Louella

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/53813-0-24-0-L-Tech-Scientific-Industries-V2-20 this mod, has camera modules, both a film camera (with limited amount of film), and an unlimited use digital camera. The cameras give science when you activate them. More science for more exciting pictures. Think you also get even more if you can take pictures of really interesting things, like the Mun arches. the mod needs updating, I think, but the cameras in it work with the current version of KSP, as do the rest of the science things.

was in orbit, waiting for manouver node to send a satellite to Minmus for a contract. see something moving on screen, whoosh, something zooms past at a few km/sec, less than 1km away. I'd nearly collided with a satellite I had put up previously, which was going the opposite way !

If I had one of these rockets, and attach it with a stick to a rover, then, I'd be able to drive somewhere else on Kerbin, and launch the rocket for science there, right ?

It seems to work, but is rough in places. The KSP log shows some errors, but I have no idea what they mean. I think something must have been changed between the last update of this mod, and the current version of KSP. The cameras generate science, though I think one of the options relates to making screenshots from some other mod, which I don't have. The radiation detector and the radio receiver both generate science as well. I think the radio receiver is supposed to extend an aerial, but this doesn't work correctly, because it's looking for a model that KSP moved. The lab seems to generate scientific reports properly, but I think there might be some error with the GUI - it doesn't quite look right, although you can press buttons and get science from it alright. It mentions an aerobrake in the original post, but I didn't see it ingame, and I saw some errors in KSP's log for it. I think someone with knowledge of the current version of KSP might be able to update it without too much difficulty, if it's just a case of updating where it looks for Squad's models.

I seem to remember reading something that says currently, rocks that contain 3% copper are economic to mine for copper. Makes you wonder about the copper content of the spoil heaps of old 18th and 19th century mines. And yeah, metal content of landfill sites. Was also something about how it'd be economic to gather dust from road junctions, and sift it for gold, platinum and other metals, deposited there by exhaust gases from vehicles with catalytic converters. Or that guy does that thing with space mining asteroids for more gold than has ever existed on earth.

I ditched 2 aircraft into the sea, to get atmospheric measurements for contracts.

yeah, I didn't know that Astronaut Barbie first appeared four years before the Moon landings, and long before the USA put female astronauts in space (though they had some in training but who didn't fly for some reason.And the USSR had a female astronaut two years before Barbie). There were some later space Barbie dolls that were spacecraft crew of some sort. Some that made Moon landings (glow in the dark moon rocks), some time in the 80's and 90's. And then a Barbie that went on a Mars mission. so yeah, whatever it is that means that there's not a lot of female KSP players, it's not Barbie that's the cause of it. apparently too, original 1965 Astronaut Barbies are real collectors items. Never had any real Barbie dolls myself, but what I did have, was my own, and my parents Action Man and Sindy dolls, and they went to space! in cardboard box spaceships, with spacesuits made of biscuit wrappers and sellotape and stuff, lol.

how do you build stuff that's already docked to other stuff ?

I was typing stuff into Google, to see if there was a Barbie space program. Turns out, Barbie first became an astronaut in 1965. And subsequently went to the Moon (bringing back glow-in-the-dark Moon Rocks), and later to Mars. MARS !

one of the somewhat sad things about space exploration, is that, in order to find out what exactly caused Beagle 2 not to function correctly, it pretty much requires someone to be there and investigate. But if we had the technology to get a person there to retrieve it, then the cause of the malfunction would by then be academic, rather than particularly useful, because technology had moved on by a lot, so the knowledge of what went wrong, doesn't really help anymore.

A simple engine swap from a basic jet to a turbojet turns this aeroplane that reaches 18km altitude and max of 400m/s or so: Into an aeroplane that does this: The massive increase in performance took me by surprise. I wouldn't have expected such a difference, and if there was aerodynamic heating and/or other shock effects, I expect it would have exploded, and the pilot killed. And the turbojet is still an air breathing engine, for atmospheric use. It's for an aeroplane, not a spaceplane. You do not expect to have to deal with re-entry heat, for an aeroplane, because you don't expect to go into space at all, so requiring heat shielding is not really intuitive.

Is there a list of the rep titles ?

no response to trying to toggle the jetpack on or off ? could try going to the space centre, then returning to your flight ? sometimes that seems to unstick things.

is it possible to make it drain all fuel tanks simultaneously ? or do you always have to manually shift fuel around to balance the aircraft ?

that's a railway tank car imploding due to vacuum, as part of a safety demonstration now they're really built to contain internal pressure, so a vacuum balloon wouldn't be built the same way, but that's still a fairly substantial, and heavy, steel structure, and it crumples that easily.

it'd be good to be able to wind tunnel test stuff, before risking it for real. but i suppose, that's what sandbox mode is for

I built a rover, landed it on the dark side of the Mun, at night, with RCS as the final stage. It landed safely, despite me having no idea where the surface was. And then I rolled it because it had no lights and I had no idea what the surface was. lol.

There is a whole lot of stuff that is involved in aerodynamics and the atmosphere, that you're not aware of, and there's no feedback from the game from. like, aerodynamic drag during ascent of rockets, the terminal velocity table for Kerbin for a fuel-efficient climb. I don't know how that was worked out, and I wasn't aware of it until recently. Knowing about it, means I can make a spacecraft reach orbit with a whole lot more fuel, by limiting acceleration in the ascent, to keep speed below the value in the table. Aeroplanes shift balance when fuel is consumed. A plane I have that is very stable at full tanks, becomes almost unmanageable at full throttle with less than 1/4 fuel remaining. You have to pump fuel from the rear tanks to the front tanks to keep it easy to control. If the atmosphere becomes more "realistic", whatever that means, given the dimensions of Kerbin, then there needs to be a lot more feedback and information from the game, such that players can do things, and see the results of those things, and have some idea of what happened and why it happened. the worst situation in Kerbal Space Program, is looking at a failed flight, and not knowing why things happened that way. Aircraft flips at high speed due to breaking the sound barrier ? well you have to know that there is a sound barrier, and why breaking it made the aircraft flip, and that sort of thing isn't shown in the game. All you'd see currently, is the aircraft flip, possibly breaking up, with little information as to why.

you could also try moving the .zip out of that directory, into somewhere else. it might be that the program is spotting that zip and thinks it shouldn't be there, so gives you the error message, even though it works.

pseudopodia, or maybe telekinesis.

you haven't added my suggestion of different sized landing gears for aeroplanes ?

On another forum, mostly about a particular space-set game, one of the jokes there, is the existence or otherwise of "Rep Cartels". That is, there are particular groups who may, or may not, +rep all posts by one of their members, while -rep'ing all posts by someone taking the opposing side in an argument. It's also a vBulletin forum.

I think some forums don't increase your post count number.

Is it ? why ? because of all the plumbing that is needed ? My thought about having crew transfer last, was that that's the one that requires an actual door in the port, whereas electricity and fuel connections don't actually need a hole in the hulls, just connectors for the plugs and pipes.

Yesterday, I took my jet surveyor aircraft, and swapped the basic jet engine on it, for a turbojet, because I was having trouble reaching 18km altitude for some survey contracts. The plane, a single engine one, is now fast enough to get the flame visual effects on it. It now does in the order of 1.1km/sec sustainable at high altitude, and up to 1.9km/sec in a shallow descent from the highest altitude I reached with it, which was 45km. No mods of consequence installed. Mark 1 cockpits. With shock heating and re-entry heat being a thing, would that aeroplane still be able to do that ? with that single engine, and with Mk 1. parts ?