Kerba Fett

One thing to keep in mind about angling your engines is that if you later add a mod that automates your vertical rate like MechJeb Translatron, it will have trouble with the angled engines. Apparently the angle screws with the throttle calculation and it spends all its time hunting for the correct setting. For stock there's no problem and it even adds some pitch/roll stability.

I've got the same problem whenever I try to use MK3 parts. They fall apart on the runway. Since I never see that with any other parts, I assumed that the new MK3 stuff was just defective. I've also heard of other people having trouble with the new MK3 stuff.

That looks very cool. I really like the mechanism you use to swivel your lift engines. Will they use multiple fixed positions, or will you be able to move them to any angle like IR servos? The engine pods seem to be fixed to the craft. While you could use the thrust limiter to make adjustments to the hover center of thrust, what about making the rear engines surface mountable so they can be placed where needed for balance. This would also allow for a heavier 6 engine configuration for hauling fuel or whatever. I was also wondering, do the engines rotate forward of vertical? I can picture this thing doing a vertical takeoff from a launchpad then swiveling the lift engines to transition to forward flight. But what about when you get to your destination? Are there retro firing engines that slow you or do you go to hover mode and pitch the nose way up to slow for landing? I would think for passenger comfort you'd want to try to keep the craft level and use braking engines. (I wonder if they could be tied to the brake action group to fire when you push Are there going to be lights for it? It's such a nice clean design and the stock lights are so big and bulky. It looks great so far. I can't wait till there's a downloadable version to play with.

Thanks guys. I just had a look at the stock lights and they have an option to turn them off or on. They must have added that recently since the last time I used lights with action groups I'm sure the only option was toggle. While I could tweakscale the stock lights down for indicators I'll check out the aviation lights. If they have on/off switching like stock that's exactly what I was asking for. :^) Boomerang, that's a great tip about removing lights from the switchable list. I was hoping that would carry over to the staging action group to remove items from the staging stack, but no such luck. Thanks for all the replies. They were quite helpful.

I realize that lights can be toggled with action groups, what I'm interested in is lights that can be set directly to an off or on state. Since I've been playing KSP I've had a number of times where I had engines controlled by action groups. This ranges from orbital tugs with prograde and retrograde engines, to VTOL's and Munbus type ships with hover engines as well as prograde and regrograde engines. Setting up engines to activate or deactivate with action groups is very simple and you can even use lights to mark which engines are active. The problem is you need to manually set up your lights to indicate active engines, you cant make them go directly to the correct state. Also pushing the U key will throw them out of sync. While I was originally thinking of lights since that's what I've used in the past, they wouldn't actually need to cast light to be useful. A simple little surface mount box with a glowing indicator might serve just as well. Green when activated and red when deactivated. These could indicate the status of engines, karbonite or kethane converters, status of OKS/MKS modules or anything else you can switch on or off with action groups. Is anyone here aware of a mod like this or even just direct switchable lights? If not, does this sound like an interesting project any of you want to take on?

Glad to hear about your plans for the future of this pack. Sounds pretty cool and I'll keep watching for upgrades. With respect to Tommygun's suggestion, the windows do look pretty clean compared to the rest of the texture and could stand a bit of grime. You'd want to keep it subtle though. A spacecraft is a major asset and the windows not going to get too dirty before somebody takes a clean rag to it. I wouldn't change the color of them though. While transparent windows can be done in KSP, most people don't use them when they make models. They make the window a light bluish color like you did. If you were to change the window to shiny gold or black it would look less like glass and more like metal plates. It's the same with lit windows. If people see a glowing square or circle and it's white or yellowish white they assume it's a window. If you make a glowey red or green shape people don't think it's a window with different interior lights, they think it's something else entirely. I'd stick with accepted colors for any glass on the ship. I meant to mention a couple of things about your skycrane. It's not displaying the fuel bar or any icon in the staging. When used as a standalone ship there's no staging bar. If you right click on it to activate the engine it seems to fly well and with your landing legs it makes a nice little lander for science instruments. It's probably some minor config thing since all of your other engines seem to work well enough in staging. I was wondering about an RCS pack for it though. I'm thinking of a matching part about half the thickness as the 1.25m monopropellant tank with 4 linear thrusters built in. My reasoning is that if you put your skycrane on top of a tall base module like one of the MKS modules your COM will be quite a ways below your COT. Your payload acts as a pendulem preventing your from pitching or rolling enough to control your horizontal speed. Adding RCS thrusters gives you fine control of your horzontal speed while the main engines keep you airborn. A couple of mods that really help with skycrane flying are: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/50736 and http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/85838 As for the tug, I am familiar with nli2work's tug and have downloaded it. I'm getting pretty close to the limit of what my install can handle though so it hasn't made the trip from the download directory to the KSP install directory. Hopefully soon though. It makes me sad that there are so many cool mods I want to try and the 64 bit version that should free us from these memory issues doesn't work properly. The nice thing about yours is that it would only be one more part in the inventory. I was thinking that switchable fixed engines might be simpler and more future proof. As long as KSP doesn't change the way you activate engines with action groups future patches shouldn't affect your part. I was also thinking that rather than making a seperate robot tug with bidirectional engines you could just have a stripped down version of your engine mount. No fuel or probe core, just a 1.25m quad engine package. If you rotate it 45' and mount it on top of your skycrane it goes from being a quadcopter to an octacopter with twice the lift for heavy payloads. If you face the engine package the other way it goes from a skycrane to a robot tug. Anyways, something to keep in mind for the future. One question for you: Making this stuff takes quite a bit of time. Between the modeler and Unity and config files and testing in KSP, then having to fix problems, do you actually have time left to play KSP any more? Or is it just a big developer nightmare where all your game time is spent on it and the fans just keep asking for more? :^) (like me)

I'd like to say that I think you've got the start of a very nice model pack here. I like the worn industrial yellow look for an established colony. It makes a good contrast to the surface of the Mun or Minmus so if a ship goes down it's easier to spot. I do see the apeal of a stock like color scheme though. Most spacecraft are white or shades of gray to reflect sunlight (heat) and because it shows damage. If you did want an alternate texture pack it shouldn't involve much more than loading the color channel into an image editor, selecting all the yellow hue stuff and turning down the saturation to make it gray. I did have a couple of issues with the download linked in the first post though. It's refering to an IVA that wasn't in mine. This was causing problems for activating engines and going EVA would cause the space center to go all black and leave just the HUD intact. (navball, windows ect. By editing the 2.5m lander config to look for the stock 3 crew IVA (mk1-2) I got it working properly. It seems to fly pretty well around the spaceport, but the pod torque is a bit high. I find it a bit twitchy at the default of 9. It seems better tweaked down to about 5 on each axis. There's a couple of design points that I'd like to mention. First is the windows on the 2.5 m lander pod. They seem gigantic for a kerbal spacecraft. They're far larger than what you'd see on a tour bus. It seems like the sort of thing you'd see on the command tower overlooking a Mun base not on a light weight lander. I would think on a research lander with 3 crew the pilot would be watching the ground below and ahead, the co-pilot would be watching flight instruments and calling speed and altitude and the commander/flight engineer would be watching system status and navigation. Mostly they don't have time to look out these huge panoramic windows. Also, upward visibility wouldn't be a big deal since there's no other overhead traffic to watch for and most of docking with the command module is done with instruments. You might want to seriously think about shrinking or eliminating the overhead and side windows. They seem like a luxury for a research craft and they'd cost a lot of mass and wall space that could be packed with science instruments. I hate to criticize your work because I've seen the work that goes into making something like this, but that's my opinion. The other thing that seems a bit off is the landing gear. They function great and give a wide enough base to deal with some decent horizontal velcocity in testing. But in the raised position they seem to hang down a long ways. The engine of the lower stage is tucked into the base nice and tight. The entire lander is a small compact unit exceot for those 4 legs sticking out the bottom a half meter. What if you were to have them stow 180' from their current retracted position like the large stock gear. That way they'd tuck in along the lander when retracted and still extend to the current postion. When landed they also seem to give a lot of ground clearance. This is great if you're mounting RCS tanks or GOO canisters on the bottom of the lander. You still have lots of ground clearance. If you don't mount stuff on the bottom it just looks like they tucked the engine into the lower stage for no real reason. You might want to consider a ring that attaches below the lower stage with lights, batteries KAS storage, ect to fill some of the ground clearance. By the way, a great addition to your lander pack is the Universal storage mod and Dmagic Orbital Science that adds science modules in a universal storage format. The US octicore give plenty of room for science experiments and when they're all used you can either EVA and take the datapacks and take off in the upper stage to dock with the command module or transfer all fuel to the lower stage and return the entire lander to the orbiting station to refuel and reset experiment bays for another biome landing. For future addons to your pack how about landing lights? The stock lights seem so huge. Do you really need a spotlight the size of your pilots head? How about some nice trim little LED lights. I also wanted to mention your skycrane. A probe core with engines and fuel in one package is brilliant. It looks like it would be a perfect match for MKS. The same specs as the LV 909 split into a 4 engine package. And if you need more thrust you can always just rotate them 45' and stack them. Would you be willing to do another variation of it focused on orbital construction? It would be exactly the same but with a second set of engines facing the other way. You'd select which group of engines are active with action groups and use it to move station modules into position. The module with the tug attached would be launched into orbit with a booster. Once in orbit the booster would seperate and the tug would use it's engines to rendezvous with the station and dock the module. Having engines facing in both directions means you don't need to keep turning end for end as you match velocity and you can save your RCS for final docking. The tug would then seperate and parachute to the surface for recovery. If you're using Extraplanetary Launchpads the tug could drive into a recycle bin and it's parts would be saved for future building. If there was any way to use an emmissive texture to indicate which engines were active that would be really cool. I normally use lights tied to the action groups I switch the engines with, but lights don't have on/off switching with action groups. You can toggle them, but that depends on them starting in the correct state when used as an indicator. Anyways, as I said at the start, really nice mod pack you've started here. I can't wait to see where it goes if you continue to develop it.

There are a couple of videos on the MKS thread that show how to launch multiple modules in the same ship, but you'll need to land them one at a time if you're putting them somewhere without atmosphere. You'll probably want to put a fuel tank and engines on top of each module so that after you land it you can decouple the sky crane section and fly it away. You should also move each module without any machine parts or whatever they need to run. This will save quite a bit of weight and you can bring it in a later trip. Another option would be to look at Extraplanetary Launchpads to just mine for the materials and build the modules on site.

There is a mod to disable the part highlighting. I'm at work and don't recall the name of it at the moment, but if you go to kerbal stuff and look in the popular and new release sections you should be able to locate it in a few minutes.

Don't feel too bad about it not completing. There's a guy on the steam forums with a contract for a circular orbit around the Mun with an allowable variation of 2 meters. I'm not even sure the game is capable of measuring that accurately, but that's what the contract is calling for and it won't complete till it gets it. I've simply been avoiding orbit contracts till the next version.

The fact that they "loan" you the part to be tested can work in your favor. Most contracts have a pretty long completion time so you can just keep using the borrowed part for a while if you don't need the payout and the part is useful. Of course this worked better before they started to limit the number of contracts you can have active.

If the ability to repeatly refill your EVA pack bugs you, couldn't you simply not do it? I always find it funny when people want to change the game because they feel compelled to use the cheats and exploits available.

On my previous career I used a lander with a lab module. To keep it from getting too tall and tippy I radial mounted t800 fuel tanks with lv909's. (I used 4, but 2 or 3 would probably work.) This lets you use normal landing gear and still have decent ground clearance. I'd land and take samples. I'd then transmit the samples and clean the experiment bays. Then I'd take more samples for returning and EVA to get them as well as surface samples and EVA reports. Keep in mind that you can store 1 copy of data in the lab and another copy of the same data in the capsule. This should let you recover ALL the science for each landing spot. After visiting a few sites I'd reorbit and dock with the orbiting ship to refuel and store data. Later a small data courier comes from Kerbin to pick it up.

But using Dropbox doesn't merge separate persistence files into one so it wouldn't allow collaboration on a single save. After I helped him do the brakes on his car, my neighbor was nice enough to make me a program to do just what I was after. We've only used it a couple of times so far, but it's pretty cool being able to load a ship that's already in orbit into your game.

If you use Extraplanetary Launchpads there's a quirk that will allow you to quickly generate huge amounts of cash without leaving the ground. No loan approvals or interest payments. Just free money. Sort of spoils your career though.

I've got a couple of friends that recently started KSP. While I'm aware of MP mods, you need to have time to play at the same time. What I was interested in was to collaborate on a game through e-mail. Suppose I build a space station while my friends are more interested in building a Mun base. I'd build the station then send a copy of my persistence file. They merge my orbiting station into their save just as I left it. Then when their base is done they send me a save and I merge their base into my game. The result is that I can play with what they build and they can play with what I build. While you can get this effect with a text editor, it's easy to make an error. Are there any mods with a nice simple interface to do this? If not, anyone here interested in making one?

That seems like a strange issue considering that the normal EPL tanks have a positive value empty or full. I'll try playing with the cost in the config and see if I can fix it. (seems cheaty to get a refund of almost 900,000 for launching a ship.

I noticed a weird bug with the expanding containers on .25 32 bit. They act like they have a negative value of 20000. The rocketparts printer also seemed to have a negative value. Anyone else seeing this? I looked at the config files and they seem normal but it's only these parts that are doing it.

Just wanted to confirm that my system is now doing instant builds after editing my persistence file and ask another question. Recycled ships just return scrap metal rather than rocket parts, right? And if you don't have scrap storage you get nothing? What about any fuel or monopropellant? Is that salvaged?

Thanks for the advice guys. I found the setting in my persistence file and changed it. I haven't tried it, but I should now get instant builds. (except for all the time I spend mining ore, smelting it, and making rocket parts)

I was doing some testing to make sure I understood how EPL works and discovered that you can use it to generate huge amounts of cash right at the KSC. You start with a probe core or capsule and add an EPL foundry. Connect some storage tanks for ore and metal and right click on the ore tanks and fill them. Add a power source and you're done. Now you just launch and while you're sitting on the launchpad or runway, refine all that ore into metal the recover the vessel. While you had to pay for the ore, metal is much more valuable so you make a nice profit every time you do it. As your cash increases you can afford to launch ever bigger forges with more storage tanks. It's a cheat, but can help recover from a shortage of cash.

I was afraid it would be something simple like that. I've been looking for a setting file and the closest thing I can locate is mm.cfg. (module manager?) I didn't see anything in there about timed builds, but it's pretty hard to be sure since its got no real formatting. (like one long run-on sentence) I'm at work now and can't check on it, but I'll have another look once I get home.

Not having any idea what it was, I said yes to timed builds or progressive builds when asked. Now I'd like to change that. I already spent enough time getting rocket parts, I don't need to spend weeks in time warp to wait for some small probe to build. How can I change building to instant without having to uninstall? I've got a lot of EPL equipment off planet and would prefer not to lose it.

Really cool looking model. If you're thinking of doing other stuff based on the movie I'd like to request the Moon Bus. It seems like a nice little passenger transport that would fit in with KSP well. https://www.google.ca/search?q=2001+moon+bus&es_sm=93&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=Php6VIWoD8-rjAKkooDoAg&ved=0CB4QsAQ&biw=1920&bih=912

I like a nice IVA. I find it adds immersion to the game, but you don't really need one. If you've got a good forward view some people may use it for docking, but it will always be a small segment of the total users and even people that like IVA don't use it all the time. Pretty much anything you can do from IVA you can do better from the external view. If the rest of the model is done and working properly, (hatches, ladders, nodes, ect) I'd say release it without the IVA. If people like it you should have an easier time finding someone to do the IVA for you. Or you could start working on building your own IVA and update the model when you get it done.