Andersenman

A "Show Fuel Flow" mode could turn all parts mostly transparent and then draw 'crawling ants' through the CoMs of all parts involved.

Hahaha, and that's not the first misspelling in his reports: (should be 'heavier than', not 'heavier then'.) Anyhow, great reports again. One question: You always mention you plan your crafts, but could you perhaps describe your planning process a bit more, perhaps in a separate post? I'd like to know what you consider and how that transfers into your designs. Thanks!

Any image editor that can import RAW data, ditch 20 header bytes and (optionally) flip horizontally, in conjunction with saving as PNG files can do that. Such as IrfanView. Then again, depending on what you want to do, there are indications that you should refrain from doing that. A couple of days ago I read somewhere here on the forums about the pros and cons of mbm, tga and png. Something with loading times, compression and decompression at runtime, but for the life of it I just can't find it anymore ... Perhaps you or someone else may be luckier in finding it.

Can't do part clipping with Lego. More seriously, It would be nice if they stopped refusing to spell Jeb's name correctly. A typo is one thing, but continuously failing to observe spelling, let alone of someone's name, real or fictional, is what causes ignorance and incompetence in a downward spiral where one has to fear any educational attempt will be taken offense at and be subsequently silenced …

Although it should feel obvious and natural, watching the Internet at work crossing borders, times and cultures to spontaneously create educational collaboration is humbling every time. Best of success, Beta Ray! A. from Germany

That is exactly how you do it. Best of success! Edit: Ninja'd by the very creator of the linked advice, my life is complete!

Found this only recently. Truth or hoax, the transcripts left me choked.

Congratulations on that mission, all that effort made for a really nice tale! Going probe-first - a simple but effective idea to decouple (uncontrollable) bits on parachutes without smashing into them. It never quite occurred to me, although in my defense I usually employ capsules which more or less demand being pointed away from the ground, hehe. Looking forward to trying pods with tweakable chutes set to open and deploy at different pressures and altitudes. With those science pods, what do you do with sensors that cannot be used in a particular area the respective science pod was assigned to? For example, a pod may be assigned to Duna's high atmo, so its seismometer is useless. Do you try to fill those sensors up even though there's a different pod assigned to ground readings?

Quite the ride there during capture!

Ha, happened to me, too, and I'm sure to many others! I like your functional designs and your very sensible use of part clipping. Speaking of which: If you replace and (0.025 t + 0.175 t = 0.2 t) with the wider (.05 t) you save 150 kg mass per side, provided you're willing to wait with the Duna landing until the Tech Tree bestows it. (Actually, I would even use the slim decouplers and go only with a single in the first place. – Yes, I'm that avaricious!) I did get my .23 yesterday night; unfortunately, playtime was again not included in the deal, hehe. Hopefully I'll be getting some crafts up over the holidays! Atmosphic flight, Duna landing – Sounds like a plan to me. ... Oh, you weren't counting in binary? I was wondering already what this bit in the middle was about!

Perhaps not outright replacing, but yes. Something like a halo billboard that always renders on top, scaled in size and alpha depending on flash brightness and ideally view distance even, and only invoked when the camera has line-of-sight to the light source ... or illuminated objects, like adjacent fuselage. A billboard sprite ... or some shader-based overbrightening ... something like that.

So, clothing and music wasn't the only thing the 80's had bad taste in? Haha, just kidding. I remember my Silent Service II for Amiga coming with several glossy-paper cut-outs, each one for a different Amiga model's keyboard! Ah, nostalgia. Anyhow. One reason why I suggested "pastellising" those primaries was: printed colours are usually not emissive unlike screen colours, and would rarely show or even allow min-maxed colour channels; therefore, toned-down, less aggressive colours would help imitating the "printed" look. Just my thoughts, though. Edit: Then again, as players do print them, this aggressiveness solves itself. But could still cause bleeding or swamping if the printer's colour profile is cruel enough. And more often than not, it is.

There's a typo in the VAB section on the Build map - "Asembly" should be "Assembly" The primary colours of the Modifier keys and the respective text labels on other keys are rather stinging. Perhaps you could soften them up slightly? The Mouse boxes as well as the Docking and EVA boxes overwhelm the dark stuff inside. Perhaps you could dispense with the colour fill, reduce its alpha and/or swap the brighter with the darker tones (ie. dark-blue box, bright-blue text)? The text labels are overall very small. Even full-screen on a secondary monitor, they are hard to read. I suggest to increase text size, drop more unnecessary words and work more with icons. For instance, you could use triangles or entire arrows for directional keys, bent and straight arrows for rotation and translation in conjunction with a stylised spaceship (eg. triangle-box-triangle resembling Apollo CSM) to distinguish "forward/back" from "up/down", and different symbols for toggle/trigger/hold (eg. the power symbol, a positive pulse of square wave, and a stylised spring perhaps) where necessary.

One thing that keeps bugging me with the lights, or KSP's lighting system in general, is that the effect lives and dies with pixel size. Even when there's a massive flash on an object: once the object is far enough away it becomes just a single pixel flashing at "only" 100 % screen brightness, and not even that once it starts to drown in Anti-Aliasing before finally getting swallowed by view distance. I do realise that this is just the way the engine works, so I'd simply be interested in you guys' thoughts about this problem - if I may use this thread for that. Thanks!

Hey Dave, it's been over a month. How's your programme coming? Best, A.

You guess wrongly. It's not that it has no point, it's that you're missing it. KSP is a sandbox game made by a small indie developer with limited funding, staff and audience. Not a nerfed-to-death multiplayer Korea grinder by a humongous Conglom-O, micro-transactioning pocket money and souls from trillions of braindead mouse mechanics testers.1 You decide however you want to enjoy it. Add stuff, mod stuff, use infinite fuel, Hyperedit, or <spooky>Mechjeb</spooky> ... If all omissions were deliberate, why did Squad add the Jumbo when you can stack two X200-32? Why did they add the radial Ant when you can use the inline one with [strange contraption with Cubics, Oscars and fuel lines]? Where was your difficulty slider then? Talk about logic. Correlation, let alone coincidence, does not imply causality. "Oh no, Squad's Dark Council of Doom must have decreed the lack of a certain part to remind everyone to whose draconian rule their players owe their pleasure in little-green-men gaming"2 is not the first thing that should reasonably come to mind when contemplating said lack. 1 Totally true. 2 Dramaticised for entertainment purposes. … Or, is it?

Yes, but mine points to what to actually do there.

I'd love to see the KSC evolve from what is basically Jeb's scrapyard, with a shoddy shed that rattles when something lifts off, with one Kerbal standing nearby wearing goggles and holding an RC transmitter, another one watching through binoculars, and a third one mowing the grass of the runway strip in the background. Then, as the player progresses, the place shapes up, with Kerbals "racing" steamrollers and diggers (like they do with those vehicles in VAB and SPH now) to erect new buildings and radio towers, or lay down concrete and asphalt for launchpad and runway, and more kerbals come to watch launches ... basically KSP with some SimCity-style flavour. ... What? A player can dream, no?

Many thanks for your input, I shall see to getting Win7 post-haste!

In a sandbox game like KSP that is also decidedly moddable even, any such difficulty would be completely pointless: If you feel a part is lacking, go ahead and make or modify one. Likewise, if you want the challenge to live without certain parts, don't use them.Interpreting absence of a certain part - real absence, not just 'locked by tech tree' - as difficulty measure is therefore a fallacy. Measured with the nature and scale of KSP it is way more likely that IAS was kept for legacy or place-holding reasons. "Leave it in, it doesn't hurt anyone, we have enough issues at hand for .21 to spend time on thinking what to do with this thing here" would be a perfectly reasonable call for a KSP producer. At any rate: Yes, I would have loved a tiny IRW for my rovers that kept tripping out whenever it coasted over a crease in terrain geometry, so I would welcome such an item, OP. It could be a rescaled IAS with adjusted torque values and amended flavour text along the lines of:

Again: 64-bit OS (say Win7) on unchanged 32-bit hardware?

At least you remembered.

Regarding the infamous "water lag", there is this advice.

You might find the missing info in : He concludes that Tylo is basically Kerbin without atmosphere and builds and tests a lander based on that finding.