vidboi

Alright, here's a bit post coming up with 8 different construction techniques and tricks that I've been using for a while. I doubt many of them are that unique though! 1. Quad chambered 2.5m engine - the LV-T180 A useful analogue for the RD-170 or similar, this engine uses 4 LV-T45s and provides a useful lift engine with a bit more power and efficiency than the Skipper. To make it, simply attach an LV-T45 to the top of two cubic octagonal struts (as shown below) flip upside down and attach 4 to the top of 2.5m-1.25m adapter. Smoothing can be done using nosecones or similar, but then fuel lines are required. 2. Larger podded engine - the R96 vernier Goes well with the T180 for a soyuz like look, the R96 uses two 48-77s in a covered pod. No fuel lines required! Attach a cubic octagonal strut to the bottom/side of a fuel tank facing downwards, then add cubic octagonal struts on either side facing downwards with small fuel tanks and 48-77s at the ends. Attach a rover body to the radial attachment end of a cubic octagonal strut then place said strut on the inside of the root cubic octagonal strut, angled 15 degrees upwards. 3. Standard docking port with navigation lights. I now use this in place of all standard docking ports. Simply place 4 small batteries rotated inwards on the sides of a part beneath the docking port (e.g. a z-1000 battery) so that the lights on the top stick out. Highly visible without whitewashing everything nearby! 4. Size 1.5 parts Handy for lots of places where 2.5m parts are too big and 1.25m parts too small. I use these mainly for adding decoration to space station modules. First take one truss piece. Take a 1.25m part and rotate it 180 degrees to it faces inwards when radially attaching. And radially attach with 4x symmetry (or more for a smoother look, I find 4 is a good balance between aesthetics and part count). 5. Ring Structures Purely aesthetic, these weight quite a lot and use plenty of parts, but they look awesome! Start by building the support structure for the ring and the basic repeated section for the ring. Copy the basic section and built outwards in a straight line before curling the ring inwards from the outside. For example here, each section in curled inwards by 30 degrees, so the half ring is made from 6 sections. When finished rotate the whole lot inwards by half the rotation of each section (e.g. 15 degrees here). And then copy, flip, and place the duplicate on the ring support to form a whole ring. This can be done in many sizes and shapes. Try multiple supports (e.g 2, building a quarter of the ring at a time) or non-circular rings. 6. Radar-Style comms dish Looks pretty cool on large vessels or bases. First, place a column of 5 cubic octagonal struts on top of the base of the dish. Then attach a pair of medium antennas rotated inwards by 15 degrees at the top of the second cubic octagonal strut. Rotate and reattach the column of cubic octagonal struts, add a 1.25-0.625m adapter at the base of the column and decorate to your hearts content! 7. Stubby 1.25m Nosecone - VAB/SPH A 0.625m nosecone placed on top of a 1.25m-0.625m adapter looks really naff. By offsetting the nosecone, it can be made to look much smoother. Simply clip an octagonal strut into the top of the adapter, then attach the nose cone to the bottom of that. 8. Non-heatproof mk2/3 fuselages - SPH The mk2/3 heatproof tiles look a bit odd if, say, used on a transport aircraft... This technique covers them up and gives extra fuselage space to boot! Base the fuselage around an I beam - this provides both strength and preserves the centre point. Attach a cubic octagonal strut either side using symmetry. Attach a fuselage piece to the cubic octagonal struts with symmetry enabled, and rotate so that the underside is facing inwards. Then rotate the I beam 90 degrees to get the fuselages on the top and bottom. This can also be done with mk3 fuselages, one mk3 on top and a mk2 on the bottom or vice versa. The whole reasoning behind this is to prevent the ugly clipping of textures that happens with the ends when clipped directly to the centreline of the fuselages. Hope some of that helps!

A normal gravity turn starts with a pitch down by 15 degrees between 5000m and 7500m. Yes, that is slightly below the knuckle in the gravity-drag plot, but the delta-v requirements for starting late greatly outweigh the losses for starting early, especially with slower lifters. Science!

Currently working on going bigger and better: That's a Nova-C8 design for an Apollo style Alternis-Kerbol Mun mission. It needs to be able to send an orbiter, lander and a long term hab with enough fuel to propel itself back to Kerbin to the other moons of Jool. Given that the Mun is larger and harder to land on in Alternis and that I tend to overdesign things for aesthetics over efficiency means that a pretty big rocket is required...

Certainly makes for good looking and effective landers, I think I've been developing one along the same lines since v0.21/0.20? It's definitely more fun than just using the lander can! All this minimalist/efficiency talk is starting to get me down though, what we need here is some serious lifting power! A Nova C8 style rocket that I've finally managed to make stable. It's being designed for an Apollo style Mun mission in Alternis-Kerbol - with the addition of a long term hab vehicle for the crew for the way to and from the Mun.

Normally designing new lifters is fairly trivial. Not today however...

Not really any glitch, just "Kraken" glitches. In this case it's using the phantom unbalanced forces that can rip your ship apart to provide useful propulsion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_elements The argument of periapse determines how far round the orbit the periapse, the mean anomaly at epoch determines where the planet is at a certain time (the epoch) so if the epoch is set to 0 then it's the start position of the planet. I'd guess that these values use radians and vary from 0 to 2pi

No, it's not an eclipse, because Mercury and Venus don't obscure the sun when viewed from Earth. They're properly called transitions.

It's the way the new resources system works - now instead of immediately flaming out the engine will use every last bit of fuel available (in this case intake air), reducing it's thrust whilst doing so. It's a neat feature

Consider those running on 32-bit operating systems where application can only use 2GB of ram. In that case part count and complexity has very little effect, but with KSP's stock memory usage you really can't afford part mods. In general with collaboration projects it's best to avoid part mods as far as is possible. As RLA doesn't really expand the game very much I'd say it's far from high priority, despite it being a very nice mod.

But can you land in anger instead? Practice makes perfect though. I really need to get around to making functional SSTOs again, I think my last entry here was in v0.20...

There are multiple pages for sub-assemblies - just click the right and left buttons like on the other part selection tabs! (although to be fair, I think it took me a while to notice that...) But yes, the lack of categories and deleting parts is annoying, although I'd like a proper directory system for sub-assemblies, the mod system felt quite limiting, especially when unsure of which category something fitted in.

Definitely this. All the problems I've encountered with struts/fuel lines not connecting when using sub-assemblies can be traced back to using alt-click rather than just dragging the actual part (remember to save your ship first so you don't actually lose the sub-assembly part...). AFAIK it's because struts and fuel lines are only connected upon placement after copying and so aren't actually saved as placed when copying to a sub-assembly.

Decided to do some testing of rovers and bases in the desert/polar regions before sending them to other planets. Of course, using a rocket to get them over there would be far to easy, so I built a large cargo plane instead. Thompfield appears to approve of its agility atleast!

I doubt it's anything to do with trademark or copyright, KSP has always striven to not exactly replicate real life - calling it SABRE would have gone against the whole style of the game

"CTV-1 you are cleared to dock"

I'd actually like to see these in the reverse order given here. The current cloud are still really nice, and getting landing effects and other cool things would really add massively to the game experience.

Sounds like the below sea level bug; everything goes dark (apart from lights on the ship) when the camera's below 0m altitude.

The ships in orbit around sun/launching around sun bug has just started cropping up for me repeatedly with Jool in that position. The only thing I can think of is that Kerbin is currently crossing the orbit of Jool around the Sun, which could be causing a problem. (I faintly remember some similar problem being mentioned before to do with crossing orbits, but I can't remember what it actually concerned). Other than that I can't offer any more help :/ perhaps releasing the updated version without the complete fix could help to produce more helpful bug reports?

Interestingly, I've found that my game runs faster with Alternis installed, and I've heard others say the same thing.

No, you still don't quite understand. Overclocking RAM doesn't increase the amount of memory it has (that's entirely hardware dependent) but increases the speed at which the memory can be accessed. I'd expect that running at a higher frequency would give the best results still, but I don't expect it to have much of an effect on overall performance due to the main limit being processing power.

It's Nova's new Alternis Kerbol system: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/63536-0-23-Alternis-Kerbol-Release-thread-v0-0-Dec-25-Mind-the-bugs It's beautiful

There's a launch button in the top right of that window iirc

Looking around the spacecraft exchange (and in particular the showcase thread) I realised their isn't a thread for posting large, multi-part interplanetary ships or 'motherships'. As these creations are something many of us are very proud of, I thought I'd make one, so go ahead and show off your biggest and best! To get us started, here's the Cassiopeia crew transport and Cepheus cargo ship: