CorruptDB

Why not just define them in the "abort" (backspace) action group instead? I like using abort more than the numbered action groups because my backspace is a bigger key and thus is easier to hit when I am in a panic and it doesn't waste my numbered groups to use it.

The claw doesn't have a minimum speed, I have one on the end of a robotic arm and I can grapple things at very low speed.

Whelp, it happened again. I have ruled out debris, I am not at my max debris and there is no debris in the station's former orbit. I suspect Orbital Construction as well, this station doesn't currently have any KAS parts but it is an OC space dock. This time, there was an orbital anomaly in the station: the orbit mysteriously changed from 120x120 to 120x~960. I fixed the orbit and started some operations at Duna. I checked on the station several times and each time it was still there (until the last time obviously. I don't know what is doing it, but it seems like something is changing the orbit of the station when I am away from it. If it changes it to intersect Laythe it would explain the disappearing station. The crew roster in the Astronaut Complex shows the four crew members as "Missing in action". I don't have any other dead kerbals, is that the norm? I think the next step is to break the station down into its component pieces and see which one disappears. I suspect it will be the part that contains the space dock.

I don't think that is is debris, I would see debris in the save file and there is no sign of the station there. I have checked the (former) orbit and there isn't any debris there. When this happens the save file gets smaller by (what I assume is) the size of the station. It is possible that it got marked as debris for some reason and was auto-deleted, I am at my max count for debris. I will try terminating some of the debris to see if that helps. The station does have control, it has four RC-L01s. It also has a hitchhiker storage container where the crew is but IIRC that can't exert control. I don't think this is the result of an upgrade, I unzipped the 0.23.5 version into a fresh directory, added all new mods and started a new savegame. I haven't changed any mods since this save was started. I have (again) reverted back to an old save, hopefully I can get some more data if it disappears again.

Well, it just happened again, station is gone. Of course I don't have a save for my last 3 hours of play. Nikola: There are 4 kerbals onboard, including Bob Kerman.

It was orbiting Laythe in a 120 km circular orbit, which is quite a bit above the atmosphere so I don't think it deorbited. I have checked to see if it got marked as debris but it just isn't there. I have also checked the save file for any reference to this station and there is nothing other than a probe that was launched from it and the save file is several hundred kb less than the save file that contains the station. I loaded an old save file again and have rebuilt the station but I am deathly afraid it is going to disappear again. I assume it is something specific about this particular station as it has disappeared twice and I have never had any other stations/craft just disappear like that. I am currently using the following mods on 0.23.5 64-bit running on Linux: Kethane Kerbal Attachment System Kerbal Engineer Redux Orbital Construction Kerbal Alarm Clock Infernal Robotics I would hate to throw this savegame away as I have complex stations around Eve, Kerbin, Minimus, Duna and Laythe which would take a long time to reproduce. It's difficult to see when it disappears if I am not actively doing something at Laythe, in this last instance I was attempting a landing on Duna (which involved several different quicksaves) so by the time I noticed my current quicksave didn't have the station anymore. I have been trying to remember to do periodic named quicksaves but I don't end up making those as frequently as I should so I lose a lot of work when having to revert. If nobody else has seen this it might be something specific to Linux or specific to my install so I guess my only hope is that it might be fixed in some future version.

I have a station orbiting Laythe that has suddenly disappeared. This is the second time this has happened, it happened once and I reverted to an old savegame I had from before the missions to build the station arrived at Jool. I then re-assembled the incoming parts into a new station. I was doing some things with some other stations and I noticed that it had suddenly disappeared again. There are a few pieces of debris from the construction still in its orbit but the station itself just vanished. Has anyone else seen anything even remotely like this? I doubt I have to tell anybody how frustrating this is, the station represents many hours of work and having all that work suddenly disappear makes me not want to ever play again. What's the point of building something or launching a complex mission if ships just suddenly disappear? I have learned to deal with the numerous bugs in the program (perpetually stuck docking ports, flapping intersects, kraken lurking everywhere, etc.) but this one doesn't seem possible to work around. Does anybody have any suggestions on where to look for a cause?

"I'm almost positive I quicksaved a few minutes ago" - goodbye three hours.

Ugh, I'm stupid and installed the new version and lost most of my ships. If you have existing craft with KAS gear be careful about installing the new update!

You can stop fuel flow out of individual tanks by right clicking the tank and clicking the little green arrow next to the fuel/oxidizer amount. It should change into a red circle with a line and shouldn't feed fuel until you re-enable it. As far as I know, you don't have any control over fuel lines themselves.

Just unzip the file in your KSP directory. The actual location may vary depending on if it was installed from Steam or from the Website and which platform you are on. Usually mods will be zipped up with a directory structure inside, if they just have the mod directory then unzip it in $KSP_ROOT/GameData/, but most mods will include the GameData directory in their structure so you just unzip them in your KSP folder.

I have a pickup truck rover that I use for things like this. On the Mun I have cranes that can lower debris into the bed, on Laythe I have to use the KAS winch mounted in the bed to pull the debris aboard. It works out pretty good, but my trash dump is about 7 km from my main base, if it is just 2.5 km away approaching or departing ships will often be in render distance of both my base and the trash heap.

- Forgetting to deploy solar panels on unkerbed vessels. The first time this happened it seemed to be caused by going behind the mun so I spent a bunch of launches putting unneeded communications satellites into orbit so I could contlact my dead vehicle. I forgot to deploy panels probably 15 times before the Kerbal Space Commission decreed that all unkerbed vessels must have at least one RTG. - Not knowing how to use the throttle on the first launches so falling back to the ground every time the launch clamps were released. Alternately, figuring out how to throttle up but not knowing how to stage so expending the whole fuel load clamped to the pad. - Even after hundreds of hours of play STILL forgetting to put things on interplanetary craft. Power, docking ports, RCS, sufficient delta-v, landing legs, chutes - I have forgotten to include them all. - Crashing into and destroying various stations while learning rendezvous and docking

OK, I did a little test and confirmed that wings don't need access to airflow for lift. It's useless to make conventional planes, why make a plane 100 meters wide and prone to touching a wingtip when you can just have this: It's a dream to fly. With a few more wing panels I think it will turn into an airship, it almost floated off the runway. Definately a plane Jeb would love to fly I think I just solved all my wing problems.

> 1) The sudden spin mostly cause by your engines out of air. Check your air-intake. I don't think it is an engine-out condition, none of the engines appeared to go out ( I have seen those engines flame out, it does some particle effects and the engine goes dark)and resources reported plenty of IntakeAir. Speaking of that, how much IntakeAir is enough? The TurboJet engine in the SPH says it requires 15 units of IntakeAir but the Ram Air Intake only provides .2 units so do I really need 75 intakes to feed each TurboJet engine? That seems a little unreasonable, I must be missing something here. The plane in question has 6 engines, with 12 Ram Air intakes and 34 radial intakes. My previous plane didn't have as many intakes and it was able to reach around 25k before flaming out so I don't think it is a lack of air. > Point 1: In the VAB make sure your center of lift is just behind your center of mass. Putting the centre of lift even more than a few "CoM ball widths" behind the CoM is OK too *if* you have enough control surfaces to compensate. Never put the center of lift in front, this is a common cause of uncontrollable pitch-up. >Point 2: Be aware that as fuel is drained from the craft the center of mass is going to shift. Usually people put a long fuselage of fuel tanks with the engine or engines at the back. In this configuration, the centre of mass is going to shift backwards as fuel drains, potentailly moving far enough to put it behind the centre of lift. Then see point 1. The plane goes up a little nose heavy and should stay that way as 4 radial tanks in the back will empty before any fuel is used in front of the CoM. > Point 3: As your velocity increases drag becomes a significant factor in the behaviour of the vessel. An aircraft that uses the scoopy, surface attached radial air intakes on, say, the underside of the fuselage might seem fine at low speed, but when you start hitting 1000 m/s or more you will discover that the extra drag under the plane makes it difficult to get the nose up. On the other hand, if the scoops are on the top it might be difficult to keep the nose down. Note, also, that the drag forces are tricky... intakes way at the back will tend to make the plane want to point its nose along the velocity vector, since any deviation from this will create a torque as drag is produced off the centerline. Is the aero model in KSP different depending on if you take off from the runway vs. the launchpad? My understanding of the model is that each part had a value for drag (0.2 for the scoop intake) and that value combined with its mass determined the drag of the part regardless of orientation. The drag of all parts is summed to determine the drag of the vessel. I'm almost positive that is the way it works for rockets, does it not work the same for planes? At any rate, the intakes in question have radial symmetry and should balance out fairly well. > The most efficient intakes (in terms of intake-air-to-drag-ratio) are, by far, the blue-textured high performance intakes. Is this just accepted lore or has it been tested? The SPH reports more drag for the ram air intake (0.2 vs 0.3) and it masses only 0.0015 tons less. The scoop says it supplies 0.5/1 units of intake air but the ram air only supplies 0.2. Does it really perform differently at altitude or is the difference cosmetic? The part.cfg file says: dragModelType = default maximum_drag = 0.3 minimum_drag = 0.3 it doesn't seem to me like it should act any different than any other part. I guess I will just keep testing different wing configurations on this plane. Does the orientation of the wings even matter or does each wing part jusr provide "lift" no matter how it is placed?

One more question: The wiki says that the intakes produce less drag when closed, is there any other documentation on that? I don't seem to see any difference no matter how many intakes are open or closed and KER reports the same amount of atmospheric drag. Is there any official documentation from Squad? Where do the users that edit the wiki get their information? Is it just from experimentation or is it stuff gleaned from the devs on the forums?

I am attempting to build a reusable spaceplane to shuttle Kethane from the surface to orbit and I have been running into a number of difficulties. My latest incarnation is a canard biplane. My current problem with this plane is on the climb out when I get it to 6000-8000m it suddenly noses up and goes into an unrecoverable spin. I have plenty of speed and have the nose at about 25 degrees when this happens. I designed the plane to be stable according to aerodynamic principles (I design, build and fly a lot of R/C airplanes so I understand the basic concepts) but the planes in KSP don't follow aerodynamic principles. What is required for a stable plane in KSP? My first attempt was scapped when I was unable to reenter from orbit without an uncontrolled spin. I thought this was because I was more top heavy on re-entry (fuel tanks were slung low and had nearly emptied) so I designed this plane to be balanced in the pitch axis as well as the roll axis but it seems to be even less stable than my first one. For both planes, I always have to maintain at least a 15 degree pitch or I lose altitude, is that normal? Are their any parts with airfoils or does everything depend on the angle of attack? Do people regularly angle the wings up on the fuselage or does everyone just fly with their ass dragging through the air? In what units is the "lift generated" parameter on wing parts? How do you calculate the amount of "kerbal lift" to lift a plane of a certain weight? Does the KSP aero model even have a concept of a stall speed? It feels like the planes fly exactly like the rockets, the only thing that seems to matter is the direction of thrust, the wings dont seem to interact with the atmosphere at all. With this model, what makes a plane stable or unstable?

Pictures of the rover would probably be helpful. Make sure the brakes are off, I find when I first switch to a rover the brakes are on even if the brake indicator says they are off and they need to be turned on and turned off again before the rover will roll. Also check your power, no electricity == no movement.

I know you said "no mods" but I find Kerbal Engineer Redux to be very useful for landing since it shows my my horizontal speed, vertical speed and actual distance to terrain instead of to sea level. I find the altimeter in the game to be lacking, on Kerbin it sort of makes sense as altimeters would use barometric pressure but for bodies without air, what is the stock altimeter supposed to be using to measure distance to the Mun's "sea level"? The spacecraft that have landed on Luna used radar altimeters (yeah, I know that this exists in IVA but it is a pain to use). KER doesn't perform any tasks for you but it does give you a lot of information that the stock game doesn't, if your no mods request was just to forestall people saying "Just have mechjeb land, duh!" you might want to consider KER.

Damn all you ninjas! Serves me right for not quick-replying.

About 4:30, the phase angle is 44.36 degrees according to the Interactive Illustrated Planetary Guide and Calculator: http://ksp.olex.biz/. I highly recommend this tool, you never will have to wonder what position you need for a transfer again.

Well, in the case of Jupiter's moon Io, the Laplace resonance combined with its eccentric orbit results in tidal heating. Laythe doesn't have any eccentricity but it is in a Laplace resonance with Vail and Tylo so maybe that is what is heating it.

Thanks a ton for the detailed answer Starwaster. I just didn't know how the program related the parts to each other. I was able to change my winches and connectors into cubic struts and was finally able to get my tanker docked with the station.

Oh, and regarding the 50m vs 100m of slack, I was envisioning being all the way taut on one side then thrusting the opposite direction (passing near the winch in the middle of the burn) so 100m total.

It's a non-inline winch, I think it is called the vertical stack winch in the VAB. It is hooked to one of the nodes on the standard 6 node connector. The only thing it should have attached to it are the connector (which I also removed from the file) and a couple of struts. If the file layout is a tree it should be the second to last thing (connector being last) on that branch so I have no idea why the rest of the station would depend in it being there.