NeoMorph

I have the volumetric clouds mod added and I see the clouds moving past but there is no wind and I come down straight under parachute... and that made me wonder if wind will ever get added to the game... well, weather actually. Another addition for hardcore mode maybe?

That sounds freaking awesome magico13... Re the costs, did you know that back when they were running simulations originally they charged time on mainframes by CRU (computer resource units). Basically it was time X how complex it was (if it needed lots of info to be dragged off mag tape because the operators had to manually get them from the vault) and always at the end you got a dump of data back. In this context we don't have to worry about mag tape but the cost could be linked to time by how far away from Kerbin the simulation is and how complex the SOI is. So a Mun sim would be cheaper than a Jool Sim as the Mun is a single source while Jool has 6 (planet plus 5 moons). Limiting the information available until you send a satellite to the planet with a radar sat at least should force you to have a low poly landing site (ie maybe just a flat surface). If you use Scansat maybe you could get a landing map to show what to expect for your proposed landing area. This is just icing on the cake though so just what you put would be great... Only reason I know about the computer side of things was that I worked in the computer industry before PC's were even designed. Hell, I even beta tested some of the early IBM-PC's as we were a big IBM user (worked on IBM 370-158, -3033, -3031 and the 3800 series - I even beta tested the first multi thread OS in VM-CMS on a 3033... but then killed the entire mainframe so OOOPS!). I could tell you some stories about Mainframe Madness, lol. I've played KSP since 0.16 so I want something a little more... one thing is to try and force limitations on myself with making more efficient spacecraft. It's easy to throw loads of delta-v at a ship and know you can make it. But NASA craft have to be cut down to the very bones. Just look up the weight reduction they did for the Apollo moonshot. Oh and the main reason for the sim should be so nothing gets added to the save game (ie no debris from hyperediting stuff everywhere ) and no parts cost added to the campaign. There should be a cost but not the equivalent of a full rocket. Maybe for the dump it should list things to a project notebook like Target planet orbit altitude you are aiming for, how much delta v is needed to land and get back to the specified altitude etc. One thing I would love to know is how much Oxygen and food etc I would need for my Kerbonauts because I usually pack WAYYYYYYY too much in my TAC-Life Support cans lol. Launch/Landing/Capture etc Sims should be to just give you more info in the fight to make a more efficient spacecraft mission. And yeah, forgetting to add a battery or even turn on a nuclear pile and wondering why your rocket stopped working when it's millions of miles from home really, really SUCKS. Oooh... How about a checklist maker too. I tend to write mine down but it would be great to link a specific checklist to a ship and doing the sims is the perfect time to add info to them. Launch Phase, Orbit Phase, Departure Phase, Mid Course Correction Phase, Orbital Insertion Phase, Landing Phase, etc, etc ... I'm probably OCD about it and I still miss things at times. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ You do know that this is a "Suggestion" and not a commandment. I'm not saying "Simulations should be added right away and everyone should use them!". I'm just saying that it would be a cool way of testing your craft and not have penalties for blowing up craft and littering bits everywhere that have to be hoovered up. Revert doesn't always work. If you hyperedit your craft and then F5 Save and restore it breaks the revert button. If your game crashes you now have a crew in orbit of Jool... which has cost you campaign cash. And at the end of the day it could be OPTIONAL. If you don't know how software is developed then you don't know that you plan feature additions months ahead. They are added to the project timeline and can be bumped or even removed. But to be added to the game they have to be planned for ahead of time. So suggesting this now will not affect the current game development in the least.

Actually dude I was trying to say I agreed with you. But in my morphine addled brain I tend to waffle at times lol. I was trying to say "If you don't need it then don't say anything because it won't affect you". Hence my "Make it optional" comment. God my brain sucks in the morning. - - - Updated - - - Hmmmm... this from a guy(or gal) with a sig that says... Ironic?

Dude... The old "we should agree to disagree here". The thing is that we should not say because one person wants a thing then nobody else can have a view. That's just a selfish way of behaviour. "I don't need it so nobody else should have it" is one of the worst kind of views in my book. I started this thread as a "suggestion". We repeat launch after launch using revert to get things right and it just doesn't feel right to me. We are simulating a space program after all and if we have to travel millions of miles just to try out a lander that may or may not work just wastes time in my book. If you have a program running with multiple ships in flight it gets messy... FAST. Currently we have to hack the game to move items to another planet, break the revert to launch system if you use the F5/F9 system and then time has passed, you've missed a burn for one of your satellites, parts are lost (which cost in game money) and generally it feels wrong. Run a simulation you could simulate the launch, bypass the fly to the planet, test the lander systems (see that you forgot to add electrics... oops), test the burn to orbit, check you have enough DV to get back to Kerbin... Sim complete. THEN you fix the problems (add a battery and solar panel to the lander in this case) and set off for real, using save but only using reloading in case of a game bug/glitch/crash. You could still miss the window... still crash the lander... but you KNOW it is possible with the build you have constructed in the sim. If you were to run it how it is now you would fly to the planet, go to land... find out you had forgot the electrics and now you have to ditch the entire flight and go back to the VAB in a groundhog day event. In essence, using a sim you SAVE time by only flying possible flights and crashing a lot of crap in the sim. Remember, we aren't all as good as Alshain... we are human after all and mistakes are made. I've lost count of the times I have reached a planet and found that I'm missing something crucial or have clipped a part that causes weird phantom forces or have enough delta-v but my landing arc is too long and I burn out and crash. The best design I can see is... 1. Plan your flight to see what delta-V is needed for the individual parts 2. Build your ship 3. Simulate the critical parts of the flight 4. Launch the real mission. Is running sims fun... If you didn't think that you wouldn't be playing the game. Hell, make it optional. Instead of just bolting parts together and throwing them at another planet like god's dartboard a good planned build and then launching without reverts is like the seven minutes of terror all over again... Just look at the wireframe sims in this video... and tell me again that simulating wouldn't be cool.

For a second I read that as a 10 MILE blast radius lol... Thank's for the info guys. TAC Self Destruct was just what I was looking for. It says 1.0.2 but it works in 1.0.4 as well. Just spent a while messing about with it because it's soooooooooooooooo pretty lol. TAC-SD lets you link it to the abort button with ease.

OK... I give you an example... You design a heavy lander for Duna where you want to use air braking but you don't want to fly all the way to Duna to test the lander with real Kerbals (especially if you are running a "dead is dead" game). You COULD use hyperedit but it would end up with lots of rubbish littering the landscape which you would have to manually dig through from the Tracking station and delete them bit by bit. I have debris from "simulations" on pretty much every planet because of this. Also when using hyperedit it breaks the reversions so parts are pretty much lost. Hence it's not simulating... it's just taking real parts and teleporting them to the planet. If you ran a simulation that had no effect on cost, parts, time so you can test your ship because you are limiting yourself to no reversions means the planning has to be done right or else you end up with a case of The Martian (or in this case, the Dunan) when your lack of testing means your craft fails due to an overheated landing gear and the lander hits on the engine itself which explodes... For those of us who like to run immersion gameplays with no reversions allowed is what makes the game more nerve wrecking. Having to use Hyperedit stops reversions from being an option. But how else are you supposed to try new fangled landers without running a simulation. So nope... the answer here ISN'T the revert button.

For example, when a real launch vehicle goes wonky there is a guy with a key to a cover over a big red button that detonates the launch vehicle so that large parts don't rain fire over a large area. I just had a rocket go bonkers and almost take out the whole of the KSP launch facility. I think only the pilot training facility was left standing lol. Now as I wanted to play a "No Revert Playthrough" I was screwed as I had ruined everything. So time to start again... What would have been useful is that big red button that does this.... So does anyone know of a mod that lets you blow up the rocket before it hits the ground?

I know you can revert to a previous time but how about building the rocket or plane like normal and then instead of the normal launch you get a cut down graphics version of the launch... Maybe even make it wireframe. 1. It would differentiate between real launches and simulations. 2. It would increase frame rates if it doesn't have to show Hi Res extras. 3. It could show data like from Kerbal Engineer and highlight thermal and drag problems. For rockets, maybe you could use a 2d video of the launch with the launch data. Perhaps plan re-entry profiles too so that you know what would happen if you came in from Duna straight into a re-entry (ie turn into a molten powder puff). Simulation planning before real launches would save money with your campaigns too. Let us move test craft like Hyperedit... but not move the real craft. It would make the difference between running sims on computers at JPL/NASA against flying the real craft.

Actually in those cases the radial decoupler stays on the craft if you look at them after separation. But the guys who suggest that only probe or populated parts should be selected when hitting [ and ] is another good suggestion. Perhaps use { and } to select all parts in the vicinity. But please let us swap in atmosphere ffs no matter what.

No, what I mean is that I'm like a toddler in a sweet shop... I WANT THEM ALL (yet I know I'm going to break KSP). It's all down to the wonderful mod community giving out all the lovely sweeties is what I'm saying. Been playing this game WAY too long lol.

What I mean is, when there are two docking ports connected to each other you should automatically be in control of the part your clicked "Undock". Sometimes the control selection method is absolutely BONKERS. I was just on Duna and my delivery crane system had just landed a new base module. I clicked undock and of course it switched to the base module instead of my crane. So I though "Hey ho... never mind. I'll just hit the "]" key to go to the crane." but instead of going to the crane it went to a decoupler that was still coming down. So I tried to switch back to the crane or the base module AND THE BLOODY GAME TOLD ME I COULDN'T SWITCH WHILE IN THE ATMOSPHERE (which it already clearly did). So just to get back to the crane I had to go back to the space centre, THEN to the tracking station and then back to the crane... but by that time it had fallen off the base module and I was shown a lovely explosion... All because the game switched to the wrong part and then wouldn't let me switch back. Squad, you really need to sort out the switching in atmosphere limit. I have lost SOOOOOOO many craft because switching goes to the wrong darn part and refuses to let me switch back. Also let us switch directly to the tracking station from the map screen. Having to load up the Space Centre and then load up the tracking station is an unnecessary step. Especially when you are in a rush to save a ship or something. An alternative solution would be to have a drop down list of ships in the vicinity to choose which ship you want to switch to. It would definitely be better than the roulette wheel that is the [ and ] buttons.

Sorry... that may be a bit misleading... I mean I hate the good mods that keep making me want to install them. Oh and also not forum mods... Damned English isn't that clear. Back to the topic on hand and I have just counted the number of subfolders in my GameData folder and my jaw dropped when I realised it came to FORTY EIGHT! Yup... I'm a freakin mod addict. The strange thing is, my build isn't that unstable either. As soon as I shifted it to Open-GL a good 95% of the crashes stopped and a bit of fiddling with the mod versions fixed the rest. It does get low framerate at launch but I can deal with that. My complaint is that I keep coming across awesome mods that I have missed and find I just HAVE to have them... Like Smart Parts (that helps automate launches). I love being able to design craft that stage at specific altitudes or can dump fuel before landing. Then there is Throttle Controlled Avionics that help fly VTOL jets by balancing the thrust from the engines. You have to set the craft up right but ships that usually flip over now can fly nearly perfectly and can even land on the VAB. Yup... Those are just two of the mods I have come across that I just couldn't imagine being without... and that is one top of my base requirements like Engineer, Mechjeb, Scansat etc... I like to build craft like NASA does and include all the automation so that you can plan on launching a craft and get it to land on a specific planet location with the minimum of input. God... I hate mods... they have just taken over my KSP... - Squad released a monster when they made the game moddable. A+++++++++++++++++++++++ Edit: For those of you not realising you can run the game in OpenGL mode (and save memory doing so) all you have to do is make a shortcut to the game executable and where the end of the link goes "\KSP.exe" you just change it to "\KSP.exe" -force-opengl". This is on Windows, by the way. I don't know if it works on the Mac or Linux builds.

Thanks for the help guys... hopefully I will be able to start making planes properly... I've mostly stuck to vertical rockets up to now with only the occasional dabble in space planes due to this annoying glitch it means that every elevator that touches the wing goes BOING and resets to some weird angle that takes a while to get aligned properly

Joe, did you ever make any progress on the renaming of the Kerbals? I wanted to make a mix of military (wanted things like Sgt Boo Kerman and Capt. Zap Kerman) and civilians on a long journey mission and see who comes back. Not going to force it, just see who survives the kracken events... And I have Deadly Reentry installed too. I lost one because a wing overheated and went POOF! This ship is a nuclear torch ship going on a system wide journey. Bit of a science experiment like in the movie 2010, you see... because, well... SCIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEENCE.

For some reason whenever I try they always never align properly. The rotate and offset functions seems to jump in large increments so that I never get the damned angle wrong. WHAT AM I DOING WRONG?

Kind of ironic that it works for OopsThatNotWork.

I cannot for the life of me believe that I missed this mod in my years of playing KSP... This is something that really, REALLY peeved me off about asymmetrical landers and spaceships and being unable to balance RCS to keep control. Now all in one and the things fly true finally. I am one happy bunny. I did have one really funny glitch (my own fault though) due to not adding two fuel lines... So the craft would go up, the two small tanks that I used to attach the main engines would drain and not fill up from the main tank and then the craft would just flip over heh. Had me scratching my head for a bit until I spotted it. I tend to hide fuel lines in the creases between tanks as the yellow lines look horrible... and I just missed that I hadn't had symmetry turned on. Landing on the VAB hasn't been this easy in full grav in AGES.... (turning off the grav doesn't count).

Love this... I'm a big SpaceX fan. I think a lot of it is due to growing up in the 60's watching Fireball XL5 heh. Weird how science fact imitates science fiction...

So my mod heavy sandbox game was going great... right up until Jeb, Bob, Bill and Valentina got up and vanished from my save. I kept expecting them to re-appear if they had mysteriously died from some mod bug but no. So I kept sending up my noobs but still missing my main crew. Then I went to try out a new station escape lander that I wanted to try and get to return to the landing strip when the game up and sent me the message "Runway not clear... Untitled Space Craft is already on the Runway". So I pressed the button to recover the space craft and... there were my A-Team... all sweaty and cussing and accusing me of imprisoning them on the runway without food and water for nearly a year. Luckily though they had a large cargo bay full of snacks and Dr Pepper lol (Also lucky that I hadn't installed TAC Life Support at that point). *THUD!*.. *THUD!*... *THUD!*.... <---- (my forehead banging on my desk). God, sometimes I feel such a noob when playing this game. Building ships with solar panels and then forgetting to deploy them (dead spacecraft littered the whole system of my permadeath build)... Building craft that have no RCS facing forward so that when I went to dock with my craft in Duna orbit I instead crashed into the space station when I tried to dock... (even placed all the RCS nozzles on one craft and then removed the RCS tank when modifying the ship and only noticing it in Moho orbit. Forgetting to put crew into ship and sending it to another station in Eve orbit and wondering where the crew had gone when I tried transferring them from my transfer vehicle... ... and the list goes on lol. Let's just say I spend a good portion of my time running rescue ops while my design crew get chewed out by Gene Kerman. Anyone else make such silly mistakes like this? Misery loves company you see.

It's those linear ports I use a lot (check out that tutorial I did... I have been using them for a long time.). But that Part Angle Display is something that will probably help a LOT. Trying to keep up with what angle the part has changed too when you move it a millimetre and suddenly it is pointing in some weird direction that has now messed up your balance is what was really messing my ship up. Lifting bodies look really nice but all the curved angles really make balancing a chore. Hell, I can balance a LEM faster than a lifting body heh. Edit: YES!!!!! That Part Angle Display is just perfect for what I wanted. To be honest I'm baffled that it's not part of the main game. Being able to use fine movement down to 0.01 degrees it means you can really fine tune your setup. So thanks Red Iron Crown!

Nope... not the MK2... I was trying to use the RCS Build tool (which I use a lot) on the Mk4 space plane parts. I found I was fine on up/down/left and right but when you add anything that gives you forward and back it totally messes up the torque on everything else. I've been balancing normal rockets for a LONG time now and can do it pretty much in my sleep but when you get something like the MK4 it totally falls down and shows the problems with the placement alignment. Thinking about it, what would be really useful is placing rcs (or even any engine) at a specific angle that you type in... then any pod you place will fire in that direction allowing you to more easily balance the placement. You see the problem comes from when the engine connects to the model surface... it can twist the angle to something weird which makes it REALLY hard to get the balance right. The only way you can get around that is to use SAS to keep correcting the poor balance which isn't exactly good design. Add in possible phantom forces and docking gets to be crazy hard. Oh and Warzouz... on small to medium ships, drifting isn't much of a problem. On medium to large ships it's a right pain in the ass.... make the craft large and asymetric and you get problems that need more precise placements... oh and if you don't know what a lifting body then you really need to bone up on space tech. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifting_body TLDR: Basically the problem I'm having is balancing RCS on large asymetric shapes even using RCS Build Tool. P.s. I even wrote up a standard balancing tutorial on here for those who have probs balancing RCS so I'm not exactly a newbie. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/28983-How-To-Balance-RCS-On-Your-Payload

Seriously, I spend 90% of my time trying to get the RCS balanced on large lifting bodies because the editing rotation is so freaking gross (gross in the "large amount" as well as how inaccurate it is). For example, just moving it a teeeeeeny tiny amount and it jumps the angle of the RCS pod several degrees... and the position I need to place the damned pod is somewhere in the middle. Even using the Shift- modifier doesn't give you enough accuracy. Consequently the poor positioning means it makes docking a LOT harder than it needs to be. I can do it, yes... BUT, when translating you don't want your ass swinging all over the place causing you to become off axis for a solid dock. For cylinder shaped vehicles it's simple because you can place pods in pairs to offset and balance but with a lifting body if you try placing in pairs the balance will be WAY off. You need to be able to fine tune the placement but the accuracy of placing is too damned finicky. Imagine trying to place RCS on Thunderbird 2 for example. So a lot of my time is spent swearing at the game when all it needs is a precision mode for placing parts. I'm hoping there is a way to do it that I haven't figured out yet. Anyone got any pointers? Why the RCS isn't auto-balancing to counter the poor positioning problems inherent in KSP is beyond me... If you want to translate up it should know not to rotate you. If your ship is out of balance it should reduce power to the ones that are pushing you out of alignmenent. If the ship is TOO out of alignment it shouldn't even fire the RCS at all, giving you an idea that you need to redesign.

I fixed mine after multiple angry outbursts at the game. This is what I did to fix it... Stop KSP if it is running. - Right click on the folder where you have KSP installed (usually '\ksp_win') and select 'Properties'. - In the dialogue box that appears, untick the "Read Only" box if it is lit. - Let it recurse through the folders to make the folder completely writable. - NOW DELETE SETTINGS.CFG!!!!!! (I tried to just do the above but it still played silly buggers until I trashed settings.cfg) - Now restart KSP and it now behaves itself and lets you alter the settings properly. I've never had this problem before 1.0.2.

I'm using a HOTAS Warthog and have no probs. Have you calibrated your joystick in Windows itself? I've got a SW 2 FF floating around somewhere in my flat and if I can find it I'll have a go at using it in KSP as well but I think the thing is to get windows calibration working first... In XP the SW2FF didn't need calibrating IIRC but my Hotas needs recalibrating after every time I pull it apart to do mods.

I bet Jeb was flying in Elite Dangerous because Valentina had kicked him out of Kerbin spaceport for crashing too many rockets again!