BrickedKeyboard

Ok, I'm trying to figure out how to use "Real Fuels". The problem is, I go to the GUI for an engine and choose a higher tech level. The tech level displayed does not update. Furthermore, I have to choose the engine tech level for every single engine in the game when I place it? There is no way to click somewhere to say "I am now tech level 2"? Or am I missing something somewhere. There appears to be no documentation.

It seems like V18 is incomplete. I saw the warp drive was available super early under science, and there was a bunch of stuff unassigned.

Alright, so I fired up this mod, i think. I downloaded all 35 files, put them in my ksp, loaded up the game and downloaded V18 via Tree Edit. I saved it, then removed tree edit (so I won't be tempted to cheat), then hit the VAB. Uhh...the start node is completely empty. I get this is supposed to be a hardcore challenge, but since I don't even have a kerbal to put on the runway, I cannot even get started. What gives? Ok, I deleted modular fuels. Then I relaunched the game. Suddenly, craptons of stuff is available. What is going on here? (I deleted modular fuels because that mod is on the "honor system" regarding tech level unlocks, and I find that far too tedious to deal with)

Alright, I just checked. There are approximately 4 mods in this list that can't be packed into a mod pack "legally". (not that anyone is likely to be suing anybody) Those mods are both KAS and Kethane, and like 2 others. Yes, a file with all mods in it would be a big download, but I would much rather click 1 file + maybe 4 others tops than have to dig up 35+ files.

Ok, so I'd like to try this thing out. I opened up the Excel document...and there are 35 files I need to dig up from 35 separate forum threads? Ouch. Ok, so after installing all 35 files, do I only need to install the tweak pack, or is there something else to do...?

As for a simple way to handle a spacecraft overheating : When heat > thresholdOverheat, trip a thermal overload breaker for the entire spacecraft. You could set the EC to 0 to model this, since, while the breakers are tripped, the electrical systems of the spacecraft are shut down. Once the heat gets below some thresholdOk, reset the breakers automatically, which will cause the game to power up it's systems, and restore any EC that was stored in the batteries. (the EC wouldn't be lost, just temporarily unavailable) This would be far more realistic than losing probes because the panels decide to fold up on their own. Also, you should reduce the storage greatly so the overheat happens within hours.

I am virtually certain you are wrong about this. As the black body of the solar panel heats up, eventually it will reach a temperature that is in equilibrium with the environment. This temperature is not going to be hot enough to damage the panels in most situations, and all the heat is being radiated away from the black body panel outside your spacecraft. If you use the energy to drive a circuit inside your spacecraft, virtually any circuit you might be driving produces waste heat. If it drives the electronics controlling the probe, all that energy is going to be released as waste heat by the chips, and if the probe has no way to dissipate the heat, it will build up until it fails. If it drives the plasma rocket, that 28% waste heat is released inside the housing of the engine's high power circuitry modules. (the high voltage transformers, the magnetrons, the big power control semiconductors). Those components will overheat if there is no way to get that waste heat away from them. So, no, your model is wrong. Solar panels not driving a load are not going to overheat your spacecraft, while if they are driving a load, they will. The best model would be to identify every single electrical component on a spacecraft, and cause it to produce waste heat as a percentage of how efficient it is. Electronics are space heaters (100% of the power they consume goes to waste heat), while plasma engines have a smaller percentage of waste heat, but they use hugely more energy. But, barring this, you could just model it by the power consumed from the solar panel's output. From your other writing, I'm guessing you have a decent education in physics. However, sometimes, it takes a bit of engineering knowledge to understand how these abstract ideas will actually apply in an actual system. I can give you schematics of actual spacecraft if you are still not convinced.

Ok, what's the deal, here : This is a much simpler situation. I've got an interplanetary "mother ship" that is orbitting Gilly. I have a lander on gilly. I have a dish antenna (not needed at this range, I know) pointed at the mother ship. The mother ship has a connection to Kerbin. From the lander, I cannot send science back to Kerbin. I can see a yellow line in this picture, I don't know what that means.

I agree 100%. Also, the way waste heat affects spacecraft systems is also quite wrong. Fractal should use modulemanager to add the waste heat stat to the game's pods, engines, and scientific instruments. If waste heat is too high, it should disable them. Furthermore, the waste heat storage number should be much much smaller. It should be about 100->1000 times smaller. If you are making waste heat faster than you are dissipating it, spacecraft should overheat and shut down within hours, not days or weeks. Finally, waste heat should not be generated if power is being produced by solar panels and is not being used by the spacecraft. (for nuclear reactors that are at idle, this is understandable). Solar panels that are not producing power do not produce waste heat in real life physics. (I mean, they do heat up, but you are basically just holding the circuit open, and there's no load that they are driving)

This was how it worked in the Minecraft days. No one wants to watch some video and follow a spreadsheet. At most, they want to click one link. Look, you can just go to the forum threads for the various mods and check. Are they using a CC license? Then pack it in your pack. The mods you absolutely cannot pack for any reason, you will I guess have to give a direct link to where to download it at, but you need to include all files that are used to modify the mod. In the Minecraft days, modded gameplay did not become popular or common until they developed the Tekkit and Feed The Beast launchers, which are programs that are 1 click.

Like any programming language, you can emulate this feature with a lot of code. You could set the steering to just a few degrees over to activate the RCS, then a moment later, release the steering, and have you script calculate the rate of change (the angular turn rate). You could keep doing this, "steering" ahead of where you want to be, and doing the opposite to slow down at the other end.

So, flight computer...where can I find a list of what these buttons do?

So I built this drone explorer aircraft. With FAR running, it flies quite nicely. However, there's a severe shortage of power. It is flying in the atmosphere on 2 high bypass turbofans, and various parts from B9 that remind me of modern jet aircraft. Well, one of the parts it seems to be missing from that ensemble is an auxillary power unit. The turbofans produce far too little electric charge on their own (which is realistic, I suppose, I think modern jet engines used for flight only have tiny alternators, just enough to provide backup power to the aircraft). It needs an auxillary power unit that provides little thrust but about a megawatt of power. Instead, I have to keep the radios running using solar panels, which is silly (and it is hard to fit enough solar panels since they add drag)

"Helicopters" node breaks the save. I cannot figure out what exactly is wrong with this node...and the problem is not every time, but in my actual savegame (with all the extra crap in it from actually playing the game, not the pristine file distributed here), researching helicopters makes the node "flight" disappear and prevents me from researching anything else. Deleting the node from tree.cfg and removing the dependency on the next item up in aerodynamics fixes the problem. I can't see anything special about the node in the tree.cfg file, I don't know what the error is caused by.

If you try to type a "^" in the terminal in kOS, you get that arrow. I *think* it still works right and raises the number to an exponent.

I can't think of any work around. There's absolutely no way to use kOS to do anything other than the example files (for landing and ascent assistance). This is because the very moment you create variables in memory, or have running code, the ship becomes un-savable. The variables cannot be erased, as near as I can tell. Anyone have an idea how to get around this?

Well, then the other problem is that the Mission Control plugin isn't so great. It does not seem to actually do anything but silently keep score (inaccurately) in the background.

I can confirm that just setting values to memory is what is screwing it up. I can sorta do a mission if I am very careful to avoid doing that until it is part of a stage I am going to get rid of.

alright, have loaded 2 savegames with "kOS" parts on my ships. Each one was corrupt, with half the ship missing. This was from quicksaving, then screwing something up, then going back to the quicksave. From the comments here, I take it that kOS corrupting saves is a common occurrence? Any fixes or workaround? Update : I narrowed it down : opening the console, then running some code, then quick-saving, even if that code has terminated, will corrupt the game. Toggling power does NOT help. It is still corrupt, even if I turned the power off to the part before quick-saving. The corrupt comes from using the "set" command. If you set some variables into memory on the ship, boom, save is now corrupt.

You really should pack every mod into a single file. The user should not have to do anything to play your tree as intended but extract a single file. Similarly, KAS and Kethane don't even have tree settings in the mod! The majority of mods allow for redistribution in their license, so long as you don't steal credit.

Probe flights are impractical within the current setup, because 1. Antenna for long distance are very finicky and unreliable, and if you lose connection, the mission is lost. 2. You get huge numbers of points for collecting samples. I just got 800 science for grabbing a soil sample from minmus.

Feedback from actual playtesting : So I made a firespitter + B9 based propeller plane, and I went to most of the biomes on Kerbin. Eventually I had the science lab, the barometer, the thermometer, and Jeb to give me science. This got me some points, but I found out that there is just not enough points on all of kerbin with just these instruments to really get anywhere. I was forced to do a large number of 1 way trips because I could not radio the findings back to base (no line of site to KSC, and no satellites), and I just couldn't justify investing more points in the aerospace tree other than to get the propeller engine plane and the Lancaster engines. Suggestion : Stick most of the science instruments into the aerospace tree. I think everything except for the Science Jr and the mystery goo you could justify "lore-wise" as coming from necessity when the kerbals developed aircraft. (while those pure-scientists just sat around and played in their Science jr). The instruments are : accelerometer, thermometer, barometer, "gravioli" detector, and sensor array computing nose cone. You need the first 3 to make even basic aircraft work in real reality, and I could imagine that when the kerbals develop supersonic high end jets they developed that nose cone to measure what was happening when you break the "sound barrier". And maybe the gravioli detector came as a collaboration between a science tree item and an aerospace tree item, as the pilots went to the scientists and asked if the force pulling them down was the same everywhere. That way, you start the game, and you go into the aerospace tree, getting more science instruments as you go, so you can fully explore kerbin making all of the measurements available. The way it is now, if you put points into aerospace more than the bare minimum needed to fly to biomes and do the few measurements you can make, you will screw yourself - you'll exhaust all the available science points, and you won't be able to get to space to get more. Propeller engines may be fun to start with, also, but to really get anywhere you need the turbojet. But you cannot have that without screwing yourself, and then, later, once you have unlocked more science instruments by making trips into space and bringing back science, and you want to get more science from kerbin, you can just do suborbital hops which are much quicker, especially since you can just time warp during the high ballistic arc part of the flight.

Got a question : do the piston engines in this mod lose power at some realistic speed? That is, they supply a certain amount of thrust until the airspeed over the propeller reaches a certain point and then the thrust diminishes to zero over some range? That seems to be what is happening, but was not certain.

Does the HL fuselage contain rocket fuel (fuel + oxidizer) or jet fuel?