ASnogarD

Physics are a bit of a laugh on this game... Rockets wobble like a stack of saucers recently washed, or dangle like a baby's hanging toy. Make no sense when you try apply logic to strengthen up areas... I try brace up some rocket stacks and the thing pulls the rocket apart, dont brace it and it bounces like crazy but the ship flies... dont try fob this off with flexibility vs rigid structures, shearing and twist factors, the physic simulations are a mess. Not Squads fault though, its the limited tools they have at their disposal... not to mention that modding has accelerated the growth of the game feature wise. Still annoying as hell when one time the ship flies, then the very next time it blows up on the pad... and why the [ beep bleeeep beep beeeeep bleeeeeeep ] do the bloody things spin so much. Finally got the power right, yet on a perfectly symmetrical ship there is uncontrollable spinning... canards ? Dont work. SAS on individual stages + ASAS on the main control stage ? Dont make a difference. More RCS on the outside stages ? No good.

I like none conventional designs myself, have a affair with tri symmetry designs like this one... (older picture... I got rid of the strut connections, added a 2nd stage under the payload but still inside the tri stacks) Unfortunately this design barely gets my 40 ton 'bus' into orbit , I have to circlise the orbit with the payload engines which isnt really a problem if I get my gravity turn done properly... a nice flat arc out to orbit at a good speed ensures my orbit fixing burn is not too demanding on the nukes limited thrust. I have been playing about with the lifter design to try make it more powerful for heavier loads but without adding rings of boosters and / or engines + fuel stacks I cant do much more... extra fuel on top just makes the ascent much slower and in the end eats up all the extra fuel without really gaining anything... cluster engines instead of mainsails spare the juice but slow the ascent down so much that the fuel saved is used to reach the same heights the mainsails managed... effectively same result just slower.

Thanks for the tutorial, got some of my issues answered and will try docking again... when I have calmed down from raging after nearly 2 hours of idiotic space ballet with my station and my 'bus' buzzing poor Jeb in the station Cupola. Issue was I couldnt get the prograde into the target reticle so kept flying past the station, I did start to get the hang of it but then ran out of mono prop. I wish there was some way of telling when you are going 0.02m/s towards the target , and 0.02m/s away from the target (other than checking range and pro or retro grade marker positions) ... perhaps a change in the colour would be more useful. ... anyway, thank you for taking time to write and demonstrate docking.

To carry on the car analogy... Squad made a VW Beetle for driving the family around, fans have pulled the poor Beetle apart and added a Porche chassis with electrical windows , mirrors adjusting motors , ICE systems , LED's , Hydraulic controlled suspension systems... ... and other fans are complaining the Beetle engine cant match the speed of the Porche it now looks like. I would imagine the game got a lot bigger than Squad had originally planned, and got caught up trying to add features to keep the fanbase happy but now is near or actually beyond what the engine is capable of providing.

One weird way to test that docking issue is to build a simple rover you can use to try 'docking' on the ground, basically : - make a rover with 8 wheels split in 2 with docking ports - O-O<||>O-O - make sure both sides have a probe and battery power. - launch and then drive the rover to some flat space with room to move. - experiment with the docking mechanism. Edit: Test the effects of getting the docking facing the wrong way... the docks have a side that connects to the structure and a side that connects to other docks.

Isnt it more likely the program has gotten more efficient at loading since 0.18 than the fact you added memory ? Unity cant handle 12gigs of RAM as it is a 32 bit application in fact the 4 gig you originally had was its limit...so increasing the RAM capacity of your PC doesnt help in KSP.

Dont I know it... had a rocket all ready to go to orbit, a nice hefty lifter with a nuclear engine powered payload cradled inside the lifter (I like compact designs) and when the physics loaded in... my nuclear engine simply fell off, it hadnt touched the ground nor does it have things dangling it, it simply fallen off. I was like oh nice, yeah just drop off why dontcha its not like I needed the bloody thing... really Had odd issues with my last ship (equally cool looking but ultimately useless 'bus') , the lifter portion has 3 engines and fuel towers and for some odd reason 1 engine would wobble in a weird fashion... but only one, its odd because I basically design 1 engine + tower + struts/lines/nose caps/etc etc then pull it off and then re-attach with 3 times symmetry, ie all the engines are exactly the same. I have rage quit a number of times, been all ready to type out a rant on the forums... then calm down, then think of another approach to try, then when that fails go rage again...repeat ad nauseum ad infinitum. KSP is a evil game I tell ya! Pure evil !

To be accurate : Assembly is the low level language (machine level code), C is a high level language and LUA is a script. Assembly is hyper fast but is NOT portable between makes of CPU (even AMD and Intel PC CPU's) and is extremely difficult to read even with years of experience. C is a human readable language that tries to make fast code but also portable code, but is slower than assembly. LUA scripts are very slow but offer the ability to change parameters in the game without needing to compile the code each time you try a new change... like say you have a variable that controls the ISP of a engine, var_Engine_ISP = 220 but something isnt quiet right, in C you would change that value in the code and recompile and then run the program, in LUA you would simply change the value in the script and run the program again. Scripts also allow you to change parameters without access to the source files, and without needing to provide command line options to adjust each setting. *mind you I am not a coder (budding hobbyist game programmer) so it is possible I am entirely wrong, but thats how I understand things.

I really hope they work on the est. burn time mechanics on the manoeuvre nodes, getting told your 1 min 30 sec burn is actually 6 min 39 sec when you are 40 sec from the node is very annoying. Your nicely worked out circle orbit tends to shift to the one side as you pass the optimal point to adjust your orbit. It happens when you change stages, from say a huge mainsail engine to a 909 ...but even doing a quick burn doesnt fix the estimate time, it still bases its calculation on the bigger engine... until you start your burn.

Well , while I dont expect Squad to try the home brew engine route, its not out of range and scope of a small indie team ... just highly unlikely. Unknown Worlds use a homemade engine for their indie title Natural Selection 2, and it has been praised for good visuals and effects and is reasonably good in performance and COULD be a lot better but the devs opted for massive mod support so hinged a lot of the engine on LUA scripts to allow easier modifications. Took them about 4 years but the main engine programmer had started on the engine before they dumped Source for Spark, so give or take 5 years to code that engine. Possible, but highly unlikely. Oh yeah, now that game in development took ages before the game was in a playable state...even after launch there was a lot of work to optimise it and most of the optimisation came about 2 - 3 builds prior to release. Alpha version was so slow it ran about 5 FPS at lowest settings on the top end machines, build 156 got it so more machines could run it at about 30 FPS, but it was near release that the game hit 60+ FPS. Point is that optimisation is a late comer to the development stages, as developers are still fiddling with the insides of the code spending time to optimise it is really a waste as often parts are simply ripped out and replaced or discarded. UE and / or Cryengine is a commercial product and is designed for multi platforms and much more variation for usage than say a home made engine for a single game, so it takes longer to make a master of all trades than a master of one trade.

My comment was a bit on the exaggerated side... basically I meant if you are player that enjoys piloting then wrestling a craft is your bag, but some of us just enjoy making spaceships. Now I dont mean its all fine to make some nasty mess that only MechJeb2 could possibly fly, hence I only use the kill rotation function... I could in theory, especially my current lifter which only has a slight rotation when I start my gravity turn but as I want to see how much fuel the sucker needs on a reasonably efficient 45% turn at approx. 10k km in the air at a 90% heading, I rather not need to Hold F - Pulse D and mess with Q and E while hitting Shift (toggling SAS via T is even more problematical for me). You would probably consider the lifter a milk run compared to some of the heavy lifters some players use...mine is currently only lifting 45 tons. I guess its all down to individual tastes but I would rather not have MechJeb considered the same as some wallhack or aimbotter type tool.

I use MechJeb2 for 2 reasons, the info on delta v and ships...and to kill rotation occasionally. My last lifter has a weird spin just after releasing the first stage in the middle of my gravity turn... I would run out of fuel, separate the first stage and let it drift away a bit, start my 2nd stage and complete insertion but for some reason the release of the first stage causes spinning (ship is symmetrical and compact, no logical reason it should suddenly start trying to break the spinning top records)... and as I dont want to end up in a polar or counter orbit, I let MechJeb2 kill the rotation. Hardcore pilots and their full joystick and throttle with pedal controls can take off MechJeb2 if they want to wrestle with the craft... I just want to get the loving designed spacecraft to orbit so it can fly (the craft itself flies beautifully in space, the lifter is the spinning sod of doom). The only mods I would consider 'cheating' (though single player cheats dont really count) is the ones that modify engines to skew the power to weight ratio... a extreme example would be allowing a ant engine to boost 300 ton craft to orbit Most of the mods I have seen seem to just add aesthetics, functionality or more things to do (NavSat , Kethane <3 )... so its all good.

Optimisations are usually late in development, its pointless spending all that time optimising code in a game that isnt even feature complete... what if you need to change things to get a feature in, and it breaks all the optimisation done up to then ? Time was wasted, rather get the game done then run over it with optimisation passes. This is of course a con for early access to developing games, you cant complain about the performance until its a full game.

Does this count ? Its actually a craft to run Kerbils around in space but not land (except for dump expensive drives and parachute to Kerbin), I have a thing for a tri design types...tri engines tri stacks on the launcher. Its actually very stable, doesnt flop about on the pad and easy to control I dont even need the MechJeb2 to help fly it...just stock ASAS. It isnt complete yet as it needs a little more to actually break out of orbit without a 3 min burn of the 3 nuclear engines... it gets to LKO and has 2 thirds of its fuel supply to fly around LKO ..I just want to tweak it. (It is stock, perhaps the engine pylon connecting the nuclear engines to the central column of the craft is from B9 , not sure.. rest is Stock for certain, bar MechJeb2)

I have been pretty obsessed with trying to find a 'elegant' solution to getting fuel to LKO with only stock parts, but failed miserably... hell even my *koff hahaha koff* 'heavy lifter' could not take up 1 lousy tank WITHOUT using every drop of fuel in the bloody tank...and still failed to get to a stable orbit. The close calls were uncontrollable ... a few times got so turned around I was on a counter orbit path. Probe controlled craft, and I use the word controlled loosely here, are a pain to even gravity turn with or without SAS and / or MechJeb2 ... bloody things are all frustrated spinning tops that got forced to the rocket career instead. The craft parts all seem to be connected with spit and chewing gum, I actually had a nuclear engine simply drop off the bottom of the craft... just like pop, you didnt really need that did you ... BEFORE launch. Docking port connections act like trampolines, even the Snr ones, the large ring ASAS likes to collapse on itself at random. VAB likes to play silly buggers when you are trying to put on parts... you dont really want to put this tank on top of this one do you, thats boring...lets flip it 90% to the side and 45% to the left...now thats art, yeah man. ... so getting that fuel up to LKO has eluded me so far, but to be fair I am still a new player and really need to just forget about large projects and stick mastering orbiters first, then Mun runs, then stations and... perhaps someday, get fuel to LKO

What I meant by elegant is more something that is believable ... a vehicle that would deliver those tanks on a routine basis, and I am sure we can agree that some of the marvels of Kerbal science are a tad large and unwieldy looking. I could get the equivalent vehicle by launching up a ship with space for 3 tanks, and then launching the tanks up individually, then multiple launches to full up the 3 tanks... sort of defeats the purpose of a fuel delivery vehicle... it becomes a extra stage and be easier to send the fuel direct to the station. I was trying to go for a neat shell around the 3 tanks with enough power to lift the lot into LKO, with perhaps a few SBR's to help with lift off but avoiding a scenario with heaped stacks of fuel columns... BUT as explained by other posters the ratio of fuel needed to get fuel up is too high for anything other than masses of engines with lots of fuel tanks to brute force the 3 tanks up. In effect its more efficient to run several lesser launches than to try get that amount up in a single launch, so the 'simple' fuel delivery ship is not really possible... merely a noob KSP players (me) error. If it makes you feel better I wasted a number of hours over a couple of days trying to get those tanks up, and each time ended up with a cluster**** of engines and fuel tanks ... the Mainsails got power but are inefficient , the KV's are more efficient but lack the power, SBR's can help with power but run out before you escape orbit, Nuclear engines are hyper efficient but probably couldnt even lift a probe out of orbit in atmosphere... so no matter how you play with the design of the rocket, the conclusion is always the same... a **** tonne of engines and fuel tanks to lift 3 tanks in one go. Not elegant but a requirement. ... looking at some of the ships here, my 275 part ship is rather sparing of the parts... but the over 1000 part rockets did the job whereas my designs couldnt so they were superior designs. EDIT: Cipher29's rocket is roughly what I was looking for ... a nice sleek design.... and GoDores design is also pretty sleek too , more compact actually, sorry I didnt look at it closer.

Hmmm , those are viable solutions just not very elegant or efficient... more like lets get as many engines and fuel tanks together to take 3 orange tanks of fuel up. Not saying you guys havent done the challenge I set, just I feel those are 'monstrosities'... dont look like fun to fly and not something you can easily re-use each time you need to run a fuel run to the station. I guess it isnt possible to send up fuel into LKO without using 500 engines and 1000 times more fuel than you are delivering... in terms of fuel tankers on the land, those ships would be using the huge cargo tank to travel and delivering the small fuel tank to the petrol station I tried to keep a small profile and low profile so I attached 3 tanks to a central tower, and with girders attached 3 drive towers between the gaps of the orange fuel tanks (using symmetry, there is enough space to do this) ... so I had a pretty tidy ship but could never get the power to fuel to weight ratio down... not without adding a lower stage that did the mess of engines and booster stages.

Short Version: Get 3 Orange tanks to LKO using STOCK parts (Mechjeb2 allowed), no 5000 part monstrosity, no hot seat uber pilots skills needed (a Kerbil must still be able to fly this thing after all). Try get it as elegant as possible and with fuel to dock with a Station in LKO. Long Story: I watched Scott Manlys re-usable space program videos and in a few he struggle to get fuel to his station from Kerbin (he was limited to no staging and discarding parts remember) , I thought at the time why didnt he build a fuel delivery vehicle... a simple craft that carries 3 orange tanks up. Boy was I naive... I have been trying to make such a delivery craft since I got KSP, I havent even built a station or done a trip to the moon to plant my custom flag, I have been trying to get the bloody fuel craft built. Each time I try drop the idea some other idea pops into my head and back to the VAB I go, and time and time again I hit the same snags, design after design ... all look elegant, and in theory once in space will work like a charm... just cant get the buggers into space. I always end up in a vicious cycle of weight - power - fuel - weight - power - fuel ... its heavy I need more power, but the mainsails guzzle fuel like mad so I need more fuel but this makes the thing even heavier needing more power. SRB's do well initially but after they finish burning the craft loses speed and slowly falls back down. Staging and stacking make the thing unstable and eventually ends up with something silly with way too many parts and more struts than ship left... yuck. It also feels silly to spend 10000 tonnes of fuel to get up...100 ? I do know that it is realistic that getting up that much fuel into orbit is a difficult job and will always end up wasting more fuel in getting the fuel to space than the amount you can deliver... but it is a challenge to see if a nice elegant solution can be found, or a insidious torment mechanism to drive you insane trying to get that elegant solution. Ah, Scott , now I understand why you didnt fill up all 7 of the Stations tanks... As for me I think I'll drop the idea and move on... to stations and docking, then the Mun... I hope I can shake the challenge off because I am stubborn. NOTE: I can make a launcher that will be able to send up 1 tank, for some reason I got hung up on the idea of 3, and tri hull ships or tri engine designs. I also rage each time it fails so I dont have pics of my failed designs, sorry.

First up... Greetings. Picked up this game after watching some youtube vids, and the entire re-usable space program by Scott Manly. Looked like fun... oh I was a naive little child, fun is such a deceptive word. Oh dont worry, I like the game and I do realise its still in development and not a released title as yet, so its forgiven but... dayum! I got a problem in that I love to design things, so when I get to the VAB with the intent to make a *koff* simple station core THIS time, I end up with a 50 story monstrosity that would give King Kong vertigo climbing this mess... but yes it really needs a special habitat for toilets, and how can they live without the jacuzzi you monsters! *a-hem* In short I tend to over design everything, and then cant get the mess into orbit... I get stuck in a vicious cycle of adding moar engines which need moar tanks which make the craft moar heavy with needs moar engines... Yeah I used (and not used) Asparagus staging, single stage to orbit vehicles, multi stage , multi asparagus , ramjets ... closest I came to actually getting a station to orbit ended up with me realising that with my ships tossing and spinning and jumping all over the place, not only did I not hit the correct altitude... I was in a counter orbit...a east to west direction(ironically on a perfect equatorial orbit somehow). I tried using MechJeb2 to fly that mess to a stable 200km...it made it to just over 10k km and tore the ship to pieces doing a gravity turn, I tried again and a random fuel tank broke at 03 sec after launch, wasnt even inside a stack , was on top of my 1st stage lift engines... this left 1 (one) engine with a third less fuel than the other 3 and when it ran out of juice... spinny spin spin. Next attempt got to about 40k km with about 800 km/s and seeming on the way when it was time to separate my first stage... which it did, but decided to take the ENTIRE engine cluster of the second stage with it on its trip back to Kerbin, left me with all the fuel and no engine on that stack . ... pure evil, gives you a tonne of design tools to enjoy but makes every connection act like its a spring, every fuel tank practically needs a 'Mainsail' attached which slurps up all the fuel itself, every radial connector is actually a piece of chewing gun, every docking port doubles as a trampoline and the notion of you are in control is really foreign to Squad and Unity. The VAB is a annex of hell on its own, a seemingly simple task...put tank on top of other tank has you spinning the view around trying to coax the tank to go on top, not on the side, not on its side, not upside, or on the left side, or right side...but on top... yeas I am sure I want the top , not a 45% angle to the main engine and how the hell did my command probe end up 3/4 into that orange tank... *sob* I just wanted to strut that one little piece... Lets you design really fancy stations and stuff, with lights and panels that extend...and and and... then laughs at you when you try get the mess into space, perhaps one more 'Mainsail' will work, ooh close, how about some SBR's ? Oh dear they ran out and you are slowly fallign back to Kerbin even with the 6 Mainsails firing at 100% and going to blow up overheating... and you will be back with a new monstrosity to launch, good luck getting that up to space no matter how many struts to slap on it Pure evil I tell you, but like a really insidious example of evil its challenges you, taunts you and you keep thinking... if I just... Great game Squad, thanks for the hours of fun and hair pulling... I am both having a good time, and losing my hair rapidly... and hello KSP community, please forgive my occasional rantings and ramblings, I like to whine a lot when a game kicks my arse

Thanks , I'll check out your craft design and use it to help design my lifter, or at the very least use it to continue my quest to plant a flag at the Mun. I have thought of a improvement to my 'Skinny' design... going to have fun trying to put that together but if it works it both bypasses the girder and connecting issues, and even offers chances to slip in some more fuel in the 'body'.

The RCS tank is at the top, the Orange Fuel tank is the Payload so the RCS cant go higher. I have tried some new designs but keep hitting new issues... This is the 'Skinny' series , the nickname is because of the skinny section of the middle of the craft where the fuel payload is meant to be attached (my challenge : get 3 full Orange tanks into a safe parked orbit so they can be either used or hauled off to some space station). I am testing without payload as I spent nearly a day yesterday with my 'Awesome 4 some' craft trying to get up 3 tanks.... only to discover to my horror the bloody ship itself wasn't capable of leaving orbit even without a payload... scrapped. Skinny Mk1 - no Payload , gets to LKO barely. If you look carefully you can see the girders attaching the side tanks and engine to the skinny main section of the craft BUT only the top part of the girder is actually attached, the bottom part is clipping into the main section but not attached , couldnt get the top and bottom part of the girders to attach to the main ship... same with the orange tanks on the girders...either they attach to each other or to the girder but not both even if you align the snap points. Is there any way around this ? I am a bit of a stubborn sod and wont easily let go of an issue even if I can just bypass it... I want fuel tanks in space and dammit I will get them even if I have to kill a continents worth of Kerbals. ... then I'll see about that Mun trip, hmmm why is the Kerbal Space Volunteer list so empty suddenly... ah never mind, toss in some homeless Kerbals in the pods wont make a difference, not for the first 3004 launches anyways.

Have you tried manually undocking ? Right Clicking on the docking port to undock (after EVA transferring crew). I dont think the staging was intended for performing all the needed manoeuvres in space and some manual intervention is needed at some stages, I would also think of using action groups to facilitate undocking to separate the dock/undock procedure.

Not used to putting pics up but here is one with the payload. The decoupler that breaks was strutted with 6 x block girders on each end to accept the strut bars, just when the launcher got to just over 10k km ...pop went the decoupler and squashed the ASAS and Mechjeb2 part, completely ignoring the struts, they just broke and vanished.

Not sure if this is the correct place to put this semi rant , semi question , semi scream at the internet and Squad... (Dont worry not going to swear and tear into the devs) NOTE: Stock except for Mechjeb2 and B9 parts (both 0.20+ compat Right, I am ok at tossing small craft into orbit, even docked a pair I launched as a dock practise set... now I want to do a space station, as a half way stop to the Mun (yeah I know I could do a launch and Mun landing in one but my plan was a station for re-fuel). I have been trying to design a heavy launcher to launch ...heavy loads into orbit, but while I can build ships that can get to orbit easy, as soon as I attach a payload everything goes to hell. My latest launcher has - 1 x Mainsail , 6 x LT45 as a core with 1 x Jumbo tank and 1 x 400 Rockomax tank, it has 6 x LT35 (?) with 3 x long tanks feeding the main core tanks, and it has 6 x Boosters... as stage 1, with a 400 Rockomax tank and poodle as a 2nd stage controlled with a remote probe (large ring) , ASAS, RCS fuel tank, Battery, Jeb , Info drive... ... then the payload, in this case a single Jumbo tank with some RCS, a probe and a shielded dock port on the top. All strutted as much as I can logical see is needed. Thing keeps failing at the large decouplers, and breaking at the decoupler... I had tried some Snr Docking ports so I could manually let my payload off, but the joints swayed like a helicopter rotor and snapped off all the attempts to strut the bugger. It makes no sense, the ship barely lifts off with 50% throttle but does reach decent heights with good fuel but then... a decoupler will simply break. I could understand it if it broke at launch when all the boosters suddenly kick in, but at nearly 10k km , just thinking of doing my turn and ... what?!? Wheres MechJech ? What ? Why has all my ASAS gone ? Check flight data and sure enough the decoupler broke squashing the ASAS ring and Mechjeb at the same time. NO, I am not using time warp, or physics warp (if that is indeed something different) I am just press T - CapsLock - and throttling to 50% - hitting launch. YES , I has launch stabilisers to hold the rocket, and have some Canards for atmosphere control. Do I need that Farams mod to sort out the atmosphere simulation, or what ? I have watched a lot of videos, tutorials etc etc and really wanted to try some of the things... do orbits gets dull after a few launches. Is there some bugs with the structures (I heard something about the orange tanks breaking unless you buffered them with grey tanks for some reason) ? Am I perhaps putting the ASAS , Probe , RCS fuel, Battery Ring and Decoupler in the wrong order ? There was some difficulty in getting some of the parts to attach to the probe ring and it does seem hollow... so does the decoupler to the fuel tank, perhaps it needs a engine to work as a decoupler ? I am pretty sure the launcher is solid, I got the design from a picture of one of the fancy launchers with the multiple engines underneath the tank (similar to http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/35856-Launch-Vehicles-Other-Than-Asparagus - first pic), but went for 1 mainsail and lots of LT45 with a ring of droppable LT35 (no gimbals)... I find mainsails overheat too fast and blow through fuel like crazy, so 1 is enough. Sorry its bit of a rant but I had so many ideas and schemes but I literally cant even get off the ground... the designs I had to scrap because of the joints breaking each time, the fancy yet balanced systems, the awesome habitat with expansion docks to put together...the space tug to cart the components around... all scrapped. Thats me, thanks for reading. PS - still a good game, and I know its still in development.