Kerba Fett

Pretty sure you couldn't. The bicoupler is the only one with enough space between the nodes for multiple jets. (unless they fixed that in .24) You could mount 2 engines on a bicoupler then mount 2 of those subassemblys on another bicoupler.

Ive used ion landers on the Mun. 4 ions on a small lander gives you a TWR of about 1.35. The problem is that you need to burn at full thrust for a lot of the descent and it uses a lot more dV than chemical landers.

I've tried every version of this plugin that you've released. None of them seem to be working for me. In the example below, when I hit the spacebar to stage it should I get a message about recovered parts? I get no message and lose the value of the decoupler, structural fuselage, and parachute when recovering the craft. Do I need a probe core mounted on the parts I decouple to make it work?

Every version of the firespitter plugin causes my game to crash. What functionality do I lose by removing it? Does this mod work at all without it?

Wow, quick response. Thanks for fixing that considering it's such a minor feature that most people probably don't use. In my particular circumstance I like having the ASL display as well as the radar alt for use on the Mun. I often use an ion powered lander for point to point travel and it's got a low TWR. If I come up on a hill with much speed it doesn't have the thrust to climb over it. If I use the scansat map to find out the highest point on my route and stay above it there's no worries. For now I guess I'll hold off on the Landing Height plugin.

Diazo, I just noticed an interesting quirk with the last couple of versions of this plugin. It used to be that your plugin would show the radar altitude and vertical rate of a Kerbal on EVA. The last 23.5 version and the current .24 version no longer do that. They show the same ASL altitude as the stock display till you touch the ground then the altitude display switches to 0. I went back and loaded an older version of the plugin from last Febuary and confirmed that it does show radar alt on EVA. Also, are your version numbers going down? That file is named uploads-2014-02-VertVel161 while the current one seems to be version 1.2. It's definatly an older plugin since it doesn't even have a button to go to the settings window. I realize that this isn't a major feature of the plugin and only works on low gravity moons, but it was a nice little bonus. Also, if I'm using the latest version of your Vertical Velocity controller is there any point in using your Landing Height plugin? Isn't that function also integrated into this plugin?

Thanks for the info on the payouts. That should make the Duna mission easier. RSwordman, if you find you're going too fast when your reach the target altitude, try completing it on the way down. After you launch make a new stage above your engine and drag the engine there. When you hit your target altitude hit X to cut your throttle. You'll keep going up till all your vertical speed bleeds off then start to fall. As you pass through your target altitude hopefully your speed has increased enough that it's also in the target range and you can hit space to stage the engine again and complete the contract.

I've got contracts to explore the Mun, Minmus, and am considering Duna. They list payout ammounts in cash, reputation, and sometimes science for making orbit, transmitting data from orbit, landing, and transmitting data from the surface. Do you get paid as you complete each condition or not until you complete them all? Most of the contracts for testing parts only list the completion payout and are pretty straightforward, but this is a little ambiguous.

I usually guess based on info from MechJeb. You can have it show your TWR for various bodies in the solar system. You want to have a twr of 2 or better for Mun landers. While you can land with anything over 1.0 you have to start your landing burn at very high altitude and burn a lot of fuel getting down. For instance, I made a lander with 4 ion engines that has a twr of about 1.35 and about 6300 dV, but it will burn almost half of it getting to the surface of the Mun from orbit. Normally getting to the surface from orbit takes under 1000 dV. Low TWR craft are best used for point to point travel on the surface as they can hover for a long time and you don't need to bleed off that much velocity when you slow to land. I'm pretty sure Kerbal Engineer Redux also shows your TWR for various bodies but I've never used it.

I put the DLL in my gamedata folder and even though I've put parachutes on everything I drop and they deploy when I stage, I don't get any window about recovery. Is this supposed to happen as they land or only after I complete the mission? EDIT: After completing the mission I got back just under 1200 in recovered funds on a rocket that cost just under 16000. I guess I'm one of the people it's not working for. (using the 64 bit version on steam)

Toadicus, I wanted to say thanks for including the ability to tweak the EVA pack on your latest release. I've restarted my career and have only made orbit once so far, but the lower thrust of the EVA pack makes it so much easier to accurately move around outside the ship. Good job on that. :^)

The mod pack you're thinking of is Porkjet's Habitat pack. Edit: wow, quick reply

If the objective is to stiffen the payload rather than just hide the mess with fairings, here's one way to do it stock without leaving any unsightly strut ends on your station. Once it's in orbit you activate the upper decoupler. The nose assembly will float away leaving an unmarked cupolla window. Then you activate the lower decoupler and the station floats free of the framework. While you could extend the girders to surround the station more, there's more chance of bumping it when you seperate. Presumably there will be solar panels and other stuff you don't want knocked off. Don't forget to include RCS on the launch vehical so you can back away from the station.

Perhaps you're just looking at this from the wrong perspecitve. Sure you could call them stranded, OR they could just be the first members of your new Duna colony just waiting for the rest of the base modules to arrive.

Very nice video. Short, to the point, explained the problem and showed the solution. I wish more people did videos like that. Not sure I agree that you can't completly get rid of the rotation. I would think RCS could eliminate the last of it, but you probably meant just by stiffening the structure. I've been playing KSP for quite a while and I had no idea that fuel lines would act as struts.

I think if you want to launch rockets into space you're probably better of with KSP. Even if they add rockets to prison architect it's unlikely they'd be as detailed.

You know your'e a noob in KSP when the movie Gravity still seems realistic.

Usually I do kethane mining on Minmus, but I've got a miner at my Mun base as well. It's handy for surface to surface trips or fueling ships from kerbin for their trip back. I can't imagine anyone mining for kethane on Kerbin. You can bring kethane or fuel from minmus for a lot less dV than bringing it up from the surface of kerbin.

As for stations in general, the only real purpose for one in LKO is refueling. A lab module looks cool, but how often do you want to reset experiments in LKO. Still, it's fun to have a place to visit in orbit. If you're ok with mods have a look at these: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/35043-0-23-5-FusTek-Station-Parts-%28X0-04-4-DEV-BUILD-5-June-2014%29 http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/64442-0-23-5-Habitat-Pack-v0-4?highlight=porkjet The cool thing about porkjets pack is the rotating centrifuge. The kerbals seem to like having gravity to play in.

That would be a pretty cool mod if it was maybe 1/10 the size. 1.25km accross just seems like overkill.

I guess I wasn't thinking of the same type of VTOL's. I hadn't considered the effects of wing lift because I don't think I've ever built a VTOL with wings. I normally use a lander configuration with a jet engine under a lander pod or I use a tricopter or quadcopter configuration with girders moving the engines away from a central pod. I suppose fuel burn changing the hover point would be a bit of an issue unless you retune the hover preset periodicly and shift all the other presets by the same ammount. As for the pitch/roll thing, that idea came from how I do short range travel on the Mun. Rather than launching in a high ballistic arc, I usually climb to a few hundred meters then pitch forward 30 degrees. I usually want 100 to 150 m/s and I pay attention to how long it takes to get to that speed. Once I reach my desired speed I pitch back to vertical. At this point I check the map to eyeball my distance from where I started. Since there's no drag you continue over the surface at that same speed. If you pitched forward 30 degrees to accelerate then it should take the same time and distance to stop if you pitch back 30 degrees. If you have something to target where you started and where you're going you can use the labels to know exactly when to start slowing, otherwise you need to estimate it from the map. I find it works pretty good for moving at a decent speed for shorter trips. (10 to 50km) I also built a Munbase recently and found that I can get pretty close to vertical, but not quite exact. It will often start to slowly drift as I descend. Since your vertical control plugin makes it a lot easier I've been placing stuff pretty close together and drift is bad. I've been using the surface panel on MechJeb to keep myself completly vertical and it works pretty good but it also wants to control heading and that can be a bother. I also thought the pitch/roll plugin would act as sort of an easy mode for regular planes. After a turn as soon as you let go of the controls it returns to straight level flight. (assuming you set it that way before turning. I know just what you mean about hot summer weather. We get lots of that here in Vancouver too. Best investment I ever made was a $100 air conditioner. (too bad my worst investment was also to beat the summer heat. A sailboat)

Thanks for the quick reply. I was actually thinking of the presets for jet powered VTOL's. While your plugin does work with jet engines I find you need to be pretty close to a hover before you engage it. If you're dropping at 20 m/s and you set your plugin to hover it will go full throttle and stay there till you start to climb. Then it cuts the throttle but it takes a bit of time for the engine to spool down. By the time it does you're climbing again and as your upward velocity drops it won't get back on the throttle till you start to fall. You end up in this up and down oscillation that you need to manually damp out. My thinking was that it would be up to the pilot to anticipate and switch to hover thrust at the proper time. The plugin would just quickly go to that preset when told. I've tried the altitude control, but not at the low altitudes you suggested. Crashing into the surface too many times has made me pretty conservative about landings. ;^) What I usually do for landings is use a MechJeb function called "Time to Suicide Burn" My understanding is that this is the latest point where full throttle will save you from a crash. I let the ship drop till this gets to about 15 seconds then manually apply just enough throttle for it to reduce to about 5 seconds. Then I start using your plugin to more precisely manage my descent rate. I keep the increment of your plugin set a 1m/s for nice soft landings so there can be a lot of mouse clicking. I do quicksave before my de-orbit burn so I should probably try your suggestion to use altitude control close to the ground. Your RCS plugin sounds interesting and to a small degree it will do what I was looking for in the pitch/roll plugin. When I was building my Munbase I landed a couple of solar collector towers. It's got a low COM, but is a pretty tall structure with solar panels mounted on it. I noticed that if I put RCS thrusters only at the very top and use IJKL to operate them, not only would the RCS slow me down it would also cause the ship to pitch back a bit so the main engine helped slow me as well. Soon as the RCS thruster stops firing SAS returns the craft to vertical. Your plugin sounds like it would enhance this system quite a bit. No worries if the pitch/roll plugin doesn't interest you. I can get the same function from MechJeb's surface panel. The one thing I don't like about it is the need to click in a number field and enter a value. And while your focus is in that field you have no control over your craft. That was the main annoyance that caused me to switch to your program from the translatron. Anyways, I can't wait to see what you come up with next, but don't forget to enjoy your summer. :^)

You're collecting science the same way I do. The process to follow is this: 1. Go to the surface and collect samples. 2. Transmit anything that gives you 100% right away. 3. Pull the data from the experiment bays and put it in the pod. I usually do this when I go out for a surface sample. 4. Repeat in as many biomes as you have fuel for then return to the orbiting refuel station 5. Dock with the station and refuel the lander. (right click on one fuel tank then ALT right click on a second tank) 6. Right click on the mobile lab and clean the experiments. 7. Get your lander pilot to EVA. Right click on the lander pod and choose take data then go to the lab and right click and choose store data. 8. Get back in the lander and head back to the surface to do it again. A few other tips: You get more science points for transmitting a sample AND returning a sample than you do for just returning a sample. You should always transmit your first surface sample then go back outside and get another one. If you've got enough experiment bays on your lander it's not a bad idea to do this with Goo and material observations as well. While the lab may be able to hold 2 copies of the same data, it's unlikely you'll be taking the lab back to the surface of kerbin. It's more practical to just send a small courier ship to pick up the data and return it to kerbin. When you take data from the lab you can't choose which ones you want to take. It's all or nothing so if you've got duplicates you won't be able to board the courier ship unless you discard the duplicates. Even if your courier ship did have 2 pods and you were able to take back the duplicates, I'm not sure you'd get credit for them when you recover the vessel on kerbin. It might just give you credit for the one of each data sample on the ship. I usually send a second courier for the duplicate data, but I suppose you could just separate one pod in orbit and land it separatly. If you don't have much practice with Mun landings you might want to use this method to harvest science on Minmus first. The science is worth more there. The gravity is a lot lighter so you use less fuel and your lander can carry more experiment bays. It's also not as hilly so that makes landing easier as well. This is the setup I used for harvesting Minmus but it would also work on the Mun. I used the 3 man pod since it gives me enough crew to use the lab and still be able to move the ship if I want to. Fuel capacity is the same as an orange tank and it carrys 4 of the larger RCS tanks radially mounted. The engine is a poodle. Fully fueled it's pretty heavy so I sent it up half full. The booster stages got it a good AP and some of the orbital velocity while the poodle was able to finish making orbit. I fueled it in LKO then moved it to Minmus. The lander went seperatly on it's own booster and transfer stage. If I were going to Duna I'd probably dock the lander to the nose of the mothership and just do 1 trip. The mothership could completly refuel the lander 8 times, but the lander is never empty when you get back to the station. You run out of experiment bays before you run out of fuel. Fully fueled the mothership has about 4000 dV and you burn just under a quarter of that getting to minmus. The small ship docked above the lander is the courier. The docking port (sheilded) is on the bottom while a parachute is on the top. It's only engines are RCS thrusters. Once I did the transfer burn from kerbin, they were enough to enter Minmus orbit, dock with the station and get back to kerbin. When returning to kerbin I use the RCS to drop my PE to about 35km to areobrake and land without needing a lot of fuel or thrust. (you want to set your PE just after leaving Minmus's SOI when it doesn't take much energy to do it.) I'm not sure the RCS courier would work as well in Munar orbit. It takes more dV to enter or leave orbit of the Mun and the TWR of the RCS courier is pretty low. Anyways, that setup worked great for harvesting minmus and you don't need to unlock too much of the tech tree before you can build it. (a single minmus landing got me enough science to build this for the second trip)

Even if you want to drop straight down onto your target he sure made the process a lot more complex that it needs to be. If he knows he wants to be stopped over his target and he knows that the burn to do it will take 71 second, then why not just start burning at T-71 seconds? By the time he gets to the node his speed should be 0 and he can start descending. Seems like he's adding a lot of math that may not be needed. Also, I keep forgetting to mention one of the most important things. Quicksave before your de-orbit burn.

I really like your plugin and have gotten so used to it that landing with manual throttle seems quite difficult now. I do have a couple of suggestions/request for you to consider. You're probably aware that your plugin doesn't work well with jet engines because of the spool up lag. You plugin appears to link the throttle to the vertical speed indicator. Suppose you had another mode for jets where your vertical speed controls were just throttle presets. You'd have to tune it for each plane, but it could be a semi-automatic process. You'd start on the runway and apply just enough throttle to climb. After a few seconds the plugin notes the throttle setting and vertical speed. It then reduces the throttle by 2%, waits for the engines to catch up and makes a note of the new throttle setting and climb rate. It keeps doing this till it finds the throttle setting for hover and records that preset. Then it slowly increases the throttle till it finds the preset for +5ms. It keeps repeating the process till it's got throttle presets from -25 m/s to +25 m/s in 5 m/s increments. It saves that config and you're ready to fly. You'd still have the throttle lag in jet engines so you'd still have to anticipate your throttle changes, but with the presets you'd spend less time overcontrolling the throttle. I was also wondering about having 2 different increment rates in the setting screen and a toggle on the main panel to switch between them. You could do your early descent in 10 or 20 m/s increments then easily switch to 1 or .5 m/s for the final descent and landing. Finally, have you ever considered doing a companion plugin to control pitch and roll? It could use the same layout as your vertical control but have an extra row of buttons for the extra axis it controls. Perhaps you could even have an option for it return the craft to vertical when the surface speed reachs a preset point. For instance if you're pitched back to slow down it could go vertical when the speed hits 0 to keep you from overshooting and end up going backwards. Like this plugin you should be able to override it with manual control, but that shouldn't disengage the plugin. If it's set to hold the craft vertical and you pitch forward, it should return to vertical when you let go of the key. If you want to go manual control it's easy enough to click the off button. I think something like this would not only be handy for landers, but that it would make a nice aid for flying planes. Anyways, I realize you're probably busy with life. (everyone is in the summer) Perhaps when you get bored and start looking for a new project you could keep this stuff in mind. :^)