NikkyD

I think the game (still) has a small memory leak, it keeps accumulating memory when showing the same screen. Win7, 64bit, 10 to 15 mods including gfx stuff Main Menu, right after startup, 2.45 GB KSC after loading career 2.95 GB

I just created a testprobe and hyperedited it into Laithe orbit, the orbit was dropping slightly but so much that i could not place a maneuver node, not even mechjeb could place one. I mean the yellow bar next to the navball indicated that there was a node, but i could not see any and the projected dV was nA. Did anyone else see this in conjunction with the aforementioned bug ?

You do know that Oberth cannot be exploited as it is merely an observational (mathematical) phenomenon ?!

I understand that some ppl don't like/use certain aspects of the game but that doesn't mean the parts can be ignored. It's like who says A must say B. If you implement a part, make sure it really works without any glitches. They implemented wings and obviously wanted to allow the players to build planes, but the whole thing was more of a mess without FAR and such. With the initial drag model they should have not implemented wings and plane stuff. Now there are wheels for a long time and recently they added more and more plane gears and different size rover wheels. That's not just a nice to have, it's a path chosen. So wheels are there to build vehicles, but way too much stuff is missing to make vehicles complete. One could argue that 4 wheels and a base make a vehicle but thats semantics. It's like saying 2 wings and a base make a plane, whether it will be able to fly or not. It's troll argumentation. So what did they want KSP to be ? From the parts, they wanted rockets + planes + vehicles. The rockets work quite well, the rest... so if you say you don't see a need for them to improve it, you are saying that it is ok to release broken/unfinished stuff for as long as you don't need that stuff but that's where i strongly disagree. If you put something into a game, make sure it works. Not just in principle but also in a sense that it can be used as what it was intented to be used for. A rover that flips over all the time or ice-skates on kerbin is not really useable.

As a software developer i am well aware of that. But i am talking about things that are not personal flavor but simple basic things. You have 1m, 2m and 3m engines and fuel tanks but only 1m boosters... why ? stuff like that

I don't want to derail my own thread to cars, but even a Nissan GTR has 2 backseats. They call it 2+2 and it is somewhat popular amongst supercars but nobody really wants to sit there. But the whole statement was taken out of context. The context is, that there are 3 professions in the game and it makes sense to take them with you on a trip. In addition because of the xp system you want as many kerbals as possible to place a flag on every body for max xp. You start career with 4 but the pilots are doubled. So taking the famous 3 along with you is kinda a nobrainer imho, but the 5 year old capsule parts dont feature that. As a logical next step in the tech tree after a 1-man-capsule for first steps in space there should be a 3 or 4 man version, given the whole setup. Next step would then be a lander for 1 and a lander for 3. If you look at the visual model of the 2man lander can, you just have to ask yourself "why can't i fit 3 in there ?". And yes, it bugged me so much i simply made my own part, without inside view tho, which is a bit annoying but acceptable.

@Plusck there are hinges... with mods ofc. It has been mentioned over and over that i want to buy a product that is somewhat finished and not a LEGO set of parts with which i have to build my own game first and then i can build things inside it. But look at mods like mechjeb, its been around since the earliest days of the grid and they NEVER implemented something like it into the full game even tho everyone seems to be using either MJ or the engineer tool or something in that neighborhood. Gothic 3 was a desaster when it came out, the only thing that kept it alive was a community. The first thing everyone was installing along with it was the community patch. Years later they want to make a buck out of it again and this time they included the community patch officially in the game. It's just not professional behaviour this attitude to let mods fill up the gaps that you leave open beause you are understaffed and underfunded. MineCraft was written by a single guy, many indie games are written by single guys, you know that before you start, i dont let that count as an excuse. If the game is successful, you hire more crew to finally patch it to near perfection. If it was some bottom dwelling niche game with 1k buyers and a 2 guy crew, it'd be understandable but that's not the case.

Imagine a heatshield with a clamshell opening and an engine inside. During ascent it would be open and be some sort of "skirt" around the engine, no aero trouble. And when it comes to landing you close it and have the engine shielded. This way you could enter engine first.

Why NOT ? On a 10t lander, a 500 kg rover is nothing. The problem isn't the weight or space, its that THERE ARE NO PARTS to properly pull that off even though it would be so easy. As i have done it, 2.5 service bay and a rover that fits into it. Now make this stuff on purpose and not makeshift and it is absolutely no issue, but thats just it, there is no such part. And it's not just the reloading of the rover, its the landing itself. Putting a rover in a box is a standard requirement imho, but they dont have parts for it... there is just so much stuff missing, it's like they never even played it themselves or they would have realized within 1 hour what kind of stuff is missing.

I am serious! I just finished my horrible Duna Expedition. In a sort of mental debrief i am wondering what i could have done better. The setup wasn't bad, it's just that KSP can't handle its own mechanics... Let me start at the beginning. Mission was Duna + Ike, with a Rover that drives to as many biomes as were timely manageable. The rocket consists of 2 parts, a nuclear driven Traveler-Strage with about 5k dV and a lander with 3 Kerbal and a Rover. 1) It was a MESS to build a vehicle that can be unloaded and loaded back up with all science on board including the possibility to store experiments. I know that some players build monster trucks that are huge as a house but i have a problem with that. I just hate inefficiency! So much that i regularly quit KSP and have to let off steam elsewhere... great. So i built a really small vehicle with the help of TweakScale. I was small enough to fit/drive inside a 2.5m service bay.ofc driving in and out was easy on Kerbin, on the other planets the wheels suddenly could no longer manage to drive in. The service bay was my "landing gear" so it was on the floor. And ofc the wheels popped inside the bay everytime the ship moved even tho the rover was secured with a docking port. Building vehicles to reach as many biomes as possible is one of the BASIC and FUNDAMENTAL things in the game BECAUSE of how the career mode is made. But there are almost NO PARTS to help out. Yes there are wheels... but HOW THE HELL do you transport those vehicles ? There are cargo bays... sure, and how do you land something with a cargo bay in a way that you can reload the rover ? Ahhh... the huge plane with ramp. Seriously, that is the ONLY option ?! Like no one would ever want to build a rover and drive around on planets. But hey, with enough cheating and mods somehow i got the rover thing done. 2) Reentry. It's a good thing that reentry finally is more deadly, but mainly its deadly because there are no parts to build proper rockets that can survive it. I know there are heatshields, but how do you build a ship that has a somewhat aerodynamic nose, and engine pointing in the oposite direction AND a heatshield that points in the same direction as the engine ?! Good thing for me that a service bay is almost better than a heatshield but still i have to mount so many parts radially and they will pop. I mean how do i protect landing gears that i HAVE to attach radially because the only thing with a bay is the plane gear stuff. I can't wrap everything in a fairing that i rebuild every time. There is this awesome inflateable heatshield, but it is MAX SIZE and heavy AND does not allow and engine other than radials. And radial engines SUCK (efficiency). I only need ONE nerva so radial placement is off the table anyway unless there would be smaller nerva so that i could split up 1 into 3 or 4. Yes i could do all that with TweakScale BUT when i tweak a part i can no longer see its stats as i could in the part description. Makes planing harder. Plus i have the feeling that the 4x weight scaling is a little bit cheat. So how do i design a PROPER rocket that has to do multiple aerobrakes ? I spent AN HOUR until my ship finally slowed down enough through duna that i could orbit without blowing up. Why was that an issue ? 3) So to plan a mission i have to look at community budget maps. Why ? because the game itself provides NADA. You can't even plot a course at a future time to see how many steps and dV would be required. The game simply provides NOTHING but its silly course plotter. How much dV can i aero off at duna with my design ? NO WAY of finding out other that cheat/beaming the ship to duna and trying it out. Oh yeah, thats practical. How lost would i be without Alexmoon's charting tool... how will the planets be aligned in 300 days from now ? Stock game CAN'T give you the answer. You need mods mods mods. And this isn't something special, this is the VERY BASIC in a game that deals with rockets and space travel. 4) have you ever looked closely at the weight of the stock components ? Some are so rediculous. The smallest wheels weigh 50 kg, same as the bigger ones... WHY ? Both extendable ladders weigh 5 kg but one is twice as long ?! Batteries however. An average car battery weighs a good 10 kg and in KSP the smallest disc-battery weighs the same. What a bargain! All the parts... it's like 5 years ago someone quickly scribbled some numbers together, late for dinner or whatnot and BAM they made it into release and have never been touched again, EVER. 5) Cockpits. Now with the system of 3 professions it is somewhat obvious that a lot of players will want to bring 3 kerbals with them however there are only TWO cockpits that allow 3 or more and they are utterly bad. The one is a plane cockpit and the other one weighs... That would all be no problem IF there were nicely stackable 1-kerb-cockpits. But the Mk1 can not be stacked properly and the lander can has horrible aerodynamics. It would take a developer TEN MINUTES to overhaul those numbers, but no one does it. So i am playing this game since... dont remember... and still so many vital parts are missing. Instead we get a career mode that feels like occupational therapy for ADS. Unity 4 to 5 and imho it still looks the same and i have everything maxed. Every year we get like 3 new parts, YAY. Most of the time they are not balanced, Duh. How do you deal with it ? Install 20 mods and once more unto the breach ? I just can't build those cartoon rockets with parts sticking out left and right, i really hate that. So how do you all deal with it ? And please don't answer by suggesting even more mods, my limit for a year is reached. I REALLY like this whole space stuff but KSP just gives me more and more headaches with each patch.

massive problems with wheels (TR 2L and M1) I have a battery and some structs as a base and use 4 wheels with 50% size, my total chassis mass is 57 kg and its falling down to the floor, the suspension is not holding them. The wheels still seem to have the power of the bigger size which makes my mini vehicle accelerate so fast that i hear aero sounds. i really need a small rover

i need about 1 small radiator for 2 drills on mun

OP states that he is a veteran and has been to every body in the system and now suddenly with more realistic aero he can't even get into orbit. There is just too much contradiction in this to take it seriously.

i deleted all mods before starting up 1.1, so everything is fresh. (should be)

Let me ask this noob question, i took a look at the awesome screenshots of those mods, installed them rightaway, fired KSP up and... didn't see much of it ?! The space center view looks the same, water looks awesome when close but usually i am not. Mountains in the west look the same (from KSC), did fly around a bit and the ground looked the same. From my space station the city lights looked kind of weird and the landmass still had some LoD roughness. Also the clouds didnt look as nice as in the screenshots. Is there some other mod that i need to install to "improve" the results ? AFAIK i have the important ones installed, like moduleManager and my rig runs DX11 64bit, no issues.

Seriously, nobody should play KSP because they want to do some rocket stuff thingie that flies no matter what.

Those straight up and back down trips early on can be tricky as most crafts will have a good streamline. Just a capsule and 2 staged boosters gets you to 150km but you never survive the reentry, you fall through the atmosphere like a rock and when u hit about 20 km you start slowing down a little but still not enough and you hit the ground with 1 km/s. Not even heat is the issue here. Edit: If you just need "some science from space around Kerbin", take an MK1 capsule, a chute and a RT10 set to about 60% thrust. This will get you to above 80 km where you can crew-report and EVA. On the way back down, set the whole thing horizontal and hold it there with SAS. Somewhere in the lower atmosphere it will start pointing the capsule to the ground as it is the heaviest object. Then you need to move left and right (like a pendulum) to stay as much sideways as possible, this should slow you down to chute speeds and thats it.

I checked and if you only allow the first 2 nodes, that is the 5 and 20 science, the engine and part restriction would make it a suitable demo. Once you get the 909 you can do way too much for a demo.

They do have their own little folder, don't they ?!

I guess mun and minmus are possible and kerbin alone gives you enough science to max out the lvl 1 science tree which is a bit much for a demo. However it would be possible to just make a special demo tech tree that doesn't have more than 3 branches and as such only unlocks a few items with which you really wont get far.

I smell a challenge there ^^

Nobody wonders when someone with 3 posts asks such an odd question ?!

Why so risky ? somewhere between 5 and 7 km is fine. Set SAS to retro, burn and throttle as you feel comfortable. I don't have good manual landing skills but this way i manage 800 dV landings. 900 if i realize that i will end up on the side of a mountain and need to carefully balance everything out with super soft touchdown.

You should not have any problems with your old machine...

I tried some mini plane stuff on the weekend and i'm thinking that the game has a huge problem that most don't even see, the whole physics calculations are too "simplified" or "dirty tricks" to simulate something that the engine was never written for. I made a mini plane (tricycle style) and made the suspension maximum stiff. Then i played around with SAS on/off, all steering surfaces off etc The plane starts in a straight line, ofc, but at some speed, as others have already reported, it starts jumping left/right (rolling). When i looked at the aero-forces with F12 i saw a lot of stuff going on and was wondering where the hell those forces would come from ? Ofc once my plane rolls to the left by 5° within a second, that movement causes lift and so on. But why can the plane roll to the left all of the sudden ? I did put the engines and 60% of the whole weight on the wing tips, now the wings have terrible leverage and it should steady the whole thing but the engine just knows a center of mass aparently. I forgot how the engine deals with it all, someone explained it sometime somewhere but i think the major issue is there. If every plane is basically a sphere with wings then ofc it is very unstable. The wheels SHOULD have dampening and thus a sudden shock from the wheels should be eaten up completely by the dampeners. The force that makes the plane jump must come from the wings/aero then. But how can only ONE wing generate force on a symetrically built plane ? The wing itself, not any control surfaces. Real planes ofc are not perfect, so its ok to say that the forces are distributed non evenly, but material flex eats up that difference in reality, it may cause vibration and stuff but here every force is applied down to the smallest amount (it seems) and thus a 0.0001 Newton force on one wing causes a slight roll which in turn causes other "things" to generate forces and so on, it just builds up until the plane flips. I also notice on some wobbly rocket designs that the trajectory marker /the orbit is very jittery. With no engine working there should be no change but ofc if you think about it. If some heavier part of the rocket is suddenly a bit closer to the source of gravity, it experiences more gravitational force. So if a part wobbles towards the planet and then away from it, gravity applies different forces all the time. That is ofc in the nano-digits, but it might throw a calculation off as it is based on floating point numbers somewhere in the code. So my fear is that the whole thing is more and more a manifestation of this. In the beginning (maybe) some bugs leveled eachother out, but as the bugs get fixed more and more of the real problem is becoming visible. Just my weekend thoughts