KSK

Going with Iain M. Banks theme again, I think GSV (for General Systems Vehicle) has a nice ring to it, especially given the scope of ambition for the thing.

Hi folks, I'm trying my hand at writing a ModuleManager patch to replace the stock part descriptions and stock tech tree node descriptions with my own versions. @Snark and @5thHorseman have been kind enough to get me started with some code snippets but I'm not having much luck getting ModuleManager to load my patches. Basic details OS X 10.10.5 (Yosemite) KSP version ID: 1804 ModuleManager version 2.8.1 Screenshot of my GameData folder KISPartDes.cfg and KISTechtree.cfg are my alleged patches. I'm not much of a mod user (never mind a modder ), so my best guess is that I'm doing something basically dumb. If anyone could help me get up and running that would be much appreciated! Thanks, KSK.

Hmm, it could be that the Death Star was orbiting at the lowest possible altitude where it wasnt' unduly affected by atmospheric drag. Although admittedly, that's overthinking things for Star Wars and would also be super lame if the Empire got it wrong. "Rebel base in firing range, sir." "Excellent - you may fire when ready." Wah, wah, wah, wahhhhhh "The Rebel base appears to be still intact, lieutnenant?" "Yessir. Superlaser firing sequence aborted, sir." "Would you care to elaborate, lieutenant?" "Uh - unexpected damage to focusing dish, sir. Sensors indicate partial melting due to atmospheric contact, sir. Please don't tell Lord Vader, sir."

Backing up is always sensible but in this case I haven't played KSP for a while so if I bork my install it's no big deal. Besides, from Snark's post, I think that's the big advantage of using Module Manager - I can just mess around with the MM config file until it works, without worrying about editing (and possibly breaking) the actual game files.

The spy satellites they sent to Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto were pretty cool though. That's some serious long range capability planning there. Not to mention the prototype Autonomous Defence Vehicle (free rock blasting laser with every unit!) that they put on Mars. And the SIE (Single Ion Engine) Scout that they sent to Ceres. @DDE might have a point about US private space industry - I don't really have any comments on that. But conflating "private space industry' with the "US space program" is a bit unfair to my mind.

Hi @Snark Another question if you don't mind? What would be the equivalent configuration copypaste for editing tech tree node descriptions please? I've been poking around with Google but not very well since I don't have a clear idea of what I'm looking for. I've found the tech tree configuration file but taking your last piece of advice to heart... Alternatively, is there a good guide to this kind of stuff that you could point me at, rather than writing it all out again here? Many thanks!

Well said. I can do the first part. Been plugging away at my KSP fiction since 2013. The story may not be to everyone's taste but I'm thinking the commitment is there. Hopefully I can do the second part too. Borrowing @5thHorseman's DescriptiveDescriptions as a worked example should help a lot! And yeah, if anyone wants to lend a hand with localisation, you'd be very welcome. Tentatively I'm thinking of modelling this after the flavour text from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, with each part description being a quotation from an in-game character. I'll probably borrow bits of my fanfic for inspiration too but generalised a bit so that the part descriptions don't hew to any particular story. Should be fun!

Cheers again @Snark. I'll definitely need a hand to do anything fancy. But yes - very happy to share this as and when it comes together. Wow - starting my own mod. Who saw that coming?

Thanks @razark and especially to @Snark for the (much needed) step by step instructions! Will have to give this a whirl! Will take a while to redo all the part descriptions but it should be a good project for doing in small snippets here and there.

Personally, I agree. With a couple of exceptions, I like the older part descriptions and it would be nice if more could be done with them. The problem is, I think, that everyone's definition of a lame description will be slightly different. Also, the more detailed the part descriptions, the more risk of unintended consequences during localisation. Question for the forum - is there, or could there be, a mod to expose the part descriptions for editing?

This. Spoilered for length and well - because spoilers, in case anyone reading this ever wants to read my KSP fanfics.

Agreed. As @tater pointed out, there aren't so many industrial reasons to go to space and they probably won't require people. It's a slender peg to hang a lot of geek dreams off but I think that large scale crewed spaceflight is basically going to be space tourism. People going to space (whether that's LEO or Ganymede) because they can and because it's there. Once you have enough space tourists wanting to fly then there's money to be made (as with all tourist destinations) in providing them with transport, goods and services and in providing the underlying infrastructure to make those goods and services happen. Crazy? For sure. But tourism in its various guises is a significant contributor to many national economies and I think that it will be a big part, possibly the only part of any sort of 'space economy' that supports a widespread human presence in space. And that's why I agree with yourself and @tater. Building the infrastructure to bootstrap this sort of space tourism economy is not a rational investment. It's only starting to happen now because of deep-pocketed dreamers who aren't in it for personal financial gain. Not on a timescale that most investors would consider remotely realistic anyway.

I don't know what the actual numbers are but I would guess the margins are pretty slim. Launch vehicles can fly a 'dogleg' ascent trajectory to help them hit the right orbital plane, for example if they're launching from a latitude that wouldn't let them hit that plane directly, or if some additional margin in the launch window is needed. However doglegs do require extra propellant. Given that most launch windows tend to be quite tight anyway despite there being a mechanism for widening them, I'm thinking that launch vehicles don't fly with that much of a propellant margin. 5% sounds pretty close to real, allowing for the fact that you're hand-flying your launch vehicle!

@Plecy75 - great work as always and thanks for keeping the downloadable version going! That's the split I'd go for as well, although I suspect Part 3 (formerly Part 4) will make the others look lopsided by the time we're done. I'll have to think of a title for the merged Part 1 and Part 2 at some point.

And on a serious note, I'm still really enjoying this tale. It has a fun, classic sci-fi comic vibe about it (think Dan Dare or something similar) but with enough serious moments to stop it getting cheesy. Thumbs up.

"Hokey wings and unreliable engines are no match for a solid chunk of blutonium or two, kid." "You don't believe in SSTO's do you, Jeb?"

I'd have thought the Earth's magnetic field would induce eddy currents in the asteroid that would cause drag and slow it down over time and eventually cause it to deorbit. So it might work (leaving aside the problem of getting the electricty down from orbit) but you'd also need to constantly reboost the asteroid to keep it in orbit. Short but effective video here which demonstrates the principle.

The Shuttle OMS (Orbital Maneuvering System) had enough onboard propellant for about 300m/s worth of maneuvers. Around a third of that was required for the de-orbit burn.

Full disclosure - it's not too much of an exaggeration to say that spaceplanes killed the game for me, so I'm not exactly unbiased when it comes to plane parts. With that said, from what I recall of the early plane part nodes, they're a mess. The Aviation node for example- if I remember rightly - gives you Mk1 fuselage parts combined with Mk 0 (Juno sized) engines and air intakes. Given that working planes are already significantly harder to build than rockets, I would have thought that the first plane part node should include the requisite parts to make a simple 'inline' plane with a Wheesley on the back, fuel tanks to suit, an inline cockpit and an air intake on the front. The neophyte plane builder would then still have to worry about putting wings and other control surfaces in the right place, contend with unneccessarily fiddly undercarriage parts, get the CoM,CoL balance right and, in all probability deal with a runway that appears to have been freshly bombed. However, they could at least reliably put a working fuselage together without having to deal with the added 'fun' of wedging Juno sized engine parts onto an otherwise Wheesley sized fuselage and making sure the off-centre thrust balances nicely so that their lashed together contraption stands a fighting chance of getting down the aforementioned freshly bombed runway without turning donuts, turning turtle or exploding for any number of other 'hilarious' reasons. On a quick review of the remaining aircraft tech nodes, there are a fair few parts in there that I'm not familiar with so I'm not the best person to be commenting on the later nodes. That first one though is dreadful. I would merge Aviation with Aerodynamics and throw in the first lot of retractable undercarriage parts too. Yes, that's a lot of pieces to contend with at one go but at least you've got everything you need to build functioning aircraft from the outset.

Engine clustering is the tech tree error that stands out for me. Bear with me - its been a while, but as I remember the tricoupler is available quite early on in the tech tree, whereas the bicoupler and those adaptor parts that let you stick multiple 1.25m engines on a 2.5m tank come very late in the tree? That makes no sense from a gameplay or a teaching perspective. To my mind you'd unlock all the 'clustering' parts at about the same time that you unlock the 2.5 tanks and engines, or possibly one tier later. From a teaching perspective, you then move from simple rockets to staged rockets (lateral or inline) to bigger rockets including mixed 2.5 and 1.25m parts, to bigger rockets with clustered engines. From a gameplay perspective it gives more advanced players an early set of trade-offs between engine size and cost vs part count, and also the ability to fine tweak their designs by giving them more options to work with.

I think they will for the reasons I mentioned. (This was referring to @SaturnianBlue's suggestion of probes orbiting every planet). Replying to @ChrisSpaceSo how and why do you imagine current planetary science missions are supported and funded? Why would that change over the next 50 or so years? Probes in orbit around every planet seems like a perfectly reasonable suggestion to me, especially as our record is already pretty good on that front, given that various space agencies have already put probes in orbit around Mercury (Messenger), Venus (Venera), Earth (need I say more), Mars (Viking for example), Ceres (Dawn), Jupiter, (Galileo, Juno) and Saturn (Cassini). I'm sure you can think of many other interplanetary probes that I haven't listed. If we're relying on strategic value to drive crewed space exploration then it's not going to happen. If there was strategic value to crewed space exploration, Apollo would have been just the beginning and this thread would be very different. In my view, there are exactly three reasons for crewed space endeavours: Because enough people want to Because enough people can Because once enough people are in space they will need to be supplied with goods and services. That last point obviously depends entirely on the first two. Over the timeframe suggested for this thread (out to 2100), thinking of space as a strategic asset for Earth is a dead end. If my Mercury mission ever happens (and I've already made it abundantly clear that I regard it as an extremely long shot), it will most likely happen because some private individual has an 'Everest' moment and decides to go to Mercury because it's there. And that will probably only happen if space travel to other destinations becomes sufficiently routine that a) crewed travel to Mercury looks feasible and b) because that sufficiently routine travel has lowered the costs of space travel to the point where 'Everest' style private expeditions become affordable. At least to the Musks and Bezos of the world.

Cool! Look forward to it.

Thanks both for the interesting comments! On a sort of related note, I got to see the Cosmonauts exhibition whilst it was in London - and it was wonderful. Starting with a (very) early experimental rocket engine fashioned from a blowtorch and going all the way up to near-flight hardware from the Soviet moon program, all the exhibits had a sort of heroic ruggedness about them. Wore my Gagarin t-shirt (what else?) for the visit and was a little disappointed not to find anyone else wearing one. Got me into some fun conversations with the museum staff though - guess I stood out a little as a bona-fide Space Nerd. I'll wear that too.

Yup, because both are proposals currently in progress (for varying definitions of progress). SpaceX apparently have plans to put paying customers around the Moon and the necessary hardware (Falcon Heavy and Dragon 2) are being built as part of their short to medium term plans anyway. Even allowing for a generous dash of Elon time, I think that's feasible before 2100. Once the concept has been proved, I can certainly see it happening again. As somebody else has already pointed out on these forums (apologies - I forget who), DSG is a made-for-SLS project, that involves moving lots of mass to orbit but doesn't require committing to the technical, logistical and human challenge of new lunar landings. Cis-munar journeys are also well within the projected capabilities for Orion. SLS has rather a lot of political backing, so DSG gives everyone a nice face-saving reason to keep SLS running and keeping the funds flowing where they're needed. So yeah, I'd be disappointed if those didn't happen by 2100. I'm hoping they'd be pretty much a baseline level of spaceflight achievements by then, therefore my pessimistic scenario was baseline achievements and not much more. As for flags and footprints on Mercury... there's a reason that was my 'out in the weeds', optimistic suggestion. There's good evidence for ice at Mercury's poles and from a planetary science perspective, getting hold of some of it would be enormously interesting. And if water ice can survive at the poles then astronauts should be able to as well. Getting there is another matter (and I'm sure there would be the usual arguments in favour of robotic exploration) but hey - we were already in a scenario where lunar outposts, Martian outposts and asteroid mining were all things, so why not go for broke and posit crewed flights to Mercury!

Trick or treat? Sinister machinations, (more) horrors walking Kerbin, or pumpkin and candy related culture shock for Val? Because bobbing for apples is tough when the apples are frozen solid and embedded in ice... Maybe all, more likely none, of the above. Either way I can't wait!