kelmv

You know you play KSP too much when; You attempt to break speed records to kill a little time before going to school. This does include creating said craft.

When you start wondering what would happen if someone made a DF/KSP crossover game

Best thing for that is to pin them to the desk and hit pause imediatly. Also, quicksave when they make a move for the desk.

Another test. Less fuel (2x 1 FL-T800 with three engines and three intakes). With a 4.5 ton load (undrained FL-T800 tank at the tip) it reached orbit with 267 units of fuel left in the center. 4 FL-T800s put 4.5 tons into orbit. As I recall, that isn't too bad.

Ok, after ditching the boosters I was just about 700m/s shy of orbit. Not too bad, all things considered.

Well, I can say this: 30k feet and ~1100m/s horizontal velocity off of 2 2xFL-T800. I think my ascent was too shallow, but it seemed to work alright. Might also help if I dumped the air intakes when I swapped over to a closed system to save drag and weight.

I'm currently testing 3 ramjet intakes and 4 nozzles. I'm just playing with them at the moment to see what I can get them to do. I'm mostly interested in their little ability to swap between air-breathing and rocket modes, but right now I'm having FPS issues for some reason, so testing is slow.

I've started playing with the RAPIER engine as a first stage engine to get a small rocket up through the atmosphere and I was wanting to know what other people thought of them for this purpose

iirc, 18 or 20 RTGs will run a single ion engine forever. That said, they are great for orbital craft, like satellites. I find they tend to work really well to put themselves into orbit once they are at a high enough altitude. How I put up my old commsat network was I launched the probe out to ~2.8Mm around Kerbin on a ballistic trajectory (saving me from having to recover debris later on), and then started to bring up my periaps once I was within ~30s away from apopapsis and start to circularize. And with roughly 4km of dv aboard the thing, I can put it where ever I could ever want to, and I can do that in about 5 tons of ship. That said, to hell with trying to change SoI with them. Down that way lies madness (or hoping mechjeb can handle the job)

I have never heard of someone refer to that wobbling as 'the fish'. Consider that term stolen

Ran into an interesting issue; upgraded my GPU and KSP no longer worked (only displaying a black screen). I wiped out my saves and settings.cfg, and things worked once more. I'll be migrating my saves over from my laptop back over to my desktop to make sure that it wasn't an issue with the saves.

The core game lacks a lot as far as gameplay is concerned. However, mods like Kethane and RemoteTech2 add a level to the game that it otherwise not there. As-is, if you want to do a round-trip tour of the Kerbin system, you have to launch all of your fuel, packed it all up in orbit, strap a Stayputnik to the nose, and off you go. With those two mods you have added 1) Refueling while en route 2) Dealing with problems en route with your refueling systems if something breaks issues 3) Deploying and maintaining a CommSat 'net There are other mods that add more and more to the game. I was at a similar point where KSP was about as entertaining as Minecraft (read: not), but any game can get to be too easy if you spend the time to learn it. Now, if your computer won't handle big ships then maybe it is time to upgrade. Not saying that this is an ideal solution, but my little 1.4GHz laptop can handle KSP with several-hundred part ships (including my Space Elevator which, without any load, was costing me nearly 400 parts).

Make sure that your launch clamps are all in the same stage, and that stage happens to be when your primary engines fire. Also, make sure you lock the gimbal on at least some of your engines, otherwise your tail end might decide to start _break_dancing at the most inoprotune time.

More dv == more weight. If you are hauling around an extra 5k dv to Mun, I think that can be considered 'too much'. An extra 500m/s makes sense, maybe 1km/s if you are a newbie.

Found out my SCANSat mapping probe couldn't fly on it's own. Seems some part clipping occured and my little sub-one-ton probe couldn't finalize it's own orbit. And it was such a cute little thing, too.

A few suggestions: 1) Just have it run from the current working directory instead of taking an arguement. 2) Backup the old KSP.x86_64 by moving it somewhere else 3) Use newlines in your echo statements, or use printf(). Either way, it will clean up your code. You might also be able to use heredocs for especially long sections of output. Bash doesn't allow heredocs to be indented, but that shouldn't be too much trouble to work with. 4) Split your code up into functions. Yes, this is a fairly linear script, but abstraction can make a script a little easier to live with.

Or you can swear once, then recover. Recovering a lost mission is harder than one going perfectly.

++. Mechjeb is great for removing some of the tedium from flying (like circularizing your 20th flight for the day), but there are some things that it is just so much better to do by hand, like landing.

As I recall you can deorbit faster firing -rad than firing retrograde. It isn't as efficent, though.

After having a communcation sat duplicate then explode in KSO and thus litter that orbit with >350 parts (I over built it just a tad), I try to avoid leaving trash in orbit after seeing how much of a pain it was, and honestly ditching all but the last stage with a 20km periaps then boosting that last bit into LKO isn't hard.

Make a checklist and check it thrice. Nothing sucks more than crossing that infamous horizon and losing comms due to a bad antenna, except for having the two Mainsail-powered boosted do the splits 1km in the air.

"I didn't know a rocket could bend that way" (For those who havn't seen it, pile a bunch of torso fuel tanks atop each other, then strap a probe to the top and an engine, like the LV-30, to the bottom and launch)

Okay, this issue seemes to have been resolved. As it turned out I was incorrect and the satellites in question didn't have any extended antennas. Oops. I also havn't seen this issue repeat itself, so it may just have been a run of user errors.

Today I watched as a liquid fuel booster (part of the 2nd pair that was supposed to drop) broke apart, leaving me with an assymetrical lift and a weird fuel issue. Managed to just make orbit still. I think it was the Mainsail's vectoring that kept that thing going up. Hell, it didn't wobble more than a degree or two during the whole incident.

"I think that I'll be fine with all the wobbling" "It won't stop wobbling. I'm going to turn on MechJeb and RCS and let it settle down" Once in orbit... "Ok, time to lay over and fire prograde. MechJeb, point me in the right direction" (Regarding Mun landing of an unmanned lander) "Hmm. I'm sure this nuke will kill 100m/s in 1km" "Ok, fire +Rad and... where did that hill come from?" (seems I forgot to kill horizontal speed correctly)