Daveroski

Indeed. I have played for thousands of hours and I still cannot remember a single time when I thought I needed such an alarm. If I am setting up a precise trajectory from one body to another, either to get the required orbit or for setting up a gravity turn, I usually have focus set to the target while I edit the node. This has now become quite awkward. So I invite the devs to enlighten me as to when such an alarm would be needed. I can't think of a singe one. D.

The trouble with most mods is that they start out as a good and simple idea but then the developers are browbeaten off the path by potential users and get into areas they had no intention of going into. If a developer made a series of mods which each did one thing and did it well, like performing the next plotted manoeuvre, I would be in there like a rat up a drainpipe. If this series of mods could also be used separately or together without conflict then I would clean the developer's alter once a month (except bank holidays) If these mods were properly tested and were so simple that they just worked without glitching and giving my PC an Estroke then I for one would be a very happy fellow. D.

You put alarm icons where they are not needed and yet you still haven't implemented a warp to start or end of SOI travel line. Come on guys get yer finger out! D. Also when travelling to Mimnus and you try to reach the end of the SOI by clicking on the end nearest Mimnus, The whole line goes blue and turns into an orbit line, Like your ship might sail past Mimnus altogether and start going back to Kerbin. Looks really tacky. D.

Why? They get in the way ALL the time. No one ever needs alarms at An and Dn often enough to warrant their being constantly in the way. Please get rid of them. D.

I can't play it like this. D.

To get an orbit, no matter which direction you start flying, you would go prograde. You see, unless you are already in an orbit prograde it the name given to the direction your craft is currently travelling in. A rover on the surface going south by southwest will still be going prograde from the point of view of the rover. This is because In Space There Is No Up Or Down, North Or South, East Or West. You need a reference. Such as the Planet you are orbiting, the Sun or the ship itself. Around the Sun, Prograde is the direction that the planets travel around it. At least in most systems. This is because planets are usually created by the formation of the Sun. The sun is spinning too and planets tend to go in the direction of that spin. A captured planet could have a retrograde orbit. Around a planet, Prograde is recognised as the direction that the planet is spinning or assumed it would be still spinning if it hadn't wound down and stopped. A captured moon could have a retrograde orbit Your ship. Prograde is the direction that it is travelling. Not the direction it happens to be facing. Firing your engines Prograde means thrusting in the direction you are travelling. This will increase your Apoapsis (Ap) or Perriapsis (Pe) (which ever you are furthest from. Or both if you are directly opposite neither of them. Enough thrust will make your current position the Periapsis and the Apoapsis will move directly opposite Firing your engines Retrograde means pointing them in the opposite direction to the one you are travelling in. Reducing Apoapsis Don't think of it as speeding up or slowing down. That will get confusing. Especially as thrust tends to have the opposite affect on your actual orbit speed. Lower either and your orbit will be faster raising them will make it take longer to complete an orbit. Once in orbit. You would then use Normal and Anti-Normal thrust to change the inclination of your orbit. (It's tilt or slant) 0 Degrees means you are going exactly around the equator. 90 or -90 would be a polar orbit. This small amount of information is enough to confuse anyone at first. ) Doubtless others will e only too happy to muddy the waters with but's and ahh's) In short, if you can understand what I have told you so far, you will do fine. If you don't re-read it until you do. You'll get it eventually. D GTG tea's ready.

I doubt, after all this time, it will ever get fixed. It's more like an unfinished mod than a real DLC. D.

I use Linux Mint dual boot with Win 7. I play KSP on Linux, since most of it was developed on Linux on an engine that was developed on linux. My games on win7 pro are slowly being updated to not work on win7 pro any more. Enough of them work on linux to keep me entertained. When I can't play games on win7pro any more I'll just reformat for Linux. Linux is as powerful an O/S as windows, if not more so. An interesting point is that while I can play a good number of the latest games on Linux I can also still play games that are older than most of you. Some older win games though will not run at all well on newer versions of windows. Upgrading my Linux OS to the next version is as easy as upgrading windows. With my Linux though, everything still works afterwards. Once I have backed up with Timeshift on Linux, I can tweak and customise my OS without worrying about breaking it. Everything can be put back just as it was before I started fiddling with it. As I see it, with the corporate OS's, I have to pay to be spied on and pay to be advertised to. With Linux I don't 'have to' pay although I have bought a number of coffees over the years and of course the spying and the advertising is much more controllable. I will never get win10 or any other corporate OS. I've been ripped off quite enough by their like. My Linux systems all run faster and more smoothly than the others. So I'm happy. D.

Playing on Linux No Mods All DLC Not using steam. Playing from the steam folder. Went onto steam. Noticed an update for KSP. Installed the update. Closed steam. Entered the KSP folder and started KSP. Played around with a jet making kerbals black out. Thought about doing a High G mission. Noticed that Duna was coming up along side Kerbin so decided to launch a Sat. Launch went well. Made minor course correction to set Ap of sat to around 50K over Duna North Pole. Flew with the ship out of Kebin SOI. Got the milestones for flyby and orbiting the sun. All looked well. Decided to change vessel to Mimnus Station and cash in on several days of science. Couldn't find my Sat any more. Checked that I had Relays and probes Visible on the map. No sign. Went to Tracking Station. Debris from the flight to orbit was there but no sign of the vessel. Gone. D. This is from a vanilla (never seen a mod) game. Just updated. If this is bug that no one knows about and says that they need logs and screenshotsI will quit playing KSP right now. D. Odds Bodkins. Just reloaded to see how recent my latest quicksave was and the ship was back. Right where it should be. Showing up on the tracking station as soon as I entered. I'm sure that somewhere in it's malevolent code it's laughing is little thrusters off at me. Ok KSP... I'm watching you.

TLDR: GOTO The Short Answer Below The art of "Getting Good" is fast becoming a lost art. Our imagination is a huge part of the thinking process. Your main tool at getting good is an imagination. Unfortunately, the very technology people want to "Get Good" with is the same technology robbing them of the art. The death of the imagination started when calculators in school became part of the thinking process. One is no longer taught to visualise two apples magically vanishing from a row of five to leave three remaining apples. Now one simply presses 4 buttons to get the answer. Going hunting used to involve throwing a spear or shooting an arrow. Before the shot one would visualise the path of the spear or arrow and be able to estimate how much power was involved in making the shot. Today over 95% of the population of the world have never even seen an animal in the wild, let alone have to hunt one. It is fascinating to think that so many people eat hamburgers yet in cities less than 6% have even seen a cow. They are only ever seen on TV for so many people. People used to walk from place to place and the number of possibilities of things that could be imagined might happen on the way is what gave birth to so much of human literature. That people are not having their own individual experiences any more is the main reason why there is so little in the way of new stories. As children, picking up a stick or a stone and it becoming in the mind's eye an aeroplane or a motor car and imagining the forces acting on it as one flew of drove at insane speeds around the garden was the foundation of many great scientists and thinkers. Imagining who might live in that creepy old house and what they might be like became the start of many scary stories which have since become books and movies. Speaking of books. Reading stories means that you have to be able to see the story in your mind. Excellent training for the imagination. But today, even though there are so many more people in the world than there were, there are actually fewer people in the world today that have read an actual book than there were just fifty years ago. They see the product of the imaginations of others splashed on a screen and never use their own. Back when the human population didn't have so many zero's in it's number people used to imagine for their entertainment or used it as a tool for their livelihoods. It was a tool used to invent new and wondrous things. The wheel, flight, submersibles and yes, even the first rockets. Someone had to imagine wearing the skin of an animal before clothing was invented. If our children and their children never imagine what life would really be like in the low gravity of The Moon or on Mars then as adults, they will never want to go. The Short Answer How do you get good? Stop looking for the short answer. Imagine. Feel. Think. D.

Does your lander have ore containers in symmetry around the outside? D.

Different strokes for different folks. I have a refinery in low orbit. I descend, mine the ore and take the ore back up to the refinery. With a level 3 or higher engineer at the refinery (or in the miner doubling up as engineer for the refinery) it proves to be quite efficient and cost effective. I can even use a tiny awful drill to mine the ore (takes a while) then I don't have the expense of lugging large drills and converters up and down even the weight saved on cooling and power is all fuel. Then even a level 2 engineer is cost effective. D.

Keeps losing enhanced scanning ability on flat ground just around the KSC. I'd expect it to lose enhanced if the rover leaves the ground. It does. But if I zoom out with the scanner so that just the range of the scanner can fit in the window and drive around a little, every so often it loses enhanced ability and the zoom resets to default. I have to then set the zoom again. It happens too often to get any joy. ALSO: There is a question mark on the scanner in the KSC boundary. I can drive over it with the rovemate but it has no clue what it is. Having the largest ROC scanner on board doesn't help either. "Nothing to scan" Kerbals can't see anything when they are standing on it. So there you have just two of several problems that have sucked all the joy out of any attempt to actually make an interesting rover for off-world exploration. D.

When I give a part a name using the controler I would like to be able to right click a model part and see a reference to that name on the gizmo. Then I would be able to see just by right clicking a part weather I have programmed it or not. D.

This is nonsense. I always turn off rotation on RCS thrusters in space and only use gyros. The only time I use RCS for directional control is when I am re-entering with a spaceplane to keep the nose pointing in the right direction while airbraking. Switching when speed in a given direction becomes zero or even minus is one thing. Switching just because your speed falls below a positive number is unhelpful at best. I always felt it smarter to switch to Radial-Out just before touch down then I can gently settle onto a steep slope without sliding down a hill. Which is why I put it in the tech support area. It is a technical function which to me, currently makes no sense. I use an unmanned probe for data gathering for my stations. Because I can get the probe thrust down to RCS speeds I don't really need RCS on a probe to dock with the station. Problems only arise if I apply slightly too much thrust so that I don't come to an relative stop. Simply selecting Target/Retrograde on the SAS would be a huge help but as Target/Prograde and Target Retrograde become unselectable at low speeds, it becomes problematic. I have to manually point at these directions and it is slower than SAS would be. This magnifies the error of the overshoot. The question I always ask myself when this situation arises is "Why make them unselectable?" I just have to know. The puzzle is taxing my logic. I'm even starting to think that it isn't by design and that it simply hasn't been "fixed" yet. D.

I just said that. If I can see them on my nav ball I should be able to select them with SAS. Now that we have established the question how about some answers for the reasoning behind it?

While I am here... At low speeds prograde and retrograde become unselectable when using the SAS in Target mode. I can still aim for either manually but not with SAS. Was this lack of function by design? If so what was the silly idea behind it? D.

This setup uses the old port and seems to work as expected. However with the new port... It does not. If I try to translate forward, there is no reaction from the ports at all. If I translate backward They will all fire. If I translate Left or right... I had an Apollo style mission to The Mun which would have been a disaster had I not been experienced enough to dock using just the ships engines. Needs Fixing. D.

Eva? a game? film? My memory is full of suckiness nowadays. Should I know this? D.

I made an unmanned data gathering trip to Mimnus. The idea was to make a Drop-Pod that I could allow to fly all the way from Mimnus and back to Kerbin and just splash into the atmosphere rather than orbit first. See the full documented mission report here Hope you like it. D.

I tend to play vanilla mostly. My current game has no Mods. It does have the two expansion packs and I decided to test the Hinges on this mission too. I used them as landing struts and as extenders to push out parts in an unnecessary manner. The plan is to land a craft on Mimnus Get my data and complete the Explore Mimnus contract. At the same time I will leave a relay station on the surface. My target will be one of the poles of Mimnus with the idea that it will be in constant communication with Kerbin. This is the craft that will make the trip. Now to get it ready for the trip. This ship uses asparagus staging It will first drop the top and bottom tanks and then the two side tanks. First the top and bottom tanks are emptied and dropped They also kept the central tank full of fuel. Then the two side tanks are dropped when empty. They also kept the central tank full. Finally the central tank is dropped and we are left with the craft that will actually make the trip to Mimnus. Here I tested the hinges by pushing out the Coms and Solar Panels. It has to make the trip with them fully extended and make the landing too. Course plotted. Yes I'm really going to fly all the way there and not use the magic to instantly get me there. Some of us like to do things the old fashioned way. I may not hit it on the nail but sometimes if the ball lands in the garden it can make him just as angry as it would if it hit the window. Close enough I hoped and it seemd to work out alright. Setting the obit after arrival. Here I have marked a couple of waypoints somewhere between the two should be good. Get rid of the engine and tank that brought us here. Now we are ready to attempt a landing. Got to keep an eye out for the slopes. Some of them can make landing problematic. Looking around before final descent. A bit of a slope but manageable. The Hinges seem to make better landing struts than Landing Struts. Which is nice. Gather my data. Save the data for the return trip and turn off the engine on the landing craft. Then I can raise the throttle a few notches and when I hit staging the return pod should launch. On our way home. Now it gets interesting. I have set the target to be inside Kerbins atmosphere. The idea is I burn this node and then drop the remaining fuel and engines before hitting the atmosphere. No slowing down. No getting into orbit first. Firing the node and letting you have a closer look at the return stage. It carries the fuel engines coms and solar panels. Preparing to drop the fuel and engines. I will then have only the remaining power in the pod section so that it's gyros can keep the pod pointing in the right direction. We Hope. Not going so fast right now but I suspect we will speed up considerably as we get further in the gravity well. The chutes are set to auto-pop so now we just wait and see. Picking up some heat and our speed is most certainly increasing. Getting some air resistance starting to slow us down but it's also getting hotter. It seems the heat shield did its thing and we are cooling and slowing. Of course it's on the dark side so visabilty is poor. The glow just faded and the chutes will pop any time now. Even in the dark, That is a lovely sight. Here I am concerned that it may not float and end up being crushed by preassure. She's a bit keel heavy but retrievable. Looks like we might get something nice for crimbo eh? Contract complete! Jolly good! I hope you found this report interesting and possibly inspirational. D.

A friend bought me the expansions, I should have said "No Thanks." I was going to come here and rant about how mod makers writing expansions was a bad idea. That they would, like all their mods, either not work properly or break the game. Some of the bugs I took in my stride. The latest one is a step too far. I built a ship carrying 3 com sats end to end and sent it to the Mun. Put it in a Hi-Lo polar orbit and selected a small decoupler and told it to decouple the first sat. But it was broken. If I warped after the decouple the front sat simply vanished. An error in the Console says something about a NaN orbit. If I switched to the detached ship instead of using warp, it moves away from the carrier and then just seems to sit above the Mun with no orbital information. The Console is spammed with errors. I hoped that this new patch would allow me to continue my mission, but no, It's broken. I didn't even use anything from the expansions (MODS) to create the ship. You have simply broken the base game. I am not using any mods apart from the two expansion packs. The worst part is that, just like the mods you lot have written, it will never properly work as it should again. Something will always be gamebrakingly broken about it. I'm an idiot because I KNEW what the result of installing them would be and went ahead and did it anyway. Some good came of it though. I only installed Linux because of this game. Linux is now my main and preferred OS because of this game. https://www.dropbox.com/s/2421jm5cu305rrr/quicksave.sfs?dl=0 D.

You are welcome. (Hmmm appreciation.. warm and fuzzy inside... hmmm) ;o) D.

The effect is caused by wind shear. KSP doesn't have wind! I hear you cry! If a completely symmetrical craft isn't pointing exactly prograde then drag caused by the wind hitting the side closest to prograde is the result. The higher the airspeed the greater the shear, the greater the effect. The fins on the first craft produced more drag on the prograde side than the retrograde side which helped to 'steer' it toward prograde. Very close to prograde the difference may be small. It depends on how much surface area is exposed to the shear effect. Stray too far from prograde and any craft will stall and flip. This is the reason some craft tumble when going into orbit. The upside is that if you make a craft close to the shape of a bullet without fins, it will be quite happy to keep flying toward prograde and will allow you to let it stray further from prograde than the same craft with fins would do at the same speed. D.

The reason they glitched out of a structural tube is simple. It's because you put them inside a structural tube. D.