Der Kosmos

Has anybody had any luck making a rover out of KAS peaceable parts? I tried making a rover out of 4 small wheels, two seats, small solar panels, and 4 small batteries. It fit into 6 containers, one of which formed the chassis of the rover. I was able to build this with some effort on Kerban, but I was unable to get it properly balanced on the Mun, each time I would add a wheel It would either flip up into the air (vaccum?) and take several minutes to land several dozen meters away, or the new part would simply become embedded in the ground. I wasn't able to assemble it on the Mun because one of the wheels went missing, but on Kerban it was really topheavy. It would be nice if KAS had a dedicated rover chassis part, and smaller, less awkward wheels. I'm really stuck on the idea of being able to fit a rover into a cargo container and assemble it on the Mun in EVA.

I apologize if this has already been suggested but. I noticed that in Career mode that while larger tanks are unlocked latter in the game, there is very little difference between one large tank and several smaller ones. A single larger tank might cause less center of mass issues, but a bunch of smaller tanks will dissipate heat better. However in real life, a single larger tank will have a better dry mass to total fuel capacity ratio than a cluster of small ones. (The small tanks will also have a higher boil-off rate with cryogenic fuels than a large tank but that isn't modeled in game so it's a non issue.) Might it be a good idea to make smaller tanks have a higher dry mass in proportion to the larger ones as a balance fix? This would give the player an actual reason to want to unlock bigger tanks instead of just focusing there research on power and experiments. We already have an example of this sort of thing with the RCS tanks, the inline ones are more efficient than the radial ones.

They make my parallel staged rockets 100% safer, before I used them the boosters would sometimes smack into the center stage on separation, I had to rotate the rocket to make sure they would fall off sideways, now I have positive separation without having to do anything, just by putting one on the tip of each stage. It's kind of annoying to make sure the staging is correct though.

Usually the capsule's own engines are enough for a launch abort for me.

The heaviest parts. Also the insulation cabling, and structure are included here. It's the just the furniture and appliances that need to be transported up separately. They do not weigh nearly as much as the actual structure of the house.

You are still underestimating how much of the habitat is just an hollow shell filled with air. Empty fuel tanks are dead weight that cannot be re-used, and there is considerable mass to be saved by re-using them. Sure you still have to send up all the equipment in the habitat, but by re-using the fuel tank, you save having to send up the habitat's structure, which might weigh as much as the equipment it stores depending on various factors.

But why? In theory it should just consist of filling the rigid structure of the tank with two inflatable bladders. One is filled with fuel, and the other is collapsed. As the fuel is drained from the bladder it will collapse, and the second bladder can be filled with air and lived in.

Scot Manley uses mechjeb. That's all I need to know. I will say however that my current mission to Eve WITH mechjeb is fairing worse than another Eve mission I did in an earlier playthrough which made minimal use of mechjeb. It still dosn't play nice with new SAS and is very finicky. And yeah, what the other guy said, I think I'd rather have MechBob (please not bill, his stupidity is max)

In theory you should be able to "fix" broken solar panels by editing the persistence file and changing the line that says stateString = BROKEN I'm not sure what to replace it with though, "EXTENDED" "DEPLOYED"?

I started with stock, then got Mechjeb when I couldn't figure out how to land without smearing my lander across the surface of the mun (I had not figured out you need to be coming straight down) Eventually when career mode came out I learned how to land manually. Now I'm glad I know how to do it and will probably not touch the landing module again in the future because it's finicky and often gives bad results. That said I will at some point go back to Mechjeb for a few things, 1) Rover autopilot: Cruise control is good 2) Spaceplane autopilot: My fingers get tired 3) Ascent guidance: **** launching by hand. I know how to do it, but it's boring and the computer always does it better. I'm sorry I learned how to get into orbit before Mechjeb, and I still do launches without it, but it's probably the least fun part of a mission. 4) Warp helper. Messing around with time acceleration is annoying. 5) Interplanetary transfers: Okay this one I will admit I can't do by hand. It's hard okay! I will however say that right now mechjeb has a few problems. Landing as I said before is kinda iffy, and mechjeb does not play well with the new SAS. Docking Autopilot is also buggy right now unless they made another update recently.

I've found 8km seems to be a good distance. It's high enough to miss mountains but low enough to get a good view of surface features and minimize gravity gains while landing.

Sorry to Necro but, I just hit the side of a mountain between 4 and 5km. It was an equatorial orbit and the mountain was the rim of one of the larger craters I think. I would have cleared it if I had about a hundred or so more meters. The wiki says the highest peek is 7061.1416 m at 82° 31′ 5″ S 152° 19′ 31″ W so 6 or 7km is probably safe for most equatorial orbits with anything higher than 7.5 being safe for polar orbits.

Wouldn't work, winglets have the same amount of lift and drag even if they are clipping inside of another part, so a winglet that was retracted by a robotics mod would have no effect. You'd need to mod in a winglet that retracts on it's own and has reduced lift/drag when retracted.

More interesting surface features on Kerban. Namely procedural cities and forests. With proper use of instancing it should be possible to build large randomly generated cities without too much of a performance hit. Procedural cities could be made a lot more efficiently than building them by hand in Kerbtown.

Jet engines also have high ISP in a vacuum. It's not a glitch because that's how much ISP they would have if they were getting infinate intake air from another source, ISP is measured based on how the fuel (not air) travels through the engine. And rockets are more efficient when there is no air to get in the way of the escaping exhaust. (At least that's how I understand it) You won't ever see the full efficiency of jet engines (because it simultaneously requires them to be both in an atmosphere and not) but remember the two ISP values are not binary but rather a range between two extremes. An engine in an atmosphere will start at sea level and slowly move to vacuum as it gets higher. And jet engines will reach maximum efficiency somewhere between the two depending on how many intakes you have and how fast the aircraft is going.

More science! Particularly a reason to build a space station. A 2m science Sr module that needs crew and power to operate, and creates large amounts of science over a long period of time. You put it in orbit, and leave it there for days or years and it slowly racks up science. This would happen even when the spacecraft is on rails so you could be doing other things while it works. I could see how this would be a problem (getting free science for basically sitting in LEO) but right now there is no real reason to build a KSS which makes me sad. Perhaps this idea might be best for once resources are implemented so the Kerbals have to be resupplied with snacks regularly to keep making science. So the player either has to launch one impractically large rocket, or make at least one resupply mission. Another idea would be a vanilla version of the ISA mapsat. Generating science for making maps (the total science would be based on the total percentage of surface mapped and there would be no extra science for re-mapping the same areas. Like the Science Sr this would work even when the spacecraft is on rails so you could do other things while the mapsat sits in a polar orbit.

A science lab which has to have Kerbals in it to work, and generates lots of science over a long period of time, would be awesome. We need a reason to build space stations and or spacecraft with larger crews. Another idea would be a stock version of the ISA or kethane mappers. Generate science based on how much of the planet they have mapped. Would be really nice if they could make progress while the ship was on rails so you could leave a satellite in orbit and do other things while it maps. NEED MORE SCIENCE!

I wish they were thinner, but it's not THAT bad.

Has anybody made such a part available? If it's so simple shouldn't it be in by default?

Here's an idea. Make a tiny one piece rover that folds up into a single KSPR pack.

Hmm, I tried again, this time keeping an eye on the prevent flameout module. For some reason it worked now. I don't know if the prevent flameout module was on before, but I don't think it was because I don't remember ever activating it or seeing it active. And anyways my intakes weren't losing any air anyways, the pitching wasn't that extreme.

So nobody has any idea what could be causing the F119 engines to throttle themselves down when i pitch the aircraft up? It happens when I add them to the Aries 4a but I can't seem to replicate it on the on the Haldeman. At first I thought it was mechjeb but none of the modules seemed to be active.

When your engines aren't working properly, that's as far as you can go with them. Consider adding more intakes, going faster, or lowering your altitude. All of which increase airflow.

The best option is to turn off the engines and switch to rockets BEFORE you flameout.

I'm upgrading the Stock Aries 4a with the F119 engines, but whenever I pitch up, the throttle shuts off by itself, only to come back like nothing happened once I pitch back down. What causes this? It dosn't seem to be present in the example craft that uses the same engines. I really wanted to try an SSTO with THRUST VECTORING :c