ronny

Well, I've been flying this a bit. 200 tons to LKO with 12 mainsail engines in total. The droptanks I use are about 25% cheaper per unit of fuel than the stock orange tanks so with stock parts you'd probably get like 650k cost not including the 57k cost of the top two 200t payload stand-in tanks. I have strutted the engines like a madman, but the droptanks seem to do just excellent with 8 struts each, haven't tried 4. EDIT: If you're going to copy it, turn off gimbal on the engines and note the wings on the droptanks. Turn on gimbal at high altitude.

I suggest a New game engine. And would like to have some way of letting the KSP people know they have support for it. Then they can do it once they find they have sufficient support. If not for KSP 1 since we're 20% into it, then for KSP 2. But then again, economists are the first to tell you to ignore sunk cost if it makes sense to scrap the old for the new. So if we have enough support, it will make sense to scrap a 25% finished game for a new one with a better engine, where the work will be done quickly and efficiently due to the design being over 25% finished already. There's all sorts of good that KSP can get from having a game engine that fits the ambition of KSP. We just have to do it such a way that they don't go bankrupt by trying to make the game again in another engine. I can step up and buy the game for Triple A game price to show my support. But I really want KSP in origin, not steam, I can't stand steam and loathe having it on any computer under my roof. I want suggestions for how we can show our support for a new game engine. And I want the thread to become a threadnought (the Eve people here will get that), and stickied.

+1 from me! I'd pay triple A money for KSP if they went for a triple A engine.

Neomorph, that just worked, this thread is about stuff that turns out don't work as planned. Whatshtisthis, could you explain a bit? Did it work or did it fly as poorly as it looks like it does? What happened? Korda, Nice save of a flawed design! Often KSP is about flying something that shouldn't really work, and getting away with it.

Lots of good contributions ^^, This qualifies I think. I designed this base of single parts that mean I could have something like 400 of these crew cans and not lag, but at this rate, 400 parts spread out with my "genius" crane, is 6 and a half hours of none-stop work. I'm trying to think of a faster way to distribute 400 parts, all with the necessary flight status so they don't get removed as debris. Btw, Genius means:

The first launch platform I tried to hyperedit to Mun crashed into the ground and exploded... Otherwise my fails are usually design-related. Started a thread about failed designs.

Post pictures/videos of your "genius" designs in KSP. Not things that were designed to not work, but stuff that accidentally didn't work at all. Not really any other rules, just post failed builds you think are amusing. My first "excellent" design is this crane for use on the Mun. I tested it on Kerbin and found no flaws with it. But note that this is the 2.0 version which had RCS in order to get unstuck, the first one didn't have RCS and just stood on the platform like this, unable to get away. The RCS doubles in function, to get unstuck, and to get stuck again when you want to pick up something else from the platform. It spent its entire tank of RCS in two trips, meaning I would have to pick up one tank of fuel between every crane-job, and that is IF it had the ability to transfer RCS fuel, which I am pretty sure it doesn't. So it could do TWO jobs, then it was useless. But the "beautiful" thing about the design is that it had the handling of a wild horse in low gravity, so with patience, and skill, and luck, you could do ONE trip without ending up in little tiny pieces scattered across the Mun. And here I managed to tip over the one crew module I had managed to place. My roving skills are unmatched. And here my genius placement of the weight shows itself. The first was only a near-roll, the second picture was from later on (3 minutes later). I used RCS to try to correct it in the second one, which only resulted in flying about a bit, before landing upside down (I'm an ace RCS pilot as you can tell, even forgot to put on docking mode). Here I finally dropped the flawed design I previously tried to fix twice. In favor of a NEW flawed design. This thing is better at reversing than going forward, because the counter-weight at the back makes accelerating forwards a wheelie-competition. And in order to get the magnet over the middle of the thing on the platform, you must approach the platform from the taller side, and you must have the platform in an odd-angle, not at a perfectly water-level area. The rocket at the back which doubles as a counter-weight is my solution to get the crane off the platform, because the wheels are placed too wide. I would lie if I said the wide stance makes it stable, I have already rolled one of these (having lifted and placed one thing). Note that I only put ONE thermoelectric generator on it, so while I lift stuff with the electromagnet I have a tendency to run out of electricity, which I have done twice thus far. A genius design indeed... PS: Note that I didn't add any electric generators to the platform, so that runs out of power also, so I have to use hyperedit to just top it up once in a while (I really can't be bothered fixing that, and the hassle serves as punishment for my bad design). PPS: The only good thing I can say about my cranes is that they are quite sturdy, the weakness in the first is that the RCS tank don't have struts so its the first thing to fall off, and the second crane falls over well before it lifts anything heavy enough to destroy it.

Festivefire, you say space stations lag less if you add joints? (when two objects dock you add a joint) Seems very counter-intuitive?

ASnogarD, My guess is that the joints themselves are the processor demanding tasks. Because by themselves the parts are just particles in a physics sense.

于明八, Excellent idea! I'll steal that. Have one huge rover bus that the compounds share. Smorfty, yes, but they can be way bigger before they lag noticeably. rryy, KAS only reaches 50 meters at a time I think, so I wonder how many parts it would take to reach 2.3km.

I've come to realize that with the Kerbal attachment system (here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/25563-0-20-KAS-v0-3-1-Kerbal-Attachment-System ), you can have bases consisting of single lone parts not connected to any other parts. Just make a crane, and drop lots of lone parts (tanks, crew cans, etc), and place the stuff with the crane. Transfer fuel with the KAS system, so no need for docking ports on the fuel tanks. But check if the crew cans have doors before placing them about. Because I didn't, lol. Alternatively you can land a launch platform and pick up the stuff directly from that with your crane and build a huge base in no-time (well, it takes time if you're paranoid about making the crane too low like I am, leading to me having three consecutive failed crane designs, two that fell over and one that got stuck on the platform, lol). Then drag the platform 10 kilometers away, and build another base. With only lone parts that are not connected to docking ports or landing legs you can build way bigger bases.

I notice you dock things to reduce pieces that lay around. Would not undocked pieces have less processor demands due to the lack of physics calculations between the docking ports?

I just muddled up my station and have to start over again so thanks for the station parts! I tried putting two of my habitat modules into orbit per launch so each horribly drawn out rendeveuz with the space station had twice the payout. But when I separated the two hab modules before docking, only one of the two had functioning RCS even though both had RCS ports, RCS fuel, and cockpits. What the second module didn't have however, is a pilot. I didn't realize I could have gone EVA to go pick up the second module 50 meters away, until AFTER I made the station go BOOM trying to RCS it to the empty hab module. Forgot to quick-save silly me.

If anyone wondered, you can't put a launchpad in orbit and build a space station. The objects you spawn start at zero ms and the launch pad tend to disappear from orbital view. Kind of sad about that, but I guess mining the mun and launching from it will suffice.

Ooh! I just realized I can make a robotic arm on my space station which reaches out and grabs the new module I am supposed to dock, and then place it at the docking port instead of burning a million buttloads of RCS fuel!