FaceDeer

CKAN still thinks the latest version is 5.5.2 with the teeny Xenon tanks. Is that something that needs fixing on this end, or on CKAN's end?

That'd be nice, it'll make it easier to take or leave just the functionality that I'm interested in. In Kethane, for example, I always threw away that Kerbal-to-Kethane generator unit (ick) and it was annoying having to dig it out each time. And I have some trouble with the thermodynamics of Karbonite rockets, so I'd prefer to just have the mine-and-convert stuff.

You might like the real-life MOOSE system that NASA designed ("Man Out Of Space Easiest"), but sadly has never actually built and tested.

For some reason I'm obsessed with Moho. It's got a stark, barren beauty to it, and it's deuced hard to get to so I feel like I'm out there "on my own." I love sending big missions with ultra-long-range science rovers there, to spend months traversing the landscape gathering science without knowing for sure whether they'll get that payload home. And there's a creepy vibe to the place, I can just imagine the sound of rocks creaing and cracking at dawn and dusk as the temperature switches between ultracold to searing hot.

Yay, 0.23! Time to start building my ridiculously large fuel depots again!

This is much as I imagined a portable smelter would look, very nice. Perhaps a future enhancement might be to put side panels covering it that unfold like petals when it's in operation and have radiators on the inside surface? That would give it a nice analogous functionality to how the Kethane processor's radiators emerge during operation while not simply copying the design. Perhaps even make the furnace itself give a little glow of heat.

Nice! HexCans were a decent enough stopgap measure, but it's good to give a mod like this its own unique and recognizable visual style. Yeah, the number one thing that's held me back from going whole-hog with Extraplanetary Launchpads has been the models for some of the parts. I'm glad to hear that you're getting input from actual real-world engineers on how stuff like this would look and operate, I'd love to set up a bucket-wheel excavator on the Mun.

I don't know how versatile the Kethane DLL is in this regard, but it'd be fun if in addition to the big ore deposits there were also lots of littler ones scattered around. If that was the case then it might make sense to have a small ore scanner with a range measured in meters - you'd mount it on a rover and send it tooling around the countryside looking for nice-flavored rocks. I wouldn't be surprised if the resource distribution system in Kethane is going to get a revamp in the future to account for biomes, though. Those spiffy heatmaps Majir was showing off in the Kethane thread would go well with that.

Now that is a spiffy launchpad! I won't be too terribly concerned if the top connection node doesn't move when the launchpad unfolds, it looks like anything that remains connected there would be serious trouble either way when stuff gets built on it. So I would use it solely as a connection point for a sky crane or other such temporary gripper.

Heh. Maybe not the best time for me to suggest this, but I've been pondering base-building a lot lately and I think it would be neat if there were a version of the pipe in KAS that was big enough to serve as a crew passage. You'd probably not want the end points to be attachable, they'd be the size of clamp-o-trons at least. I know that currently Crew Manifest doesn't actually care about what intervening parts a Kerbal has to pass through to get from one pod to another, so you can in fact cram a Kerbal through the existing pipes, it just seems weird.

I've actually built support frameworks like that for spherical tanks out of stock girders and struts to make ground-based fuel depots, it worked quite well. A promising-looking mod I haven't tried yet (it hasn't updated to 0.23) is UbioZur Welding Ltd., it might prove useful for some of these sorts of cases. It takes several existing parts and combines them together into a single part. I imagine once spherical tanks has those mix-and-match adapters it'll be something I use a lot to fuse together the ones I use frequently, to improve structural strength and reduce part count for the physics engine. You could perhaps use this to weld girders onto the base to suit your needs.

Given that my intent is to manufacture these things on location from local resources, a texture that looks like concrete is actually ideal.

Eep, how embarrassing. I haven't been paying as much attention to the structural components that come with the spherical tanks, I forgot that those were bundled with them. That habitat dome is exactly the sort of thing I was thinking of, it looks awesome. What wasn't releaseable about it? The only thing that looks a bit "off" to me is the brightness of the blue in the windows, might be a good idea to darken those a bit and crank up their specular reflectivity to make them look glassier. I'd love to plunk a few of those down around any major bases I've got groundside.

I've used the smaller half-spheres as "endcaps" on cylindrical tanks and other standard-sized cylindrical parts before, it looks awesome when I do that. The larger half-spheres have made for neat-looking "domes" as part of base-building activities on other worlds, I've used Extraplanetary Launchpads to make them from local materials and then used a rover with a KAS winch to drag them off the launchpad to wherever they're supposed to go. Speaking of which, what would you say to the notion of a variant of the large spherical and half-spherical tanks that hold Kerbals? Sort of an ultra-mega-sized Hitchhiker. Extraplanetary Launchpads has made me start thinking big and it'd be nice to be able to populate my ridiculously large stations and bases with similarly ridiculous numbers of Kerbals. I wouldn't care about an IVA or anything fancy like that, just slap some portholes on the texture and I'd be happy. I love your plan for separating the mount and tank models, adds a lot of customizability. If you go with that another nice thing to consider would be angled radial mounts. Here's a fairly common pattern I use when making use of these large tanks as part of a ship. As you can see, with stock parts this looks a bit ragged and for these Mainsails I had to trick the clipping-detection code slightly to make it work.

I haven't played around a lot with this mod yet, but I did notice what seemed to be one cause and workaround for exploding ships: it seems that the ship was spawning with the root part attached to the launchpad, even when the root part was deep inside the spacecraft. I used the "change root" mod to change the root part to a docking port on the bottom end of the ship I was trying to build (and that was exploding on undock) and it spawned just fine.

There used to be a "KAS debug" module you could add to parts that would let you mess around with its attachment parameters in-game, so that you could see how the part would be oriented while carried on a Kerbal or mounted on a surface, and then once you got it right you could copy the parameters and substitute them into the configuration of the non-debug module. I don't see that on the wiki now, unfortunately. Anyone know if that's still available in the new KAS? There are a few parts that the old Attachment Pack allowed me to move around that I'm missing - most notably, the smallest ladder piece. I liked putting temporary handgrips near wherever it was that I was going to do a bunch of EVA work.

I have the same problem with reading status. I'm using "ALT:RADAR < 1" as a workaround for now (modify the number if your CoM is higher than that when landed, of course)

This plugin has enormous potential, I've been wanting something like this forever. My main goal is to make a program for a semi-autonomous rover that I can just point at a target a hundred kilometers away and say "go there" with some hope of it making it. I've got a basic little start, but I'm running into a few problems. Here's the program as it currently stands: lock wheelsteering to target. set maxspeed to 5. until target:distance < 100 { if ABS(target:bearing) < 90 AND surfacespeed < maxspeed { brakes off. lock wheelthrottle to 1. }. if surfacespeed > maxspeed { unlock wheelthrottle. }. if ABS(target:bearing) > 90 { lock wheelthrottle to -1. }. if surfacespeed > maxspeed * 1.1 { brakes on. }. if ALT:RADAR > 1 { SAS ON. }. if ALT:RADAR < 1 { SAS OFF. }. }. brakes on. unlock wheelthrottle. unlock wheelsteering. Problem one: I had to retype that program because for some reason KSP_win\Plugins\PluginData\Archive is completely empty. Is that where the programs are supposed to be stored? It's being stored *somewhere*, I can quit the game and come back and it's still here, so I'm probably just missing something basic. Problem two: I wanted to detect if the rover was hurtling through the air and slam on SAS to kill any tumble. The KerboScript page of the KOS wiki mentions a "status" statistic with "flying" and "landed" values, but when I try checking them the compiler complains about unrecognized values. The radar solution is an okay substitute in the meantime, I guess. Problem three: I targeted a lander I'd placed about 80 kilometers away from KSC and sent my test rover toward it running this program. Everything seemed to be going okay until it reached a gentle upslope incline, at which point the wheelsteering went completely bonkers - it flickered rapidly back and forth, nearly flipping the rover, and then eventually settled down with the rover turned 90 degrees away and switching endlessly between forward and reverse as it tried (and failed) to reorient toward the target. I tried switching the rover's control module from a forward-facing probe body to an upward-facing one instead, to see if it was the frame of reference that was causing trouble, but that also caused similar freakouts (except it kept switching between forward and reverse while keeping approximately oriented toward the target - going up an incline seemed to flip its sense of direction over). I think something in the maths behind wheelsteering and target direction isn't happy about sloped terrain (specifically, upslopes. It seems to handle downslopes okay). And finally, I guess a feature request. I'd like to be able to detect my rover's pitch so that I can adjust its maximum speed based on how steep the terrain it's traversing is, but I can't figure out a way to get the ships current heading to extract that. Getting the current heading would also help me make a more intelligent anti-tumble routine than simply switching the SAS on, I could have the rover use torque or emergency RCS to flip itself to a level orientation while still pointing in the direction of travel so the wheels catch the ground smoothly. I know you're working on better rotation support, will something like that be included? Oh, and something a little more "out there" - a way to get a heading toward a predefined latitude and longitude target? That way I could set up a whole chain of waypoints between two destinations and program a rover to take a safe path between them.

I've encountered this problem too, and unfortunately I don't know of any workaround. It seems like KAS thinks you're actually on the surface when you're in orbit around the Mun and Minmus; if you drop the part that's on your back it'll suddenly have zero velocity relative to the ground and you'll lose it. It works okay when you're in Kerbin's SOI, though, so in a real pinch you could boost whatever you're working on out of Minmus orbit and then return it when it's fixed. Hopefully this awesome new version coming along soon will fix this little glitch.

Whichever way you decide to set up your successor, I'd at least suggest sticking with a copyleft license of some sort. That way if whoever picks it up doesn't "work out" for whatever reason it'll be easy to change things up and try again. And folks will be able to take the mod in unexpected new directions, too. This started out as just a thing for winches but these days I use it more as a means of offworld construction and repair. Never can tell where these sorts of things can wind up.

Ohmigoshohmigoshohmigosh! Ohmigoshohmigoshohmigoshohmigoshohmigoshohmigosh! Ever since installing the attachment pack I've been sending ridiculous-looking "spare parts probes" to my various bases, festooned with little batteries and ladders and RTGs and clamp-o-tron Jr.s and so forth to provide a source of parts to fix design oversights with in the field. This sort of parts storage bin is going to be a godsend for both aesthetic considerations and framerate. And when I'm housecleaning by stripping off never-needed-again parts like RCS blocks on a permanently landed base I'll have a place to stow them instead of just dropping them in the dirt or making them vanish tediously by going into the pod with them one-by-one. I have no idea how one would go about it but will you be able to pre-load parts into these bins in the VAB? That would allow for parts that can be connected to a target surface but not dismounted again, so that they wouldn't be infinitely reusable as they are now. That would be an interesting challenge to add to the current system, and much more realistic.

I can see this being very tricky, unfortunately. I haven't done any actual modding but it seems like a lot of part plugins don't run when you're in the VAB. One thing that I actually quite like about stock struts, for launch stabilization purposes, is that although the second connector placed can't be nicely snapped to a particular spot it's only "temporary" and will vanish entirely once the strut has been snapped by decoupling (and the flight has been saved and loaded). I make sure to always start a strut on the disposable stage portion of the rocket and end it on the payload.

Woo! I like this way better than the Quantum Strut, glad to see it's being maintained. Though I've been using the Attachment Pack version too (being able to strut *anything* together out in the field is an awesome ability), have the two versions diverged? re: track122: The attachment pack still works in 0.21.1, but KAS itself has developed a few little quirks and glitches that have knock-on effects on the Attachment Pack. Most notably, sometimes you'll be unable to have your EVAed Kerbal attach something to a ship without a save-and-reload (or spaceport-and-back) scene change to "reset" KAS. And I've also noticed that it's sometimes impossible to attach things to ships when you're in orbit around the Mun or Minmus (Kerbin orbit still works), the part instantly loses its orbital velocity when you let it go and falls to the surface below. The author of KAS is working on a new version so hopefully this will be corrected soon.

Very happy to hear that this mod is still being worked on, it's one of my all-time favorites. It gives my EVAed Kerbals tons of things to do and lets me *build* stuff instead of just landing things near each other, and in conjunction with the Attachment Pack it lets me fix soooo many little mistakes without having to launch a whole new spacecraft. Keeps me sane.

Oh my, a music replacer? I'm shoveling the Homeworld soundtrack into this.