pvtnum11

Perused these forums, administered on a KSP Facebook Group, *might* actually get some gametime in later today.

Sell the fuel? You mean the refund thing after recovery, yes?

Xsplit can also record locally, and although of slightly lower quality than FRAPS, generates far smaller files than FRAPS does. I've heard of folks using OBS also. One that I used to use was Razer's GameBooster - it comes with a video capture program. Might have been my machine being too weak at the time, but I found that the audio slowly desynched over time with the video, getting more and more out of synch the longer a vid lasted. But again, it might have been my machine simply having trouble with it.

I think I was making good progress on getting this done when I crashed the game - getting into LKO was simple enough, the Mun encounter was decent and I even managed to make (very) low orbit. Just a sliver more fuel and I might have managed a Suicide Burn to land it.

This is a Beta Than Ever moderately modded career playthrough. Mods include RemoteTech, TAC Life Support, KW Rocketry, AIES, Universal Storage and DMagic Orbital Science, and Mission Control 2. I added others as I went along, but those are the core mods. Currently, I'm waiting for a transfer window to Duna, the entire tech tree is unlocked and all I've yet to upgrade fully is the SPH and Runway (they're at Tier 2 right now). I've had a lot of fun making this series and eagerly await 1.0 so I can do it all over again. Focus went from capturing everything to capturing only significant missions (since I eventually ended up with a LOT going on). Quality improves when I picked up a desktop condenser mic and learned how to do some basic editing, so a thousand pardons for that.

It's still a good test to see if a player has learned efficient ascent into orbit and good orbital maneuvers. A number of folks I challenged with on FB this were unable to do it for several tries and only just barely were able to pull it off. So what's easy for an experienced player is indeed a challenge to the inexperienced ones, or the players who are used to the "MOAR BOOSTERS" school of thought when conducting Mun missions.

IKE WITH THE X - HOLY KRAKEN. I'm seriously impressed.

I'm probably doing it very very wrong (that or I simply lack enough GHz to run it right), but this is the result I ended up with when trying to fly it. I only found this forum thread about it earlier, so I ask your pardon for my vitriol - I was totally flabbergasted with the thing when it finally loaded. I'll give it this much, it is rather impressive looking and it turned itself into a substantial and quite astounding debris pile.

Looking at the Wiki, I see that the Mainsail and Poodle had their stats adjusted in version 0.24 - Mainsail's Isp jumped up a good amount, and the Poodle went on a diet. Together, these increase the delta-v of the rocket to levels that permit round-trip Mun lander missions, if a moderate degree of patience and skill is used. So yeah, not much of a challenge for the experienced pilots, but it might serve as a nice yardstick to judge the piloting abilities of relatively new players - if they can fly this okay, then they have probably achieved a nice degree of competency in efficient flying.

Back from the dead: Long voiceless video, but this was bone stock Beta with a bone-stock Kerbal X, and it worked. http://youtu.be/tgs80csya3Y

NaN is basically the best inclination match possible, I've had it happen a few times, makes for some great orbital rendezvous.

Negative. The CG shifting issue manifested before I even got to unloading the rocket - indeed, that's what caused me to unload the rocket in the first place, in an effort to save something, as the all-up assembly lost all flight control due to a loss of stability. After I did that, it was pretty simple. If you can manage to keep the all-up assembly under control during the ascent, that's a big plus. The rest is easy.

I tinkered with this all morning. Problems manifested in the CG shifting as the plane's fuel is expended while it ascends. But it did work (for a loose definition of "work"), provided I didn't care about having the now-abandoned plane disappear once it left the 2.4km physics radius of the rocket I was controlling. As a technology demonstrator, I rate it a paltry 6/10, since the plane is a total writeoff. I was playing mostly stock (I have only RPM on my Steam install). There are mods that address this, though, so all is not lost. Maybe we'll have better luck with the concept once the Beta 0.90 Mark 3 parts hit the street. They're pretty beefy.

Last time I did a Demo-version Mun mission (and recorded it) was about a year-and-a-half ago. Finally made time to redo it.

Okay, so I grabbed OS and I really like it - but then it would appear that when I grabbed the KAS and TAC LS addons for Universal Storage, it strips off the wedges from the OS parts. I'll delete the LS and KAS stuff and see if the wedges come back to see if there's an incompatibility issue or something.

The very recent 0.25 (at time of this writing) update allows you to open/close the ports in the VAB and SPH, but you can't attach items to them, still. So not only are they mere decoration (as it were), they're also teasing me.

Yeah, once I adjusted my way of thinking to low-cost and efficient designs, everything went more or less fine. I now have a fairly large budget surplus to splurge on things I want, instead of just what I need for the mission. Better flexibility and all that. Pretty much done with the tech tree and yeah, flag-planting and 'gather science at x' missions are nice little cash cows.

I just figured out that OX-STAT panels (and some other things) are massless and have no drag (yay, time to add zillions of them). However, they still cost money, so in the interest of XTREME SPARTAN BUDGETARY CONSTRAINTS I'll probably still use them sparingly.

The difference of Career vs. Sandbox (as far as I have played them, anyway - tongue-in-cheek: Sandbox - Yeah, six of those widgets look great, really liking the symmetry going on here. Career - that part costs me HOW MUCH? Going without! Sandbox - Mun mission... I'll have a 30-percent delta-v buffer, so that means I'll have roughly 10,000m/s of total delta-v budget for the entire trip. Career - this design is on the ragged edge of an ideal delta-v budget... and that's cuz I'm broke. Sandbox - I don't care if I will never need to use the gigantic solar arrays (short of ion probes), they look cool. Career - OX-STATS are practically free! But I'll only use four, since I want to mimimize air drag on the ascent... Sandbox - Six antenna, because redundancy and Rule of Cool. Career - What's an antenna? Are you implying I'm not coming back to Kerbin? We don't need no stinking antenna. Sandbox - I need no less than six crew to fly this mission to Jool and back. Carer - Hey guys? I need ONE brave soul with nothing to do for the next five years. Sandbox - 600-part ship on yet another routine trip to Duna and back. Framerate sucks, but it looks cool. Career - 50-part ship on a first-ever trip to Eeloo and back. But hey, DAT FRAMERATE. Sandbox - Those ARM Rocketdyne parts are great for shoving 300 ton monsters into LKO. Career - Those ARM part cost HOW MUCH? Nope, we'lre doing this with Skippers and maaaaaybe Mainsails if I'm feeling... generous. Sandbox - 300 tons to LKO, goes nowhere. Career - 20 tons leaving LKO, already moving out to Jool. Sandbox - MORE STRUTS! Career - Gah, even struts cost money.. okay, here's just a few struts, but no more. Sandbox - Welp, botched a landing, killed the crew... better luck next time, guys! Career - *cries* Sandbox - Man, this game is super easy and fun! Career - I am sweating bullets trying not to botch a Munar landing, because if I do, I'm broke as hell and might as well wipe the save and start over. Sandbox - MOAR BOOSTERS are for losers who can't set up fuel lines right. Career - I have never been so wrong in my entire life. Sandbox - half of my ship is not fuel, but it looks cool! Career - My ship is about 90-percent fuel tanks by weight, but I'm still looking for any not-fuel weight I can shave off. Sandbox - I'll just sort of half-bake my burns and hope it works out, since I have spare fuel I can correct it with, later. Career - SILENCE! I need more time to tweak my maneuver nodes! Every drop of fuel is precious!

I second Smidge204's fuel node thing. I don't have to do that very often, but it works well when I have to.

Nicely done! Now I know that getting into orbit again is at least possible.

I have a channel that I don't update much with, since my mic died and the stock one is not very good. Also, that my computer decided to go on a vacation so I have far less processor power to run both recording and playing the game. http://www.youtube.com/user/pvtnum11/videos Some of that stuff is fairly old and looks really... amateurish now. I did like the Semitruck to the Mun thing, though.

A raw look at the stats of the Kebal X stock craft shows that it will not support a return trip from the Mun, and it's a finnicky piece of kit to land on the Mun anyway. I experimented with landing it and taking off again, and it's a bear. So, here's the challenge: Get the Kerbal X (bone stock) to the Mun, land and post up a pic of how much fuel you have left over. Hard Mode: Get it back into Munar orbit. Super Uber Hard Mode: Get it back to Kerbin. My attempt at this is shown:

So basically, the Drek is a mobile torpedo tube, designed to wreck the day of far larger ships than itself.

Modular ship design. I like. I was using something like that for a routine Duna trip. Now with the SAS tweaks, modular ships are a lot easier to fly.