Bobnova

There are contracts you should not accept in real life, too. Personally, I'd call this a feature

Squad is a marketing company. Harvester is an employee of theirs. As I recall he went in to tell them he was quitting to make a space flight game. They said "Hey whoa whoa let's not be hasty. Tell us about this game!" and then started paying him to make said game. That's what cracks me up the most when people start complaining about the bad job Squad does with publicity, publicity is literally their job. http://www.squad.com.mx/

Can you post the craft file or some pictures? A picture of it just before the engine gets ripped off, while it's getting ripped off, and just after it gets ripped off would be very helpful. I like imgur for uploading for the KSP forums, super easy.

I'm surprised that stayed stable. All my attempts without fins slammed sideways. Nicely done.

That was my take on it, otherwise I wouldn't have entered. I'd be using NEAR but I like the mach related aero changes and the occluded areas calculations. I'm pretty psyched to see NEAR in existence though, I'm hoping it makes it into stock eventually.

Or install RSS and all the realism mods and give it a whack yourself. Very different.

No clipping, stock parts. Am using FAR rather than NEAR, if that disqualifies me I understand. 211,665 meters.

I don't think I have ever played a 3d game that involved two entities colliding (you running into a wall, two space ship parts hitting each other, etc.) that didn't have clipping errors every once in a while. Times when you get stuck in an object, times when object1 is violently ejected from object2, falling through the floor, etc. Physics engines have limitations, even if you multiply by a million before you do your calculation you're going to run into rounding issues from time to time. If you're lucky the rounding issue will be small enough that it doesn't matter. Usually it is. Other times, you come back from the calculation to find that one fuel tank is inside another fuel tank. The simple solution to this fuel tank issue is to crash. Nobody wants that, especially not when you're doing things like time compression where you can't check to see if there is an impact constantly. The next solution is to move the parts away from each other, because clearly they cannot be in the same space. Now the fuel tank that gets moved is inside the engine on the far side of it. That won't work either (crash). etc.etc.etc. Eventually most games settle on giving a part that goes inside another part some velocity away from the part it's inside's center, and waiting to see if the problem resolves itself. Then you just end up with parts violently ejecting each other. Here's a wonderful example from iRacing (A simulation that is both completed and in constant development with a massive budget and a lot of geniuses): A physics engine is just a model of the real world. It will never perfect exactly the same way the real world does. We don't know why the real world behaves how it does, so even given an arbitrarily powerful CPU/etc. we can't model it. Also, you people need to stop using "kraken" to describe multiple things. It confuses the issue mightily. If you simply MUST use the word "kraken" please describe exactly which bug you're referring to when you say "kraken".

I think you answered your own question. When it says stage, it means stage. That's been my experience.

It's for FAR so you'll need to add another 1.1km/s of boosters to make orbit, but this was my first manned Mun lander in 0.24: Costs could be cut obviously, swap the pod out of a cheap weak pod, take the fins off and fly carefully, etc. Just swapping the mainsail (I had a test contract) for a skipper would probably do it.

That's how I'm looking at it. After accepting a contract to test something (I forget what) at 6000-9000m and 390m/s-700m/s I've been reading a bit more closely, much like real contracts. The text description isn't that far off sometimes either! EDIT: Having used Windows 95, which was a full release completed not cheap piece of software that crashed easily as often as stock KSP, I am not complaining about KSP. That said, the fact that I play Dwarf Fortress, including the painfully not-exactly-even-alpha super new releases with wild bugs (yay 0.40.1/2/3!) and love it should tell you something.

First manned Mun landing in the new save for 0.24. Had a "plant flag" contract, so it's manned. Previously I sent a probe lander and brought it back for ~11.8k. This time I had contracts not only for the flag but also for launch clamps on Kerbin and Mainsail landed on Kerbin. I was going to use a skipper, but what the hell, who doesn't like a takeoff TWR of 3.7? I found a Mun biome I didn't know existed! Pretty psyched. Aldas (first hire) declared it to be his swimming pool, water not included. Picturesque spot! I rather liked how the lander came out, looks very snazzy. I have a policy that manned landers use pods rated for at least 40m/s impact. It's saved a lot of lives in crashes that leave the pod and little else intact. On the way back to Kerbin on the second pass (first aerobrake pass was a little high, had to come around a second time to get down to the ground) there was a lovely sunrise too:

I noticed there was music playing on the way down to Mun on my first manned mission. Didn't really click at the time, but it's pretty cool now that you mention it!

There have been a couple people that posted screenshots of contracts to test launch clamps while landed on Mun. Difficult

I have something like 1 to 1.3 million I think. Part of the key is I've been working really hard on cost efficiency. My Mun probe that went to Mun, landed, then came back to KSP and landed safely cost me less than 20k. Big profit margin on that thing. Could a newbie nail that? No way. Could I nail that without a ton of trial and error and/or KE? No way! (With KE, first try) I don't think that they overpay for the most part. A few do, a few underpay. It's almost like real life contracts!

I, on the other hand, am absolutely loving this update. I think the mods have caught up faster this time than any previous time that I've been using mods for, save 0.23 to 0.23.5, which was very small. Not sure why we needed to know you couldn't handle change. Bonus: I've yet to run into a bug. There are some contracts that are impossible to fulfill, but that's just realistic. EDIT: Wait, being Alpha isn't an excuse for bugs? That's hilarious. For two reasons: 1) This isn't alpha anymore, they took that branding off. 2) When KSP was alpha, it was the most stable bug-free Alpha I'd ever played.

Successful trolljob is not unsuccessful.

I got that contract too. So far the LV-1 is the only engine I've had to test with Run Test. All the others have been staging. And yes, you have to stage it (or hit Run Test) when all the requirements are met. If they are not met when you stage it, you don't get anything. Regardless of whether the requirements are met later or not.

Just had my largest. Built a probe Mun lander, fairly simple thing, for the first Mun contract. I have a contract to test the LFB landed at Kerbin, perfect! Put a pod on top of it so that Jeb can fly it back down after separating the Mun probe. Parachutes, etc. Get into orbit, separate the probe, discover I put the decoupler and torque wheel in the wrong spots, torque wheel stays glued to the bottom of the probe's engine, decoupler stays glued to the cockpit on the booster. So much for the probe. Whatever though, it's a cheap probe, the booster costs over twice as much. Re-entering with the booster it flips from head first to tail first when the parachutes pre-deply, at 1800m/s, with FAR. The cockpit rips off, leaving the booster to come down gently out of physics range (bye bye money) and the cockpit to come down significantly less gently (bye bye, Jeb ) Easily the largest failure of 0.24, arguably one of the larger failures in a while at that.

This is the oddest for me so far. Company wanted the basic jet engine tested splashed down. They were not, however, willing to give me any intakes. Middle tank launched empty. Right and left tanks had about 25% fuel/lox, landed in the shallows with only a few units of fuel/lox left, used some to cushion the chutes opening and more to cushion the landing. Funny mission. I'm enjoying the contracts.

Testing the LV-45 at 5400m to 8600m and 390m/s to 600m/s turned out to be remarkably difficult with stage1 tech. When I finally got it (MOAR BOOSTERS!) I combined it with the getting out of the atmosphere and orbiting missions as I was already halfway there. Some of the missions are pretty funny.

Might look into the TI Tiva-C Connected Launchpad. It's programmable in Energia (Arduino IDE clone), has 256kB of RAM (yes, RAM), 1MB code storage, a 120MHz ARM CPU, a bunch of input/output headers, built in Ethernet, and costs $20 free shipping. I love Arduinos, but I'm completely addicted to the absurd amount of power in the Tiva-C launchpads.

3D printing is far, far, far coarser than even a garage machineshop. It's wonderful for creating things, but your finishes and your tolerances are measured in mils (thousandths of an inch), where a decent CNC mill they're in the 1/10,000ths to 1/100,000ths. It's a very cool thing to be able to do, and very useful in many situations, but it's not especially precise and it's far from a wonder-process.

Don't care. I start a new save for every update anyway.

More fins on the very very bottom of the rocket. I like the small wings with control surfaces, they work the best for me. Gravity turn on a RSS setup comes much later than stock with FAR. I usually tilt over 5° or so at 10km, then very very slowly tilt over to 45° at maybe 50km. After that I spend my time watching time to AP and the curve of my trajectory on the map screen. It's a very touchy business.