Montieth

Thanks. I'll give that a try.

Was there a way to get the Anomalies to show back up in the Mapsat interface?

So, can this be done or is it a VAB function only?

I will try the new version out and see if I can get it to work reliably.

As someone who used docking struts religiously for docked orbital components and then found that it would in fact cause the bugs that we see repeated above it's not hearsay. Further I tested this myself, and with specific components. It was most certainly causing a thrust vector towards Kerbin that would deorbit craft. NOT. A. RUMOR.

I have plenty of RAM at 14 Gig. It's just annoying that Unity doesn't use the other processors on my Quad Core. Now, I did notice I get less lag when I re-niced KSP's process. In the terminal window.... -find KSP's Process ID (PID).

So aside from adjusting process niceness for KSP "down" to -20 what other things can we do to increase game performance on a given system?

http://www.goodyearblimp.com/cfmx/web/blimp/history/faq.cfm How is the ship anchored when it's on the ground? At the very tip of the blimp's nose is a steel ball much like an automobile trailer hitch. This ball locks onto a cup at the top of the portable mooring mast, which is taken along and set up wherever the ship is operating. The blimp is anchored to the earth only at this one point, so it is always free to rotate 360 degrees around the mast as the wind changes. This arrangement has held the blimp in hurricane-force winds on more than one occasion. The blimp will always point itself into the wind, like a weather vane. See also - Airship Ground Handling

Which has both ship mods and airship mods.... And hey, it's an AeroSpace Game...

Scotius, what level of force do you think the harpoon will be exerting. Also, ballast is a key component to airships and modulating the lift that the lifting bags exert. The craft uses fuel and a neutral or slightly negative buoyancy is what one wants close to the ground. Too much lift and you risk going out of control, exceeding pressure height and venting your lifting gas. Then when you come back down you'll be over weight. Look at the details on the US Navy's Airships. They went to great lengths to setup a ballast release system as well as condensers to retain some of the water from engine exhaust and to use that as ballast. This reduced the amount of lift gas venting necessary to maintain boyancy in a controllable range. As to anchors, correctly speaking, you need a weight of earth or material upon that anchor to act as enough ballast for such an object. A few inches of harpoon barb would be poor at best and would rip out. NAS Lakehurst has multiple tie down points of steel eye hooks embedded in concrete cast into the ground. There were also very substantial anchor points for the high-mast plus other equipment. Naval Anchors work as I said laterally. They can act due to weight, but the forces on the ship are laterally and not as much vertically. If a ship is anchored and very close it it's anchor it will pull it's anchor up and drag under the force of currents. Anchors work basically like a plow and dig in that way. There are differences in types for types of sea bottom and amounts of weight vs shape for various levels of function. http://www.christinedemerchant.com/anchor_styles.html

Oh, there were airship journeys to te arctic by Explorers. Umberto Nobile is one of them and flew to the north pole as well as transmuted the north pole from Europe to North America. Setting a a cluster of screw in anchors in ice would be trivial.

Airships carry ballast. In theory if you wanted to anchor to an unimproved site, you'd drop a few men down to set screw in ground anchors and then moor with those. Setting a weight as an anchor point is odd because you're going to have to carry that weight around. Any ground abhor you set will need to resist vertical movement. A screw in anchor point would make the most sense to me and would be small an light to carry.

Airships were anchored to blocks of concrete or tiedowns in the soil. A bar sticking out of the ground would look correct. Nautical anchors work with a lateral pull. The horns are designed to catch as its pulled. An airship will have a vertical pull that a ship does not have. Ships are able to raise anchor because they're pulling the anchor upwards. A large heavy tower/mast with the anchor on the nose would be the best way to anchor your airship. Bud one in the VAB and move it away from the launch pad on large wheels then retract the wheels.

I am using these as well and they work just fine on my small command station. Next up is to build the orbital fueling station.

I'm pretty sure it does affect how the automatic steering functions. Going down to small numbers for Ki_Limit and Factor seemed to help with precise docking control of big things, but moderate sized craft with a 3meter orbital stage are now clunky for me so I'm trying to tweak or just return back to default numbers.

Regarding the Attitude Adjustment for tweaking the PID. What are the variables again? The Wiki Doesn't seem to have the explanations on it for this window.

Hey, that works as a great refueling hose system. Nice.