Pecan

On a clean, new, 32-bit install of KSP 0.24 I spent a couple of hours downloading and installing all the mods I wanted, starting with RPM. Now I can't play at all - I just sit in the cockpit looking at all the lovely displays; HullCam, NavInstruments, MJ, SCANSat, VV - all working perfectly. Having trouble with the Mk2 & 3 cockpits so I'll keep reading. Awesome job there, well done :-)

That would a "rocket engine" ^^.

Yes I was. Does that mean I win? http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/24898-Challenge-Submission-Guide

Oookay, if you say so. Sounds a bit too much like forcing failure as a learning tool, I suppose a 'throttle' tooltip/popup would just be too easy ^^.

No this is not a good thread, I'm afraid. 1. It is not a challenge for other people, so it's in the wrong place. 2. SSTO means "Single Stage To Orbit". It does not mean "Spaceplane".

a. Uninstall FAR and get a flight-simulator for when you want to fly planes. b. Uninstall FAR and learn to build planes that work in stock KSP. c. Uninstall FAR and try NEAR. d. Leave FAR installed and learn to fly rockets with it. 75% of your options say uninstall FAR if it's not meeting your needs. 50% of your options say practice more. ;-0

You talk about several attempts and what happened to them, so it's very hard to understand what the current configuration is. That's why pictures are so useful. If you think we need to see the craft itself then provide a link for it! Don't be surprised if there aren't many people willing to download and install it though, as they'll have to create a set-up with exactly the same mod-list as you, which you will of course have to detail ^^.

Must have been before my time on the forum. When was it discussed before and what was the result?

What's wrong with GOAP, we need abbreviations and jargon to distinguish us from 'ordinary' people ^^. "One, very Kerbal, solution is to 'get out and push' - you have infinite EVA fuel so get the Kerbal to push the pod retrograde using the suit RCS, re-board the pod to refuel the suit, repeat as required until the periapsis is in the atmosphere and aerobraking will do the rest for you." (http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/79658-Exploring-The-System-A-design-tutorial-campaign?p=1167684&viewfull=1#post1167684)

OK - all the ships work alright in 0.24 and I've more or less finished the proof copy as PDF - see the OP for the link. I wanted to get this out today so someone can check it downloads and looks ok. Lots more spelling and grammar errors fixed and the text has been updated where necessary for 0.24 but I have not yet updated the stats (mass, cost, TWR, deltaV) in the individual data sheets. Since cost is now a thing the total for each ship is likely to be different, as are the others where using parts Squad have rebalanced. Similarly, where they are referred to in the text they have yet to be corrected. Apart from as a matter of detail and accuracy they should not affect your experience. NB: The text in this thread has not yet been corrected at all but I'm getting there - BB Code takes some time.

It's not likely to be "fixed by an update" since Squad seem to think it's a good idea to have it at 50%. 0 or 100 I can understand but apparently this is the way it "used to be" so they've put it back that way. Makes no sense to me, but there you go.

Angle-snap in the VAB seems to keep turning itself off now :-( I always have it on and previously just had to do that once, now I have to do it every time I start the game.

Oh alright then. Same basic design as my avatar here but using a more 'neurotic' font:

Doh! Thanks, I was only looking in the 'save as' options - you're quite right, LibreOffice also has 'Export' to PDF. I'm currently verifying the ships in the final two chapters still work as advertised in 0.24 and should have an update within the next few days, work allowing. New plan is to then work on 'KSP from the beginning', how to run it, install mods, start a new game, what the buildings are, etc. After that 'best', cheapest, reusable designs for infrastructure - the sort of thing that will help people wanting to do career. Eventually I'm still hoping for a complete manual - this campaign is intended to talk about the mission and vehicle (especially rocket) design considerations, others will look at the cost, tech-tree, flight and *gasp* maths. Whether I'll ever get there is a different matter ^^.

The tutorial linked in my signature is an attempt to provide and explain a complete collection of vehicle designs one might need. In general the maths and details of 'getting to orbit', etc. are skipped in favour of links to other tutorials on the forums and wiki. So much for phase 1 of my intention to write a definitive manual - just these example vehicles print-out at around 100 A4 pages. This weekend I'm verifying the designs still work in 0.24 then I'm starting work on phase 2 - KSP from the beginning :-) There isn't actually much maths to deal with for the most part - Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation, TWR and orbital altitude/speed/period calculations. Interplanetary transfers and windows I'll leave to someone else, I think ^^, as we have the great http://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/ and http://i.imgur.com/NKZhU57.png.

A VERY good question that often trips-up people trying to calculate orbits by hand! The display is relative to sea level. Some cockpits include a 'radar altimeter' that will also show you the current true altitude above the ground. Several mods will give you both figures. (If you are trying to do it by hand, you need to add on the radius of the planet/moon to get the altitude relative to the centre).

Can't suggest anything else I'm afraid. It can be tricky to click the tag without KSP wanting to create a new node but when I do the figures stay displayed - I've been using it a lot.

Exactly the same conversation happened in fact and the towers were raised by more - the trouble is, how much more would be 'enough'? Can't tell you what the final answer was exactly but once they'd FOUND the real problem the rest was easy :-) Part of my point there was that finding - and fixing - the underlying reason may be very difficult, however big and obvious the effects might be. You may also like to know that in medical circles the same thing you're describing is known as treating the symptoms and not the disease. Sometimes it's the only option - we don't KNOW what the real problem is (or can't treat it if we do) - but sometimes it's just simpler/cheaper to control rather than cure. That's not as harsh as it may sound, the symptom-treatment might be 30 minutes on a sun bed every week whereas the disease-cure might be invasive surgery with 5% chance of death. Yes, I am making this up just to make the point ^^.

Challenges is not the place for this - that's for challenges you set other people, not ones you set for yourself. Fan Works > Mission Reports or Live From Mission Control might do you. All in all, as I said, I sympathise with you because I have the same problem. It is entirely possible that the people at NASA/ESA/SpaceX and others have it in real life too - they want to go to Mars but have to grub around with unethical Murdoch hegemony satellites again ;-0 Right now though you seem to be asking two different things - what should constitute 'losing' and what mods to use. I'm afraid I have no useful advice for the former. For mods RT2, KAS and Kethane make communications (non-Fox), bases and mining necessary or at least useful. My own favourite is SCANSat for mapping satellites - although note the current version uses ModStatistics so you may want to avoid it. I don't know how familiar you are with the aesthetic mods - EVE, Distant Objects and others but for video they would probably be very convenient. FAR and DRE I wouldn't worry about so much, depending on how much you want to mess around in atmospheres as opposed to in space.

It's still the same, what problem are you having with it?

What goes up must come down - UNLESS it's in orbit. The definition, and difficulty, of orbitting is that something is going around a 'world' fast enough to keep missing the ground as it free-falls back towards it. In a perfect vacuum - such as KSP emulates - there is nothing to ever slow this orbital velocity so the satellite, or whatever, keeps going around forever. However, if any part of the orbit is low enough to enter the atmosphere - even the highest/thinnest part of it - the velocity will be slightly reduced, lowering the orbit even more so, eventually, the orbit will degrade so much the thing will crash. In real-life everything affects everything else and even an apparently-perfect orbit might be deflected into the atmosphere by the famous chaos butterfly - you know what I mean here ^^. For simplicity and, mainly, to keep the game going at a reasonable speed KSP 'just' calculates your vehicle vs the body it's orbitting so a 'perfect' orbit will stay perfect. It's always a good idea to provide propulsion for every craft though so it can perform "station keeping" adjustments if it needs to, just as in real life. There is no specific relation between the KSP universe and Earth but the scale is roughly 1/10th. "Low" orbit around Kerbin is usually taken as 75km, although the atmosphere stops at 70km. The reason Sputnik fell is that it never assumed an orbit that was entirely outside Earth's atmosphere so if you want to replicate it in KSP keep the periapsis (low point of orbit) below 69km.

These are SOME of the threads asking almost exactly the same thing. You may find the answers there useful; http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/86776-Testing-parts-in-the-ocean-%28splashed-down-requirement-for-contracts%29 http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/86611-0-24-Rescue-Mission-Get-Kerbal-aboard-the-vessel http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/86659-Radial-Decoupler-Contract-not-Working http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/86881-Test-Launch-Escape-System http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/86692-Wait-Did-I-misunderstand-the-contract http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/87059-experimental-requirementes http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/86478-Testing-Parts-in-Flight http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/86619-Can-t-get-the-Rescue-Lodeny-Kerman-from-Kerbin-mission

Best quote of the week I think, Lol.

Aye, and therein lies the rub ;-) Those little bugs do bite big, for some people. A 'Kraken', as you will have read, is only the name we give to the biggest biters in KSP. Well done again for still being active in this thread, despite the 'troll' calls. As you can tell there's a fair few of us that have spent a lot of time bug-hunting and it exercises us mightily. If you would care to proof-read my tutorial (link in signature) I'd be very pleased. There are still a lot of typographical and grammatical errors in it, despite my best efforts. It's about 40,000 words - so a decent computer application would be about 100 times larger. The major difference is in the fact that you are intelligent and can cope with the mistakes in the text - computers are stupid and at 'only' 1% errors (a normal quality-assurance assumption) things can go wildly wrong. Worse than that, most of the errors that cause problems are not 'mistakes' at all, they are more 'unforeseen consequences' in that everything works exactly as it was intended to but might not, exactly, work in the way something else thought it might. That's where you get the trouble with mods - the people who write them don't know what Squad might do next and Squad don't know what the modders are assuming. And none of the modders know quite how the others are doing things (unless they read ALL the source code, in detail, which would be more or less impossible). So a 'little' change in one part can bite another part to death, even if not a bug because it does exactly what was wanted. Real-life Bug Hunt case study: The Orwell is a largish river in Eastern England. Microwave transmission towers carry a significant proportion of the UK's telephone conversations across this river (or did when this story happened), partly because British Telecom (BT, monopoly 'phone supplier at the time) has a big centre nearby. 'Sometimes' - once every several months - the communications would stop for up to a minute. Why? Just that. There was a history to it; starting about a year previously all communications - and therefore every 'phone connection - would simply be cut, suddenly and without warning, for between 40s and one minute. There was NO pattern that anyone could see and no hardware or software fault they could find. Well, almost no pattern. Every time it had happened had been at high tide - just not every high-tide (so it took a while, and some desperation, to make this connection). Next high tide BT stuck an engineer on one of the towers all night to see what happened (no idea who, he must have got good for overtime but a rotten duty for everything else ^^). Nothing happened. Next high tide they did again, because they had nothing else to go on. ... EVENTUALLY, a ship came along and the transmission was interrupted. It turned out a company with local docks had bought a new ship a while ago. It was 2ft taller than others on the river. IF that ship came along the river (every few months) AND it was high tide (specifically SPRING tide, every fortnight) its funnel was high enough to block the microwave signal. Solution - raise the towers 2ft. Small bug, big bite.

Ooh, yes it was, I was expecting the quote to be obscure. For anyone else looking - http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff. Every other reference I found linked back to this directly or indirectly, which is a pity because it explains absolutely nothing :-( It suggests any similar-length code would have 5,000 errors - I assume 1%, ~4.5 so certainly wouldn't quibble about that. But how do/did they know there was just ONE left in their code? What was it? Why didn't they fix it? Ultimately - and again unfortunately - all the article really says is that if you spend the world's biggest software budget on the world's most time-consuming project but can keep it on track you'll eventually track down most of the problems. IF you know about them, that 'one' really bugs me - pun intended.