Diche Bach

Sorry about that. I normally spoiler large things, but it skipped my mind. Don't browse by mobile much myself; do spoiler sections come through okay on most platforms or is snipping really the way to go? Argh . . . my BBCode-Fu fail huge. Anyway, the giant chunk I was using is gone and pretty much everything I said is here in one form or another so, all is good. The cyber-archaeologists of 10,000 years hence will enjoy deciphering it all I'm sure . . .

Looks kinda like an M4 in which case 9.6/10, but if I'm being duped and it's actually a BB gun 0.1/10 and shame on youze. Just bought one of these to clear the brush that has infested my back yard for . . . Oh, 16 years now! Already arrived yesterday and I LIKE!

Interesting stuff. Where can I read up about this topic, I've never really encountered any reference to it in my minimal forays into the arcane world of astro-magicus-grandicus. Honestly I'm a little sckeptikal that any projections of this nature are particularly valid, given that the greatest minds at the cutting edge of these sciences have to invoke deus ex machina like "dark matter" and "dark energy" to get their models to work with the actual observed behavior of the [apparent] universe. Maybe that is naive on my part, but that is my mindset at this stage; I'd rather be 'guilty' of being naive by virtue of skepticism than by virtue of blind acceptance. Seems like we are sort of like an amoeba who somehow gained the ability to gaze far outside its petry dish and are using neural aparatus that is frankly far deficient for the task to try to comprehend the strange signals we are receiving in the laboratory surrounding the petry dish. I'm certainly no creationist, but that is where I sit with this sort of stuff. We have no loveing clue what is going on out there beyond the observable universe and we may never have any clue. Like that avatar and siggie

In two years, when I'm done with my apprentice level project as a C++ developer, it may well be that staying with my current team and helping on "next project" will be a great option. Or it could be that moving on to something else will be an even better option. It is impossible to tell, just as it is impossible for those of us who are not close enough to the "inner circle" of KSP staff dynamics to tell anything except "Quite a few long-time team members departing." Given that for many (all?) of them, this was their first job in game development, if not in software development more broadly, I'd say it is just as safe to speculate that they have maxed out their development potential and are moving on to greener pastures. Wish them well, and wish the existing team well and hope the best for everyone and accept that what is going on behind the scenes is more than likely to remain as obscure as it ever was.

When I submitted my dissertation years ago, and met with my committee the first time, one of my reviewers (not the lead instructor) who was a bit reluctant to be on the committee in the first place, gave me this long icey stare and said, "You REALLY should provide a glossary for all these acronyms you're using to refer to stuff." When I wrote it up it was like 10 pages double spaced with one space between each definition!

Is final entropy the actual projected fate? I find that hard to believe. My understanding is that the universe is overall expanding, so I would think that long before the available material in many galaxies have reached the point where there is too little (or too defuse) of fissile material to fuel stars the galaxies themselves will have been scattered far beyond the current boundaries of the observable universe. Interested to hear more. Lee Smolin hypotheses that black holes are effectively the "wombs" for daughter universe, and if that is correct, and we can figure a way to make it through that transfer "intact" then exploring those daughter universes would seem like a good idea for a hundreds or thousands of trillions year old "species" (by that time, I reckon we will not be "people" any longer, but rather energy patterns "living" eternally in vast solar system spanning "computers."

Also, American Anthropological Association!

Fare thee well fellow space traveler!

Thanks man! Already expended my likes for the day When I get one built again, I'll see if it makes a bit more sense this time round, or if I have questions, I'll post some screenies here. Honestly when I found the mod, it was in a flurry of late night mod installing right after I started playing the game again, so I wasn't even sure it had a forum thread, and only discovered it is your mod and this thread today. Great stuff! Given that, as you say, it wasn't really meant to be part of the game, it works amazingly well

I probably do not do it quite right, but here is my scheme in synthesis: 1. Always 4-point radial symmetry. I've used 3 and that is functional, but 4 seems to work better. 2. Try to place thrusters so that all thrusters on the vessel line up relative to the cross-section of the vessel (difficult to explain this, and I recently uninstalled some mods, so now several of the craft that would exemplify it best cannot be loaded in VAB . . . but: imagine a rocket that starts out pointy on top, spreads out to 0.625 at the beginning of the command module, then expands to 1.25, then eventually to 2.5. In this case, I'd place the RCS groups that attach to the smaller diameter portions on the end of girders so that those RCS packages lined up with the ones attached directly to the surface of the 2.5m diameter. WASD mod, Editor Extensions Redux, and a bit of clipping are integral to this). 3. ESSENTIAL: the sets of 4 MUST be lined up with respect to the two planes the four thrusters form through the center of the vessel. You should be able to start at one of the thrusters in a set of four at the top, and draw a straight line from it down the whole length of the vessel, and every subsequent thruster below it must line up with it as close to perfect as possible. 4. Always try to have at least one set of 4 at the superior ("top" prograde) end of a vessel, one set of 4 at the inferior ("bottom"), include more in the middles depending on mass of the vessel and space them roughly equally. So the final "payload" section will have at least two sets (one "top" one "bottom") then the stage below it will have at least one toward its "bottom," and the next stage same, all the way to the lowest stage where I will use RCS; I often do not use it until in space, but sometimes really clumsy craft need it right from the launch pad to maintain maneuverability. 5. For each section of the vessel that might need to be involved in docking manuevers, make at least one of the sets of four thursters comprise five-way thruster modules (either one of the integral modules or five of the "put anywheres" arranged on a girder end) to allow for prograde/retrograde translation and more effective roll. 6. Place most or all monopropellant fuel tanks toward the final stage so it doesn't get inadvertently jettisoned with an otherwise spent stage. The game seems to do a good job of using up stuff from bottom to top, so including a fraction of the mono fuel in lower stages is okay. This seems to work pretty well for me. Can dig up some screen caps if anyone is curious to see what I'm talking about. Be curious to hear if anyone who knows more than me has any helpful suggestions for my particular approach. ADDIT: here is one that shows pretty much what I'm talking about. The larger diameter lower stage(s) has already been jettisoned, but just imagine there was a larger cylinder attached below the engine that had RCS attached directly to the tanks, thus those RCS modules on the girders would "line up" with them. This module is a 4 Kerbal capacity passenger vessel that I'll be using for tourists contracts (1 pilot and up to three tourists) and later in the game I'll often keep one on my backup launchpad for rescue missions and also use it for personnel transfers to bases and stations and the like: thus a bit of extra battery power, some supplies (the food carton looking things with green markings) and solar panels to allow for up to about a week in space when at max Kerbal load. I've tended to use the linear "place anywhere" ports more than these integral 5-point modules (which come from a mod I think). The place anywhere smaller version has like twice the thrust power of these. But I recently noted that five of those place anywheres are about 4 times more massive than one of these integral 5-point modules so I'm checking out using them instead.

Really Cool Stuff.

I figure drogues are cheap, and I have on occasion had things not work quite as intended and needed their drag to slow down enough that the main chutes were well within the safety zone. Probably unneccessary, 95% of the time, but for a couple hundred funds (which you will likely recover most of anyway) and a bit of added risk mitigation, I'll keep using my drogues in pairs along with the main radials! I noticed the other day that one of the capsules I tend to use (not sure if from a mod or not) has "ablator" as one of the resources in its menu pane. I guess in that case, one could even forego the heashield, but I think I'll just keep using them. The other benefit of the heatshield is that it is heavy so it tends to keep the proper end pointed at the ground. Will be interesting when I finally get farther in the tech tree and get to check out the silica-ceramic techs for space planes.

Is there a good description of how the ballast tanks work somewhere? It has been a while, but shortly after I first installed the mod I fiddled around with making various "Land Shark" vehicles: low tech buggies comprising a couple Mk1 pods, girder framework, with airplane landing gear, a rudder on the top stern, jet engine for propulsion . . . I expected that you could use the ballast tank to selectively angle the craft: put one along midline on belly in front, one in back (or even to tilt by quarter: two adjacent in front, two in back) but it seems this is not how they really work? Seems like just one ballast tank toward the middle of the crafts center line and of course along its central axis are the way to go? Also, the functionality of the "In" "Out" buttons was a bit obscure and how the ballast tank relates to the "universal water" thing wasn't clear. I was able to get good results, but I suspect I wasn't getting full functionality out of the ballasts as it was more a matter of: click on stuff until you see descent, leave it alone, okay, you're deep now, see if you can turn it off << click, click, click << ah okay, seems like the tanks are starting to sit at equilibrium now . . .

@regex Who is that you quoted? Very well said.

There are some mods that add ballast tanks, as well as all the parts to build all sorts of ships. Large Boat Parts The ballast tank works, though it is a bit obscure exactly how it works; there are several controls modelled on the IN / OUT buttons used in resource transfer between modules in spacecraft. I've definitely managed to get makeshift "subs" (meaning buggies made of girders and airplane landing gear and with space capsules as the "command pods" and bristling with science gizmos) to submerge and even to maintain particular depths. Mod includes various water-environment propulsion systems, command modules, hulls, super-structures, etc., etc. _IF_ using mods would float (or in this case capsize!) your boat . . . There are several different packages in that guys mod on SpaceDock and Curse. I had a couple of them installed at first, but now I've switched to just two directories: LShipsRequired and LShipsModern I believe. There are also WWII parts.

Got to the Pyramids only to find they were "underground." Hyperedit saved me. Hopefully this entire save isn't gonna be like this. Thanks for the tool!

Thanks for your service to the Free World, and congrats on your success! Hope you get to fly the planes you want to fly!

That is awesome. I'll have to show that to my wife. Murican like me, but went to High School in France and fluent in the language. She'll be impressed that her French amies have such good tastes in semi-truck drag-racing aesthetics. But yeah: overall, rovers that don't suck and can actually behave more like dune buggies, semi-trucks, tractors, tanks: that would make the game a LOT more fun than the current situation: Rovers that feel like they are made out of balsa wood and with suspension made out of dried spaghetti.

I have absolutely no problem with the new graphics. Looks fine to me. Doesn't look just like anything previous (and actually looks pretty similar), but then it wouldn't be new if it did look exactly like the older stuff, now would it? Picasso tended to make different looking stuff each time and he was really famous. Granted, the Venus figurines all do sort of look a lot a like but we've come a long way baby! I really like those ancient Greek "Cycladic" carved head things too. Look kinda like Kerbals to be honest.

Both of your posts deserve an uptick, but sadly I've already depleted my measly 25 allowance for the day. @Red Iron Crown: So if I understand correctly, the working principle is: Include a number of empty stages at the top of any stage you will be attaching to a target ship (either in editor or docking) that is equal to the number of existing stages on the target ship? Example: I have a "Munar Orbital Rendezvous System" (MORS) Comprising an Munar Excursion Daughter (MED), a Munar Rover Baby (MRB) and a Munar Orbital Momma (MOM) with about 7 stages ([0] radial chutes on both MED and MOM, for when MOM (and maybe MED haven't tested that on reentry) return home; [1] drogue chutes too; [2] decoupler between the docking port on the MED and its belly-mounted rover (MRB); [3] 8 RCS engines on the MED; [4] decoupler between the MRB's belly and the docking port on nose of the MOM; [5] decoupler between the command module portion of MOM and its final main engine (one tank and a terrier or something like that); [6] The Munar manuever and return engine. Lets say I have a 4 stage launcher sub-assembly (actually lots going on in each stage though, lots of chutes because I use Stage Recovery), if I want to plug that sub-assembly into MORS to make a "Munar Expeditionary Synthetic Ship" (MESS) I just need to add seven empty stages to the sub-assembly before I bring it in?

@eddiew Thanks man. Deserved a Like, but I already used up my allowance for today. Looking at the dV table on Wiki, I think perhaps I'm not getting as much out of my Mun flybys as I was thinking I was. Anyway, on topic: I'm definitely totally in favor of updates/improvements which enhance the existing flight planner and add additional journey and manuever planning tools. A "transfer window" visualizer would be sweet. Something that made gravity assists a bit less of hunt and peck would be sweet. Especially when working around Kerbin after a career campaign is well underway (lots of misions, lots of sats, lots of debris) I find the inability to turn stuff OFF in the flight planner to be a gigantic pain. Yes I know you can turn off whole ship classes, but why not all of a class EXCEPT "this one?" And why can those damn waypoint markers from missions not be turned OFF!? And when I'm trying to get a redezvous, why can I not turn off those damned Apoapsis/Periapsis drop downs? And why no AN/DN markers by default? Sometimes you just want to get a particular inclination relative to equatorial, and not relative to a moving target. Why is setting the object you are orbiting as "the target" so obscure? (pretty sure it can be done, but it just seems to be some random keystroke somewhere).

LOL, I made an airplane with a rover strapped to the bottom with parachutes: called it the Seagull-104-MaRovaThonPara I'd post a KerbalX file but can't be bothered right now to go in game and get the screen caps. Didn't work so hot really . . . Seems those command seats lack straps or something to keep the Kerbals from flying off into the sky when their rover decouples and parachutes from the mother ship . . .

Reticence and boredom. Why C#, not C##? Bit too dull?

I wish there was a simple tool to tell how much dV has been gained/shed from a gravity assist.