Traches

I had a similar issue one time - it was caused by using tweakscale on aerodynamic surfaces (in my case fins on a rocket).

That all makes a lot of sense! Thanks for the hard work. Would it make sense to add some cold-gas RCS thrusters to the early tech tree?

Alright, if you want to be technical: Pressure fed, hypergolic engines with bladder tanks. Not all engines and thrusters require ullage, but as far as I can tell all of the engines in this config do. Quoting the RF OP: I don't think it makes sense for a hypergolic probe engine not much bigger than an RCS thruster to require ullage and only have one or two ignitions.

Looking forward to pressure fed engines! Not having them makes early career pretty difficult; tough to do ullage without RCS. Question: Is it realistic for hypergolic engines to have a limited number of ignitions? My understanding is that the fuels react on contact, and no ignitor system is necessary.

Unless you have some modded main rotor that simulates a swashplate, an accurate helo will be impossible in KSP. If you want to fake it, you could mod yourself a ridiculously strong reaction wheel to accomplish a similar purpose, though it won't really behave correctly.

You can try putting small fins (if you have tweakscale, basic fins at 50% seem about right) on top of the command pod so it ends up looking sorta like an old school nuclear bomb. They have to be pretty small so they don't destabilize your rocket when you launch (or you could cover them with a fairing)

Have you trimmed as much mass as possible? Carry just barely enough fuel to complete the course, make sure you've dumped your monopropellant from the cockpit, mess with wing strength sliders and get them as low as possible without breaking, and remove everything that's not absolutely necessary. Airbrakes could work; you need to set them not to deflect very far. Try to place them in such a way that they don't cause a pitching motion when they deploy. You only gave us about 40 shots of its butt, maybe one or two from the side & front?

Posting my SSTO spacetruck. If you can fit it into 2 mk3 cargo holds, it can take it to orbit. Important mods used are tweakscale, procedural parts (for the nose), and adjustable landing gear. Album: http://imgur.com/a/oyga9

Hah, yeah that's true, but it's true for any amount of content they might add. The idea would be that each experiment (or group of experiments) unlocks some relevant part of the article, so if something piques your curiosity you can design another mission and spend the time to study it more closely.

If I'm not mistaken, isn't the science library just a collection of your science reports? I was thinking of something more complete and unified than that, with more than a sentence or two (many of which are frequently repeated and/or meaningless).

This may be brushing too close to "Improvements to science/Integration with discovery mechanic" on the WNTS list, and if it does I apologize, but my idea deals more with what science does for you rather than how you go get it. I've always thought that while big, the Kerbol system is pretty empty and boring. The journey to each world is fun, but once you get there it's just another box checked and another bucketful of science. There's just not much to see, do, and learn from each place. I'd like to see an extension to the current science reports: in the R&D complex there could be an in-game encyclopedia that fills in as you explore various worlds. It would basically read like wikipedia, but funnier and with a kerbal spin on things added. This would help to get over the "Been there done that" feeling you get after playing for awhile. Right now there's not all that much difference between Moho and Eeloo except the route you take to get there (which, don't get me wrong, makes them both a lot of fun. A couple times.) Usually by the time you're capable of reaching either of them, you've unlocked most of the tech tree anyway, science points don't mean a whole lot, and you have more funds than you could ever reasonably spend. If there's a story to be found on every world that can't be found anywhere else, it would give me a reason to explore more thoroughly and make the Kerbol system feel much fuller and more interesting than it currently does. It would also add some realism and believability to the science system; you'll still have the gameplay required "analyze soil sample, learn to build a new rocket engine" weirdness, but you'd also get some actual and relevant information that could conceivably be gained from such a soil sample. It wouldn't have to be limited just to that world's article either; for example, information gained from minmus could show up in the Kerbin article about things like tides or hypotheses about their formation. Information learned from dres could enlighten kerbal scientists about how planets form and the overall origins of the Kerbol system (can you tell I've been reading about the Dawn mission?). Idunno, just a thought. Beyond the time required to write the lore (which would be a lot, though it could draw heavily from real world wiki pages), it doesn't seem like it would be all that hard to implement. Just a UI for reading and some checks on which experiements have been performed. Zero impact on gameplay balance, too.

Triggertech's transfer window planner works fine with RSS, but I don't know about Linux.

Surely the service module had an offset CoM as well to compensate?

So, your position is that stock, 32 bit KSP is bug free? You're really going to make that argument?

The latest RemoteTech update (1.6.0) seems pretty big, is everything gravy with RO or will it break things? Anyway, thanks to felger and the RO team for an awesome set of mods.

If I have to force-quit a game, that usually means I'm playing a terrible console port. That said, I've played terrible console ports that were better optimized than KSP, so I suppose I'm setting the bar a little high.

Precise Sunrise, sunset, noon, and midnight alarms for landed craft would be useful in a few different scenarios. (Interplanetary launches in RO being the one that comes to mind).

Of course there's a limit to the accuracy of orbit predictions, but don't tell me there's no possible fix for jittering orbits. You could filter/average results, slow down or limit recalculation for certain distances or velocity changes, or even allow the user to pause recalculation for a little while while planning a maneuver. Someone smarter than me could come up with all sorts of clever solutions to stop them oscillating all over the place; squad just hasn't taken the time to do it. It's not whining, and RSS would like to have a word with you. Just because it's possible to figure out doesn't make it good UI design. It would not be difficult to indicate more clearly to the user how the rocket's going to end up on the launchpad. My own pet peeves: - Maneuver nodes in general. They ignore clicks, sometimes you can't even create one when and where you'd like, it's really easy to accidentally scroll on an indicator (and then there's no undo/reset optoin), half the time you accidentally delete them and the other half you can't select them to delete them, there's no clear indication of what the different components of the burn are, attempting to drag a node forward or back in time is a laughable nightmare, and fine tuning a maneuver is very fiddly. I don't know how people play without precisenode. -Close approaches not showing in places that make sense, especially when 2 orbits are similar but not identical. I want to be able to see where the target will be when I cross its orbit, not 3/4 of the way around because that happens to be the next closest approach by straight line. -The bug that causes my orbit line to mostly disappear when intersecting a different SOI in conics mode 0 (which is the only one that's actually useful). It's been present for every version I've played (since .21) and it usually hits when fine tuning a close approach. -When using landing legs, I have to click the gear button twice because they start out of sync. (Yes, I know it's because of spaceplanes.) -Crew state (manned/unmanned) doesn't save when building ships (may have been fixed in .90, I haven't messed with it). -Only tangentially related-- the game's aerodynamics being so laughably bad that people go around calling something a "gravity turn" when it's really just a regular turn. -Curse, and Squad's use of it. -Physicsless parts that have no business being so. Edit: Oh yeah! Also the very first menu you see when you open the game. Why does it exist? Another thing is that you have to click through several menus, a loading screen, and a couple animations to quit out of the game. We should be able to do it from the pause menu.

PTN, I think you're actually making it more complicated by trying to avoid installing the textures. Just use CKAN, find realism overhaul in the list, and it should take care of all the dependencies for you. You may also want to install hyperedit, which is a cheat menu that helps immensely with the type of testing you're talking about doing. (It lets you do things like teleport ships from the launchpad to an orbit, bypassing the launch).

Heh, as part of my troubleshooting I uninstalled KJR while leaving the rest of RO installed and tried to launch my Saturn V approximation. THAT was something to see-- who makes a rocket game with floppy rockets? Think about that game design decision for a second-- struts are massless and dragless so there is no gameplay related reason not to use as many as you want, and anything heavy will require a lot of them, but the physics engine crumbles under more than a couple hundred parts. Their bad game design compounds the pain from their poorly optimized code. From here it seems like they doesn't do much to help the modders who are mostly trying to fix their broken & incomplete game. KSP as a whole is an awesome and wonderfully original concept, but the execution is astoundingly poor. Anyway since it's only really a problem when timewarping rockets with great personalities to their launch windows, the unbreakable joints cheat is a pretty good workaround.

I'm having the "big rockets fall apart on the pad" bug as well. I've simplified it down as far as I can; if it turns out this is a problem with my installation or something I've done wrong then I'm terribly sorry for wasting your time! The only mods I need to cause the bug are KJR and procedural parts. Here's a video demonstrating it: (Here's the craft file from the vid.) Text version: With KJR and procedural parts installed, stack 2 mondohuge tanks (I use 10m diameter and ~15m long, which is around 1000 tons) on top of each other, add some clamps to the bottom, and launch. Usually it holds together through the first physics load (sometimes it doesn't), but if you go into timewarp and back it falls apart. "Unbreakable joints" in the cheat menu predictably prevents this (which I've been using as a workaround for my RO save). Here's the log file for that KSP session (I quit out immediately after I stopped recording), and here's a screenshot of my gamedata folder. Ferram, I've got over a thousand hours in this game and without your mods it wouldn't be a tenth of that. I really appreciate all the work you do, thanks.

You're missing the crucial factor, which is time. 214 Gs for a split second is no problem. 9 Gs for an hour is a problem.

You set it to 10% reward and now you're wondering why it's grindy?

If you're using RO, your thrust will reduce with atmospheric pressure. Are you accounting for that? KER will, if you click the atmospheric button in the VAB.

Ooh! I'm a C-130 FE, so I know a little bit about this one! The most efficient props turn at a constant RPM and control thrust with blade angle (so torque is your primary indication of power.) The inside of the blades move through the air more slowly than the outside, so you'll generally see a twist along the length of the blades (higher AOA inside, lower AOA outside) to balance out thrust. You can't let the tips of the blades go supersonic because (reasons? I'm not sure), which is also why you'll see a scimitar shape to newer props-- it's the same principle as a swept wing. Here's a photo that shows the twist I'm talking about (but not the scimitar shape): Basically, since the inside of the blade is moving more slowly through the air, it needs to take more of a bite out of the air to develop the same thrust as the outside of the blade. I'm not sure how you can accomplish this with pwings; you might have to approximate it with multiple parts? edit: Ooh! I found a better photo!