not-a-cylon

finally did it. Eve SSTO. full album and craft link!

love this mod! is it possible to bind functions to more than one key? for example, I'm trying to build a VTOL that can do the normal VTOL thing with rotatrons- I've bound the pair of rotating engines in the GUI to "F" to move them down and "V" to move them up. What I'd to do: I'd like to have V and F still be there WHILE binding the left engine to pitch DOWN with "G" while the right engine pitches UP with "G" and the exact opposite with "B". I've tried binding things such as "F;G", "F:G". "F,G" to the same part and other permutations of various punctuation marks, but with no success. I'd like to easily do the Crazy Ivan from Firefly It's a bit of a pain flying a plane with the two engines bound to completely different keys for rotating.

I'm trying to understand how the thermal turbojets work... correct me if I'm wrong. I notice that the higher I go, the lower the thrust output becomes. However, if I go faster more intake air will feed the jets and restore thrust. Is this correct? Also, is there an speed limit on the jets? I'd like to know the maximum speed before switching propellants. I know the B9 sabres will lose thrust at 1600 m/s. I'm trying to plan my Eve SSTO

I finally did it! I designed a spaceplane with a TWR under 1 and brought it to supercruise! Pictured here is the the plane throttled down to 0.476 TWR (the full throttle is under 1) in a shallow climb at mach 4 and rising. I suggest everyone playing with this mod to challenge themselves with designing aircraft with a TWR under 1 (or throttling the craft under 1 TWR the entire flight) to supercruise. It forces you to fully exploit aerodynamic principles instead of relying on brute force engine power to make your planes fly. Sorry for the night shot. It takes a while climbing to the appropriate cruise altitude, like in real life. The SR-71 blackbird had a TWR of 0.382 and had an interesting way of getting to super cruise as described here. Added a daytime shot without the UI. It's comfortably cruising at mach 5.129 at around 32,000 meters with a TWR of 0.327.

Ah. Didn't see you post in the while I slowly typed on my phone. I see the direction your mod is going for. I can see why auto anything might be outside of the scope of this mod. Maybe the skillful combat could be part of a larger arc of a war mod. I'm no programmer, just a dreamer with a few ideas. I have no idea how difficult it is to work these things into a game. Keep up the great work!

I was also considering engagement ranges. Auto tracking weapons, with relative ease at farther distancesn, can track due to lower transversal velocity (I think that's the right term, I'm thinking like in Eve online) than at close rranges. Same goes for heat seeking missiles. The missiles have much more time to correct a course at ffarther distances. Once you get to a close enough distance, auto tracking weapons become almost useless and you have to switch to manual aim to hit your targets. I'm thinking this way in order to make a flexible self balancing combat game play. With these rules, it should be able to easily balance land/air/orbital/interplanetary combat while allowing room for emergent game play.

Hmm... I reread the description. You're probably right about InfiniDice not wanting to auto tracking weapons. I still think that the heat mechanic could be used for lasers should he want to add them.

Love the concept and possibilities of the mod! Can't wait to try out the release. A few suggestions if you don't mind. Thermal production. Heat seeking missiles/Infrared tracking turrets: might be a way to implement a skillful version of guided missiles and auto tracking weapons. It will force you to think about designing crafts with proper thermal shielding around engines to reduce thermal footprints. It could also introduce the possibilities of countermeasures- releasing disposable hot probes to confuse the heat heat seeking weapons. Should you choose to add near or far future tech lasers, heat production in space could also be a way to balance the skillful aspects of this. You could probably fire lasers a few times in space before overheating the entire craft. To radiate heat, you could dip down into the atmosphere or you could attach radiators (exactly as the interstellar mod does) to your craft. The upside to using radiators in space is that you could fire lasers more often (still not an infinte amount) in space. The downside is that other crafts will be able to track you much easier with conventional weapons as your heat signature would be huge due to the radiators.

a search of "physics lock" brought me here and it seems I've found that your mod has an anti-physics lock mechanism. This is going to sound crazy, but is there any way you could do a force a physics lock feature? I was thinking that you could build bases/infrastructure spanning wide distances with Kerbal Attachment System and then force a physics a physics lock to essentially "brick" your entire base onto the planet!

Hello there! I love the concept of the mod so I went and installed it. I guess the purpose of this post is to find the answer to a few questions and to provide observations on my experience. Now, I'm one for figuring things out on my own, but in the 4 days that I've played this mod, information that a new player (to this mod) needs is not readily available or is not clearly intuitive even with visiting the wiki or reading this guide. note I'm playing the game in Career Mode 1. At the start of career mode, why is the player given ammonia/water tanks and then given thermal rockets and reactors much later? These extra resources confused me at first and made me feel like I was missing something while I frantically searched for what these mystery parts/resources were for. I found that water is for making LFO and ammonia for monopropellant through the ISRU. It took some considerable amount of digging to find this. 2. When I got the radiators, I understood that anything with solar panels/reactors/etc need radiators in order to function. I loved the form and function of these parts! However, I did not understand how much radiating was needed in order to keep my craft safe- I did not know how much waste heat solar panels/etc etc to produced. 3. When I got the reactors, thermal rockets, and combinations of fuel (liquid/LFO/Kethane/etc), I did not know how to accurately predict the thrust with each combination. ISP was a little more forgiving to understand as the information was cryptically placed in the tooltips- I think I might have eventually figured it out. The reason for needing this information is to ultimately find the [reactor+engine+set fuel amount]'s delta-v for a specific mass of payload. I think I'd have to do this manually as Mechjeb/Engineer, as far as I know, can't display the information. 4. I've dabbled VERY lightly in researching science for upgrading, so I might be missing the obvious. Is there a GUI in determining how much science you've accrued? How does one go about upgrading parts while in career mode? 5. How does the ISRU attach and how do you set up the base infrastructure in order to produce the reagents to produce the final product? I hope my comment doesn't seem to harsh! This direction of the mod adds a refreshing touch of complexity to reward in the game, but I feel like some of this complexity can be avoided through: 1. A complete, organized list of parts, resources, and features in the wiki with descriptions (already starting to happen) and HOW to use them. 2. A series of guides and tutorials explaining how to use this mod. The guide I linked earlier begins to do that. The videos on youtube don't really do this- they look like a series of Let's Plays and really just focus on the obvious warp drive (which is TOTALLY AWESOME) Thanks for your hard work! I hope you (or any of you Interstellar vets) can help me out here and continue to help out others with questions. I really want to stop being frustrated and really appreciate the scope of this mod.

Hey Ferram! Thanks for your work in getting this playable ASAP for .23. Anyways, I noticed that there isn't a way to tell what the maximum deflection for a flap is before it stalls like in previous versions. Have I missed something?

edit. just read back a few pages. looks like this has been suggested already. thanks again for the work! just ran into this thread! I love the possibilities of this mod! As one who just plays the game (no modding experience whatsoever), I'd like to make a suggestion though I'm not sure if this is the right place for it or have the right qualifications to make such a suggestion. Would it be possible to create a part that spawns the object in the game provided x amount of rocket/construction parts and a vehicle with some a constructing part (I'm thinking along the lines of extraplanetary launch pads) near the spawn site? I think this be a way of seamlessly integrating kerbtown features into the game while keeping immersion.

i'm making a whole new orbiting refueling system with the new update. with the relatively recent changes to kethane density, which is now more efficient? refine kethane on the surface and then haul the refined fuels to a refined fuel tank station? haul unrefined kethane to a kethane tank station where it will be refined in orbit? I've tried using the search function to answer this question, but nothing seems to come up... thanks!

For me, it's not really about exploring the bottom. It's about being able to make an easy kethane submarine for my future floating refueling station on Laythe. KhaosCorp mentioned that s/he uses an offshore platform that sinks the kethane drill which is a great solution, but I want to try a super mobile solution to my logistics challenge.

Firespitter electrical engines and Lazor camera it is then fun project when I get home...

yeah I do remember seeing something like that a while ago... but I'm not sure if it would still work. I'll be home in a bit and I'll try messing with the game to see if I can enter negative values in the HLEnvelopePartModule and put it onto a fuel tank. @Hooligan Labs: any way you could code HLEnvelopePartModule to accept negative values if it doesn't work? Could you also model a HL variable buoyancy tank? I know it's asking a lot from you, but I really dig the depth your work adds to the game. Yeah I ran into that problem. HOWEVER with Lazor attachable hull cameras, I believe this becomes a non issue. I haven't tried it yet. Also, if I IVAd in the Mk1 cockpit, I would assume it would look like normal IVA- it would look cooler anyways than a following camera. *edit. lowering a drill into the water doesn't work- it bounces up like anything else that touches the water

commenting so I can agree with the posts above! it would make kethane mining operations on Laythe waaay easier!

Well the pipeline is a different case: 1. You have 2 objects docked on the ground 2km away- the game will freak out trying to figure out where the center of mass is. 2. The game doesn't freak out with my contraption because there is only one point of contact with the ground: the anchor part which drags along the ground, preventing explosions. My pipeline solution was using the Lazor mod and attaching rovers with a bunch of fuel transfer lazors at various points so I could pump resources around the planet. Took a while... I'm not sure if driving the resources was quicker at times. The way to combat the slow transfer was to attach many many more lazors. The designs conflict with my low part count paradigm though. I'd post a screenshot of my kethane and ore pipeline system on the Mun, but my old save file got bugged out.

a follow up to a post I made a while ago: my suborbital payload bearing balloon! I finally worked out the kinks and managed to save 20km safely above the ground! yes, that winch is extended at least 20km

I posted on spaceport, but i figured you might read this thread a a little more often. copy/pasted: love the parts! it’s one feature away from being perfect- any chance you can make these parts able to dock with the stock docking ports for resource transfer? I currently have a spherical spaceplane that uses your hatch perfectly but has no room for the clamp o trons. also, I edited the part.cfg to include the docking port size1 module. the proper context menus show up in flight (I have the docking camera mod installed as well- it shows activate docking camera) so I know I edited the part correctly. However, docking with my space station doesn’t work. there must be a way to edit the attachment rules to properly allow docking… when I try to dock, it seems the magnetism attempts to grab the outer ring of the hatch instead of the flat front surface.

i could stare at the smooth texture tanks for days! one thing though- I feel that the mass of the couplers are unbalanced. 2.5 tons for all sizes- did you mean to do that?

I just updated to R3.2 and my Sabre air UI (grey bar) doesn't show anymore. it could be my fault because I installed a few mods as well.

love the mods! a few things: I'm currently trying to make an Eve elevator powered by the envelopes for my spaceplanes in order to save massive delta V. While I can get my planes above the thickest part of the atmosphere, I run into the trouble of my elevator getting deleted once I decouple and fly away in my spaceplane. I know you're supposed to touch the ground in order to save the ship, but I believe I've stretched the Unity Engine to the limit with the lazor system draw distance increase and my edited 50,000 meter KAS grappling hook anchor. Sometimes, I'm able to press the make slow button without touching the ground and make the airship save, but when I decouple, the spaceplane flies like it's still being affected by the make slow button even though I made sure to disable the make slow AND the airship is stuck in physics freeze (according to the in game debug) meaning I can't move my elevator at all, rendering it useless floating debris. 2. Any way to make the SQUID work on landing gears? I edited the gear bay part (correctly, as far as I know) to have the SQUID module on it. While the action group and context menus show up, the effects of SQUID don't happen. 3. I also put SQUID on the Hecto runway. I got it to work, but it only works on one part that it comes in contact with rather than all the parts that come in contact with it- usually my back left landing gear instead of all 3. 4. Could you make the Hecto runway foldable? If possible, as I know it would take some animation and coding wizardry, foldable with a way to attach things to it in the folded state. The reason for questions 2-4: my floating runway 2300meters above the terrain on Kerbin! I use squid on the runway to slow down my approach (assuming my left wheel doesnt cause me to spin off) and squid to boost my spaceplane off. I'd love to move this thing to Duna. I know it's possible to use the extraplanetary launch pad to build one of these there, but I'm waiting until the bugs get ironed out.

___________________________________

Is there any way to make the Aerobrakes behave like a control surface either through part.cfg tweaking or keybinding wizardry? ie, when I press yaw left, the aerobrakes on the right side will engage as long as I am yawing left. combined with the awesome smarter thrust vectoring in the pack, I would be able to make an extremely maneuverable craft. Thanks for the great mod!