capi3101

Hey y'all. Been a while. Been participating in Scott Manley's Runway Project lately, so I've been dabbling with autopiloted fighter craft in KSP a lot since October. Been doing okay-ish so far; had a plane get into the top twenty during the third round. Still not sure just how well my fourth round plane did but I got top marks for art, so that's not nothing. Meanwhile, I've begun work on my fifth round plane. Testing is...testing. Here's Bob riding the remains of his plane like Slim Pickens on an atomic bomb... This is not my plane for the fifth round, just to clarify - this was when I was tired with testing and decided to take a break for some fun.

Spoiler shields. All I'm saying.

You are using the KIS (Kerbal Inventory System) inventory right? Not the stock inventory system - the two are incompatable with one another and Pathfinder uses KIS's system.

No problem. If you do find yourself having additional issues, feel free to ask; I've got a fair amount of free time coming up in the near future.

For minerals, double-check to make sure that they are present in the biome in which your base is located. Use a Geology Lab or a surface scanner to make the determination. If you do have Minerals present, your drills oughta be bringing it up. If they aren't, set up some dedicated storage. Slag will also require a dedicated storage unit. I have had issues getting Slag in the past; I'm trying to remember if there was another step involved or not. Check your Rock first. If you've got it, use it. Most bodies in the system don't have it. But then there's the Ore Melter converter...which is incidentally another good reason to pack a Micro ISRU with your build. Once again, check to make sure it's in the biome. Anytime you shift modes, always go to your Geology Lab and make sure everything's there... The Castillo structures will have omniconverters once you can get them built.

Precious Metals and Minerite are present in Classic Stock mode only; switching to CRP mode will change those to Rare Metals and Minerals. Switching game modes will change the concentrations of whatever resources are available at the site on which you're attempting to build, fair warning - you always want to be sure to do as thorough of an orbital biome survey as you can manage ahead of establishing a base at a particular site so that you can be sure you can expand it in situ if that's what you're planning on doing. For that reason, I'd recommend putting your base-seeding equipment on a rover, so that if need be you can pack up and move to another biome. I would also recommend including at least one Micro ISRU unit so that, if needed, you can print up equipment from alternative resources. Resource concentrations to pay attention to are Rare/Precious Metals, Minerals/Minerite, Rock, Metal Ore, Ore, Exotic Minerals and Uraninite, in that order of importance. Most sites won't have Rock but where it exists, it's a pretty awesome way to make Konkrete when the time comes. A polar-orbiting satellite with a narrow band scanner can tell you the concentrations of each biome as it passes over, and it's the fastest way of determining the optimal biome in which to put your base. You want to do that ahead of sending your base-seeding mission, so that if you decide you want to put your base somewhere off a world's equator you can do the necessary plane changes while it won't cost a lot of delta-v. Make sure to have storage dedicated to whatever you're wanting to dig up, whether that's a dedicated Chuckwagon or an Omni Chuckwagon set to specific resources - sometimes the game won't mine something without the storage in place. If you continue to have issues/questions, feel free to ask away; I or others here will do our best to answer them.

Finished week 1 of Scott Manley's Runway Project. My flippy-little plane moved from 165th place up to 91st thanks to artwork. Begun work on Week 2. Wondering just how well three GAU-8s are going to work on a DC-10 anyway...

The eldest and I spent the last couple of days building a fighter plane for Scott Manley's Runway Project. Quite a different experience for me, a seasoned spaceplane veteran, to build a plane with the exact opposite characteristics of what makes for a good SSTO plane. Plane itself was a decent enough design but I'm pretty sure BD Armory's AI doesn't like me very much. The fact that it had to be armed with an Abrams tank turret also threw me off a bit. Second half of the challenge is artwork; I might post whatever the boy and I come up with here in a few days after we've submitted our entry. I wish I had screenies of the plane itself to share with y'all.

Yeah...the old way of switching modes was to switch to Pristine, then exit the game, then switch to what you wanted, then exit the game, then restart the game. Changing the setting by hand or not following this process exactly was a surefire way to bork the mod completely. Nowadays, you let CKAN handle it - pick one game mode and ignore the others. Sometimes though, you have to fiddle with the configuration files. I mean, I've had to do that every version with the Pipelines. Then again, I like the idea of shooting ten tonnes into orbit around Eve from the surface. Is that cheating? Yeah, in that case, almost certainly...

How exactly did you go about switching it to CRP; did you use CKAN, and if so, did you do a full uninstall/reinstall? If not, you'll need to do that at this point. You might need to do that anyway - Precious Metals doesn't exist in CRP mode; the equivalent resource is Rare Metals (if I recall correctly, it's Rare Metals that gets used for Equipment printing in CRP mode.). And 'Minerite' becomes 'Minerals'. And you'll need to do a fresh scan with your Geology Lab or Surface scanner to verify they exist in the biome in which you're located. I used CRP mode for a long time. Frankly, I like it better than Classic Stock (which I switched over to with 1.9), but that's just me.

Okay. Assuming you didn't use CKAN to install the mod, let me see if I remember how to check this manually... So, you want to go to C:/Kerbal Space Program (or whereever you've got the game installed)/GameData/ and find the file WBIPlayMode.cfg. Open that file up in a plain text editor of your choice (Notepad will do the trick just fine in Windows). It should have something that looks like this: WBIPLAYMODESETTING { name = CRP } We're interested in what you've got where it says "name = ". If it matches mine (i.e. if you're playing in CRP mode, or really anything if it says anything other than Classic Stock), that would explain your issue; Precious Metals and Minerite are endemic to Classic Stock mode only. (I was just thinking that I had an old version of the game/mod I was looking at, and it is - it's my KSP 1.8 save. Process would still be valid, though.)

Which mode are you using?

I'll ask you the 'is it plugged in' questions first - have you verified that Precious Minerals and Minerite are in the biome in which you're located (check via the Geology Lab or with a surface scanner), do you have a dedicated storage area available designated for these two resources at your base, and what kind of drills are you trying to utilize?

Bug. Been there a while. Not just the 0.625m drive. The Alcubierre Drive doesn't handle atmo well at all - had an Alcubierre-equipped probe (0.625 meter engine again) that I attempted to deorbit once. Thing sped up when it hit the atmo until it blew up. Tried the flight again with a pair of 10 meter heat shields attached. Slowed down until it stopped slowing down, then the stupid thing held velocity until the heat shields exploded, then it sped up again anyway... It's called "exotic matter" for a reason, I guess... Not sure if I ever reported the behavior or not. That was a few versions back and when it happened I failed to grab my log file; no log file, tough dooky (as it should be). EDIT: I made the exotic matter quip as a joke, but out of curiousity does it do the same thing if you empty the tank first?

The trick is to put yourself on a trajectory directly towards or directly away from Kerbol at relatively close range, then watch your relative speed to target (the target being where it is you want to go). When you're at a relative velocity close to the orbital velocity at your destination, you can warp there directly. If your relative velocity starts to creep upward again, you can either warp from there or reposition yourself over Kerbol such that the relative velocity starts to go back down again. I have a YouTube video on navigating with the mod that's a few years old now; largely still applicable. I'll have to find the link again... EDIT: Here we go. I apologize for the quality; at the time I recorded it on the best terminal I had available to me...which was my work computer. Not designed for gaming even back then. Can't play KSP on it any more... The stock power requirements have increased significantly since the video was made, incidentally. You can read about those in the video's comments.

Pipelines are effective within the SOI of the body in which they're located. If you want to shoot something from Moho out to Eeloo, for example, you're out of luck - even Mun to Minmus is a no-go, but you can have a Pipeline connect between the edge of Kerbin's SOI and LKO for example. The minimum distance is physics range; the sending and receiving ends cannot be within physics range of one another. Maximum distance is dependent on power, to which there is a limit. Default is something like ten tonnes at a time to Mun orbit, which is not terribly helpful if you want to send a lot from, say, the surface of Eve to Eve orbit. If you're willing to fiddle with the configuration settings, you can do more with pipelines; the aforementioned Eve surface shot was something I was doing regularly a few versions back. I would have to look up the specific configuration setting to adjust though. Travel time is instantaneous, but - and this is critical - there has to be sufficient dedicated storage for what you're attempting to shoot, and it has to be unlocked. Otherwise it will just up and vanish on you. I usually just attach the damn thing directly to the end of a Hacienda, mash go and run like hell. On a world where you can jetpack, you can land directly on top of the thing, have your jetpack turned on and just fly off... Spyglass is pretty much worthless. I'll just say that. And yeah, they do have a tendency to explode with new craft. I quicksave before finalizing new craft as a rule, and if possible I try to have another Rangeland printed up in case something goes completely south. It's good practice with MOLE's orbital shipyards as well - sometimes what you built just ain't gonna fit in the drydock... Wish I could give you better advice here. You'll need to have dedicated Gravolium storage set up somewhere, whether as part of a Castillo or Chuckwagon, and you'll have to use a Hacienda/Claim Jumper to get to it; the stock drills haven't worked with the mod properly since about 1.3 or so.

Well, at the very least he has the weight of a plane on his head, but I get your point...

Well, I had a response all ready to go for you...I'll leave it here. But then I read the part about this going to LEO, not LKO, so never mind. Good luck getting all that up in a single thwack...

Okay...basic "is it plugged in" questions: are you using Kerbal Inventory System, and did you pack a screwdriver?

Yeah, just turn on your drills and you should start seeing whatever resources you've got in the biome in which you're parked flow into your base, provided you've got somewhere to store them. Which is when I should mention that the Hacienda/Claim Jumper configuration generally works better than the stock drills, and way better than the piece of crap Buffalo drill. More general advice: Nuclear power. You want to get off of solar as fast as you can, and nuclear is usually reliable. As in "not going to make everybody glow in the dark if your base spontaneously combusts" reliable. Geothermal works if it's available (which it often isn't) but not as well. I usually pack along 6 SAFER reactors with my base-seeding equipment; that much provides plenty of power for a growing base, definitely enough until you can get more dedicated reactor units going, and even then they're still useful. A lot of how much success you'll have with a Pathfinder base depends on how much surveying work you do ahead of time. Before you put a base out there, you want to get your communications network established for the world and then get a surveying satellite in polar orbit. Make sure it's got a Narrow-Band Scanner installed (not the Survey Scanner - you want the hexagon-shaped one that spins). Since you're in CRP mode, you want to set the bandwidths to look for Rare Metals, Minerals, Rock, Metal Ore, Ore, Exotic Minerals and Uraninite and you want to keep track of the biomes in which you're seeing the materials. Rare Metals are the key - without them, you're not making Equipment in-situ, which means you won't be expanding your base without imports (you'll also need OSE Workshop installed, I believe). Minerals are used for a couple of things, such as Konkrete production. Rock is not really needed everywhere - which is good since it's actually fairly rare as a resource - but it's a fast Konkrete solution. Metal Ore you need if you're going to be using your base as a remote launch site (i.e. you also have Extraplanetary Launchpads installed). Ore is ore. Exotic Minerals is the other main ingredient for Equipment manufacture, but you can get around it if you've got Mini ISRUs available (they can be configured to make Equipment on Rare Metals only). Uraninite is for making Enriched Uranium, which you need for nuclear reactors. When I'm done surveying, I look for areas along the equator in the biome that I want to try to inhabit. Usually I've got a biome missing some resources so I look for biome boundaries where the missing resources become available - a reason to put your base-seeding equipment on a manned rover. A way to get biome maps helps here, as they can provide you with good landing coordinates so you don't have to rove so much - places like Mun make for quite dangerous driving.

Ah, the old floating base bug...I don't know what causes it, but it's not a specific interaction with any other mods; it'll do that with stock terrain too. Not all the time either. My advice: on high-gravity worlds, pack a ladder. The alternative is watching your base spontaneously combust for no damn reason on loading. Between the option of that or putting up with a self-levitating base, I tend to wanna go with levitation... As far as getting resources is concerned, attach a storage unit dedicated to whatever it is that you want to be digging up. Chuckwagons are your best bet - you either want one configured specifically for that resource, or an OmniStorage unit with that resource added to it (IIRC OmniStorage in CRP mode is only available with the Castillos, so you'll probably need the dedicated Wagon).

Oh boy...this one I'm not sure I can help you with. I want to say they (i.e. Angel) made a change a version or two ago that let you pick what mode you wanted to play with on CKAN. I could be completely and totally wrong about this. The old way of dealing with the problem was to fire up KSP, switch to Pristine Mode, quit, fire up KSP, then switch to whatever the final mode it was that you wanted to use. I don't know if that would still work or not.

Simplified Mode and Pristine Mode, unless I'm mistaken, don't have the necessary underlying templates in place for Snack Production - you'll either need Classic Stock or CRP mode to make snacks in-situ. The inputs are Water, Compost/Fertilizer (depending on which mode) and Electric Charge.

Nope. Pathfinder.

The port is from the early days of the mod; alas that changes to KIS over the years made the port on the Saddle go away. Best advice I can give you is to pack a pair of Mineshaft crew ports. Go ahead and attach your Saddle to the ground and put a Pondarosa on it, then attach one Mineshaft to the top and another to your Equipment source. Should be able to mash go at that point. Quicksave before you attach the Saddle to the ground or the Pondy to the Saddle; I've had issues with spontaneous combustion in the past with both activities. Hopefully you get this reply before you've got something off-Kerbin...