tobyb121

New version now available, just awaiting approval on Curse and then it should be downloadable. Adds a new part: the ChemCam (as seen on the Mars Curiosity Rover: http://www.msl-chemcam.com/) HDDs can now data collected in EVA Made some changes to the folder structure (please read the notice on the original post if upgrading from a previous version)

Personally I find it easiest to get into an orbit around Kerbin of ~200-300 km then target the planet and turn the ship towards it (be sure to click the telescope and select control from here!!) use fine control (Caps lock on) and with SAS on and 1x zoom get the target planet in the centre of the view window. At this stage I wait for the position to settle and then turn OFF SAS. For some ships it might be necessary to time warp on and off quickly to kill and residual movement but you can see across the solar system without doing this. Then slowly zoom in adjusting the camera using I,J,K,L (with RCS off!!!) to control the camera servos directly. Doing this you should be able to take a stable picture of any of the planets without too much difficulty, though killing off the movement of the ship is most important. There will always be a little jittering and movement as the angles when you're looking at distant planets are so small (the field of view for max zoom is about 0.001 degrees).

Glad you like it, I've got a few more ideas for things I'd like to do before more telescopes, one in particular that should be releasing soon Would you be alright with me using this on my description page for the mod (credited to you of course)? I tried making my own video of it but it didn't come out very well , I'm not very good at video editing.

This seems quite strange, could you try deleting the TarsierSpaceTech folder and re-installing the mod, if you didn't clean install the mod there is a ksp bug that could cause the problem, though I doubt it. If that doesn't work could you PM me your ksp log file and I'll have a look into it. I'm afraid I can't really test this as I don't use Linux. Could you also PM me your log file, not sure how much I'll be able to help though without a system to test on.

Yes, that's right, the latest versions of visual enhancements do not need any special modifications so the standard build works for everything

New update is now up with camera wobble removed when looking at distant planets (many thanks to SolarSailor for identifying the real problem). I've also added a new telescope model based on the TESS telescope (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transiting_Exoplanet_Survey_Satellite) I'm going to work on EVA data collection from the HDDs and also want to add distant galaxies into the telescope

Good News...the shaking was indeed caused by the joints!!! I'm working on fixing it now, and should have a new version up soon

This error is when you are trying to debug a class library project. A class library is a dll file which includes classes that can be used by another program. For example when you reference UnityEngine.dll in your KSP add-on I allows you to access lots of the unity classes like Vector3 and GameObject. A dll has no entry point, meaning the code doesn't create a program, it is just available to be used by one. In order to test your dll you need to build it (under Build>Build Solution) find the output dll (under Project Directory/bin/Debug) and copy this into your KSP directory for your mod, then run KSP. You can use batch files to do all of this and change your project settings in VS to run the batch file when you press the debug button.

This is quite interesting, I'll have a look into it. I could move the camera so that it is attached to the base part rather than the armature, so it would hopefully lose the wobble.

I believe the problem with shaking is due to how ksp renders the distant planets, it creates a separate smaller version on the solar system that has been scaled down and draws it using a separate camera. You basically have one camera for the nearest planet and the ship etc. Then a second camera rendering a scaled down version of the other planets. I believe the shaking problems are effectively caused by rounding errors between these two "worlds" and so I don't really see a fix for it unfortunately

What MeCripp suggested was correct, but it won't take data from the same part that it is stored in, if you really want this functionality why not just add the small hard drive and bump the capacity up. The drive being overfilled was a small bug that will be fixed for the next release.

That's it exactly @acc, the idea of the data transmission losing science is to try and keep some balance in the game. Most of the squad parts have similar penalties for transmitting data. It's not a realism thing it's a game thing, making it more of a challenge. If you want to turn off data loss feel free to change the part.cfg, just change xmitDataScalar = 0.5 to 1

The command pods couldn't store science in the previous KSP version, so the hard drives were needed then. In this version they are certainly less useful, but they have the advantage that you don't need to EVA your kerbal, saving time, and can also be used for un-manned missions No, the ScienceDefs for the telescope is stored in the TarsierSpaceTech folder, the main ScienceDefs file is left untouched and both get loaded in when the game starts.

The most recent version has fine control if you use the servos, turn off RCS and then use i,j,k,l, this should allow you to have much better control of the telescope at high zoom

Sorry about that, it should have gone into a separate folder but I made a small mistake when preparing the zip. I've re-uploaded with the correct folder structure

Yeah, that's the stuff

Thanks for the feedback, the thing with the sun is a bit odd, I specifically had to add the sun to the list of celestial bodies that get checked, as I was sure it wasn't in that list, but it now seems to be there. At least it should be an easy fix

Just added some much requested new features, servos have been added to the telescope to give fine control of the camera!!

Sounds cool, would be nice to see a screen shot

I have not used a science experiment module for the telescope so it doesn't have all the features of other experiments. I have no idea off the top of my head how to "give" Kerbals science, but I'll have a look and if I work anything out I'll add it to a future version. The hard drives are going to change quite significantly in their next version because I'm going to make it so a window is shown with all the science data available and you can choose what to transfer in. It's always best to start from a low zoom, and centre your target marker as best you can then slowly increase the zoom adjusting at each stage. At high zoom when you make adjustments wait for the ship to settle after each small change, you will find the planet you are looking at "jumps" off the screen, but it will likely drift back after a few seconds.

In EVA I wouldn't have thought that it should be possible to collect data, I haven't looked at EVA at all to be honest, did the GUI still show up etc. when on EVA?? I wouldn't have thought it makes much sense to control in EVA, as you can't control the ship and so there is no way to look at stuff. In terms of image stabilisation...This is the most requested feature, and I am not ignoring it, however the main issue is that when you are zooming in to high levels the angles you are talking about become tiny (10,000ths of a degree) so the constant adjustments that SAS makes, and even floating point errors cause things to look like they are jumping around. It becomes very complex to try and design a system that has this level of fine control within the constraints and mechanics of the game, for the moment all I can recommend is that you enable fine control (caps-lock) and make sure you set the telescope to "Control from Here" (the picture on the original post was reasonably stable and was taken using this technique). For more help you can try Mech-Jeb, and using Smart-ASS which will control your ship and look at the planet automatically. Finally the sky texture If the sky texture doesn't scale with zooming, or scales differently things look very weird, and it just looks wrong. That said I'm looking into creating a procedural star field, so that even at high zoom you will have distant stars , rather than smeared blobs. It would also bring the possibility of new science, as distant constellations and galaxies could be added to the list of things to see. This would be quite a big task though, so please don't expect anything soon. Glad to hear you are enjoying the mod though I'm hopefully going to add a new part, and some updates soon

It's one per experiment subject which is a mixture of the experiment type and location. The experiment system has experiment ids, which identify the device that did the experiment, and experiment situations/results, e.g. KerbinFlyingLow or MunSrfLanded; these are joined to create an experiment subject, e.g. eva report from the surface of the Mun. The science hard drives will store one up to 1 piece of data per experiment subject. Hope this explains things better

At the moment the telescope only stores one result per planet, the existing one is just overwritten, it does this because otherwise you could just keep clicking the button loads and generate loads of science. The science HDDs currently only store 1 piece of data per subject. It doesn't overwrite old data and it can store new data for that subject if you transmit or delete what's on the drive. I will probably remove this limitation in a future release. The reason it rotates is because the control point is on the front of the arm of the telescope so when you close it animates shut so your reference transform changes position and SAS tries to keep that point looking in the same direction. If you turn off SAS or take control from your command pod/probe core then this won't happen.

You could always give the Hard Drives a go and bring all that science home at full value

I think, from memory, that objects get unloaded at 2 km, you should be able to see anything within this range but any further and you are right they will be unloaded (plus trying to focus on them from any further will be tricky).