gabyalufix

Ok, so totally by accident, I thought up a new challenge. Was fiddling with my plane for the last challenge, and something Tim said stuck with me. To paraphrase: epic moon bases and planes don\'t mix. Well why the heck not? Here\'s the challenge. You operate a Space-Limo service for recently-married literalism enthusiasts. These very, very wealthy Kerbins want the real deal--a honeymun on the actual goddamned mun. Load a space plane carrying a detachable lunar lander as a payload. Launch the plane, deposit the lander safe, upright, and intact, on the munar surface (landing yourself is OPTIONAL), then come home and land. Use whatever parts you feel like, and we\'ll all judge them as they come. Bonus points for: --using only recoverable (parachuted) boosters --Single-stage, no boosters at all. --Larger and more luxurious honeymun suites. --Styyyyle: remember, you\'re a limo. Sell it! A few shots of my (failed) attempt: Here\'s my honeymun suite. Small, simple, but it\'s on the Mun, so don\'t be so picky. Have a good time, Mr. and Mrs. Kerman! Edit: I didn\'t have landing struts. I dropped the capsule from an almost-hover at 1-5 meters or so. It was . . . tense . . . A problem: My limo is a seaplane. It needs sea. And that sure is a big continent . . . . Dropped off my big heavy engines (now out of fuel). They each have 4 chutes to keep them nice and cost-effective. A lake! We\'re saved! It totally looks big enough to land in, right? Ok, so the answer is 'sorta'. Technically it\'s a landing, but our insurance company is never gonna SPEAK to us again . . . I\'d call that a failure. I mean, for one thing: with the limo wrecked, our first customers are probably gonna suffocate up there when their air runs out . . . (but hilariously fun. Seriously, you guys, you don\'t even know. I\'m still shaking from adrenaline. When I saw that lake . . . oh man . . . ) I know you folks can do better! Show me!

Wernher: Where\'d you get those cool solar arrays?

I\'ll never beat the falcon--but if I must fail, I choose to fail as big and over-complex as I can get past the horizon! I know just what it needs . . . a solar array!

No problemo. I\'m not sure why this plane flies so well. All my previous attempts fall apart, stall out, have the glide plane of a grand piano, can\'t lift off, or don\'t have enough fuel. This one does insanely well, and I\'m still not 100% sure why . . . Glamour shot:

Ha. Good times. New plan: Swap out a 4 bio mods for 2 chemistry and 2 physics mods, and toss the most uppedy dozen kerbals out the airlock on the way up. Problem solved, and the dozen bachelors get themselves a roomie-free pad.

Something I built a while ago. Seemed fitting. The PolyPrefix-Class Single-Stage Space-Sea-Tri-plane. It appears to be moon-capable, though the only time I really tried I crashed--mostly due to stupidity. I turned on my SAS and time warped, but forgot to turn off RCS. 9x C7 spaceplane motors. I actually edited the cfg\'s on those radial chutes, reducing the drag so that I can use them as drogue chutes without getting torn apart when they open. I usually (but not always) lose the bottom pair of engines when I land. That means that the nose gets driven into the water if I try to take back off. Hilarity ensues. I might try to take this up tonight. Edit: forgot to include the craft.

Thanks for the info, folks. I figured that was the most likely scenario, but just wanted to ask. I used to to modeling / animation in milkshape, back in high school. (I actually just dug up my old purchase key, which I somehow remembered to always forward on from 4 email addresses ago. Still works!). I belonged to several different gaming communities, which has wildly different rules about this sort of thing. In one community, even asking would be considered almost insulting. The group had a sort of friendly/competitive vibe--everyone always trying to outdo one another--so using someone else\'s models would be viewed as 'cheating'. In another community, we were basically all collaboratively working on a game together--a massively different vibe altogether: they thought it was funny that I bothered to ask (after all, we all would have gotten our names in the credits anyways, if the game had ever been finished). My point is just that close-knit subcultures can have wildly different ideas about what is reasonable. Of course, this was before DMCA or creative commons even existed. I feel old. Anyhow, I\'m just reminiscing. Rules noted and understood. Will do.

Even if the failcan disqualifies it, I decided to give it another shot. Swapped out 5x of the liquid engines for a more efficient but weaker cousin, and put them on a separate stage. Didn\'t set up the empty engines to jettison when they\'re done, because (1) I\'m too lazy to take my flying village all apart, and (2) the tanks\'re needed anyways to keep the thing structurally together. 5 engines were swapped out. Not a perfect landing. I lost 1 leg. Both funspheres survived this time! Paaaaartaaay! And then . . . tragedy struck our intrepid heroes, as the universe itself crashed around them!

I\'ve sometimes been in co-orbit with released stages, and I\'ve had them seem to go in and out of sight, as our two slightly-different orbits wave past each other. But I\'m never 100% sure they actually went out of sight, or if I just really tiny and I didn\'t notice. I\'ve also gotten log notifications of stages hitting kerbal, long after separation (for example, if I release while technically in orbit, but with a perigee just barely inside the atmosphere). But then again, I\'ve also had situations where I expected to see the impact logged and didn\'t. Does anyone know for sure if stuff stays around even when far away? It can be hard to tell, due to the speeds involved? Does anyone know if there is a 'fog plane' in the KSP graphics engine, beyond which objects are simply not rendered, even if their positions are still being tracked?

So if I were to, say, mod up some slightly re-textured versions of various existing parts, should I ask permission from the original modder before posting the results, or do I just need to give credit, or what? What\'s the generally-accepted rule there? Just askin\'. Different communities can have wildly variant cultural mores.

Half a gigabyte, compressed. Ouch! I\'ll see if I can figure out a way to get this hosted somewhere . . .

Tried again. Added boosters back. Got to the moon. But then: tragedy! NOOOOOO! WHY ARE YOU SLOPED? I HATE YOU MUUUUUUN! Ok. You can still save this. Just . . . THINK . . . @#$^@#^@#$%!@#&^*$@^$#%$#%@#!!!!!!! I still count this as a landing. Oh yeah. Totally. We\'re fine. No worries. The kerbin species is totally safe.

I did some chainmailling in college. I also made a set of plate armor, by heating and bending pieces cut from a HDPE barrel. I then covered the plastic with faux leather and riveted the heck out of it. edit: Worth noting: when I larp, I wear ringmesh chainmail. It\'s insanely light, but strong enough to hold together even when normal unriveted steel chain would bend and tear.

ooooooooh. That is HANDY. Some of the modules are crazy-hard to place properly in certain situations because they keep trying to grab the sides of nearby modules, instead of going into their stacking port like they\'re supposed to. Woo! Thanks!

@cardgame: Biological diversity sure is handy around the house! (or module, as the case may be). So here\'s my most recent attempt. I had a few minutes free while my code was compiling, and I threw together a quick-and-dirty orbiter. I used my design from the previous challenge, but took off the boosters (they were getting in the way of placing new stuff). I\'ll probably snap them back on later, but they\'re a pain to set up, since you can\'t use symettry (because the ship is internally very asymmetric), and you have to place all those rcs thrusters by hand. So it\'s a single-stager. Again, it uses silisko\'s LV-T300 and the failcan\'s super-long fuel tank. (not sure if that qualifies as 'balanced' or not, but w/e. I\'m just having fun.) My biggest solar array yet! Contains 41 hab mods, as before. All recreation must take place within KSP-approved FunSphere modules. Warning. Do not use ladders: They don\'t go anywhere. 6x soyuz-reminiscent modules provide (some) of the life support. There are also 24 science modules, more than enough to provide plants for oxygen, plus a chemistry mod and a physics mod or two, I guess. There\'s also a mk3 and mk4 command module in there somewhere. There\'s no RCS, but I\'m pretty sure there must be an acs somewhere too, but I forget where. There are 2 emergency escape / shuttle vehicles, mainly to pro vide transport between motherships. There\'s also an exploration probe / comm relay. I actually accidently set off the escape towers before launch. So they\'re just decorative now. Whoops. Communications dish. there was also supposed to be one on top of the solar array, but I think I accidentally detached it at some point. Jeb: 'GUN IT!' Bill+Bob: 'NOOOOOOOOO' We may never know why I accidentally hit spacebar on a 1-stage ship. But I did, and the probe, the shuttle craft, and the top piece of the solar array (which is actually a decoupler--who knew?) drifted off. All in all, not bad for a single stage ship.

At the time, I was working under the assumption that the hab mods included CO2 scrubbers and other basic stuff. Something like the old soviet space stations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salyut_5 Plus, I just didn\'t bother sticking on all the extras. I was purely curious as to how many hab mods I could get into orbit. The original plan was never to land on the mun. I just got up there the first time and realized that I had a 3/4 tank of fuel left . . .

I no gardener, but I thought that most earth plants need night time, or they dry out and die. It had something to do with the plant\'s Stoma, or something. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoma In 5th grade, we were growing peas in the classroom and they all died when someone forgot to unplug the sunlamp at night for a few nights in a row. Maybe some plant\'s don\'t? Or maybe they just need more water in this case? Or maybe 5th graders are just really bad at growing peas?

Right. Now that I know how to do attachments, i can attach the craft file. As for the part list - much trickier. First I downloaded every part I could find, then I used whichever ones I felt like at the time. Also, there are 2 different kinds of heavy struts used - I accidentally used some heavy strut from two different packs, and can\'t figure out how to get rid of them without just removing every strut, everywhere. So I just edited the configs so they\'re identical. One is harvester\'s strutConnectorHeavy. The other one was named something else--similar but different. Like 'heavyStrutConnector' or something. Also, I manually edited the configs of the extra command pods. I made a new copy and called each one 'OriginalCommandPodName_aux', and declared it a 'strut'. Maybe if I have time I\'ll switch over my external to my linux box and do an ls -r of my mods directory. Thank god I switched over to JSGME. Edit: it\'s called NP_Heavystrut, from the novapunch pack. I think I changed heavyStrutConnector (from the kw challenger pack) to match the novapunch version. I suspect it won\'t fly if you leave it as-is, since the kw version is, like, 20 times heavier. I tried fixing it by textreplacing instances of heavyStrutConnector with NP_Heavystrut, but it did not like that at ALL.

Ah, thanks!

So a question about the KW-LEM. Mine seems to be broken, somehow. Here\'s what it looks like when unattached. And here attached. I can see the struts, but they\'re covered over by this weird stretched-texture thingy. Not sure what the deal is. What\'s going on here?

So some objects don\'t clip with other physical objects in the ship editor. Examples are the big lab module in derp: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=2161.msg19904#msg19904 Also: most of the sattelites. This means you can\'t attach stuff to the sides. Is there a reason for this? Can it be fixed without having to edit the mesh? Is there a cfg flag somewhere I can change so that I can stick struts and things on my satellites?

Other notes: (1) You probably don\'t need to keep the sunlamps on at 'night'. The Munar month is only 1.5 kerbin days long, so they\'d only be in darkness a little longer than they would on kerbin. And their days would be longer too. I\'d bet the plants can survive the nights without light. Maybe you\'d flick them on for a few hours, but that\'s it. Of course, you\'d still need power at night, to keep your kerbins unfrozen and to make Bill\'s piping-hot espresso (not to mention CO2 scrubbers, etc.). (2) My idea for power storage: Use a bunch of SAS modules! The same dynamo that you use as a motor to spin up the gyroscopes can also be reversed into use as a power generator (sapping off spin while producing electricity, rather than spending electricity to add spin). It doesn\'t rely on any weird, unstable chemicals like batteries do, and as a bonus you can use them as stabilizers during the ascent! Fun history fact: In the 1940\'s the swiss actually built busses that ran on gyroscopic energy. When they stopped in a station a motor would spin up the Big Flywheel, and then they\'d drive off, running entirely on the flywheel\'s generator until they got to the next stop. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrobus

Just an FYI. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population For most vertebrates (including humans, for example), you need a LOT more than 10. Anything less than 1k-5k and you start taking a double digit risk of extinction. Of course, kerbins might be completely different. For all the heck we know, they might breed via mitosis--just splitting apart like amoeba. Then you\'d just need Jeb. Sorry. Anal-retentive hopefully-soon-to-be-biostatistician here.

I have no idea. It\'s called the 'S.O.S. habitation module', and was created by 'Mrbrownce (Mesh) and MoodNiatrec (Skin and Re-coding)'. I think it must have come with one of the big packs? why doesn\'t windows have grep? Seriously now. How the heck do I find which mod this came from?

No time warping, once I was below 5km. If you time warp while too close to the mun, sometimes the moon 'jumps' and your orbit changes. And then you die.