Perry Apsis

Kuzzter, that was, in a word, elegant. Some genuinely beautiful elements, and some great moments. And your ascent vehicle almost made it look easy. I am envious.

Tiaga, That looked like an interesting design but I couldn't for the life of me figure out what you had done with the upper stages. Can you tell us a little about the construction?

The vertical axis doesn't change. Space just rotates your Kerbal around the vertical axis so it's facing away from you. If you're seeing the back of the Kerbal's suit, even if from above or from below, there's nothing more for the space bar to do.

I'm not super-proud of the design, except that it demonstrates persistence. Only thing really interesting about the ship is the way I used the increasing tank size on the outer asparagus stages to control TWR so I could run the engines full-throttle without wasting too much energy on air resistance, which naturally gave rise to an exponential curve like the pipes in a pipe organ. I used MechJeb for the take-offs (33 stages, come on already) and KAS to refuel (which turned out to be a mistake). The retrieval ship was the same launcher, minus the 300t lander, with a docking port on the bottom so I could refuel it safely, and a three-Kerbal capsule. I never used Hyper Edit before, but if I had not used it to test the lander over and over during the build process, this would have taken months. Naturally I did not use it during the mission. So what happens now? Does a TV crew show up at my house to deliver the badge?

Done! Level 3. Home again, home again, jiggity-jig. No energy yet to try to put together any sort of coherent narrative out of the 100+ screen shots. Took almost a week to build it, another day to learn to fly it. 2 HOURS (at 4x physics zoom) to swim to shore and another 2 hours back. I discovered that my Peet's Coffee scoop was exactly the right weight and shape to hold down the W key so I could read a book while Jeb swam. I'm not saying I'd want to do it again, but I don't think another landing would be too difficult or time consuming now that I have it figured out, and if I landed on the shore, or nearer to it anyway, it would save a lot of tedium. 300+ tons for the lander, 1900+ tons, 600+ parts, 33 stages for the lander and its launcher. Another 235 parts, 1600+ tons for the ship to go get Jeb and bring him back from orbit. Unquestionably the most ludicrous thing I have ever built, and quite likely ever will build. One or two things of note about the ship, but mostly it's just massive asparagus and a few ideas I stole from other players. Will follow up with pics.

Are you using MechJeb or any other tool to point your ships toward their targets? The only time I've seen behavior like what you're describing is when I have Smart A.S.S. pointing my mother ship toward its target and then switch to the target to do the docking. It's especially bad when you have both ships trying to point their docking ports toward each other. I've had a couple of disasters doing that. A better approach would be to use the tool to orient the mother ship correctly, then turn it off and use SAS to lock it into that position, then do the same for the daughter craft when it gets close to the docking port.

Well, I'll be... I tried it once from space and I turned a Kerbal into an itty puff of smoke, kind of like in a Roadrunner cartoon. I tried it again from 5k and bounced like a beach ball. This is a great fall-back if your radial chute rips off your back. (If you haven't tried it, KAS does let you grab a radial chute and use it to survive re-entry, but it can be a bit tricky hanging onto it when it deploys.)

These are very nice.

My first time to Jool (Lordy, that seems a long time ago) I had no idea what I was doing. I came screaming into the system at some huge relative speed and it occurred to me, hey, maybe I can slow down by going through Jool's atmosphere. So I picked an altitude at random and burned the little nuke at the bottom of my huge ship (I was paranoid about fuel) until my periapsis dropped down into the atmosphere. All went well until I realized I was slowing too much and wasn't going to come back out. So I lit up the Little Engine that Couldn't and burned somewhere prograde of radial, and it just wasn't cutting it. Suddenly I realized that my lander's engines actually hung out over the sides of the stack. I activated them and was just barely able to claw my way out of Jool's green embrace, dragging my precious fuel with me. (Did you ever notice, by the way, how long it takes to do an aerobrake maneuver on Jool?) Even less deservedly, I was then on a perfect intercept for Laythe. I actually used that design deliberately for a long time, where I would hoard fuel by using a single nuclear engine for efficiency, and burn the lander's rockets when I just couldn't stand it anymore. Those were the days when I refused to read the forums or google anything related to KSP because I wanted to figure it all out by myself.

Yes, those are the players who keep playing for years, as you and I have. Those are the ones who make the community, who care about the product, who build for it. And yet development effort goes into bringing in people who will buy a $40 game, play it for a week or two, "win" it, rate it poorly (let's face it, it's a fantastic sandbox game, but as a mainstream game it's only so-so) and leave. Obviously, I'm concerned that on the whole, it will be bad for the game. Yes, and after a new release comes out and I've stopped taking contracts, that's usually where I go (partly, again, so I don't keep getting messages about how there's no point to gathering science). Science is pretty cool for at least two reasons. First, because it helps new players through a bewildering variety of parts (okay, I've got B9 and other mods, so some of that is self-inflicted). But really, a decent set of parts search/filter/sort tools would go a long way in that regard as well. Second, because it gives you something to do out there, which has always been a mild shortcoming of the game in my opinion. I think mining/refueling operations (along with rebalancing the game to make them necessary) could be a good way to go. Aside from the challenge of hitting specific orbits, where I actually learned more about orbital mechanics after I thought I knew precisely enough for KSP, Career mode gave me one positive game experience. That was because my completely-reusable Munar transport system now mattered. I could get Kerbals to the Kerban satellites for just the cost of fuel.

Honestly, I think career mode puts a limit on what should be an unlimited game. It's already happened more than once that I was building something for some mission that I wanted to do (not a contract, a mission), and ran out of money. Sure, I can go do something I'd rather not so someone will give me the money to do what I want, but that's depressingly similar to real life. Yes, you can play without career mode, but you're reminded that you're not playing the real game, and despite my best efforts, I find it demotivating. Intrinsic motivation is a subtle and tricky thing, but it's a powerful thing, and it's what makes this game great. (See for example, research that shows that rewarding people for completing tasks decreases motivation if those tasks require high-level thinking.) As game designers, Squad must be aware of those factors, but the more they try to make KSP a "real" game by putting in the stuff we expect from games, the less motivated I find myself. That's why I find this conversation depressing. KSP doesn't end. To even talk about it ending would have seemed silly before career mode. Now I find that it ends when I'm just not interested enough to go put another satellite into a specific orbit (although I admit that the first few were quite interesting and fun). It actually works well as a tutorial, but it should be clear that this is all preliminary, and the *real* game starts when career mode ends.

Then I suppose this will have to wait, since it has hinges on both sides of the docking port pairs: - - - Updated - - - BTW, there were some truly entertaining moments involved in this. The Clampotron Seniors generate a lot of torque, and things tend to go boom. Still, this was an improvement over the usual land-based docking experience for me. Is the docking port issue something there's a fix in the works for, or should I expect it to be this way more or less permanently? Obligatory: Trying not to go all gushy and fanboy here, but seriously, look how much creativity and fun this mod has unleashed. I read 75 pages of posts in this thread looking for more info on the docking port issue, and it was great reading. Hats off to the devs, and to the community as a whole.

I like this one because it's serious. No makeup, no huge eyes with big reflections in them. It's a female Kerbal on a typical day at work. Why should female Kerbal pilots have elaborate hairstyles, when the males have such God-awful coiffures?

This one gets my vote. Definitely BadS.

I have a rover with a gantry rail variant, with a hinge riding on it, with a 1x1 Structural Panel stuck on the end of the hinge, and a Clampotron Senior attached to the panel. It all works fine to start. I can raise and lower via the rail, and adjust the angle with the hinge. However, if I use it to dock with a base, when I undock, everything seems scrambled. I can only move the IR parts a bit, and when I do, oftentimes both parts move. If they were physical parts, I'd say the torque from the docking magnets jammed the mechanism. I did not attach the port directly to the hinge, but could I be suffering from the problem I Have Been Warned about involving attaching docking ports to IR pieces? Thanks for any insight.

Hi, Maximus97 (can I call you Max97?), Actually, Squad said they'd be including that feature in 1.0, and listed some common problems they would be checking for, like fuel tanks that won't flow to an engine. I know the Clampotron Senior has tripped up other people as well from the forums, so I am hoping they'll include a check for that in the Engineer's Report. I was wondering if other users had found any of those errors that are hard to spot until you've spent four game years getting to Eeloo, that might be feasible to implement in the report.

I've had two problems occur with Clampotron Senior that are frustrating because they're easy to miss until you're out in orbit somewhere. First, attaching them wrong way out. Second, and harder to spot, is attaching them via the top node instead of the bottom, so that they're partly inside the part they're attached to. I use them in odd places, like on the bottoms of fuel tanks, and I can't count the number of times (okay, it's like five, but it feels like a lot) that I've had to revert to launch, or de-orbit a station after spending a few minutes trying to dock and realizing that I will not stay in space today. I looked around for a thread for suggestions for the engineer's report but I didn't find one. Does anybody else have some things they'd like to see the report check for?

Gom, you can build a neat base onto an asteroid by attaching all the components to the asteroid with claws. Whatever magic it is that tunnels fuel, electricity, and now Kerbals, through various parts of the ship, works through an asteroid as well.

I have this behavior frequently, both in stock and with numerous mods, and for any number of versions up through .9, but quick-saving and reloading generally fixes it. I've never had it persist for a single craft.

There are a number of tutorials on YouTube and here on the Forum that can help you get started. The essence is to use what's called a transfer orbit. Your ship is always in an orbit. When you leave Kerbin's sphere of influence, you're in an orbit that touches Kerbin's orbit at one end, with the other end out in space somewhere. If you've done it right, the other end is closer to your target's orbit. As a rule of thumb, if you want to go to a planet farther from the sun, you want to thrust across the dark side of Kerbin so you escape in the direction of Kerbin's orbit. If you want to go to a world closer to the sun, you thrust across the light side. Play with the maneuver node so that your course when you escape is parallel to Kerbin's orbit. Once in interplanetary space, you want to modify your orbit so that one end touches the orbit of your target. That's your transfer ("Hohmann") orbit. That's easy to do once you've got a handle on how to use maneuver nodes. The trick is to time the burn so that when you get to the far end of the orbit, that's when the target is there, too. If you select the world as your target in map mode, the game will show you where the target will be when you touch its orbit. It could be that you'll have to wait a year or even a few before the target and your ship are in the right place in your orbits so that sliding the maneuver node around will get you a close intercept. This should give you an intersection that didn't cost too much fuel to create, and where the relative speed when you get there won't be too high. If you're still running out of fuel when you get there, then you may want to built another, much bigger stage onto the bottom of your ship, so that you're essentially launching the existing ship from somewhere above the surface and already moving. You might also consider using the nuclear engine on one of your upper stages, even though the burns can be painfully slow. It's much more fuel-efficient. Another thing to think of is minimizing the weight of your lander, and particularly the amount of mass you carry back up from the surface. That will have a cascade effect all the way down through the rest of your ship. If you're trying to use the same capsule to get there, land, take off, and come back, consider using a separate lander. You could even launch one ship to go there, land, and take off, and another ship to go out there, retrieve the other astronaut and come back. Once you've got your technique down, you can get fancy, and do an Apollo-style mission where your lander rides along with your main ship. Post some screen shots of what you come up with and how it works. Good luck, and fly safe! One way to get a feel for the maneuvering and burning is to get MechJeb. It can create the maneuvers for you, and even execute them. I learned a lot about orbital mechanics from watching MechJeb.

Exactly the same issue here. Not sure why it's working for most people and not for you and me. I'm running MechJeb, KAS, and Procedural Fairings in 0.9 Windows 32-bit. EDIT: Somehow I must have installed an older version by accident (I keep all my KSP downloads in a single folder, so I probably just clicked the wrong one). I removed the Procedural Parts folder from Game Data and installed the correct one and I stopped getting the message about the incompatible KSPAPIExtensions.dll and the mod started working correctly.

I don't really use refueling stations as much since they brought in the NASA parts, but I felt like building one and I thought this was a neat way to do it. It's largely stock. KAS to make the supply depot, and the little runabout was made with Procedural Parts. It's not particularly elegant, but I like the look of it. A little Suessian? Maybe Whos and Kerbals are related, somewhere back in the mists of time...

Hi, very eager to see this mod in action, but I'm a little confused about which package to download. I already have RPM and Toolbar through B9. I'm not able to interpret the names and requirements of the three download links. Can you spell it out for me? Many thanks!

Thanks. I've downloaded both B9 and Firespitter (been meaning to check out both for some time now anyway--ironically, if I had not been on this quest to find the right wheel, that would have been the next thing I did).

I can't imagine nobody has made these but I've searched a truly unhealthy amount and couldn't find them. I'm working on a design that requires the ship to lower itself down onto a ground-mounted docking port. I can do it with small gear bays and a couple of radial engines, but it's a bit hard and a little wasteful of fuel. I can do it with landing gear and just maneuvering extremely carefully but it's VERY hard and rather wasteful of fuel. Can someone please point me to some wheels that can propel the vehicle as well as retract? TIA!