GreeningGalaxy

Banned for hogging all the reliable hydrogen fusion without letting the earth have some too. Come on, Sun! Let us have some fun too.

I did a sideways RCS landing of a gigantic transit vehicle on Gilly once. It worked well, of course, because Gilly "landing" is basically closer to docking than landing as such. I haven't been back to Gilly in a long time; I should totally do that again soon.

I like the RAPIER mainly because it opens up possibilities for single- or dual-engine SSTOs, which were impossible or at least nearly so before its release. I mean, yes, most of my SSTOs are big KSPI nuclear-powered monsters or at least quad-engine RAPIER affairs, but there are some times when I just want to let Jeb take a vacation to LKO and don't have much else I want to haul up with him.

When you look at a show-off-your-stuff thread and someone posts a ship that they say "can SSTO with nuclear pulse propulsion" And you just sit there like Did you mean: Giving the whole world radiation poisoning?

356?? Whoa now. I'm more popular than I thought. Or at least more infamous, I suppose. I'd be surprised if every single one of those 356 visits happened because someone thought my posts were flawless and wanted to come gaze at my adorable profile pic.

I've heard that. It's kind of remarkable how slowly some things happen on the sun, and how so much of its characteristics only exist by virtue of its incredible size. Like how photons emitted in the core take millions of years to reach the surface, and how any given proton within the sun might last millions of years before finally undergoing fusion. The cores of experimental fusion reactors have to be 10-100 times as hot as the sun's core to get anywhere, and they still haven't even achieved fusion for more than a tiny fraction of a second at at time.

Scott Manley for sure, with Danny a close second. I've also found Macey Dean interesting and been amused by Robbaz, Enter Elysium, HOC Gaming and Overfloater before, but I can never seem to get enough of Manley's science and voice.

Hydrogen and time, everybody. Thinking about all that amazing complexity that arises when a bunch of hydrogen finds itself in one place gives me chills. Stars, though. Just wow.

Oh wow. That's beautiful!

You should totally add BD Armory to that. It's a weapon mod that plays nice with most parts and doesn't add anything extra besides the weapons, unlike Romfarer's Lazor System or things like that. Stock missiles are amusing but can get old fast IMO. And of course, I might actually get DMP and join the server if you added KSPI to it as well, because giant nuclear-powered warships are amazing. But yeah, I can understand that might get a little out of hand with people tossing antimatter bottles at each other and running un-safeguarded DT Vista engines to kill everyone else's kerbals with radiation, and that everyone might not want to have to figure out how to run nuclear reactors in order to compete.

The argument most people make about that is this: Stock KSP isn't detailed enough for you to be able to do everything yourself. Nuclear engines do all the reactor management for you, you never have to worry about kerbal life support or radiation or heat shielding, and using maneuver nodes is literally only a few button presses away from Mechjeb. I agree that doing stuff yourself is fun, but if you're playing an unmodded game, MJ is just a tiny tiny step away from you on the scale of how much the game does for you. That said, my personal argument for not getting mods back when my game was stock was that I didn't care about realism, and was just having a lot of fun seeing what I could do under the constraints of the stock game, and only those constraints. If mods that improve the aerodynamics model, make nuclear engines more realistic, add more wing shapes, make engines scale their thrust with altitude, etc. don't feel right to you and undermine the kerbal aesthetic, I totally understand, but it is a bit strange to hear people talking about how they don't use mechjeb because they 'like to do everything themselves.'

Does it still change on you if you put it in Chase mode? I thought I got all the way from launch to Minmus in Chase mode once, but I guess I could have dreamed that...

AFAIK, Unity does not support N-body gravitation, meaning that as long as you're in the SOI of something (like Kerbin or the sun), it's the only gravitational force that can act on you- thus why KSP has no realistic Lagrange points. Since the asteroids have no SOIs, I don't think they can have gravity based on KSP's current model. Also, as the asteroids are much less dense than real-life ones in addition to being small, I don't think even a class-E would have enough gravity to be noticed. I could be wrong about gravity absolutely requiring SOIs though- thinking in terms of what I know from making realistic(ish) gravity in Scratch, N-body stuff shouldn't be too hard for 2 dimensions, so I don't imagine three would be any harder than essentially adding another axis. Of course, it might be less an issue of code and more an issue of the majority of KSP players not owning a supercomputer.

I haven't tried MJ yet, mostly because I can never be bothered to actually go find it and install it when my game already takes 5 minutes to load all the other mods I've installed. It looks like fun, but I'm already just hyperediting my big KSPI ships into orbit because, while I have demonstrated the ability to make gigantic lifters to loft them the right way, my computer has not done so well with part counts in the upper 600s, and sitting through a launch at 1 frame per second isn't a lot of fun, nor is trying to dock the last section to a ship of 300 parts much of a good time either. Although it's probably what I should be doing at this point. If I'm not derailing the thread too much, does anyone know of any mods that completely disable part-on-part wobble? That's one element of realism I'm willing to forgo, especially since a) having to calculate high part counts is making my computer cry, and I have yet to run into any wobble problem that can't be fixed with a few struts, so why not skip the struts and make everything cleaner and smoother? I'm assuming that would work or at least help a little, but correct me if I'm wrong about that.

...Huh. Now I want a steampunk mod for KSP. I've already been weirding out my family by saying that things of particularly modular, internally incongruous, and/or hacked-together construction have a 'kerbalpunk' aesthetic.

Clearly, the only true kerbal solution would have been to try to explode off the corresponding engine on the other side to get the thrust balance back. Although I would guess that would just make its TWR too low take off at all. Nice.. photojournal? comic? thing! I usually forget to document my missions that well. Once I accidentally flew an experimental fighter jet to the south pole after an unscheduled flip-out incident just after takeoff. I didn't even realize I was heading south until the ice sheet appeared on the horizon. I didn't manage to incur the wrath of the Kraken, though, nor did I do it in quite so stylish a plane as you did, however. Neat!

I built this monstrosity with KSPI: It's got 3 D-T Vista engines and probably enough fuel to do several Eeloo round trips. It's also powered primarily by an AIM microfusion reactor, so it will certainly last long enough to do that. Even better, it now has some new landers with legs that point the right direction and actual power generation. I'm not 100% sure they'll be able to take off again after landing on Eeloo (which happens to be the goal) but they theoretically should. Unfortunately, it has no warp drive because the AIM reactor doesn't like those very much. The trip without it will be more fuel efficient but, of course, much, much longer. Hope they packed extra snacks!

Well, it looks like it pretty much dissolved his body... Guess the helmet must be fiberglass though. :|

So far all I've done is put a class-E in a high-eccentricity polar orbit (about as useless an orbit as you can get) and a class-A in a retrograde low-equatorial orbit (also pretty useless). I was going to hook them together with KAS or something and make a Prospit-and-moon kind of setup (maybe even complete with buildings) but then that save broke.

I've established so many bases by either landing with a ship that turned out not to have enough fuel to get back to orbit (like when I tried setting my Mun lander down on Eve) or I just didn't want to leave because it took so long to get there (Eeloo). Or because the ship broke into tiny little bits when it hit the ground at a perfectly reasonable speed. In fact, I've only ever established two bases that I actually had planned to make into permanent bases before arriving at the planet- One was just a Hitchhiker with some parachutes and RCS strapped to it that I dropped onto Laythe on my way past, and the other was a big KSPI fuel generation facility that I set down on Minmus, which proceeded to only last a few minutes because launching the next flight broke the save. With enough imagination, anything can be a base. "Jeb, why is there a spent radial decoupler sitting over there? I thought you said this was a-" "Shut up, Bob, it's a base."

Can someone fill me in on what the exact working definition of 'suicide burn' is? Is that where you just point at the thing you want to go to and burn until you get an encounter, or is that something else?

Structural panels are inanely difficult to place properly, I would agree with you there. You can actually get them to attach in the center (to either make a stack of panels or attach other inline parts to them), which seems to work better for me if you view the panel you're trying to attach to edge-on in the VAB/SPH. Attaching them edge-to-edge with any degree of precision is even harder, and while I have managed to make a few of them connect nicely, I can only conclude that those monstrosities you see people make out of them must have required some combination of witchcraft, thaumaturgy, or reality bending, not to mention a mad mad gaming box to run that smoothly with a ship with a part count that high. My advice is to set your mouse sensitivity a little lower and play around with the WASD keys in the VAB a bit more (as well as viewing the target part from different angles) to see if you can get anything to meet up nicely. Oh, and of course, don't forget to turn on angle snap!

I had one of those once! The eclipsed sun broke over the horizon just as the docking ports finally met between my lander and the transit vehicle that took it out to Duna. That mission ended up stranding three kerbals on the surface of Duna AND crashing the transit vehicle into Ike, so I guess eclipse sunrises are hardly a good-luck charm (or maybe that was when I had only been playing for a couple weeks and was a huge noob ). I think I a have the screenshots somewhere, but that was a lot of versions ago.

I've been getting some kind of erratic behavior out of the AIM reactor. I tried putting two generators on it, one KTEC solid state and one direct conversion, but before I launched it, they both turned into direct converters without telling me. I didn't notice until trying to charge the Alcubierre drive drained all my charged particles very fast and killed the reactor's performance. Shutting down one of the two generators made the drive charge quickly and sustainably. It didn't get weird until I fixed the ship and converted the other generator back to a KTEC solid state- after that, I couldn't charge the drive for more than a few seconds without the thermal power and charged particles hitting zero and the reactor taking many minutes to get back up to any meaningful power output. Turning off either generator sometimes extended the charge time available, but usually not. Is there some other thing about how to set these things up that I'm not getting, or at least a way to adjust how much power the Alcubierre drive uses while charging? Edit: I made sure I had plenty of deuterium and uranium nitride, as well as an antimatter supply and a trickle of helium-3 coming in from decaying tritium. I'll admit I'm not quite sure what I actually need to make this thing go and in what proportions, but it ran okay and never said resource deprived or anything.

god yes. the 'place strut oh whoops there goes your whole ascent stage' thing happens to me so much it's unreal