Cydonian Monk

They're towards the end of the Aero tab. TF-10 Aerodynamic Enclosure and the TF-10 Extended Aerodynamic Enclosure.

They're either Tantares/LV or Stock. And some of the earlier crafts used the SoundingRockets fairings.

Well they're both on the same thread, so it's tough there to give two different links. I'm using both, FWIW. There is actually a mistake in the mod links where I've copied in a link to the old, retired thread of one of the mods, but the forum was being a bit grouchy when I tried to fix it so I've left it as-is for now.

Ah, right. I've been getting it free (with new hardware) for so long I forgot they sell it. Apple won't tell me how much the new version is (I'm on mobile), but you can buy it from the AppStore if/when you upgrade beyond 10.6.x independent of iLife (since it no longer exists). Might be farly inexpensive, or it might be $30. No idea. OpenOffice and/or LibreOffice were still good (and still free) last time I used them. Not as slick on OS-X as Pages or Word, but still nice for editing. One of the two should work nicely on your machine. And there's always Google Docs. Word routinely SBBoDs my Mac (Spinning Beach Ball o' Death), so I tend to avoid it. I only keep it around because of work. And of course it's a tad bit expensive. TextEdit still rocks. It's really not a terrible machine, just as long as you don't plan to edit videos or play modern AAA games on it.

Thank you. I use retrograde Mün orbits for two reasons: 1) Free return trajectories for crewed spacecraft. Everything I send to The Mün (or the Moon) that has a living crew needs to be able to return to Kerbin (or Earth) without an additional burn. Since these ships then have to dock with other things (space stations), those other things also have to be in a retrograde orbit. 2) Given #1, to minimize the chance of a high-velocity impact. So if everything in Münar (or Lunar) orbit is orbiting in the same direction, then we're looking at 10-100m/s relative collisions instead of 1200m/s. Setting up the free-return trajectory requires an extra ~120m/s for the transfer burn but slightly reduces the capture burn. The difference for landing on or launching from the surface is negligible (18m/s). There are a few satellites in a prograde münar orbit, but most of them are in very high orbit. There might be one or two things in a prograde LMO from earlier saves....

OK. I'll look into options when I get home tonight. Not sure if I'll set up a git repo or put them on KerbalX, or use some other alternative.

Thanks! kOS scripts, yes, though I'll warn you I'm a lazy hacker when it comes to things I write outside of work. Some occasionally ugly code this way lies: https://github.com/cydonian-monk/kOS-Scripts Craft files, not really. I use such a mish-mash of mods that the craft files might be difficult to get everything needed. I don't have them online in an easy to share place regardless. I wish I knew, but this is twice it's happened. Presumably I've found some strange RemoteTech bug, though I'll need to scratch at it some more to confirm. I have some ideas. Possibly having a connected antenna being the only part on a ship? Or a connected antenna that's lacking an SPU? Might also be a mod conflict or something else entirely.....

Second Verse, Same as the First Identical in every respect to the first Phosphorous, P-2 was launched just as soon as updated landing software was available. This time the kerbals had a plan: Land on the far side of the Mün. They were (mostly) guaranteed to be in direct contact with the craft during tis entire descent, so this was less about landing in full isolation and more about landing on the far side. This launch was less than perfect, thanks largely to an errant K-Box controller left plugged into one of the desks in mission control. Gene had warned the various flight controllers against playing video games on the "Big Board" in MC-1, but there would always be that one kerbal who just had to get in a few more minutes of whatever the super hot game of the Münth was. Super. It took the crews some time to determine what was causing the excessive undulation of the craft... it seemed to be fighting against itself, oscillating as much as 45 degrees off-course. (The software kerbs were quite happy they had never gotten around to coding the "deviation auto-abort" sequence for the launch script, as the waggling displayed by Phosphorous 2 would've surely resulted in an abort.) In the end it turned out to be the joystick on the K-Box controller not having a large enough dead zone. Hot. Placed safely into orbit, the P-2 was on its node for Münar Transfer in less than half an orbit. The burn was completed using the RT-2 onboard flight computer. This operation turned out to be a bit less precise than desired, with the craft's resulting trajectory being one that intercepted the Mün. (Though arguably that was the plan anyway....) A short 6.4m/s mid-course correction burn cleaned that up nicely. Super. Unlike its predecessor, the P-2 was placed into the more standard retrograde Münar orbit. The basic orbital operations were handled by the RT-2 onboard flight computer, bringing the lander probe into a 12km parking orbit. As it so happened the Boron 4 was in orbit just ahead of the P-2, keeping it company during its short visit and acting as a terrific relay. One orbit later and the P-2 was set up for landing. A short initial burn from the transfer stage was used to deorbit it and the lander, afterwards the four-legged beast took over the show. Next stop: The East Farside Crater! This part of the landing wasn't particularly nerve-wracking, given that it had already been proven in the P-1 mission. As expected the craft managed its descent smoothly, keeping the throttle set just enough to stay within the previously determined optimal speeds. There was some question as to whether it would land on, in, or on the rim of the crater in a crater it was headed for, but ultimately it came down just North of it. And then the moment of truth. Everyone in mission control was gathered around one of two stations. Some had chosen to watch the response from the flight computer, others the telemetry. Some even attempted to set up a betting pool to see if anyone could guess which would report first, but everyone picked one side so they just took their money back. And, as expected, the cheers rang out from the telemetry desk first - No motion! Landed! Unfortunately the script running in the onboard kOS flight computer was still in its final descent stage, and had not yet reported touchdown. Fortunately that particular code locked the throttle to zero if the vertical speed was above a certain threshhold, so the craft remained exactly as it landed. Upright. A SIGKILL command was sent and the landing program aborted. The science teams fired off yet more commands to run their experiments, and waited anxiously as the data was beamed back to Kerbin. Sweet, juicy, science points. The currency of the universe. Don't phone home without it. The software teams would later review their code and attempt to fix the "landing detection" issue, but they only had time for minor tweaks before the next launch. -- A Little Bit Louder and a Little More Rehearsed "I'm Phosphorous the Third I am. Phosphorous the Third I am I am...." Gene was starting to wonder about his Range Safety Officer. Wonder? No. It was straight-jacket worry with a capital B time now. The kid had always been a bit off, but now she was singing as though she was the probe itself. Herself. Itself. At least that's what it sounded like. Should he let her continue? They were in the middle of a launch, as it were, and if anything went wrong it was her duty to kill it. With extreme prejudice. The rocket, that is. Which was a bit tricky, since as far as Gene could determine she was now the rocket. Super. "I got married to the rocket next door. He'd been married, never before...." Pressure. Had to be. After this mission was safely away and in the books they would take a short break and let the teams cool off. Had to. They already had one seemingly permanently insane kerbal, no need for a second. Or a third. Or a fourth. Wasn't there a reward check sitting on his desk, ready to be cashed? Time to burn it on some new snacks. Kannolis, perhaps. Hot. "And every one was a Phosphorous...." "RSO, Flight." "Wouldn't have a Sulfur or a Tin. What's up flight?" "The rocket is. Can we have some peace and quiet for the rest of the launch, please?" "Sorry flight. Won't happen again. It's the Third old probe named Phosphorous." Phosphorous the Third it was it was. And it sailed onwards to orbit in the near silence of the upper atmosphere. Mission control had also descended into a strange, almost uncomfortable silence. Silence as though someone should be singing or music should be playing.... Looking around the room it seemed to Gene his controllers had all turned into hermits, huddled down into their trenches, every last Kerman of them. Very strange. Good, too. Yes, something told him he might just be into something good. Quiet, yes, awkward, doubly so, but still good. And Phosphorous the Third slipped silently into the night. Roughly a day later and the P-3 was happily in orbit around the Mün. Once again the ground controllers had a plan - this probe was destined for the Mün's "Right Eye", otherwise known as the East Crater. The P-3 was slightly different than its predecessors, in that the orbital stage included a reaction-control system to assist with attitude control. This was largely done in response to the oscillations observed with the previous launch (just in case the weirdness wasn't due to the errant K-Box controller), and ultimately burned up almost all of its monopropellant early in the flight. Decent enough trade off for the extra launch mass. As is usual, the first step was to deorbit the transfer stage and its married probe. As was also usual, the upper part of the transfer stage overheated and exploded into..., well, I guess it became pure energy as there wasn't even a hint of shrapnel left behind. Except for five little birds. Four extra pieces of debris - the four monoprop tanks. And the usual backup antenna. (This will be important later.) As with the P-2, the P-3's kOS flight control software handled the descent into the East Crater perfectly. Almost too perfectly. There were a few nervous kerbals in Mission Control Room 1 as the lander headed towards yet another crater-in-a-crater. The previous lander was resting safely on an inclined slope, but hitting the very edge of any of these craters might prove fatal. The "drone probe" operator was arguing his case with Gene that they should abort the software and let him bring it down safely away from the crater. Gene overruled him and stuck with the ones and zeds. And while it did come down on some rather steep terrain.... ... it managed to drift softly down to the regolith, staying upright the entire time. Yet once again the landing software failed to detect and validate the landing. This was later determined to once again be a case of the position of the radar relative to the base of the lander having been improperly calculated. The hackerkerbs were convinced they knew how to fix it, and were already well on their way to cleaning up the script. It would now have redundant checks to ensure landings were always properly confirmed, as well as a few "extras." But they wouldn't be able to test it until Phosphorous 4. The science team was again salivating over the copious amounts of SciencePoints returned by the probe, and had to be dragged away from their terminals when Gene ordered a mandatory after-mission party. If it was a snack, it was at the party. Cheese dip, corn chips, kannolis, yellow mush, it was all available for the taking. The only rule: No talking about work. As a result none of them noticed Phosphorous the Third had landed near something of a popular vacation spot.... And hopefully they didn't notice the universe coming to a crashing halt as Jeb, the Bs, and N more kerbals once again landed somewhere long enough to line break in a 1200 part vessel named "Vessel Name." Because such nonsense never happened. Nope. Not in this universe. This time, instead of an antenna, the four monoprop tanks jettisoned by the P-3 AND another antenna somehow survived being suborbital, and, well, borked the universe. Yay. Easy to fix, but, Yay. With the landing requirements now tested and validated, work could begin on both a sample return mission and with placing kerbals on the Mün. Time was short, the Jool window was fast approaching. Navigation: Next Post

Pages for OS-X 10.6 might still be a good version... I seem to recall being happy with it back in the ye olden days. Won't work with the iCloud backend, but I'm not sure anything from 10.6.x will. I still prefer Numbers to the spreadsheet alternatives (excluding Excel '97 as an alternative since nothing I have left will run it), though on my Mac I tend to edit everything in TextEdit or vim. Because of course I do. One thing I would suggest NOT using are the newer versions of Chrome. While I don't mind Chrome as a browser, recent revisions have made it both processor and memory intensive, and it can drag older systems to a crawl. Especially Macs. Even my circa-2012 2.9GHz i7 MBP has trouble with Chrome at times. Though there really isn't much in the way of a better alternative, especially if you're invested in the Google ecosystem, and having an up-to-date browser is more important than avoiding the lag. (I use Firefox for the important stuff, though I tend to use Safari for any generic browsing because it syncs bookmarks more reliably.) Other than that, you can now join the secret society of Mac users. We have a special handshake. And you can feel content in the knowledge that you're using a real UNIX. Welcome to the club.

And unfortunately Squad has bigger fish to fry and better "bugs" to fix than those.... Especially since (I'd assume all of) the raw values used by the science parts to build their display strings are exposed through the vessel object in some way. So really there'd be little to gain by them "fixing" those issues. It would be nice if the data was displayed in a consistent format, and those parts aren't the only place that's an issue. Perhaps there's hope in the U5 UI rewrite....

Also a good argument for requiring data sources in kOS to be derived from a part on the ship.

Quite true. Contact switches seem to be a popular solution to that (based on a quick sample size of two....), though they too could also have false-negatives. Valid argument regardless.

Sort of. It's possible to have a positive (or zero) vertical speed when hovering (to find a better landing site, for example). And the radar altitude is based on distance from the root part (where presumably the radar is mounted) to the ground and is slightly inaccurate based on the physics simulation. I've got the problem mostly solved, though much like the launch scripts, the landing script has to be customized for each craft. The combination of both helps, and with the addition of time it can be verified.

Cool. I'm all for anything that gets people interested in programming, doubly so if space is involved. Using kOS as much as possible raises some interesting engineering problems the likes of which I've not seen since college. Ex: Here lately I've been hacking on the landing routine, trying to find a method that uses radar velocity and radar altitude to detect a landing algorithmically. Sure, I could just wimp out and check vessel:state (or whatever) to see if it's landed according to the game, but real spacecraft don't have magic states to check. (And given some career decisions I need to make here real soon now, this might have real-world uses beyond just being toy coding for a game. The problem is the same in both spaces.) The only real complaint I have with kOS is its occasionally obnoxious user interface.... which is kinda necessary to have a development environment inside of a game that uses keybindings. I'm always tripping over myself by typing in a still-highlighted kOS window when I thought I was doing something else, like going to the map view.

Fret not, unless on the guitar you strum, then fret on and be brave. Strut too, for struts and frets go hand in hand, as boosters light their way to a watery grave.

In the persistence file search for a line like this: "crew = Jebediah Kerman". Obviously replace Jebediah with the kerbal name in question. Delete that line. You'll also need to update the status in the kerbal's entry, otherwise they'll be MIA. (Don't recall offhand the exact values for status, sorry. Should be easy enough to figure out.)

It's that combined with strapping SRBs to them that makes it look unique.

There's a mod list in the first post.... though using all of them at once will require forcing open-GL mode or using a 64-bit version (ie, Linux). Best to just go easy on pat mods until 1.1 comes out, really. As for kOS, this is your friend: http://ksp-kos.github.io/KOS_DOC/ Create files with "edit filename.ks."

Thank you, to both of you.

A Phosphorescent Return to The Mün Training for the Mün trials of the Silicon DSH were well underway at the space center, but that wasn't what was generating the most buzz. Instead everyone was focused on a new project: Phosphorous. Phosphorous was the test bed for building landers. Mün landers, Minmus landers, Vall landers, all kinds of them. They had to run before they could sprint, so first they needed to prove such technology was possible. At first this meant small, robotic landers operating without real-time supervision from Mission Control. The first of these probes was to be sent to The Mün so the landing software coupd be debugged live with only a minimal delay. Once the programmers were confident in the code larger landers and advanced surface operation would be tested, followed by Descent/Ascent vehicles intended for short-duration visits by kerbals. All of this was required to be completed before the first Silicon DSH/DSV left for Jool, so the teams were operating on a bit of a tight schedule. The first Phosphorous was a small and simple affair. Little more than an engine, fuel (ROUND-8 Represent!), and a slew of different science experiments, its true purpose was to field-test the "landingcurve.ks" kOS script. And to not crash. The resulting probe and transmunar stage were small enough to fit atop an LV-05 Cantata. Large enough to not be small, small enough to not be in charge. This was the first probe sent beyond low-Kerbin orbit in quite some time, and there was some uncertainty as to the communications quality. For power reasons the probe was lacking anything stronger than a Communicatron 16, so it would require a relay back to Kerbin for any commands. The teams were pleasantly surprised when the probe remained in contact for the entire transfer and orbital capture. The funds used for the Neon build-out were proving well spent. Against all recommendations and conventions the craft was sent into a prograde Münar orbit. Both the transfer stage and the lander were intended to crash (or not crash) after less than one orbit, so intercepting any of the many retro-orbiting satellites was considered unlikely. Plus, should the capture burn fail to occur, the debris would shoot out into the Solar System and bot be a hazard. (A fate many considered to NOT be a failure.) To everyone's delight the craft safely completed its capture burn and entered into a somewhat inclined prograde orbit. With farside communications opened and stable, the techs transferred the latest version of their landing software to the craft (a few quick revisions had been made while P-1 was in transit). A dangerous prospect, as a communication loss mid-transfer could spell Doom. Or maybe Quake. (An old space hacker long chained to a desk cried out when they saw multiple instances of duplicate code. "Functions! Functions! No more than 20 lines each!" These objections fell on earless kerbals.) With no specific landing site in mind the kerbals decided to take their chances. The order to run the landing code was sent, and that was that. The descent burn started with the transmunar stage, to properly deorbit it. Following its short burn the probe was on its own. Things were going well during the first phases of the descent. As luck would have it the P-1 was dropping nicely into a pair of craters. Nobody was quite sure how the little probe would react to landing on an incline, but it was too late to do anything about it. The descent had been going perfectly so far. And then the engine cut out unexpectedly when the craft was still 20 meters above the surface. The landing software reported back to Kerbin that it had "detected landing", and was done. A quick-thinking operator fired the craft's engines and armed its SAS, which was enough to save the craft, but.... Sideways. A software review would later find the problem to be obvious ("until 20 > alt:radar"), but it was too late for the little Phosphorous 1. Minor damage, a few panels busted, but all science data was safe. Science data that seemed misplaced. Despite coming down in the Highland Craters, the data captured was for the Mün's Midlands. Strange. Even stranger was that the World's First rep was all but ignored when he showed up with the "Yay! You landed on The Mün!" plaque. Instead of the usual celebration party, everyone was busy preparing the next craft in the Phosphorous series.... The party would have to wait. Navigation: Next Post

In a few hours. Had an update I could've posted this morning except for lack of time (need to upload the screenshots). Shifting focus to The Mün this week, and will hopefully have the first of the Silicon Deep-Space Vehicles making its test flight there by the weekend.

To be fair, even when KSP 1.1 hits it might take a month for most mods to be updated. (And some may never be....) So press on (in 1.0.5....)! That's one of the most original "first ships" I think I've ever seen used in a career. I like the idea of a mostly-SRB approach.

To link directly to posts you need the topic number, the dash, and ANY letter after the dash. Weird, yes, and probably a bug. There may be a thread about this over in the Kerbal Network. So: forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/100086-Z&do=findComment&comment=2425926 works but: forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/100086&do=findComment&comment=2425926 doesn't.

Wow. Don't know where you found that song, but I know what I'm listening to tomorrow while hacking around at work. (And I'll only be half as crazy as the Eeloo crew....) "Pillar robbing for my pay...." (That's a story that don't end well.....)

The key here is in the Vessel's "Discovery" node. A state other than -1 prevents you from switching to it. (I think this node could be used in the future Multiplayer mode to establish ownership by userID.... Though there's likely a better solution in mind.) The problem is that gaining "control" of the ship afterwards gets a bit tricky, as it then behaves like an asteroid. So to avoid having to edit each craft in the persistence when I "reclaim" it, I decided to just leave it as a "-1". You also have to make sure you set the Lifetime to Infinity or the game will purge it.