BrickedKeyboard

Well, that didn't fix it. What did fix it was using heavier wings from B9 aerospace, using your cockpit and engines. This made a flyable aircraft. Another flyable aircraft I discovered by accident is this :

Playing it now. Looks like you took my suggestions and cleaned them up. Which cost, the one that doesn't count or do you mean science cost?

You can, using the hotkey. However, even 4x time warp is not enough for ion engines. Still, it does make interplanetary burns manageable. They are about 40 minutes long for a major burn, and you can just go into 4x time warp and use mechjeb so it only takes 10-15 minutes of real time. Ion drive powered spacecraft do have a huge range advantage, and you have tons of delta V to space - you just gotta wait a long time to use it. It's quite easy to make a spacecraft that can burn it's ion engine for 5-10 hours.

Fixed that for ya : https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/16656673/tree.cfg Almost exactly the same number of points, but I took a bunch of points out of the middle aviation stuff, reducing their costs to about 1/2 to 2/3 of their former values. I added those points to the top line of high end rockets, increasing it all but especially increasing the cost for the nuclear engine. I left the science stuff below alone, since you can't be getting points flying around the atmosphere if you don't have science modules. The reason for this, as I said, is to beat this campaign you absolutely MUST have rockets, eventually the big ones, to get around to get that science. You need extra fuel if you don't have mechjeb, also, so the bigger the better. You MUST have science gathering gear and radio antennas to get all the science you need, this tree totals out to almost 50,000 points. But you do not need any of the aerospace stuff, you can get around the planet much easier doing suborbital hops.

What strange bug? I cheated myself enough science points to unlock your whole tree so I can take a look at it. It looks great, for the most part, with nice clear paths of progression and the KSP interstellar stuff fits in perfectly. I closed the game and relaunched, and loaded the game again, nothing has disappeared. Now, there's just one criticism I have. The nodes "basic rocketry" and "general rocketry" come reasonably early. Moreover, you can get them instead of supersonic and high altitude flight. Suborbital hops are much easier to make work and are much faster than airplane flights for the job of getting around on Kerbin. If you are using remote tech and Ion cross, you'll have trouble actually going anywhere that is not near Kerbin, but you can get there much faster with rockets. However, at least all the planes are available much sooner, versus space travel which you have to research 2 trees to do effectively. Also, for those of us who have a tough time setting up an efficient interplanetary burn without MechJeb to calculate them precisely, it's a good spot in the tree where you put it. The way I would fix this, I would move the top line of rocketry stuff (the line that starts with basic rocketry) over a couple notches in difficulty, and I would move the hypersonic flight nodes back several nodes. I know that in real life, we have barely teched up to hypersonic flight 50 years after rocketry was common, but in this game, it is very hard to fly a hypersonic space-plane to anywhere, but rockets are easy.

I did look at the tutorial, but every firespitter plane I tried has a "feel" like it is made of styrofoam. This is horribly unrealistic. Sure, I've managed to sorta get into the air, sometimes, but things tumble around as if they have 0 mass.

You know what the ironic part is? The ion engines in ksp are horrendous overpowered, by a factor of about 1000 The other rocket engines in the game are actually a little worse than the state of the art engines (high end Russian liquid fueled rocket engines have better performance and weigh less, the NERVA rocket is worse than prototype nuclear engines) but the ion engine has about 1000 times more thrust than the real thing.

You're saying that Mar's atmosphere is not enough to stop you? That's true in real life, isn't it? I think the aerobraking they do with space probes has to use a very long path through the atmosphere and they have to use a rocket at the end.

I'm not saying DRE isn't working - it is, I've burned up many times. I'm pointing out that with good navigation you don't need a heatshield, and this is unrealstic -> on earth, there is no way at all to avoid burning up unless you can shed your orbital velocity with engine burns. RSS? what's that? 33km is a fairly high periapsis, the atmosphere is quite thin and there are only flames briefly. You also streak past that point very quickly, 33km is the lowest point of the aerobraking pass. The point is, after you do several braking passes, your orbit becomes briefly circular and then your apoapsis drops below the periapsis and you are going to reeenter for sure now. DR does not think there is enough energy, coming in from a low circular orbit, to burn up. I disagree, there almost certainly is, and I think that either the effects of reentry are being understated or the stock parts (goo tanks, stock engines, stock fuel tanks, etc) are too resilient. Of course, another factor working in the other direction is that high mach aircraft can fly so fast they have flames around them. They just barely survive, heating up to 900+ C in the upper atmosphere. Much harsher and they will burn up as well -> it isn't possible to heat shield their parts, and the real SR-71 doesn't burn up.

I have a couple of questions : Is it possible/likely that squad will buy this technology off you guys, or hire the creators of this mod, so that multiplayer can become a streamlined part of the stock game? The software implementations required to make it work is not a simple thing, it's gotta be worth a decent chunk of change, and a lot of Kerbal players want multiplayer. I mean, who wouldn't want to show off their ships? How daunting a task is campaign integration? Ideally, upon login to a server, a player would have a separate tech tree file created for that player detailing what that player currently has unlocked and how many science points they have. They would be restricted by the server to ships that use parts they unlocked, and science points would be server-side for that server only. Of course, I'm not sure if anything stops a player from hacking the game in several ways to cheat this, such as editing their stock ships to act like they are from star trek, or simply telling the server they just gained 100,000 science points...

I've managed to reenter several times, using FAR and DR, with my entire rocket remaining rocket, from a Munar mission. I set periapsis to about 33 km, and aerobrake on a pass. So far so good, you can aerobrake in earth's atmosphere without a heatshield if you choose a high enough altitude to do it from. I do a couple of passes, which makes my trajectory suborbital, and then I'm able to reenter with the entire bottom stage of my rocket still attached. There are some flames, but apparently stock fuel tanks don't burn up at at a mere 450 C. And, DR does not seem to model the high pressure shockwaves that would tear those thin walled tanks apart.

With FAR installed?

Sure, that looks reasonable. You going to release that tree so I can play it? Also, have you had any luck with Firespitter and FAR combined? So far, I've found the firespitter aircraft to be absurdly unrealistic and nearly unflyable.

1. Nothing 2. Depends on power source. http://i.imgur.com/omF5f3q.png 3. Node_name 4. Not very, because of how the game does not simulate spacecraft you don't have focused. This prevents relay systems from working more than intermittently. I think most players find them more trouble than they are worth.

Could you use antimatter + outside air or antimatter + water to get enough thrust for liftoff? Admittedly not very efficient, but the thrust would be there, right? Of course, out of all the futuristic technologies i know about, for doing mere liftoff from an atmosphere, using a laser based on the ground to vaporize the back of your spacecraft (several thousand isp), or an electromagnetic launcher (isp irrelevant), or an elevator cable is all a lot better than any engine.

2 rover wheels connected by an i-beam with a seat on top and 2 jet engines on the back would be as close as we can do with stock parts, right?

Start a new game. Choose the "KSP Interstellar" tree. Look at the top 3 nodes in the tree.cfg file. That's them. There's also a couple other definitions buried in the tree. Look at this map here : http://i.imgur.com/55xVHqY.png As for cost, well, I haven't played the research enough to really know what the costs are, however, keep in mind that KSP Interstellar offers a science lab that simply gives you more science points if you put it somewhere and it has crew and a power source.

My god. And he's not wearing a helmet. (yes, at a mere 45mph, a helmet would probably help). And, he's on an uneven road on a somewhat janky looking bike. The actual speed is not as big of a deal, I think a good cyclist can hit 45 mph under good conditions?

Conversely, they would not have needed to dock at all for a Moon mission that was just a probe. The Soviets sent several probes that were able to land, 3 were able to return samples. Wiki says it was 0.326 Kg of moon rocks, versus a few hundred pounds with the Apollo missions. However, presumably, the Soviets did this much cheaper. Similarly, with the manned missions that were saved by crew, had the crew not been there, the mission would have failed...but we could have launched several more unmanned missions for the same cost, and probably at least one of those missions would have succeeded.

You didn't add the new nodes "interstellarTechFusionPower, interstellarTechAccelerator, or interstellarTechAntimatterPower" to your tree.cfg. So I'm having trouble seeing how you support warp engines and other stuff from KSP Interstellar. A search of the file reveals no results for common KSP Interstellar items such as the "vista" fusion engine, etc. I finally figured out why it is working at all -> it's set by the mod itself to be present when the vanilla tech tree node "experimental science" is present. However, you haven't added the correct nodes to the tree from this mod.

Can you link a part file where this has been fixed so I can look at it in the editor and see where precisely those centers need to be with respect to one another? (yes, i know the basic idea is CoM ahead slightly of CoL, but there must be other subtleties there) What about where the planes "feel" like they are made of styrofoam, and they jerk around erratically? That seems to happen to anything, I think it's either that the mass/lift/thrust values for this mod are way off, or FAR is way off.

Ok, maybe it's my design, maybe it's my piloting, but with FAR installed (have not tried without), I cannot seem to make a plane that is flyable. I've tried most of the stock firespitter planes, most of them are unflyable. They go out of control almost immediately after throttle up. One of the few planes that works, surprisingly, is the VTOL. For some reason, the aerodynamics model likes it. One thing I did notice is that no matter what plane I tried, they all "feel" like they are made of styrofoam. They instantly accelerate, they get tossed around the air like tops, the slightest twitch on the rudder during a takeoff roll and they get tumbled end over end into pieces. Note that I've tried stock planes, the ones packaged with this mod pack, and I have a thrustmster HOTAS joystick. I don't have any problems like this with semi-realistic flight sims. Anyways, if anyone has gotten an aircraft from this mod that feels realistic and is easy to fly, please link the part file. I'd really like to find out what I'm doing wrong. Note that this must be WITH FAR running.

I was thinking how the incredible fame the early astronauts enjoyed was not entirely deserved. After all, they didn't design the rocket or the mission or do all the math needed to make it possible. (for the most part). Apollo era astronauts were mostly there to float in the can and flip switches on demand from mission control, just like Kerbals. However, there is something to be said for the bravery the early astronauts showed when they boarded those multi-story colossi crammed to the gills with fuel and liquid oxygen. It does take serious guts to ride a barely tested rocket. And I wondered, so if I were looking for humans to stuff in my shiny new rocket, what characteristics would I look for? I'd want to find someone who was educated and skilled and willing to strap themselves into a crazy untested contraption and have a good attitude no matter what went down...

I looked at your tree file, KW Rocketry and B9 aerospace are both mentioned a lot. Do we want to have one or both installed for the proper experience? (the reason I asked is that B9 and KW both add a lot of duplicate parts that clutter up the editor)

Problem : the nuclear reactors in this mod make too much EC. You've already included your own energy resource - megajoules - so there is no reason to let the reactors turn their power output to EC at such a high rate. (I assume it's 100%, but whatever it is, it's too much) This is why : I suppose this counts as a cross-mod interaction, however, even the stock ion engine becomes super OP because you can run a limitless number of them off of the smallest reactor.