hobbsyoyo

Funny thing I just saw this thread because I was about to post in the CFC forum KSP thread about how much nastier the members here have gotten since the last time I used this forum. I knew something really strange had happened to the community here when I opened the thread about official gaming site reviews of KSP and found it to be a lame Squad bashing session. The funniest part of the bashing to me is that the people who were beating a dead horse to death are the same people who have probably spent countless hours enjoying this game and countless more hours telling strangers about it on the internet. But low and behold and some game reviewers give the game stellar reviews and there was a massive collective freakout because 1.0 DIDN'T HAVE ALL THE THINGS. That's what it comes down to, I think. Pre-1.0 (and especially Pre-.90 when full release seemed forever away) everyone could hope that their own pet projects and dreams would make it in the final game. I mean, release was forever away so obviously it was going to be perfect in all ways to everyone. Except that's not how perfection works, it's in the eye of the beholder and all of a sudden everyone was royally pissed that the coveted "1.0" arrived and it didn't have everything they dreamed of. Of course, KSP 1.0+ will never please everyone perfectly because it can't literally contain "all the things" but I think many posters here seemed to have adopted a mentality that eventually it. No one seems to have adopted the perspective that 'hey, so I don't like thing X, but that other guy doesn't like thing Y but overall, we're pretty happy with the whole package and the game could never satisfy us both perfectly because we like different things'. To top it all off, the people here that are so butthurt are the same people (as stated before) who have enjoyed the heck out of this game over the year and contributed numerous posts here about it. But there are some things (that, to be honest, are quite trivial in the grand scope) they don't like so they've taken to missing the forest for all the trees. And before the 'but broken features and aero model and this, that and the other thing....!' bandwagon gets rolling - well, Squad is still putting out updates. And be happy you have already gotten (and will continue to get) so much enjoyment out of the game. You also most likely got it dirt cheap during early development and by doing so, you helped fund it and also got an outsized say in the development path that the game took. Do you think EA is going to give you that kind of input? Nope. Just be happy if their next multi-billion-dollar release isn't broken from Day 1 and require 5 months of daily patches to make it playable. Meanwhile, new KSP players get a pretty solid game from 1.0 on and old players got to directly contribute to that and all will continue to enjoy new feature roll-out and healthy mod support for the foreseeable future. Shoot, if I was a Squad member and I spent years on this project and then opened up the 'game review thread' and read what was there, yeah, I'd stop listening to the haters too and then everyone loses. Also - so much this:

ninja'd! Gemini was (more or less) a 2-seater Mercury capsule in real life. Also, not sure why the OP has to resort to mods to get a two seat capsule. It's pretty trivial to just stack 2 one-man pods in the early game. I typically use a capsule up top then add non-aerodynamic airplane cockpits stacked underneath it to add more Kerbalnauts. It works pretty well overall but you do have to watch it when you start stacking 3 or more pods together because they like to flip over on re-entry.

I'd support this fully. However, I'd also like to see an SAS system that could actually handle the trajectory while on rails. I haven't unlocked ion engines in the new version of KSP but in the past, you had to stop the 4x time warp every minute or so because the SAS would wander off the chosen heading. This gets really frustrating and I think if you added in on-rails time warp, it would be much worse. Currently the SAS can't keep your vessel locked on a heading during on-rails timewarp even when you aren't thrusting. So I'd hate to go into 10000x time warp and instantly be way off-heading. I'm not talking about trajectory corrections (i.e. the orbital path itself), just the fact that the SAS can't keep a steady lock on the chosen heading on the navbal. That needs to be fixed before we do on-rails ion drives in my opinion.

This is realistic, fwiw. That's only true if you are using an ion engine to get to Mars. Real missions (and the vast majority to the region of Mars don't use Ion engines) use higher thrust hydrazine thrusters with burn times on the same order as KSP burns. Ion engines require ridiculous amounts of power at any thrust. They all operate in the multi-kW range, necessitating large solar arrays. They're all power hogs regardless of their thrust levels - it's the nature of the beast. Yes it would to be usable at the outer planets. The asteroid belt is about as far as you can push the technology using solar arrays. RTG's cannot provide nearly enough power to do the job under any realistic circumstances IRL. The fact that you can power any ion probe with RTG's is a concession to enhanced game play over realism.Anywho, sorry to quibble over real life stuff that's beside the point. What I would like to say is that I do fully support making ion engines higher thrust and lower power requirement for gameplay reasons. I haven't gotten ion engines in the new career mode yet, but in previous sandbox iterations, you couldn't leave the ion engine thrusting (even without time warp) for hours on it's own - you had to manually tweak the trajectory every few minutes because SAS couldn't keep a lock on the heading. So they need to have more powerful thrust so you can do a good burn in like 45 minutes tops. And also the lower power requirements will let us use them further out and with less RTG's and solar cells. I'm an aerospace engineer, I work on satellites.

What is the upside to this idea again?

To be fair, you don't spend weeks planning and building your morning shower.

I typically don't care about broken saves. I would only care if they come out with a save-breaking update before I can finish my Laythe base but I doubt that will happen.

Probably the CPU is the most intensely used component. These days, CPUs like your Intel i7 have multiple cores, which in most circumstances act like multiple CPUs to divvy up the processing work. It's a feature that is called multithreading, but unfortunately KSP doesn't make use of this feature. So what's more important than the number of cores your CPU has (whether it be 2, 4, 6 or 8) is how fast its clock speed is (2.8, 3.0, 3.2gigaherz), etc. For example, having a high clock speed will allow the game to run better because even though a program with multithreading utilization can use all 8 cores of a 2.6gigaherz octo-core CPU to do calculations really fast, a no-multithreading program like KSP can only use the 8 cores as if they were a single core clocked at 2.6 gigaherz, which is pretty slow these days for calculation intense games such as KSP. Also, while it's obviously good to have a decent graphics card in KSP, it's not as important as it would be for a game like Crysis because KSP doesn't use graphics cards nearly as much as it utilizes the CPU. Finally, anything over like 6gb of RAM should be enough memory as the game doesn't use more than 2 or 3gb IIRC *** This is all an overgeneralization

I think they will brake saves with the next update. I have nothing but a hunch to back that up though.

In some cases you won't even need fuel lines as the struts are crossfeed-capable. If you mount them directly to the tank then the engines will work fine without fuel lines.

Oh gosh, bringing up a shuttle to dock with something whizzing by at faster than escape velocity sounds tricky. Good luck!

I don't find the big NERVA engine in NovaPunch to be badly unbalanced. It has good thrust and the standard 800s ISP, but weighs a lot and doesn't generate electricity. It's also physically large so it's harder to integrate it into existing designs and requires a lot of working-around to accomodate it. I don't use the other 2 nuclear engines, I think they are supposed to be fusion engines IIRC but look dumb to be honest and I don't know, they just stretch believability for me. I also haven't found a use for them yet either that couldn't be met by either the standard NERVA or the big one in NP but that's all probably just me.

They would likely use advanced ceramics today if they made a NERVA engine that weren't available in the 60's. That would help with heat for sure and possibly with mass and radiation, dependent on how much you had to use and how opaque to radiation it is. Point being that materials science has progressed lightyears from the 60's which open up lots of new possibilities and capabilities.

So slap 50 engines onto a tank underneath it and radially on the sides? You are going to have to add a lot more than just one or two struts per engine to make the scheme work in most cases to avoid clipping issues or blocking exhaust and god forbid you use more than one booster core for a launch...then it gets even more complicated. I have used engine clusters a lot and it's really not as simple as just slapping in more engines in most cases. That's all a bit silly for marginal mass savings, imposes a serious lag penalty and is only viable so long as cubic octagonal struts are massless - which presumably they won't always be. (and I don't buy that 50-100 cubic struts will have negligible mass when mass is implemented for them - you only have a 1 ton margin to play with after all) I guess that works for min/maxers, but for me, no thanks. Are the cubic struts truly massless?

I would be surprised if you were not able to make better, more efficient missions without a cycler than with one - even when including mass budgets for life support, crew living space, etc. I was recently able to send a large single-piece space station to Laythe and it would have been a trivial thing to slap on a return booster to come back to Kerbin. It was more than large enough to simulate life support and crew living space for at least 4 Kerbals. (it was designed for 16 without consumables). Trying to add a cycler and shuttles to get to and from the station at Laythe would have seriously overcomplicated the mission when I could have alternatively just slapped a Kerbin-return engine on it.

Wouldn't all mass from all the parts necessary to attach 50 48-7S's negate all of the mass savings of the engines themselves?

There was a thread about this the other day, fyi. The benefit is that the cycler can be used to move massive stuff like life support for multiple astronauts back and forth between planets and you only have to accelerate it once and then use gravity assists to sling it back and forth. Then you use a smaller-mass shuttle to take astronauts from the surface of Kerbin or Duna and meet with the big, bulky cycler. Of course, the benefits of the cycler are lost in KSP as we don't have to worry about life support systems and whatnot. So if you can build a vehicle capable of taking astronauts from Kerbin all the way down to Duna (and back) then you don't need a separate cycler. This is entirely possible in KSP and people do it all the time. The other thing is that I'm not sure you can really do a true cycler in KSP; I don't know if the physics engine will allow you to do a cycle without lots of extra burns to correct physics-engine errors between SoI's and such. So you would probably end up spending a lot of fuel to keep the cycler going, so much so as to negate the benefit of a cycler which is supposed to go back and forth with limited deltaV expenditure. Also, you would still have to have a ship at Duna to go up and reach the cycler and bring astronauts down to the surface or transfer them from the surface up to the cycler. This shuttle will have to refueled and unless you are using the Kethane mod, this will result in multiple launches simply to refuel the shuttle. In the end, trying to make the cycler work isn't really practical given that you can accomplish the goal of sending Kerbals to and from Duna much simpler without it.

The game already has a lot of features and variables to keep track of, both in its present state and as far as what is planned yo be added. Adding yet another variable to keep track of and make the game more difficult to play and do successful missions doesn't sound fun to me. If I wanted ultra-realism I would play Orbiter. At some point KSP will stop being a fun game with a side of realism and start being a game of realism with a side of fun if we go down that path.

1/10 the size for now.... They aren't done adding planets yet and the ling burn times are only going to get longer. I am all in favor of better nuclear engines. Plus, the NERVA program was built with 60's hardware and materials; if they built it now they could make it withstand heat better which means more efficiency and thrust.

Do NOT edit the persistence file while the game is running. Also, if you are going to edit the persistence file, back it up somewhere else as you could accidentally corrupt the game.

Someone said it in a thread yesterday and they said he said it in this week's Squadcast or something. Sorry that's all I got source-wise. :\ I use the solid landing legs in NovaPunch to get around this issue as I have had even a 6 ton lander lean at random, unrepeatable orientations at times. It's really frustrating - I get not everyone uses mods but if you are into base building like I am (putting together a big colony on Laythe ATM) then you really have to get around the landing legs bug.

In some ways the Gemini capsule was more advanced than Apollo as work on it started after work had already begun on Apollo by a year or two. Also, the company that built the Mercury capsule built the Gemini capsule, but not the Apollo capsule. This meant that the company already had experience in building them and put that to good use making Gemini whereas the contractor building Apollo didn't have that. Edit: Crap I didn't see there was already this post: Edit: Yet another post I should have read, lol:

What I was saying was that what was said seemed to imply they didn't think it was a problem outside of being partially incompatible with old saves which also implies they weren't going to fix it. However, Harvester recently said they are going to tweak the legs but not until .23, which still kind of sucks.

Yeah keep pressing V until the screen notification says, 'Chase'. Use the right mouse button to then position the camera behind the craft and it will stay there so long as you are in Chase mode.

Ha! This reminds me of a time I sent my Kerbals on a Duna mission, messed up the trajectory and wound up on a one-way trajectory to Eve. I deployed the chutes too soon and the craft blew up so I jettisoned the pilot in a hail mary pass. He hit the ground and skidded for a couple of kilometers but he made it! And then he stayed there until the next update erased him from the Universe.