ctbram

Have you considered adding a switch to turn the clouds on and off. I find that it makes trying to land impossible some a lot of the time. You cannot pick a good landing spot because the clouds obscure everything. Yeah yeah I know it's "more challenging" but seriously real spacecraft would have some kind of terrain radar. This is like trying to land with a bag over your head and that is not challenging it's ******ed. lol

Next dumb question how can I open and close the thermal mech helper without having to leave and re-enter the VAB????? There is no icon for it. Would be nice if it was added into the toolbar mod

Just downloaded 0.10. What about HexCans? The Instructions say remove the Warpplugin. The old version had HexCans and this version does not. Do we also need to delete HexCans?

Deleted by user. Dup sorry

Before I get more "you are powering a flashlight with a reactor". I realize this is not a practical design. I just wanted to see the smallest craft I could build using the 0.625 stuff. More importantly I was trying to use this to study how the heat transfer stuff works. But I just get frustrated because I cannot correlate any of the numbers in a way that makes sense. I would rather meltdown a small cheap ship then build a 1500 part monster and then find out I don't know how to size the damn radiators!!! Where is the thermal mechanics helper? That would be useful rather then having to deorbit and rebuild stuff by trial and error.

More Radiator Sizing HELLL!!!!!!!!! I want to use a .625 reactor and generator stock (no upgrade). I want to use them in space. The reactor only has to drive the generator. Nothing else produces heat. I need about 1.6kW of power. I am trying my ass off to compute the size of the cooler needed I am I coming up with like 3.7m^2 for the area of the radiator needed. The radial and inlines lose a factor of 20 in space so I'd need like 60 small inlines and the smallest folder out is 5x the size of the reactor and generator! I have to be doing the math wrong. Can someone, anyone, for the love of god and for the sake of my sanity please EXPLAIN HOW TO SIZE THESE F'ING THINGS? Here is an example satellite. You can see it simply has a reactor core, a 0.625 generator and an omni and scanner that draws 1.53kW of power. I stuck three of the small radials on there by simply guessing. After warping I see the waste heat shooting up and up. Also what are the units for waste heat being shown in the resource bars and info on items? On this particular sat it says the max is 1,200,113 what? The reactor info is 113/113 of what? Meanwhile the generator is the only thing producing energy and it has no waste heat bars at all. Trying to figure this out is like taking a fork and sticking it in my eye! So the reactor is capped at 113/113 mystery units and is not melting down. Just one radiator says it's radiating 23Kw and there are three of them. The resource bar says 13140/1200113 mystery units. Are the units Watts? So the ship is at 13kW of 1.2MW but the reactor core is at 113 Watts??? Nothing makes any sense!!!! then the reactor also says it's producing 450kW of thermal energy. Great yet another Power number that I cannot correlate with any of the other numbers. I need to go take a shower because this is really pissing me off. I keep spending hours putting things in orbit and fiddling with phasing only to have them shut down because I cannot figure out the right amount of radiators to put on them. I mean JESUS what do I have to do put 16 maxi huge gigantor radiators on a 0.625 reactor to be sure I have sufficient cooling!!!!

I really could use some help with the waste heat thing as it's now starting to **** me off! I had a sat network of 6 commsats plus a space station that I had to retrofit or relaunch to add radiators. The station seems to be okay but the waste heat keeps rising on the commsats and I should have ample radiator capacity. The only things that should be generating waste heat are four gigantor solar panels according to what I understand each panel will generate 18ec * 1/2 kW / 1ec or 9kW and they have a max waste heat value of 18 ec * 1kW / ec or 18 kW. I put 2x the regular radial radiator which according to the note in the VAB says will dissipate ~50 kW each. That should be 100 kW of heat dissipation for two of them. So why is my wast heat for my solar panels continuing to rise??? I just spent 4 hours relaunching 6 commsats and retrofitting my space station and I am going to be really pissed if I have to do it all over again. I really must know EXACTLY how to size these radiators because guessing and then having to relaunch every thing is NOT AN OPTION! Here are the screen shots of the Commsat. You can see it has 4 solar panels and 2 radial radiators. The limit for each solar panel is 1800 and the value just keeps rising!!! Will it stabilize at some point or do I not have enough radiators?

How do I toggle the megawatt power display button?? I turned it off and now I cannot remember how to get it back

Thanks for the reply I kind of have my head wrapped around the sizing of the radiators now although the numbers when I look at my ships still have be a tad baffled. I have gleaned that the max heat for an item appears to be 1 ec/s = 1kW and the rate that an item generated heat is 1/2 kw / 1 ec. I have a pair of the regualr radial radiators on a sat with four gigantor solar arrays. These generate peak 18 ec / s so I can expect a max heat rating of 18 kW and a rate of 9 kw. Each of the four arrays stabilize at 165 / 1800. The two radiators are at 655 / 3500 K radiating 10 kW. the info on the solar arrays is 17.43 ec/s, heat production 8.71 kW (which matches the expected 1/2 kW / ec) and the waste heat is stable at 165/1800. The total waste heat for the sat is 993 / 807200. It is these total numbers that I don't understand. They do not seem to be a multiple of any of the values for either the radiators or the arrays?

Okay because of waste heat I pretty much have to do a complete restart of my comsat network. I might be able to retrofit my space station. but before I go through all that is there a way to size the damn radiators like I can size the battery requirements based on c/s? I seems the stat I need is not listed for things like solar panels and such. I do not feel like spending a day building and launching things bases on spit in the wind guesses!

any status on when we might see a 0.23 release? I really hate having to build parts in 0.22 and then move the files over to 0.23

okay thanks. I am assumming this is seriosly not the way it is intended to work. I mean it's a decimal input field. Why not just let us put the number we want in it instead of ... If it's a tues and you are facing north and want a number less then 1 but greater then .324322 then (from the keypad) move the cursor to the right of the number in the box if that number is already greater then 1 and to the right if the number is between 1 and .467, then alternating from the keypad to the number keys enter the value you want in reverse order ..... and it goes on .... lol

doh sorry the network went down and it did not look like the first post was sent. I do apologize for that

Sorry if this has been asked. but I am having trouble entering my own Tf values. Symptom: You try to delete the existing field in the input box and it puts a value like 1 in the field. Then you try to add a decimal place and it changes the filed to 0.1 then you try to erase the 1 to make it say .3 and it fills the field with 0.01??? ,,, and then you try to change that and it puts another value in. The whole time this value is being used to control your ship and it of course is now bucking wildly out of control. Is there a reason I am fighting to put my own value in this input box and if so can I please for the love of god make it stop?

I apologize of this has been asked before but has anyone else been having trouble entering the Tf value??? It's really annoying I try to type a number in and it just stick random ass numbers. Hit back space and it goes to 1, then try to hit . and it goes to 0.03, then hit backspace, and it goes to 0.1. WTF! It actually caused me to wreck today because I could not change the god damn value and it was entering crazy ass **** like 15!!!! My friend has the game as well and he says it acts goofy for him as well. He just takes ten minutes to get a value in that he wants and then does not touch it any more. For me it seems to have a memory and keeps coming up by default to 0.03!!! As I understand it you want to be between .5 and no lower then 0.03. Is there a known bug that is making the input box act oddly and prevent you from putting in values?

The wiki suggests putting two satellites in the same orbit as the Mun with one trailing mun by 3500km and another in front of mun 3500 km. Can anyone describe the procedure for accomplishing this either manually or with mechjeb2 or the built in remotetech2 nav computer. I am kind of eyeball the orbital height and then play with the orbital period but it's not very accurate. However, I am totally failing to see how I get the 3500km spacing with any kind of accuracy. I can't figure the proper math for speeding up or slowing down the orbit and then timing the recircularization burn. I have failed now more times then I care to admit and do not want to waste time trying again until I have a solid idea of what I am doing.

Sorry to rant and this is not any kind of slam against the plugin. I love it! But the VAB has a lot of issues like this and it becomes really frustrating because you start clicking wildly and then I have screwed up hours of work because I will get frustrated when parts will not snap into place or worse yet you put something is a spot that you cannot get it out of and have to destroy an entire model to get to it! One starts to go insane!

Okay there has to be some kind of god damn trick that I am not aware of because I have been here for a full 3 F'ing hours trying to get the third piston to snap into place. WTF! Is there some way to line these damn things up? The F'ing thing snaps to everything but what I want it too! I am ready to take a god damn hammer to the computer! Two hours to make a three cylinder piston for the love of god there has to be something I am missing because this sucks ass!

Are there any instructions? I see two keys boxes. if I put a number in the first one and press that number all I hear is the server buzzing but it does not rotate??? There are also rotate <> buttons on the VAB UI that seem to do nothing??? Can someone please explain the UI functions?

Unfortunately this assumes you have satellites that are small enough and compact enough to fit in a single rocket. For complex and heavy satelllites it is hard to carry the entire network of them up and deploythem using the 4h period orbit technique.

Thanks I will give that a go. I am pretty consistent with making my rockets symmetrical and balanced, with the exception of maybe putting a thermometer on one side of the ship and not balancing it out on the other. I doubt that sort of thing is going to cause the kind of crazy behavior I am seeing. lol I am playing in career mode. I had completed the tech tree in standard vanilla in career mode and had set up a space station, a geo stationary satellite network with remotetech, a moon base, and was just starting to go interplanetary and decided to add a bit more realism and started a new game with FAR, Remotech, tacLifeSupport, tacFuelbalancer, Mechjeb2, Engineer-Redux, Crewmanifest, ProceduralFairings, KW Rocketry, KerbalJointReinforcement, LazorDockingCam, and the Kethane addons. But I quickly stalled at the 90 science level of the tech tree because I am struggling to get into orbit with any comfortable level of control and consistency.

Okay, apparently I suck as I cannot control getting into orbit with this mod at all and 90% of the time I cannot even get into orbit. Is there a tutorial on using this mod. My assumptions are that I am either building the rocket with improper aerodynamics or I am mismanaging my ascent or both. Aerodynamics: I am using fins and I am keeping the center of lift aft of the CG. I tried on the CG but that was fail and as I pilot I was afraid to even consider putting it in fornt of the CG lol. With each launch the rocket wants to naturally start to fall off to the north no matter how hard I try to get it back to the east I cannot. Then it stalls and tumbles uncontrollably. ASCENT profile: PLEASE NOTE I AM NOT DOING THE WHAT VANILLA KSP CALLS A "GRAVITY TURN". I believe I am trying to use the proper ascent profile by trying pitch the rocket gently over to the east while keeping the direction vector inside the pro-grade vector and let gravity and te aerodynamic forces on the tail fins to pitch the rocket over. But I can never get to this point because the rocket stalls and goes out of control and I cannot figure out what hell I am doing wrong?!?!? I am trying to keep my ascent speed under control and I was trying to see when I hit max Q before throttling up to full. I am not sure what the proper max ascent speed(s) are up through the lower and upper atmosphere. From vanilla KSP they say keep V to under 200 m/s but everything in vanilla is dumbed down. I do not want to switch back to the "EASY BUTTON" mode that is vanilla but I really could use some tips to get on the right track. It's frustrating to just keep randomly trying things. I searched youtube and I could not find anything really usefull. People either know what the hell they are doing and LOVE it or cna't figure out what to do and get frustrated and uninstall it and go back the EASY-BUTTON mode. I am not that kind of person and I would rather figure it out then be a quitter or complainer. It would be great if there were a couple short youtube vids showing some of the common mistakes people make when trying to use the addon (like trying to do the wanky vanilla pitch over that everyone calls a "gravity turn"). But any tips to get me going would be appreciated. TY

Sorry I have another, probably, dumb question. I have advConstruction and stability unlocked. I am looking in the .cfg file and the 0.625 and 1.25 say they require stability yet only the 0.625 bases are unlocked. NOTE: I found the panels. The issue was they seem to show up in two different tabs, in one they are greyed out in the other they are not. The 2.5m base says it requires advConstruction, which I have, yet all I can select is the 0.625 bases??? There is a 3.75m and 5m config file but there is no TechRequired value set??? Do I have a bug, or is this normal behavior, or am I not looking in the correct place for the parts? Also, to jettison the fairing there is a note that says I must add a decoupler. I do not see one specific to the mod, I can't see any radial decouplers that woulf work, if I use the 0.625 inline decoupler UNDER the base I blow the base and payload into space, if I put the decoupler on top of the base and under my payload, I blow my payload into space. so what decoupler do I use and where do I attach it? Sorry if these are annoying questions.

Well I just started playing the game less then a week ago. I am sorry if I have not drilled down to disassembling the machine code and yet. Thanks for the pointer to the .cfg file.

Can anyone please tell me when the fairings are suppose to unlock so I know if I have a bug or not? I just got composites and the conic and egg fairings are still locked???