Tibrogargan

I built a rover that's pretty much intended to collect science from KSP and feed it into fuel launches to a station with mobile lab in Kerbin orbit for "free" science. The rover just sits on the tarmac with wheels spinning. Wheels are clipping into the ground slightly (not sure if that's relevant). Exactly the same rover works by simply replacing the wheels with other types (e.g RoveMax Model M1), it's just the TR-2L that do this. I've triple checked that they are facing the right way and have been fiddling with friction and traction control for a while. Can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. Any suggestions?

When attaching anything to the bottom of an LV-N "Nerv" engine, the attachment point start to blink on and off making it quite difficult to place parts. I have a number of mods, including both Restock and Kerbal Atomics (both of which modify the LV-N) however the game behaves the same with these modules disabled. Would be interested to see if someone else can repo this issue with a very simple build: RC-001S Remote Guidance Unit, Mk1 Liquid Fuel Fuselage, LV-N "Nerv" Atomic Rocket Motor, TD-12 Decoupler, C7 Brand Adapter - 2.5m to 1.25m. After that anything I try and attach gets the blinking attachment point.

Sorry for the confusion, I was paraphrasing. At some point in time a burn needs to happen to get the periapsis back out of the atmosphere, hence "accelerate out of the atmosphere" - but this makes me wonder if it's worth it, since "accelerating out of the atmosphere" is often the most expensive part of any flight from Kerbin.

Short version: Is aerobraking when coming from a higher orbit in order to achieve an orbit going to save fuel (a worthwhile amount) , even though you need to accelerate out of the atmosphere? Long version: I have a ship that I designed to take Kerbals from a station in low Kerbin orbit to the moons in order to participate in flag placing ceremonies. The ship is designed around the 10m heat shield - it pretty much just slams itself into the atmosphere in order to dump momentum and adjust afterwards to circularize / rendezvous with the station again. There's also a spaceplane to get the Kerbals into orbit in the first place. It struck me that maybe I'm not really saving any fuel by doing this, since I need to accelerate back out of the atmosphere at the end - and maybe I could just re-design the spaceplane so it can make it to the moons. How can I figure out if I'm actually saving non trivial amounts of fuel?

When I was playing a few versions ago it seemed to only work at speeds above about 1 m/s, but the behaviour seems to have been updated - you can now go as slowly as you like and as long as the angle is reasonably close to 90º it should connect at very low speeds. ("0.0 m/s"). Haven't really tested it, but it seems that going too fast doesn't work now - but perhaps the few times I tried that the angle was the issue.

Thanks for that. Is there any way to enable the "Next Orbit" button on the 2nd and subsequent maneuvers? Trying to find a Duna transfer window at 1 hour per click is somewhat tedious

This mod provides some very useful functionality, thank you. Is there a way to restore the default behavior of closing/deselecting the node if you click somewhere else?

Just started using this mod, it's really useful. Is there any way to exclude engines (or sets of engines) from the calculation? I sometimes build landers that have a set of "landing" engines and a set of "main" engines and as far as I can see so far the plugin doesn't let you distinguish between them - so it's still usually back to the VAB/gravity hack cycle for balancing them.

If by "the Kerbals are not occluded bug" you mean that Kerbals that are not connected to, but still contained by a craft are affected by the surrounding environment as if they were not contained, then "yes", I guess?

Looks like the faring does not work either. The Kerbal is still being treated as a separate craft and immediately gets subjected to physics separately from the "parent". There seems to be no concept of being enclosed / inheriting parent physics unless the Kerbal is literally attached, by being in a chair / inside a capsule / on a ladder. Probably just going to have to accept it. There goes my dream of a Kerbal Dyson Sphere Tangential question. Is there a way of building a procedural fairing between two pieces of a craft without having to put some connector through the middle first? I assume the new engine plates use this type of mechanism, but it would be cool to have a customizable fairing instead of the plain cylinder.

Playing 1.5. Trying to make the kind of plane that is used to collect science information from (for instance) the Arctic, or from hurricanes. People can move around in the "cargo" area and do their work without being sucked out of the plane. Technically I guess a faring would be better than a cargo bay, since normally there's no ability to open the working area of a science plane.

Will this protect from aerodynamic forces, or just heat? Heat hasn't been a problem so far - he's just getting bounced around and explodes (although, if you're quick he can grab something and be safe)

I've put an external command seat in the cargo bay of a plane, along with a materials bay and goo container. The idea being that the scientist in the seat can do EVA reports while seated, then leave the seat in order to restore the materials bay and goo container. Problem is, when the plane is moving the Kerbal scientist becomes subject to aerodynamic forces even while the cargo bay is closed, with unfortunate results (for the Kerbal at least) Obviously, since both the materials bay and goo container are not biome specific while flying there is little actual point to being able to do this ... however ... I want to (realism or something). Is there any way to designate a space as "enclosed" so that Kerbal can be "unattached" and remain relatively safe?

Yes, tested after the upgrade. I think I see what's going on. Ore was mined, then when I switched on the ISRU it ran out of power and shut down in the middle of the night, but both the ISRU and drills showed that they were still running. Version 2 needs moar batteries.

Yes sir, I left it long enough for it to process about 150 science, which is about 15 days or so. No fuel made. Currently seeing what happens if I leave the drills running but not the ISRU.

I have a lander on the Mun that's intended to hop around collecting science and refueling itself. It seems to be OK with mining ore and refining it into fuel as long as you focus on it. If you switch to something else, it stops making fuel. When you come back, the drills say the ore rate is n/a. Anyone have any ideas where I could start with looking for the problem? The lander is probably not designed well, but there's nothing that stands out as egregiously wrong. The lander does have decouplers separating the ISRU and drill sections from the main body, in case the kerbals need to get back to Kerbin on their own. The decouplers do not have crossfeed enabled - does that affect ore flow, or just fuel?

Me too When talking about this sort of theoretical arrangement, it would hypothetically impact an MPL because while you would get a context bonus for doing Kerbin research on the surface of the Mun you would not get a bonus for doing Minmus research there (or maybe you would, since the data was still collected in Kerbin's SOI - but I guess it would just be lower)

Not talking about the actual experiment results. The MPL-LG-2 lets you take data captured in the field (i.e. from an experiment) and convert that data into science. 1 data = 5 science. You get a bonus for being in the same context (i.e SOI) that the data was captured in and another bonus for being on the surface (except for Kerbin, where you get a penalty). So, if the surface of the Mun is within Kerbin's SOI as far as a lab is concerned (the Mun's SOI is technically fully within Kerbin's SOI) you could theoretically get 138% instead of 125% just for being in orbit.

I've been taking field data from Kerbin to my orbital processing lab, but I was wondering if being on the surface of Mun counts as also being in Kerbin's SOI for purposes of the Mobile Processing Lab's Context Bonus. Since I send a shuttle out there every so often for training, it would be "free" to send science data along too and enjoy the extra bonus.

I'm trying to build a comms array with small relay satelites with 3 satellites spaced evenly around the equator of a moon. Getting the satellites into their initial position is easy enough (followed the tutorial), but the burn time is so long using xenon drives that the orbits end up being quite off center. I could do this with multiple small Hohmann transfers every time I hit AP - but it requires quite a few burns on multiple satellites - it ends up being very tedious. Is there a way I can plan my burns so I don't have to do quite so many?

Is there any way to invert an individual axis on a control pod, either in the VAB or during play? I have a ship that has two sets of engines, each facing a different direction and a control pod for each set of engines. I've set up the ship so that the "main" engines work as desired, but when I swap to the "auxilliary" engines/control pod I can only get two out of three control axes correct (pretty much East is East and Up is Up but North is now South). Is there any way I can individually invert a control axis that a control pod uses?

I'm finding the M4425 Narrow-Band scanner to be next to useless as the colours it uses for it's UI do not have enough variation (It's displaying 12.5% with exactly the same colour as 15.13%). I imagine it would be fairly simple to add some controls so that you can tell it to restrict it's output to a narrow band (*cough* *cough*) of values to get a decent spread of colour variation (would also be nice to stop it using fluro pink and green). Is there a mod or even just a way to modify settings to improve the readability of the UI scanner? I'm assuming that the problem might start with the granularity of the main resource display cut-off controls but I wouldn't know where to start doing something about it.

Not sure why playing stock disallows a skycrane harpoon (as long as by "harpoon" he means a grabbing unit). Maybe I'm crazy, but I built my entire 5 or 6 section Mun mining base with a reusable skycrane that is pretty much 6 terriers in a hex shaped arrangement balanced around a coupler. I use a docking port as my coupler, but no reason the port couldn't be replaced with a grabbing unit. Would definitely be relatively easy to pick up something under a couple of tons and get it into orbit. (I probably should have just built the crane with the AGU in the first place, it could have just refueled by landing on the base)

Ooh, never occurred to me that you could adjust an SRB's throttle. Thanks!

Refueling (96K for the Asparagus version). A Jumbo-64 plus a recoverable docking maneuver piece. 244 tons total with 43.9 ton payload. I believe 18% to orbit isn't bad for a rocket. Obviously once I open the tech I can do a lot better with turbo-jets. Technically, if I was recovering all the pieces it's possible to recover the actual cost would be more like 50K. I believe the SRB version was considerably heavier - and way harder to control (I deleted it, due to terrible)