The Right Trousers

I've never used RCS to dock. I always zero out relative velocity, line up the ports, and have one ship ram the other at 0.5 m/s.

This won't be useful in established games until the jump drive only targets specific jump targets. When I activated the drive, I got a list of targets that went off the bottom of my screen. Bug report: The first time I clicked on the propulsion tab (I know it's not in there), I thought my computer froze. It was nearly unresponsive for about a minute. When I clicked onto the page under utilites that contains the jump drive, it took about 15 seconds to bring up the page. You have a resource problem somewhere. Ubuntu 64-bit, if it helps. Idea: It might be good to limit the drive to out-of-atmosphere use. Idea: It would be cool if the drive maintained the *relative shape and inclination* of the ship's orbit. I could set up the exact orbit I wanted for Eve (which takes a lot of dv) before jumping there from Minmus (which is easy). I'm not sure what to do about degenerate orbits like on grounded ships - maybe just hyperbolic with no velocity (i.e. dropping them) would be good. Then players could build bases by setting up a geosync satellite and jumping to it from the launchpad.

That actually explains everything. If you made "on the launchpad" mean "within a 15m-wide, VAB-height cylinder," would that make the achievement significantly easier? BTW, aside from getting frustrated about the meaning of the achievement when it was "obvious" to me that I'd done it, it was a really fun one. I'd welcome more like this. Is there a lithobraking achievement? It would be great to have one for each celestial body, and might be easy to implement.

An achievement pop-up ruined a Mun landing. Move them somewhere else? I got a command pod onto the helicopter pad in 8 seconds from launch, and didn't get an achievement. When does the mod start counting? The command pod was on its side, but was still. Does that not count as landing? The text says "Launch a Kerbal." Does that exclude command pods? Should the Kerbal have to go on EVA?

Thanks to OrtwinS, we have a transcription of KSP's main theme to play around with. Here's my arrangement: Kerbal Space Program main theme arrangement (Soundcloud) I haven't made sheet music for this, but the main theme chords are these on the beats: C, Cmaj7, Em7, Am7, Gm7, Bb9, Cmaj7, Am7, Gm7, Bb9, C+4, Am7, Bb6 or Gm7, ... My little interludes use these (not necessarily on beats): Cmaj7 9 +11 13, Cdim, Gm7, Db7 Lots of passing +4/+11s in the C chords (and +2 in the Em) make it sound spacey. Fun stuff. EDIT: Link to OrtwinS's transcription

Excellent. That's a good base to work from. At half notes, the chords under the main theme are C C C C Bb F C C Bb F C C Bb I've been experimenting and found this is quite nice: C C Em Am7 Gm7 F/Bb C Am7 Gm7 F/Bb C C Bb6 (i.e. Gm/Bb) The Em and Gm7 in particular sound regal to me. The second Am7-Gm7-F/Bb-C allows walking the base (playing octaves) around low-low-C, which sounds strong. I've been trying different rhythms. Swings and Latin rhythms sound cool, but are wrong for the piece's tone. (I might try a jazz arrangement anyway.) I think it really needs a march; something like the opening to the Superman theme. I'll bet a percussionist could come up with something nifty. For embellishments, passing F#s sound cool and spacey, blend well with any C turned into Cmaj7, Em or Am, and admit more dissonant transitions using major-minor scales and chords. Ascending and descending arpeggios that incorporate the tune seem to work well. Again, nice work. This is fun to play with.

Just now, on the first two pages in KSP Fan Works, there are four music threads. (Disclaimer: one of them is mine.) There have been plenty of others, and we have regular music producers. I think this justifies having a [Music] tag. How do we get one?

I think you're right about the tempo. I'm starting to think that three of my Soundcloud recordings (including this one) are too slow, but I didn't think so when I first uploaded them. Maybe I need to let them cool for a week before I share them. EDIT: Wait, you dance and sing? This place is full of such interesting people!

I'm glad you like it! (Wow, I don't think anyone's ever told me they tried the score before...) I used Lilypond, a scoring markup language. That's also part of the answer for "why 15/8?": for Lilypond to produce a MIDI with the right rhythm, it needs the scoring to be really precise. The other part is that I'm a purist... I'll try 5/4 with a swing, though. (I think the lead-in to measures 13 and 43 could remain 16th notes.) I've got another song I should try that on as well. If you don't mind, could you let me know whether you find the fingering suggestions helpful? Or whether you find different fingering in those spots more comfortable? We all have different hands... I don't usually put fingering in, but measures 9 and 11 in particular (and their corresponding measures at the end) gave me conniptions until I finally discovered that 4 crossing over 1 made them consistent - for me.

I've tried to capture the impatience and excitement of waiting for a transfer orbit in Kerbol's SOI to finish, SO AS I CAN GET THIS SCRAP BUCKET TO DUNA. Yrrrggl... I think the 15/8 meter (for most of it) does the trick. This is officially the hardest song I've ever written, and it's tons of fun to play until my fingers start to ache... Genre: Jazz. An Endless S.O.I. (PDF) A recording of me playing it: An Endless S.O.I. (Soundcloud) An Endless S.O.I. (MP3) MIDI (missing only the arpeggios): An Endless S.O.I. (MIDI) For those interested: Lilypond source (links to Github) More music by me Soundcloud Anybody know why Soundcloud is acting like an idiot? It gives me an "OH NOES" page every time I click on one of the Soundcloud links, but serves the page properly when I reload it.

The fast beat, instruments and general epicness remind me of Chrono Trigger's main theme. Nicely done.

OP updated with Soundcloud links. Thanks for pointing me there in my last post. I'm definitely checking out the jazz. I've loved piano jazz it ever since I discovered Vince Guaraldi (i.e. the musician behind the Peanuts cartoons music). He was taken from us far too early...

I was struggling to come up with a bridge for this song until I decided it was about Minmus, and remembered my first flyby. It is therefore a KSP Fan Work. I don't look at pictures of KSP planets until I visit them, preferring to let the difficulty flavor the experience. I remember my first visit to Minmus as being like getting socked in the head with a slice of lime wrapped around a solid rocket booster. Genre: Space Jazz. Over an Emerald Moon (PDF) A recording of me playing it: Over an Emerald Moon (Soundcloud) Over an Emerald Moon (MP3) I don't have a screenshot of my first flyby, so I'll shamelessly post someone else's: Lilypond source, for those interested: Lilypond source (links to Github) More music by me Soundcloud

No problem - I just wrote another one. It's like... the more stressful school gets, the more music I write. Cool. Running Lilypond on it should output a MIDI file. I didn't include license text in the music source, but feel free to do whatever you want with it. It'll probably take some work to put any life into the MIDI, though.

Never heard of Soundcloud before today, and... it is awesome. I'll try to find the time. Thanks for the kind words. Now that there are at least 3 composers here, we should lobby for a [Music] tag.

I've had a song idea tumbling in my head for years, waiting for the right rhythm. It came to me while I was docking in KSP: a tango! It sort of all fell together after that. Orbital Tango in ÃŽâ€v Major (PDF) A recording of me playing it: Orbital Tango in ÃŽâ€v Major (Soundcloud) Orbital Tango in ÃŽâ€v Major (MP3) Lilypond source, for those interested: Lilypond source (links to Github) I was going for whimsical, punctuated with the glorious realization HOLY COW I AM IN SPACE. More music by me Soundcloud

Turns out the free-turning docking washer can be used to make some pretty cool vehicles. I present to you... the V-3 Penny-Farthing! It gets up to 43 m/s on Kerbin on a full tank, probably up to 50 m/s near empty. But it gets better. I thought I'd try it on the water... Holy Moses. It's also a paddle boat.

Undisclaimer: I've made quite a few 3D games and demos in the last 20 years. rkman has the right answer: it's perspective distortion arising from projecting a 3D object onto a 2D surface. I wouldn't wish for another projection method, though: in almost all of them, lines turn into curves after projection. One way to mitigate the distortion is to narrow the field of view (FOV). But then you'd see less stuff on your screen. Some games (especially first-person shooters) allow you to change your FOV. A lot of FPS players use ridiculously high FOVs, approaching fisheye-style projections. I don't see an option to change it in KSP, though.

Works like a charm. I now have head room in the VAB for making bigger things, so... here's the Tangerine Terror 2: At launch: KSP seems to be a lot happer with big Orion payloads if you put big ol' rocket holders on 'em. It requires a fewer struts between the payload and the drive to keep them from falling apart. Once in the air, the connection between Orion and the payload doesn't seem to need to be as strong as on the launchpad.

Huh. That didn't happen on my expedition to the sun, probably because I went at night. Nyrath, thanks for slaving over a hot whatever-it-is-you-slave-over-to-do-this just so we can have fun.

Update: I got a 500 ton payload to Duna. I had to redesign the "Tangerine Terror" stations to be more compact so they fit just under the roof of the VAB. It's not ideal, but it's a workaround. Everything else seems to be working fine on 0.21: animation, action keys, etc. Edit: You said a while back you wanted to see screenshots of big payloads. Here's one to warm the cockles of your heart as you chase the problem down: It was supposed to be a little heavier, but halfway to Duna, the Orion drive lost its connection with the docking port I was using to connect it to its payload. (Unlikely to be your problem. Heavy stuff just falls apart in KSP.) I had to aerobrake and use liquid engines to establish orbit. One more edit, just for fun: the new reaction wheel system makes turning these beasts a lot easier. I put 12 on that sucker, and it maneuvers like a gymnast. Well, more like a fat gymnast, but between that and physics warp it handles fine.

FWIW, thanks for staying on top of this. Next to MechJeb, this is by far my favorite mod. I'm seriously looking forward to parking gigantic fueling stations on all the planetoids again so my SSTOs can flit about all over the solar system. Edit: Bah. Scooped by MajorMajor, yesterday.

This might help: it seems if you lift the engine far enough off the ground before launch, it won't explode. This, for example, lifts off just fine: I raised it all the way to the VAB ceiling. I don't know if it needs that much space below at launch (I was too excited to share this new information to test more ), but it's enough. Theory: due to KSP changes, the first charge is just above ground level when it goes off. Detecting whether the plate is too near the ground and doing something different (e.g. don't detonate the charge, but subtract one anyway) might be enough to fix this.

I would imagine you could hook him up to a dynamo and get cheap energy for decades. Anyway, just tried 0.15, and it seems to be working: the thing is still ridiculously powerful (yay!), the action groups action properly, and the pusher plate is nicely sinusoidal. I tried putting some stuff on it, and it indeed rises and falls with the plate, but it also moves inward on the upstroke and outward on the downstroke, which looks a little weird. As long as you're working on the pusher plate, could you make the collision mesh around the banded part vertical? This thing is so awesome.

My son and I were very disappointed that this setup didn't work as expected: Jebediah walked away unscathed after five whole minutes of crisping. Actually, the engine blew him gently off the top of the pod as soon as he stood up. Seconds later, the chair exploded. So unrealistic.