Galane

MechJeb works OK with Stock Drag Fix, which mainly eliminates the mass of fuel tank contents being added into drag calculations. (Other features TBD.) No problems on ascent though rockets that would hit terminal velocity don't with SDF yet accelerate faster and reach orbit with more fuel left. On landing (tested on Kerbin and Eve) on bodies with an atmosphere, MechJeb doesn't make a long enough high deorbit burn. It goes long but then aimes the nose retrograde and down to do a long correction burn. From there it handles the rest of the descent normally - though you get less deceleration from drag. May have to revise parachute arrangements (especially with deadly reentry) and find somewhere to put more fuel if your lander is built to hit the dirt on fumes with stock aerodynamics. If you are staging things off the top end of your rockets you will absolutely need moar boosters to kick them up and away due to the higher speeds the rockets will hit by the time the empty tanks have to drop. I resorted to surface attaching a pair of slimmed down stretchy SRBs to each largest Kerbodyne tank, with the thrust kicked up to around 1700 with a 4 second burn time. Just a *bit* overkill because they'll shoot ahead well over 1,000 meters. If you're tired of the "soup" but don't want to go to FAR or even NEAR, try SDF http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/84978-0-24-x-Stock-Drag-Fix It won't break things.

I had to do some refitting on a heavy booster that stages kerbodyne tanks off the tops of asparagus stacks. The reduced drag allows so much more speed in the lower atmo that not even several 200% tweakscaled separatrons could pull the empty tanks up and away. So I surface attached two small diameter Stretchy SRBs to each plus a pair of off center scaled up separatrons to ensure they don't just fly straight ahead. Set the thrust of the SRBs wayyy up so the burn time is only 4 seconds. That really gets them out of the way and keeps the parts count down. One odd thing though. The booster never hits terminal velocity, not even while the large stock SRBs are burning, so MechJeb never throttles back. Yet I was able to get to a 180KM orbit with my heavy Eve lander on top with nearly a full ThunderMaximus 288 tank instead or a 100KM or lower orbit with only about 1/2 a tank left. SDF's effect on landing on Kerbin and Eve with MechJeb. It 'goes long' on the initial high deorbit burn then flips the ship to aim the nose retrograde and down to do a long correction burn to get the predicted landing to the specified target. It appears to be running the stock drag values to do the deorbit burn yet is able to adapt for getting it wrong. Might want to pack more fuel for landing on bodies with atmosphere. (Note to self, test unmanned Eve lander with 50% fuel load for descent to see if it will need more.)

So the Angular Drag numbers in the CFG files don't actually do anything? Drag for all parts is calculated the same no matter which way they're ripping through the atmo? This looks like it's shaping up to be a very useful mod! Making nosecones beneficial instead of detrimental to performance and properly drag shielding parts inside fairings or stacked beneath other parts will be very nice. On my heavy launchers I've taken to strapping on enough SRBs to where MechJeb will throttle back the liquid fueled engines to save fuel during terminal velocity ascent. But still it takes tons of strapped on asparagus to deliver even half a tank full (of pretty much any tank) of fuel to orbit with the stock drag model. Edit: I'll have to try my failed Duna Kethane mining landers to see if this will make them efficient enough to be useful for bringing Kethane to orbit from there.

I was having a similar problem assembling my new for .24.2 Eve ship. (Due to parts changes borking the old one and to take advantage of the new parts + my updates to ReStock.) I brought up all four 'sidesaddle' boosters in a single launch to dock then decouple individually to swing around and dock side to side. Unless I used SASS TGT+ to at least get them started towards the ports being aligned, DAP kept trying to take the boosters around to the opposite side of the ship from the target port and one time it wanted to back up about 500 meters despite the safe distance override being set to 5 meters. On the other hand it flew the two Kethane scanner satellites over quickly, directly and perfectly. Only had to decouple the port node, set control and target ports then engage DAP with distance override set to 5 and force roll on.

A plugin that would be very useful when assembling interplanetary craft in orbit is a "stage manager" to automatically add/renumber stages of two craft so their stages don't overlap. For example, I have a lander with 10 or so stages (used to drop various parts during ascent from Eve) to dock nose to nose with the transfer vehicle (itself assembled from 7 docked pieces and its messed up staging from those dockings already re-arranged) that has 17 combined stages. So when they're docked everything overlaps and it's a major pain in the posterior to poke around and drag everything into the right order - and make sure not to disturb the setup for the docked lander or the lander for Gilly and Rover for Eve that were launched already on the transfer vehicle core. Some way to just add stages "above" the docking port and fill them with the setup from the docking ship would be soooo useful, especially if it also had the ability to swap the staging above/below the split in cases where it puts the wrong ship at the bottom of the staging stack.

A bowling pin setup for KSP. Get it here. http://pastebin.com/vL2Fnwqa All stock parts. Max the throttle then hit the spacebar to get the pinsetter out of the way. How to play? Build something, preferably unguided, to launch at the pins and knock them down. Use standard bowling scoring rules. The launchpad ramp should make it more challenging, while the runway would be more like a traditional bowling alley. Bowling by g_alan_e, on Flickr

Make sure you also get the unofficial .88.1 update for Kethane or the converters won't work.

Why doesn't KSP just use degrees for rotation?

Seems to be an issue with lower orbit starts on landing guidance. I tried to do a land somewhere abort from a 64KM Kerbin orbit (rather than ride out the slow decay to crashing) and LG would just instantly time out. Starting from just above the top of atmo it'll time out some of the time, sometimes hitting abort then land at target again will set it right, especially when it's making all kinds of completely wrong "corrections". But some times it'll time out several times before the craft gets to the lower atmo. Starting landings well above atmo top seems to be the best way to avoid LG timeouts as it currently is.

I tried several iterations using girders but they'd always break off. At the time, MechJeb was having a few difficulties with Eve landings such as not starting the suicide burn *quite* soon enough and a few builds wouldn't lower the gear until just before impact.

I've done plenty of testing around Eve and Gilly using hyperedit and have flown the return ship from Eve to Kerbin. With the changes in .24.x and some mods I'm having to do some redesign before I do the full mission "for real". It took a rather large number of attempts to come up with an Eve lander that could return two Kerbals inna can back to orbit. I may have to do more work on it to be able to get the crew down on ladders instead of using a KAS winch.

Huh. I've been using blizzy's toolbar for quite a while and never saw any of this.

My Eve lander and return vehicle is in here http://partsbyemc.com/pub/Eve-pack.zip Consider this pack interesting but mostly made obsolete by recent changes in KSP. The small lander on top of the drilling rover has been put out of balance by part mass changes in .24.x so it's now unusable. (Doesn't have any mono tanks anyway so docking it would have been a pain.) The manned lander is based on a design I found on the old Spaceport. That one was much more spread out, included a couple of rovers and other things, and could only just barely bring one Kerbal in a chair back to orbit. My much revised and compacted design uses six gas bags to lift to "launch" altitude (around 24K) so it can be landed at any ground level. No reason to not share my design since it's based on someone else's design. I think I included operating instructions in the Zip for the lander. Should have a list of the mods needed. If not then... Quantum Struts, Kethane+ unofficial 0.88.1 update, the old Stretchy Tanks/SRB (works fine with .24.2), KAS+ unofficial .24.2 compatibility update, ReStock Reloaded, Hooligan Labs airship parts, quite possibly KSPX and... not sure what else it might require for the whole set.

When entering the Eve/Gilly system I want to drop off a lander into an Eve orbit from which it can most easily reach Gilly. It won't have the fuel to get out there from low Eve orbit so I'll need to drop it out far enough then lower the main ship's orbit down so I can drop a lander and rover onto Eve. Later I'll take the main ship and the recovered lander can back out to Gilly to refuel with the lander left out there for the trip back to Kerbin. Is there a way to alter the warp altitude limit for Gilly? What's the minimum altitude around Gilly that can be made without hitting anything, in any inclination?

Orbit Editor, Simple, Select Body. Enter the desired altitude, it's in meters and only meters. Hit Set. Select orbit to edit is for moving things already in orbit, which are not the current focus. If focus is set to a planet, Select Body will move the planet with focus to orbit the one you select.

You need the unofficial Taniwha's Kethane 0.8.8.1 fix.

Why does it cut the throttle when coming close to collision when using SASS TGT+? I was attempting to hit a target with my new "Long Lance" kinetic kill vehicle that uses Vernors for steering instead of RCS and at the last instant before potential impact it'd cut throttle to zero and *whiff* a miss. So I manually put the throttle back to full as it turned around and another miss because it cut the throttle. I don't want it to do that with the throttle. After deorbiting the KKV I turned to its orbital insertion/maneuvering stage about 1.6KM away and it managed to strike the target but without anything hard to hit with it just exploded without damaging the target.

Why not just build the lightest/simplest rocket you can to get a small scanner to orbit the Mun?

MechJeb is still doing the hula dance. Log http://www./download/17guy7jhe6sv8mu/output_log.rar I deleted the log, ran KSP then loaded and launched the lander. Then I used hyperedit to move it to a 20KM Mun orbit. Next I landed with Landing Guidance. The problem came (as usual) with Ascent Guidance. It did a perfect launch and circularization, then instead of disengaging it twisted around to aim the engines at Mun, set throttle just above off and sat there gently wobbling around while slowly gaining altitude.

I get an aaa_toolbar incompatible with .24.2 alert with the latest release.

The Una, Ray and Cirrus ones will fold back up when you reduce lift to zero. The Cirrus ones are rather bulky in either state.

Would it be possible to edit craft and save files to swap old Stretchy Tanks for PP ones?

Finally, some scientists decided to be scientists instead of just "debunking" things that don't appear to obey known laws of physics. http://www.gizmag.com/cannae-reactionless-drive-space-propulsion/33210/ Now if they'll apply the same actually scientific investigation method to the Biefeld-Brown effect instead of the "test" they did in a vacuum chamber with a crude model made unlike what any other B-B experimenter had made, then declared that since their design didn't work, the effect could only be an ionic wind device that would only work with an atmosphere to blow around. Nevermind that many hobbyist/experimenters have shown these devices lifting when fully enclosed in plastic bags or secured to balance scales with cardboard etc to block any effect from air movement. Any air pushed down by ionic effect hits the inside of the bag or the blocking plate and the thrust cancels out. Same effect as a truck full of flying birds has exactly the same downward force on the tires as when the birds are all sitting on the floor. Some experimenters have calculated the volume and speed of the air blown down, and thus how much mass that airflow could support - yet the B-B device can lift itself plus a payload that exceeds that mass. There's something to the B-B effect other than ion wind and it's high time there's genuine scientific research into what it is instead of just declaring it to be nothing and wasting time building deliberately non-functional "experiments" to "prove" their conclusions.* The hallmark of a genuine scientists when faced with something he or she hasn't a clue how it does what it does is to say "I wonder how it does that!", not "It cannot do that and I'm going to prove it can't.". *Like on Mythbusters with their "experiment" electrolyzing water into hydrogen and oxygen to run an engine. Of course such a small device could not produce enough hydrogen to run a big block V8 engine, but they went "the extra mile" to ensure it wouldn't work by completely blocking the carburetor inlet so that the only fuel and oxidizer supply was the small hose from the electrolyzer. An internal combustion engine does not work solely on the fuel supplied and the oxygen in the air. The nitrogen and other gasses (that make up 70+% of air) act as a "working fluid" that is heated and expanded by the fuel rapidly combining with the oxygen. If you tried to run an engine on the fuel it needs and just the amount of oxygen in air it either would not run or would run very poorly. What they should have done on Mythbusters is just put the hose from the device into the open carb, like they later did with a bigger hose from a tank of hydrogen (on which the engine ran a bit). They also should have tried different sizes of engines and explained the stoichiometric ratios of hydrogen and other fuels with both air and pure oxygen, and volumetric efficiency and just how much total volume of air goes through an engine. But investigating to see if it *could* work was not their agenda with that "experiment", it was to "prove" that it could not work at all in any circumstance which is why they completely blocked the carb inlet, and insulted the intelligence of everyone in their audience who knows how internal combustion engines work.

That will completely @#%& up every converting craft I have in use. May as well start a new game.

Arron Bates built a twin prop RC stunt plane, but it's where he put the second one that makes the difference. He cut away the fuselage and fin behind the wing, replaced it with a pair of carbon fiber tubes then mounted an electric helicopter tail rotor sideways between the tubes and hung the rudder off the back. Check out the stunt flying videos. http://hackaday.com/2014/07/30/aerodynamics-super-honey-badger-dont-give-a/