capi3101

I'll probably wind up doing some extensive GIMP work before everything's said and done (already did some to prep up the revised card prototypes...not much, just a gradient fill on the background). I've got something special planned for the Kerbalnaut cards that's almost definitely going to demand it. Engines and Pods are essentially complete at this point, and I got all the electrical parts done. Today's probably going to see work on Structural cards.

Last night I scrapped my original Apollo-style Mun rocket design; I came to the conclusion that I really wanted one of my larger, more stable rovers for the mission and my dress-rehearsal landing proved the science probes I'd designed wouldn't be up to snuff. So first I designed some new sci packages and modded the rover to carry them around; that way they could be deployed from the rover instead of requiring them to be independent. Testing was largely successful; I'll have to remember to bring the rover to a halt before deploying the packages attached to the front, but that's not a big deal. Next step was to redesign the descent stage of the lander; that rover had been designed to use a discardable skycrane - okay if you're just transporting a rover on a one-way trip, bad idea if you've got Kerbals riding down with it. Came up with a new challenge idea in the process of testing that design. Finally, I added all the hardware to the Apollo design elements I had already (CSM and LEM ascent stage) and redesigned the booster. Booster test showed it didn't have sufficient delta-V to achieve orbit on its own and my computer spontaneously shut down before I could try again. Tonight will likely see further booster redesign efforts. Occurs to me that I might want to do a dress rehearsal with the new LEM... Began getting some feedback on the KSP-based card game I'm currently working on.

Welcome to the addiction that is KSP... Lessee....launching. General rule, straight up to 10k, turn to 45 degrees elevation at that point along course 090 (use the navball) and hold that until you're about 30k, then look at your time to apoapsis. If it's less than thirty seconds, hold 45 degrees; greater than 45 seconds, start burning along the horizon. Between the two, go somewhere between ten and twenty degrees elevation. This is a rough guesstimate for what's called a "gravity turn", and it takes advantage of Kerbin's gravity to reduce your launch delta-V requirement. Orbital ops...Mr. Shifty's got you covered on how to change the inclination of your orbit relative to a target. Just burn north at the descending node or south at the ascending node until it's zeroed out; this is the very first thing you want to do when trying to make a rendezvous, as it's one less dimension you have to worry about. Then use the maneuver nodes to plan the rendezvous; set them at the apoapsis or periapsis (to see which one's coming up first), then see what a burn prograde or retrograde does to the estimated distance between you and the target. Adjust that as necessary...as long as it's getting closer over time, don't worry too much about it. Actual docking can be tricky to the uninitiated; I highly suggest RCS for the first time. The Gemini tutorial on the wiki may be helpful here. I would recommend getting comfortable with getting into orbit before attempting docking, though docking isn't as big of a deal as you may think. Like most things in the game, it takes practice. Accept that you will botch it badly at some point, and you can laugh at it and move on.

There is a new Mun image on the wiki, but it's got a starfield background instead of a transparent background like the old image, hence the reason why I used the old Mun. Had a couple of parts today with the same problem; going to be digging into the game to fix those. Plus, I wasn't sure which one folks liked better (nostalgia factor). Personally, I prefer the old Mun (easier to land), but once again this is something that would be a snap to change.

Thanks. I've already thought of a reason to change the atmo effects rating for the Joolian moons (besides Laythe)...if you could aerobrake (available via action card), you'd probably aerobrake at Jool before proceeding to the target moon. So those'll need to be updated. Easy fix. Spent the morning working on Engine cards. Got those done except for the LV-1R and that's mainly because it's new and the wiki entry is incomplete (as of 8/7/13, anyway). Just means I'll have to dig into the game next opportunity I get. Afternoon's going to see work on Pods. Probably won't post any new card images until I get all of them at least to a point of preliminary completion.

Nice looking rover you've got there. One quicky suggestion for the future...I'd highly recommend encasing the critical hardware - probe core, batts, RTGs - between structural panels or girders (or at least sandwiching them). Why? Those parts have an impact tolerance of 80 m/s, far faster than you could drive. If despite all your precautions the rover flips at high speed, a simple structural panel will make the difference between having the annoyance of figuring out how to upright it again (easily doable on a low-gee world like Minmus) and having the frustration of yet another pile of debris generated... Eight RTGs is a bit much for the hardware you've got, but to each his own, right? I might suggest the addition of a roll cage for the seats, but as I have no idea how to build an effective cage out of stock parts my own self, I won't actually suggest it.

Had one that I drove on Minmus last night for fourteen kilometers without a hitch...of course, this is the same design that utterly failed to flip over on Kerbin even when turning at 23 m/s. I'll say that having SAS on and using the docking controls (as opposed to the staging controls) makes driving a rover a heck of a lot easier, as does low and wide. Try using a Reaction Wheel instead of a Rovemate for the chassis, and use modular girders to form the remainder of the wheelbase...on my rover, I've got the front wheels extended further forward with XL girders, with four wheels in the back; the two outboard wheels are on girders jutting from the side and the inboard wheels are center; they're there for additional power (and to help offset the weight imbalance a bit - my skycrane for the thing includes a counterbalance). Basically, it's what they called "cab forward" design in the early '90s - and it's remarkably stable; don't even have to lock steering on the back set of wheels. Somebody will tell you "re-map your translational controls to the keypad" sooner rather than later... Need to get some pics of my rover up. I thought I had some, but apparently that's not the case.

Sent a Hellhound to Minmus to find the floating monolith. Drove 14 kilometers from the landing site; considering I'd never been in Minmus's highlands before, I think that's not too shabby personally. The Hellhound was equipped with a KER flight computer, so I was able to get it to the coordinates indicated by kerbalmaps (at least close enough to spit - .0007 degrees to the south and .03 degrees to the east. I should be able to see it by now, I'd imagine...but yet it eludes me...... I'm sure I'll find it; the NAM eluded me too. Just a matter of turning the camera the right way. Of course, if it's underground, that might prove to be problematic.

Here we go... The delta-v amounts listed are based on the current delta-V map on the wiki. They could be completely wrong, so if anybody would like to check my math on those, I'd sure appreciate it. Like I've said, changing things is going to be relatively easy and I'd rather fix problems with cards now than after they get put into the mod (still easy to fix, just more that will have to be done in that case). Looks like a few of the cards have some edging...easily fixed but I'll have to make a note to do it.

The idea is to stack the cards, yes. You can tell by the color of the edges what kind of card it is (red=fuel, blue=pod, yellow=engine, green=crew/power, grey=structural). Red+Blue+Yellow+Green=one rocket. If your total mass is less than the thrust provided by the Engine, it can take off. How much delta-V it has depends again on mass (the mass of the fuel tank itself is figured into the delta-V) as well as the Isp of the Engine. Your crew/power card will give you a certain number of six-sided dice you roll for the mission. You declare the location of your target (which has a delta-V requirement and a number of points associated with it) and attempt to beat a certain difficulty threshhold - working right now with (points - structure + pilot's stupidity). Meet or exceed that number and the mission succeeds; you collect the points you shot for. Miss, and the mission fails. If your mission includes a landing and you're the first one to do it, you collect an action card; these have various effects. I'm setting the point threshold for victory at 50 points for the moment but that's something that's going to take tinkering; in Atanar's original game idea, the game didn't end until all the locations had been visited - struck me as being potentially a very long game. I'm still working through the specifics of the rules (in particular the effect of multiple fuel tanks - something absolutely essential in a real game of KSP - is giving me fits). Beautiful thing about VASSAL though is that making changes is relatively easy. Doesn't involve printing anything either (i.e. it's cheaper). I was able to work on the location cards a bit more today...still just have MS Paint and Publisher with which to work but I think they turned out quite lovely. Planets are a touch fuzzy in spots but that can be addressed. I'll get them up for everyone's perusal when I get an opportunity.

I too was curious about staging...I could've sworn that having a three-stage to orbit booster was a requirement at one point, but I didn't see it.

Greetings, fellow Kerbalnauts. About a week ago while doing some searching about one damn thing or another on the boards (don't remember what at this point), I stumbled across the thread for Atanar's Kerbal Card Game. His idea for a card game sounded interesting and I posed a question as to how he was going about developing it, and whether he'd considered using the VASSAL Engine or not. I myself have had recent experience working with VASSAL; that was for a board game but it included a heavy card-playing element. Since then I've been thinking about making a VASSAL-based Kerbal Card Game on my own. So, today I'm announcing the commencement of work on the Kerbal Card Program - A KSP-inspired Card Game. So far it's basically the same as Atanar's game as he described it back in May, and I've credited him in the first draft of the rules (which, incidentally, are not yet complete). I have been spending time gathering up data - some of you may have noted me asking about Knowledge Base information yesterday; this is why I was doing that. So far the game's got a lot of clunk to it - it's hard to take something like the Tsiokolvsky Rocket Equation and turn it into something usable in a card game - but I am making progress. Yesterday, I knocked together a few prototype cards; thought I'd go ahead and share them with y'all. Yes, they look like crap at the moment; cut me a break, I was using MS Paint. The Round-8 prototype was the very first card I tried, which is why it looks worse than the others. I guess mainly I'd like to know if anybody out there is still interested in such a project, and if anyone would be interested in helping out with the development. I intend to build it around the VASSAL Engine so this is something that could be actively playtested as development continues. I have no intention of trying to sell anything here - I'd just be doing this for the fun of it. UPDATE: KCP 0.1.7 RELEASED!!

Decouplers, seperators, docking ports. Those are probably the only things you should even consider attaching to the bottom of any rocket motor. LV-Ns also have those damn annoying side-splitting fairings that shoot off and break things.

In my further preparations to send an Apollo-style mission to the NAM, I launched Tartarus 7 - the loaded LEM portion of the mission - to further map out the area and to test the lander design. Mun transfer went off without too many hitches; got a circumlunar free return trajectory and landed within 200 meters of the flag Jeb planted on his last visit to the site. Broke off one of the four lander pods on landing - at 4 m/s; kinda annoyed about that. Unloaded the equipment (a rover and a portable science station on each lander pod) from the lander; am now thinking I should've used decouplers instead of seperators for that job -the separators left a lot of junk. Fortunately a lot of it was used to feed the Kraken so it'd leave the important crap alone. Since there were two probe cores on the lander pod that broke off, I was even able to get them seperated as well - so I delivered four science stations and four mini crap rovers to the site. Set the rovers up as a bullseye; used one of them to ferry Jeb out to the Memorial again, where this time he jetpacked up and planted a flag on top of the Memorial. Each rover then used that flag as the targeting point and I set them up at 150 meter intervals along the cardinal directions. So at this point the Memorial site is well marked. The science stations...didn't have as much luck with them. Basically they consisted of an OKTO-2, an RTG, four science instruments, four toothpick lander legs, an FL-T100 and an ant engine. Deploying them proved to be extraordinarily difficult. Jeb and Bill took the obligatory ride on Bullseye around the site, up past Tranquility and back to the Tartarus, with Bullseye moving back to its designated parking area for liftoff. Lifted off with the ascent stage - which is where the mission went horribly wrong. I'd left SAS turned on the entire time Jeb and Bill were gallivanting on the surface and the ascent stage had no RCS backup for attitude control. Out of power, the only way it could steer was with the ascent stage engine turned on. It actually did manage to make orbit, but I got bad data for the return burn - burned right into the Mun. Haven't checked to see if Jeb and Bill's next of clone have come out of the tanks yet. I guess this mission showed me the overall design problems I would've had in the event that this had been the actual mission. I know now which kinks need to be ironed out when I try again. I do wonder if I now have too much stuff out there to do things in the spirit of the "Doing-it-Apollo Style" challenge, what with the site now heavily mapped out and ground markers all over the damn place. Also tested a new heavy rover design. It sucked - going to have to try again later.

I had success using a stack decoupler, a modular girder adapter and twelve Seperatrons as an abort tower . You have to be sure to aim the decoupler towards the command pod (so that it separates with the rest of the abort tower if you don't need it and want to jettison it) and give a little bit of an angle (5 degrees) to each Seperatron away from the adapter. You then set up an action group that fires off all twelve Seperatrons at once and includes the decoupler that's holding the command pod to the rest of the stack (not the one that's holding the abort tower to the command pod). Push the button and off it goes. I find that having another action group that subsequently deploys your command pod's chutes helpful after an abort...otherwise you got to stage, stage, stage until they pop. I have one of these on my Apollo-style rocket; I set it up to jettison after the second stage lights, just like Apollo. VERY IMPORTANT that you DON'T set the chutes up to deploy when the abort tower fires...the chutes are likely to just disappear if you do, leaving your command pod to lithobrake later.

That's...about 120 tonnes, right? I'd imagine you could do it with one of Temstar's Supernova lifters. No Mods, though...that would include Subassembly, I'd wager. That's unfortunate. Means you'd have to replicate the Supernova by hand. Oh well. Not much of a challenge either. This probably needs to go in "How-To" instead.

I too need to report issues with the lifters in 0.21...attempted to lift a payload with the subassemblies from 0.20 in 0.21 and my ship went UVD. It looked like the struts didn't connect properly.

I'd probably resort to: 3. Hit F1 3A. Dig out screenshots... Rest of that sound plausible enough. Especially number 4...

There's a scrap of text about Kerbin - goes like this: "A unique world, Kerbin has flat plains, soaring mountains and wide, blue oceans. Home to the Kerbals, it has just the right conditions to support a vast, seemingly undepletable population of the eager green creatures. Reaching a stable orbit around Kerbin is one of the first things budding space programs strive for. It is said that he who can get his ship into orbit is halfway to anywhere." I'm told that's from the Knowledge Base. I'm looking for the text for the remaining planets/moons.

Wiki's not complete; it was one of the first places I looked and the information I was looking for wasn't there. Thanks anyway. Okay...is there anyway I can access the text without being in the game itself? I'd like to not have to transcribe it all by hand if I can possibly avoid it... That is something I can work with, though, so thank you.

...does anybody happen to have it all in one spot? I'm mainly looking for the knowledge base information on the planets in the Kerbol system. Barring that, can anybody tell me where that information is in the game? I've been searching for it for a couple of days now without success.

No argument there... Well, they actually do look like that in RL; central cask and cooling vanes.

I would think either Gigantors or RTGs would suffice, not necessarily both. My personal preference is RTGs of course (because they aren't reliant on Kerbol to supply power) but everyone will tell you they have a pretty lousy mass-to-power production ratio. In my experience, a large battery bank will suffice to get you through the night and the Gigantors charge them up rapidly upon sunrise. I also use a trio of Gigantors; that way at least two panels face the sun even if the third is blocked due to the craft's orientation. If you take a sufficient number of RTGs, you shouldn't need batteries at all...only time I've had issues with them is when I've had to power up an ion thruster.

I managed to get a circumlunar orbit over the weekend. Required a correction burn, but I did get the trajectory. Took a second burn to adjust my inclination; I don't count that one, though. I did make a subsequent attempt without further success, though. I suppose this is just something that's going to require practice.

Tinkered with the Castle Zulu design a bit to get all the criteria in for the Doing it Apollo Style challenge. After my changes, the booster could no longer make orbit (not enough thrust in the second stage). So that's going to have to get redesigned. Decided I should try a dry run, so I fired up my first ship - the Fireball 7 - and sent Jeb out to Tranquility Base (the Cerberus 7 lander) for an attempt at a targeted landing using Bullseye (the Hellhound 7 rover I'd left parked at the memorial). Jeb landed a little over a kilometer from Bullseye and about 900 meters from Tranquility; he's going to have to do better than that if he wants to get maximum points for the challenge, of course. He did take the opportunity to jetpack out to Bullseye, plant a flag in its place and take Bullseye out for a little jaunt, fixing the two wheels it broke on its initial trek to the Memorial. He drove up to Tranquility and then headed back to his Fireball. Once aboard, Bullseye drove itself back to Jeb's flag and Jeb came home. All in all a successful mission, but I think next time we'll try things in an Apocalypse 7 lander - for all its shortcomings, the Fireball is less massive than the Apocalypse lander and therefore has a higher TWR (both are powered by LV-909s). The redesigned Castle Zulu will probably be harder to land than either of them, but the Apocalypse should be closer to the final "experience". Actually, something just occurred to me...I should take the Castle Zulu lander out there by itself.