Lunaran

Our long national nightmare is finally over. Dueb saves the day: [ http://lunaran.com/files/KSP-WetWorksCrewTanks-0.13.zip ] CC-BY-NC licensed and open for (recompilation and) business.

whoa hey so I'd like to open this up properly for people who want to take over or just use the models in their own mods, but I don't even have the 0.13 download any more. Freethinker provided me with 0.12, but if anyone has 0.13 I'll stick the proper license file in it and put it back online. Here's the old 0.12 download in the meantime, with license and source code: [ http://lunaran.com/files/KSP-WetWorksCrewTanks-0.12b.zip ]

they're simpler to animate

I have a habit of calling the smaller SRB "Lil' stubby".

I can't find it, but someone posted a report (possibly in this thread somewhere) about getting a piece of uncontrolled debris to orbit by jettisoning it with the throttle open, and locking/unlocking the LFO resources as its forward vector tumbled past the direction he needed to accelerate.

If this feature had always been in the game you wouldn't be the least bit upset at how long it takes to scroll a list of ten names to pick out a pilot.

So, if I land three Kerbals on the Mun, all three of them should plant flags? And then I take two down again? So, is flag farming the new science spamming?

Why climb the half-highest mountain? Why ford the half-widest river?

the continent of TEXAS

here let me save you all the trouble: 01000001 01101110 01101111 01101101 01100001 01101100 01111001 00001010 "Anomaly\n"

Manley did it, and also whoever that Russian guy from somethingawful was who did all kinds of goofy stunts back around 0.17. That guy. Had to do all kinds of odd spirals over the Mun's surface to let some extra fuel burn off in his landing SRB to get the timing right.

if stupid_chris has his laptop back by now he's probably busy using it for his exciting new career in academia. sit tight. Future note for future versions: Reducing the mass of the launch stability arms to 0 caused supercrazy spring physics with heavy vessels now that joint strength is based on part mass. I tweaked mine way up to 4 tons and the problem went away. This does throw off the center of mass in the VAB again, but by the time I'm sticking launch clamps on, I'm done with the worrying-where-the-CoM-is part.

A small rocket lifts off. It goes up maybe 500 meters, sputters out, falls back down and explodes. Observing from in front of a nearby barn, three Kerbals in lab coats scribble on clipboards wordlessly. A medium rocket lifts off. It goes up farther, pitches over, disappears into the clouds ... falls back out of the clouds, and crashes into the sea. The scientists, now in front of a nicer building, take more notes. A larger rocket lifts off. It gets past the clouds, up until the sky turns black and the horizon curves ... and sputters out. The scientists, watching the fireball of reentry from a distance, silently take notes. A side-by-side three-panel montage of progressively larger rockets all lifting off, each one getting a little farther before running out of gas - high kerbin orbit, solar orbit, rocketing helplessly past Duna. Each time, it ends in notes. Finally, a really rather huge rocket thunders into the sky from a bustling space launch complex. It stages, it brakes into orbit over Duna, plunges into the atmosphere, extends its landing legs, and sets down. Jeb and Bob emerge to plant a triumphant flag and strike a stoic pose. There is success and dancing in Mission Control. The scientists exchange silent congratulatory nods. Satisfied, Jeb and Bob plop back down in their seats, brushing off red dust. Jeb, grinning, looks down at the fuel gauge. It reads, "Empty." Back on Kerbin, the scientists exchange looks. Cut to a truly monstrous rocket heaving itself off the pad. KERBAL SPACE PROGRAM

A towering rocket fueling on the pad. Three Kerbals walking in slow motion towards the elevator. Bustling activity in Mission Control, and in the center of it, Gene Kerman sits calmly. Countdown. Liftoff. That launch-tower-cam shot of the whole rocket sliding by as ice and paint fly off. Kerbals floating aboard their little craft, horsing around on camera for the folks watching at home. A lander descending towards the Mun. Brief shot of Gene covering his mouth with a nervous fist. She's down. The hatch opens, and the first Kerbonaut slowly pokes his head out, ready for the first step. The landing gear is too short, the lander is balanced on the engine bell, and there's no ladder. KERBAL SPACE PROGRAM

because i want it nowwww edit: wow, the forums automatically deflate your post if you type the whole thing in caps. but what if I'm using sarcastic caps?

yeah, that makes sense. the mk3 to mk2 adapters don't look like they narrow at all, but it's probably just the perspective. which means, we can't easily determine it from the images, but it's probably a whole fraction like 2.75m or 3m. The four verts that make up the peak curves are still going to take pretty finicky trial and error. I don't have them exact yet, but they don't seem to conform to anything more than what looked like the best fudge to blend from that flat slope (which looks like it's almost exactly 1m from vertex to vertex) to a radial curve. I should just do a directX mesh rip and be done with it. unless that's against the eula in which case i would totally never do that ever.

I wonder if we can get the measurements for the cross sections of those parts in advance. The community could probably have compatible cargo bays released before 0.90 actually comes out. The Mk2 profile is 2.5m wide, 1.5m high, the flat side bits are 0.3m wide, and the sloped sides come up at exactly 60 degrees so they match the rotation snap. It looks like the Mk3 is a 3.75m circle, clipped on the sides to 2.5m, but that gives me this: which looks awful high and thin compared to the images in the OP.

The proverbial boys back at the lab, powered by coffee so strong they had to eat it with a knife and fork, assembled an improved rescue scooter for Dilfrod and Munrick. Since I wasn't sure what had thrown KER off on the previous vessel, I used LFO and a 48-7S, and KAS was not involved. KER claimed 2400m/s, and much simulation was performed to ensure that it wasn't lying this time. It wasn't. Buzz hired some rookie and took him up in the Airhog One to deploy it. By this point, Dilfrod and Munrick had been huddled around a tiny heater in the darkness on the Mun eating cold snacks for two and a half days. Release was nominal, the engine burn was nominal, and the Munar encounter was forecast to be nominal as well. Everything was nominal. Couldn't get more nominal if you tried. 860m/s was used for TMI, we'll be liberal and say 300m/s for capture and 800m/s for landing, which adds up to 1960m/s, leaving, uh ... oh. 440m/s for liftoff. balls. this is what you get when you rush and don't let your boys back at the lab get any decent sleep.

The spirit of the contract is "fly a mission with Kerbals to this body, and plant a flag on it." The letter of the contract is just "plant a flag on it," so that's what everyone does, because the game lets them. It's not exactly an exploit, but it's not exactly in the spirit of the thing either.

I managed to land my emergency repurposed SS Care Package right next to Dilfrod and Munrick's cabin of doom downed lander without breaking anything or killing anyone, in the dark. And with Planetshine installed, the dark means the dark: I also thought of a way I could get some kind of a rescue ship to them without breaking my launch delay rule: an experimental SSTO so far only flown by Jeb in simulations, the "Airhog One." It only had a single short cargo bay, so whatever I sent had to fit inside that. It would be flown by the only two Kerbonauts I actually had left on the ground, Lenbrett and the legendary Buzz Kerman, first Kerbal in orbit. The boys back at the lab had pulled an all-nighter to put together a lightweight monopropellant-driven probe with two lawn chairs welded on top. It would be an exciting ride to orbit, but with KER reporting 2400 d/v and the ability to refuel it after landing with extra monoprop from the lander can and the Care Package it would absolutely get the job done. It was nicknamed ScootyPuff Jr. because it was 5AM and they'd used up all their original ideas building it. It was also slightly too big to fit in the cargo bay. I remedied this by adding some KAS boxen in the cargo bay as well and slapping a 'some assembly required' label on, but this left even less room for the lander so I had to strip even more bits off to put in even more boxes, until eventually Lenbrett had to basically build almost the entire thing in orbit, in a hurry. And he did, because he's a trooper, troubleshooting a Communotron that wouldn't unfurl by pulling it off, sticking it on the hull of the Airhog, having Buzz extend it, then reattaching it to the lander, and scavenging some solar panels off the Airhog when it became clear that the mini-RTG wasn't enough to keep the batteries topped off on its own. Just before Munrise, the rescue scooter's engines were fired for a shot to the Mun. The 2.4km/s dV that Kerbal Engineer reported evaporated after only 800m/s of acceleration: not even enough to reach the Mun's SOI, let alone land on it. I'm not sure why - I switched to my screwing-around save, built exactly the same lander in the VAB and tested it, and got 2400m/s out of it. My theory is that KAS has to faff with the physical-insignificance setting on tiny parts to prevent the Scott Manley Magic Exploding Lander bug, and that was contributing a bunch of nickel-and-dime mass additions that KER wasn't accounting for because those parts were supposed to be massless. The boys in the lab have another night of work cut out for them (so does the KSP PR department), but it looks like Buzz gets to fly the Airhog One again tomorrow morning.

I have a lot of trouble with flags disappearing. It seems like it's gotten worse with later versions. I gave up on marking the east end of the runway after six tries.

^ WHAO ^ Decided to finally get going on the plant-a-flag-on-every-body thing I started this save for. First one (technically a few days ago) was a wash since I forgot that Procedural Fairings bases do not double as decouplers. I fixed that and some action group bugs, and the second attempt was going great until it became apparent that the lander could really use rather a lot more TWR, because a crazy early slowdown ignition gradually turned out to be a not-early-enough suicide burn by a margin of 18m/s. Dilfrod and Munrick "Munrock" Kerman (who has yet to collect any munrocks) managed to put the lander can down safely-ish, after smashing it along the surface in such a way that it was utterly denuded of all fuel tanks, engines, batteries, landing gear, lights, RemoteTech antennae, the Clamp-o-tron ... literally everything but three RCS quads: So, flag planted, under rather ignoble circumstances. Besides RT I'm also playing with Snacks, so while my two green heroes are not going to freeze to death in any mechanically enforced way, they've got ten days worth of goldfish crackers and no way to radio back to Hadfry in the command pod that they're even alive. Night is going to fall in about a Kerbin day, however, so I decided I had to get some kind of aid to them (we'll say Hadfry saw their helmet lights as he passed low overhead) before then or soon after. I didn't start this save with Construction Time installed, but I decided to set a limit of a week before a rocket launch - a full munar orbit. Hadfry hadn't anywhere near the d/V for an ill-informed landing on the engine bell, which left only ... that station I thought was going to be pointless in this save. It still had the unmanned supply craft I sent up, which I was finished with and just hadn't gotten around to deorbiting yet, and thank god I didn't as once empty of its 2-ton snack delivery it actually had the potential dV to land on the Mun. The crew of the newly expanded station got to work, pumping every ounce of monopropellant into it that they could find (enough to fill it thankfully), stripping the batteries and solar panels off the Albion crew shuttle and sticking them on inside the 6S compartment, and rooting around the KAS boxen for whatever else might be useful. I hadn't shipped up any RTGs, unfortunately, but I did have some cubic octagonals, which I stuck on the bottom as impromptu landing gear (just in case) and two pipe ends, which would be used to bridge the supply craft's inline batteries to the surviving lander can, (since by the time it landed, local sunset would have happened and the included solar panels were going to be initially useless). And a month's worth of snacks, just in case. The supply craft, newly christened the Care Package, left with a surprising 2300dV. Frank Kerman set out in the now rather stripped-down Albion, to dock with the supply craft and use an LFO burn to lower it's periapsis from 250km down to 72km, which shaved a good 120dV off the injection burn. (there was a whole bunch of spare LFO on the station, but the Albion didn't have big enough tanks for a mun visit.) At periapsis, which was precisely timed, he then burned another 105dV worth of the injection burn on LFO also (timed to put himself on a high arc to rendezvous perfectly with the station again as soon as possible, since all the extra batteries and solar panels on his craft had been moved to the Care Package), and the supply craft finished the burn on its own, with 1800dV of monopropellant with which to attempt an emergency supply drop, by remote control. I'm now glad I put a trio of satellites around the mun to provide omni-antenna coverage ... Frank's return didn't go as planned - his batteries went dry during his docking approach, leaving the modicum of monopropellant he'd sipped from the Care Package for maneuvering, which also went dry, leaving him in a dead spinning craft headed right for the station (which, yes, I should have brought in the first place. mistakes were made.) I gave him a squirt of the throttle when the ship was pointed off-axis to deflect it a bit, then another when he was pointed roughly target-retrograde to at least stop him nearby, and sent Burlong on EVA with another monopropellant tank, bearing the last of the thruster fuel on the station, which he installed on the Albion to allow it to finally dock, despite the incessant spray of errors RemoteTech was giving me because of the dead battery: Now I've got two Kerbals stranded on the Mun, six Kerbals on a station with one crew shuttle that doesn't have any power and another that doesn't even have a service module (I accidentally staged it off who-knows-when a while ago and it just floated away). The Duna launch window is in 200 days, so these guys better get it together. I wonder if I shouldn't start a Mission Report thread for all their shenanigans.

A little more soot around the edges, yeah.

jesus "congratulations patty, we're going to celebrate your baby with a display of flaming babies" remind me not to have you plan my bachelor party

I've noticed this too. What makes rendering so slow at certain altitudes is that it doesn't just cut off, it crossfades by altitude. This is a workable solution if you're passing through the crossfade zone quickly, but if you're in a circular orbit right in the middle of it your machine is always drawing both the planetary terrain quads and the scaled-space dummy planet, alpha blended together, which is worse than just drawing one or the other. I've started launching to only 75km and putting stations at 250km just to stay out of that zone, because it turns my laptop into a hibachi. 100-200km is for RemoteTech satellites I'll never have to switch back to.