Galane

Naming it Zumwalt is appropriate because Zumwalt spent most of his time afloat serving on or commanding destroyers.

Yes, there's really a US Navy Captain named James Kirk. He's to be the first captain of the USS Zumwalt. http://www.ktvb.com/news/regional/230135811.html I wonder what his middle name is. Probably not Tiberius but if he parents were real Trekkies they would have made sure it began with T.

If you angle the view around to where a planet or moon is too close, the Kethane grid vanishes.

Here's a much simpler craft to poke around with quantum struts. http://pastebin.com/Dmwd3wDR Definitely all stock parts except for the four Quantum Struts, assembled specifically to demonstrate the effect. Pop it into orbit with hyper edit. Try to rotate it in any direction. It won't move. Hit 1 to turn off the Quantum Struts. The Cubic Octagonal Struts they're mounted on go flying off at high speed and now the vehicle can rotate - with the Quantum Struts hovering next to the vehicle. Hit 1 to turn the Quantum struts back on and it once again cannot rotate in any direction. And now for the really weird part. The problem isn't with the Quantum Struts, it's with the little Cubic Octagonal Struts and some interaction between them, KJR 1.3 and the Quantum Struts if they're attached to the little girders and turned on. The first version of this test craft had the Quantum Struts between the two adapters between the fuselage sections, with none of the little girders. No problems at all rotating the vehicle. How I found this was I replaced the robot arm on my Kethane drill rover with one made mostly of DROMOMAN parts and I wanted to brace it (so the docking port could be used in Kerbin orbit to refuel) without leaving any strut ends on it. Quantum Struts to the rescue! But to get them to reach over the arm to the port they had to be a little higher so I stuck on a couple of the Cubic Octagonal Strut girders, stuck the QStruts on them and gave it an orbit and landing test. I'll try some other part as a QStrut mount on the test craft and see if something like the Small Hardpoint shows the same effect. Soooooo, the problems with Surefoot's rocket might not be with the Quantum Struts but with the parts the struts are attached to, but only when Quantum Struts are attached to those parts and turned on. Alan Aerospace Recycling and Packaging's legal team is advising applying for a process patent for this "Quantum Locking Effect". Used intentionally it might have some useful purpose.

Damned Robotics is dead. Long live Infernal Robotics!

Version 1.3 is what I had in with that rocket. Could be a reaction wheel from KSPX on it somewhere. The only KSPX parts I have installed are these folders large_shortMonoTank large_tripleFuelTank large_sasModule mini_asas mini_sas

I have Editor Extensions installed. Same thing or is editor tools a different but similar mod?

Looks like we'll have to wait for Squad to add a sub-0 node size, or for some modder to figure out a hack. Meanwhile, what'd be real useful is if you could get all the IR parts' nodes to snap in place. I'm putting together a multi joint arm on top of a heavy Kethane drill and the docking washers or rotatrons don't self-center on there like fuel tanks, decouplers etc. do.

This is strong enough to use on Mun to hook up a docking port? I'm making a Kethane mining rover with two of the heavy drills, to match up with a modified version of my 32K Kethane lander. Without the heavy drills on the lander it'll be more efficient, not having to make some fuel for rendezvous after it claws its way back to orbit. Already have an arm on the rover made with girders and IR parts but it's rather clunky.

Now I have one that KJR won't let off the pad. http://pastebin.com/HEgu0jgF All stock except for the long tanks and monster SRBs from ReStock http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/0-21-restock-parts/ This looks interesting. Seems there's something built into KSP but not working/enabled yet for stiffening things. Couple of links in this post. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/37680-DROMOMAN-modular-arm-parts-for-Damned-Infernal-Robotics?p=478780&viewfull=1#post478780

The probe cores have smaller nodes, don't they?

When having MechJeb do maneuvers, click OFF on Smart A.S.S. and it goes to AUTO so MechJeb handles the rotations etc as needed.

Looks a lot like an A.S.S. module. http://hackaday.com/2013/11/01/deconstructing-apollo-flight-hardware/

IR does some wobbly weirdness with some parts. I managed to make a stack of 8 of the telescoping pistons from largest to almost the smallest. Stick that into the side of a tank and put a probe body on top. http://pastebin.com/3y4i6XGw Launch it and the assembly jiggles around on the pad. Use one of the ReStock ThunderMax tanks and the thing will shake rather violently - with or without KJR installed. I tried it with only a 3 segment stack of the pistons and either it didn't shake or it was moving too little to see. Extend the pistons and the shaking slows down. Disabling torque on the probe core makes no change.

Ships don't always burn retrograde to circularize. If the launch has exceeded the target orbit altitude, then a retro burn is needed to bring the altitude down, followed by a prograde burn to hit the horizontal velocity required for the target orbital altitude. If MechJeb is burning to a higher orbit when you're wanting to land, it's most likely you have Control from here set to a part upside down with respect to the engines you are using to do the deorbit burn. It's especially easy to do with docked craft. Deactivate the engines you're not going to use for deorbit then set control from here on a part of the other ship, the one with the engines you will be using. It's easy to check if it's upside down. In SASS click OBT and retrograde. If the craft points its nose instead of its engines in the direction it is orbiting, you've selected an upside down part or a part on the wrong docked craft. Before the automatic adjusting ascent path, you had to always ensure the turn end altitude was no higher than the target orbit or Bad Things would happen (like rising to the target orbit height then nosing over and heading for the ground or spinning around and thrusting in various directions, or wildly gimbaling the engines during coast phase and breaking up the ship). You still have to check the altitude setting, especially when you switch from launching from airless bodies to ones with atmosphere. Launching to a 15KM orbit on Kerbin, not a good thing... I just let the ascent path take care of itself and build to fly it. I also found that those early auto adjust versions didn't work in KSP .21, even with the auto adjust turned off, it'd still do crazy things - so buh-bye went .21, hello .22.

When you add Debug = True to the kethane settings.cfg make sure it also has ShowOverlay = True in it. The debug version of the kethane window is also a bit buggy where it often won't display correctly. I got it to work once so I poked it to reset Kerbin until I got a good deposit all around KSC. Then I quit and deleted the debug line in the settings.cfg To do Laythe you'll have to be in control of a ship orbiting Laythe then go to the map view. If the debug window won't show right, you'll have to restart the game and hopefully it'll decide to work. If not, keep restarting. I had to restart it quite a few times until it worked. No problems with the normal Kethane window.

Interesting rocket. Where do you fly it to? (Aside from "to outer space" of course.)

JATO or Jet Assisted Take Off. Really should be RATO because they're small rockets, not jet engines. The YMC-130H used them for takeoff and landing, but the Credible Sport mission was scrubbed when during a test the crew lit the reverse rockets ahead of the vertical ones, slamming the plane into the ground and breaking it instead of braking it. The test runs up until that final oops must have been a real thrill ride. An 80 ton plane, with rockets pointing in many directions, capable of landing in then taking off from a soccer stadium. The P39 looks good. Also looks like it flies pretty good too. Northrup P-61 Black Widow?

I've had no problems with my 32,000 unit Kethane mining lander that uses 8 of the full size telescoping pistons, A and B segments stacked, to spread the heavy landing legs out so it can handle moderate slopes. Could someone pastebin a subassembly stack of all 9 segments of the telescoping pistons? Just need the one arrangement, can pull it out and take ones off either or both ends as needed. Would save a bunch of time assembling them each time when needed.

The idea is to have an autopilot able to run any staging sequence that works when run manually. There's certain setups that work fine when run manually that MechJeb currently cannot run properly. Why would you not want to see it improved? I'd like to see it able to handle more, apparently you're fine with how it currently is.

Simulating the Bell P39 Airacobra could be a bit difficult. No way to in effect have the engine behind the pilot with a driveshaft to the prop?

In asparagus or parallel staging, all the engines to be run asparagus style are in the same stage, the decouplers that let them go in sequence are in different stages above the engines. When the fuel associated with each of those stages is gone, MechJeb releases them - if one has ordered the decoupler staging correctly. If the decoupler stage order doesn't match the order in which the fuel tanks drain or solid boosters burn out, MechJeb won't release the empties. It operates strictly in stage order. I've put together some complicated asparagus staged rockets, both with stock and with mod parts. What I did was put different engines in two separate stages but MechJeb activates the top one before the middle one is finished burning. The way it works, to get it to not fire the separatron stage immediately after the second solid rocket is fired, I'd either have to set autostage to stop at 1, which defeats the purpose of having a fully automated flight, or I'd have to add weight and complexity by putting radial decouplers between the separatrons and the solid rocket they're attached to - and move those decouplers up a stage so it doesn't simultaneously light and cast them loose. It should be able to operate the engines strictly in stage order in any case, same as if it's staged manually with the player waiting for each stage to burn out. MechJeb should be able to have such 'patience' to operate the staging the same way.

Of course that works *but* it defeats the purpose of placing the engines in different stages that are supposed to be activated one after the other *in series*, waiting for all the fuel in each stage to be consumed *before* activating the next stage.

It's still burning engines in different stages at the same time, which should not be allowed to happen. The engines have been placed in different stages for the purpose of the higher stage being activated only *after* the fuel runs out in the lower stage. Doing something that should not happen is a bug in the software.

Yes, they bombed the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq. Iraq was building it with help from France. Osirak was a portmanteau of Osiris and Irak (as Iraqis tend to spell Iraq). IIRC Osiris was the name the French gave to the reactor design. Iraq also benefited from American 1940's nuclear technology. As part of a periodic review of "obsolete" technology to be declassified, some genius threw a magnetic uranium separation system (one of three different processes* used to refine the uranium for the first atom bomb) on the declassify pile. Saddam Hussein's spies said "Hey, thanks!" and nuclear engineers in Iraq improved the efficiency of the process to the point where if some guy in the post 1992 Iraq inspection teams hadn't decided to buck protocol and actually do his job - catching the trucks rolling out the back of a building while the rest of the team was allowing themselves to be BSed at the front (the gotcha event is on video somewhere), Iraq would've had enough enriched uranium for a few "Little Boy" style crude a-bombs in a few more years or perhaps even one or two "Fat Man" style. It never pays to underestimate the ingenuity of people who want to blow you up with nuclear explosives. *Three processes were used because the scientists didn't know if any of them would make enough. Turned out some calculations were a bit off and it took about 1/4 the enriched uranium they thought it should to go kaboom. "Oh, hey. We have some left over. How about we design better bombs to use it?".