Souper

Deciding to challenge myself, I finally took on the task of building an all-solid-fuel-to-orbit (SFTO) launch vehicle in the hope that it would be cheaper due to not using complex liquid-fueled equipment. But after a few tests, it was quickly realized that solid fueled engines sucked in space compared to liquid fuels: not only were tiny liquid fueled stages more controllable, they were much more efficient and thus small as well. To minimize launch costs to orbit, it was decided to begin development of a new launch vehicle that used a fully solid-fueled core stage in conjunction with a highly efficient liquid-fueled upper stage. While developing this, I also made the observation that a very long core stage is aerodynamically stable without the use of fins due to how the vehicle's center of mass shifts upward as fuel is burned, which allowed me to eliminate fins from the design altogether. The product, the Caker-III launch vehicle, had a liftoff acceleration of 2.2g in vacuum (about 2g considering air pressure) and could place a small three-ton payload into low Kerbin orbit. Above: The KOIL Telescope mated to a Caker-III launch vehicle prior to launch. After I had finished the final prototype run, I needed something to use it with. The Caker-III vehicle was built to be cheap and easy to use, so it followed that it would be used to launch an equally cost-effective payload. I thought about a worthwhile payload to launch for a moment before producing the concept: a very low-orbit space and ground imaging telescope. Such a machine could not only provide basic astronomical data but also allow for surface imaging and mapping. for all of the myriad anomalies on Kerbin, this was perfect. I would not need to fly all the way out to them to know what they were anymore. And so, the KOIL (Kerbin Orbital Imaging Laboratory) telescope was built: from the HullcamVDS mod, a PictoZoom telescope was mounted onto the top. The vehicle including fairing and stationkeeping engine weighed almost exactly a ton. The launch (which I regrettably did not think to screenshot) went off without a hitch, and in fact, I had over a thousand m/s of dV with the upper stage due to launching significantly under the launch vehicle's payload capacity. KOIL circularized with just an extra 1.5-2km of clearance over 70km for its orbit dimensions. Above: The KOIL telescope orbiting over Kerbin's primary desert The telescope was then used to image several anomalies. The most significant achievement of the telescope was its imaging of the Dessert Launch Site, during which it was powerful enough to detect spinning wind turbine blades. Above: Dessert Launch Site, as imagined by the KOIL Space Telescope The best part is, of course, that this entire mission costed about 13k funds!

Breaking Ground propellers SUCK. The way they were implemented is super clunky, they don't resist timewarp, etc. They should have just added procedural, breakable propeller engine parts that let you adjust the length, shape and count of the blades in the part menu instead, would've been WAY easier to use for the player while still offering pretty much the same functionality. Also, unmanned should have come before manned in the tech tree, the tech tree needs to be bigger to make it last longer, the contracts system is too restrictive for the core progression contracts, and strategies are useless.

I've recently become addicted to optimizing aerodynamics in KSP, both for aircraft and for launch vehicles. I have found the best way to do this is to combine one set of control surfaces as far from the CoM as possible for maximum leverage while also providing smaller ones closer to the front (canards) to keep the CoL close to the CoM for turnability. By doing this with some fine-tuning I've made rockets that are ridiculously easy to turn AND stable at the same time, eliminating those super annoying cases when my rocket doesn't want to gravity turn! I tried this with one of my own aircraft in combination with SAS and it was a thing of beauty. I could literally spin 180 at Mach 2.5 with zero issues!

Like, which ones do you find the most useful? My favorite would have to be split neatly between all of the procedural fairings. Did you know you don't have to finish / close them off? It's true! You can snap them to the edges of other parts to make custom interstage nodes and adapters, and even leave them open to make neat little shrouds for engine clusters at the bottom of your rockets to both make them look neat and shield them from aerodynamic effects hopefully!

I'm playing with a bunch of aesthetic mods, BDarmory, Strategia and Kiwi Tech Tree. Currently I've landed my first unmanned Mun probes. I must say, the visuals from ReStock and HullcamVDS are amazing. Finally, I can build spaceships that look complex - like they were actually engineered instead of just drawn up in a cartoon!

Hello! A lot of you people probably remember me from the old days of this game and remember both the trouble and the memes that I used to stir up when I was here. When I was active, I'd frequent Forum Games and Science & Spaceflight, the two bits that attracted me the most. Regretfully, life caught up with me. I had effectively vanished by 2016, and just two years later, my dad died and I had to move in with my uncle. Fortunately, that gave me the opportunity to attend high school. This was a life-changing event to say the least, as previous circumstances had meant I was not even attending regular school and did not even possess education between the 3rd and 8th grades. But despite this, I was able to adapt to the knowledge gap. After four years and at the age of 20, I have recently graduated high school, and am now currently preparing to go to college at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. The degree I'm pursuing? Aerospace engineering! I am extremely proud to reveal that this game was almost singlehandedly responsible for my decision to pursue a career in aerospace! Ever since I first picked up the demo, it was intoxicating. I could not stop with it. When I finally convinced my father to buy the whole game for me - over nine years ago, in 2013! I would have been 11 years old! - I had a blast, to say the least. That first impression has stuck with me my whole life, and I believe it to be responsible for my fervent interest in space and engineering as a whole, which really started to manifest in the last three years of high school when I realized what I was destined to become. Thank you for making, supporting, updating, modding and spreading the word about this game! I cannot thank you people enough for what you've done to my life trajectory. Engineering is without a doubt my true calling, and KSP was one of the biggest stepping stones to taking me there. So, now that I have a great deal of free time on my hands, and have even graduated high school at the top of my Computer Science class, I am greatly pleasured to announce that I will be returning to regular forum activity here. In the eve of KSP 2, I realize that this community is on the cusp of changes and growth like it has never seen before since the first game was originally released. There will be a whole new development cycle going for it - and it won't even remotely be done with by the time I'm out of college in 2026. In that time, I expect KSP 2 will become a mainstay of my inter-class activities - a game I will play regularly, one that will keep me sane on my journey through physics and math classes that are sure to be just as hard for me once I enter schooling as the basic algebra courses were when I first entered high school. I am looking forward to many more years of virtual flight and design with you guys! No seriously, you people rock!

I have this issue whenever I approach the cloud layers on any planet. The particles are always pitch black. I installed EVE Redux via CKAN, along with the stock configs for it. I don't know where I can upload my KSP log file. If you could provide a place to do so, that would be awesome. Thanks.

How might I go about easter-egging the power settings?

I got an awesome new gaming laptop to play KSP with, but it has poor battery life. So, I went and bought a new Maxoak 50000mAh power bank to use with it. It was going fine until it kept shutting itself off while I played KSP. If I wanted to play KSP, I'd have to lower my rig's GPU to low power mode, or else it would trip the power bank. I looked at what happens whenever I did this, and apparently the battery rapidly alternates between being charged and not being charged while on higher performance modes. It would be stable, but the Maxoak is programmed to automatically shut itself off if it's not charging something. This makes it totally unusable. I went to Reddit with this, and I've had no luck. Does anyone here know how to fix/workaround this?

Faction Black rolls soft bark into layered fabrics to create armor similar to chainmail, which is capable of blocking wooden swords and cushioning thrown rocks.

Guys, please don't focus in specific events. This game is supposed to be about technology. Faction Black starts crafting camouflage from leaves to better sneak up on Faction Alpha, rendering their club-men ineffective via surprise.

An exercise in worldbuilding led me to develop a new forum game in which posters detail the technologies developed by two factions at war in order to get an edge over the other. The rules are delightfully simple, yet lead to oh so much complexity and fun in the end! Here's how it works: Faction Alpha and Faction Black (A and B) pick up sticks and start beating on one another. In following posts, each side uses what means they would have available to create new weapons, countermeasures and doctrines to win the never-ending war. Here is an example of that in action: Poster 1: Faction Alpha picks up big sticks and uses them as clubs. Poster 2: Faction Black counters by picking up stones and throwing them at Alpha club-men before they can get in swinging range. Poster 3: Faction Alpha reverse-engineers Faction Black's stone-throwing technology and arrange their rock-throwers in front of their club-men. Poster 4: Faction Black develops methods of banging rocks together to produce sharpened implements that are good for cutting. They incorporate this with stolen stick-wielding technologies to produce string from wood skins, stone-tipped spears, bows, and axes. Poster 5: Faction Alpha steals a stone toolkit from Faction Black and starts their own stoneworking industries. Using string, they create an experimental device for causing combustion within flammable materials (a bow drill) and create torches, which are carried by torch-runners to burn Faction Black's forests down. Poster 6: Faction Black develops shields and wooden armors to create armored infantry units, alongside wooden boats from logs cut down by their axes. They create a basic navy filled with bowmen to block off rivers and creeks. Poster 7: Faction Alpha uses fire to create superior canoes armed with flaming-arrow launchers with very simple crossbows engineered to not require metal components and fastenings. Using a special stone element in front of their arrows, the flaming projectiles' payloads can be split into a cloud of flaming sub-projectiles for increased fire spread. Poster 8, 9, 10, 11, etc. : Large siege engines for sinking canoes, metalworking with fire and metal armors, ironclad boats, explosives, battleships, shaped-charge impact-fused shells, electric munition detonation fields... DISCLAIMER: To prevent this from devolving into a roleplay and getting shut down, posts that include worldbuilding elements (e.g characters, personal relationships, specific actions) are invalidated. Keep it purely technological, folks. I'll begin: Faction Alpha picks up big sticks and uses them as clubs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoOOgitOtmc

Fraid not. Melontime?

I had the thought of what humans would look like in KSP a while back, but I kept it in my head until now. Now, I decided to actually design what they would look like! I knew KSP's art style was cartoonish, with the models sort of smoothed, so a human would be as well. They would either be a replacement for kerbals in RSS or another species to choose from (Interspecies cooperation?) that would have a different set of abilities and drawbacks. At least, that's what I'm thinking. From a Kerbal's perspective, humans are horribly tall and lanky contraptions with less cool-looking but more practical suits, with a boring but brilliant logical mindset. In my headcanon they are actually the ones who made most of the game's anomalies and then moved on for unknown reasons. Do you guys like it? What would you change? Would implementing them as a mod take a lot of balancing?