gabyalufix

Yeah. Harlin. Pssht. More like . . . Harlame. He won\'t be missed. Edit: by the way, Kryten. The reason that it seemed like no seconds had passed by is that the decoupler must have survived and remained on the launchpad. If you leave debris on the launchpad, then for some reason KSP 0.14 doesn\'t recognize that you\'ve launched, and doesn\'t start the launch clock.

Ergh. I accidentally added too many without backing up the sfs first. Now whenever I try to load, it just freezes up on launch. I\'ll have to start over. Also, it\'s not even that dangerous. low Kerbin orbit actually has enormous volume, so even with a thousand bits of shrapnel the actual debris density is tiny.

Odd. I don\'t get any lag at all. maybe it\'s because I was running on a completely fresh .sfs persistance file?

So I was fiddling around with the new parts, when i noticed that decouplers now properly trade momentum with the parent part. So as the decoupler is sent backwards, you are sent slightly forwards. So I was thinking about building an orion drive part, so to test the theory I changed the decoupler ejectionForce to be 1e37. I also amped up the breakingstrengths and suchlike to 1e37. Again, this was just a test, purely to see what would happen. Woooeeee. 15 seconds later I was 30,000 light years away. Using a 6-minute travel distance of around 6 million petameters, I calculated my velocity to be approximately 5.56 × 10^10 times the speed of light. Whoops. Sorry boys. Don\'t think we\'re gonna be able to get you home. But look on the bright side: you\'ll hit the edge of the observable universe in about 10 months. So that\'s something to look forward to.

not sure I understand what you mean. The direct link to the radial chute is here: http://www.captainslug.com/temp/RadialParachute1.5.zip

Man. that\'s a blast from the past. Should be here: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=816.0

Are there docking clamps already? Where?

A while back, I thought I remember reading about a way to set the 'center' point in the config file. ie, the point where the module is centered when you grab it off the vab menu. Is that point always the origin of the model? Or is there a way to change it? I ask because I\'m fiddling with this idea: a telescoping landing leg (model is just a curiosity / proof-of-concept, not for actual use) http://i.imgur.com/bJAu1.jpg http://i.imgur.com/rmfQ5.jpg It works by being very far away from the origin. But as it is, I can\'t get it far enough away that it looks straight, because if I do, then it appears outside the VAB walls. Another likely-unsurmountable problem is the fact that if the origin passes through the ground, it explodes. Does anyone know the extent of the new plugin system? Were the vanilla landing legs built as a plugin? Do we have the ability to code our own animations?

Bump again. Added big landing legs.

Agreed. I normally don\'t even bother glancing at stock rockets. Only reason I came here was to see what caught nova\'s eye. Nicely done, Daveigus.

I did something like this a while ago. For this challenge, I posted awhile back. It\'s launched in one big block, just because I could. That was before I made my nuke reactor (and was WHY I made the nuke reactor), so it just had a bunch of nonfunctional nerva engines stacked internally as a placeholder. It had 24x 2-meter habitation pods, and (iirc) 9x 1-meter habitation pods, and a FULL 3-meter fuel tank AFTER achieving solar escape orbit, for the deceleration phase at the destination star. It also had a few extra fuel tanks, for supplies. The solar arrays were just for use during the ~100 days spent near the sun, and to get the nuke reactor fired up. How would we assemble anything in orbit? Is there a docking framework that I am not aware of?

Shiar: If I understand what you mean, then you just need to buy the full version. Kosmo: It looks a little something like this:

I have no idea what you guys are talking about. Not even a clue.

Hmm. I should dig up the Farside I and Farside II missions, and finally sort out the mod dependencies and convert them to being 0.14x4 compatible. I could actually do the lowball meetup nowadays . . .

The first one is the offensively dangerous one. Attaining an intercept course with a counter-orbiting space station with a single ship, even a huge one, would require perhaps-impossibly-exact orbital navigation. But with the shotgun, you could create a shotgun zone counter-orbiting a space station. Mwa ha ha. Edit: Did the math. Assuming you put the shotgun and collider in opposing orbits, then your chances of achieving an impact is around 0.005 with each pass. With that math, you have a 50-50 chance of surviving ~135 passes without impact. All very approximate. Also, since everything is on rails in 5x dilation and beyond, you\'d have to run it at 2x in order for an impact to happen. Boring. Better launch a bunch.

So I designed a pair of craft that are literally accidents waiting to happen. The idea was to fill space with junk, then 'accidentally' impact one, without intentionally setting up an intercept. I\'ve yet to see it happen, but not for lack of trying. Here is the basis of my efforts: The first ship is the Kessler Shotgun, which launches 192 radial decouplers into LEO. It does NOT mess around. Bottom stage uses vanilla-balanced engines, and my novapunch-balanced fuel tanks. Top stage is pure novapunch. It also has a ton of spare RCS fuel and rockets, so that you can spin it up before you start releasing the decouplers. The second ship is designed purely to have a large cross section, around 25 meters in diameter. This should maximize the chance of 'accidental' impact. I was lazy with this one, so i snapped the silisko-edition-balanced engines onto the novapunch-balanced fuel tanks, which is massively unbalanced in combination. But whatever. Any fair launcher will lag too much to fly once you have all that debris in orbit hogging all your clock cycles. Both require only 0.14x4, Novapunch, and my miscellania. Happy widowmaking! edit: my estimates indicate that the shotgun places (very) approximately 1 decoupler in every 350-meter square, within an approximate 5km by 5km 'danger zone'. The danger zone shifts shape, depending on where in the orbit you are, relative to the original release point. So the probability of impact is relatively low in each pass. But eventually . . . edit: Brain fart. Forgot to attach the ships!

The tragedy is that I really hate winning at things like this. I push the boundaries as hard as I can, but when I\'m done, there is always a hope that it is possible to do more. I treasure that hope. Damn.

Bump for update. Fixed a few bugs.

Made a new ship. I call it the Shotgunner. It launches 192 vanilla radial decouplers into orbit. The first stage is my 7x novapunch-balanced main tank, with seven of my 7x1m vanilla engines. The second stage is just a 2m novapunch tank and a 2m novapunch LFE. And a metric ton of struts. Spin it up before you release the decouplers, one layer at a time. It gives them better spread. All you need is 0.14, my miscellania, and novapunch 1.0. Edit: Forgot pics:

Does anyone know the altitude of the highest mun-mountain?

Apparently 760 is simultaneously too many and too few. Pics from last night, of the counter-orbiting gauntlet-runner. Closest call before I turned in for the night: pics of the full debris field: It looks worse than it is: This morning, found the result: Ran for 2 hours, then, tragedy struck, but the wrong kind! Foiled again! If I have time, I\'ll probably design a special 'shrapnel' decoupler. My experience is that if you rename a stack decoupler as a radial decoupler, it will fire sideways in the z-axis when it decouples. Combine this with high breaking strength, extremely low mass, and a reasonably high decoupler force, and we\'d probably get a nastier shotgun spread. That should allow more orbital shrapnel coverage, whereas now it\'s really just several discrete 'danger orbits' that are chockablock with debris. Of course, if I wanted to I could probably match one of those danger orbits, but that\'s not really the point, is it. It has to look like an accident. Mwa ha ha. Edit: Hmm. Do you think persistent.sfs files are transferable? or mergable?

Launched a eastward-orbiting space station (actually just a whole bunch of mostly-empty fuel tanks) into the orbital death gauntlet. Just in a few minutes, I saw a few 5km misses. I\'m going to leave it running and see if it impacts overnight. I think I\'ve sent around 750-850 objects up. Does anyone know if objects will impact one another when on rails? I know in 0.13, once you jumped past 2x time dilation, objects would pass right through one another. is this still true? Would post pics, but Imgur is down. edit: note: found a way to count exactly, by looking at the persistent.sfs file and search-counting the number of strings matching 'VESSEL {'. I have 760 debris objects in orbit. Another note: it takes about 15 minutes to load the launchpad, no matter how small the rocket is. I\'m guessing this might just have something to do with the previous note.

Unanticipated problem: getting into orbit is much harder now, because the debris in the map obscures my trajectory. I\'m having to guess at the actual orbital velocities, like we had to way back in the day before the map was added. Where the hell did I put that spreadsheet?

This is how the world ends. I\'m too tired to count properly. I think that\'s ~650 independent modules, but I could be off by a launch or two. In ~75km LEO, you find you\'re always in 'sighting' range of at least a few bits of debris. Never been hit directly, yet.

Subliminal messaging. That would explain an awful lot. My secondary hypothesis: I\'m severely sleep-deprived, insomniac, overworked, and I\'m 27 days from my thesis defense. It is a legitimate possibility that I\'ve snapped.