Nephas

Ninjad with a Shotgun. Damn you're fast. And yeah, you already mentioned MM in the OP

This looks like an awesome mod and a huge amount of great work, but I've got an issue: In the description you mention rearranged Techs, but for me its just the standard Tech tree. Mystery Goo and MatLab in first nodes, no Thermometers. Am I missing some dependency? Edit: let me answer myself: I was missing ModuleManager. Perhaps you could give a hint or just package it with the download. Apart from the small problem its the Mod I've been always waiting for

I would second that, I understand the reasoning behind the unstarveable orange suits, but it doesn't really fit my playstyle. I don't often have more than five Astronauts actively flying. Just a flag in the settings.cfg to ignore the BadSes would be great. Apart from that, really great mod RoverDude, keep up the good work

After days of designing and engineering, I finally feel like I'm ready to enter this challenge and fail dramatically! Paperworks first: The Ksp Version is 23.5 - Sandbox Mode. I'm using some mods that make life harder more interesting, the noteworthy are: - FAR - Deadly Reentry - TAC Life Support (simplified somewhat by taking out the requirement for food) - SpaceplanePlus (just some wings) and HabitatPack (inflatable crew centrifuge) by Porkjet - and the obvious interface and information mods... Now the mission plan: I went for a pseudo-realistic approach and generally valued plausibility and aesthetics over efficiency. I also didn't look through the previous posts, so any similarities are pure coincidence. Three brave Kerbals will go on the voyage of their lives (that would be level 2 I guess?): Jebediah , Bob and Gregmund (if you ask: WTF is Gregmund? I don't know either, Bill somehow got lost during preparations and tests...) Core of the design is my mothership, the Hyperion which will serve as living space and fuel depot and carry the transfer engines. To explore the moons, it will carry: - the creatively named multipurpose non-atmospheric lander (MuNoL?). 3km/s dV, TWR ~2 - a dockable fuel package and crew compartment (FuPaCC?) to extend the lander's range. +3km/s dV - and a spaceplane especially for landing at Laythe. The nuclear main engines should have a dV budget of about 10 km/s, but that's hard to estimate as landers will be refueled from this pool and on the other hand some equipment will be dropped after use... does that sound reasonable? Its first route will be Kerbin -> Jool transfer -> Jool aerobrake -> Laythe aerobrake to low Orbit. Here the plane will descend and hopefully return to the ship. Then the MuNoL with the FuPaCC will be sent to Vall to land there. Meanwhile the Hyperion will do the direct transfer Laythe -> Tylo, where it will stay for the rest of the mission. The MuNoL will separately transfer to Tylo, refuel, do the roundtrip Tylo -> Pol -> Bop -> Tylo. Finally it will descend to Tylo... and return? Hopefully this dV map makes it clear (landing dVs not included): And if enough fuel and Kerbals are left, we can eject from Tylo orbit directly to Kerbin and aerobrake again. What could possibly go wrong? The following album shows the launch vehicles that are needed to assemble the mission: the Hyperion is delivered in three parts, the landers need another two launches and carry the crew members. So all in all five launches. The launches meanwhile happend, the assembling of the ship can be followed in the next album. And here he is, Hyperion in all his might and beauty. In the meantime, the crew decided to rename the unimaginatively descripted landers (seriously, the engineers must have been quite tired when coming up with these stupid acronyms). The lander shall be christianed "Selene" and the plane "Eos", after the children of the Titan Hyperion. Note that all crewable parts have access to each other via tunnels, thanks to the Connected Living Spaces/Ship Manifest mods. The only situation that requires to go EVA is when boarding the spaceplane. Another design feature I'm quite proud of are the breaking engines on the engine pods, for those situations where you don't have the time or where it's not feasible to turn the Ship around (e. g. during aerobreaking or gravity assists). But now some rather unromantic technical data: - total mass: 638 t - dry mass: 190 t (still including payloads) - part count: 224 (comfortable, isn't it?) - Delta V: 9400 m/s (when using only the nukes) - launch TWR: 0.115 (1.13 m/s²) The first launch window will be on: Year 2, day 255 at 5:13:12 1984 m/s ~30 min of burn time (oh yeaaaah...) Now I'm waiting for your "go", Ziv. I hope I didn't violate any rules?

I assume that you already know triplanetary's map, but i will shortly recite the rules for other readers with my addition: Triplanetary Movement Rules The ship's positions in the former round and the running round are connected by a drawn vector arrow. to predict the movement in the running turn: 1. the vector is copied and drawn again starting from the tip of the old arrow. 2. any gravity arrows the ship ran through in the round before move the tip of the new arrow by one field in the shown direction, where a) Black arrows cannot be ignored and are cumulative The small grey arrows cannot be ignored, but arrows from the same ring are not cumulative. If the ship ran throug several contradicting arrows, the captain may choose wich one to count c) White arrows are totally optional and may be ignored. 3. The captain may expend one point of fuel to move the final position of the vector by one field. part and the grey arrows were added by me to model the large scale gravitational force of the sun. The part about ,,choosing your gravitational influence'' can be reasoned as small scale correction burns that fall below the granularity of the fuel system. If you play around with it a bit (for example, just do the movements for a ship without using the engines), you see that it produces nice parabolic and seemingly elliptic trajectories. Of course the trajectories are not closed ellipses (like real kepler orbits), but in the most practical cases you do short arcing transfers from one planet to the next without doing full solar orbits anyway. And it reproduces important characteristics of the gravitational field, like ships that go faster when falling deeper into the gravity well, or if you don't have enough fuel you won't even reach the outer planets ... just imagine what you can do with assistance of your computer: large scale map, moving planets... On the 3D: it really is a question of whether you do interplanetary war (here i think it would just add loads of complexity without adding anything to gameplay or strategic options), or whether you stay close to one planet's orbit. But there i don't see a system that does fit both scenarios equally well. Except if you go totally abstract and use some graph similar to this one (just more detailed, and with cross connections): But here again distances and relative velocities don't play any role. disclaimer: perhaps i should add that i was mainly thinking in terms of board games but that isn't necessarily bad when designing a video game

Well, I don't know the rules of Rocket-Flight, but from my general understanding of the matter, this map looks just like a simple 2D-cut through the ecliptic of the solar system, without any thought put into inclined planet orbits. For example look at the Lagrange points, L4 and L5 which lie in the plane of the earth's movement. Also, the star signs of the zodiac lie in the planetary plane, and i think in this context the star signs are just used as an North/South/East/West-analogue. So my interpretation would be: up-down: low solar orbit - high solar orbit left-right: trailing or leading on orbit, relative to the planet in the same row of hexes I think this is just a rather sketchy mapping of the dV-Problem, also because a physically realistic DeltaV-map for this many bodies (5 Planets and dozens of asteroids...), that gives correct DeltaV-values for all thinkable transfers cannot fit into a 2D-Plane. And if you want to simulate combat, distances and relative velocities of your ships are important, which a DeltaV-map can't give you. Think of it this way: you expend the same dV as your enemy, you land on the same orbit as him, but you could be drifting 1km behind him or going on the opposite side of the planet/sun, which makes quite a difference... Also, i don't think that in a simulation of interplanetary combat the third dimension (read: orbit inclination) would be very important, as nearly every point of interest lies within the plane of planetary movements, and the inclinations of planetary orbits are just some neglectable degrees. But you've mentioned Triplanetary which has imho the best spaceship movement system ever (if you don't know the rules, read them and try the system, it's brilliant). In my eyes It's a newtonian physics simulation, boiled down to a level of granularity that you can fit the rules in five sentences and carry it out by hand. You get the distances and relative velocities simply from counting hexes, and you can even do gravity-slingshots. I've made my own modification of the solar system map that includes a large solar gravity well and produces large kepler-ish solar orbits for your spaceships without any major rules additions. The only thing it still needs are better combat mechanics than the vanilla ones. If you're interested let me know and i will post and explain the map.

When the Mohole was mentioned, i immediately had to think of this awesome thread: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/45238-The-Hanging-Gardens-of-Mun-a-super-crater-colony-COMPLETE-%28-bonus%29-IMAGE-HEAVY Go see for yourself.

I wished my Germany was like the one you are describing...

So, it looks like you didn't even try to open the parachutes... awesome picture How did that happen?

I think the easiest solution would be to put the front wheels (if by front you mean the loaded side) at least in line with the load, or perhaps a bit further out. Then it shouldn't tip over without need for a counterweight. Totally second that, it's the easiest design, and with the large wheels and the tank steering the fine-maneuvering for docking base parts is very easy.

This opens up disastrous new possibilities for accidental space-button-hits...

If there's still room, I'm in. Preferences: anything except Plane/SSTO-stuff, best would be something interplanetary Experiences: Station/Base-building, manned landings on Kerbins and most of Jools moons and on Duna (and safely returned ). Also lots of probes and rovers. Name: Herman Kerman

If you want to do it stock, the closest to a sky crane will be a Lander with radial engines and the rover attached below on structural parts and decoupler/docking ports. For more realism you could install the Kerbal Attachment System Mod (KAS) which brings working cables and winches, so you can really do it Nasa style. Don't get discouraged from the Deadly Reentry mod, it's not that hard, and considering Duna's thin atmosphere, the heating won't be too bad. Otherwise, i would just recommend the large adapter parts for heatshields.

For me building escape pods even got easier since 0.21. They now fly quite well without additional SAS and flight computer stuff. Just a 3-man-pod, the smallest of the 1.25m tanks on top and two of the small radial engines (250m/s Delta V, brings you home from a 500km orbit). 3 radial Parachutes land on a soft 7 m/s. Makes a total of seven parts (with an additional heat shield they even work great for Deadly Reentry). Got a small array of these Pods on my Space station. Also, the separatrons work great on a one man Pod, but unfortunately they're not strong enough to push the big one.

I've been playing KSP since 0.18 (it was love at first flight i think, and shortly after that discovered the Fourms, but i never considered signing up until know... well, finally it's done! Hope I'm getting new ideas what to do in this rocket-fuel soaked sandbox. So hello everybody, and may your missions always be ... exciting