The Kraken HATES this one simple trick...

[Kerbals_of_Steel]

What fun/cool/wierd little tricks do you use in your gameplay? I've got two that I use a lot. The first is a way to work around the janky stock fuel transfers. I design my logistics ships (tankers, Ore-Bots, Ect) with two sets of fuel tanks. The first tank(s) have just enough DV to land on the target, and the second set makes up the DV difference for launch when loaded, or are just the main transfer tanks for the fuel tankers. This means I can land a ship, fill the tanks with the KAS system, which is Uber reliable if slow for large ships, and then disable the landing tanks before launch. This means that when I dock at the orbital station, I still have the DV needed for landing locked away in those tanks and just need to reactivate them for the next run, so I just empty the payload tank and leave without having to click through multiple tanks. It also means that if I need to refuel in orbit, I can just fill the landing tank to capacity, without needing to remember how many units are required to land, or playing whackamole trying to balance the LF and Ox mixture. There is a mass penelty of course, but I will eagerly pay that to minimize my frustrations with the transfer system.

 

The other one is much shorter and simpler. Universal Storage has a whole number of components in slightly different form factors than stock, but they only mount on nodes, no surface attaching. The KAS sockets, however, surface attach anywhere and provide a building node on the other side. Bam, surface mounted Universal Storage components.

If only I had realized that before I scrapped all the batteries and fuel tanks I had sent to the Mun...

[Lewie]

Dang, that title sounds like a buzzfeed article...

In all seriousness, that’s a pretty clever system you’ve come up!

Edited September 14, 2020 by Lewie

[Okhin]

Factoring symmetry.

Turns out that symetry is not limited to 8, you can go way further (I've been to 256). It does not really helps with my already high part counts designs, but it makes easier to align stuff perfectly. Or to load a lot of battery on a 5m radius thing. @Matt Lowne explains it in this video

But you can stack it more than twice, meaning you can reach at least 256 symetry. Which you can the reduce using Shift + X to get the number you need / want. If your building rotating rings, or where you want a lot of, say, neon drives, it helps to have them nicely arranged.

But yeah, the part count goes insanely high, fast.

[Mikenike]

Ok, we know this for the most part already. we know that you can even do 1024, at least from what Ive seen friends doing.

@Okhin

Edited September 14, 2020 by Mikenike

[dnbattley]

1 hour ago, Mikenike said:

Ok, we know this for the most part already. we know that you can even do 1024, at least from what Ive seen friends doing.

@Okhin

I'm not aware of any formal limit, but my computer complains greatly after a few hundred parts...

Also worth noting you can adjust symmetry down by removing X part(s) from n symmetry (and then removing those parts entirely). Any offset or rotation of the remaining parts will "reset" their rotational symmetry in the new n - X configuration.

[Mikenike]

10 hours ago, dnbattley said:

I'm not aware of any formal limit, but my computer complains greatly after a few hundred parts...

Also worth noting you can adjust symmetry down by removing X part(s) from n symmetry (and then removing those parts entirely). Any offset or rotation of the remaining parts will "reset" their rotational symmetry in the new n - X configuration.

My friend said his framerate was like 3-4fps.......

[Okhin]

Who needs fps anyway, when we're sharing screenshots :p

I would say there is a formal limit, which is 8, which we're not supposed to reach, but that's just me being picky with formalism.

And I guess, the non-formal limit should be around the size of an int, or something similar (so, probably around 65534. At which point my computer would have melt down in protest). I wonder what happens if you push it above this kind of limit. Is it a signed int ? In which case we could have negative symmetry factor (because everyone knows that 65534 + 1 = -65535), whatever that means. But then, I'm not sure I'm really equipped for those kind of experimentations (going above a thousand part in the VAB tends to kill and freeze the game on my setup)