FleetAdmiralJ

MOAR ERMAHGERD PLERNERTS!!! I've always kind of felt like having resources would make it feel like Starcraft. "SPAWN MORE OVERLORDS." Though I guess I can see why people might want it. But we don't have to mine on the moon to keep doing space travel, so why should they *shrugs*

The main problem I'm still having with the SAS is on the gravity turn. I'll turn it, it will sling back to where it was, then slowly move back to where I let go. I would think it should just say where I let it go, especially if there is little momentum that could cause it to fling around. I've had to hold the S button down to make sure it stays in the turn until the SAS can "catch up" to it a couple of times. However, other than that, it's been working like a charm on rockets. No problem launching straight up, no problem keeping a heading when I burn.

I too noticed that winglets on rockets seem pretty useless unless you are manually correcting. However, one thing that seemed to matter is that if you just had a rocket without any launch struts (or whatever they're called), if your rocket leaned and you turned on the SAS, it tended to "lock in" the way the rocket was leaning. So making sure your rocket is straight as an arrow when SAS is enabled seems to matter too. Or at least it did for me.

See, when I downloaded it, I thought about that too, but putting a gimbaling engine on it really didn't help, but putting launch things to make sure it stayed straight until launch did help.

OK, I downloaded the craft file and flew it, and I've come up with a hypothesis. Flying it with no changes at all came up with the same problem - it would immediately start leaning. In my case, it leaned toward the south. I went back and added a pair of Launch Stability Enhancers to it and flew it again (twice, actually, to make sure). It may have leaned a couple of degrees, but nothing like it was before. I'm wondering if what was happening before, without the launch stability enhancers, it was leaning slightly on the launch pad, and once you turned on the SAS, it kept that "lean" when you launched it.

Hmm, how is your center of lift? On my first rocket I had a center liquid fuel engine and two solids on the side. If I fired just the solids and not the liquid, it tended to tilt, but if I did all three it went up straight as an arrow. I'm not sure why it would do that, but it seemed to matter. I don't know if it was the ASAS or just luck (though it still seemed to hold things pretty straight in space too)

Are you just using reaction wheels or are you using the advanced stabilizer? JUST reaction wheels won't automatically steer your ship.

There are reaction wheels, which will give you torque, and then there is the "advanced stabilizer" which actually does the controlling for you like the ASAS did before. Or, at least it seems to do it for me.

It was like that in 0.20. I think that's supposed to show you where in the atmosphere you are which, since you're going to the mun, there IS to atmosphere. I'd say watch the altimeter (and your shadow) rather than that gauge.

Mine seems to work fine, except I can't load saved craft. I'm pretty sure I cleared out all my mods too..

Just launched a basic probe with the advanced stabalizer. I had very few problems. It would float some during the gravity turn, but only in the direction I was trying to turn. It clearly doesn't "stick" as fast, at least during gravity turns, than the last one, but it settles fast enough.

I don't know if this will help or if it's already been mentioned, but I found on the rocket that the "medium reaction wheels" didn't do much to actively keep my rocket in line, but the medium advanced stabilizer DID. Much like how before SAS didn't keep my rocket in line but the ASAS did. Perhaps make sure you're using the right one? I never could figure out the difference between SAS and ASAS. Looks like the difference between reaction wheels and "advanced stabilizer" might be the same.

It looks like the formatting for kerbals in persistence is pretty much the same as before, though to make sure one doesn't break anyway, I may add any custom named kerbals as a recruit instead of directly to the main list. Yesss the two "other" named Kerbals that I became attached to will still live!

I've had this problem when trying to test landers/base parts for the moon. About all I can say is this: more chutes and more struts. If you have radial engines attached to the core, put chutes on BOTH. If you just put them on the engines, the sheering force of the center not stopping but the engines slowing may tear it apart. Ditto for the reverse configuration. However, if you can try to slow everything down at a comparable rate, sheer forces will be less and it has a better chance at staying together. And of course struts would just give it that much more structural integrity. As far as it tipping a bit, I think if you can get it so that it slows down to less than 5 m/s, which shouldn't be a problem on eve, I'm not sure that will be all that much of an issue in the end unless it's just tilting wildly to one side, in which case you may want to re-arrange how your chutes are attached to see if you can add them in a way that causes it to lean less. Edit: Also, try to make sure you make "weak points" (RCS tanks, SAS modules) in areas that minimizes the stress on those pieces. Things like RCS tanks and SAS modules are notorious for not being able to withstand the forces of a parachute deployment

This could be very dangerous. I already like creating fantasy universes. This will just making planets and star systems easier lol Edit: I just created one. 82% water, with a "superdense toxic" atmosphere, Average tempt is 52 Celsius (126 F), inhabited by mere Prokaryotic microbes. yay me? lol

I wouldn't assume that (though I suppose one could build a rocket in that way, but I would think it would be extremely unstable). When I do an asparagus of 6 orange engines outside a center orange engine, all 6 of those engines are attached to the center, but only two of their fuel lines attach to the center.

This is essentially what happened with Soyuz 1, which killed Vladimir Komarov when his parachutes failed to properly deploy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_1 Everyone in the program knew Soyuz was a death trap, so much so that Yuri Gagarin, Komarov's backup, tried to supplant him as the main pilot because he knew they would never launch it with him on board. But Communist leaders wanted to launch it to commemorate Lenin's birthday, so they overruled engineer's safety concerns.

Or how about a Rage Quit video with KSP. Michael raging as his rockets go tumbling and exploding...

There are two things that always bite me when doing asparagus: 1) make sure that when you're adding fuel lines, you're doing it for both sides (or if you add tanks in, say, a group of six, that you link the fuel pods together correctly one-by-one), and 2) make sure you are connecting the fuel lines in the right order. Fuel always runs from the tank you start the fuel line from to the tank you connect to. If you connected the line from the center tank to the last asparagus stage, then the fuel will be running the wrong way. Edit: Do you mean you're alt-clicking the tanks to copy them, pasting them next in line and letting the fuel lines attach where they may? that could be part of the problem...

i like playing music from Apollo 13, heh

One question I had since I heard it rumored, but didn't see anything in the videos that I've seen so far: we can recruit new Kerbals, but can one EDIT (or create) our own Kerbals in-game? I have some Kerbals I've gotten attached to XD

I can't claim that I *KNOW* how far my ships are going to go, but I think I've gotten pretty good at making a good educated guess based on experience. Sometimes I'm wrong, most of the time I make it, though. Despite being a math person myself, I'd prefer not to get too bogged down in delta-V calculations. I just make a rocket I'm pretty sure will work.

Do we even have enough places/things to even make a Kerbal Monopoly board? heh

I actually did a solar orbit rescue mission not too long ago (though with a one man pod lost, though I figure this will be the same). The name of the game will be patience. Since you have a 3 man pod lost, you'll either need a ship with a 3-man pod but remotely controlled, or something like two 2-man landing pods on the ship. The rescue craft probably will absolutely need nuclear engines just for the fuel efficiency, and quite a bit of fuel (4 to 6 tanks I would guess thereabouts). Then of course you'll need a launcher to actually get that into space. You'll want to get your orbit somewhat like the lost ship's (you can set it as a target and play around with trying to find burn angles/times that get you close). When I had to do it, I think I ended up doing 4 or 5 course corrections to finally get everything lined up. You're going to be talking about several burns with Delta-V of 2000-4000 quite possibly, thus why fuel-efficient nuclear engines are probably a must, even though the burns will probably take 20 to 30 minutes with those engines. If you don't have docking ports on your stranded craft, you're going to have to get relatively close (2k or closer probably. Closer if you can) and then have your lost Kerbals EVA to your rescue ship). Then, of course, you're going to need to adjust your orbit to try to get a Kerbin encounter once you're rescued them. My attempt took about 13 months of game time to ultimately complete, I think.

I use some mods to supplement parts of the game that are useful (some additional parts, but not a lot, alarm clock, docking camera, crew manifest, etc.) but I kind of feel like if one does too much it starts feeling like cheating. Also, I think it gets one used to stuff that may later get replaced by the actual game. *shrugs* but that's just me.