dpraptor

Thanks for the effort! Your images are not available. I was wondering how do you tell on these sheets when you have done certain tests. There are at least 9 tests for each biome.. Crew Reprt, EVA, Surface Sample(ground), Sci Pod, Temp, Barom, Grav & Seismic. Dont see how I can verify any one of these per biome, so I can go back when I have the tech to do what I still need. Nice & compact is good, but seems incomplete. The sheet I use enables me to verify all science done per biome, I am curious how you can tell which science you do in each biome. Many times I do another run which I get one or 2 things done, but I cant seem to be able to find how to do that here.

Hi KSP Community! I could really use a hand with building a craft that will allow me to fly around Kerbin as high as 20,000. I am trying to complete the surveys, but every craft that I have designed (and a few I even downloaded) just wont make it. I have completed the 1st 3 tiers of research, and 3 of the 4th tier (the tier that requires 45 Sci Points each). I can get into space and orbit no problem, but I just can't build anything with what I have to fly over kerbin, the rockets keep spinning and are insane to try to maneuver in the direction I need to go, no matter what combinations I try. I also tried the VAB and built some basic planes, but that was a joke.....haha..(I think Jeb's still mad at me for dying so many times!) I downloaded the excellent Hummingbird Surveyor from KerbalX, but that is for low flights only, and I had issues keeping it up (More practice I know..) I need a ship that can get to 18,000+ accross a decent distance for the surveys. I haven't played KSP for almost a year, but when I did I had flown to MUN, Minmus and Duna, so I know the game well. Seems the physics changes have really thrown me off. Appreciate any help in either design, or a ship I can download that will do the job, given the limited parts I have in early career mode.

Its 666 666 - HAHAAH!! Its the end of the Kerbin world!! Armageddon is coming to Kerbin in the form of the Kraken!!!! RUN!!!

Yea, the Devs did an awesome job with the new update, adding a lot more fun and challenge to the game. I just wish they would work on getting the game to run more smoothly when you have a lot of parts. That is the biggest problem I am having, like building a moonbase and expanding. It would be nice to use more processing cores and memory!!! But a great job so far! I dont really have any complaints!!

I'd like to understand this: total mass divided by dry mass, but what is dry mass? Total mass must be the total weight? By adding everything up? Dry mass is after the fuel burns? I think might give me some understanding if I understand that, if it is explainable in terms I can get. Thanks for any help you can give!!

Hmm... I was going to like a dozen separate quotes with comments and additional questions...... hahah - Naaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!! I have an elementary understanding about mass ratio and delta V - not enough to fully comprehend everything you said. And I imagine I have a lot of reading to do to fully catch up on this. But i can understand about the doubling of tanks per stage!!! For now I will look at the images people left here and reproduce them and see how they fly. If you have any good ships that can make to further planets and back, I would like to see them, and play around with the design. But thank you for your help in trying to get me to understand how it works!! I will keep trying to learn from what i see, and later get a better understanding of the physics. (been a while since college!)

Wow - awesome!! This has been the biggest problem with base building. I have always had just separate vehicles around the base, I could never attach things together without all kinds of problems. I will definitely give this a try. Thank you for your incredible work and clear insights on how to do this!!

I feel your pain... My career attempts just to get a landing on Mun still resulted in using 76,000 fuel on the 3rd stage alone!! I really need to learn about downsizing too.......

We are Legion!! And the game hasn't even been officially launched!

WOW! I have never seen anything like these! I hope you do this from home and not from an institution!!! Freaking amazing!!

** Note ** - I think this belongs in general discussion, can someone move it there?? I have to say that these designs are really great!! I started this thread because I have a lot of problems building smaller, more efficient vessels. I began with a few smaller vehicles which did their job well, but when it came to Mun, I found myself making these giant monstrosities just to get a landing and return. Here is a brief history of my ship development. I am hoping to see a lot of ships that I can try and experiment with to see how to maximize my efficiency with minimal design. I have been playing this since around April 2013, and built hundreds of crafts, but always keep moving to larger sizes, while I see others getting there with much smaller craft. I still have not yet been past Mimus, and was hoping to see how you all do it without gigantic craft. As you will see in the last pics, my attempts to get a lander on mun and back went to extreme sizes!! My 1st attempt with a smaller craft led to the lander not having enough fuel to return, so it is now stranded on Mun. Here is the 1st two crafts, which did all the Kerbin biomes. My Mun Orbiter did well, but I am sure I still made too large a craft: This is the Mun lander that got stuck there, I am sure that I could have done this so much better and made an easy return, but earlier and smaller ship attempts I did only got into Mun orbit with not enough fuel to land. So poor Jeremiah is going to be there for a while!! Hope he brought some playing cards!! This is the ship (Discovery!) that managed to land on Mun and return. I wanted a lot of science equipment, and I wanted to return them to Kerbal rather than transmit the data to get the full science. I did a lot of tests and had to keep making it larger as i saw that I needed more and more fuel with each test. This craft finally did the job, but used an enormous amount of fuel: The 3rd stage alone had 853 Tons and 76,080 fuel!! (Please don't laugh too hard!!!) I had 5 science units and 6 goo canisters. It was fun to build and fly, but I want to see how minimal I can be with this!! Here it is getting into orbit and landing on Mun, which went well, though it was tricky to rotate until I ditched the 3rd stage. But it flew into orbit quite well. Here is the Mun lander, 9 rockets! 5 of them had the Science pods. The only thing I did wrong was not attach parachutes to the ones I jettisoned!! One of them survived the fall so I did recover it, but I will add parachutes so i can drop them close to the surface and recover all of them. I think with further planets I will use the transmit. So I will look at all the other ships here and experiment a bit to see how you get to other planets/moons with smaller ships. Thank you all for posting, I hope to learn a lot about better efficiency. Can you post some pics of ships going to further planets? If I made a ship this big just to get to Mun, I can't begin to imagine what I will build to get to Jool!! (Double Face Palm!) And Rune, thanks for the link to your craft files, I really appreciate that, as I will test your vehicles and see what I have been doing so wrong!!!!!!!!!!!

Nice ships! My ships seem to be a bit heavy and rather large, I am trying to get a smaller lighter one to use. I am going to post them later. The grey techs are ones that require 2 prerequisites, one of which has not yet been researched. Once you research it, the grey-out one will be available.

I would love to see some of the ingenious ways you all came up with getting the most out of your limited supplies to do the impossible!! I would really love to see the mum landers and any simple rovers that were made. I am just sending my 1st ship to mum, and wonder if this tin-can of a bucket is ever going to make touchdown!! I will post pics once I get there, as well as some of the earlier ships I used. I think this would prove quite interesting to see!!

Ahh - I see - the diminished returns for transmitting are 40 or 50%, so I may only be selective about doing that. I guess more for the further plants than the closer ones. I just read where a guy used the grav box thing all over a planet and did like 20,000 science just from that. But I will have to wait until I get the solar panels, which is my next research to go!

I was doing some reading on the forums and it seems you can reuse the equipment - Goo Capsule, SC-9000 Pod, and the other measuring devices (Grav/Thermometer, etc)? I was taking reading with them once and returning back. I know it says to reset, but i thought that meant it lost the original data. I am now thinking I can reset them and keep doing scans over and over and collecting lots of data before i recover?? I am ready to head over to Mun for a landing, so I would love to know if i can reuse the instruments to get many readings before I return home. Does that also include soil samples?? I also found out there were 9 biomes on Kerben, I think I got most of them, I went to the north pole, is the South pole counted too? Thanks for any help

You dont have to do to the tracking station after you land. You can mouse over the panel at the top of the screen and the recovery button will appear.

Wow - I can only recommend checking to make sure they are still bound, and just shut down and reboot. All else fails - try a reinstall - just backup your saved games first!

Before you even head out in space, you can do landings on Kerbal and land in each kind of biome. I landed in water and grass so far, did all experiments and reports, then recovery, and it netted me over 24 points for 4 attempts. There are I think 7 biomes -(mountains, plains etc..). I use 2 of the goop things for extra points. So try everything you can on the ground to get as many points as possible before going to space, you can have a lot more research dont before you get that far.

I know that you can add science parts to them, but after a few uses, the # of science points drops down. Getting science depends on doing newer and newer things to gain more points, so most of those will only be temporary was to increase science. I am not sure about satellite probes, if you attach a goop or a science station it might work, but I really dont know. If you have an antenna on them, you can transmit the data too.

Wonderfully stated!! End of Discussion!!!!

I find MechJeb has its uses. I dont have a lot of time to play, so it is very useful in rendezvousing, which seems to take so much time to do. Also if i have problems docking with less than cooperative ships, it can help do that final tricky dock and save time. Sometimes I will use it to help me land if i have tried and failed, some vehicles are just too hard to do, and MJ does help. But most of the time I like to do things manually, so I only use MJ when I need to. Besides, although a lot of people feel the game is very realistic, its not, it has a lot of the physics, but I can understand people using this trying to get as close to the real thing as possible. And it is the best simulator out there! But it is also a game, so I think it is very silly for anyone to rant negatively about anyone using any way to do anything they want to in this game. Mods are there to make the game more fun, and expand on possibilities, so I say use them to your hearts content and have a blast!!

Hi A-Rob, You can build some pretty large stations. I dont know the part count of mine - but it must be around or over 800 or more, possibly over 1000 - as there are many small parts that are decorative, I can do without those in future builds. But Attaching them requires docking. If you can get the ports fairly close, Mechjeb will do the final docking for you, but you need to maneuver them fairly close. But docking is really not that hard once you try it for a bit. But I do sometimes use mechjeb to help out. You can use it to get very close, then do the final maneuvering, get it closer with the ports lined up - then mechjeb will do the final docking. You can build them in dock-able stages, launching each part and assembling in space. I built this ship in 0.19, before they had optimized the game more, so by the time i was adding the last few sections it was terribly laggy. I am working on a new massive station to see the limits of the number of parts before it gets laggy again. When you build really large ships, i recommend using the Tri-port adapters for the central connections, as it has 3 ports to attach and has a much stronger hold than just one one port. As you will see, I use that on all the areas that I add significant sized sections. here are a few screens of the one I built, The H.M.S. Wileen: This is the first base part of the ship. I decided to make the connections to the other main parts via tri-docking ports, which hold much more securely in a large ship. You can see 2 of them on the left/right sides. I did make a mistake by using the wrong kind of ports on 2 of the sides(front and back), I should have gone with tri-ports on all 4 of the sides. I will be doing that on my new station. I also added a tri-port on the top to connect with the upper section. I left the bottom with tanks and engines in case I needed to move it. One thing I needed was to have the Tri-port docking parts on BOTH top and bottom of parts, so I had to devise a method of attaching them to the rest of the ship. This was the method I used, using 2 tri-ports facing each other and adding a separator ring on each: This allowed me to undock the tri-ports from the engines, although it did leave a little debris in space! Here I am docking the Base section to the communications section using the Tri-port docks: A little tricky, but once docked, it was quite strong. Just make sure to line them up right!! Funny thing, This was only my 3rd or 4th docking attempt! So it really is not that hard. I built 2 of these antenna arrays, more for looks that function! Again - the tri-dock ports were used on both ends, one to attach, and one to add another section to later: And here is the final docking of the 4th section, again - lining up the tri-port docks carefully. You can see the tri-ports on the back of the other section already attached, so i can add another large section to it. HAHA!! One thing to watch for is lag... I used mechjeb to assist adding the 6th section - and it didnt go to well, but the ship did not break apart, I believe that was because of all the tri-ports I used: So always save before you begin approaches!!!! Here is the final station H.M.S. Wileen, I added a set of escape pods on the right (upper), and a science section on the left (lower). This is a pretty massive station, If it didnt lag out so bad i still could have enlarged it even more, by using the front and back docking ports, but I would have wanted to use the tri-ports there. i found the station to be very stable when rotating or even moving. It does shake a bit, so i think I work to make one more compact, without the long leggy extensions, but using more tri-ports on the central base to expand on. So it is both possible and a lot of fun to make big stations!! Highly recommended!!

This was quite a great improvement!! Awesome job squad! I waited a day to update so the traffic would make it faster. Cant wait to start career mode!!! I Hope they will be adding a lot more science, I see the new parts and will have to do a lot of experimenting to see how the experiments go! I was surprised that a lot of them require experiments on Kerben, I hope there is a lot you can do in space, since that is where I will be spending most of my time! But everything seems to work great in sandbox, so its off to a new budding kerbal astronaut career!! Thanks Squad!

Hmmm - so now I am a bit confused.. What exactly do I need or not need for rockets? SAS or ASAS?? I still attach the ASAS module, do I even need to since I read that it was incorporated in the command modules?? Can someone give me the lowdown on that? I launched a few rockets with the ASAS module and so far have had no drift at all, although the rockets were not too complicated.

I really Need some Help here - Does anyone have this problem? I need to know if I am the only one with this problem. The Lazortab is being covered up by the Mechjeb tab, and i cant move either of them, So I cant Use the Lazor system because it is being blocked: Can some of you tell me if you are having this problem?? Will have to remove the Lazorsystem if i cant get this figured out. Thanks