tomf

I have narrowed down the cause When loading my mod I am calling vessel.load() on a list of vessels in order to get some information on them. I extract the information and call vessel.unload() but it seems that something happens on the load which means that an exception is thrown when the game is paused.

When I press escape I am getting an error message. The puase menu appears but time continues. I broke it a while ago while developing a plugin but didn't notice. Can anyone suggest something I might have done wrong? (Filename: C:/BuildAgent/work/d63dfc6385190b60/artifacts/StandalonePlayerGenerated/UnityEngineDebug.cpp Line: 49) Game Paused! (Filename: C:/BuildAgent/work/d63dfc6385190b60/artifacts/StandalonePlayerGenerated/UnityEngineDebug.cpp Line: 49) NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object at Part.partPause () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at EventVoid.Fire () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at FlightDriver.SetPause (Boolean pauseState) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at PauseMenu.Display () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at PauseMenu.Update () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

I have solved this by using vessel.GetWorldPos3D(); to get the position of the vessel relative to the active vessel, getting the celestial body for the sun and its position and then adding the vectors.

How can I get teh distance from Kerbol for an unloaded vessel? vessel.protoVessel.position.magnitude seems to be 0;

Ahh those look like they might be useful -are ProtoPart and ProtoVessel cut down version of the full Part and Vessel? Is there any documentation?

I'm not looking for a plugin that calculate the electicity usage. I want to write a plugin that is able to make an estimate of how much electicity a vessel generates between the time that it is unloaded when we switch away from it and the time when it is next loaded. The best idea I can come up with is to at the unload point find all the solar pannel and RTG parts, find their maximum generation at the current distance from the sun and assume that in the long term they will generate a set percentage of that. The problems with this are That it wouldn't be able to deal with unknown electricity generating parts It would only crudely take into account times when the craft is in shadow it wouldn't take into account orientation of the craft and the layout of solar panels it wouldn't take into account varying distances from the sun.

What is the best way to predict the powere generation of a craft that is unloaded? I want to model a part that continuously uses electicity while a vessel in not loaded. At the point when it is loaded again I can say how much powere my part would have used in the intervening time but I can't say how much powere would have ben generated. I want to have a figure for the average net rate of power consumption/generation, and then I can add or remove the required amount of power from the craft. Does anyone have any good ideas?

Bill Phil is talking about rare earth elements, which despite their name aren't very rare on earth. What is rare is a deposit of them that is rich enough to be worth mining. AFAIK there isn't any reason to believe that they will be any more concentrated anywhere on the moon, and as they are relatively heavy elements is seems likely they will be less common overall.

My larger missions often include several smaller probes attached radially. E.g. my first eve mission was a mapper/relay sattelite designed to stay in orbit and two radially mounted impactors so one could land in the ocean and the other on land. However the weight of the still attached decoupler meant that the probes were unbalanced and irritating to fly.

Great, it isn't exactly a game breaking bug but it is a bit strange. Now I can get back to the original purpose of my testing which is to work out how the game handles electric charge for craft that are unloaded.

I edit my save games a lot. I Edit it when TAC lifesupport decides that I have run out of a resource when I know full well that the recyclers are generating more than the kerbals are using.Recently I have just started setting the available space for oxygen and water to be really large and just periodically using hyperedit to fill them up fully. Most recently I edited a ship to change where its antenna was pointing when I found that Kerbin at opposition was a couple of % to far away from my probe for me to execute a maneouvre. I repointed the antenna at a cratf that luckily had 2 high power antennae and was half way between.

I checked this by using a probe that had 12 full batteries, a core and 1 empty battery and the charge rate was down to 0.14 so it looks like Padishar is correct. I can't work out the maths though, it certainly isn't the available charge being divided equaly between charge stores.

Gilly always eems the worst to me, although that might be because I frequently want to warp on my way to a landing which can take an age. My solution for a couple of the problems is Kerbal Alarm clock, it can stop you from accidentally warping past a maneuvre node and by setting an alarm, switching to a craft which is able to do a high warp and waiting for an alarm you can avoid waiting for ages for laythe to rotate. If you are waiting to overfly a particular point as it rotates you are going to have to estimate how long that takes yourself.

Padishar appears to be correct. This ship has a core, 12 full batteries, 1 pbnuk and 1 empty battery. It looks some charge is lost for each full charge storage part.

Version 0.25.0.642 Win32 What Happens: Electric charge doesn't add up Mods / Add-Ons: All Stock Steps to Replicate: A completely fresh installation of KSP Build a rocket capable of orbit. The final stage consists of an octo2, four z-100 batteries tweaked to be empty and disabled for launch and 1 ox-stat panel Launch to orbit point the ox-stat towards the sun until its sun exposure is 1 and charge/sec=0.75 and stabilize by using warp for a second note game time right click a battery and enable it observe charge rate shown in resources wait till battery full and observe game time. Both the charge rate displayed and the one calculated from the time taken to fill the battery will be less than the expected value. I expect 0.75 - 0.03 = 0.72. I observe 0.63. I created a thread in gameplay to investigate variations on this and we were unable to come up with an explanation.http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/97565-Electric-charge-doesn-t-add-up

The stock contracts can't be completed without going into orbit though, and doing a flyby is a natural step to acheiving orbit. It does slightly favour unmanned exploration over manned.

Could you do flyby contracts? Before you are asked to go into orbit around such as Jool there should be contracts that you can fullfil on a hyperbolic flyby like the mariner and pioneer missions. e.g. With an unmanned probe on an escape trajectory from Jool carrying a thermometer, transmit science These should appear much earlier in the progression so when the player is landing on Duna for the main contract sequence they are being given flybys for moho and Jool.

What about landing liquid stages upside down with parachutes? Most of the expensive stuff on a stage is at the bottom, while I expect the top end when empty will act as a huge crumple zone.

For the last set of screenshots I unzipped a new installation and only installed hyperedit to make it easy to get the probe into space, so the probe never had any more parts attached and the core was the root part I am running the windows 32 bit version.

Interesting idea that the bateries might be losing some charge but it doesn't look like it is the explanation, I just launched a test probe with 24 batteries and I am still getting 0.63 Has anyone else tried this, is it a bug in my slightly modded version/my experiment or the game? First pointing away Now pointing at the sun Showing the charge status of lots of them Which probe core I use might make a little difference

It is about a year since I used mechjeb but it used to have an option in the launch autopilot where you could put in the pahse angle that you needed to launch at in order to get a perfect rendevous. It would calculate that angle for you if you let it do a test launch. If you want to be 8 hours behind you could work out the angle made by your orbit in 8 hours and add that to the phase angle.

ok, here are two shots of a similar the craft, this time built with tthe cube core. In the first the panel is facing away from the sun to show the base load. In the second then panel is getting the full .75 e/s In the second the charge stored is only increasing by 0.63 when I expect 0.72.

Of course you should turn off any devices with cooling fans to avoid dying of fan death http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death

With SAS off I get the same thing

SAS was on but not providing any force. If it used power on a stationary craft I would have expected the requirement when facing away from kerbol to have been higher.