Andrew Hansen

So, terrain scatter has been around for dozens of updates (I think), and it still says "WIP." I suspect that's probably because it doesn't have collision. So this suggestion is simple (and yes, I know it's been suggested before, but the last thread was about a year old): Allow stuff to crash into terrain scatter. The first thing people are going to say is, "The performance hit would be terrible!" But I think the terrain scatter only has to have collision in a 300 meter radius around the rocket (the same radius that full physics extends to for inactive rockets). I think that the benefit would be huge for adding that. Suddenly driving in a rover would become way more fun and exciting by having to avoid rocks and/or trees. Landing would become more challenging, as you'd have to find a place without ground scatter beneath you. And another thing that would have to change is that ground scatter would need to become permanent, so that once it was generated, it would stay in the same place (otherwise people's save's could get ruined by having ground scatter spawn within a craft). To avoid taking up too much memory, there could be a criteria for having terrain scatter be permanent (obviously memorizing the position of terrain scatter on every inch of every planet would be insane). That criteria would be if the scatter is 300 meters or less to a ship that is landed on the terrain. If that ship leaves the ground, the scatter no longer has to be permanent. But maybe I've missed some important reason why ground scatter would be ridiculously hard or impossible to implement. If so, please speak up. Anyway, the way I look at it now is a little bit of coding for a huge amount of added fun.

That moment when you land on Tylo and get tons of science, fly back up into orbit to dock with the return vessel, and then decouple the lander without transferring the science to the return vessel. You fly back to Kerbin and wonder why you didn't get any science on this mission.... True story.

From B9 of course, under the control category.

I agree with you. The physics warp code hasn't been touched for a long time in KSP - maybe now it needs an upgrade. Of course, maybe it's a lot harder to deal with than I thought. I also thought I'd bring up the BetterTimeWarp mod into this discussion. It allows you to have as much physics warp as you could ever want - a billion times normal speed if you so desire. If you use it on 10,000x speed and you're burning an ion-powered probe, logic tells me that the ship should disintegrate from the increased forces (Just think about how much more force is applied in 4x warp than 3x warp). And yet, that's not what happens. So... I wonder if that says anything (I'm just a layperson, so I won't/can't jump to any technical conclusions).

Nice devnotes, but more importantly, nice Squadcast. This upcoming cinematic sounds interesting because the word "Universe" was mentioned. This has my head swimming with ideas! Looking forward to the detailed development update later on in the week.

When I install this, it says that RealSolarSystem is out of date with 0.24.2. Is this OK?

I've noticed that the HL cockpit is nearly twice as heavy as the Mk5 cockpit, yet it holds the same number of Kerbals. Since there's already an IVA for it, it would probably be a lot of work to change it and allow for more Kerbals to occupy it, but perhaps it could have the option of holding some fuel and have a lower dry mass.

If you pack them like sardines, but I think one Kerbal is plenty enough. And 0.625m pods are just completely unrealistic for fitting Kerbals into (unless they expand outwards, sort of like the Mk1 Lander Can). But still, I wouldn't want to go into a 0.625m pod if I were a Kerbal.

Wow... that's pretty stunning, I never realized that before. It's clear that Squad models aren't the most carefully designed at all. While a 1.25m cockpit would be awesome, the stock one isn't too bad. I'm just really happy that my favorite mod is getting all these awesome new features. Oh, and I'm sure the invalid parts on the example crafts is just because I had an older version. I'm updating now. Thank you, I'll be sure to take a look into that! EDIT: Ahh, so they don't have IVAs - that's why there can be 8 new cockpits (a huge number). *raises eyebrows* Nonetheless, it looks interesting.

I've downloaded the pre-release and I'm loving it! I've been using NEAR as well for the first time (I used FAR several months ago though). I know I shouldn't be creating all kinds of crafts in the pre-release, knowing anything could change and render my work useless - but I did anyway. The only thing I wish is that there was a 1.25-meter cockpit to replace the horribly ugly stock one (at least, it's ugly in comparison to B9 parts). You see, I love making VTOL SSTOs, but the VA1 VTOL engines are only good for small crafts. I tried using the Mk2 cockpit, but couldn't get two VA1 VTOL engines to work on it. Thus, my craft is 100% B9 parts besides the cockpit - oh, and the vertical stabilizer. I know I'm going to have tons of fun making massively gigantic SSTOs out of HX parts. By the way, I tried flying my VTOL through the HX4 parts, but couldn't quite do it - they're smaller than I thought (but seriously, don't make them any bigger)! Anyway, here's a picture of my spaceplane. I'm very proud of this SSTO, which I call the Bullet, because it is ridiculously balanced - the most balanced craft I've ever made, with 0.00 meters shift from wet COM to dry COM (I used RCS Build Aid to balance it). If you use TAC Fuel Balancer, you can rest assured there will be absolutely no shifting of the COM during flight. It has lights, RTGs, air brakes, and is super maneuverable with its COL relatively close to the COM. The only thing it doesn't have is a ladder, but you can get your Kerbal in and out of the cockpit by lowering the front landing gear. Download the plane by clicking here. Feel free to modify this and put it in as an example craft if you want. Speaking of example crafts, why do some of them say that they have "locked or invalid parts"? I did a clean B9 install and put all the folders in (I only installed RCS Build Aid and the other mods after first running B9 by itself). I'm using KSP 0.24.2, 32 bit. I LOVE B9 AEROSPACE! Thank you so much to all of its developers - Reputation for all of you.

You just made my day. I'm reposting what you said in the hopes it will make more people's days.

Looks nice! Though I have one request: Don't make the helipad much larger than the one on the VAB - it's more fun when they're equally challenging to land on. But having a circular helipad means that we can now practice both our rectangular and circular landing skills (whatever that means)!

With B9 Aerospace, there's no such thing as bad looks. Every part looks absolutely stunning. Even that giant lump of... huge rocket pieces shown previously looked pretty high-tech and beautiful.

Take your time, it'll be well worth it and awesome in the end.

So B9 Aerospace is being updated?! Woooohoo!!!! From the wording in the OP, it also sounds very soon.... I can just imagine the space stations I'll be able to build with those massive HX parts! I'm excited about the tweakables too - that'll clear up a ton of clutter. I may be wrong, but I'm almost suspecting that even with all the extra parts, B9 parts will now take up less space in the editors than the previous version!

So is it possible for Eve to orbit Gilly? Also, with the wording in the original post, maybe a planet that is 2x the size of Eve could orbit a moon that is 2x smaller than Gilly. Is that correct? Nonetheless, this sounds pretty interesting.

This looks very interesting! More people need to see this. I've downloaded and will try it out.

I posted a video about a VTOL SSTO that looks like a dragonfly, and I took it to the Mun! I was inspired by Bagel Rabbit (forum user Upsilon Aerospace) to create this.

VTOL SSTO Looks Like a Dragonfly

I don't know if it's possible to keep 4.5 km/s to orbit while having a realistic atmosphere. The other option would be to increase the density of Kerbin's atmosphere, but I'm not sure that's a good idea either. On the other hand, FAR designs seem to require a lot more speed to take off than non-FAR designs, so maybe increasing Kerbin's atmospheric density would keep the extra 1.5 km/s to orbit. Anyway, I think working on the aerodynamics would go very well together with the spaceplane-parts overhaul they're doing. I'm hyped!

Try out the BetterTimeWarp mod, allowing you to speed up physical time to millions of times normal speed! That means a 2-hour ion burn can be a 2-pico-second burn if you want it to be (warning: universe has a 99% chance of disintegrating with such high timewarp values). But seriously! The BetterTimeWarp mod is one of my favorite mods.

I think that once the first cargo bays are implemented into KSP (from this implemented mod), more will soon follow. That is, unless, Hugo already made one for the Mk3 family (unfortunately, though, they can't fit 2.5-meter parts). I'm not really familiar with the mod, as I haven't used it much, but I think that if you're pointing close to prograde and then you see the ghost retrograde marker and try to push it around, it won't affect it in the same way as if it really were at the edge of the screen. Anyhow, I'd survive either way - whether it was arrows or marker ghosts. The toolbar? I don't see how that was messed up.... The mod's icon shows up in the toolbar, you click on it, and the mod's GUI shows up. Seems to work nicely to me.

AWESOME DEVNOTES! The best ones I've read in a long time! I'm so excited! Wee! Yay! Yahoo! OK, I'd better calm down.... I actually like arrows better because then I'm not confused about where the markers are. For example, if I'm docking to a ship, sometimes I'll just see retrograde on the edge of the navball and will push it onto the target-retrograde marker. I wouldn't like a ghost version of retrograde to be confusing me.

Congratulations Wooks! Watch out for an epilogue he's going to be making too.

Wow! This is amazing! Hopefully we'll see extra contract types like these make their way into the game in the future. Until then... *downloads*