Decoherent

Oh man. I'm not even going to tell you how long I poked around at this without ever thinking that a rocket's ISP might depend on whether or it it's in atmo. Once in orbit, that engine generated 148kN@686s, which sounds great to me. I know these engines are slightly less "effective", but the coolness of actually having nuclear power rather than just a slightly-special engine is very much worth it. Thanks!

Sorry if this has been asked tons of time, I did briefly skim the thread, I promise! I'm confused by the thrust produced by the thermal rockets. I put together a 3-man test platform consisting solely of the 3-man capsule, a stock fuel tank, the 2.5m generator, the 2.5m (basic) reactor, and the 2.5m thermal rocket. According to the table in the OP, this should produce 222 kN thrust at 686s ISP, but what I'm actually seeing (see screenshot) is 59 kN at 275s ISP. Is there something obvious I'm overlooking?

Is it intended behavior that the antenna starts transmitting all data when you jump back to a ship? Both times I switched to KSP to warp and back to my Eve orbiter, the antenna started up by itself and dumped all data back (costing me a ton of science on Gilly, as I didn't have the dV to go back). I have a handful of other mods installed (B9, KAS, MJ, and the interstellar one), but I've only seen this happen right after restoring a node. EDIT- that came off sounding kind of dickish; I just wanted to see if anyone else has encountered this behavior

I've been having problems recently where the "terrain" altitude has been *below* the sea level altitude. I noticed it first on one of the moons (can't remember which) and just pranged my lander into Kerbin a couple times at orbital velocity due to the same problem (KER showing ~1100m at sea level). Of course, I forgot to get screenshots. Has anyone else encountered this? Is this a KER-specific problem, or is the game reporting incorrect data to KER?

I wasn't really sold on career mode at first either, but the first couple hours have been really fun. Jeb is actually inventing space travel! My only small irritation is that the goo chamber needs an in-line model; I haven't really figured out what to do with it besides using two and ignoring one, or just leaving my rocket imbalanced.

"Mike broke the Hubble!"

Were you planning on adding (or have already and I don't see it) an autoupdate button? My biggest difficulty with KSP mods is noticing when a new version has been released, and this would be really handy.

I don't *exactly* plan for their safety, but I've gone to ridiculous lengths in my "persistent" saves to bring every Kerbal home. For some reason when I started playing, I just used probe cores, and the game got boring after a week or so. Then, on a whim, I launched a mission with Jeb and accidentally stranded him, and spent days devising a rescue mission. It's amusing how attached to the little digital green guys it's possible to get.

Although MJ is generally excellent, I have a bug report/question. It seems that when MJ is calculating a burn time, it sums up the dV of all engines on a craft, regardless of whether or not they're activated (or pointing in the right direction). My larger ships tend to consist of several independent modules hooked together (landers, etc.), so a given "ship" will probably have 8-12 engines in it, most of which are disabled. If you have MJ calculate & execute a node, it and the game properly calculate the dV and place the node, and the game shows a correct burn duration for the number of engines active. However, it appears that MJ is calculating its own burn duration when deciding when to start the burn, and it seems to include all engines on the craft, regardless of whether they're turned on. This can lead to some pretty significant errors. Some made up numbers for the sake of example: if my large ship has a total of 14 engines, 2 of which are activated for interplanetary insertion, MJ will calculate a 2000 dV burn, which the node display will show as taking 20 minutes. However, MJ does its own internal calculation and decides that if all 14 engines were active (even if they're pointing in the wrong direction), the burn should only take 5 minutes. Thus, MJ starts the burn at -2:30 rather than -10, potentially offsetting my interplanetary trajectory significantly. It seems the "expected" behavior of MJ would be to only sum the dV of engines that are activated when the node is created when calculating burn times. Hopefully this is an easy fix, and this post isn't too long...

Looks nice! Subassemblies will be great. Hopefully, this update will also include a CTRL-Z function in the VAB, as well

This is a neat mod, and I'm enjoying using it! However, I'd like to echo the request to be able to adjust the "thickness" of the generated wings. I have designs for which I'd like very long but thin wings (length along the fuselage, not sideways width), but length (of the adapter) seems to be the only determining factor for "thickness", which can make some fairly ugly wings

I thought we decided they are early Irken?

I've been struggling with a problem for a while, and it finally occurred to me to actually ask for help. In short, is it possible to build a winch/connector/port/(part) assembly while in the VAB? Basically I've been trying to use a winch as an attachment for a minirover to my rocket. I've got the winch/connector on the main rocket, and a radial port on the minirover, but I can't get them to attach together until after I launch. I assumed I could just start building from the winch out in the VAB, but after adding the winch, then the connector, I cannot, under any conditions, get a port to attach to the connector. Is this a mod limitation, or is there something important I'm missing? After hours of struggling, my workaround is to just mount the rover onto the rocket via a decoupler, right next to the winch, then have Jeb come out and connect the cable manually after launch, but this is inelegant. Also, do you think you could add a radial winch at some point in the near future? It seems all my winches end up radial, and I'd love to reduce my part count.

Heh, you must have missed it by what, five meters? The spotlights suddenly appearing out of the darkness was blood-chilling! Also also, watching other people's KSP videos is annoying because I keep trying to move the viewpoint

Realism is nice, right up to the point where it stops being "fun", and this point varies by the player. Personally, stock+FAR+Deadly Reentry is a good "sim balance" for me, and kethane et al. gives me something interesting to do. Custom controls are pretty cool, though.

One more question! I just wanted to see if I'm still not quite grasping re-entry physics, or it it's not actually possible to land the 3-Kerbal pod with just a single XL chute. I was trying to land my rescue pod last night, and must have reloaded a dozen times or more, trying a huge variety of re-entry angles, and ended up lithobraking every single one because my speed never dropped low enough to deploy the XL chute without it snapping off. Eventually I got frustrated and sent up a rescue pod to rescue the rescue pod, equipped with a drogue and a couple radial chutes, and that worked fine. Not knowing much about real capsule re-entry profiles, do they all use a drogue or something?

SAS controls everything now, not just wobble, including heading. Personally, I'm not seeing any major problems with MJ at the moment (although I haven't tried kethane yet), but I have noticed that MJ is *far* more aggressive in using control forces while keeping a heading than the new SAS is, and that's not really a good thing. I can use SAS now on virtually all of my rockets with no oscillation, but when I utilize MJ for a long interplanetary burn, it sets up a pretty severe oscillation that sometimes damages my craft. (the author) may want to consider using SAS unless SAS isn't being aggressive enough to keep the heading.

Oh man, drag and lift coefficients change based on speed and angle of attack? (clearly I've never done any of these calculations myself.) I started looking at taking a stab at extending alterB's online calculator with mass, lift, and drag per vehicle, but I didn't realize the coefficients changed. I just started looking through your code (nicely commented, btw), maybe I can come up with a "good enough" approximation to get a ballpark trajectory. Out of laziness, do you happen to have any links to "easy to understand" pages with the required math?

Ah, thanks, I hadn't realized that there were diagnostic sounds, as I was playing with the sound off!

I've seen a couple posts in this thread about aerobraking, and how the adjustments to aerodynamics makes the atmosphere much "thinner" for aerobraking, but I haven't really seen if there's a good way to actually calculate aerobrake maneuvers with FAR installed. I've used the online calculator in the past, but that assumes stock aerodynamics, which I'm guessing won't work. Is there a way to accurately calculate aerobraking maneuvers with FAR?

This may be sort of a silly question, but is there supposed to be some kind of on-screen display for this mod? I can see the temperature in the right-click menu, along with some coefficients I don't understand and the ablative level on the shields, but it's not clear to me if there is a display I can pop up without having to constantly right-click on parts to see how they're doing. Mind you, I've only landed 2 capsules with this mod, one of which went nicely, the other stopped via lithobraking

Helped some, certainly. I think I finally figured out orbital matching and docking from his videos, and I found his "intro to KSP" videos to be helpful. Mostly though, I like his stuff because he's entertaining in an educational sense, and his accent amuses the hell out of me. I just want to hear him build a rocket and then say, "And now we will report to the launch pad, for a series of tests!"

After failing the first few times, I sent up 2 capsules that were basically giant RCS tanks, and spent 4.5 hours getting the damn things docked. The next time only took 30 minutes, now it takes me 3-5 if I do it by hand. The real keys were learning to use the translation controls properly (HJKL etc), and keeping Kerbal "down" so the ship moved how I expect. Typically I like jetting over to ~50m by hand, then letting MJ take over for the final dock.

This particular problem has scrubbed so many missions of mine, I now have a rule that AS SOON as I add a probe body, I attach 3 of the OX-STAT panels to it, as an emergency backup. That's saved tons of my missions, although not all, as sometimes you end up in the shadow of a planetary body on an intercept course with the dirt ><

It took me hours to recognize that one of my ships had the docking ports in the same orientation (Sr's on the end of orange tanks), because I didn't notice the orientation difference, and yeah, MJ just slams the ships together in weird ways. Personally I think KSP should flips the ports so they work, but that's not a MJ problem