Kerbal Space Program

[Gargamel]

Nope, no near or far. Most of my addons are just parts, aside from mechjeb. I don't mess with the workings that much. TAC fuel balancer.

You can see kerbin waaaaay in the background. it's in a 100km minmus 10' retrograde orbit. The base is located in the western half of the lesser flats of minmus, and the mountains create a bit of an obstacle for landings in a prograde orbit, so having a retrograde descent path makes the approach easier. It's also inclined about 11' to pass over the base to make rendezvous easier.

I actually haven't intentionally left Kerbin SOI yet this save, been trying ot build a base for ages, and I finally just said screw it. I launch them completely assembled and gently land them using a 300t lander. 16 engines. Strong enough to land on Kerbin, only using a couple chutes to keep the thing oriented correctly. I'm really trying for a "off the shelf" interplanetary mission system. My orbital stations, ground bases, and rovers will be prebuilt and tested, and I just have to launch. I have the pusher section of my space craft built (I'm going way too big on it, 3.75m body with 24 LV-N, 16,000 dv), just need to build the crew compartments and landers.

The 4 tiers on the sides are docking ports full length 2.5m tanks, acting as pontoons, giving us the 16,000 dv or so. It should drop to about 12k when the crew compartments are added, and I get a new computer after the part count melts this one.



Overkill? Yup. I've done interplanetary on much much less before, but this is intended to take a space station, with landers and rovers attached, and visit anything it wants.

[Fr8monkey]

KSP is going 1.0 on Monday. And now you can get a Gamers Edition with GOG and Gamer's edition...



Check here

[Gargamel]

Any feedback yet? I just downloaded, haven't installed yet. Been hearing a lot of issues on the forums. Mainly with the aero and the heatshields.

To me though, it seems mainly like any major expansion and revision of any popular game. "They Nerfed this! That's now OP! I can't adjust! RAAAAWRG!"

[Betonov]

I'm happy that 1.0 is finally here, but I'd be lying if I'd say I'm impressed.
Some new features are really great, but are just what I expected for 1.0.
I think it is a tad thin, and it seems the devs rely on the modders to do "the awesome work", only delivering the basics to build on.
That is ok - just not overwhelming.

Then again, 3 years ago, I paid...uh... 9$?
But that's not the point.

[NeonSamurai]

I dunno, I mean I agree with you in some ways, I'm not all that impressed with 1.0, but for entirely different reasons.

I think KSP has enough parts. I think this partly (get it? ) because if they add many more parts, it will interfere with my ability to add mods (unless I go in and remove those parts), due to the game's poor memory handling, and other issues below.

KSP has bigger problems.

The number 1 problem with going to 1.0 is that they still have not optimized or bugbashed KSP. Both of which are key things to move from beta to release. KSP still has massive memory leaks (this is what causes the game to crash after x hours of game play, depending on mods installed). There are also numerous bugs, many that go back to the very beginning (like the sticking brakes bug).

There are also a lot of missing planned features http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/w...anned_features, x64 doesn't work right, multi-threading/processing for the physics engine isn't possible (this and x64 are mostly due to Unity 4 limitations, Unity 5 might be the solution though).

x64 and multi-threading really are crucial to the game's future, as it is these two things that most heavily limit what we can have and do in the game. Proper multi-threading for the physics engine would go along way towards improving the simulation aspects (more detailed physics simulations would be possible), but also towards frame-rate/lag issues due to part counts, which is a key reason for poor frame-rates (that and poor optimization). x64 is what will allow us to break free from the current mod/parts limit (which is compounded by the memory leak problem), and would let many of us uncompress our textures (we compress textures to let us stuff more mods in for the same memory footprint).

With the extensive mods available to the game, I really think the KSP devs need to focus on fixing the memory leaks, getting rid of bugs, migrating to unity 5, and adding features to the core game. We don't need more parts, or mining resources or whatever, all that we already have and more because of the massive modding community.

[Betonov]

[Fr8monkey]

[Oberon]

I love that pic.

Meanwhile in Sandbox, while I was watching a twitch stream of a friend who was putting an X-wing into Kerbin orbit, I decided to put an old favourite of mine up there:

[Gargamel]

Oh Very nice Obs!

Maybe it's cause I haven't upgraded since .24, before they have pilot skills or such, and other features I needed, but I'm loving the new aero and controls. This is the first time I have been able to get a stock rocket into space and into a circular orbit. Before I had to use MechJeb to do it for me, originally for performance reasons, but then because I couldn't control the rocket.

But Now I can.... and I went full out.

I built a working shuttle. Took quite a few attempts to get it to fly right, and kicks to the west upon launch, but the pilot brings it back vertical, and then I nose it over to 70 degrees for ascent. I need to put sepatrons on the booster/tank, but other than a few minor tweaks, it works.










And it flies like gliding brick..... just like it should.

I have to learn the re-entry pattern for this ship, as I came waaaaay short of the landmass that the KSP is on, and had to pull a water landing. more than half the ship survived, so it's all good!

Working on a true spaceplane too, as I have one that can get to orbit, but I need to use RCS to reenter.... need more oxidizer somewhere....

So all those people complaining about the new aero screwing up their games, they can suck it. I'm loving it.

I'll probably go back to mainly rockets though, as I'm not a fan of planes in general, and taking 20 minutes to land.... errr crash, is a lot more annoying than parachuting back down.

[NeonSamurai]

Well technically you built some sort of Space Shuttle/Energia hybrid.

Building a true space shuttle that works, is one of the hardest things to design in KSP (even more so in stock), in part because you need SSME type engines with a fairly high gimbal range (11 degrees or more). This is because the shuttles engines need to thrust through the COM (center of mass) to keep the ship flying straight and not go pirouetting through the sky. Of course the fun part is that the COM moves around as the fuel drains both the liquid fuel tank, and as the SRBs lighten. That's why you need such a high gimbal range, so you can keep the engines pointing towards the COM as it shifts downwards (which is a nightmare using stock parts, as none of the engines can gimbal sufficiently). Of course there are lots of other fun technical challenges too, including dealing with the lift the shuttles wings produce while flying through the air, properly positioning the SRB's and balancing their thrust with the main engines, and dealing with payloads and how they can upset the balance.

Here's Scott's attempt at it (in a much older version of KSP). He pretty much ends up with a hybrid Energia/Shuttle too


In comparison, building a spaceplane is so much easier, because you don't have to deal with a laterally shifting COM.


As for being able to fly now, I wonder if any of it has to do with your previous rocket design style. Wide onion style and similar (like your kethane rig) have always been very unstable, even with extensive strutting because of the rockets flexing under the strain of the main engines and causing all kind of unpredictable phantom forces such as spin. The soup like atmosphere also didn't help much when using fins on those twisting and turning boosters.


Me, I'm still stuck in 0.25, as I am still doing my Interstellar Quest play-through. Probably won't upgrade until another few versions (preferably when we have a working x64 version).

[Gargamel]

No, even the smaller simple probe rockets were wastes of my time in stock. Maybe it's because there's some pseudo autopilot with the pilot skills now. As for the bigger ships, at launch, some of them were pushing 500 parts, and there was no way I could control it at those framerates.

I just installed the 1.0 mechjeb on the 1.0.2 game. Yeah.... no. Tried the shuttle first. Bad idea. URD fest there. Installing the dev release now...

I like MJ for the precision it provides, usually.

[NeonSamurai]

MJ can work in more realistic atmospheres (current game, or in FAR). But it needs some serious tweaking. One of the major problems with MJ is that it is very twitchy and aggressive in its control inputs, which can make rockets flip out, particularly in the upper atmosphere, where tail stabilizers don't work.

The other problem is that the stock turn it makes during launch is far too sharp and shallow. Here are the settings I use for mechjeb launch assist in FAR.
Turn Start Altitude: 0
Turn End Altitude: 60
Final Flight Path Angle: 1
Turn Shape: 75%
Generally speaking this will work with most rockets. Occasionally though I do need to tweak it, usually by playing with the Turn Shape %. You will notice that the curve is very smooth and constant, and this is to prevent mechjeb from turning the rocket too hard into the airstream so that the rocket looses control. Just like planes (only even more sensitive) rockets cannot remain stable in flight if their angle of attack (AoA) gets too high. AoA is the distance between the flight path marker, and the center-point (nose) on the navball.


One of the cool things about FAR (Unfortunately its harder to do with KSP 1.02) is that it is actually possible to do real gravity turns. Where the rocket flies to orbit with almost no inputs what so ever.

The basic concept is that you need a near perfectly balanced rocket with clean aerodynamics, that has a starting thrust to weight ratio of about 1.2-1.4. You then launch as normal, and at about 1500-2000m, you turn the craft about 10 degrees and let the rocket fly itself (with SAS off). Gravity should gradually pull the rocket over to the horizontal. Then you just cut off the engine at the desired Apoapsis and fly as normal. That is why it's called a gravity turn, as gravity is what turns the rocket while in flight.

With KSP 1.02 to pull it off, I had to use fins or the rocket would pitch up and flip over for no good reason (and just not fly straight). Even with fins it was hard to get the proper orientation (it was almost always far too steep or too shallow). In my opinion, though better, the stock aerodynamics still are not that realistic. I've also heard that squad messed up the upper atmosphere by making it thicker again, which a lot of people are not happy about


As for your new found flying ability, I still suspect a change in your craft design as being partly responsible for your new found skill (I bet practice also is a big factor too). Compared to prior versions, flying rockets manually is harder now, because they loose control so much more easily. On the other hand the newer version, isn't quite as sensitive to aerodynamic/mass imbalances in the design as you are not flying in stew any more. However in the new version you can't get away with non aerodynamic shapes much any more, due to high drag losses. So I think you may be doing better because you pretty much have to use more conventional designs.

You can tell when you have a good rocket design, as a good rocket design is very stable. They can pretty much fly on their own, often without even SAS. They won't spin or drift when going straight up. Bad rocket designs need heavy amounts of SAS to even fly, they will tip over, spin, or wobble (spin+tipping).

[Oberon]

Finally, after <n years of trying, I think I've got docking nailed.


The R6A undocks from the PHIR space station

[HunterICX]

Originally Posted by Oberon

The R6A undocks from the PHIR space station