stibbons

Well, there's no reason Jeb can't be the first Kerbal to be rescued from outside the Kerbin system.

It helped me a lot to get my camera alignment sorted. Orient the lander retrograde, then align the camera so that it's looking retrograde as well, and oriented so that changes to the attitude happen in the same direction as the navball (navball goes left, lander tilts left on the screen). That helps avoid last-minute panicking and over-correcting.

So I modified the isplore 2 slightly (smaller antenna, kethane scanner, KAS port), and dropped it on Minmus. Landing a small rover and using it to find a flat area suitable for a larger kethane drilling base worked out really well, and now I've got Kerbals on the surface they're using it to explore some. I found the rover drove really well while I was testing it on Kerbin, but on Minmus it seems to drift a lot. Suspect the light weight combined with the low gravity makes it hard for the wheels to get much traction. Maneuvering at low speeds is a major hassle, but for getting around longer distances it's great. I wouldn't mind trying the S model to see if the added weight makes it handle any better. EDIT: I just read http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/25775-Why-won-t-my-rover-wheels-grip-re-post and it's general weirdness with rover wheels, nothing to do with this rover in particular. Apologies. Here's Bob cruising down from the low plateau my base is on to check out one of the frozen lakes.

I have model names with numbers indicating sizes. My remote tech relay satellites all have names like RelayBoy 500 for the tiny Mun relays, up to RelayBoy 6000 for the huge satellites in Kerbal orbit. Then there's the MapBoy 1000 mapping satellites, and the rover I'm about to land on Minmus, RoveBoy 750.

I went the other way, looking at the power to weight ratio of the Z-100 and Z-400 batteries and comparing that to the nickel-hydrogen batteries on the ISS. That comes out to 1E = 11W. Then I got lost trying to convert the E/s rating of KSP's solar panels to a wattage. But they still seem overpowered - a single OX-STAT panel can recharge a Z-100 in just over two minutes.

Yeah, I've started carrying Kethane scanners as well. It wasn't the weight that threw me off, but how much power it eats. My satellites now carry six Z-100 battery packs. That's enough to power the kethane scanner on the dark side of Kerbin at a 200km orbit. Also enough for some good long burns, although I haven't tried any of the transfer orbits you've done. Fantastic! I may have to borrow that idea in my next iteration.

Dingbat Station.

Hate to disagree with you sal, but the SGI vendor string doesn't actually mean it's an SGI card. But I think it does pretty much guarantee that you're using the X.org drivers, rather than the vendor's proprietary ones. The box I regularly play Kerbal on has a very old Radeon card, I'm using the X.org driver, and have the same glx vendor and version details. KnightKiller, what video card are you using? And could you include your X server's startup log file (/var/log/Xorg.0.log) so we can make sure you're using the appropriate driver?

I sent Jeb on a manned mission to put a satellite in synchronous orbit over Kerbin (couldn't go unmanned because I'm using RemoteTech). He got off the ground and circularised in a very good orbit. Got up to altitude and deployed the payload, then turned around to head home. It wasn't until he started to enter the atmosphere that anybody thought to wonder where the parachute had gone. Jeb still had a NIRV and three quarters of an FL-T400 full of fuel, so at 30km above the ground he turned retrograde and started burning again. Came down vertically, but still hit pretty hard, destroying everything except the pod. But Jeb lived to forget his parachute another day, and any landing you can walk away from, right?

Sure, just edited my post to include the craft file. That lifter will probably start to have trouble if you stack much more weight on, though.

I don't have it. I did pull a figure for SMA from these forums, but that was lost in the crash, and I even restarted my save (thanks to big changes in the RemoteTech mod). Was planning on calculating it myself from the Wikipedia article.

The three 1U CubeSats were NASA's phonesats, that are using Nexus 1 phones for the avionics. Pretty neat stuff. I saw a talk from one of the ArduSat guys where he was talking about a cost to build and deploy a 1U CubeSat as still being in the tens of thousands of dollars range. Very tough luck if that goes boom. But still probably cheaper than than the full payload Antares is designed for hauling up.

I've been launching and positioning synced my RemoteTech satellites by hand. The orbits I get are pretty close. My last Kerbin synced satellite looks like SMA = 3468774.00236996 ECC = 1.05486218982213E-05 INC = 0.000512411442541808 Around that point, the apoapsis and periapsis markers start jumping around, and it's difficult to get the altitude any finer. But once I get them that close, I'm happy to use hyperedit or similar to correct them so they'll stay put. Putting a network of satellites in orbit is fun, but constant maintenance of them is not.

My mapping satellites use ion drives, so I'm a little heavy handed with the batteries and prefer solar panels to charge them. But they're still pretty compact little things. The antenna next to the ISA dish is a RemoteTech omni. The launch vehicle I use for these is pretty modest too. 31 parts total, all stock apart from the ISA MapSat dish and two RemoteTech antennas. It's gotten these MapBoys in orbit around Kerbin and Mun so far, fairly sure I can get to Duna without modification. EDIT: Here's a craft file for a stock version of my satellite and lifter.

Disagree that we should be able to control antennas and dishes when they're out of range. But I do agree that they should extend to try to establish contact. Poking around in the part config for the MicroSat to understand how the plugin works now, I discovered its antenna module is setting willWakeInPanic to true. The way I read the source code, all antenna modules have that variable, and setting it to true in a part's configuration will cause the antenna to toggle on if the vessel is out of range. Your post sounds like you're not going to like this solution either, but adding willWakeInPanic = true to the antenna module should solve some of your problem.

I've just finished my fourth launch to get a relay satellite around Kerbin. Each sat has 2x 900GM dishes, 2x 50GM dishes and and 8MM deployable omni antenna. The first is in a stationary orbit over KSC, the others at roughly 90° intervals. Took four separate manned launches (they're pretty big, flew them up separately to be on the safe side), but now I've got pretty thorough coverage of everywhere I've sent probes before. Next launch will carry four relays to Mun, each with a single 50MM dish and an omni. In my last 0.4 save, I found putting those in a semi-synchronous orbit around Mun meant that I was always in contact with all of the satellites, and seemed to have good coverage on the surface, at least in the central latitudes my two test probes landed.

Have you tried rotating and maybe zooming the view a little? I find if another object's orbit is visible and behind the object I'm trying to select, it can be hard to get the right object. Another thing worth trying, you should be able to click anywhere on the object's orbit to target it.

URL? My first thought was, if NASA can lose a probe because their ground station was using imperial units while the probe itself was using metric units, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_failure) then anything's possible.

Oh, thanks for the heads up about MechJeb. I've been thinking about installing anyway, didn't realise it included orbital parameter readout. As far as corrections go, I was thinking that once I've gotten orbits as correct as I can manually, I'm comfortable with save file editing to nail them to stable figures that won't slip.

So, the way I see it, achieving a [prefix]stationary orbit works like this: Correct the orbital plane - stationary orbits should be perpindicular to the rotation of the body you're orbiting (over the equator). Burn to and circularise orbit at the [prefix]stationary altitude. The wiki has stationary altitudes for all the bodies I've successfully sent satellites to (just Kerbin and its moons, and Duna so far). But I'm not too sure about the best way to get the inclination right. For Kerbin I was able to target Mun and align my orbital plane with it, and successfully achieve stationary orbit that way. But not all bodies have convenient moons. Is there a way to find out orbital inclination? And as an aside, how close is close enough to consider an orbit really stationary? My first hand-cut attempt at a true one around Kerbin looks like this in my save file: ORBIT { SMA = 3468759.99471155 ECC = 1.48870593842893E-05 INC = 0.00271292376481049 LPE = 16.4245875461034 LAN = 122.780332697676 MNA = 5.37750305411083 EPH = 49042.4426463683 REF = 1 OBJ = 1 } It's about 15° from KSC, when I'd like it to be overhead, but don't know if I could be bothered going to the effort to try and correct that.

The 64 bit build is apparently still highly experimental. I'm on 64-bit debian, but have only ever run the 32 bit build (also installed from Steam). Do you still see the same problem running the 32 bit version?

Having to restart my world will be worth it for the rover functionality. If anybody needs me this week I'll be busy remote piloting a buggy around Duna. Thanks for your work.