Brotoro

Congratulations! Nice first post.

I assure, no kerbal has ever been injured in the VAB.

I very much like the tweakable parachutes. Being able to set the full deployment altitude makes setting up staged deployment for heavy rockets work better. I'd used manually-staged deployment of multiple chutes before, but you always had to wait for the first chute(s) to deploy at 500 meters before you could pop out the later chutes. But with tweakables, you can set the first chute(s) to open fully at 600 meters, and the rest to open fully at 500 meters... BUT now you can pop them ALL out early on so they can help slow down the ship while in reefed (semi-deployed) state, rather than only having the first chutes available for that.

I wouldn't get to go (no need to take the color blindness gene along), but I'd help build the ship.

I tested them with both locked and unlocked suspensions, and neither way can take as much impact force as landing on solid girders. BUT, I was testing a RAPIER SSTO rocket yesterday and found that I could land it at 7-point-something m/s without breaking the legs, so the breaking speed may not be quite as low as I thought...so the actual number is somewhere between that and 10 m/s. But I did try unlocked suspension legs in conjunction with girders (in the tests mentioned before) hoping that the unlocked legs would absorb some of the landing shock before the girders it the ground to absorb the rest of the shock (things were positioned to have the girders hit BEFORE the legs compressed all the way, thinking this would keep the legs from breaking because they never were asked to compress fully), but the legs broke anyway. So, I conclude that the program simply looks at how FAST the legs are hitting to determine if they break, and not looking at how much impact force they are actually being asked to absorb. Anyway...back to launching payloads.

Whith the launch tower, there could be no Wackjob.

The Saturn V on display at Johnson Spaceflight Center was laying outside on its side in the terribly humid Houston weather for decades, and had become seriously deteriorated and corroded. It has since been restored to its original appearance and enclosed in a building to protect it, but some of its exterior detail parts were replaced by molded replicas. No way could this rocket be flown (and it is the only Saturn V display made from three stages that were actually meant to fly in space).

My tests with the RAPIER had it running in air breathing mode while the intake air in the Resources read zero...for a long time. I was confused.

Jeb on Tylo: Lift off of the ascent stage (the middle layer of the tank sandwich) It looks overbuilt to me now.

VERSION 0.23 AGAIN… It turns out that the problem of KSP not responding to right-clicks can be solved by making FASTER clicks. Apparently 0.23 is less tolerant of holding down the mouse button during a click (maybe this is also true of left-clicks, but I just never noticed it…maybe my right-click-finger is just slower that my left-click-finger). It's not that I accidentally move the mouse a little during the click (I've tried holding it firmly in place with the other hand), and it's not that the part of the rocket is moving under the mouse cursor during the click (I've tested it on stationary objects)…it's just how long the button is held down during the click. So anyway…no more languorous right-clicking. It turns out that the solution to the MechJeb weirdness was to open the Attitude Adjustment window (when did that get added? I use very few of MechJeb's features…I should investigate them more fully) and then uncheck the only item in there ("Use stock SAS" …which then shows all sorts of info) -- and then MechJeb acted the way it did before the upgrade.

Why couldn't you just shield the phone? You could include a lot of radiation shielding and still come in MUCH lighter than the originalApollo computer system.

I'm having a similar problem to BARCLONE, I think. Rockets that used to fly perfectly in the previous version now wander all over the sky at some point during boost. Also, when trying to point the ship while in orbit (to align with a node or do a landing at target burn) MechJeb's pointing wanders around crazily like a blind man trying to find the node with his white cane. I can easily point it under manual control, so there is plenty of control authority on the ship. I looked in the Attitude Adjustment window, but I could find no "Auto Tune Tf" option to uncheck. I unchecked the "Use stock SAS" box (the only option in the window), and this appears to have solved the problem (subject to further tests). (I'm using MecjJeb 2.1.1 on a Macintosh running OS X 10.8.5)

VERSION 0.23 I've returned from holiday travels and have updated my save game file to version 0.23. Waiting gave time for certain mods I need to have been updated. Some of these mods I need because I use them a lot (such as Kerbal Alarm Clock). Other mods I need even though I don't use them much (such as Protractor) just because I have parts from those mods on various ships, and the save file won't open with all the ships intact if I don't have that mod installed. Alas, the much-loved-by-me Maneuver Node Improvement mod is apparently not being developed any more, so I have installed the PreciseNode mod, which has similar functionality. I experimented with the new version of the tweakable heavy-duty landing legs… It appears that they will work fine in the "suspension locked" setting for keeping my GasStations, etc., at the proper height. There is a problem with their damage resistance, however. The old heavy-duty legs could take landing speeds of 10 m/s, so many of my ships were designed with the appropriate number of parachutes, etc., to land them at 7 to 8 m/s or so, but that will break the newer legs. Simply having girders or I-beams extended downward as landing legs works fine for taking up a high impact shock, but the disadvantage there is that they can't be folded away… so you either have to live with permanently extended landing structures sticking out and being in the way, or permanently extended landing structures that don't stick out so far (so as not to be in the way) but which are less stable because of narrower leg span. I thought a compromise solution where girders stick straight back far enough to protect engine nozzles from hard landings, and foldable landing legs mounted on those girders at a height such that they will not fully compress before the girders take up the remaining shock (and still be there to give a wider stability base), would work well… but it does not. This configuration still results in the landing legs breaking at high landing speeds. Apparently the program just looks at how hard the parts hit the ground, and not the actual forces involved (so that the legs break even if they only have to compress a little way before the girders take up the impact force). So… landing more slowly is in order. More parachutes, and some engine breaking, will be required on some of the landing bases, etc., designs that I've used. I updated the save game file to use the new version of the landing legs, but that means that my various bases and GasStations on Laythe would appear with their landing legs folded (since KSP does not check to see what the previous state of the landing legs was when it replaces the old legs with the new modules), resulting in the ships crashing to the ground and (in many cases) either breaking parts or falling over. This required using HyperEdit to move some of those ships into orbit before the upgrade, and then using it to place them back into their original locations on the ground. Tedious tweaking, but now done. Next I experimented with the RAPIER engine (because who can resist playing with new toys) to make a RAPIER version of the spaceplane to send to Laythe. The test results look very promising, and they certainly seem to make spaceplanes easier. But I have read some people saying that other changes to the program have made SSTO spaceplanes easier, and it's not really the RAPIERs that are responsible. So I'll be able to test this by doing comparison flights of the two versions on Laythe. Last night I ran into a problem with MechJeb, which I'm currently stuck trying to figure out. I hadn't noticed any problems at first, since I was doing things like landing leg tests and spaceplane tests that I don't use MechJeb for, but when I got to doing some more tedious things (like sending more stuff into orbit on Reusable Rockets) I ran into a problem where MechJeb no longer seems to be able to keep the rocket pointed correctly. On boost, the Reusable Rocket will start spinning, and then wander off course (even though I can control it manually there just fine…so it has plenty of control authority). And when I'm maneuvering a ship in orbit and tell MechJeb to point to a maneuver node I've set up, it will randomly flail around trying to aim the ship as if it was feeling for the proper direction with a blind man's white cane. So I have to work this out, or die of tedium handling routine things manually. I'm also running into the problem where right-clicking on a part of ship will not bring up the menu of things you can do with that part (such as changing the landing leg settings or setting control to a certain part). I often have to click multiple times to get the menu to appear. I don't know if this is a KSP problem, or some problem with the combination of mods I have installed. So I guess I'm going to have to run that down as well (starting with a clean install and adding mods one at a time to see where the problem is). It's a problem I could get by with, but it makes playing the game more frustrating, and could result in the loss of a ship if I get into a situation where I have to quickly activate parts with right-clicks and can't). Below, the GasStation on Aldner Island stands tall on the new version landing legs. This one was easy to fix because it's by itself (with only a flag near it), so a little use of Hack Gravity allowed it to stand up again when deploying its legs in the new version (just trying to deploy the legs would result on one of them spearing into the ground and getting stuck).

My computer automatically backs up my files every hour, and there are old versions of my game files saved going back months. Also, before and while I am doing complex operations, I manually save the quicksave files by renaming them so I have a trail of saves. I almost never need these, but I'm diligent about backups as a matter of habit. Renamed quicksaves have come in handy if I needed to go back and get a picture of something I missed.

This is what I heard as well, that it was an obscene phrase in Russian, and therefore the Russians preferred to call black holes 'frozen stars', a name that comes from fact that (as seen from outside) the stellar material collapsing in to form the black hole appears to slow down and come to a halt as it reaches the event horizon (where the gravitational redshift becomes so great that the matter disappears from view). I have never confirmed this with a Russian.

My first flight to Eeloo was back in version 0.18-something and is written up here.

Other things I'd like have been suggested already... so I'll go with: Triangular-shaped structural plates. I'd like to see the cool stuff people would build from those.

That wasn't heat. That was amusement.

You wouldn't be doing anything as absurd as using 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, or 7 days in a week would you? My gosh...how do you survive?? And I'd hate to think how many radii fit around the circumference of your circles. Hopefully you've managed to make that come out to ten as well for peace of mind.

Oh noooo! I wondered what happened to the fleet.

I would have preferred Constellation with double the budget. But nobody asked me.

"Commander" of a kerbal expedition is primarily an administrative position, and is not necessarily related to seniority as an astronaut. Kurt Kerman is the most senior astronaut on the Laythe expedition, for example, but Thompbles was chosen as the commander by virtue of his previous experience running the the Minmus base. Although the commander is the one charged with making decisions in critical circumstances and implementing policy, it is primarily the bigwigs back at KSC that make the policies. Kurt is the deputy commander of the Laythe expedition. Emilynn was chosen as the commander of the Vall expedition, but she is a relatively new astronaut (although she worked at KSC for some time prior to that as flight instructor to the newer group of scientist-astronauts, of which Hellou was a recent member). With the unplanned curtailment on the Vall expedition, Emilynn and Hellou were reassigned (at least for now) to the Laythe expedition.

Set up science equipment for long-term monitoring of the environment. Many kinds of equipment to set up, connect, put RTG fuel into, retrieve, test, etc... all for fun science points. Run hoses from one vehicle to another close-by vehicle for refueling. Pick up rocks...have cool pictures of the rocks generated so I can see them to look for certain kinds...oh, and generate a file that I can send to Shapeways so they can print it out and send it to me. Set up equipment for extracting useful resources from the atmosphere, oceans, and ground. First person EVA view, and cameras my first person view kerbal can use to take images that later generations of morons can call fakes.

Did I do an SSTO spaceplane on Kerbin? Yes...I did that soon after I made the BirdDog for use on Laythe (using a modified BirdDog ship). What pleased me on Laythe was getting the Ladyhawk into orbit with as much fuel to spare as I managed.

Not yet (I only just got around to doing the NAMOR mission). I have fewer classes to teach this Spring, so hopefully I'll have more time. But right now I'm on holiday travel, so I'm not playing any KSP at the moment -- I flew the Part 23 stuff before leaving for travel...then spent six hours in the middle of nowhere stuck in an Interstate traffic jam caused an ice storm... I can get around on Laythe easier than I can drive across the country.