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Everything posted by Diche Bach
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Heading Back to Rocketry School (Help Needed)
Diche Bach replied to Turk_WLF's topic in KSP1 Gameplay Questions and Tutorials
So Aegolius13 and Streetwind have provided some more "bare bones" designs and I provided one that is "excessive" (should be MORE than enough d/V and main challenge might be going too fast in low atmosphere and experiencing loss manueverability) Somewhere between those two extremes you may find your sweetspot. Me personally, I like to design things that are capable of doing "more" than what they are designed for initialy. This way, an initial design can be reused and multi-purposed to future missions which may be more demanding. But then that motivation comes primarily from using Kerbal Construction Time and Stage Recovery mods which make career into a bit more of a "strategic" enterprise: reuse designs = more cost effective. -
Stranded in the jungle? I'd take a rock hammer (you can make any stone tool with that). The sheet of plastic would be nice, and the mirror could have some uses.But the mirror depends on sunlight and the plastic would only last so long. Just me and my rock hammer: as long as I could figure out the local edibles and avoid local predators long enough, I could stay indefinitely I reckon A good solid Meso-American style machete would be my second choice, there is a lot of overlap in the two tools but many things that would require fashioning additional tools from the hammer could be done with relative easy with the machete and making stone choppers/axes/knives is pretty difficult (not to mention there may be no useable chert findable with relative easy, so the machete would a definite plus. Third would be a metal canteen in the 750ml ballpark that can double as a cook pot and water vessel. Again, something that "could be" fashioned out of local materials, but having it would make the first few days SOOO much easier.
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parts [1.2] USI Survivability Pack (Formerly DERP) [v0.6.0]
Diche Bach replied to RoverDude's topic in KSP1 Mod Releases
Ahhh! I gotcha! Yeah, they can defintely "get into a pod!" I'll have to try that! There is also the radial remote control unit in MRS, though it seems to be a bit of an electricity hog. -
Interesting . . . so if Earth was a little smaller/less dense spaceplanes would be easier in real-life . . . but then, if you changed those upstream variables too much, Earth might never have developed an oxygen rich atmosphere much less rich ecologies or complex/intelligent/spacefaring life . . . so I guess we're stuck in the middle and the pain thunder? . . . sorry I'll show myself out.
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parts [1.2] USI Survivability Pack (Formerly DERP) [v0.6.0]
Diche Bach replied to RoverDude's topic in KSP1 Mod Releases
Would that somehow allow "tourist" Kerbals to use escape pods? I don't quite follow you. -
Games that give users more options are generally better than games that give users less options . . . right up to the point that the effect of giving more options causes the game to be experienced as "more complicated" instead of "more immersive/rich." Fella over on the Stellaris forums opined quite eloquently about this issue in a similar discussion pertaining to whether Paradox should include a particular featre in an update to the game as an toggleable option or not (actually it might have been food transport between planets! ). When a user launches an app and is greeted with a bewildering if-not overwhelming display of obscure controls, buttons, knobs and valves = giving user more options has not served well. When a user launches an app and is greeted by a welcoming, cognitively-intuitive, seemingly-straightforwad at first glance UI, which . . . on further examination by user action turns out to reveal even more "goodies" under the hood that the user can play with _IF_ he or she wants to = giving user more options can serve well. It is about UI design more than anything I think. The UI has got to be clean enough to not put off the "I just want to spend 5 minutes having some fun" users, while also being fascinating and fun for the "I want this to offer me so many options and so much immersion that it will take me years and lots of thought/analysis to master it." ADDIT: slightly tangential but . . . a theme here that I see neglected in many game design studios mode of thinking/designing, is to make full use of mouse controls and also to use alternatives to the standard rectangular drop down/popup panes. Old game called "Temple of Elemental Evil" which was a Real-time-pauseable/turn-based combat Dungeons & Dragons game: used the right-click button as a bottleneck to a host of user inputs that one could effectively ignore while initially learning the game, but which made mid- to high-level play much more rich. Right-clicking on a character or other object in the game view would open up these neat radial menus which allowed you to queue "commands" for the character(s) like parrying, defensive stance, etc.
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As one who: played the game 3 years ago, came back and I feel I've now more or less "gained/regained proficiency" with the tech tree (Community Tech Tree variant) up through about the 160 point tier, and have nearly ZERO experience with space planes (built a whacky thing: airplane with rockets strapped to the sides, didn't work but it was interesting to fail with) I find this thread very interesting. I saw some posters in another thread lamenting that "spaceplanes are too easy/too lucrative/break realism, etc." Well since humanity has yet to truly achieve a spaceplane, I guess having them at all _IS_ realism breaking, though it seems they are theoretically possible (in real life)? Would love to hear some of you gurus comment on that and in particular provide some synthetic view of what it is that needs to happen for it to become a reality and what implications it will have for the future of real-life human space exploration. But based on comments here, it sounds like the "lamenters" I refer to above were probably overstating part of their lament. Sounds like spaceplanes in the game, while yes, inherently unrealistic in being a fairly doable system that has yet to actually exist in real life, are actually NOT so OP as some have argued. Sounds like they have a lot of tradeoffs both in terms of in-game resources, and meta-game resources (play time, difficulty, attention level, tedium, etc.). So in real-life, is the idea: 1. Take off from a runway 2. Gain altitude and speed until you are as high as your airbreather engines can function (I'm assuming there are some special types of "airbreathers" that can function at even lower pressures?) 3. Switch to engines that use chemical oxidizers instead of atmospheric oxygen 4. Accelerate and gain more altitude until you are in orbit? -=-=-ADDIT-=-=- And one more question! What is this Spaceplane/SSTO distinction I see some guys making?
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parts [1.2] USI Survivability Pack (Formerly DERP) [v0.6.0]
Diche Bach replied to RoverDude's topic in KSP1 Mod Releases
Thanks hab, that is pretty much what I figured. Shame though that they cannot use escape pods, given that well . . . escape pods would be logical for non-crew to be able to use too. Probably not an easy fix for that though I'd reckon. -
The wonder of file compression. Now why didn't I think of that? Oh that's right because I was up way past my bedtime fiddling with mod configurations on KSP when I should have been studying my data structures or sleeping . . . https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2K3NkxgCZpLRk1JMGd1b0lrUUE Like I said, the error ensues during the few score milliseconds between line 50134 and 50321. Lots of "Hide UI" "Destroy Button" stuff going on that I cannot make good sense of. Just as a contextual point: I've had a recurrent bug with both of my modded builds up to this point (a) heavily modded with like 106 subfolders in GameData, so probably on the order of 110 "mods"; (b) moderately modded with about 76 sub-folders. KCT was in both. I'm presently winnowing to try to figure out which ones are contributing to performance issues like I said above. . . . Anyway, during the scores of hours with those two mod builds I have a recurrent bug that has cropped up probably 10 or 15 times. It only occurs after several hours of play. It occurs at the point of scene change from Space Center to R&D and once it has ensued it seems to carry over (sometimes) to any scene change from Space Center to any of the other scenes. Only way to make it go away that I've found is to reboot the application from desktop. The bug comprises what I would call "invisibility" of the destination scenes visual elements. So for example, you click on R&D while in Space Center, R&D visual elements flicker briefly into view, but then disappear and you are "back in" or rather "still in" Space Center . . . but actually you are not, the scene has changed to R&D but it is just not visible. Mouse moving can cause the Tech Tree and other R&D visual elements to flicker in and out of visibility briefly; clicking on the graphics for the other centers does not allow you to transfer to them like you would if you were actally in Space Center. Clicking the top right button closes R&D and one is back in Space Center. I've seen this carry over to essentially all the scenes accessed from the Space Center, and also a similar bug while in VAB where the entire UI does a similar thing: flickers out but then flickers back in based on mouse movements. It may not be a KCT thing, but because it is such a transient bug, I thought I'd mention it, as trying to pin down this one that caused the crash might be deriving from a similar problem in the code.
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Heading Back to Rocketry School (Help Needed)
Diche Bach replied to Turk_WLF's topic in KSP1 Gameplay Questions and Tutorials
I pay mostly modded, and haven't played vanilla for a long time. But I've been testing out mods, so it was a small thing to do a quick vanilla sandbox (so i had all the parts). Sorry too late here to fiddle with images, but if you look on Kerbal X you are sure to find a lot of stuff: Stage 0----2 radial chutes on an Mk1 pod with heashield Stage 1------2 radial drogues Stage 2: one of the FLT 1.25m tanks (not shortest but slightly shorter than the middle length) and then a Reliant engine (the 1.25 t) Stage 3: decoupler Stage 4: Another FLT 1.25m tank longer + a "Vector" engine (says ~850 thrust, never used it before) Stage 5: decoupler Stage 6: Reaction wheel + FLT 1.25m to2.5m + Rockmax 2.5m tank, plus a Mainsail (overkill it seems, but it works) Four radial attached delta wings, with 4 radial decouplers midway between each wing Four kickback SRBs attached to the decouplers, with nose cones on the top. Run one section of light strut set to 4 point radial symmetry between the SRBs near the top. That is pretty much it. Total overkill, and the technique for flying it up is probably more important than the craft itself. 1. Set Mainsail to ~5% thrust at launchpad 2. Engage SAS (if you wanted to add RCS to it you could, but it isn't really necessary) which means you need to use a "Pilot" Kerbal 3. Engage Stage 6, and keep the LqOx engine on low power (just for the maneuvering it affords) 4. Burn radial (straight up) until you are comfortable starting a gravity turn to eastish (can be done as early as 50m/s but 150 is "safer" from a manuverability standpoint and less risky of tumbling. 5. Once you are fast enough, begin to turn slowly and patiently to the east (just press lightly on D key to yaw to starboard . . . pause a half-second or so. . . press it lightly again . . pause . . . press again . . . pause . . . press again . .. pause . . .do this until your craft is tilted at about a 10 to 20 degree angle. 10 is "safer" but 20 would be more "efficient." 6. Once you are flying east and radial and hit about 300m/s it is just a matter of keeping it from wobbling off course and keeping a nice stead rate of eastward yawing (toward horizon) as you continue to gain speed and altitude. 7. Very rough ballparks: 25 degrees yawed to east by about 250-300m/s and perhaps 15,000 to 25,000m alt 35 to 40 degrees at about 350 to 450 m/s and 35,000 to 45,000 m 55 to 65 degreees at about 750m/s and 65,000 8. When you get to 65,000 and are confident you are going to get higher than that (at least 70 which is edge of atmosphere) you can lay off the thrust and yaw your ship almost to 90 degrees. If you are not as confident at maneuvering, keep it in the 75-degree range until you begin your apoapsis burn. 9. Check flight planner and set a manuever node at apoapsis. You can take the time to actually set this up for your desired altitude but it that isn't necessary. Basically you just want to know when you are close to apoapsis, so you can start to burn prograde if not a bit anti-radial (if your prograde marker is still a good ways above the horizon). Basically just burn "at the horizon" (or its environs) till you raise the periapsis to above 70km. You are now in orbit. It is of course easy to make a lot of various mistakes along the way, and wind up either crashing into the planet or wobbling around wasting fuel trying to keep it going in the right direction, else setting up a Kerbin escape trajectory. But the only real way to learn how not to do those things, and instead handle the craft well, is to practice. Use revert flight or F5-F9 to your advantage till you get the hang of it. -
Have a bug that seems to relate to KCT. It only seems to happen on the first session of a new career save (when KCT prompts for Settings). Everything gets written to Persistent, but then a scene change (or at least trying to enter VAB) causes the crash. I cannot quite make out what is happening in the output_log.txt, I replicated it twice, and also tested the save file once; the save file worked fine when it was rebooted, so it appears to be related specifically to functions KCT is running from the initial setup pane. Quite possibly interactions with other mods adding to it I suspect. I've played with the mod for many scores of hours and had very few crashes (none of which I would attribute to KCT). Though this may have happened the first time or two I installed it and I just shrugged it off, not sure. Reason I found it, I am methodically testing all my mods: started with the ones I consider most essential / least troublesome and have got up to about 50 reinstalled, installing in batches of 2 to 4 at a time and making a quick note of CPU, RAM use, load times and scene change times. When I reinstalled KCT is when I had the crash, so I would say it is pretty sure bet the error is coming from KCT being involved (though as I said, possibly in interaction with other mods) in scene change logic on a first session of a new career play. Sorry but cannot be bothered at the moment to do a clean install with only KCT, though if you want I can do that. Hopefully you'll be able to make more sense of what is happening between about lines 50,134 and 50,325! Lots of "button destroyed" stuff that I can only vaguely guess has to do with how the game renders panes (JFrames they call them in Java, but I don't know what they are called in C# . . .) I've got the output_log.txt file for you, but not sure where to put it. Google Docs seems to choke on a 50,000 line text file, and I'm not signing up for a Dropbox account just for this one thing. Pastebin won't take it on a free account either. 50,000 line log files, why is that so fitting for a Kerbal Space Program!?
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Mausei, scientist babe. Theoberry, slightly befuddled pilot. I've got several contract pack mods installed, and I got these two from either a "drive a Kerbal Tourbus" mission (which gives you half-dozen crew qualified level 0 kerbals, which you apparently get to keep indefinitely if you just do not cancel that mission and never complete it) or some sort of Space Camp mission (sent 14 Kerbals and three crew up in a space camp for 40 days orbiting around Kerbin. There was a gigantic bag of tacos and lots of cases of beer so they were cool . . .). The random name generator is pretty good.
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[1.3.1] Persistent Dynamic Pod Names release
Diche Bach replied to linuxgurugamer's topic in KSP1 Mod Releases
I've been wishing for this! Already expended by 25-like allowances for the day, but if I hadn't OP would definitely get an uptick from me! -
Already expended my 25 likes for the day, but I wanted to second this idea . . . and most of the mods that are supposed to do this do not seem to function well (well, the ONE mod I tried anyway . . .).
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The v1.2 Hype Train Thread - Prerelease is Out
Diche Bach replied to Whirligig Girl's topic in KSP1 Discussion
Believe it.- 1,592 replies
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[1.11] RemoteTech v1.9.9 [2020-12-19]
Diche Bach replied to tomek.piotrowski's topic in KSP1 Mod Releases
Didn't see if anyone has responded to your question: I don't use any of these features, but based on a cursory examination of the Flight Computer "2nd Pane" in-game . . . some or most of those buttons/functions have tool tips that show up when you hover your mouse over them. Based on those, this appears to be the pane for controlling rovers and/or planes . . . I guess just rovers cause it doesn't include any altitude functions. -
I guess its about time to give Steam its quarterly "access to the internet" allowance.
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@Red Iron Crown: Thanks. That is good to hear you clarify. I will take up the gauntlet and resolve to test each mod individually.
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Wouldn't it be _AWESOME!_ if Squad did on their end what they could reasonably do to mitigate these issues? It is a bit puzzling to hear your prognosis though. I'd say most of my mods are either parts mods (the USI pack, InterstellarExtended, the NearFutures set, etc., KW_Rocketry), or what I'd call "widgets" for lack of a better word (e.g., Chatterer, biomatic, that sort of thing, even MechJeb I suppose). Only VFX I run that I am aware of is Scatterer. Then there is TweakScale, which I suspect is the main culprit for my performance issues, and is in sort of a class by itself I suppose. I see my biggest performance issues when large complex ship designing is involved, not in situations where I'd think Scatterer would cause problems (e.g., while in flight on Kerbin).
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So quick question to anyone watching this thread who uses lots of mods: do you notice appreciable performance degradation associated with using mods?
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Mechjeb is very famous plugin for Kerbal Space Program. By placing a Mechjeb module on a craft (appears like a small computer-like walkie-talkie doohickey) one implements Mechjeb functionality for that craft. Mechjeb functionality includes a host of user-configurable features and functions, which mostly can be glossed under the concept of "auto-pilot." Here is the link to the Mechjeb Curse page, and if you scroll down a bit, there are some links on the left including an online manual, and a link to the forum thread. https://mods.curse.com/ksp-mods/kerbal/220221-mechjeb
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Never leave an RCS segment off of a stage just because you figure (I'll be ditching that before I get to the important part, no need to balance it out as if that will be the inferior end of the craft . . .): currently wrestling with my (otherwise well RCS balanced) Mun orbital service module trying to get a good docking rendezvous with the Lander returned with 4 Kerbals and several hundred science. The lander is nice and manueverable, but the orbiter (with one pilot aboard) has the lionshare of the fuel . . . Always overestimate how much RCS you "might" need. If you use Kerbal Engineer, NEVER forget to leave the module off every command pod in a complex ship (also that clumsy orbiter above has no KER module in it!)