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 Look, the space program needs to make money and that sometimes means we need to cut some corners to do it.
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Jan 2, 2015 21:41
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So on parts test contracts, specifically something like decouplers, do you have to trigger them in staging or can you just right-click and activate? I ask because I seem to be having trouble completing the contract by right-click activating.
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Jan 2, 2015 22:17
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Internet Explorer posted:So on parts test contracts, specifically something like decouplers, do you have to trigger them in staging or can you just right-click and activate? I ask because I seem to be having trouble completing the contract by right-click activating. The crontract will say what you need to do. Typically that is "Activate the part via staging when the parameters are met" and if not then "Run Test" will appear in the right-click menu for the part and you have to toggle that when you are where the test needs to be done.
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Jan 2, 2015 22:19
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Avenging Dentist posted:Alternate solution: cover the plains with dangerous boulders. Boulders? Balls to that; when you start a new game, randomly seed the area around KSC with debris that you can't destroy from the tracking station. Some of it still smoking perhaps. You don't think you're the FIRST guy to run the Kerbal Space Program, do you? 
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Jan 2, 2015 22:21
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Grand Fromage posted:I installed a few mods and now my camera seems to be locked at like, rooftop level in the middle of KSC and I can't click on anything. Anybody had this happen and know which mod is screwy? I just added Scansat, DMagic Orbital Science, KAS, Station Science, Universal Storage, and this ModuleManager dll. This happens to me -- only when I'm alt-tabbed away during save load. If KSP keeps window focus, the space center loads normally. I don't have any extra modulemanager versions laying around. There's any number of mods I could blame it on. there's probably 12 that updated / installed around the time this started happening.
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Jan 2, 2015 22:44
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Internet Explorer posted:So on parts test contracts, specifically something like decouplers, do you have to trigger them in staging or can you just right-click and activate? I ask because I seem to be having trouble completing the contract by right-click activating. *either the bolded bit is new in .90 or I just never noticed in .25 and it has made money missions so much easier to build for.
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Jan 2, 2015 22:46
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Maxmaps posted:Our main directive for the aero overhaul is predictability. The worst part of stock aero, especially during the floppy craft era, was how hard it was to predict how a craft was going to behave or how it would respond to inputs. Making things a little more logical and predictable is a very good approach. karl fungus posted:How are you supposed to use those girders, nodes, beams, and shaped struts? I'm looking at them and I can't really think of anything that comes to mind. All of my rockets thus far have just been various combinations of pods and engines and separators with some science stuff thrown in. Didn't see a thorough response so. You're right that a lot of things can be solved with smart use of the mission-critical parts, so in most cases girders should be your last priority. There was a recent post where someone said if you want to use a NERVA as your landing engine, build your fuel tanks down so they form legs to stand on and run fuel pipes back up. That's basically the approach to take- try to build a craft with only the bits you need, then consider struts and girders. That said, some ideas: -Putting arms on things. Suppose you want to move some engines outboard, either for stability or so parts don't clip. Girders can help with that. -Attachment points. If you're having trouble putting something on a craft, say putting a part on radially, girders can create attachment points. -Sleds. Girders actually make really good landing legs for small craft, or sleds for rocket-powered rovers. You'd be amazed how much speed they can handle. -Cages. For rovers or delicate lander craft, stick on some pointy bits so when you flip over the girders protect your science. -Probes and rovers. Just because you'll probably need some odd bits to stick things on to. Also: Infernal robotics will give you a million new ways to use these parts. Oberleutnant posted:A simple thing - could you possibly widen and lengthen the runway, and perhaps add landing lights which align when you have a good approach? Maybe a North-East - South-West runway too? Doesn't need to be complex, but currently the plains around KSC is infinitely preferable for landing. I basically never use the runway at all. Counterpoint: Scott Manley's Interstellar Quest lands on runways almost exclusively. The guy is bonkers, but it can be done. That said, a few more spots to land and some more airport-like runway options would be swell.
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Jan 2, 2015 23:03
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Ciaphas posted:Boulders? Balls to that; when you start a new game, randomly seed the area around KSC with debris that you can't destroy from the tracking station. Some of it still smoking perhaps. Seed it from bones files uploaded by other players.
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Jan 2, 2015 23:07
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revdrkevind posted:-Probes and rovers. Just because you'll probably need some odd bits to stick things on to. I've found them pretty handy for making pretty-looking satellites, too. Also, with procedural fairings, they're great for service compartments -- fairing base, girder, fairing base, then stick all the bits you need (batteries, science, etc) to the girder and enclose the whole thing in a procedural fuselage. Avenging Dentist posted:Seed it from bones files uploaded by other players. One entry on my long list of cool projects I'm never going to have time to implement is "write Hearse for Kerbal Space program".
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Jan 2, 2015 23:11
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Fermented Tinal posted:The crontract will say what you need to do. Typically that is "Activate the part via staging when the parameters are met" and if not then "Run Test" will appear in the right-click menu for the part and you have to toggle that when you are where the test needs to be done. Splicer posted:After accepting a contract if you click on the contracts dropdown (the page icon in the top right of the flight/map/facilities view and in the bottom left of the vehicle assembly screens*) there'll be a little blue "[+] Note". Click the [+] to get more info on ambiguous things like that. Ah, okay. Thank you guys. I thought "activate part via staging" meant that right-clicking was enough, but apparently not. Thank you! Going to try to make it out of the Kerbin system this run!
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Jan 2, 2015 23:14
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Nostalgia4ColdWar fucked around with this message at 22:27 on Mar 31, 2017 |
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Jan 2, 2015 23:16
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Sounds more like there was maybe a clipping issue when he appeared outside the capsule. Is there anything attached to the capsule close to the hatch or ladder? Edit: There is a plugin DLL somewhere that fixes a glitch with clipping in EVAs.
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Jan 2, 2015 23:19
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Nostalgia4ColdWar fucked around with this message at 22:27 on Mar 31, 2017 |
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Jan 2, 2015 23:21
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50 Foot Ant posted:No, I'm really careful about that. That'd cause that. No, the door doesn't really move.
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Jan 2, 2015 23:24
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Any landing you can walk away from, right?
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Jan 2, 2015 23:29
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Collateral Damage posted:Any landing you can walk away from, right? And you don't have to mount a rescue mission!
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Jan 2, 2015 23:44
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I would count any (space)plane landing where 50% or more of the parts didn't explode as better than average, regardless of whether they are still attached to the cockpit.
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Jan 2, 2015 23:45
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Maybe one idea I have would be delta-v planning in Mission Control. First, in Mission Control, you'd select all the stages of your flight from a dV map. So, for a simple flight to the Mun, you'd pick: Launch -> Kerbin Orbit -> Mun Intercept -> Mun Capture -> Mun Landing And then you can reference this flight plan in the VAB, while you're creating your stages and stuff. I'm imagining the flight plan would look something like this:  This does rely on a MechJeb- or Kerbal Engineer-style staging breakdown, and that doesn't always work for all mission profiles. For example, Kerbin-Orbit-Rendezvous (Orbital assembly via docking) would need players to manually separate their flight and launch planning stages in the VAB, and a Munar-Orbit-Rendezvous (Apollo-style) would require even more wrangling to plan.
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Jan 2, 2015 23:53
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Psawhn posted:stuff The problem I had with my Apollo-style mission was the mechjeb dV calculations weren't working right because I'd attached the lander to the service module's engine. I had to keep the dV of both the LM and the SM in mind before building the rest of the rocket and even then I wasn't sure if it would work. It was a resounding success, LM got back into orbit and docked with the SM with 8dV left in its tank and the SM has more than enough fuel to do a flyby of Minmus before returning to Kerbin, filling another contract and grabbing even more science. I will admit that this is the first time I didn't use MechJeb to rendezvous and dock (I don't really count flipping the SM 180* in kerbin orbit and docking it while the LM floated about 2m away as an accomplishment). I actually got the ships within 200m of each other before matching velocities and used RCS to get the SM the rest of the way. I wasn't gonna dock them, but I forgot to have Bob take the science out of the LM before flying him over to the SM and forgot to quicksave first so I hit F5 and hoped that it wasn't gonna take me a million attempts, did it first try.  Literally my proudest moment in KSP. Would not have been possible without knowing dV (the orbital maneuvers cut it really close and I had to really keep an eye on things to avoid running out of fuel) or without having watched MechJeb do it at least a hundred times before. E: Nearly ran out of monoprop too. Fermented Tinal fucked around with this message at 00:34 on Jan 3, 2015 |
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Jan 3, 2015 00:31
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ToxicFrog posted:Also, with procedural fairings, they're great for service compartments -- fairing base, girder, fairing base, then stick all the bits you need (batteries, science, etc) to the girder and enclose the whole thing in a procedural fuselage. I prefer 6S for service compartments since the stack is shorter, and the little door makes it easier to grab experiment data while on EVA. I modded my install of 6S to add extra nodes so they work more like the stock cargo bays, though. Hopefully with the aerodynamics update in the works by Squad, we'll get some more stock parts to do stuff like this.
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Jan 3, 2015 00:52
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karl fungus posted:How are you supposed to cluster the stock ion engines? And if you're willing to do what the game will let you do, you can stack them one on top of the other. Ion exhaust isn't blocked by parts. oddium posted:I remember waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back before the orbit maps you would have to punch your current flight info into a program someone made and it would show you your orbit If it came from the ancestor of this thread, that would have been the program I kludged together. It was my first attempt at doing anything with C#, and it got me headed down the crazy rabbit hole of finally trying to understand the Keplerian equations. It's possible that talking about doing the research for that in the interview may have helped me get the job I've had for the past year, but it's unlikely that that was the deciding factor.
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Jan 3, 2015 01:04
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maltesh posted:And if you're willing to do what the game will let you do, you can stack them one on top of the other. Ion exhaust isn't blocked by parts. Wait, what? So I can just stack a load of ion engines on top of each other to increase thrust?
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Jan 3, 2015 01:09
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karl fungus posted:Wait, what? So I can just stack a load of ion engines on top of each other to increase thrust? Yep.
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Jan 3, 2015 01:14
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Maxmaps posted:And yeah, sorry, the engine gets really cranky when we mess with higher time acceleration or adding force during timewarp. Wouldn't it be possible for the engine to make some assumptions to do this? If the craft is stable prior to warp lock in the stability during warp. Essentially turn off the physics calculations, even if it requires for you to be in map view to 'Ignore' the craft physics. The patched conics should be able to take the calculation for [Orbit now] vs. [Orbit after X burn] and interpolate the results for burn time and update accordingly. M_Gargantua fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Jan 3, 2015 |
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Jan 3, 2015 01:19
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M_Gargantua posted:Wouldn't it be possible for the engine to make some assumptions to do this? If the craft is stable prior to warm lock in the stability during warp. Essentially turn off the physics calculations, even if it requires for you to be in map view to 'Ignore' the craft physics. The patched conics should be able to take the calculation for [Orbit now] vs. [Orbit after X burn] and interpolate the results for burn time and update accordingly. Not impossible. Will bring up monday. Also that ion behavior is so not intended. 
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Jan 3, 2015 01:42
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How tall of a stack of ion engines would it take to get from KSC to Kerbin orbit? edit: More than 16, but they explode on the pad. withak fucked around with this message at 02:01 on Jan 3, 2015 |
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Jan 3, 2015 01:52
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Maxmaps posted:Not impossible. Will bring up monday. For what it's worth, I think one of the main benefits of how timewarp works now is that orbits are* closed-form (i.e. you can predict the position of a craft at any point in the future without stepping through iterations). Allowing ion engines to work under timewarp would probably make this a lot harder, and I'm guessing that's part of why things are the way they are. While you're talking about that, it might be worth bringing up the idea of maintaining rotation while under timewarp. It would remove the exploit that lets you kill rotation by timewarping for just a second, and it might even be possible to make SAS operate under timewarp, which would be great for stationkeeping (e.g. if you want the station aligned so that docking ports are always oriented a certaian way relative to the body you're orbiting). I mentioned this earlier in the thread too, along with some other small suggestions. Sorry to nag! * Ok, they can be. I'm assuming the game does it this way... although I don't think this works for SOI changes or collisions. (Collisions aren't actually hard to predict, and it's totally possible to prevent tunnelling through planets at high timewarps with a good collision function.)
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Jan 3, 2015 01:53
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In my defense I have been lovely regarding keeping up with the thread due to being on vacation in Ottawa.  withak posted:How tall of a stack of ion engines would it take to get from KSC to Kerbin orbit? Stoppit.
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Jan 3, 2015 01:59
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Maxmaps posted:Not impossible. Will bring up monday. Maybe you guys can go full Orbiter-Sim and do high-order Runge-Kutta prediction. 
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Jan 3, 2015 02:19
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I spent an entire week one time trying to get an ion powered ultralight plane into orbit. Biggest problem was running out of daylight, and it's hard to cram enough of the massless batteries on a Stayputnik to make it through a few minutes of indirect sunlight let alone a night. Plus it's easy to run out of xenon when you're trying to achieve orbit.
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Jan 3, 2015 02:25
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Tommychu posted:I spent an entire week one time trying to get an ion powered ultralight plane into orbit. Biggest problem was running out of daylight, and it's hard to cram enough of the massless batteries on a Stayputnik to make it through a few minutes of indirect sunlight let alone a night. Plus it's easy to run out of xenon when you're trying to achieve orbit. It apparently can be done, but my best attempt resulted in nothing more than a circumnavigation.
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Jan 3, 2015 02:49
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Maxmaps posted:Not impossible. Will bring up monday. My thought on accurate "burn while timewarping" behavior is to split the maneuver nodes. Even splitting one maneuver node into two would improve the accuracy immensely because it would take the burn time into account, and then each node can be split in two again recursively. And then, once you have the projected orbits for 1, 2, 4, and 8 nodes, you can use extrapolation. Pretend that your solutions are values of f at f(1), f(½), f(¼), f(⅛), and so on, and you can extrapolate to f(0), which corresponds to an infinite number of nodes. 
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Jan 3, 2015 04:17
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Maxmaps, when you're doing your next part list to add, can we please get a stock petal adapter? KW is OK (but out of date), MRS is not as good, but any part that requires an instruction sheet to use really is just a bit poo poo. And I vote that a petal adapter is one of those things that kinda needs to be stock anyway.
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Jan 3, 2015 04:48
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eth0.n posted:Would you mind trying again with StationScience? If there's a problem with it, I'd like to know. I'm re-adding one at a time until I figure it out. StationScience seems to be okay so far, KSC loaded normally.
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Jan 3, 2015 04:54
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I wanted to see if I could get my chair strapped to a rocket into orbit with some modifications. This game is stupid in the best ways.
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Jan 3, 2015 05:08
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Scrub tier question - How can not starting an engine until later in flight actually increase DV? Or is this an error with KER? It seems like not lighting them all at the start would increase time spent in the atmosphere eating gravity/drag and reduce DV. Here's what I mean - the total DV number is higher when the SRB's stage first alone than with everything together. http://imgur.com/a/3BAfK intuitively it feels like the top arrangement should have higher DV.
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Jan 3, 2015 05:16
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Engines become more efficient when in thinner/no atmosphere. Something to do with how rocket fuel ignites/oxidization or something, I don't know anything about the physical and chemical reasoning behind it.
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Jan 3, 2015 05:18
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It looks to me like your SRBs' decouplers are set to fire at the same time as you activate them, making the SRBs contribute nothing to your delta-V.
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Jan 3, 2015 05:18
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Avenging Dentist posted:It looks to me like your SRBs' decouplers are set to fire at the same time as you activate them, making the SRBs contribute nothing to your delta-V. Ok that makes sense, lol. I actually launched this craft and that happened but I didn't make the connection. e: the effect still persists after fixing that, to the tune of about 500m/s in favor of doing the SRB's first. rockets are unintuitive, who knew.
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Jan 3, 2015 05:20
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Sokani posted:Engines become more efficient when in thinner/no atmosphere. Something to do with how rocket fuel ignites/oxidization or something, I don't know anything about the physical and chemical reasoning behind it. It's simpler than that. Basically: (in real life) thrust is worse in atmosphere because there's air pushing back against your exhaust. ISP depends on thrust. KSP calculates ISP incorrectly in that it changes the fuel flow instead of thrust, but the effect is the same.
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Jan 3, 2015 05:26
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