Kimberly

In the VAB, docking ports are treated like decouplers. In flight, docking ports act like, y'know, docking ports.

Is there a way to actually integrate these into the game? It's pretty immersion-breaking to have to switch out of KSP to select a song, so it kind of defeats the point of atmospheric songs in the first place.

I just read up a bit on self-calibrating pseudolites. Apparently, they communicate with each other to determine their relative positions. Then, they can give relative coordinates to whatever's inside the network. They can't give planet-relative coordinates, so implementing them properly would probably be labor-intensive and also not terribly useful. You could just add a pseudolite part made of handwavium, of course, which tells you planet-relative coordinates anyway.

You could use RemoteTech's model for line of sight calculations: it assumes the planet is a perfect sphere, and the sphere used in the calculation is slightly smaller than the actual planet. This prevents mountains and such from blocking the signal. Pseudolites definitely sound like an interesting idea. Building a GPS network around every planet seems less realistic than strategically deploying some pseudolites around your main area of interest, e.g. a base. I'm curious, how do pseudolites calibrate?

That would allow for exploits. You could convert liquid fuel into xenon, for example. The "xenon dissolved in kethane" excuse is silly enough for xenon production as it is, but kethane would become totally unbalanced if you could do that.

Real GPS satellites need to synchronize with ground stations from time to time to keep functioning properly.

Still, a telescope would be cool thing to have at the space center, or to launch into orbit--even if it's not functional. And if we get asteroids and similar small bodies, we could use them to detect those--detection of such objects is ongoing.

D'oh, I should probably have quoted a post. I was talking about RemoteTech integration; if you want to do that, it would be useful to make GPS satellites non-functional if they're not in contact with the RemoteTech network.

I think something more productive would be to add a communications delay to the GPS read-outs, and to cancel GPS functionality of a satellite if it's not in contact with the network.

I always make sure it's rotated right before I undock the vehicle that brought it to the station. It's easy enough to undock, rotate it properly and then redock again, you just have to pay attention and get it right before your construction vehicle leaves.

Something shouldn't be hard to do because the interface is bad, it should be hard to do because the action itself is a challenge. Please search the thread before asking questions. This particular one has been answered over and over again. There's a "search thread" button in the upper right of the page. Go to the Kethane folder, open settings.cfg and add the line ShowInMenu = False.

You still need to download plugins from the Spaceport and there is no installation involved--I don't think "put folder X in folder Y" can seriously be considered such. You'd only be making the system more complex, by attaching a simple website like the Spaceport to a separate piece of software that you need to run just to install a mod.

No, but you can set an arbitrary time delay, so if you know how long it will take to reach your apoapsis, you can simply schedule a burn in X seconds.

Under the current system, attachment nodes follow a parent-child structure, and one part can only have one parent. This means multiple connections with multi-couplers are not possible. However, a ship is allowed to dock to itself, and it can do so multiple times...which is why it's possible to do this with docking ports. But docking ports only work if physics are turned on, which they aren't in the VAB.

Personally, I don't like the idea of splitting up a functional description and "flavor text". In my experience, this tends to break immersion, and the flavor text will end up being very bad--Magic the Gathering is an excellent example of where the flavor text is clearly trying too hard to be flavor text. I think a sensible system would be to assign each part a subcategory (which also makes sorting easier), and to have a single description that is both amusing and informative.

Maybe I'm doing things very differently than you guys when docking. What I do is this: Get a rendezvous. Target ship. Point towards it and burn to approach, then come to a standstill. Switch to the target, then turn so that the docking port is facing the approaching ship. Switch back to your original ship, line up your docking port with the target docking port, do a burn so you approach. Readjust carefully to correct for drift, and dock. You don't have to be concerned about lining the ports up relative to your orbit at all.

Works for Laythe!

So, it's exactly like a typical mod?

Why does everyone say that a high stupidity bar actually means they're smart? What is that based off of? The way it is now, it sounds like someone just made it up.

Why not just switch to the other craft and turn the docking port the right way?

When you burn fuel, you reduce your mass but you keep the same thrust, so your delta-V will be higher than you'd expect. I think the Engineer gives you the right number.

When I asked earlier, it was said that using stock antennae and probe bodies should be fine. Use of the satellite dish was not recommended because satellite dish function has been greatly changed in the new RemoteTech, so relying on it may break your network.

I still don't really get what the suggestion is. If you right-click on your docking port to "control from here", and you select the other ship's docking port as your target, then you can use the Navball to perfectly line up both ships' docking ports. The only thing you can't match with this method is rotation, which does not affect docking itself.

Is this based on anything in particular?

It seems silly to make a whole app for something that small. Why not just write a note on a piece of paper?