Gargamel

What do you think Mercury and Gemini was?

Probably was there from the beginning.... But I know what you meant

I just proposed a possible Elevator that would might work in KSP in the mod request section. Feedback is requested.

Have you tried infernal robotics?

ok Ok OK! I hear you! It's been requested ad-naseum, and it can't be done it's been said. But I have an idea.... bear with me. If this type of idea has been proposed and shot down, well, forgive me. But read on, I think it may work and would be a huge bonus to the game. We know there's a physics limit, so a true elevator can't be done. But what about simulating one? Ground base: Add into the tech tree, a unit, or unit's of varying strength, that would represent the ground base/anchor for the elevator. These units would be very, very heavy, but would be launchable by a heavy booster so it might be landed on other bodies. The heaviest unit would be able to support lifting the lighter ones into orbit on the elevator. Each size unit would have a max lifting capacity, and would require the matching sized orbiting station and filament to operate. Orbital Station: This would be made up of a variety of parts. First off would be the core, manned, so the kerbals could monitor and control traffic up to, down from, in, and out of the station. Then the orbital anchor unit, this would be the main mass of the station and where the elevator would be attached to. These would need RCS and probably some decent engines to make some adjustments to remain in geosynchronous orbit over the base. The elevator itself would be made of Karbon nano tubes (Sorry! Couldn't help myself!). These would be lofted into orbit in containers similar to fuel tanks. The light weight elevator would use the full size 1.25m tanks, while the medium 2.5m, and heavy 3.75m. It should require at least 6-8 tanks worth of filament up there to dangle it back to the surface, and there would need to be a spare on the station for tension adjustments (Not actually simmed, just having a tank with >25% capacity would suffice). So it would require many launches to build the elevator. The orbital station/anchor would have a resource (filament?) that would have to be transferred from the filament tanks, and once it's full (6-8 tanks worth) and the spare is present, the elevator would be operable. So how's it work? Take the magic of Hyper-edit and mix in some Construction Time, and it might work. When you build an object/payload to be lifted, it would spawn on the base object (obviously only KSC bases would spawn items, others on other bodies could attach to it through a docking port or such). It then starts to lift, and is despawned. After a certain amount of time based upon the size of your elevator, speed of the car, and mass of the payload, the payload would respawn on the orbital station. There it could be detached and docked to a conventional craft, and a something else could head down, or another payload heads up. So there actually isn't a physical object spanning the space in between the ground and orbital units, we just get the functionality of one. Each filament can only support it's max weight, and only in one direction at a time, but you can have multiple cars (another item that needs to be included, and matched for the appropriate size filament) on one filament as long as it doesn't exceed the max weight. If you have a station with two filaments on it, you can have an up filament and a down filament. Filament can only be produced in bulk on Kerbin, maybe tiny amounts could be produced from an insane amount of ore in orbit. This would allow a small elevator orbiting another body to eventually create enough filament to upgrade to a bigger elevator, but the anchors (ground and orbital) and station would have to be imported. Like I said, I think it's plausible as I've seen all the elements of this idea function in other mods. The time delay might get tricky, but the rest should be doable for a skilled modder. The orbital construction aspect makes it good for gameplay, and the different levels of the pieces make it 'realistic' as you'll have to traditionally launch heavy payloads repeatedly to build one. Or one could whackjob a single launch. Switch out mass and weight where appropriate, I used them interchangeably here. I would love to tackle this myself, but I have neither the skill, nor the time to do it or learn to do it. But maybe I've planted a bug in a modder somewhere who might take this on....

This. And maybe not harder, but different. Did NASA start whining that a Lunar program was impossible after the Apollo 1 tragedy? Nope, they just did things differently. Did they give up Shuttle launches after Challenger? Nope. Did they just start stranding astronauts in space after Columbia? Nope. Did Virgin Galactic give up after their recent loss? Nope. With the amount of success that people have already shown in the release version, it seems to me the issue is not with the game, but with the users who do not want to put forth an effort to learn. "We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all kerbals. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on Jeb, and only if the Kerbal States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say that we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that kerbals have made in extending their writ around this globe of ours. There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all kerbalkind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the Mun? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Great Kerbal Sea? ... We choose to go to the Mun! ... We choose to go to the Mun in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win ..." -with great apologies to JFK

Or you start a thread that has been started 4 times in the past 6 months.

I think that's just another argument for them being a plant based lifeform. Wearable Terrarium? Yup a plant. Or would that be a wearable Kerrarium? bada-ting!

Did you break your finger spamming the screenshot?

There's been a couple other threads on aerobraking, in particular Jool. I have myself done it.

/thread

I "successfully" aerobroke (braked? hmmm...) in Jools atmo using a very heavy probe. Came in over 8500 m/s and entered at 195k alt. I did use mechjeb to help estimate the resulting orbit. But the reason I put "successfully" in quotes is that it caused an acceleration bug. Maybe it's some element of gameplay I'm not aware of, such as a heating issue (ie the Voyager (Pioneer?) anomaly where the generator's heat output was causing a very very tiny, but noticeable acceleration). After I entered the atmosphere, it wouldn't let me timewarp, saying I was under acceleration. Even after leaving atmo, the acceleration continued. I had a 'stable' orbit, minus the kraken, but since I couldn't timewarp, I didn't feel like waiting 80 days to see if it would go away, and with the accel, it probably would have knocked me out of orbit. So I just reverted, many times, to a quicksave, and after the slingshot around jool, it's now on a 300 year looping orbit. It's still got 4500 dv left after a mun, minmus, Duna, Jool tour(13 ion engines with 16 generators and a few solar panels), so I may do something with it eventually.

Epic Necro is Epic. Didn't catch on this was a necro until the .22 comment. Good thread.

I know we don't like the "use a mod" answer for stock issues, but I've always been a fan of Quantum Struts, even with their quirks, but with the stock fairings, I've found that placing them in a few spots on the payload so the struts hit the inside of the fairing, it holds the payload nicely in place. I haven't done any aerodynamic tests with Qstrutted vs non fairing launches, but I know that keeping the payload inside the fairing is a lot more aerodynamic than not.

IIRC this is not a change, but a fix. Way back when I started playing in .15 or .17 or whenever I started, the panels operated identically, but were only different cosmetically, AND the descriptions were different, stating the shielded ones were retractable and the unshielded ones were not. I never used the shielded ones because the unshielded ones had less mass (I think) and they actually retracted, so there was no use in the other ones. But now they are working AS ORIGINALLY INTENDED, which makes complete sense. Now there is a place for each type. If you're not going to be in an atmosphere after deploying them (spaceplanes or aerobraking), then the unshielded are the way to go, but if you need them to retract........ And as to the IRL versions, what spacecraft have we built that had large wing style solar panels that needed to be retracted automatically? I can't think of any. KSP is showing us the future in this aspect. Eventually there will be an IRL craft that will require retractable panels.

For aesthetic reasons, I had always started the strut on dropped parts, but now as it has an actual effect, I will make sure to always do this. IMO though, given the historically wibbly wobbly nature of KSP that we have all come love.... err hate.... err accept, I think Squad should change this to severely reduce the effect struts have on flight. I'm very much pro 1.x, but there are some elements that should be kept. IRL interfaces between objects would be designed into the parts themselves to increase strength, but we don't have that option. Struts are as much of a reflection on how the engine works as much as it is of our craft designs.

Yay! Thanks KW Rocketry! One of my staple mods!

My god, are we still whining about this? Personally I think the game has improved since earlier versions. On some level, all of us think of ourselves as scientists or engineers, else we wouldn't be playing this game. Isn't the point of science to adapt to changes in experimental data?? Grow a set and be a scientist.

Built a shuttle, and when the TWR on the boosters was too much, I fired off the fleas so they would end at the same time. That balanced out the thrust issues I was having.

Quick bug report. Tried to place two inside the module bay container for symmetry and COG purposes (I'm OCD like that ok?), and when I went to bring up the GUI, it just showed a little grey box. When I removed one of them, the (Apparently) correct GUI appeared. - - - Updated - - - Another Quick bug report. Tried to setup a graph with 25,000 datapoints. The graph window expands so far off the screen I got tire of trying to drag it back. Could we use a dynamically rendered scrolling plot to display the info ingame, say 500 pts max?

forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/76231-1-0-x-Kerbal-NRAP-Procedural-test-weights!-v1-5-0-4-30-04-15 Try this, NRAP.

Holding shift while dragging the ring will increase precision.

Sooooo..... you're recommending a suborbital space station?

If that's your heavy.... Previous versions my ultralightweight ships were 20t. What would you recommend for the 700t ship I used to run? And yes, I attend the grand holy church of whackjob.

Reading the way they phrased it, it seems like they added some mods after having a save already made, and that caused the corruption of the previously saved craft files. If so, that's still on the user.