NeoMorph

Oh god... I was SOOOO in the wrong regarding the LER rovers. Turns out the stock rockets have one of the actual rover separators in the wrong stage... that was all. When I staged to get into orbit finally it was kicking loose the one rover to float through the darn fairing. Sorry for saying the LER's sucked Bobcat lol... was just that darn sep that sucked.

Wow... Thread res! I've found that 21.1 is generally more stable... but I still have an intermittent glitch where my rocket unpacks on the launchpad and the boosters fall off and then self ignite and fly off to the heavens. Reload it several times until I get a stable unpack and then I can take off.

Oh god I can see the books now... "Journey the the Centre of the Mun" or maybe... "First Kerbs In The Mun" by Jules Kerne Have to say, the Mun is a LOT more interesting now. I love going rover driving on the Mun now as the leaps you can get are incredible. If you find a steep slope with a smaller crater further down you can almost jump the darn thing (I actually landed short and hit the far side of the crater wall... I'm thinking rockets on the back of my next rover or maybe sepatrons at the very least).

This for sure... bigger launch vehicles need to get to where the air is thinner before turning or else you will get a hell of a lot of air drag eating into your fuel supply. So yeah... false. Actually I deliberately waste fuel on some launches? Why? So that when the main booster stage cuts out we are at 85% of orbital velocity and it drops into the ocean instead of leaving it in orbit. Without the extra drag the booster could reach orbit and leave a huge assed navigation threat for later missions (and yeah, I actually had a VERY close incident of hitting a booster that I left in low Kerbin orbit. Was a "WHOA... WHAT WAS THAT?" situation as it went flying past (well, the launch vehicle was going fast for orbit when we passed the old booster).

Oh come on... it's obvious. The Kerbal engineer that designed the navigation system used to design roller coasters before he got a job at KSP... He just wondered what a roller coaster in space would be like and he got interrupted when he was testing it out... and it then got dumped into the live branch of development. It more commonly known as the "OH BABUSHKA!!!!" conic.

If you guys are wondering why it is taking so long to make my own navball (actual physical navball) this is the reason (just check the price and remember this is for a TWO axis aeroplane nav ball... not a three axis one like KSP and Apollo used) http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/STAND-BY-ATTITUDE-INDICATOR-GOODRICH-MODEL-AI-330K-PART-NO-501-1568-10-/190876189612?pt=UK_CPV_Aviation_SM&hash=item2c711b83ac I'm pretty much making mine out of sticks and stones and ducktape in relation to that. If it works I think I'll probably pass out... and drop the thing lol.

Subassembly Loader is the one mod I update on my own every time KSP is updated because... well because I HATE REINVENTING THE WHEEL. If you find a subassembly that works it's daft to keep rebuilding it from scratch. If it makes it into the stock build I will be a very happy Kerbonaut. I also move the jigsaw to the lower left corner of the VAB so I don't accidentally drop parts onto the save button by mistake (which deletes the part you were trying to save... bug there for sure).

from Eve's lakes.

You mean like this? http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/discovery-2001/

Has anyone got the LER Cargo variety of Altair to orbit WITHOUT one or two of the LER rovers floating away through the fairing. I've tried strutting the thing down but I find nothing helps. And of course if one floats away it means the lander is hopelessly out of balance so it is impossible to land the darn thing. Basically the LER variety is a failure in my book (which is a shame because the rest work wonderfully well).

My only worry is the wobbly joints. On some of my old Novapunch 5m rockets I had to overdose on struts just to get to orbit or the damned thing would fold itself into a million pieces. I was originally going to say "Bobcat's got this nailed with his American pack" but I have to say... Wow... just... WOW!

How do you determine north when the item in question has no magnetic field. Not every planet or asteroid will have a magnetic field after all. I'm not saying you are wrong RexKramer but that the reference body is artificial in cases like that and that yaw is more reliable than heading. It also has the benefit of not flipping at some random angle and changing for some weird reason as it does when you pitch higher than 90 degrees. But like others have said, it would make more sense to have more than one system in place to cater to space and planetary navigation. The big problem with the prograde/retrograde markers is as Karolus says as well... when they move behind the ball you have no idea which way to turn no matter which way up the nav ball is showing. My point isn't the automatic referencing, it's that the ball doesn't really show you what you need to know when navigating in space. For example... You are going to do a mid course correction with your big assed interplanetary bus. You mistake the amount of power you have and are low on monopropellant. You have set up the node and now need to steer the craft to the right direction but the marker isn't visible as it is somewhere on the other side of the ball... WHICH WAY DO YOU TURN. If you had the Apollo nav ball it would be a piece of cake as the error needles tell you EVERYTHING you need to know. They even tell you when the direction is coming round as they will start to move before the KSP marker would appear. Apollo was planned down to the last nut, bolt and washer and they always used Pitch, Roll and Yaw... not Heading... and each value was 0-359... not 0-180, -180 to 0. There must have been a reason for that. Oh yeah... one thing that I meant to say regarding the aeroplane style ball. Aeroplane nav balls have only TWO AXIS... Yes, even those don't use a heading. They use a compass for that. Now as there isn't a magnetic field in space there had to be a fix and that fix was to make the ball handle three axis of movement and name that extra axis the Yaw axis. It was that third axis that totally blew my mind when I was trying to figure out how they made the ball move in sync with the the spacecraft attitude. In fact the ball in an aircraft is mounted in a C holder with the C normally in the horizontal position. When the ball is rotated in the mount it denoted the pitch. When the C clamp is rotated that is the roll. In the Apollo FDAI they did is slightly different. They took a the ball, made it hollow and cut it into two. Then they took a disc the same diameter of the ball and put it vertically between the two halves and put an axis through the disc which would now become the pitch. The disc is then mounted in a C mount like the aeroplane version only instead of it being horizontal it is now vertical. when the disc rotates it is now denoting the yaw. When the C mount rotates that is the roll as normal.

Oooh... any chance of uploading that Kerbin1 & 2 texture... Pleeeeeease

Do you know what... I wish you could retexture parts more easily... Some of the parts have awesome meshes but then get covered with cruddy textures.

Yeah... this is what we need. Did you know that Apollo had two modes as well. ORDEAL (Orbital Rate Display Earth And Lunar) which mimicked the plane type ADI and the normal interplanetary mode that took the reference from the IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) gyros. Here is a page from the Apollo training manual. It shows us Pitch, Roll and Yaw, not Pitch Roll and Heading. Seeing your rates would be excellent as well... I mean your roll, pitch and yaw rates. On my hardware version I'm going to use the error needles to point me towards the next node... Oh and I will jump for joy when they get around to removing that pink or magenta or whatever the target icon is... I just cannot see it when it goes over the orange part of the the nav ball (darn partial colour blindness). I have to turn the colour up high just to get a glimpse of it.

Exactly my point. The problem lies in reference. I was trying to figure out what angle my physical nav ball was at when I came across this problem. Ball is at 80 degrees pitch... but it wasn't... it was actually at 110 degrees. Trying to figure out what the heck was going on brought this problem up... The thing is we should just do away with heading and use yaw instead... would fix a LOT of problems that way. It allows the aircraft the transition from aircraft to spacecraft easily. I'm beginning to think that a customisable Nav Ball is going to be the way to go tbh.

I really didn't get this for a long time but the nav ball is basically an airplane attitude indicator and not a true space attitude indicator. So what is the difference. Well, an air based attitude indicator works around the ground and the north pole. It uses a heading to let you know which direction you are going and has pitch going from -90 to +90 degrees. A space based attitude indicator won't have a heading because there is no north pole in space. Remember that some planets have their axis tilted compared to the earth so which would you use? The space based indicator uses yaw instead of heading. It's easy to mix up the two but let's look at what happens when a plane pitches up. As you can see, they look very similar but behave very differently. If you look at the ball used in the Apollo craft it has the three axes labeled 0 to 359 degrees... It's been niggling me for a while and it was only when I was working with Rich (the guy who wrote Telemachus) that I realised the data I was getting was actually for an aircraft attitude indicator when I really wanted the space attitude data. Pitch should be 0 to 359 no 0 to 90 then back to 0 for the top 180. When you get a pitch of 80 degrees you have to check the heading to find the true position. If I've been thinking we need a black and white nav ball for a while now (not the least to make it more useful for the colour blind peeps out there... me included) but we do need a nav ball that is labelled like the apollo version. In fact if you use the MechJeb Surf function it actually uses the true Roll, Pitch and Yaw values even though Yaw is labelled heading. Here is an example of what I mean... Using the Apollo method means that if the pitch is reading as 80 degrees then it can only be one position on the ball. With the current method an 80 degree pitch could be TWO positions on the ball and you have to use the heading to find the actual pitch. Same with heading and yaw. You can set a heading of 180 and get an actual heading of 90 if the pitch is set to 180. But with the Apollo system when you have a yaw of 180 it will always be a yaw of 180 no matter what the pitch and roll is. Perhaps I have it wrong but I feel that the nav ball currently in KSP is an aircraft attitude indicator/artificial horizon... designed for a fixed reference to north and the plane of the ground underneath the aircraft. What we need is a copy of the Apollo nav ball which is designed for a vehicle in space.

There is something screwed up with my network... Perfect line of sight, aligned perfectly, well in range and STILL the darned sat in Mun orbit says it is out of range. I used the biggest dish out there too. I think some mod is messing with RemTech because sometimes it says it is in range and aligned and other times it doesn't. Isn't power either. I think I'm just going to have to scrap my network and try again but I haven't been able to land my remote control miner on the far side of the Mun because of this (and yeah, I am using a polar sat to relay to the far side... it's that one that keeps fritzing out for no apparent reason).

I just wish the error log pointed to where the problem occurred... I've been cutting back on the mods and still getting CTD's. 20.2 with the same mods I had the game run for two weeks without a crash... and that was with the PC running constantly. I'm convinced at least one of the mods is causing problems but finding the problem when it is an intermittent fault is tough.

I found 20.2 was remarkably stable with a large bunch of mods... but 21.1 for me crashes so often that I'm going back to minimum mods again... I know KSP is an Alpha but I just keep getting CTD now. Not even throws up an error message.

I soooo love the new Mun. It really has good Armstrong P66 needs at times. I almost landed on a slope that was steeper than CactusLynx' one and was only because I used the translatron that I managed to save it. Was quite scary as I leveled out about 6ft above the ground but a foot one way and I would have impacted for sure while a foot the other way and it was like a 12ft drop instead. Actually I found the Apollo LEM's contact light wasn't actually a contact light. It was actually set off when the ship was within a few feet of the surface to allow for the reaction time of the pilot. When the light comes on and the pilot reaches over to turn off the engines if the contact was right on the pad then the LEM would have bounced up into the air again (well into space again). How many times have you guys done that in KSP? I know I've done it a few times. Going to simulate it in software at some point I think.

Would be very nice to have multiple saves though... The number of times I have saved just before the ship triggers self destruct due to a game glitch... Soooooo annoying when that happens.

OP have you tried adding extra struts as I have had cockpits snap off and cause the whole rocket to eat itself before now and extra struts do fix it (sad but true).

Yup... but here is some black magic for you... Read the top post on this page --> BloodyRain2k Plugin Fixes A Lot I was pretty dubious but as 0.21.1 was running slower than 0.20.2 I decided to try it and now I am back to 20.2 loading speeds and it runs a lot smoother (and doesn't seem to crash as often). It also fixed Kethane for me...

Action Groups are your friend. You can set up an action group to toggle engines on and off and also gimballing (ie turn steering on and off). Would be nice for some indication of whether the engine is on or off though... Sometimes when you hit action group buttons they ignore the first press.