shand

Doubtful - wave attenuation, especially of analogue signals, would make detection difficult beyond 1-2 LY even if you are specifically looking for it digital data would be easier to detect, but they'd have to decode it, which depends on them being bothered enough to decode it and have the technology to do so. BTW, this is referring to terrestrial broadcast/omnidirectional. beamed signals are orders of magnitude stronger but highly directional - we use these to communicate with probes ect.

if memory serves - it might not - the brake button (up top) doesnt activate all brakes, unless you tweak it with action groups. have you tried a combination of that and pressing the button that does braking?

*Must... resist.... urge... to reply* DAMNIT i failed. The reason your station is stable is because you are using 0.21, unlike the OP... that was ages ago... when this was a problem... and @Ming, lets not discuss this here, but he just says he thinks he's cheating, he's setting his own rules. something very sandboxey. thats it. i am not going to ironically post any more ironic pointing out that this is an old topic. Toodles!

Love the idea and as always love your posts. Make this now? pretty please? somebody? PS: in the meantime procedural fairings always either single use or permanent storage of sorts, but nothing as awesome as this!

Proof (if ever you needed it) that people don't read a whole thread before replying... Esinohio - this refers to a problem pre the last update which has now been fixed. Can everybody please stop replying (ironic statement of the year award) and let this thread die peacefully of old age!

I think it may be time to simmer down... the caps lock is starting to creep in. on topic: I agree a padlock would be nice. so yes, do that please devs. but you are blowing this all out of proportion. This isn't like the car changing gear when you enter a car park. this is like your speedo changing from "ground speed" to "speed relative to speed limit" or perhaps more realistically, the GPS zooming in your map as you slow down. there is the possibility you don't want the zoom level to change, but most do it by default. if you are lining up on the pro or retrograde marker your eyes are solely focused on the navball. now assuming you are sitting a vaguely sensible distance away from the screen this means the whole area of the navball region makes up approximately 15 degrees of view. that means EVERYTHING in that region is in your fovea, IE: the bit your eye is designed to look at. the speed readout and the mode selection are all there, as is the navball (with heading scale) and markers. So, any change will be obvious as it happens - exactly as obvious as SOI changes - and the "small" mode selection screen is actually massive. when you change camera angle the size of the warning is relatively small compared to the field of view that changes. the point im trying to make here is, if you are making a manuevre based purely on the navball (which is fair enough) you are looking at the bit where it tells you. You dont expect a big sign saying "RCS IS TURNED ON" because there is an sign right there if you want to check. And a final note: yes the tutorials suck - i dont even know if they are still included in the game - because they are finishing the game. at this stage in development new players are meant to rely heavily on trial and error as well as the wiki. in the long run, and i mean long run, the in game tutorials will be developed to a stage where wiki/forum will be for enthusiasts rather then "how do i move the seat closer to the screen" level of learning. SO to summarise: Yes a good suggestion. a small GUI change will make things easier and functionally better with little to no impact on styling or gameplay. BUT: the information is right there, where you are looking, with a clear indictation, and the tutorials will improve. Now, take a deep breath and count to 35 before replying.

hacking doesnt mean what you think it does. hacking is (amongst other things) changing the way things works, getting under the bonnet, examining whats inside and changing bits for betterment.

This whole post rings true. i got my netbook as a portable internet connection - my iphone is now better equiped and more responsive. (and i now have a proper notebook) OP:since its a gift you'll have to accept the limitations it imposes. i'd be interested if secure connection hacking is really as common as it seems. I can't imagine that being country specific anyway - are you sure it isn't just your government trying their hardest to stop you buying online? also certain services have fraud protection, so even if your details were stolen and money stolen you get it returned in short order. (credit card companies often have this feature, banks sometimes do)

Unfortunately its just not feasible. even a high end netbook is simply not designed to do anything more exciting then run office and explorer. They are optimised for this low usage by having pretty rubbish cooling - mine used to hit 85 degrees playing online flash games (and then promptly shutting down), you can do a variety of things to your machine to improve general performance. downloading a fan speed controller allows you to run the fan either at max -which will slow the raise of temp, or emergency* - which will significantly shorten the fans life. Next stop using it on your lap - set it up on top of a smooth desk (irony intended) if required raise the device up a tad. Next you can underclock your CPU - yes that will give you a performace BOOST (in some cases). some netbooks rely so heavily on passive cooling that they throttle down the CPU if it gets hot, by underclocking your CPU you control that throttle so can maintain a higher throttle for longer. Another idea is to run it on battery (assuming your power config is set up right) the additional heat from charging the battery will be preventing cool down, either running off battery OR better yet AC without the battery in - will minimise heat and increase performace. Of course the number one thing here is if you want to play anything more intensive then low end flash games buy a machine that is designed for it. a desktop ideally - but a "media" laptop is fine. I had an ASUS EEEEPC, i used to run ksp on it with the aid of dry ice... what... i wanted to launch my space station and it kept over heating!

the problem is in the fuel algorithm basically speaking (i hope) the fuel drain (rocket) asks the attached fuel tank for fuel. the tank then checks if it can get fuel, if it can it asks the next tank "up" the chain, if it cant it delivers it. this continues all the way up the chain. however, it is blocked if the fuel source has already been asked by this fuel drain - this is specifically there to prevent looping calculations. this explains one to one behaviour. when there are two potential sources they are both querried for equal proportions. IE, they drain at the same rate. the querries are handled in series. so the A branch will continue til conclusion and then the B branch will run. in completely seperate systems (the asparagus staging you show) this works absolutely fine, because each side branch is independent of the other branches. The problem comes when you want ONE tank to be source to MANY tanks that feed to ONE drain. (one to many to one). In this case the drain querries the inital tank (one) who splits the drain between the 2 (many) side tanks. this then progresses to the payload (one) tank. this is querried by branch A and provides the requested fuel. B branch then runs, but when it reaches the payload tank it requests from the payload tank - the payload tank denies the request as it has already had this discussion regarding the fuel drain with branch A. Branch B gets offended, but pressure from the fuel drain means it reluctantly supplies fuel from its highest tank up the chain. This leads to the payload tank draining AND the next highest tank in branch B. This isnt a "bug" so much as a side effect of a feature. one the Devs are aware of and no satisfactory solution is currently available. I hope this helps your understanding of the fuel flow to get the desired effect i would suggest EITHER splitting the payload tank in half (and routing the fuel from each to one branch only) OR routing the payload tank to the central tank. Key rules of KSP fuel: ONE to MANY : Good MANY to ONE : Good ONE to ONE: lovely ONE to MANY to ONE: BAD MANY to ONE to MANY: BAD. PS: the inital solution of moving the payload tank further down the chain works because it halfs the draw on it, that halfs the disbalance - hopefully if you followed the above it will make sense why that is so

Yeah that was... weird... Just ignore that JiWint the sciencey bits will no doubt be used in career mode - at the moment they are all placeholders, the temp readings dont even make sense (because they are just placeholders). so consider that suggestion planned. The VAB will continue to be worked on, i think its now in a state where its a low priority - harv did a great post about this a while back, basically improving the VAB so it was a bit less temprimental would take a similar amount of dev time and effort as setting up career mode. so its on their radar. As for clouds, i dont know what the latest is on that, but they were playing with cloud generation a couple of updates back (the "rover update"). i imagine they are waiting on some optimisations or some backend improvements before continuing along that line. Generally good suggestions and i really hope they come through, the devs have at least suggested they want to go down those routes, but career is the main focus.

^^ Made my day ^^^ if you fancy a larger challenge try to make a rocket with the thrust WELL ABOVE the CoM - as you saw here, having the thrust very close to the CoM makes everything tricky, but feasibly you could have an upside down rocket. It wont be more stable then a traditional style (Pendulum rocket fallacy) but it is much more flexability in some ways. it is my preferred style for landers for example, but i've only once attempted an inital ascent stage that way. the logic behind my use of it: well usually my return stage IS my LES, also i dont want my kerbals to have to climb down long ladders, they've just spent 10 hours in a tiny cabin for goodness sake!

the main problem with this is that we currently only have point connections, the only way to make a joint more rigid under the current model is to increase the number of connections. so either use multiple docking ports, or have multiple docking port nodes in a single part (if thats possible) The ideal solution would be to make the attachment points, surface attachment - so the entire surface area in contact is attached, but i would have no idea how to acheive this. For now, you may be interested in quantum struts.

to help with the one engine running out before others - keep fuel lines running "many to few" OR "few to many". if fuel runs "many to few to many" then it wont drain right and will cause issues. Also i've found the RCS tanks have rubbish join strength - i think they fixed the similar issue with the large ASAS mind. so connecting 2 big RCS tanks may be dangerous. why do you need so much RCS?! thats probably about 10-15 minutes worth of thrusting. Glad we've managed to fix a few of the issues

only the initial place of contact counts as either a part or remains. Thats how it works now. so to solve this problem now, strut from where you dont mind strut remains to where you dont want any. problem solved, no more ugly bits on your space station. the amount of struts you need depends on your designs. most of my ships only have a few struts. (each side tank has two connection points, decoupler/structural bit +1 strut at the top) each stage needs a maximum of 3 well placed struts, 4 to be absolute certain. I use procedural fairings, so the payload doesnt need any struts, assuming its well designed. and yes struts are realistic - in fact at the moment i think they still dont have mass, so they are OP. in RL if your current design of decoupler or tank joint isnt rigid enough you either design your own part* or use a series of rigid structural objects to reenforce the joint. the only difference is that in RL you can put these internally. *you are welcome to design your own part at any moment - a "simple" solution to the banana problem is to have 3-4 "docking" nodes placed around each surface such that they will lock together on the launch pad. make those parts (genueinly, please) and the wobble will disappear - but you should really add mass to account for the increased rigidity.

I think this was corrected - at least with aero parts, i dont know for certain regarding gimble. Either way, having your thrust higher then your mass will make your rocket unstable. the premise of your rocket is sound though, but consider instead of mounting the engines either side of a dropping central stack, having a short central stack with many engines clustered onto it with sidepods that drop off. Personally i'm having good success with my launch vehicles that have no fuel lines at all, each stage has a combination of rockets and fuel that lasts the same period of time. KISS.

yeah, i agree with radiokopf, calculating entry to atmosphere is relatively trivial - landing site, well that will depend on your landing profile.

the node editor in mechjeb does. it also allows you to directly set the numbers for the node, and secondary nodes, and change the way the resulting orbital paths are shown (patches conics) ect ect. the node editor and the in-flight information make it a worthwhile mod. nowadays the autopilot isn't so good - it doesnt utilize the stock SAS and doesnt do as good a job at stabilisation/RCS conservation.

i dont think so. try it though, nothing explodey bad will happen - if they arent compatable either the machine will let out a series of beeps and fail to boot, or it will just ignore any that arent compatable with the first slot. all three are DDR2 so theres some hope they'll work. the best indication would be the speed - the first is 800Mhz, but the second is 1066 Mhz i beleive the last is also 1066. this speed difference may cause issues, or it may just mean they run very slightly slower. Lastly it depends on what version of windows 7 (apparently) starter is still limited to 2gig (apparently), but anything else is at least 8 gig. (on 64 bit systems)

ooo i'll have to try that!

and pressing space makes the kerbal face forward. although its worth noting that up and down are constant for some reason - you cannot angle up or angle down.

i think there is one cause of it turning to a big X that may be happening here. If the node has been past by the spacecraft - so you took too long fiddling with it and past it - it stops being editable. I think. try placing the node further away if you need more time to edit it.

same thing here, click and drag and its fixed.

my key contribution here would be to say this: balance your RCS in the VAB before launch. this will help reduce wobble - you want the forces on one side of the rocket to equal those on the other use symetry and try to place the rcs thrusters at equal distances from the CoM (important note, this will change as you burn fuel ect, so try to anticipate this)

*waits on the nerf in the next update* more seriously, does this have to be single stage? otherwise i wouldn't be suprised if any target was possible. i may try a duna mission in this format - the next step in my space program anyway.