merendel

Sounds like alota extra parts. You can run struts between the ship and the clamps themselves (you can radialy attach to the red towers). A strut or two per clamp can add extra strength if your craft is so heavy that its riping out of the launch clamps on load although you still want a minimum of 2 clamps so it does not tilt sideways. I have done the trick of girders/Ibeams on decouplers leading to the clamps for times when I needed to move the clamp towers out further from the rocket though.

converting to funds isnt useless just nowhere near as OP as going to science. I more often direct the rep over to funds as a boost. Once your established and your rep is geting high the stuff is prety worthless.

One thing to note is that RT does have a bare bones flight computer built in. Click on the little icon that looks like a calculator next to your flight timer. This will pull up a window that is kindof a combination of mechjebs smartASS along with an option to execute next manuver node. If you setup the manuver while you have signal you can tell it to fly the node and it will do it even if it has no signal when the time comes (still needs power though) Make sure you tell it to point at the node first otherwise it will turn on the engine while its rotating to face the node when the time comes and will fly it poorly. I do agree with the geostationary relay sat above KSP though. That will give prety good coverage in general and once you start puting up the GPS sats they should bounce the signal around to the blindspot with their omni's. Just be aware the comunitron 16's probably wont have the range to talk to the sat in geostat. Youll either need the longer ranged omni (communitron 32) or have a directional dish like the DTS-M1 (the stock flat deployable one). the DTS has a nice wide cone so pointing the one on the geostationary at kerbin will cover most of the orbital area your intrested in and your GPS sats point another DTS at the GEOsat. agian omnies will bounce the signal around to the darkside as long as a couple can talk to the main one.

Each update I copy off a clean copy of the game for archive. Another copy is made for modding. I just manually add the mods into game data as it does not take long.

Congratulations on your landing. However probably should have posted this in mission reports instead of general discussion.

I personaly prefer Kerbal Engineer Redux. Can get most of the relivent information but no lazy mode tempting me to use it all the time. One notable lack is no suicide burn CD but its possible to get a prety good guess. Set a manuver node right at the impact point and pull the retrograde till it starts fliping. Thats how much you need to burn to stop and you can get your burntime for that. KER will tell you time to impact so as long as you start burning before burntime is less than that your normaly OK. SmartASS is nice but its goten me into trouble plenty of times, I just prefer manual. I'm also runing remote tech which has something similar to a striped down smartASS and auto node execution. Normaly its for probs so you can preplan a maneuver and have it execute even when they are uncontrollable due to signal constraints but I did tweek it so command pods have access to that bit. Use it for those long burns with ions or motherships with only a couple LVN's

you can also make cash really fast if you game the system a bit. enable stratagies that convert rep/science to funds. Place a probe with a gravioli or thermomiter in orbit of every planet. Land a ship with a kerbal on any planet you feel comfortable stationing them on indefinatly. Anytime you get a flag planting or transmit science from a location contract snap it up, swap to the apropreate ship and transmit a report/plant a flag. even experiments that are worth 0 transmited fulfill the contract and the far off ones offer good rewards. 90mil is still a bit rough but I'm runing on hard setings and have goten up to 2mill and havent even gone past mun yet and havent activated any funds stratigies.

Very interesting proof of concept. Not developed enough yet for me to want to try integrating it into a serious save game but lots of potential. I'll definitely keep an eye on this for the future though. I hope your able to get persistance going for different systems though. As it stands it would be bad if you had a station in a nice stable 50km orbit over mun and then jumped to a new system where mun had an atmosphere that goes up to 100km. It would also be bad if say an eve anolog was orbiting mun and its SOI swept up anything thats in orbit into its own SOI. You might also consider a check beyond just makeing sure the orbiting planet does not impact the atmosphere of the parent but also so the SOI does not. otherwise low orbits are impossible around the parent

It would make sense if we were actually observing the various objects from kerbin's surface. However the only time you can really see the other planetary bodies from distances that would invoke meaningful FLT lag is in map view. Map view is already either a simulated map or a gods'eye view. I just think it would be kinda pointless and not add much value to gameplay. for example if you invoked FLT lag on the map view it would throw off intercept planing unless you mathed things out by hand. However even in RL we plan interplanetary travel off where our simulations and models of the solar system says the planets are, not where the apparent, time laged visual is so its more logical to consider map mode a simulated solar system anyway. About the only time I could see this simulation as makeing any meaningful change is if you were runing the distant objects enhancement pack so you could see the distant planets easier. even then all it would do is shift them a fraction of a degree one way or another on the starfield. Sounds like alot of effort for an effect you'd never notice without a side by side comparison.

Claw worked up a fix for the decoupler bug in the last day or so. you could try useing that and see if the problem persists. you can find the fixes here http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/97285-0-25-Stock-Bug-Fix-Modules

Not to mention you can drop a probe into eve's atmo while your there. touch more fuel on the outbound leg from kerbin to send an extra science package on a parachute and you get some extra transmited science for almost free. And ya gilly has more in common with docking than landing on it. May as well be a space station 26km accross thats in a funky orbit around eve for all the gravity it has.

For that I just turned off destructible buildings after the obligitory wakakerbal all of KSC to rubble post patch. I dont crash stuff into KSC anyway so the only time anything exploded was the launchpad/runway when I sent something big out for launch. I dont even spaceplane much so hard landings on the runway are a nonfactor. only bugs. I do keep quickload avalible in case of non launchpad related bugs. I just use self control to not use it when I F*** up by the numbers.

Duna is in some ways easier than mun. Takes a bit more dV to get there than to mun but this is offset by haveing an atmosphere to aerobreak once you arrive to capture. Landing you can let the atmosphere and parachutes do most of the work, you may need some thrust to land safely depending on number of chutes, mass and your landing altitude. Takeing back off to orbit takes about as much as a full land and takeoff cycle on mun. You will probably need to pack a bit more fuel for your transfer stages than for a mun mission but not alot more. The same tech with a few spare tanks will work for both missions.

The paint may or may not be an excuse to enjoy the rest of the picture. Plausible deniability and all that rot.

I agree that better trajectory can = more effecient with fuel. However I object to reality bending where 2 identical ships fly exactly the same trajectory (pretend its possible) and yet ship A has 5% more fuel because of "Skill". Ship fliying differently because of skill = valid, ship geting magic modifiers based on who's in the hotseat = silly. Also on the subject of overriding safetys, yes it can be done. Theres buffers built into those safety margins in most things to account for slight variances in manufacture changing the exact fail point. In an emergency overrideing the safetys is a calculated risk where the increased chance of catastrophic failure is worth it when the "Safe" option wont get the job done and it needs to get done. On the other hand overiding safeties all the time just because your a BadS is just asking for something to explode, not a good thing when your flying a controlled explosion already. I wouldnt mind if there was an option to tell your kerbal to "Punch it" and they override the maximum fuel flow. A kerbal skilled with that procedure might get more out of the engiens without explodifying them while an unskilled either plays it too safe or overdoes it and blows up. Thats a logical use of skill tweeking that. a flat 5% or whatever boost to max fuel flow however? thats the kind of thing that should be on the engineers to setup and be accross the board, not on the pilot. Where you see imagination I see a lack of logic and little grounding in reality.

Oh I dont know, paint drying can be quite enthralling given the proper situation. Say for example if said drying paint is body paint on a scantly clad member of the opposite gender (or the same if you swing that way). I wouldnt call watching paint dry boring at all in that situation

I'm in the wait and see camp but I'm not overly comfortable with kerbal stats effecting things like engine performance. Geting a bit more or less responsivenes out of reaction wheels/RCS is one thing. a skilled hand on the stick so to speak will be able to control the same system to a greater degree and get more performance than someone touching it for the first time. Possibly have ASAS not wobble so much with a skilled pilot. However no amount of skill is going to make a rocket that provides 500kN of thrust max provide 510kN. Playing around with the fuel flow or whatever to get more thrust is best left to the guys on the ground who actualy know how they work, not the pilot who's flying it. Personally I'd rather have a limited amount of autopilot options that are tied to kerbal skill. Tell the kerbal to point the ship prograde or at a node and he'll do his best to line up on that orientation and hold it. Better pilots will be more accurate and do a better job. If allowd to auto fly a planed node a better pilot will fly it more accurately and with less wasted fuel. A lesser pilot may be off on the node or spend more fuel correcting for mistakes. The player could of course fly the ship on manual to avoid the issue of a poor pilot .

openGL saves me a bit over 1gb ram on my system. got an i5-3570k (3.4GHz overclocked to 4.20GHz) 8gb ram and a radeon HD5770. I also run -popupwindow so I can alt tab without actualy causeing the issues with KSP and alt tabing. For the most part performance is on par or slightly better than without openGL. with all the mods (also runing ATM) I was hovering around 3.1 gb of ram usage without openGL. With its around 1.9. Video quality is about the same and FPS is possibly a touch faster although hard to tell. it does take a second or two longer on scene change on average with openGL and I frequently get some FPS stutter and screen tearing for another couple of seconds afterwards but once everything stabilizes things are golden. Overall a much better option than runing 64bit. at 3.1gb it didnt take much for a memory leak or a large craft to crash the 32bit game. 64 bit avoids the memory crash but will just crash on its own randomly. openGL only had mild but acceptable drawbacks and alows for stable gameplay.

Mouse/keyboard. My experiments with various game controllers/joysticks left much to be desired.

On the other hand squad is much nicer to its modding community than mojang. Most times simply recompiling DLL's off the new version gets mods mostly functional agian when KSP updates. Sometimes more work is involved but its light. Minecraft on the other hand has on several patches required an almost total rewrite of the API's most moders use after mojang broke virtually everything. both the 1.5>1.6 and 1.6>1.7 updates took several months to fix the forge API as I recall and moders were stuck till that updated.

Thats quite simple. Before branching into rockets as the new thing for geting into space most of these companies were working on developing independent versions of a stealth catapult. At some point they could launch kerbals onto a suborbital trajectory and then tried silly things like sending them up with fire extinguishers for propulsion once at AP. Sadly these improvised methods of orbital maneuvering left many poor test dum... er pilots stranded.

For me Stage 1 solids + main engine (sometimes first stage is pure solids, depends on mission) Stage 2 Solids are droped, main engien gets up to AP and near orbital velocities. For exceptionaly heavy payloads there may be droptanks or additional radial stages inserted here. Stage 3 LKO circulation/transfer stage. Launch stage is jettisoned so it will reenter and this stage finalizes the orbit and is responsible for getting payload to destination. stage 4 mission payload There is some variation depending on mission profile but thats my standard design. heaver launches may have more stages that are cross fed into the central stack. Transfer stage may be larger if an apolo style mission is planed. local sat launches tend to merge stage 3 and 4 into one. Eve landers are in a stage class of their own High dV targets like moho may end up with 2 transfer stages as well, one to get there and another to slow down once there.

All told since minmus got biomes a few patches back its become the ideal place to get early science. Its really easy to send a ship up there on your second launch and skip through several bioms hoovering up science to power up the tech tree. You can even do it first launch if your comfortable with explosive decoupling although might be a tad harder with a low funds limit than it used to be. It does not take all that much more dV to aim for reaching minmus than it does for mun. Any ship that could mun land and return (single biome) could go to minmus and visit 3-4 biomes and return easy. the low gravity makes it extreamly forgiveing to land on as well as pod torque can right a craft that tips over in most cases.

Thats really quite simple. Invite them over to inspect the prototype and then fill the reserve while their inside after you pickpocket their stamp proceed to rebuild/refill after the association does some tests kerbal style.

I think alot of the particularly noisy complaints are much ado about nothing. Does career mode feel a tad unfinished? yes. Does it need a balance/polish pass on a few key areas? definitely. Is it still fun dispite being not quite there yet? Yep, passes the fun test for me. I do think that some of the stratagies need a bit of tweaking as a few are a bit too powerful. On the other hand some of the changes slated for the next version may limit those powerful ones to endgame, may make them a bit better. I also think that the launchpad and runway need to have their durability upped a bit so they dont spontaneously combust to normal usage. I'm also one of those that thinks the tech tree could be rearanged to have a bit more logic behind it. Still all those issues are polish/balance problems. It would be one thing if the devs pulled a DF9 and said thats it were done, heres the tools to fix it yourselves. Considering the moding comunity this game has KSP might survive that kind of crap but it would be a blow. However since the game is still in development and some of these systems have slowly been coming together over the last few patches I expect that many problems will be resolved as the game marches on to a release state. Thats the nature of development, sometimes you have to put in systems that start out only half funtional and broken so you can build on them later (or figure out now that they dont work so they can be redone)