Tw1

You probably know airfield island. The dedicated runway means it's not too hard to get to. But, the other three members of that island chain are not so hospitable. Steep sides, small area, inaccessible to boat, and a nightmare landing for a plane. Sure, I could land there with a rocket, but what's the fun in that? I wanted to paratroop kerbals in, to finally mark, and name these islands. At first, I tried using EVA parachutes. But, they don't always activate on time. My para-kerbals ended up rolling down the sides, or missing the islands completely. Plus, my plane was not the most maneuverable thing ever, and it was hard to stay within the render distance until the kerbal touched down. Looks like this approach is lacking. New plan: Drop pods! After some subfunctional designs, including this, which would've used infernal robotics to lift its engines away from the path of the ejected pod: It did a good job of going around in circles, and the unconventional wing shape made it almost uncontrollable. I then made this: Far more maneuverable. A girder structure to hold the engines in position, and away from the path of the pods. Perfect. Off we go! Thought about landing at Airstrip Island to make a quicksave, but decided against it. We were headed straight for the first target. As the plane approached, pilot Ludous cut the engines, to reduce the amount of speed the parachute would need to kill. Then.. Fsssssssh! The little seperatrons pushed the pod clear, combined with the parachutes sent it into a tumble. Ludous immediately began a series of tight circles, keeping the pod within render distance. Round, and round.. waiting for the parachute to vanish, confirming a successful landing. But it did not. It should've landed by now! Surely it didn't take this long for a pod with a parachute to hit the ground! Ludous was instructed to to a close pass over the pod. On close inspection, it appeared that the pod had indeed landed, just that the parachute was still visible. Only one way to confirm. Nervously, Ludous turned the plane towards the next island. We watched, as the distance between pod and plane increased. 2.2Km... 2.3km... 2.5Km... 2.6km! Lack of the marker vanishing indicates survival! It worked. Bilald was quite exited. As it was his turn next! Passing low over the next island, Bilald was dropped of without a hitch. 2/3 Islands visited. Now, the third. This one would be sightly trickier than the others. It was very narrow, but Ludous could see some patches of grass. As long as the pod was dropped on one of them, they should be fine. They turned to pass longways, over the island. Success! Now, there's just to land the plane. The original plan was to land at Airstrip island, and have Ludous plant a flag there. But, without the weight of the pods, this plane was now pretty unstable. And Ludous, who'd never even flown before, was more than a little nervous about landing. So instead, I decided I'll send someone else to plant the flag on Airstrip island, and land near KSC. We made a nice big spiral.. *Random stuff blowing up* And came to a stop Right in front of the VAB. While it may not be quite as ambitious as a landing on Eve or Duna, It was about time someone set foot on those islands, east of KSC. :cool:

Introducing The Kerbmobile MK2! Bigger wheels! Faster! Now with 20% less chance it will roll and kill the occupants! Just look how exited they are to be driving it!

Mustache! Carbonite! The final connection. Or at least, I would've been, had I not decided to pull them all up when they stared behaving really buggy. I will go back to cables next time.

My Evepod is loading again! Turns out it was the mapsat chip bugging things up. I'm so glad to have it back, a lot of careful design went into that thing. I drove it into the sunset. Then, I took it for a spin in the ocean. It is carefully tuned to KSP water physics. For the final part of the shakedown, I took it to Airstrip Island, where it demonstrated its terrain handing capability. It's ready for the long term mission. We leave for Eve at the next window. After sheltering the heat and acid-proof vehicle in the sheds, I derped around the Old Airfield for a while. With these, a mechjeb and an RTG, I made the tower into a temporary lighthouse.

I would like science to be more than just a points system. I maximise the amount of data I get per mission not with earning more parts in mind, but because I want my kerbals to learn and discover stuff. I made this suggestion in another thread, as an idea to make science more than a grind. Missions/contracts might be an interesting distraction, but I want to explore and discover when I venture out to space.

Lots of good ideas here. I'd like to add some more to the pile. Science per planet Currently, science points are the same no matter were they are collected. Moving on to a harder planet is simple rewarded by more points, making points gain the motivating factor. In sandbox, the motivations where more a combo of seeing if you could do it, and to go explore there- we didn't need to be pushed along. Perhaps science could be collected per body. This would make it seem more purposeful when you go somewhere. Going to Duna to find out about Duna, not just because you need more points. This would be on top of the point earning system. Data collation, and analysis. Rather than just collecting points, it would be cool if you could gather actual data about the body, such as mineral compositions in a certain area, gravity data, terrain info etc. Though the "Value" would diminish, you'd still get something out of doing multiple experiments in the same area. Over time you could build up a profile of the planet, accessible in the R&D building. These profiles could be done in a way so it doesn't feel like you're just unlocking info, but collecting it. It could have tables, maps, graphs and messages from happy kerbal scientists. Some basic information sorting would be nice, maybe. But that could be overkill. Variance In real life, data from experiments isn't away the same every time- there can be variation. For example, if soil data gets added, surface composition tests could return values like this: Duna plains regolith analysis: Haematite 76.54% Quartz 14.23% Goethite 5.70% Hydration: 0.51% Other: Frozen CO2: 3.02% The amounts of different minerals could vary based on distance from certain points, so you don't have to travel for kilometers for different results. This way, your rover could drill the dirt many times, and each time get a unique result after analysis. One could argue that you can see things much better from outside the pod, but that's about it. It makes sense when you are landed though, that the crew's experience would be different to when inside a pod.

Have a look around Airstrip island. There are areas there that remind me of the graveyard you could build in Simcity 4. You could plant a flag for each fallen kerbal.

It would make sense, but Unity seems to handle collisions in an all or nothing kind of way. Though I was reading earlier on the Unity forum that you could put an extra collider underneath, to catch them when the first collider misses- and the train getting stuck into the track is a much bigger problem ATM. I did PM another mod maker who may have a method of adding some sort of magnetic force along the track- that would help soften impacts and prevent sinking in. He hasn't been here for a few days though.

Surely you would use this lovely picture of Nick Cage to politely explain you aren't doing any requests..

I'm pretty sure it only changes to the number you set after you save and reload. Or perhaps that part of Kerbtown is still broken. Been trying it on straights. My entrance piece works fine, but so far, going over about 230 Km/h (65ms-1) usually causes problems. I was talking to a friend about stuff, and this mod came up. Though I can't write one from scratch, he suggested there might be free code out there I could use to achieve things. Nothing that useful was found, apart from a script that's supposed to reduce these track immersion events, but not sure if it's working. Some bits seemed smoother. I can go around a curve. Only slowly so far. It doesn't help that the suspension on the inner wheels moves up and down ATM, rather than in and out. But I did solve the exploding on reload issue by moving the rigidbody- the bit that gives it physics- so it wouldn't be inside the track. As Nothke got the multiwheels based thing up to much faster than this, I'm sure it's possible somehow. 'Just' got to solve those suspension and collision issues.

Wow. looks like I missed an update. Hope it's not using too much more memory.. Except, that looks like it's all grid based. Any chance we could mix things up a little, with some radial, or unplanned city forms? I'll be cool to see your net light map, I hope you take the opportunity to modify a few things- Kerbin City doesn't really stand out in what I've got, perhaps it could do with some satellite cities. I like how you can see the lights from the Mun. It may not be so realistic, but it helps make it seem more lively. And the Mun more lonely...

In my 0.20 Apollo mission album, one image is captioned something like this: That's one small faceplant for Kerman, one giant faceplant for Kerbal kind.... Wait, that doesn't work.... Uh... Anyway Kerbals have now planted face on the Mun.

All of them, found in the univerce replacer thread floating around in orbit, some other space programs clearly weren't having much luck.. This was a handy find when all my white ones needed washing...

On lighthouse duty. Watching over. Allways. It was trickier than expected to get this here. Flying with style. Not just a flag. It's a science becon! It has the ship's barometer on it, incase Minmus suddenly develops an atmosphere. Bob would've happily kept pulling things of the spaceship and bolding them to the flag if I had let him. Bob, A.K.A "stoneeater" Lastly: Something's happened to my kerbals?

It happened again! I forgot to move the parachute out from the first stage, so it deployed at luach. rather than abort the flight, I slowed it to a crawl, and had Erbald EVA to cut it and pack a new one. However, the Erbald who went outside could not get back in, as another (the original?) was already there. So I deployed the EVA parachute, and let Erbald II fall. I like the pod/cockpit symbiotic relationship theory. It goes some way to explain why you always need a pod if you want to get a kerbal. That's where they come from. You can get them from seats.

This is my approach to doing assignments...

I set up a simple plane. The mission- drop a kerbal on each of the three islands that were not airstrip island. (Using EVA parachutes.) To find out which pod Matdas was in, I EVA'd him. Then he took a half-step down, and tried to get back in, but... There was another kerbal in there! Another "Matdas Kerman" in the same spot as the first. I got this one out the same way. ..And another took his place. Soon, I had a whole stream of Matdas Kermani, with a few of the other guys as well. Eventually, it stopped working. Perhaps because the plane had stopped rolling, perhaps I was moving them differently. One kerbal EVA'd and was not cloned. But, when I put him back, he vanished? I tried grabbing one of the clones, and putting him in the cockpit. He vanished as well! My maker of kerbals had become an eater of kerbals. So I decided to continue with two only. I put my many Matdas Kermani somewhere out of the way. The rail track. Perfect! Watched as my plane collapsed, launched a new one... And continued on the mission, which had a 1/3 success, crashed on landing at airstrip island, and ultimately crashing the game... Not quite sure what was going on, perhaps some weird bug of crewmanifest, who's icon has been awol for a while now, or just another version of the older bug that could make multiple kerbals show up in the same ship. But it made for an interesting session.

Down at the bottom, there should be a little spot where you can type a number to set the render distance.

Most Of them were called "untitled space craft" In fact, many of my creations with a single, one of purpose have been called that... In seriousness, the first one I named was QAWS or something like that. I don't know what it stands for, you'll have to ask my Kerbals. (I button mashed.)

I think a lot of us here agree that any arbitrary limits would kill the feel of this game, where you can attempt anything you like as with what you have on hand, and the only other limitations are your own abilities. I personally hope the other reasonable limit they could/will probably add, budgets, will be balanced well so you can try a variety of things. Perhaps could use the resources you have to go to Duna, or to Eve, or send probes further out, but it's your choice what you do. But though the proposed method is lacking, the core idea deserves some attention: This is a reasonable point. Currently, science collection is just for the fun of it once you've finished the tech tree. I enjoy collecting every last bit of data I can, but mystery goo might become just a gimmick after a while. How could they keep the game about the science? Perhaps science will be linked to budget, and the more valuable science you bring back (total, per cost, per mission, per time, etc,) increases the budget available. Over time, you'd either max out the budget, or collect so much science that budget increases become very slow. Perhaps science can be used to complete profiles of each planet, which you can look at, or maybe science can be used to reveal special features of a planet, which could then inform future missions. One possible problem is the diminishing returns- though it makes sense when unlocking stuff, it'll be a little disappointing when a mission to the Mun has no scientific value. That makes click to collect science, like with the Goo, a little less interesting in the long term. More science experiments, that give you data you can keep, (a big display of all the rocks you've collected, measurements taken,) or things that give you something to do (hitting golf balls, science lasers, chemicals you can pour on the dust) could keep science interesting for the long term. A data collected screen, (as a tab on the current science collection record) would be more interesting than "Sample from Mun- 0.0 science value" and active experiments will be an experience in their own right. I find a lot of the fun in this game comes from roleplay, and using your imagination. After all, science is not something you get, it's something you do. Pre-0.22 science experiments. I think that is something the developers should keep in mind. As long as it feels like our kerbals are achieving something, it's cool. If they do have "missions" that you have to do, this is how I'd like to see it done. You declare what you aim to do, then attempt to do it. You could change plan part way, and there would have to be a system for dealing with that. If you fail, (however that is defined), then you loose reputation, get no/less money, etc. But I prefer just going and doing science. There are plenty of games in the style of "Run (insert business activity here) and make millions!" I hope kerbal doesn't make earning money a big goal.

Bill and Jeb have either got really mad at each other, or are just trying to freak out the rest of KSC's staff. By Gunfighting. Who's got the fastest draw on Kerbin? My "first" plane! Jeb and I like it. Sooo close. Yet so far.. Sudden unplanned spelunking. Awesome. You cannot plant a flag under the VAB. It doesn't work.

I talked with Kospy about creating KAS pipe like track, but doing it will meshes is a little different to using a cylinder primitive, which is what KAS does. Possible, but tricky, so I don't think I'll try that. Instead, I'm trying something else. The problem was bumps in the track: Hopefully, a tapered end on the track will let wheels roll over the connection smoothly. The taper with is about the same as the bogie suspension, or at least, it will be soon enough. This should do for connections, until better options are available from the kerbtown plugin. I also made a curve part, bit by bit in sketchup. There's got to be a better way, to make them, but I have yet to find it. Something wrong with which parts stay visible at the moment, as can be seen in this photo. Not sure why that one has the other wheels on, must've been for testing something else.

Mucking around at KSC, and I realised, we aught to put a narrow alleyway somewhere in the main island. For reasons. "This town ain't big enough for the two of us!" Some interesting ideas- I didn't think there would be any groundwater issues in a coastal location. You learn something every day, I guess. I suspect the reason for putting the seaport so far back was to make sure it's sheltered, though I see what you mean by it would be cheaper. But it would be more interesting to sail all the way through the city to get to it. Perhaps a marina could go in the back instead. Having the sea port further forward would make less trouble with bridges- otherwise, the lower road, and rail bridges may need some sort of opening mechanism to make sense, then again, that could be a feature. One problem I spotted- the river outlet/tidal channel is blocked. That's a very low patch marked out in this diagram. (More of an urban design perspective) Another thing- locating a train depot there could work, maybe, Were you thinking stabling, or just freight? But I wouldn't put the power generators near there, they'll be interrupting the view out to sea from the city. I'd also stick with one larger central island, rather than two, as you can have a more interesting layout in that sort of area. Maybe Nothke will make that one look as though it was always there, rather than recalled, with sloping edges. But Bijebo island is a clever name. I like the idea of the dyke, or seawall of some sort that you could walk along. That would be cool.

No struts? No launch clamps? No problem! After a partial unplanned disassembly, we decided to abort to orbit. Mun orbit that was! Melmy had a big sad face on when he had to leave the Mun without landing. But it was ok. With a little adjustments to the QDAW3 vessel: The lander wasn't supposed to land sideways, but it wasn't too much of a hindrance to take off again. I also had to delete the plugins for Kethane and Ioncross life support, as they were giving me trouble. They can come back in when they are ready to behave. Strangely, their absence has made the thing that gives a parachute to every kerbal work, and quite a couple of kerbals are alive because of this.