Kerbart

“At about the same time, the crew heard a loud “bang” and realized that a problem existed in the spacecraft”

I thought the whole point of a pickup truck is that you jack it up three feet, put tractor-trailer style tailpipes on it that belch out large clouds of black smoke. The Tesla seems less pliable to that.

Thank you for pointing that out. Eliminating that, would could cause @StevieC's parts to not inflate though?

Take a look at the included Firespitter folder; that one might need updating. Everything works fine for me (except the centrifuge; that one will crash KSP) in 1.1.3

...and that's exactly what you're doing wrong. Your COM should be as close to the front as possible (which, when going up, is at the top).

Given that Porkjet commented on development issues in this thread fairly recently (late April), and that he's had very little time to work on it since (with the 1.1 release) I am going to assume he can spend more time on it now. As the new parts are clearly a different design than the old ones I don't think there's harm in using the old pack, until the new one arrives (ie the new parts are really new and shouldn't break existing craft, you simply keep the two packs side by side)

As mentioned by others, it sounds like you're over-engineering things a bit. I did my first Mun mission with the .18 demo version; to get a Kerbal on the Mun and back you really don't need more than a handful of FLT-400 and -800 tanks. Actually I do recommend trying that out, as building these bare-bone contraptions can be very educational*. I'm really bad at Mun hopping so I usually work from an Orbital station with the lightest lander I can build. For Minmus I work from a orbital station (I'll need that for refueling anyway) but you can easily cover all biomes in one or two landings and hopping around. * And I'm sure someone will now point out that they went to the Mun and back on nothing more than a pilot command seat, FLT-200, an Ant engine and a Flea booster. After the obligatory Eve landing of course.

EVA Struts. Wonderful little mod, perfectly implemented (you'll need an Engineer to fix them to another part). Eliminates issues with wobbly large stations due to the flexibility introduced by docking ports. There's a lot of mods that I'm fine with that they're mods, but this is one that really should become stock.

Well, nobody got killed. And most rocket launched do fail with an explosion mid-air, either from the catastrophe or by a range self-destruct. This one though, with the rocket going sideways, doing a flip, and going boom on impact, definitely had a very uncanny Kerbal similarity.

Probably because it was; if I recall correctly it was added for Squads asteroid-return mission mod (before it became stock).

I see what you did there!

But they do tend to watch a movie before writing about it.

Reentry should be capsule only .If you add more junk (utility bay, for instance) underneath the capsule you will likely move the center of mass (COM) too far to the rear end, resulting in an aerodynamically unstable configuration. Just a capsule (heatshield, chutes, etc) will stabilize itself into flying in the right direction, even if you reenter “pointy end first” If you reenter with a Mk-1 and a Mk-1 Crew cabin mounted underneath, attach an LV-909 underneath the crew cabin (and then a heat shield, it's always a toss-up for me if the LV-909 can survive re-entry). Yes, it's a waste carrying the damn thing around, but it lowers your COM sufficiently to keep the craft flying heatshield-first during reentry.

Internally a ship is organized as a tree; each part (node) is connected to one—and one only—parent node. The tree structure has many advantages; it allows unlimited (partwise) ship sizes, makes it easy to establish fuel flow and staging and most of all it's a well understood structure in computer science. The downside is that loops in the ship topology are not allowed; this is not something that can easily be fixed. You will have to resort to struts and docking ports to close loops. To manage your expectations: it will likely never happen.

Not particularly mutilating, but I still shutter thinking back about this one particular 1.0 mission where Valentina had done a great job early in career, and after landing just hopped out of the capsule to collect some EVA science... only to turn into this big explosion upon touching the surface. I just sat there for five minutes, staring at my screen...

Well, truth to be told, canonical definition would be more appropriate for space flight Jules Vernes style, right?

You are using the craft reference frame. That's more suitable for docking, as it's measuring everything, including velocity, relative to the craft. With that reference frame, velocity will always be zero. I'm not sure if this would work, but you can try this out: ref_frame = vessel.orbit.body.reference_frame vert_speed = vessel.flight(ref_frame).vertical_speed

Here perhaps!

Only 32 days left until release! (July 31 is still July, after all)

If you don't want to use EVA (I don't think it's that big of a deal but YMMV) you can use the Manifest mod for that.

But you'd still be lifting off using an engine that has an Isp close to zero and burning fuel without getting anything substantial for it. Of course you can choose to light up those engines later on, but that's serially staged again (just not serially mounted).

There's a few caveats but with some luck they'll cancel each other out. It's doubtful your script will see you reaching the "suicide" altitude, rather you'd be passing through it. In other words, kRPC will tell you, "hey, your altitude is now below suicide altitude" and that won't be good. Starting 1/10s too late with your burn is the difference between a soft landing and rapid unplanned disassembly. On the other hand, translating DV into an altitude is tricky as you don't have constant acceleration. Unless there's a simple trick for that I'm unaware (I'd love to learn it!). The safest is to base acceleration on the (higher) mass at the start of the burn, which means you'll accelerate faster than "required" by the DV-based calculations. That should (more than) offset the problem listed above. I would do an automated landing in two stages: 1) Suicide burn to, say, 10m/s and 50m above the surface and 2) controlled landing at 5m/s (using something like a PID controller for your descend speed, it works very well in kRPC) until touchdown. @djungelorm sorry if this is getting too much off topic. Perhaps room for a third kRPC thread with discussing kRPC scripts as subject?

I suspect it's a bit like Apple. It's really good when it works well, which is most of the time. But when it doesnt work, Geniusses will just say "it just works" and declare your problem non-existent, and there's nothing that you can do to fix it. Tags are ugly and clunky, and can be left open. But that can be fixed. The IPB interface deciding to take a day off and saying “nope, not doing it today” cannot be bypassed and that's the frustrating thing. If it was in respect to something arcane and byzantine it would be acceptible, but on a discussion forum the ability to quote is pretty essential. And it's terribly broken.

Thank you, @Mad Rocket Scientist, that was an appreciated constructive contribution. The problem is that it doesn’t always work. Then you end up with one big quote block with a lot of empty lines inside. When that happens, it is usually impossible to get the cursor outside of the quote block as well. At that point I just give up. Right now for instance, I cannot type something above the quote block. WYSIWYG is fantastic when it works, but not when it doesn't. And unlike other system, IPB does not have a “plan B” for when the interface misbehaves. When the forum switched over I was fairly ambivalent and felt that people complaining were just not open to change. Now that we've been on this system for a while I’m not really seeing any blatant advantages (aside from the admittedly magnanimous “it works”) while I’m getting less and less patient with all the little naggles one runs into on a daily basis.

That is the big elephant in the room. In the early days of MP mod development it was said that “time acceleration is not a problem at all, in fact it's the easiest thing to handle” but perhaps that was only meant from a programmatic point of view, and not from a gameplaying point of view. As @Alshain points out (I’d rather not quote him), when you have a true multi-player setup with a dedicated server and client apps, things can get rather interesting. Some options to consider: RemoteTech-style flight computers that you can program in advance to make your vessels do things while you're not around (for intercept/orbit burns) No timewarp at all! Space battles can be exciting enough just around the Kerbin system, one would think. Fixed timewarp: turns multi-player KSP almost into a turn-based game. Say, 4 times per day there will be a "warp event" in which the game warps an x-amount of time forward (executing flight computer orders at the righ moment). A big timer runs on top of the screen, showing when the next warp will be Wormholes, no timewarp: dealing with the need to timewarp by reducing lengthy transfers to other planets. Activating a wormhole (whose position might correspond with the required ejection angle) requires a certain DV amount And I’m sure there’s many more; native multiplayer support will surely be cool and be able to address issues that we currently see with multiplayer Complex community projects like large bases, either in orbit or on the surface. A monster station that takes 30 launches to build and daily refuel missions might not be fun playing solo but can easily be done by a team of five or six fanatics Relay races! MSFS had a yearly relay-race event between the large FS forum websites that was always great fun to watch. I can imagine something similar with an "Around Minmus" race or something along those lines Brutal combat. What else does one need? Again, MSFS: people enjoy simulating reality. Virtual airlines (spacelines?) with assignments to bring cargo and passengers from A to B. There could be a "flight control mod" that hands out man-made missions, arranges traffic control around spaceports, etc. You'd be amazed what the community will come up with it true multiplayer exists (and I'm even not that big of a fan of multiplayer)