Semmel

Wow, I am surprised. I came here to ask if heliosynchronous orbits are possible (well, precession of orbits due to ellipsoidal shape of bodies really) is possible and if you would consider it for implementation.. and it is already in by looking at your last change-log! I am blown away by that to be honest! I never really understood these orbits, they seem like wizardry. I am very much looking forwards to your mod!

Thx for the hint, no I was not aware of TestFlight. I will check it out, looks pretty good.

Dear Modding community. I would like to ask for a mod with a small, but I believe very interesting impact: Certification. The story is this: It is very easy to build rockets for contract satellites and VIP Kerbals. Thats all fine and dandy, but I would like to have some extra that makes the player think more and ultimately streamline the game more. I would like to have a mod that makes contracts of placing satellites into specific orbits only available for _certified_ launch vehicles. Likewise, VIP Kerbals should only be able to go around on Kerbal-rated launch vehicles. How to implement: * A parts sub-assembly can become a certified launch vehicle by successfully putting a certification-dummy mass into a larger than 100x100 km orbit. By doing that, the sub-assembly becomes certified and can be used to launch any contractual payload. Subsequently, the satellite that is to be launched needs to be lighter than the dummy mass and needs to attach to the same node as the dummy mass, no other changes to the rocket are permitted. * For Kerbal rating a launch vehicle, it needs to be certified and it needs to make at least 5 successive successful launches, that is, bring its payload to orbit without parts failure. * The capsule needs to fulfil the following tests: (Kerbals associated to the KSC are allowed to board during tests of course): -- Pad abort: Test a launch abort system while landed at the launch site: detach transport vehicle while landed at the launch site and land without parts failures on solid surface or water. -- Launch abort: Test a launch abort system while flying at Kerbin: above 1000 and below 3000 m, speed above 300 m/s. -- Re-entry test: Land on Kerbin after being in Kerbins Orbit. * Make contract reward for VIP much higher than it is in 1.0.2 to rebalance certification costs and make the process less grindy Impact on Gameplay: * The player will think about creating launch families. This makes games easier because certified launch vehicles are less likely to fail because they are unaltered. Fiddling with the launcher to make a unique launcher for every satellite is prohibited. * In longer games, player spends less time designing rockets and more time designing payloads to fit in available certified rockets. * New contracts might emerge to create a certified launch vehicle that is capable of bringing x kg into Kerbin orbit, to reduce certification costs

I d it similar to Empiro but slightly differently. Usually, I launch ahead and make an efford to launch in the same inclination by timing the launch properly. Any inclination errror, I fix in orbit. Then, I put my spacecraft into a highly elliptical orbit with the apoapsis intersecting the incoming trajectory. Then hit next orbit until my spacecraft and the asteroid are at roughly the same place at spacectraft apoapsis. Once they are there, I perform a normal docking maneuver: kill velocity and then dock. That way, its possible to adjust inclination and periapsis prior to the encounter. Slightly more complex for mission planing but usually saves a lot of delta v because the docking procedure is much easier. And it allowes to divert the asteroid in case it would hit the surface.

I would just go ahead with what you have got and try to land without an inclination change. Real missions fail for a huge veriatey of reasons. Bad mission planing is usually not the most common but it happens. Just bite the bullet and go ahead, its much more fun like that (at least to me).

The problem with rovers is, that there is no where to go with them. Before Beta, there were no targets at all for rovers, the whole surface of a body was equal everywhere. Since bioms are now a thing, rovers have some uses, but not much because the distances between bioms are so great that a rover is not a good idea. And you have to micromanage the rover much much more than a hopper or a one-point lander. So the problem with rovers is not so much that they are hard to drive, the problem is that they are so useless.

Looks like they Kerbald the landing ;-)

When this mod gets live, there are some problems with gameplay that need solving. Assuming of course you dont want to babysit every single probe. * Since orbits are a lot more unstable, it will be hard to get probes into stable 2-body situations. Like for example L1, L2 and L3 points are instable and require active correction. * Geo/Kerbo-synchronous orbits will decay over time, there needs to be active control to keep them stable. These points are especially relevant for Remote Tech since you need a fleet of communication satellites.

Well thx anyway. It certainly is not easy to do that since orientation, shape and weight have a strong impact. Would be wonderful though if it would work! I was thinking of that already. That might also give some advantage by using an offset between the geometry center of the descend module and the center of gravity to provide lift during reentry. I am using deadly reentry. That is not an option. Anyway, the largest effect of the landing location is applied after the hot part of the reentry during the thicker part o the atmosphere. The service module would be burned up at that point anyway.

Using this mod, I have some difficulties I dont know how to solve. Its probably my inability to use it properly, so please give me a hint. I use FAR and Deadly reentry. I have a maned space probe, using the small stock Command Pod Mk1 with a heat shield underneath. I set up the descend trajectory to get down at my desired location. Than I separate from the lander from the service module and prepare for reentry. However, the drag of the heat shield with the MK1 seems to line up very badly with the estimated landing location. If the initial trajectory is very flat and I aim for KSC, the actual touch down point is at the west coast of the KSC continent, at the other side of the mountain range. That is a significant difference. What do I need to do in order to correct for that? Due to the nature of the problem, I cant control the descend after the separation with the service module. Any suggestion? Edit: Thanks for this great mod btw! It makes life much much easier. I also should add that my experience is with the second to last version, the one before 1.0.0.

As Squad stated, they are approaching feature completion. Planetary body tilts is not a major feature, so it might be on the agenda for the period after 0.9 is released. If it is not on the menue, would it be possible to ask permission for the code injection? Cheers, Semmel

Thx for the trouble anyway. Here is the promised file: https://www.dropbox.com/s/zavdst1yzvgaaxb/output_log.txt?dl=0

Before you are gearing up for 0.25 update.. I want to report one problem: I started with a fresh install of 0.24.2, installed all "minimum requirements" and all "best gameplay" mods, taking care of the red text where applicable, from the recommended mods, I use CrossFeedEnabler by NathanKell (v3.0.1) Kerbal Joint Reinforcement (v2.4.3) MechJeb by many (v2.3.1) Active Texture Management by rbray89 (v3.4) Toolbar by blizzy78 (v1.7.6) and from the supported mods, I use KW Rocketry by Winston & Kickasskyle (v2.6c) LazTek SpaceX by LazurusLuan (Launch v3.1a) I get an error stating, that some of the firespitter parts could not be loaded, but I dont know if that effects gameplay in any way. First thing I did to test everything was to load the Falcon 9 Dragon V2 rocket from LazTek, as expected the parts were scaled to fit the RSS settings. I had to re-assemble the rocket because the resize didn't place the parts at the correct location, but I got it right as far as I can tell by reattaching every single part. Rocket launches fine, but on ascend, at around 2min30 to 2m40 into the flight, the fuel tank of the first stage overheats and a second after that the nose cone as well. The Falcon9 has a liftoff TWR of 1.3 and the acceleration at the time of overheat is 2.7g. The ascend profile is such that I start pitch at roughly 80 m/s (approx. 1km height) and pretty much follow the surface prograde vector after that. At the time of overheat, the Rocket was roughly at a 45 deg angle. I forgot the velocity and height, sorry. I understand that the overheat is caused by deadly reentry, but I assume that is not supposed to happen. I probably did something wrong during install or I have to reconfigure something I am not aware of. Any ideas? Edit: I should add, I run it on Windows7 64 with the 32bit executable of KSP. Edit 2: Ill get the output log as soon as I am home. Sorry, I dont have it with me right now.

Before RSS+RPL, I used to play stock KSP without RT2. Data transmission never got time accelerated. So its not a bug of RT2, its just how the game works. But I guess that can be fixed within RT2.

It does slightly. You have to change the size limit of the tanks as you progress through the tech tree, other than that, its fine. I use them. To quote my self: This is valid for ProceduralParts-0.9.14

Ok, there are several things mixed up I guess. I know that you cant return from Mars immediately. Thats why I account for the dV needed to be captured and return. I do not think that aerobreak into mars atmosphere is a good approach because you would need a heat shield which is heavier than the fuel you need. It might be possible to use the same heatshield in Mars atmosphere as you would use to reduce your speed at earth atmosphere, but that requires some very clever probe design. In case I would send a manned mission to Mars.. well, thats an entirely different can of worms. I wouldnt take Science jr or the goo cannister with me then. If you send kerbals, thats all you really do. And the third thing: Going to the outer planets.. well.. I dont know if a return mission to Jupiter or Saturn is possible. I wouldnt try it with realistic technology. Maybe with some of the crazy drives from the interstellar mod (not the FTL drive).. but thats future stuff. And finally: The game does not work well if you time accelerate over a sphere of influence change. Always reduce your acceleration to 1x if you do that. Then your orbits are not messed up. Cheers, Semmel

Thx pjf, I would like to see these changes transition to RPL

Ohh I see. I thought both receiving and transmitting antennas need the specified range. I guess, I should have read the manual. Thank you! Thx. I have it but I didnt really use it much as I didnt see the offset of the thrust from the center of mass. The offset is tiny but when applying a force on the thrusters it does matter a lot. Maybe I have to deeper into balancing. However, a vectoring range of ~0.01 degrees still seem like a bug to me. All right, on the flyby at venus, I didnt had a goo nor a science Jr and got 1600 science points due to the other instruments. Thats plenty of science already. By visiting the other bodies with the 4 standard instruments, there should be plenty of science floating around. Also I have a surface laser zapping spectrometer analyser thingy from who knows what mod, gas chromatograph and liquid chromatograph mass spectrometers from the interstellar mod. A geiger counter that looks like it comes from AIES or FASA. Plenty of opportunity for science there. To have something that HAS to come back that are not kerbals and to make the return mission in any case somewhat difficult, I proposed to use the heavy science parts that give far less science on transmission anyway. Also it makes sense to return them because all the other instruments just measure something that can be transmitted just as well. You dont need to return a thermometer or a spectrum, transmitting it is reasonable. Science jr and goo on the other hand, do not have any analysing equipment. They have just a target substance that is exposed to its environment. Returning them makes sense. As for the dV question: I plan all my missions with this chart: http://i.imgur.com/SqdzxzF.png, but I plan for 10.000 dV in vacuum for launch, but obviously use atmospheric engines and a TWR in atmosphere of 1.4 at launch. Dont know if thats the best, but it works well for me. So for a mars mission with highly elliptical orbit and return, we have 10000 dV for launch 4370 dV for going there (plus contingincy) and 1060 dV for returning (plus contingincy) with aerobreak in Earth atmosphere. That makes a dV of 16000 total, including contingency. Thats perfectly manageable, even if you have a heat shield for interplanetary return and 2 experiments each. For Venus you would need slightly less. Thats a perfect example for the need of a heavy lifter btw.. ;-)

Hi all! Sorry for the radio silence the last week, I was at the SPIE conference (was there anyone else?) and had no time for KSP whatsoever. I managed to finish the tech tree as far as RPL goes at the moment and I find it pretty good so far. I havnt finished the tech tree, I just finished all the custom experiments. The experience was quite good and I like the direction this goes. I havn't had such fun with KSP in a long time as I had to play it in the RSS environment using RPL. Thank you again for making this fantastic tech tree mod! Some suggestions or more opinions what I would change. Of course, please dont feel entitled to follow any of them, I dont want to drive your progress but I still want to give you feedback. * I guess it would be viable to decouple the experiments parts from the probe cores. That way, it is not necessary to launch an experiment if one wants to build a communication network for example. So it might be nice to have two or more types of probe cores, normal ones and radiation hardned ones (heavier). Normal probe cores simply stop working after 100 days in space or something, radiation hardened ones might survive indefinitely. The experiments them selfs are goodthough. They are diverse enough to be fun! Only the lack of instructions ingame what to do with them is a bit troublesome. The text is not always very helpful. Also I experimented with SCANsat and I find the experience quite satisfying. Not for collecting science though (I only scanned Earth and the Moon) because the science return is just too small for the afford. But its still nice to do. BTW: The moons elevantion seems odd, except for some craters, the entire surface is at or above 7000m. Would be nice to rebalance the 0-level for elevation if possible. I would like to see the transmission of science option of the Science Jr and Goo container being removed or set to 0. These experiments are clearly designed for sample return experiments. Would make sense to not be able to transmit them. All together, the probes to launch are too light. I never needed to launch more than 5T into LEO. It would be nice if experimental equipment became heavier. Maybe for a moon rover, I would need 10T launch system.. It would be nice to have something that is really heavy and not fuel to launch into orbit. A space station does not really count as you cant do anything with it. And even if, as soon as the number of parts become reasonably high to be considered a space station, the game becomes unplayable due to lag. So I would like to see some really heavy non-station and useful things to launch. I said it before and I say it again: The number of useless parts that can be replaced by procedural equivalents are too large. Especially aerodynamic parts. Also many parts that are specific to certain real space ships seem to be misplaced in the tech tree. Given the nature of the game (build your own rocket and fly it to the moon et al.), many of the specialized parts (not engines) should be hidden away somehow to make the parts list shorter and less clattered with junk. I know that some people like to replay history, but to do that, RPL seems to be the wrong concept. To replay history, a tech tree is not the appropriate tech model. Instead a linear progression is much more appropriate, with only a few options in the beginning: US tech vs. Russian tech vs. European tech. After that it should be rather linear with a few dead ends here or there. If a tech tree concept is preferred with themed tech in its branches, hisory is maybe not the best model to look at. In a tech tree approach, the nodes should focus on functionality and leave out shrapnel like warheads or parts that are clearly designed to recreate real space craft like the specific Mercury tech, Gemeni tech and Soyous tech. Some issues/bugs: * The text for the range of antennas seems wrong. They always range further than the text describes. * It is hard to balance a probe with a radially attached antenna. I tried to balance it with other experimental parts of equal mass but did not succeed. I suspect the mass of small parts is not simulated correctly. Because the small probe engines do not provide enough gimbling (0.01 or so degrees, effects at least two engines), the result is a huge expense in RCS fuel. I suspect this is a bug. Cant say if it is due to the rescaling or due to a engine replacer mod, probably the latter. (Hope you read this Nathan..) * The node for nuclear engines goes on top of the right information panel. * The text of the Sputnik2 node does not fit in the available space * The science parts of AIES are available before the corresponding stock science parts Cheers, Semmel

Ohh thx.. I tried to change that in game but didnt find the option.. I forgot to take a look at the settings menu. I fixed that Lets wait until MedievalNerd sorts them out. Give the man some slack ;-)

As we talked about SCANsat being integrated into RPL, I was surprised that it kind of already was in there. I made the test and launched 2 5T lifters with 3 satellites each. The probes used the 0.5T cubic computer cores for bacterial experiments. The first were 3 low earth altitude mapping satellites and the other 3 high altitude mapping satellites. Both launches were in a polar orbits. The low quality altitude map turned out to not need 3 satellites, that was overkill, but the high altitude (orbit at 7500 km) worked quite well that way. It took 26 kerbin days (so almost 1 week earth time) to map 99.9% of the world. At 1000x speed, that were a bit more than 30 min watching some orbital ballet. To be honest, after these launches, it was quite good to sit back and see everything working so nicely. To me, that is totally acceptable. If I launch a satellite to an other world, with just one mapping gismo, well, that might be a bit painful. Would be nice if the maps would give more than 20 science though. Thats kind of lame for such an afford. Cheers, Semmel

Don't worry, my comment wasn't meant to be criticism, it was just a reminder to be patient. As for the second info... congratulations! Its nice to see ones work being appreciated! I will probably never play Watch_Dogs, too much hecticness from what I have seen so far. I loved Uplink when it came out, it had its moments where one had to be fast, but it was much more in the direction of acting in the shade. (sorry for being off topic) Contrary to the other voices here, I dont like an installation video. I prefer text to be honest. I was planing on doing a creatig a graph where each node is an installation step and each edge represents a logical connection that you have to follow in order to get a working install. But I will do the graph ealiest with the next complete install of RPL I do, so I can create the graph in parallel with my install process. On that note, anybody tried to use KSP Mod Admin for RPL? I might also try to use it for my next complete install..

With the current release of PP and RF, go to GameData/ProceduralParts/Parts/ZOtherMods/RFTank.cfg and alter the appropriate lines to the suggested ones in here: forum link. That gives you larger PP tanks, but not too large and removes the volume limit completely, so the tanks are only limited by their shape. However, please consider: So by using my suggestion, you might end up with funny things in the process but I don't understand the syntax of the MM tweaks to get the specific behavior as described in my post. MedievalNerd promised to fix the tanks issue with the next build of RPL.

I have the same issue. Sometimes it transmits 100% at once, sometimes it doesn't. I figured its not something RPL can fix, but since I do not play without it, I didn't report it. It didnt appear to be interfearing experiments though, because it happens indipendent of the experiment or the number of experiments I make at the same time.

Is it just me or does the volume of the procedural tanks doesnt update when I change the size? I deleted the old version of procedural parts and installed the new. When I put a tank under my probe core, I can change the size of the tank according to the tech limitations, but it always stays at 1060 L, no matter how large I make the tank. I use custom tech limits though to make it better fit with RSS, shown below: MODULE { name = ProceduralPart TECHLIMIT { name = start diameterMin = 1.0 diameterMax = 1.5 lengthMin = 1.0 lengthMax = 1.5 // Remove dependency on the volume, only limit by shape. volumeMin = 0.001 volumeMax = Infinity } TECHLIMIT { // FL-T400 - 1.25 x 1.87819 m = 2.305 kL // FL-T100 - 1.25 x 0.78125 m = 0.959 kL name = basicRocketry diameterMin = 0.5 diameterMax = 2.0 lengthMin = 0.5 lengthMax = 2.0 } TECHLIMIT { // FL-T800 - 1.25 x 3.75 m = 4.602 kL name = advRocketry diameterMin = 0.2 diameterMax = 3.0 lengthMin = 0.2 lengthMax = 4.0 } TECHLIMIT { // X200-32 - 2.5 x 3.75 m = 18.408 kL name = heavyRocketry diameterMin = 0.1 diameterMax = 5.0 lengthMin = 0.1 lengthMax = 8.0 } TECHLIMIT { // Jumbo-64 - 2.5 x 7.5 m = 36.816 kL name = heavierRocketry diameterMax = 7.0 lengthMax = 16.0 } TECHLIMIT { // Kerbodyne S3-14400 - 3.75 x 7.5 = 82.614kl name = veryHeavyRocketry diameterMax = 10.0 lengthMax = 32.0 } TECHLIMIT { // Not in main sequence. Depends indirectly off basicRocketry only // X200-8 - 2.5 x 0.9375 m = 4.602 kL name = advConstruction diameterMax = 3.0 } TECHLIMIT { // Not in main sequence. Depends indirectly off basicRocketry // Oscar-B - 0.625 x 0.3485474 m = 0.107 kL name = precisionEngineering diameterMin = 0.1 lengthMin = 0.1 } TECHLIMIT { // Make everything unlimited for metaMaterials name = metaMaterials diameterMin = 0.001 diameterMax = Infinity lengthMin = 0.001 lengthMax = Infinity } } Any idea? Edit: Ohh and I tried using the MM script to adjust the sizes by placing the above shown code into the frame posted on the first page for "mycheat.cfg". It had no effect, I was probably doing it wrong but I dont know the proper syntax :/