The Grand KSP 1.2 Discussion Thread

[Wallygator]

OSX - all settings on high.  And the surface of Duna is a patchwork with sunlight shining through the segments - like it was not stitched together properly.  Anyone else seeing this?  Going to try yet another fresh install...

Edited October 13, 2016 by Wallygator

[KerbalGee]

 

 

Edited November 2, 2016 by KerbalGee
Deleting posts

[DragonHalo99]

14 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

The expand station can often be done cheaply then you dock with an passenger shuttle. Have done some without realizing it

 

Very true. Right now I have 2 tourist contracts for 6 tourists total. I have too suborbital spaceflight and orbit Kerbin, fly by minmus and orbit minmus, fly by mun and orbit mun then land on the mun then get back to kerbin. I am trying to do both contracts in one launch because the 2 contracts together total 755,629. Issue is I am thinking a little too big on the rocket possibly. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=779972749

This rocket i made is 150,000 but the bottom and mid stages get the entire payload into orbit. Problem is the poodle on the payload can't handle the amount of weight in fuel I'm bringing. those radial tanks ran out when slowing down for mun orbit. My last attempt I landed on the mun. But I didn't have enough fuel to make orbit and crashed. I think maybe I should think smaller for this mission.

Edited October 13, 2016 by DragonHalo99

[magnemoe]

I use an reusable LV-N ship to send kerbals to mun and Minmus, refuel at mun or minmus, if you land at Mun you might need to fuel up here too,
orbital shuttle only need to reach orbit, 
 

[DragonHalo99]

1 minute ago, magnemoe said:

I use an reusable LV-N ship to send kerbals to mun and Minmus, refuel at mun or minmus, if you land at Mun you might need to fuel up here too,
orbital shuttle only need to reach orbit, 
 

That's what I was thinking of as well but I have only gotten my aircraft tech as far as high altitude flight and gotten the medium wheel and the research right before heavy aerodynamics. I have yet to figured out a design for a mk2 spaceplane in orbit.

[Draconiator]

Hmmm, now we have a Kerbal curse word thanks to the trailer.  "THAT GUY IS A BANANA"

[KerbalGee]

 

 

 

Edited November 2, 2016 by KerbalGee
Deleting posts

[Mad_Scientist]

Well, if we are talking about tourist contracts, I figure out how to send 4 tourists to Mun/Minmus, land and back just using 3^rd tier of technology. Especially now, when we do not need much struts, the part count is no longer an issue (at least for the busters). After upgrading VAB I also put there all scientific equipment, and just land every time to the new biome, thus killing two birds with one stone.

[magnemoe]

12 minutes ago, DragonHalo99 said:

That's what I was thinking of as well but I have only gotten my aircraft tech as far as high altitude flight and gotten the medium wheel and the research right before heavy aerodynamics. I have yet to figured out a design for a mk2 spaceplane in orbit.

The orbital shuttle can well be an single use rocket, i do that, main thing is using some of the station contracts to finance mining bases for refueling. 
You could also start using an single use rocket and switching to an ssto plane later 

[DragonHalo99]

3 minutes ago, Mad_Scientist said:

Well, if we are talking about tourist contracts, I figure out how to send 4 tourists to Mun/Minmus, land and back just using 3^rd tier of technology. Especially now, when we do not need much struts, the part count is no longer an issue (at least for the busters). After upgrading VAB I also put there all scientific equipment, and just land every time to the new biome, thus killing two birds with one stone.

Yea not needing as much struts is great.

3 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

The orbital shuttle can well be an single use rocket, i do that, main thing is using some of the station contracts to finance mining bases for refueling. 
You could also start using an single use rocket and switching to an ssto plane later 

I don't have the mining stuff yet but it's gonna be the next thing I research. Since we have containers for research now I have science equipment in a large storage bay in munar orbit atm. its got a docking bay for me to just snag it and land in another mun biome for more science farming. I was just trying to knock some more contracts out first. I want to get my final space center upgrade for my space plane hanger.

back on topic though If I recall I think the contract system takes into account reputation so the more reputation you have the harder the contracts will be. I dump my reputation into an unpaid research program to convert rep to science so the contracts I get don't reach duna levels yet. Though it just offered me one for duna that I didn't take.

[Streetwind]

2 hours ago, Mad_Scientist said:

So I started a new career, reached the Mun, and begun to accumulate reputation by performing tourist tours to the surface of the Mun and back. I know, that the new system now will weight the type of the contract you are performing and will suggest you the similar ones. That is cool, however, there is a flaw in it. I was waiting for the contract like Fly by the Minmus (I did not visit it yet in this career) to appear, but then the contract "build the space station around Minmus" popped up. I thought the system should give me that contract after I visited the celestial body... And right after this contract - build the new outpost on Duna. On Duna!!!! Are you kidding me? I did not even escaped Kerbin SOI.

Is it only me, or you also found the new contract system to be a little be too smart?

If I recall correctly, a lot of these "progression" contracts were consolidated/changed in 1.2, precisely because they were unreliable in showing up and people felt compelled to spend time waiting for them. Funny that you now report that you felt compelled to spend time waiting for them

Here's what the changelog says:

* Exploration contracts now always appear in Mission Control if there is not one currently available.
* Explore contracts overhauled, they now utilize the same logic World Firsts used to use to select a "package" of related objectives. They can appear multiple times per planet now, and should have a much more logical progression than they used to.
* Exploration contract progression slowed slightly, now requires science on a planet before allowing a fly by of the next one. Also, in the early game, return from orbit and return from fly by are required before advancing on the Muns of the homeworld.
* Removed old single objective World First contracts, other than the initial four.

(Emphasis mine)

So, potential reasons you were waiting for your Minmus flyby:
- You didn't do enough exploring on the Mun yet to signal the game that you're ready to move on to Minmus. (fairly unlikely)
- You had an "Explore the Mun" contract in your contract list that you didn't do for some reason, causing the game not to generate another Explore contract for a while. After all, Explore contracts are always supposed to pop up if there are none available, and since you didn't get one for Minmus, the only other target is the Mun. It may even be that you already explored the Mun, yet it kept generating new ones, since they're no longer unique per planet. (fairly likely)
- You were looking for a kind of contract that was removed, and the thing you were looking for actually appears in a different contract type - Explore instead of World First. (can only speculate)
- You got unlucky. (who knows)

 

As for getting Minmus and Duna station contracts without visiting either - that is not new behavior. It's been the same for at least the entirety if 1.1, maybe longer. Duna and Eve are always suggested fairly early on, too, since the dV cost to get there is hardly any different from visiting Kerbin's moons. (Mun: 860 m/s, Minmus: 920 m/s, Kerbin escape: 950 m/s, Duna/Eve: 1050-1100 m/s) Basically, as soon as you orbit the Mun, the game considers you ready to poke your nose outside Kerbin's SoI.

But keep in mind that contracts are dispensed based on Reputation. The game pushes more audacious contracts at you if your Reputation is higher. So if your Reputation isn't so good, you may not get a space station contract or a Duna contract right away even though you're technically eligible for it from a progression standpoint. If you take another step through the progression, such as orbiting Minmus, difficulty of everything will be downgraded a bit, and those contracts start appearing, gettting you to believe that you only just unlocked them. Alternatively, if you have a high Reputation - for example, from repeatedly performing successful tourism contracts - the game may eventually decide that you're reputable enough to drop a really big one on you.

And after all of that, there's still contract weighting (leaning strongly towards Mun tourism for you right now) and pure randomness. Statistically improbable chains of events still occur every once in a while to a small number of people.

Edited October 13, 2016 by Streetwind

[SelectHalfling0]

Just gonna say, hyperedit has a tendency to summon the kraken.

[Draco T stand-up guy]

54 minutes ago, DragonHalo99 said:

Very true. Right now I have 2 tourist contracts for 6 tourists total. I have too suborbital spaceflight and orbit Kerbin, fly by minmus and orbit minmus, fly by mun and orbit mun then land on the mun then get back to kerbin. I am trying to do both contracts in one launch because the 2 contracts together total 755,629. Issue is I am thinking a little too big on the rocket possibly. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=779972749

This rocket i made is 150,000 but the bottom and mid stages get the entire payload into orbit. Problem is the poodle on the payload can't handle the amount of weight in fuel I'm bringing. those radial tanks ran out when slowing down for mun orbit. My last attempt I landed on the mun. But I didn't have enough fuel to make orbit and crashed. I think maybe I should think smaller for this mission.

Looks like one of my old Minmus And Mun jobbies:

 

Spoiler

 

 

Flight would have been to Minmus, land, fall back onto Mun, land and then back to Kerbin. Looks like an old one so that would probably explain all the mono-propellent (didn't feel like getting out and walking). Don't think I would have had a poodle on that. Second stage would have been a Skipper IIRC. Last use would have been to drop it into sub-orbital on Minmus and kill almost all m/s and then let it drop. Use the four LV-9 for the rest of the trip.

[p1t1o]

12 hours ago, Robotengineer said:

Some of the loading puns are very bad. Simply reversing the order of a sentence or phrase doth not make it a pun. Vectoring thrust? Transferring Hohmann? Seriously? 

"Vectoring thrust" is not a pun, but it still makes sense, at least in the context of quirky loading messages.

Bad news for you though, "Transferring Hohmann" is an almost textbook-definition pun

Pun pun pun. One of those words that loses all meaning if you say it too much. Pun. Punny.

[Superfluous J]

26 minutes ago, p1t1o said:

"Transferring Hohmann" is an almost textbook-definition pun

You can tell because it's not funny.

[worir4]

1 minute ago, 5thHorseman said:

You can tell because it's not funny.

You guys crack me up. 

[Red Iron Crown]

12 hours ago, Robotengineer said:

Some of the loading puns are very bad. Simply reversing the order of a sentence or phrase doth not make it a pun. Vectoring thrust? Transferring Hohmann? Seriously?

They're not all meant to be puns, they're meant to be silly things that the computer is doing while it loads, in the style of the old SimCity "Reticulating Splines" loading hint.

[p1t1o]

15 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:

You can tell because it's not funny.

I think its really funny. Punny. Poor old Hohmann.

Edited October 13, 2016 by p1t1o

[Mad_Scientist]

I never used Hyper, but is not it obsolete after the release of the new debug menu? Although maybe for the purpose of hypering staff to the surface...

[LordKael]

26 minutes ago, Mad_Scientist said:

I never used Hyper, but is not it obsolete after the release of the new debug menu? Although maybe for the purpose of hypering staff to the surface...

why hyper to the surface? If you're going to play with cheats anyways, just build a reliable, super impractically heavy lander that can land anything cargo, and hyper edit it into orbit

[Mad_Scientist]

Just now, LordKael said:

why hyper to the surface? If you're going to play with cheats anyways, just build a reliable, super impractically heavy lander that can land anything cargo, and hyper edit it into orbit

What I was trying to say, why TC is still using HyperEdit, when now we have a cheat menu with the same functionality.

[Majorjim!]

Performance in various places in 1.2 is worse than before.. With a 600 part craft when I right click on parts in the VAB there is a 1-2 second freeze that was not there before.. Can anyone confirm? It does not occur with lower part counts.

Also deleting parts from a high part count craft results in the same pauses that where not present in the previous version.

Edited October 13, 2016 by Majorjim!

[moogoob]

14 hours ago, Draco T stand-up guy said:

I noticed the lean and was wondering if it was done on purpose considering the fixed stabilizers.

It was. The booster carries the upper stages and payload to the upper atmosphere, where I then turn on Mechjeb's ascent guidance and let the 909 carry it the rest of the way.

That was from 1.1.3, and was part of a thread about "is unmanned still useful" that got merged with this one so its presence could be a bit confusing.

14 hours ago, Alshain said:

If you land on the Kerbin side of the Mun you can just take a C-16.  No need for a relay.  Otherwise you could attach a small relay to the base craft, by the time it goes out of range you would be on the ground and then you just have to wait for it to circle around again.

Your TWR is awful high though IMO.  Limit that back to about 1.5 and you can do a hand-off flight to orbit.

It is - there was a huge discussion a while ago regarding whether aero drag or gravity drag was worse in the Kerbin system, and it turns out that high TWR (on launch, that it) is actually more efficient  than a lower one.

Edited October 13, 2016 by moogoob

[stibbles1000]

Just back to playing after a long while off. Loaded up 1.2 with new career.

 

I can't seem to even land on Kerbin now though. I have 3 drogue chutes and 3 normal chutes on a tiny little rocket - but they never deploy! I can activate via staging, or have tried manually clicking each and saying deploy - but they never deploy. It will say safe in very high atmosphere so I deploy, nothing happens, I start going faster, ship burns up, and I plummet to the ground.

 

Current mission was do sub orbit at 200000km which I hit. Should 3 chutes and 3 drogues not be sufficient?

 

What am I missing? Why is this so difficult suddenly? lol 

[Francois424]

57 minutes ago, Mad_Scientist said:

What I was trying to say, why TC is still using HyperEdit, when now we have a cheat menu with the same functionality.

Hyper edit has far more powerful tools than the stock one does.  And you don't have to calculate from the center of the planet (unless that was changed in release)
There is also that "Landing" option you can perform with it, where your rover gently floats down to the surface.
Very useful to test rovers on Eve / Laythe.

Stock one does the job, and is great if all you want is to get in orbit.  If you need more, Hyperedit still is better.