, and then the command module detaches, uses RCS to de-orbit and return, while the rest stays in orbit, ready to be refueled and reused for the next mission. That about sum it up? I rather like this design. I personally don't like relying solely on RCS for my de-orbits, and would give the command module a proper engine, but nonetheless this is a brilliant design that will be inspiring my own future missions! This actually looks like it could -- maybe with a few minor tweaks -- be a great interplanetary transfer module as well!

To really put this into proper perspective, my internet connection -- one of the fastest ones available in my area -- is 12 Mbps. That means that in the time it takes me to download KSP, NASA can upload it to LADEE more than 50 times!!!

Not if you stay in orbit, nope -- the game will consider it "debris" and once it leaves 2.5 Km from your active vessel, will go onto rails; at that point when it drops under 25 Km altitude (I'm not 100% certain this is the precise cut-off point...) the game will simply delete it from your universe altogether. You can put a probe core onto your goo and parachute that down, however you'd want to switch active vessels to it and follow that all the way to the surface before returning to your orbiting craft, otherwise it will again just go onto rails and get deleted. (You might be able to do this sans the probe core, I've been able to occasionally switch to "debris" like this, but it seems unreliable and each new version has made this rarer and rarer for me -- so I wouldn't count on it!) One thing you can do is to detach and parachute science stuffs alongside your own descent. So long as everything stays within that 2.5 Km physics limit of your active vessel, this can work to bring back multiple separate modules. I haven't actually found a use-case for this yet, although it is a pretty neat way to quickly land multiple base modules on an atmospheric world like Laythe, Duna, or Eve.

Last time I considered adding KE to my game (just after 0.19 was released I think), it hadn't been updated for a while and many were saying it wasn't working anymore. You guys who love it, I'm assuming you're using it in current version without issue? Is it in the tech tree for Career mode, or would I have to hack it in if I wanted to install it now? (I do want it, much more than MJ (no disrespect to those who use MJ, I just wouldn't be able to resist the autopilot features, and that's not how I want to play the game), but what's the point if it doesn't work?) Do you have any pics of a design like this? Not to hijack the thread, I've just always thought that dumping tanks rather than tanks+engines would be a great way to save on weight (and, eventually, cash) and to more efficiently stage, but so far my attempts at this have used radially-mounted tanks only; I've wanted to try this with engines at the top dumping tanks from the bottom, but haven't been able to come up with an effective design for it yet...

It was back in .19, or maybe .18. I'd just seen a YouTube video (probably Scott Manley or something) that mentioned planning re-entry so as to land near a specific target (in that case the KSC) -- something I had never done before, or even thought to do! (I'd just get back to the ground/ocean wherever I happened to end up.) So I quickly launched a mission into orbit, circularized, separated from the mostly-spent ascent stage, and then spun around and started my re-entry burn. A booster went flying past me less then 50 m away. I had just enough time to think "Whew, that was close!" before I smacked straight into the second one! Cue pretty explosion, and somehow the capsule is intact, although its chute is gone now, as is its engine. Still had its almost-full fuel tank though. Unfortunately I'd gotten enough of a burn already that I was on a re-entry course, so a rescue mission wasn't possible. That's when I started attaching Sepratrons to every single stage that wasn't going to be separated while still in atmo. And always looking where I'm going...

I'm at work and thus unable to test this, but glancing at the various files it seems the value you want to alter is xmitDataScalar in the respective part.cfg for the science part you want to alter. So if you wanted to not get any science from transmitting results from Science Jr., for example, you would change GameData/Squad/Parts/Science/MaterialBay/part.cfg and change the xmitDataScalar from 0.2 to 0.0. That covers Science Jr. and Goo, but I don't know what you'd do to alter surface samples, EVA reports, or crew reports -- I can see the experiments in scienceDefs.cfg, but there seems to be no other reference to them, so I don't know what/where their counterpart to xmitDataScalar is.

I've already been doing these, although perhaps a slightly modified version of the first: only once per mission. So e.g. a second sub-orbital mission could legitimately transmit a crew report identical to one the first sent, however the same mission can't re-send ("spam", as I think of it) the same report again. I also don't transmit results from Goo or Science Jr., although when I start doing one-way unmanned missions I may allow one such transmission per mission. Additionally, I'm limiting myself to what I feel is a logical progression for a space program: Did a couple sub-orbital flights to learn the basics of rocketry, then did an orbital mission that re-entered after almost exactly one orbit (Mission Control done screwed up the timing of the re-entry burn, neglecting to account for basic principles such as "Kerbin rotates", and thus landing the capsule far to the west of the KSC rather than aiming right for it as was the intention -- which learning such things is why we take slow and deliberate steps like this!). A few more orbital missions to refine orbital injections (and learn to avoid the highly elliptical and ovoid orbit the first ended up in), then we'll be off to some Munar and the Minmus-ar fly-byes, then tackle some land-and-return missions, etc. I intend to send unmanned probes to any interplanetary destination I want to head toward, as well, so I won't be leaving Kerbin's local system at least until I've unlocked probe cores, although there will certainly be more than enough to do around here until then, and well beyond I'm sure! While I'm sure I could have orbited Kerbin and perhaps even gotten (at the least) a free-return trajectory around Mun by Tier 2 (maybe Tier 1, but only with a huge amount of trial-and-error, heavy on the error!!), it's just not a plausible progression for me. Maybe once I "complete" career mode once I'll start a new one and set challenges like that for myself, but for now I'm happy advancing as I am.

Me too. That's why, right away, I imposed a house rule on myself: After any mission that successfully returns science to the KSC, I can unlock one node on the tech tree. The only time I allow myself to violate this rule is if, in the heat of the moment, I go from a successful mission straight into another successful mission, forgetting to go and get myself the next tech tree node in-between. That being said, though, I'm only 3 missions into career mode so far, and while all 3 have been successful and have returned gobs of SCIENCE! (well, not compared to some of you over-achievers who are touring the entire Jool system on Tier 1 parts!!), that's really not a lot. At all. So I reserve the right to modify or revoke this house rule at any time that I see fit, but so far it's been fun using these parts I wouldn't otherwise have even considered -- like SRBs, which while I have occasionally strapped a few on for kicks I've never really made full use of until now. This sum up so perfectly why I love career mode. Well, that and having an actual in-game objective to accomplish (SCIENCE!), that is. But mostly this, the challenge of being restricted to certain parts yet still having my same lofty goals (some day I will leave the Kerbal system and visit other planets... some day...).

This was mine, as well. I was shocked and surprised -- even surprised and shocked -- to launch career mode for the first time and discover, much to my chagrin, that I didn't have stage separators at all. I was so off-balance -- I don't think I've ever built a rocket without at least one stage separation before!! -- that after cobbling something together I didn't think to name or save it before hitting the launch button. I was doubly shocked and surprised -- but not surprised and shocked -- that that thing actually managed to not only reach space, but to hit over 120 Km apo! Of course I was only shooting straight up, just to see how high I could get (and hoping to do some outer space SCIENCE!), and didn't even try to get an orbit, but it was still a rather impressive showing for the historic Untitled Space Craft. Whose design has now been lost to time, sadly. Oh well, I have stack separators now, and a new line of LKO launch vehicles dubbed Prometheus, for no reason other than that's the first cool name that came to mind. Will have to come up with something else for my first Munar fly-by, but first the Prometheus line is due for the addition of a more robust lifter that can better achieve stable -- and higher -- orbits.

Kromey Kaerospace. Because I'm Kromey (been that for a lot longer than there's been KSP, so it's just a coincidence that my name starts with a 'K' and kerbals add a 'K' to the beginning of keverything), and because kerbals would obviously name a company "Kaerospace" rather than "Aerospace" (see aforementioned "add a 'K' to the beginning of keverything"). Only just came up with that for 0.22, though, been struggling since 0.17 or so to figure out a name for my space agency.

Huh. I never would have thought to work around the lack of ladders by putting the capsule on the bottom like that. That's what I love about these forums, always some outside-the-box thinking to inspire me here! Of course, I'm pretty sure Mun's gravity is low enough that your kerbonaut's jet pack could get him back up to a capsule on the top. But this is indeed a safer option, as even if he runs out of fuel he can still get back in!

You have inspired my next (and very likely many subsequent to come) ship design. I want you to know that, sir. Very nice!! I have to agree with seems like everyone else -- I don't think the current ones are too big, and if you really want smaller ones a) use the previous science parts, and/or mod in some smaller ones for yourself using the rescaleFactor (or whatever it is) in the parts' .cfg file. I, for one, would love to see a Science Sr. part for larger ships, which can do bigger science!

Since I'm doing SCIENCE! now, I've decided every mission will have pre-defined objectives and mission profiles, and after-action reports. Here is my first: Mission Objective: Escape the confines of Kerbin’s atmosphere and bring back initial observations on what space is like. Science Objectives: Crew observations from space. Upon landing EVA to collect soil samples. All reports to be filed upon return to KSC. Mission Plan: This is a simple manned mission into space. Flight profile calls for a simple vertical ascent, no gravity turn, and without achieving orbit. Ship design will use a simple two-stage rocket to bring the capsule into space, which will then simply fall back into the atmosphere and return to the ground safely via parachute. Once on the ground, crew will go EVA to collect soil samples and report any additional observations. Capsule to then be recovered and studied. Addendum: As it turns out, Kaerospace engineers have yet to unlock the mysteries of stage separation, therefore this was not a multi-stage rocket. Crew: Jebediah “Jeb†Kerman Status: Mission successfully completed; craft not reusable; demerits filed on Jeb’s permanent record Report: After transmitting a mid-flight observational report, Jeb stayed the course and reached an apoapsis just over 112 Km above the KSC. In violation of mission parameters and without proper authorization, Jeb exited the capsule and completed the first successful EVA; despite the flagrant violation of safety protocols, Mission Control must begrudgingly acknowledge that his observations on this unauthorized expedition nonetheless brought back valuable insight into space. On return to Kerbin’s surface it was discovered that the 5 parachutes used to slow the descent were inadequate for a completely successful landing, however the capsule managed to touch down undamaged amidst the (really quite beautiful) explosions. Jeb planted a flag to commemorate this historic success, then gathered the required soil sample before returning to the craft to await retrieval.

Thanks again for the flag, MadHorse. I played with the "swoosh" some and ended up dropping the original one in favor of basically a clone of the one on NASA's logo, thusly: I shifted a couple of stars to close the "void" left by removing the original "swoosh". Thanks again for a beautiful flag!! P.S.: I'd be happy to share my modifications back to you in all their layered glory if you want. It's only fair given that this is 90%+ your work anyway. As I use Gimp I saved in .xsf, but I think I can save as .psd if you'd rather have that format.

I like where your head is at! I have no idea if this would work, or be even remotely feasible, in the game, but I still like what you're thinking here! I'm going to watch this thread to see if anything workable comes out of it, and if there's nothing conclusive by the time I can fire up the game (either late tonight or tomorrow evening, sadly) I'll give it some experimentation myself.

I saw that the new update had been released. I fired up Steam. Before it was even fully running it had updated KSP for me. Beautiful! Steam ain't perfect, but neither is it anywhere near the horror-show its detractors always seem to claim. And, as others have already mentioned, the "Steam version" of KSP runs perfectly fine without Steam, so you could use it as just an updater if you wanted and otherwise have it completely shut down while you played KSP all day long.

Beautiful, thanks MadHorse!! A darker background than I had envisioned, but I like this better! You're right about the swoosh, I'll try to play with that a bit, see if I can't make it work; worst-case scenario I'll just drop it.

That... is brilliant! Why didn't I ever think of that??