merendel

I dont sopose you've got a picture of the craft? One frequent problem that crops up with ISRU's is fuel flow issues. Some resorces unless conected to a stack with the right container in it will have nowhere to go and wont be produced unless fuel lines are run. Even baring that a picture that shows the menu with the error message can also help.

Doubt it would work. The kerbal would still be in a 0g reference frame even if you technically have a rotationally induced artificial gravity. As far as the game is concerned the moment he lets go of the ladder he just impacted on a object moveing fast enough to rag doll him and the results are predictable.

I can see it as cheating when taken to extreams although I dont see morality haveing anything to do with it. Personally I'll do some minor clipping for aesthetic reasons. Things like cliping RTG's to hide them or slightly rotating radialy attached fuel pods to make the hull blend more smoothly. I will also often clip small parts inside of girder segments, its still technicly cliping even if visualy they fit just fine inside. Home made addapters where there is no normal alternitive is also fine by my book. I wont however clip multiple tanks so they are all occupying the same volume or airhoging with overlaping intakes. Airhogging is just silly and I dont see bending physics to fit a dozen times the quantity of fuel into the same volume (massive tank cliping) as any better.

I'll usualy include a pair of seperatrons and a seperator to kick the command pod off my maned rockets tied to an abort sequence. normaly not perfectly aligned to COM but close enough that the SAS can keep things stable as it blasts off at an angle. I've even had one ship that had the command pod with a second stage above it and managed to rig things so the pod could kick out strait sideways, very violent ejection system but it could save a kerbal if things went bad. That one was mostly cause stage 1 was pure solids on that lifter. space planes normaly dont have an easy way for me to eject the command pod but I do slap a radial chute on the cockpit. If alot of the ship is still attached it wont be a soft landing if I need to resort to it but it will be slow enough for the cockpit to survive impact, everything else will probably be a writeoff though. works well enough for those times I know I'll never be able to land safely because FAR sheared off somethign major.

The reason kerbals cant walk on them is the game thinks they are falling. When they hit the moving platform its moveing too fast for them to keep their feet and they just ragdoll. There is no gravity for them to orient too and their constantly changeing direction from the spin keeps them ragdolling till the spin stops or they fall off. With a rover it is being pushed into the rotateing platform hard enough for the tires to get traction. they dont care what state the rest of the vessle is in, as long as the tires have traction they will move the rover in the direction the tires drive it.

It can be done theres just alot of engineering problems to overcome. The bigest issue is how to secure the orbital section to the aero section. On the way up you can strut like crazy but you need a mod that alows struting during the mission on the return leg or the two sections will be floping like crazy on the return. Chances are the COM of the payload will be vastly different after its used its fuel up. If you dont account for that the ship will be aerodynamicly unstable on the return as well. I've tried a few times but never got a design I particularly liked. Each one had to be custom built, any change to the payload often required a compleat redesign. In addition makeing the cradle that the wings and airbreathers were mounted on ridged enough to not fly like a flappy bird around the orbiter. Balancing rigidity of the flight frame, the COM, the center of thrust, and the center of lift was just an utter nightmare. Its somewhat better if you've got plane parts with a cargo hold big enough to carry your orbiter but stock parts its difficult for anythign larger than a probe.

If I had to guess the difference would be unnoticeable. Its hard to get any closer to 0 gravity than gilly's natural state.

I vaguely recall something like that but from memory it required manual editing of the craft file and it only worked in some old versions of the game as it exploited something that was eventualy removed. If you tried the same craft file in the wrong version it would either not load at all or just snap back down to a normal altitude.

You can get alot of randomness if you want. Send up a rocket core, Attached to that core have some part with a seperatron attached to a radial decoupler. Use symmetry to duplicate the part. Make as many rings of these dibrise parts as you want on the rocket. Once in orbit kick 1 round of them off (decouplers and seperatrons fired at the same time). Give a small burn to adjust your orbit a bit and timewarp half an orbit or so and kick off another ring. Do this till your out of debris then return to space center and timewarp a few days of game time. You'll have a whole bunch of dibrise in simirandom roughly equatorial orbits. The time warping will let the debris cloud spread out and the seperatrons will make each one have a different orbit from others kicked off at the same time.

Its still quite possible to have high reuseability with DR and FAR, you just have to go about it more carefuly. Engine bells make amazing heat shields as long as your droping gently from low orbit. The hard part is makeing sure whatever you sent up is aerodynamically stable enough going backwards to not tumble and break up. This is of course for rocket design. Spaceplanes are somewhat easier you just have to be gentle with them and expect a long slow decent.

still a sticky widget that. worst case with a strait up and down accent your looking at a couple kilometers per second relative velocity. I was wrong in my analogy. not only are you trying to thread a needle from 100km away that needle is on the back of a bullet train Although looking back I futzed up the math too, I suspect I got m/s and km/h confused at some point and then did some converting with some strange results. My only excuse is its a bad idea doing napkin math just before passing out for the night. Either way you are not makeing the catch at that speed on anything but luck and will probably get riped appart for the effort. geting up to speed horizontaly first aliviates this problem somewhat but to get the speeds slow enough your geting close to orbital velocity already.

I shudder at the thought of that but I'll do a quick rundown of the problems I see so far. 1. line length. No mater how you slice it you cant(baring a few mods) get around the 2.5km load limit. Even if you strung KAS winches togeather you cant get it longer than 2.5km long so you'd need to at least push the payload up that high. 2. Timeing. Asumeing you were fine launching the payload strait up to whatever orbital hight you still have to get to the right spot at the right time. On a vertical launch your hook is going to be blazing past at 2400 kph or a bit less depending on orbit hight. It will be in and out of physics window in 3-4 seconds. Your basicly trying to shoot an arrow through the head of a sewing needle from a hundred KM away. You can aliviate this somewhat by giving it some horizontal componant to the launch but the more you add to make the catch easier the closer you get to achieveing the orbit without the skyhook. 3. Boom. No other way to discribe whats going to happen if you make the catch. At the relitive velocities involved in this stunt I see 3 potential outcomes. First the magnet and your payload meet and mutualy anialate each other. Second it catches safely but the line stretches like a ruberband before snaping violently and most likely riping one or both objects (skyhook or payload) appart. You might get lucky and only loose the line but I doubt it. The third option, if you make the catch and survive the effects of hooking the two things togeather at that velocity your going to have the two ships springing wildly around eachother on the line. I've seen this in action with skycranes lifting heavy loads off of minmus. Those lines are not ridged, they stretch and bounce. I had my skycrane try to tow a 200t container of metal (extraplanetary launchpads mod) and didnt dock fully first, just draged it to orbit on the rope. I was fine on the initial takeoff as I could carefuly get the slack out before applying more thrust. When I went to circularize however the payload had drifted a bit closer to the ship and caused a slight tug when I throttled up and it snaped taunt. It stretched then swung the 30ton ship violently backwards past the cargo container. They bounced back and forth for a while and developed massive phantom forces. Eventualy the force got bad enough that it snaped the crane off the ship. Dispite cuting thrust after controll was lost enough phantom force was generated that the 200t mass was flung clear out of the kerbin system on an eve crossing trajectory while the crane would have been destined for a steep reentry on kerbin, leaving minmus's SOI in the opposite direction from the other half.

One issue with the shuttle type design is its very difficult to fly it due to an off ballanced thrust vs COM that shifts as you burn off fuel. the RL shuttle has a gimble on the main engiens with a rather large range of motion that is computer controlled to compensate for this. We have no equivelent system in the stock game although there are a few mods that can fake it to a point. If your set on a 2 stage design I would suggest you set your spaceplane on top of the rocket. A basic lifter stack positioned under the centerline of the spaceplane. Once stage 1 burns out you decouple and fire off your orbiters engiens to finish the mission. This will take a bit of design work in far as depending on wing design the lift generated could make it difficult to fly strait up without it wanting to list. I'd also recomend adding a 5th engien, a RAPIER on the centerline between the 2 pairs you spoke of. This will alow for more efficient air breathing flight on your return should you need powered flight instead of pure glide. You can put a stack behind them (cant on the normal jets) and you can run it in rocket mode as well during orbital maneuvers. Alternitively you could make a spaceplane that lifts off horizontaly. Use the rapier engiens in airbreathing mode to get you up to altitude and to relatively high speed and then kick on the afterburners to send you into orbit. You could even potentialy sling some liquid fuel tanks under the wings that you decouple as your shifting from air mode to rocket mode. Pure space shuttle replicas are just far too much trouble to replicate in this game. You can build them for looks just fine but makeing one that can actualy fly properly takes a ton of effort.

Ya solar panel issues (both breaking them off and forgetting to deploy) are one of the reasons I always have a couple of the static ones stuck to my ships. I've just screwed up the main panels too many times not to design around the fact that they may not work. They may be insufficient for transmitting in a reasonable time frame but they ensure I'll at least get some power at some point. Even getting partial exposure on a panel will at least let the probe operate enough to deploy the main ones or to let it limp home eventually if they got broken off. I've also fallen pray to welding capsule doors shut with science instruments. Always makes me wonder how the kerbal got in there in the first place.

Information on how to submit bug reports can be found in this thread. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/92230-Stock-Support-Bug-Reporting-Guide

Depends on the craft design. Long and spindly sections with lots of mass on the end tend to cause problems particularly if the controll is out on one end. if the ship is floppy just a little bit of wobble can amplify as the SAS tries to correct it. You still need enough struts to keep things somewhat ridged on larger craft, theres just many more situations where you can get by without now. I've also had a few bugs (normaly mod related) where some part just decides it does not want to go beyond a particular speed or altitude. Once the part hits that limit it just decides its going to stop in place and pout reguardless of what the rest of the ship is doing. Unplaned dissasimbly follows as the rest of the parts keep going at orbital velocity and shatter on the imovable part. Strangely the game often reports this as impacting the launchpad of all things.

KSP is weird for an alpha IMO. I've seen released games with more gamebreaking bugs than KSP has from patch to patch. Ya there really isnt much in the way of story content but the game does not really need premade content to be fun (not that I'd object to haveing a story mode to play through)

Personaly I prefer runing a maximized window over runing normal fullscreen. with a maximized window you can freely alt tab or just mouse over to a second moniter to access other programs. The game can even continue to run while you do so which is useful during long burns or just haveing to timewarp for years to a transfer window. Runing in normal fullscreen forces the game to pause and minimize if you alt tab and can sometimes cause stability issues on some systems.

Only 1 more node than what you are discribeing in your OP and 2 of them are not ment to be burnt, only for determining timeing. Not sure I'd call them fragile nodes. I do admit timewarp is an issue unless you use a mod like kerbal alarm clock but the technique is somewhat redundant as that mod can calculate launch windows for you. On your second point I think a quick and dirty solution would be alow us to set maneuver nodes for the planets in the tracking center. You obviously couldnt fly a node set for kerbin to reach jool for example but you could set the node on kerbins orbit and drag it till it would intercept jool and then timewarp from there till the window approaches and then switch to your ship to setup the actual manuver from there. W

I find the parachute contracts nearly impossible to do on the way down. The windows are often well off the speed/altitude profile of any reasonable reentry. If you really want to take those contracts your better off makeing the cheepest LF rocket you can, just an engien, tank and probe core with the parachute attached. Send it strait up to hit the window run the test and come back down for a high % recovery. planes are another option if thats your thing although you'll want an action group to instantly cut the chute or set it on a decoupler so its not interfering with your ability to fly.

Your describing an inefficient version of a technique 5th horseman uses sometimes. do what your talking about for seting up the nodes but dont actualy burn them. first one that just bairly escapes kerbin and then set a second node along the predicted kerbol orbit that you slide around to get a connection to your target. Now deleate your first node and the second will snap back to kerbin orbit, this node is your launch window timer. You wont actualy fly this node but it will give you a very good indication of when you should setup a burn that will take you to your destination. Once that manuver node gets down to a few hours away deleate it and setup a standard transfer burn to reach the apropreate orbit for you target. Your now launching at a near optimum time and can take full advantage of oberth. Heres a video where he shows the technique as he gives instructions.

I generaly name my ships in such a way that there intended use is obvious. Satalites are labled for what they are (remotetech relays, resorce sanners, or science probes) Along with the body they are soposed to be orbiting. Interplanetary missions have the name of their destination in them, sometimes with a discriptor to indicate a special mission/contract. Space Tugs and fuel depot stations are usualy prety obvious nomater what the name. Kerbal alarm clock helps me keep track of events that need my attention.

Prety much all of the above for me asside from the web browsing only option. I only dabble in programing but I have done it. I've also built or helped to build every PC I've had since I was in high school in the late 90s. I do limit friends exploiting me for tech support though. If its something that can be troubleshooted in a minute or two over the phone I dont mind. A common example is the not rebooting a windows machine in the last month, doing so fixes alot of problems If its going to require a significant time investment to fix they are either going to need to pay me, either cash or a solid favor. Family are exempt from this although dont be surprised if I install safeguards after bringing a virus infected mess to me.

I tend to include a small amount of RCS on rovers for those unplaned jumps that can happen in low gravity enviroments. (tylo and eve need not apply) With that in mind the rovers have a limited hover capacity so I'll often have them siting on the roof of the lander and will decouple and land on the RCS. I've done the skycrane style such as what rizzo used as well. I just dont like launching in that configuration so my designs often involve a docking to put them under the lander at some point after launch. Then agian I've also had a few times where the lander itself was a rover forgoing landing legs for wheels. More often I did this with a mod such as B9 where I can have wheel bays with built in moters.

Depends on the type of the launcher. If its pure liquid launch I normally design it in such a way that 100% all the way is viable. If I'm useing a fair bit of SRB's I consider the solids my first stage. With the solids I may fire the liquids at launch to get up to speed and to have some control authority with the gimbles till I'm going fast enough for control surfaces to work but usualy they will be cut off after the first few hundred meters till solid burnout.