Galane

Try adding the hinges in the SPH. Your rocket will load in laying down but symmetry is done differently. One thing to note in the VAB is symmetry of IR parts is done differently with 2 and 3 or more. If you set it to 2 and add the VTOL rotatron (which needs a major de-uglying and otherwise total rework plus additional sizes) to the side of a rocket, they'll rotate opposite so that whatever is attached will turn to the same side of the rocket. Great if you want to build a vertically launched vehicle which will rotate horizontally and hover. But if you set symmetry to 3 or more, they'll all turn the same direction.

Balloons! You could build a large dirigible atop the reactor using the Hooligan Labs and firespitter mods then lift off and fly to where you want the reactor. Set down, decouple then send the airship off to crash somewhere.

Try right clicking a RGU, manned pod, docking port or other part with command and/or control then clicking Control from here. It's a bug in KSP .23 where at times no part will be set as control.

"Lack's Stock Extension stuff" Sounds nifty. Where do I download? Search turned up this thread and another one that's 109 pages. Would be nice if the search would find the *post* instead of only the thread.

I'm having the same problem. Two ships with clampotron jr's on their noses and the AP wants to put the center of the docking ship's port on the edge of the port it's docking to.

You could make a .cfg to create an altered version of a rotatron or docking washer to increase its diameter and decrease its thickness to make a broader pivot for variable sweep wings like the F-14 and F-111.

Thrusting too early is better than too late - unless the ship only has enough fuel for one landing burn.

50mm BK 5 cannon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BK_5_cannon

The last docking I did, (don't recall which 18x build) it got down to a short distance then slowed to an extremely slow forward speed, constantly firing RCS back and forth but still making very slow forward progress. I finally shut the docking AP off and manually activated the jets to shove it home the last half meter or so due to the mono being close to depleted. (Two FL-R1 tanks.) What would be very nice if it can be adjusted is increasing the range at which the docking ports can be targeted. With high part count ships and lag it gets to be a bit of a nail biter waiting for the range to close to where when switching ships the docking port right click menus will stay open on the other ship. It leaves a rather short time for the docking AP to get moved into alignment. If I can see the docking port on the other ship, it should be possible to target it, from at least 200 meters. I do like the change in KSP .23 where the right click menus stay open when rotating the camera around to get the opposing ship into view from both ships. That makes docking a much easier process, with the open menus acting as 'flags' to locate the other ship. Docking on the dark side, without lights? Much easier in .23! (Still want a sunrise/sunset, midday/midnight option for rendezvous and launch/landing functions.)

Which ton? English, metric, short, long?

Remove KJR and try the launch. If it falls apart then KJR was working. Add moar struts. The small hardpoints make excellent standoffs for the struts to angle them so they'll work better across joints. Put a ring of 6 or 8 hardpoints around the top of one component and around the bottom of the one above. Then connect struts across at angles to make a truss style structure. Seems to work better than just running them straight up and down.

What would be real neat is to be able to move all the parts with KAS so a ship could be completely reconfigured in flight. Need to improve the TWR after using tons of fuel? Hop out and remove some of the empty fuel tanks.

Cool challenge, now amp it up. Land the tank on the VAB from orbit.

Is there a starting altitude from which it will deorbit and just go and settle on the landing trajectory without wildly flipping around and firing the engines every which way?

While painting a nubbly masonry wall in my shop, I had the thought that it'd be a neat texture for a rocket fuel tank or something. So I snapped some pics with my Olympus D-550 Zoom. http://www.flickr.com/photos/27748767@N08/ Could use some manipulation to even out the lighting, and perhaps some cropping. I took them on a cloudless day, straight on and level as possible, can take some more before the milling machine gets moved in front of it. Why orange? Because the wall was originally grey and had crud and various splashes and sprays of other paint on it and because I just happened to have this can of orange Sherwin Williams latex paint I couldn't even give away last October on freecycle. (Who wouldn't have a need for orange paint for Halloween?)

Sometimes a server out there in the WWW can have a too aggressive caching scheme and will get a corrupted version of a file stuck in cache. Also your browser can get a corrupt download stuck in its cache. For Windows, download CCleaner and use it to blow out your local caches. The browsers' own empty/delete cache can miss some files.

I last did a docking with build 181. It moved smoothly into alignment on the port axis then approached. When it got down to 1 meter it slowed down to an extreme crawl, jetting a little forward then immediately counter-firing. It was still *very slowly* getting closer but was wasting a lot of mono. I tried turning it off and giving it a burst toward the port but after turning it back on it'd slow right back down to a speed that'd make watching paint dry seem like a candidate for the X-Games. Finally I turned off the autopilot and manually pushed it in with RCS.

Here's my HL assisted Eve lander. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/67575-Take-a-Chance-on-Eve-A-lander-that-gets-you-down-and-back-up!

My system is a Athlon 64 Phenom II 555 dual core, 1.83 Ghz. 6 gig DDR2 RAM (only 3.25 usable with 32bit XP). Video is nVidia 9800 GT with 1 gig. Will be upgrading to a Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 soon. Hopefully the other motherboard I have is good so I can move the AM3 CPU to it and unlock to quad core. Also waiting on DDR3 RAM. Current board is an AM2+ with a chipset just one revision too old to unlock extra cores. Quantum struts cause no problems unless mounted on or aimed at tiny, low mass parts like the octagonal struts or cubic octagonal struts, and only when turned on. Aim one quantum strut at one cubic octagonal strut and it makes a low power use way to rigidly lock the rotation of the ship, add to an action group for easy toggling of rotation lock. The strut guns have another issue, when installed across a pair of docking ports assembled in VAB or SPH, they won't disconnect with a node decouple. They pull the ports back together to dock. Undock and then the strut guns will turn off. The 3 in 1 and 2 in 1 docking ports usually have to be commanded to undock 3 or 2 times when docked to another 3 in 1 or 2 in 1 port. I'd like to know how to modify the cfg files so they have one undock button to release all at once. (Not my custom CFGs, found them on the forum.) The RockoOKTOClampo is my own custom part cfg, made because I wanted a way to be able to dock to the front of a transfer vehicle after decoupling from it. After adding the clampotron to the Rockomax decoupler, I figured it would also be good to add bare bones command and control functions so I added those parts from the OKTO2. I've been using that almost exclusively in place of the standard decoupler because it adds no extra weight or parts. Makes it easy to send up small deorbitizers to dock with and bring down boosters left in orbit. What I suspect was the reason the 3 in 1 docking port came off the top of the can in the first test was a lack of breaking force and breaking torque in the cfg file. The module manager patch will fix that, plus the additional quantum struts. In that test, aside from that one break at the end of the burn it was very solid. Why rovers? Because I couldn't get anything put together in one lander that could make it down to Eve and get back to orbit. Putting mining, conversion and the manned capsule all in one would have required a much larger and heavier lander than the two rovers and one lander. To do it all in one would start with a craft as big as the manned lander, then pile on the mining and converting equipment, then add even more engines and parachutes... As it is, all that will make it back to Eve orbit is the can and minimal propulsion to rendezvous and dock with the transfer craft. The rest will stay on Eve forever. This way I can drop one rover, move it to a flat-ish area and mark it, then move away a safe distance to bring down the other rover, move it then bring down the lander and move the rovers back for refueling. Using just landers might miss the Kethane or land too far from each other or they could hit one another, depending on how accurate MechJeb decides to be. Less chance of having to repeat parts of the mission when only the manned lander's landing spot is critical. It can handle a bit of slope, but if the hatch side is downhill, reboarding the Kerbal can be a problem. In one test I had to move fuel around, lock the downhill legs' suspension, raise some uphill legs and even dump some fuel to get the winch cable to swing close enough so the ladder could be grabbed. Whew! Kerbal saved! But ohcrap, in a "real" mission that wouldn't work because he has to be on the ground to manage the fueling connections and fully fueled it wouldn't have been possible to tilt the lander enough. That's when I though of adding the droppable OKTO2's for beacons. So anyway, if you have a computer with the power to handle a large ship, give this a try. I'd love to see a mission report.

More updates and modifications. The Kethane converting rover is replaced with one that has added quantum struts to connect to the rover assembly above and the manned lander below. I also moved the docking ports with OKTO2 landing beacons to the underside of the girder frames so no fiddling with the tank and engine jettison staging will be needed. That will also remove the need to have that extra weight that could possibly damage the wheels when raising the landing legs. The other big change is the two sidesaddle boosters that had mono tanks on their lower half have been replaced with ones that have two large tanks on top, plus a 4K battery and a large reaction wheel. All else remains the same. Anonfiles has quit accepting zip, rar and other archives for upload, so here's the updated archive at a different place. http://www.fileswap.com/dl/6MYdcS0ud5/ Included in the archive are two Module Manager cfg files, one to add MechJeb to all parts with command and another that adds breaking force and breaking torque to all parts that don't have such entries, which includes some of the original Squad parts.

Yes, but will still only scan one hex at a time and only when you are flying that ship.

Save this in a .cfg file where Module Manager can find it. It adds breaking force and breaking torque to parts which don't have it in their .cfg files. @PART[*]:HAS[~breakingForce[]] { breakingForce = 200 } @PART[*]:HAS[~breakingTorque[]] { breakingTorque = 200 }

Up-thread a bit I posted a craft specifically designed to spectacularly fail at deorbiting every time. The purpose being so it could be used for debugging because whatever it's doing to fail will always show up nice and clear, unlike crafts that have intermittent problems.

Starwaster, that fixed it. Doesn't fall apart with KJR 2.0 when used with that module manager cfg.