Very frustrated

[THobson]

I had 1000’s of hours of great fun with 0.9 and am now 100’s hours into 1.04 but I am about to give up:

- Why don’t we have large cylindrical liquid fuel tanks? Or at the very least an adapter from Mk3 tanks to the large liquid fuel/oxidiser tanks? Rockets made with Mk3 liquid fuel tanks either look ridiculous or like a space plane, neither of which I want. All I want is to be able to use the nuclear engine on a vessel that looks sensible.

- This ore business makes no sense. One shot polar orbit from one scanner gives you a rough indication for the whole body, this seems unrealistic. The more precise scanner gives you only the information below it but this seems not to be stored anywhere. One shot of the ground based detector gives information on the whole biome (also unrealistic), but that information doesn’t seem to be stored anywhere either. The old kethane system made a whole lot more sense. Explore the body see what is underneath the detector and store it of future reference.

- transit to other planets.There seem to be two recommended add ons for this, Transfer window planner from Trigger Tech and Protractor. One tells me the transfer from Kerbin to Duna is in 10 days the other that it is nearly 3 years away. Alarm clock’s Model and Formula methods similarly differ by nearly 3 years. Which is correct?

- With KAS/KIS I now find it impossible to remove an attached pipe end and return it to the Kerbal's inventory, are these now one use items?

- Parachutes are now getting ripped to shreds in situations when they would not have done before, and even with multiple orbits to aero-brake and a very flat trajectory give only 1 or 2 seconds of safe to open before hitting the ground.

Is it me?

[Axelord FTW]

-Vanilla ore is a bit bare. Karbonite is where the fun's at.

-Depends on how it is calculated and for which sort of transfer it is going for.

-Take it to the KIS/KAS thread and ask there. Might be a legitimate bug.

-Don't have that problem. Though, I use RealChute. They can still be ripped off if I'm not careful. An object with low drag/cross-section will still plummet pretty fast and bleed speed slowly but then I tend to use drogue chutes for that.

[Harry Rhodan]

- transit to other planets.There seem to be two recommended add ons for this, Transfer window planner from Trigger Tech and Protractor. One tells me the transfer from Kerbin to Duna is in 10 days the other that it is nearly 3 years away. Alarm clock’s Model and Formula methods similarly differ by nearly 3 years. Which is correct?

http://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/

Both. The one in three years is just slightly more efficient.

And you need a tool attached to remove parts attached with KIS/KAS.

[mikegarrison]

Yeah, kind of it is you. You are trying to play 1.04 as if it is 0.90. It's not. If you play it like it is 1.04, you'll do a lot better.

Drogue chutes can be opened at 500 m/s, main chutes at 250 m/s. Air brakes can be used at any speed but may get hot. If you don't have drogue chutes, it is possible to just come in too fast for your parachutes to help you out.

KIS changed how items are detached. You can still detach them, but you need to read the instructions. Again, stuff doesn't necessarily work like it did in 0.90.

And you obviously don't mind using mods, so grab one of the fuel tank switching mods, like Interstellar Fuel Switch. That will let you make your cylindrical tanks all liquid fuel.

[_stilgar_]

- This ore business makes no sense. One shot polar orbit from one scanner gives you a rough indication for the whole body, this seems unrealistic.

What would slower scanner change? You'd time warp for few minutes. It doesn't take a lot of electricity or any other resource, only time. Forcing user to wait isn't fun. Sure, it would be more realistic to wait for few days to complete the scan... but what would it change?

[r4pt0r]

What would slower scanner change? You'd time warp for few minutes. It doesn't take a lot of electricity or any other resource, only time. Forcing user to wait isn't fun. Sure, it would be more realistic to wait for few days to complete the scan... but what would it change?

I tried scansat during my wild ".90 with mods" days, and found painting in the map yourself was sort of satisfying.

[Corw]

I tried scansat during my wild ".90 with mods" days, and found painting in the map yourself was sort of satisfying first time. After it gets boring

FYP (+ extra characters to appease character count gods )

[Streetwind]

FYP (+ extra characters to appease character count gods )

That's quite rude, you know. If you have an opinion, state it as yours. Don't go overwriting other people's posts with it. You're not "fixing" anything, you're just disagreeing.

[cantab]

The ore scanning is a bit weird. Some aspects are sensible. The instant scanning is because the alternative is just timewarping, it wouldn't add anything really. But the way the ground scanner and precision scanners work is goofy and not well explained by the game.

KIS is more complicated than old KAS, and harder to use I find. Read the manual.

Since 1.0 KSP has had a nasty bug. The game looks in its working directory for a physics.cfg file, that specifies critical aspects of the aerodynamics. That's fine if you run it through Steam or if you double-click the game file, but if you make a shortcut to the game it may run with the wrong working directory. When that happens the game automatically generates a *wrong* physics.cfg, and will appear to work but the aerodynamics will be all screwy. The same issue occurs if physics.cfg is deleted or gets corrupted.

[PB666]

I had 1000’s of hours of great fun with 0.9 and am now 100’s hours into 1.04 but I am about to give up:

- Why don’t we have large cylindrical liquid fuel tanks? Or at the very least an adapter from Mk3 tanks to the large liquid fuel/oxidiser tanks? Rockets made with Mk3 liquid fuel tanks either look ridiculous or like a space plane, neither of which I want. All I want is to be able to use the nuclear engine on a vessel that looks sensible.

- This ore business makes no sense. One shot polar orbit from one scanner gives you a rough indication for the whole body, this seems unrealistic. The more precise scanner gives you only the information below it but this seems not to be stored anywhere. One shot of the ground based detector gives information on the whole biome (also unrealistic), but that information doesn’t seem to be stored anywhere either. The old kethane system made a whole lot more sense. Explore the body see what is underneath the detector and store it of future reference.

- transit to other planets.There seem to be two recommended add ons for this, Transfer window planner from Trigger Tech and Protractor. One tells me the transfer from Kerbin to Duna is in 10 days the other that it is nearly 3 years away. Alarm clock’s Model and Formula methods similarly differ by nearly 3 years. Which is correct?

- With KAS/KIS I now find it impossible to remove an attached pipe end and return it to the Kerbal's inventory, are these now one use items?

- Parachutes are now getting ripped to shreds in situations when they would not have done before, and even with multiple orbits to aero-brake and a very flat trajectory give only 1 or 2 seconds of safe to open before hitting the ground.

Is it me?

Who would have known from RL that space is a touch hard. I mean aren't the latest NASA mars parachute test worked well, And of course we are mining the moon and asteroids, and aerobraking vessels in Jupiters atmosphere. lol. What you consider frustrating others accept as a worthy challange for a game.

[THobson]

Yeah, kind of it is you. You are trying to play 1.04 as if it is 0.90. It's not. If you play it like it is 1.04, you'll do a lot better.

Drogue chutes can be opened at 500 m/s, main chutes at 250 m/s. Air brakes can be used at any speed but may get hot. If you don't have drogue chutes, it is possible to just come in too fast for your parachutes to help you out.

KIS changed how items are detached. You can still detach them, but you need to read the instructions. Again, stuff doesn't necessarily work like it did in 0.90.

And you obviously don't mind using mods, so grab one of the fuel tank switching mods, like Interstellar Fuel Switch. That will let you make your cylindrical tanks all liquid fuel.

Yes but... 1.04 seems to have changed. I had contracts where I had to test a chute at 1,200m/s, now they get ripped to shreds at a much lower speed, and I have vessels in flight that don't have drogues because I didn't need them, then.

I have read the instructions for KIS/KAS and know how to detach things. It is getting them back into the Kerbal's inventory that is the problem..

- - - Updated - - -

Who would have known from RL that space is a touch hard. I mean aren't the latest NASA mars parachute test worked well, And of course we are mining the moon and asteroids, and aerobraking vessels in Jupiters atmosphere. lol. What you consider frustrating others accept as a worthy challange for a game.

If you want to make it truly realistic then we are in for a seriously boring game.

- - - Updated - - -

KIS is more complicated than old KAS, and harder to use I find. Read the manual.

.

I have.

[sal_vager]

Juts a note on the parachute test contracts, the chutes you test don't have to be the chutes you land with.

[Kuu Lightwing]

Juts a note on the parachute test contracts, the chutes you test don't have to be the chutes you land with.

Maybe kerbals just want to see what happens if you deploy them at hypersonic speed

[Green Baron]

I had 1000’s of hours of great fun with 0.9 and am now 100’s hours into 1.04 but I am about to give up:

- Why don’t we have large cylindrical liquid fuel tanks? Or at the very least an adapter from Mk3 tanks to the large liquid fuel/oxidiser tanks? Rockets made with Mk3 liquid fuel tanks either look ridiculous or like a space plane, neither of which I want. All I want is to be able to use the nuclear engine on a vessel that looks sensible.

- This ore business makes no sense. One shot polar orbit from one scanner gives you a rough indication for the whole body, this seems unrealistic. The more precise scanner gives you only the information below it but this seems not to be stored anywhere. One shot of the ground based detector gives information on the whole biome (also unrealistic), but that information doesn’t seem to be stored anywhere either. The old kethane system made a whole lot more sense. Explore the body see what is underneath the detector and store it of future reference.

- transit to other planets.There seem to be two recommended add ons for this, Transfer window planner from Trigger Tech and Protractor. One tells me the transfer from Kerbin to Duna is in 10 days the other that it is nearly 3 years away. Alarm clock’s Model and Formula methods similarly differ by nearly 3 years. Which is correct?

- With KAS/KIS I now find it impossible to remove an attached pipe end and return it to the Kerbal's inventory, are these now one use items?

- Parachutes are now getting ripped to shreds in situations when they would not have done before, and even with multiple orbits to aero-brake and a very flat trajectory give only 1 or 2 seconds of safe to open before hitting the ground.

Is it me?

Yep, the whole rocket thing is underrepresented since 0.90. Without mods KSP looses it's appeal quickly cause there is nothing new to discover once you've been out there.

But the ore thing was not that bad, with a good crew (engineer) long range crafts got much smaller because of the abiltiy to refuel out there. A rough scan is enough, you don't need the exact scanning, just don't land in the "black" areas. And use Scansat to store the maps, that's a nice mod as well.

I couldn't play without KW, Transferwindowplanner, KAC, KIS/KAS, Precisenode, Scansat, atomic engines (long range and asteroid tugs) and a few other mods (Outer Planets gave me a kick, let's see how long it lasts). And yes, a reasonable duna window comes every 3 years, roughly. But that's ... natural.

Concerning aerobraking, i suppose you're talking about kerbin, there chutes are no problem at all, there is allways plenty of time when you do it right to open these things between 3- and 2000 meters at speeds of around 200m/s. I'm speaking of flights inside the kerbin soi. Coming down from Jool is tricky but possible as well. Chutes work well at duna and eve too.

KAS/KIS works well, kindly ask to rtm :-)

k

[Sharpy]

I had 1000’s of hours of great fun with 0.9 and am now 100’s hours into 1.04 but I am about to give up:

- Or at the very least an adapter from Mk3 tanks to the large liquid fuel/oxidiser tanks?

Looking for this?

Mk3 to 3.75m Adapter

It's easy to miss, but it's a very useful part. I like to use it standalone, for landers, with radially attached engines.

- This ore business makes no sense. One shot polar orbit from one scanner gives you a rough indication for the whole body, this seems unrealistic. The more precise scanner gives you only the information below it but this seems not to be stored anywhere. One shot of the ground based detector gives information on the whole biome (also unrealistic), but that information doesn’t seem to be stored anywhere either. The old kethane system made a whole lot more sense. Explore the body see what is underneath the detector and store it of future reference.

Ore scanning could be done better, but it works if you have a bare clue how to make it work. Send the low-res scanner sat to orbit to prospect promising areas, land a prospector rover/flier with two remaining scanners to determine the best spots within these areas.

- transit to other planets.There seem to be two recommended add ons for this, Transfer window planner from Trigger Tech and Protractor. One tells me the transfer from Kerbin to Duna is in 10 days the other that it is nearly 3 years away. Alarm clock’s Model and Formula methods similarly differ by nearly 3 years. Which is correct?

Both, depending on how good a window you want. The one in 3 years takes less delta-V than the one in 10 days. Use http://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/ to get the porkchop graph, and pick a local minimum you like, possibly disregarding the "best" minimum suggested by the graph and extending both axis for slower or more distant windows.

For example, to Eve, you can pick a transfer that will take over a year of travel but appear sooner than the "default" which takes just some 200 days; you'll still arrive earlier and on less fuel. Above all, understand "transfer windows" aren't some magical spots in time when the launch is possible and at others it's not. They are just arbitrarily chosen local minima on the wide porkchop graph, chosen by distance from "now", time of travel and delta-V required; different systems prioritize these factors differently and as such present different launch windows.

- Parachutes are now getting ripped to shreds in situations when they would not have done before, and even with multiple orbits to aero-brake and a very flat trajectory give only 1 or 2 seconds of safe to open before hitting the ground.

Drogues, heatshields and airbrakes ceased to be aesthetic add-ons and became valid, important parts. Trying the old suicidal reentries of pre-1.0.3 aero is now actually suicidal. Change your old, bad habits.

Is it me?

Yes.

ps. to test chutes you need to activate them through staging. They may be set to deploy much later, through preset pressure/altitude. Set pressure to .66 and you'll have the chutes deploy only at some 2.5km, not the hypersonic flight in upper atmosphere.

Edited August 24, 2015 by Sharpy

[Asharad]

- Parachutes are now getting ripped to shreds in situations when they would not have done before, and even with multiple orbits to aero-brake and a very flat trajectory give only 1 or 2 seconds of safe to open before hitting the ground.

As you enter the atmosphere, right click on your parachute and read the status of the parachute. It will tell you if it's safe to deploy. If the chute says "unsafe" or "risky", then you need to let your craft slow down before deployment. On Kerbin, your craft must be travelling less than 200m/s to be safe for chutes.

Yes but... 1.04 seems to have changed. I had contracts where I had to test a chute at 1,200m/s, now they get ripped to shreds at a much lower speed, and I have vessels in flight that don't have drogues because I didn't need them, then.

I had to learn the same thing. The first time my chutes ripped apart, I was furious. But then I realized that deploying chutes at 1,200 m/s should have never worked. Maybe you should consider the previous versions were "buggy" or "less feature filled", and 1.04 adds more to do. The chutes can tell you when to it's safe to deploy, you just need to listen to those voices. Edited August 24, 2015 by Asharad

[Kerbart]

(...)

- This ore business makes no sense. One shot polar orbit from one scanner gives you a rough indication for the whole body, this seems unrealistic. (...)

- Parachutes are now getting ripped to shreds in situations when they would not have done before, and even with multiple orbits to aero-brake and a very flat trajectory give only 1 or 2 seconds of safe to open before hitting the ground.

Is it me?

As mentioned before, something that you can time-warp through in mere minutes but introduces an extra amount of data to maintain inside the program has been replaced with something simpler. Yes, it's unrealistic but it's also more stable, and in the end not that big of a difference I think. You *do* need a polar orbit for it.

Luckily, your call for more realism has been heard though, and now you cannot open parachutes at high speeds. You win some, you lose some. You lost some with the scanner, but you win some with the parachutes, no?

More often than not the time frame to open the chutes is about a minute. You just have to make sure you're landing at places with lower elevation or you'll be in trouble (another win for realism--it matters where you land)

[cantab]

For Kerbin, Eve, and Laythe a typical blunt-fronted lander will slow down enough to deploy main chutes well before hitting the ground, unless you get really unlucky with the mountains. If it doesn't you probably have the physics.cfg bug I mentioned or perhaps some other aerodynamics bug or issue.

Streamlined things like a nosediving plane on the other hand could easily impact the ground at a speed too fast for chute deployment, but that's to be expected. And Duna may be more of a challenge, but again that should be expected, it was troublesome in older versions too.

[Hagen von Tronje]

What would slower scanner change? You'd time warp for few minutes. It doesn't take a lot of electricity or any other resource, only time. Forcing user to wait isn't fun. Sure, it would be more realistic to wait for few days to complete the scan... but what would it change?

I find I enjoy ScanSat. Because it has multiple levels of resolution and layers for maps with different angles of view, I think the maps are interesting to build, and seeing them flesh out in anticipation of your prospective landing is satisfying. The rich map and overlay options that fill out in layers also gives some impetus to study the maps and get good understanding of a planet or moon's terrain.

You get new toys, have somewhat more stringent satellite placement requirements and a time frame for map completion using (relatively) realistic mechanics, and are rewarded with a superior (and again, more realistic) map product that becomes a valuable mission aid rather than an afterthought or something you use exactly once as a prerequisite to scouting an ideal refinery placement.

Then again I am the kind of guy to think maps are awesome, so there is that.

[Corw]

That's quite rude, you know. If you have an opinion, state it as yours. Don't go overwriting other people's posts with it. You're not "fixing" anything, you're just disagreeing.

Hi there. I see we have been raised in different parts of the internet. I did not meant to be rude or disrespectful, I simply wanted to state my opinion in slightly humoristic way, as it is custom in forums I was raised. Where we do not get that easily offended and we try to be witty and funny and whatnot

Corw out.

[FastMINI42]

I had 1000’s of hours of great fun with 0.9 and am now 100’s hours into 1.04 but I am about to give up:

- Why don’t we have large cylindrical liquid fuel tanks? Or at the very least an adapter from Mk3 tanks to the large liquid fuel/oxidiser tanks? Rockets made with Mk3 liquid fuel tanks either look ridiculous or like a space plane, neither of which I want. All I want is to be able to use the nuclear engine on a vessel that looks sensible.

Not sure if you've discovered this yet, I didn't find it until after playing career mode for a week or so: If you right click on a fuel tank in the VAB, you can adjust the amount of liquid fuel and oxidizer inside the tank. I haven't built anything with Nukes yet, but once I get working on a Duna mission I'll probably use the orange tanks with zero oxidizer in them (as a side note, you can also decrease the amount of "ablation" that the heat shields have, which reduces mass and cost slightly).

[THobson]

Thanks. Yes I knew I could get rid of the oxidiser but it just feels wrong to do that when there are 100% liquid fuel tanks available.

There have been a few patronising comments on this thread about realism. Just to be clear I do not object to the parachutes being realistic, it was the sudden change I have a gripe with. Having said that the thing that will result in me getting fed up with the game is the ridiculous looking rockets I now end up with using Mk3 fuel tanks and the nuclear engine.

Edited August 24, 2015 by THobson

[FastMINI42]

Thanks. Yes I knew I could get rid of the oxidiser but it just feels wrong to do that when there are 100% liquid fuel tanks available.

Ah, yes. It does seem a little strange launching a half empty tank, it would be nice if you could replace the oxidizer with more liquid fuel.

[KerikBalm]

More often than not the time frame to open the chutes is about a minute. You just have to make sure you're landing at places with lower elevation or you'll be in trouble (another win for realism--it matters where you land)

And now, drogue chutes are usefull at places other than Duna*.

Its worth nothing that drogue chutes can be opened safely earlier than main chutes, which will also obviously help give you time for your main chute to open.

Also, make sure the full deploy altitude is set at 1000 m or over, because they don't open instantly now (which caused considerable shock and could tear apart your vessel in previous versions)

* Previously, at duna, due to the lower minimum deployment pressure, if you were landing at a high altitude place, the drogues could open sooner than the normal chutes for any landing site over 4km (assuming full deployment was set to 5km altitude).

Even earlier, before you could tweak deployment parameters, drogues just opened earlier by default.

Also, their lower drag helped stop your craft from tearing apart when they opened... because your craft wouldn't be slowed by dunas atmosphere well, and would be going much higher than terminal velocity (which still happens, but the slow deployment speed and the low speed to deploy them safely make it not such a problem - if your chutes can be deployed, they generally won't rip apart your craft)

[TriggerAu]

Sorry if theres some confusion caused by my mods - I certainly dont aim to do that.

For reference re transfer windows, there are two ways to calculate them:

Simple Hohmann transfers - based on circular orbits - this is what is seen at http://ksp.olex.biz/ and protractor and through the "Formula" version of KAC. Its the lesser accurate of the two ways to get a launch point

Using whats called a Lambert Solver - this works out the "cost" of transfers and tries to give you the best one. This is what you see in http://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/ and TWP and the "Model" data in KAC. Gives you much more efficient transfers and can visualise the cost for you via the pork shop plots. Alex wrote the code for the solver in both his web site and KAC so the results from these should be very similar, and you can get good launch points from either from my experience

I can certainly feel your frustration on some of these things, hopefully everyones tips are helping