stibbons

Correct. The KSP.app folder is an application bundle. When you extract it on a Mac it'll look like this: Just double-click the KSP icon and you're good to go. (you ninja'd your own answer, but by then I'd already taken the screenshot and I didn't want to waste it. )

Nope. Alt is your current altitude above sea level. Ralt is radar altitude - your height above ground level. If you've just landed on the peak of a mountain that's 3000m high, Alt will read 3000 and Ralt will read 0.

ElWanderer pretty much has it. Not only does your craft remain pointing in the same direction, but you have to keep in mind that you're not moving towards your target in a straight line. Instead, both you and the target are moving in circular paths around Kerbin that happen to converge. If you're not lining up along the normal plane, that means that your velocity relative to your target will drift over time.,as will your relative velocity. Another technique to try out, once you're within 1000m or so, is using RCS in translational mode to shift your prograde back across to the target.

SOINumber is just what SOI you're in now, isn't it? I'd like to set a flag when I'm on a trajectory that intercepts something else. So you'd be able to fly a Mun mission by: * Achieve LKO. * Wait until the Mun comes over the horizon. * Start burning prograde. * Wait until light on board turns on, indicating orbit now intercepts Mun. * Stop burning. * Wait until SOINumber indicates you're now in Mun's SOI. * Burn to set periapsis. * Wait until you're at PE. * Burn retrograde to circularise.

This evening I cut out and attached a base for my enclosure from the same 12mm MDF. Discovered that last night's assembly was a few degrees off square, but managed to shove it in to place and get everything lined up. It looks... pretty much the same as it did yesterday. Then I started working on the top of the enclosure. Cut it to shape from 12mm MDF, then printed out outlines for all of my separate perspex panels and started arranging them. I already had a rough outline that I drew up on my PC, but actually seeing full-size outlines on the board is a very different story. The joysticks got moved up a little bit to avoid resting my wrists on the bottom edge of the board. I realised that some controls weren't as visible as they could be and rearranged things slightly. I'm going to use some of the empty space to place a small keyboard. The rest is for future expansion - adding an OLED with a navball is high on the list for v2. I'll probably put this aside for the next little while. Need to finish the display interface, and assemble the PCBs when they get back from the fab. Then I can start working on mounting panels on the board.

While brainstorming ideas for alerts to put on my in-progress annunciator panel, I thought it might be nice to be able to detect when an orbit changes SOI. That would make it pretty easy to run simple missions like Mun returns without using the map view at all. But I'm not too sure about good ways to do it. My only idea so far is to watch for unusual changes in apoapsis. If there's significant change without any throttle, or if it changes a lot more than expected while under throttle, then that's because it's being affected by intercepting another body right? But that feels like a pretty gross kludge. It doesn't work when switching focus to a vessel that's already on an intercept trajectory, and needs some sort of manual intervention to reset. I'll still give it a try, but can't really test it at the moment because my hardware is in several pieces while I build the enclosure. But am I missing something here? Is there a nicer way to pick up on SOI changes?

Over the weekend I got designs bedded down for the last of my panels and did the layout for the whole board. So today I bought some 12mm MDF and started to assemble the housing. Bit of a chore - turned out I was cutting parts too big for the table saw at my hackerspace, so had to do a lot of cuts by hand. But I'm pretty proud of the result so far. Next step is attaching the top, and I can start cutting holes for the control panels.

Yeah, your best bet for a "modpack" right now is to use CKAN to install your required mods, and then just distribute your CKAN installed list. If you feel like you need to tweak mods, create your your own mod with module manager configs and the like, and distribute that as a separate CKAN-managed mod that's included in your list.

Hey Claw, while that's definitely an issue when purchasing the game from the KSP website, it isn't for Steam installations. That folder should definitely exist. You can have Steam verify your installation by right-clicking KSP in Steam, selecting Properties. Go to the Local Files tab and hit the "Verify Integrity of Game Cache" button.

Progress stalled on this project for a while - life was getting in the way and I was procrastinating on the next piece of work. But I finally finished laying these out and sent them off for manufacture this evening.

So much lovely hardware there! Very jealous. Is that a panel-mounted track ball on that effects board? I'd love one of those!

I'm not sure I'd call it dirty, but yeah, it's nudging the limits of what a 16MHz microcontroller can do. Hope you manage to get something good working, a screen would be pretty great. I'm using a similar model for my panel. Right now I've got a Mega talking to the PC and currently handling the bulk of input. And the display control board I'm designing will have a separate Pro Mini showing data on seven segment displays. I've pretty much settled on using I2C for this. It's not as fast as SPI, but I like the fact a master can broadcast a packet that will be received by all slaves - my code just shunts VesselData packets out over I2C as soon as they arrive, and listeners can act on them as they please.

That pseudocode is pretty much how I understand SPI to work (except for the SS pin). I'd want to try using defined protocols with decent hardware support before trying to write my own bitbanging protocol. If you're especially worried about what TVOut is doing to the timer interrupts, then you might want to try making the display microcontroller the bus master and the serial microcontroller the slave. Check out http://www.gammon.com.au/spi for a good overview of how SPI works.

Looks like a lovely old craft. But in the absence of any sort of licence in the download or anywhere in that thread, nobody apart from the author is really allowed to update the model or code, sorry.

Do you have the ports on the right way around? See the picture on http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Clamp-O-Tron_Docking_Port_Sr.

Action groups. * Assign an action group that extends your solar panels and antenna. Doing this is a good idea anyway, just because extending everything at the same time is cool. * When you're a little way out from entering the atmosphere, set a manual delay on your remotetech flight computer for far enough in the future that you know you'll be back out of the atmosphere. * Hit your extend-everything action group key. The flight computer should now show that it's going to execute that action group at the given time. * Don't forget to set the manual delay on your flight computer back to 0, or you may end up having a bad day. * Make sure your flight computer is aligning your vessel in the right direction. * Close solar panels, then shut down your antenna. The first time I did this was a nail-biting experience. But you should find yourself skimming through the atmosphere, and have the action group execute and extend your antenna and bring your probe back online when it's a safely back in vacuum. EDIT: I'm sure this technique used to be documented in the RemoteTech manual, but I can't seem to find it now. Hrmn.

I do this to such an extent that, after nearly 2.5 years playing KSP, last weekend was the first time I'd landed a probe anywhere outside the Kerbin system.

That wasn't hostility. It was pointing out that you were trying to build a case using information that was at best misguided, at worst flat-out wrong. It doesn't make your case look very good.

What? You can get through career mode without using crewed pods too. What's your point? You don't need an uninterrupted network, that's what the flight computer is for - providing some degree of autonomy. False. kOS is fully programmable. Where from? No, it doesn't.

[citation needed] And the rest of this is highly subjective "the game isn't 1.0 because I don't think it is". OK have fun with that.

Can't you stick to all of the other threads full of people whining about this without cluttering up the forum with more?

[citation needed]

For your first Kerbin system network you only need the Communotron 16 omni and Comms DTS-M1 dish. You should have unlocked both of those before you started getting solar panels. Build yourself a satellite with one each of those antennae, at least 400 or so units of battery power, and enough OX-STAT panels so you can keep at least two pointed sunward (six-times symmetry on a 1.25m core should be OK for this). Launch one, and get it to a 700 km orbit. Then test it - activate both antennae and make sure it has enough battery power to survive the transit across Kerbin's shadow, and enough solar panels to recharge. Once you've got your power requirements sorted, build out the rest of your network. At 700 km altitude, three satellites evenly spaced should be able to keep in touch with each other using the Communotron 16, but putting four in orbit can't hurt. For each satellite, activate its dish antenna, and set it to target the active vessel. That's all you need for exploration all over the Kerbin system. Each moon only needs a couple of identical satellites in high orbit, with a dish permanently aimed at Kerbin and a Communotron 16 for surface comms. I usually piggyback those on to contract missions to save money. - - - Updated - - - Oh, and I also use the Hyperedit mod. For each satellite I'm putting in orbit, I place it as accurately as possible by hand. And then I use Hyperedit to cheat them all to have the same semi-major axis (SMA). Done well, the SMA is almost the same anyway, making them match just stops them from drifting over the course of the game.

She's not smiling on the title screen because she's in space wearing a helmet without a faceplate.

Terraforming is on the what not to suggest list.