entaran

Both sides need a probe core. One on the main vessel, one on the part you decouple, otherwise it becomes debris.

Using graphs is fine, except not everyone is an aerospace engineer. I mean, yeah we could use them and will to get past the majority of the issues, but still at least having a basic marker to help you approximate the design of the plane and THEN using the graphs to fine tune is probably a more "what you see is what you get" approach. There's a fine line between simulator and real life in some instances and being forced to check 4-8 graph results every time you move a wingtip is a bit rough. The CoL marker should show you balance, I agree it has no use in super and transonic or aoa calc's etc, but it can tell you the basic tendency of your plane (pitch up, down, neutral, lawn dart, etc).

I don't know if this has been reported or not, but I'm encountering some SPH weirdness with COL calculations. Basically, the blue bubble doesn't update at all until the part is placed (as in it doesn't move as you move the part around to help you place it) and it makes no sense once it is place, move a wing forward and CoL moves back. Move Back, CoL jumps to middle or BELOW the airplane etc. It's generally in line with the wings or other parts but once you start adding multiple lifting surfaces it gets really weird, i've had the CoL showing in the "floor" of the SPH just before. This is on a completely fresh install of 1.0.2 with only the contents of FerramAero download from Kerbalstuff and no other mods at all. I made a test install because I started encountering this issue on my main save since updating to the Ferri release and I wanted to try to isolate what was causing it. If there's any other information you would like, please just let me know (and possible a short idea of how to get it if it's not obvious)

There's vernier engines in the control section. They act like LFO fuelled RCS engines and work with RCS controls. Good luck!

Sadly the left-alt-f7 thing didn't do much of anything. :/

Soooo... I managed to start my career without loading the interstellar tech tree from treeloader BECAUSE it hovers straight over the VAB and you can't move the window. Any way to force it to reappear so I can choose the tree? Or edit my save to do it from a stock tree? Regards

There's a pretty cool button on your keyboard, it's near left shift called "x". Push it. Or get floorit from the mods section (which works fine in 0.24)

0.24 works fine. Have attached an image which will only affect the most OCD among us. Basically, the wheel's don't actually touch the ground (ever). Also, the medium wheel has a mind of it's own and likes to suddenly decide it wants to turn left at random or never stop accelerating. Or both. The large wheels are pretty good but seem quite low on traction, I hypereditted them onto the mun and they are well... uninspiring. Those antigrav units tho.. Oh. My. God. Now to combine with interstellar for a thermal turbojet for propulsion and you have a duna rover that will literally never run out of fuel. Or kethane and drive from deposit to deposit to refuel monoprop with teh new monoprop engine (which isn't bad tbh!)

Thankyou for creating something that isn't as mind bogglingly complicated. I love what FAR does, but I am not an Aeronautical Engineer

Only really simple thing I could suggest is strap a pair of radial (small) fuel tanks to the side on decouplers of that final stage with small engines under them and use them for your descent, then the lander shown there is purely an ascent stage. It's a little more mass but it should be a lot easier. Also mechjeb is absolutely awful at landing. Quicksave in orbit and just land over and over and over again until you get the idea. Basically, the easiest (reasonably efficient) way to do it is to burn retro from orbit until your surface horizontal speed (read the surface info tab on mechjeb you have installed) is zero or within 1-3m/s. then just drop vertically and wait till you're about 800 metres TRUE altitude before you even start slowing down. However that make for hard targetting. Start with that, then you can refine it into a single movement with some time and practice. But seriously, strap some radial tanks/boosters to that to do the landing for you, then just ditch them on the surface of the moon. - Seeing as you're basically stock, if you shove a probe core under that lander can or between it and hte pit, you could fly there unmanned and bring back 2 kerbals.

Depends how good you are at fine piloting. It's possible to extend a ladder from the side of your spacecraft and edge it close enough that when you hit ] to swap to jeb, he can hit f for grab. Alternatively, use an asteroid claw and ram him.

After being told fairly bluntly by ferram about 50 pages ago that I was bad at plane design after I complained about planes blowing to pieces too easily... I can now get 100 ton SSTO's to orbit and home without even the slightest hiccup. (Using B9 parts) Pretty proud even though it's taken three solid weeks of teaching myself aerodynamic design... and getting much better at keyboard control because I don't have/use a joystick. RE: The mach nosedive, if you take the main body of your plane and then extend the nose forward using fuselage sections or similar, you'll find that the COM/COL moves way further back on the plane (it doesn't move at all, but the plane gets longer away from it), this will SIGNIFICANTLY increase your stability and reduce the effect of this. This SSTO is 97 or so tons at takeoff weight. Has a TWR of 1.40 down the runway and will lift before the end (at approx 150m/s nose up, 175m/s ground clearance). Can ascend at a solid 20-25 degrees to 15km, then level out to about 7-8 degrees to build up speed to about mach 4.5. It has zero wobble, zero mach nose dive, and requires minimal trim to fly on all the current latest versions of each mod. It's designed as a tanker and takes the equivalent of a bit over a full orange tank to orbit after its own fuel use to get into orbit, rendezvous, dock and then de-orbit. Product of many weeks of trial and error! If I give it to mechjeb to fly, it explodes instantly. Unless it's already at about 10km where the atmospheric pressure is significantly less. Pretty much designed it to see if I could make a completely re-usable fuel tanker from KSC to LKO to refuel stations or interplanetary stages etc. Can basically just taxi up to my orange tank stack,refuel and take off again no worries!

I'm an intensely good pilot but I can't plan a manoeuvre node to save my life. Therefore I use KSPTOT, Mechjeb and a variety of other tools. (Missions aren't meant to be done alone right Houston?) I HATE Jeb so much, I always intentionally kill him within the first 5 minutes of a new save. And I will repeat this process indefinitely every time he respawns. Once instead of killing Jeb I strapped him to a contraption consisting of about 10 mainsails and fired him on an escape trajectory out of Kerbol orbit. I am always relieved when the first kerbal into my ships isn't jeb. I wish there was a mod that would randomise which kerbal was picked for your flight if you didn't specify. The lack of gravity on most planets annoys me enough that I generally refuse to use rovers and will hop all over the surface of a planet in ridiculous lightweight landers. Exceptions apply for Duna & Tylo. I will frequently use a plane on laythe birddog style.

So I updated to 13.3 from 13.1 (which i think is the one before aero failures?) and i've run into some interesting problems. Firstly, flying with SAS now makes my plane pitch up/down ALL the time, it never stops while flying from going up/down and will eventually tear itself apart. I have NO idea how to fix this and it's driving me insane? Secondly, because of the SAS issue which I can't figure out at all, SSTO's i've flown literally 100+ missions with into LKO now don't even make it 2km off the ground before screaming off into the nether/tearing themselves to pieces. Can anyone point me to something that may be screwing with my SAS so badly? Is it likely to be a pile of mod conflicts (although I just have like KAS, Ferram, B9, Interstellar and some editor plugins with TAC.)? I'm at my wits end, I kind of hate using rockets but it's the only way I can launch things atm, I really enjoy doing SSTO cargo missions.

Even getting an encounter with minmus is crazy hard now. Given you have like 10ms window. I've had "closest intercept" below 300km and still not had it show up as an encounter.

Random minor bug: On save load, Kerbin is always "dark" - if you then zoom to map and back, the sun suddenly comes out (assuming you're on the bright side of the tidally locked planet!)

That's pretty much the bug everyone is trying to track down hotblack. Read the last like 4 pages of the thread.

Opening post.

Actually, that Duna entry should've been disallowed anyway. In your challenge description you state that the purpose is to aerobrake then circularise after exit. If you don't aerobrake enough to HAVE an apoapsis inside the SOI it shouldn't be allowed. Otherwise it's pointless, you're just firing mk1 cockpits into the atmosphere as fast as possible. (It's actually possible to hit Eve at 83,772 m/s)... my best so far. Ofc if you even consider re-entry heating or the G force deceleration you're both dead and atomised.

Well done mate! Could you please add the date of your release to your thread title? That helps us keep track of when we last d/led it and makes it super easy to keep up to date

Super hard mode version: Incline Kerbin's orbit around Jool. It appears that the Jool moons need to be spread out like... 2x as far as they are now, the outer ones not so much, but minmus/laythe definitely have some ... interesting artefacts from overlap with Jool's SOI. Maybe it might be more effective (yet unrealistic) to replace Jool with Kerbin and vice versa with some rescaling of the planets/attributes?

Some planets when you zoom on them don't appear quite on the orbit lines. They're sort of beside them.

This LOOKS AMAZING. As you do updates, could you please date the thread title? It really really helps to keep track of if you have the latest version.

Actually mechjeb doesn't land perfectly, it lands safely. You can easily beat mechjeb's landing for efficiency doing it manually. When you get to munar orbit, f5 quicksave, adjust your orbit so you're ~6km periapsis on the bright side of the moon somewhere (we're learning to land, not trying to hit a specific point). It's slightly better to do this from like 11/6 circular instead of like 90/6 but only marginal in terms of dV (like 10.) As you approach what looks like a flattish spot (craters are good, or the high point just outside the edge of a crater), burn retrograde fullspeed with surface indicator on until you kill horiz vel. Then just fall. You can suicide burn at about 1km and just edge it in after that. Mechjeb loves to just burn fuel to maintain a safe approach speed. It's also way too obsessed with exact co-ordinate targetting and not having any horiz vel at all. you can safely land with upto 5ms of horiz velocity if you have at least 4 legs. Faster if you have 8 or a better leg design. Try it and then see how you go, I'm almost certain you can beat mechjeb to the surface by a considerable margin.

LethalDose... have you ever played EVE Online or dealt with CCP Games? The levels of communication here are similar, I'm not sure why everyone is up in arms over feature changes when KSP is still obviously in Beta and features are being added, changed and removed about once a month. I mean yeah, if KSP was 1.0 full release and they said "We're making a DLC/Free Expansion with xyz (resources etc)" then they release a DLC with female kerbals and an extra planet instead then sure, this sort of storm should evolve but for a project that is headed up by all of what, 10 developers? I don't think that people should really be screaming blue murder like they are right now over resources or any other feature/plan. As for multiplayer, it doesn't make any sense to release a single player game in todays online world unless it's a solid RPG or simulator with absolutely no scope. The fact that they have about-faced on this idea is probably due to the excellent work of the alpha multiplayer mod showing that it is indeed possible. And given the precedents already set, I'd suggest that the dev of that mod may have received (or shortly will) a job offer from SQUAD.