Diche Bach

Couple questions: 1. What does targeting something actually do? 2. Is it normal that I have two "Open Dish" toggle buttons when I right click items like the stock communotron dish and long antennae? Also when the dish is open, I get two target toggle buttons too. This is with RT1.

Ah! Well that makes it a heckuva lot easier then! Anyway, my misinterpretation of the requirement has led me to some fun, funny and intriguing sandbox experiments with all SRB launch vehicles Notice all those whacked out trajectories of the preceding test flights!

I'm curious what sorts of designs you guys have been using to complete Sandworms "Propaganda" mission, the first mission in his Military Missions pack. It seems to call for a rocket that achieves orbit with nothing but solid rocket boosters, which I have not used much. I can certainly build ones that get really high up, but I'm a bit baffled at steering them. I generally use my RemoteTech Flight Computer to control my ascent using the Surface mode. So I start out with Surface Pitch = 90 and Heading = 90. Then I'll typically after a couple kilometers Update to Pitch =85; Heading = 90. Then Pitch = 80, etc. In the case of this mission I've been trying to do the same but with Heading = 25 to achieve the 50 to 70 Inclination required for the orbit. I've been using the SSH Series Model 221, Solid Booster as my bottom stage. This is added by either NovaPunch or one of the other parts packs. It says "Thrust Vectoring Enabled" and Max Vectoring Angle = 1.0. However, I do have it in a triple group and strutted together. The ship seems completely unresponsive to turn commands. Oh yeah, I also have a few KMS Mini-boosters strapped on to provide a bit more oomph to the bottom stage. These also say Thrust Vectoring Enabled, but Angle = 0.00 1. How do you steer an all SRB rocket? 2. Does a triple pack somehow disable a rockets thrust vectoring ability? ADDIT: I just did a test with only one SSH Series Model 221 and the sputnik probe on top. It steers manually, but the RT Flight Computer doesn't seem able to steer it. Weird. I suppose this could actually be an issue with how the thrust vectoring is setup in the part in the mod pack then? ADDIT2: and three Model 221's steer manually too, so it must just be the RT Flight Computer more than not being able to steer in general. Anyway, still curious to hear what you guys build to do this SRB launch mission Seems to me to need at least a two stage rocket: first to get you up to a good high apo; second to do an orbital burn. After that I guess either more small SRB units, else monopropellant and/or xenon to correct orbit and de-orbit? Strikes me as a nice challenging, though deceptively easy, mission.

The analogy of the 15th century "Age of Discovery" with the current "Dawn of Space Exploration" is superficially appealing. Certainly in many ways, getting on a carrack, galleon or fluyt and heading off a new life in the New World probably did feel about as isolated, and remote as traveling to Mars is likely to feel when people start making that journey. The first stages of each nations efforts to get their piece of the pie were largely state subsidized, but as time went on much of it was private industry. Great fortunes were made, many died, many were lost. It was a costly risky, highly unusual and demanding endeavor. There were known and expected resources that each Crown expected to be able to take advantage of and this was the primary motivation. As time went on, some of these expected resources did not pan out, but many others did. By the mid 1600s, vast quantities of myriad resources were transiting back from the New World to Europe and had a massive impact on European life. Some historians have actually argued that many developments associated with the Rennaissance might have been much more muted if not for the influx of wealth and exotic foods, products, and people form the New World. Many of these features are arguably analogous with the latent "Age of Space Exploration" that we are in the first century of. But there are a few critical differneces that have to be kept in mind, lest the analogy be applied irrational. First and most notably is that it is impossible to live in space without either regular resupplying or advanced technology and plenty of starting building materials. This means that the actual number of people 'moving' to live and work out there for any appreciable period is going to be quite slow. More later I'm actually falling asleep at the keyboard

I have played a good bit of Tekkit Lite solo and a little bit in a small group of friends on a non-persistent server, and these guys are primarily an ArmaII clan. I was under the impression that servers not infested with griefers and hackers were a rare commodity. Would love to hook up with a group looking for another person to join them and help to kill mobs and build cool stuff on a persistent server!

The stock maneuver nodes are okay for very starters. But when you get to the point of wanting to do precision stuff, they are very lacking. First of all, the are imprecise simply because of the size of the graphics it seems. Secondly, they are difficult and tedious to adjust to the exact values one wants. The fact that you must drag the directional circle you want, then let go and consult the effect it had on the apsides, then go back and adjust, then let go and look . . . repeat ad in finitum . . . this is excellent for newcomers to rocketry because the delicacy of the thing affords a good basis for understanding the basics of orbital mechanics. But once you got the basics, it becomes little more than tedium. Moreover, when you are trying to set a very precise orbit (geosynchronous or rendezvous) this oversensitivity in the controls, combined with the imprecision combines to make achieving precise orbits a veritable nightmare. Lastly, these matters are made even worse by the fact that, for whatever reasons, once one has a nearly circular orbit (and particularly when one gets close to 2868.75 km orbit of Kerbin) the apsides, the prograde the retrograde, and the maneuver vector markers all have a tendency to wobble and bounce on the navball. Infuriatingly, the apsides will even flop from one side of the orbit to the other, particularly if you use time warp as you approach your maneuver node. It is an amazing game, absolutely hands down the best simulator for realistic space flight of which I am aware. But there is plenty of room for improvement in the maneuver node system, and let us hope that the Devs get a chance to play with MJ and see what it has to show them. On the other hand, MJ I find to be very precise, but not easy to use. I'm sure I'll eventually figure it all out, but I will certainly be forced to consult manuals and tutorials and probably to ask questions I'm sure. This contrasts pretty dramatically with how easy it is to get going with the stock system. I do not think that simply "sticking MJ" or for that matter any given component from MJ into the stock game would be advisable, either from a user experience standpoint or from a look-and-feel standpoint. MJ is an amazing mod and I personally like its design, though I have yet to puzzle it through. However, it is a very different look and feel from the vanilla game, and it is also extremely noob-unfriendly.

Even if the damn periapsis and apoapsis did not flutter back and forth to opposite sides of the orbit, attaining a perfect geosynchronous orbit by strictly manual control would be a bit of a pain. I have yet to get MJ to work in my favor; so many buttons and settings and I'm just sort of figuring it all out. Flight Computer I've been doing better with. I still don't get it to turn and orient on its Maneuver vector like it did in JDP's video, but I just manually turn it into place before clicking Maneuver. Apart from the occasional keystroke error it seems to be working okay. Oh one thing though: it doesn't seem to like running a maneuver node at 1000x speed. I recently had one that I failed to slow down before it executed the maneuver node. The preceding orbit was nearly circular and in the 2650km ballpark, this was to be an apoapsis burn to extend out the periapsis to about 2865 in preparation for the last couple of circularization burns. When it was all said and done I had some weird ~1700 by 4400km ellipse! How that happened simply because of 1000x time warp I cannot fathom.

I predict that within the next 15 years, China will be either 'winning' or paralyzed by something akin to a civil war. I also predicted the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war at least 3 years ago; not the dates nor specifics, but that such things were inevitable in these nations and would happen within the next 10 to 15 years.

So glad to see you guys are getting a lot of 'action!' You are to be applauded and thanked for having kept this plugin going, and indeed improved on it relative to its original form quite substantially! It really shows the potential of career mode, and how a campaign format can enhance the games inherent experience of learning rocket science. I do hope that the Devs will be able to give your mod a whirl as they move toward the next update and their first iteration of career mode as I suspect they'd get a lot of good ideas from it.

Tis true it doesn't reflect the specifics of the original challenge. But it does reflect the 'spirit' of it: create a KSP replica of a space station that has already been 'created.' Why don't we say this: creating KSP replicas of real life space stations is worth just as much as creating replica's of film-based ones, but we'll limit each participant to submission of only one space station that is not actually on wiki list.

Actually though . . . I'm learning to roll with the punches ala Genesis, Galileo and that Mars one that crashed into the atmosphere . . . This little diametrical burn error has actually proven to be rather useful. I salvaged that craft into a weird elliptical orbit. When the apo is over KSC it offers excellent comms for a wide angle of the planet! Seems to be helping me to get my first KEO into place. Now if I can just master the art of deciphering the semi-major axis timing thing.

One more question I had about the metallic hydrogen. Based on reading about Galileo and his Jupiter probe, it seems pretty clear that inside of Jupiter is quite hot. Indeed, it seems that the probe died at about 97 km because of extreme heat, and that wasn't even quite through the atmosphere. As such, the deeper one goes into Jupiter you are going to get enormous pressure and enormous heat. Given what was said above about it staying metastable only under relatively low heat, does this mean that there is a pretty good chance the stuff doesn't actually exist at all?

So its going to form only where there is hydrogen under enormous pressure (aka Jupiter type places = really big gravity wells); it is likely to only stay in metallic form within a relatively narrow temperature range (I'm guessing colder not hotter); and it is not actually very massive per unit volume. Sounds to me like, even if it does exists, humans are not likely to ever get their hands on very much of it. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but . . . Seems like the only way any of this stuff is likely to ever get liberated from its environment of formation is in major cataclysms: supernova, galaxies crashing through one another, planets colliding (I just don't see a comet or asteroid, even a typical planet colliding with a Jupiter sort of body having much chance of splashing anything out of the big bodies gravity, eh?). The big events that might have 'seeded' some of the cosmos with this stuff long ago so that it could be dispersed to places like our solar system would seem to have involved lots of heat, which would tend to phase it back to non-metallic state (liquid if not even gas right?). And then you have the low density thing. Any amount of this stuff that ever did get blown free from its mother gas giant would tend to segregate pretty high in the centrifugal column (is that a concept or did I just make that up?), thus continuing to expose it to dispersion and 'boil-off?' Seems like there is just about as much reason to assume it is never going to be acquirable as there is to hope that it might be and fantasize about what we could do with it.

Yeah, nothing worse than expending 250m/s burning retrograde when you meant to burn prograde.

Very cool! Looking forward to getting enough Comsats into lowish orbit that I can really deal with geosync comsats and then upwards from there!

Thanks Starwaster I'll try to make good use of your suggestions.

Looks good! I'd give that a 2 myself (probably same on Xeldraks). If you guys can post screen shots that are better oriented to compare with a real-life image, then maybe they deserve "3s"

Great idea!

I hate to say this, and I don't know if switching to RT2 would fix things for me . . but I'm just not getting the hang of this Flight Computer, which is making getting a geosynch commsat very problematic. The main problem I'm having that doesn't boil down to just simple errors in keystrokes is that 1. When I queue a delayed burn, it burns. But by the time my ship has orbited around to the position for the burn, the actual position of the blue node vector marker seems to have moved relative to where it was when I set up the burn node. 2. As a result, I keep causing my orbits to get more elliptical and with apoapsis much bigger than my target for my penultimate burn (~2860ish km). The other thing that is weird, it seems like the ship does NOT orient onto the blue vector marker on its own accord the way it does in JDP's video (perhaps this was a feature added in RT2?). Instead it just burns in whatever direction it is facing. Add to this that, the exact order in which you: setup a node; turn to align on the blue marker; stop all motion, turn off SAS (having it on when you open the Flight Computer seems to cause the delayed burn to not occur, at least sometimes), open the Flight Computer (I find it must be in this order else the Flight Computer won't work right), type in your burn Dv and delay, hit Maneuver; is rather challenging to execute and any deviation from this order seems to cause the delayed maneuver to fail. Should I install RT2? Is that likely to fix this stuff? Is it possible Mechjeb 2.09 is messing things up? (I understand that the stock command pod overwrites from MJ 2.09 are not using the 0.21.1 KSP SAS updates correctly, e.g., when I have SAS on my ship does not turn at all, so maybe that is the problem?)

The largest number of stars per galaxy that Distant Worlds does (last time I played it) was 1400. You do notice some performance issues at that size, and obviously it isn't a replica of the Milky Way. Didn't know about these dwarf galaxies so I guess it isn't 'unrealistic. But in any event, it is a very satisfying and interesting gaming experience that succeeds in conveying the vast distances. FTL is of course part of the game, though I don't remember the details. ADDIT: Another idea that is worth considering by modders and devs: Initially do not worry about modeling the entire galaxy. Instead just model the immediate neighborhood of Kerbol. Assuming that the way interstellar travel is implemented is 'realistic,' then for the first phases of a campaigns interstellar exploration and expansion, it will only be the immediate neighborhood of Kerbol that will matter anyway. This map of the immediate neighborhood of Sol could serve as a good model in that it only contains the 55 stars within 14 light years.

Very nice! I guess you are our first contestant! (note I'm still not saying I'm 'running' this thing and would prefer is someone else would step up to 'lead / judge' it simply because I am likely to become rather inactive on the KSP site in a week or less). Could you resubmit your photo pivoted to match the wiki photo else resubmit with an actual photo of Mir that you think is good for comparing your KSP version to the real thing?

I'm still quite remedial in my KSP mastery so this particularly idea I had would be way beyond my current abilities. However, I wanted to pass along the idea and see if it seemed to have any promise. The discussion about the metallic hydrogen prompted me to revisit the 1981 "Sci Fi Western" filmOutland. I had remembered them mining from Jupiter, but this was incorrect. It depicts a Federal Marshall operating on a "ConAm" mining facility on Io. And BTW, the whole film is available on Youtube too. I had remembered it being cheesy, low-budget and crappy. However, having watched the first 20 minutes, I think my memory was too harsh. Really not such a bad film. Anyway, I noticed on the wiki page for it, that there is this list at the bottom, List of films featuring space stations . I have seen some but not all of these films. So I don't know if all of them would be doable or not. Certainly a lot of them might require parts mods, etc. But there ya go! Recreate any or all of the space stations shown in that list! The list includes 41 stations (though some seem to be repeated?). I'm guessing that some of them might just not be feasible, so lets say "maximum" points is 60. Submissions should be posted in a thread with enough screen caps of the KSP created station and the film space station to allow judging of how well the KSP creation recreates the film version. Submissions will be scored on a 3 point scale: 3 Superlative; 2 Excellent; 1 Good. First participant to attain 60 points will be considered "leader" to win. If no other participant has achieved at least 61 points within say 76 hours of the lead candidates submission, then the lead candidate by default becomes the winner of the challenge. If someone does pass the leader before 76 hours elapses then they in turn become the "leader" and the counter resets to 76 hours. This repeats until either someone has won. Repeated submissions of the same space station are permissible if score is below 3 on any given submission and it will be rejudged, however, points are not cumulative. If you resubmit, your points from the previous submission are reset to zero. I probably won't active on this site long enough to act as judge and maybe it would be better to have a more 'democratic' system of judging. I don't know how these things really work. Anyway, there is an idea for ya! If somebody else wants to take this on as their project, go for it! Just an idea I had and I'm happy for anyone to do as they please with it

I'd say this is a good thing for the young men and boys who will be the Mars astronauts in years to come. I'm sure a good 15% will be quite content to share their space capsule with a fellow Ken, and another good 25 or 30% will be able to swing it in a pinch as well. But that other ~55+% are gonna be delighted to be sharing those long months of deep space journey with Barbie.

Thanks! I'm using a bit less than half the number of plugins than you. Loadtimes are a bit slow but no other performance issues I've noticed. Will have to check out some of these I've never heard of

Haven't done any of this stuff yet, but I want to. Still fiddling with getting a RemoteTech basic starter network started up. Could someone post: (a) a brief description of what an orbital fuel depot consists of; ( the procedure to get it setup; © the procedure to stock it up with fuel; (d) how it is then used to refuel stuff. I of course have some ideas on that stuff, but it would be edifying to hear how some of you guys who know more about it do it. ADDIT: and one more clarification: the parts that use Kethane fuel are not compatible with the parts that use stock "liquid fuel + oxidizer"?