Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

 SilverMK2 wrote:

 Nick Ellingworth wrote:
All sorts of crazy orbits there.

Hey! Most of them are circular

Managed to get my planned crew transfer vehicle within 10km of it but couldn't match the orbits well enough to get closer. I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually.

10km? I'm lucky if I get my orbits within 100km

What is the secret to more accurate flight?

Practice and pure dumb luck.

 SilverMK2 wrote:

Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Deathshead420 wrote:
You do know about the railgun and laser mods right?

I know there are weapon mods but have not installed anything onto the base game yet.

Do you have a link?

If you want mods there's the mod subsection on the KSP forum or the new Kerbal Spaceport

That's kinda cool. I'll have to try the demo.

The demo is pretty cool - in some ways the full game is actually harder as there are so many more parts that distract you from building something simple that actually works

Then you start modding it and there are so many that I had to reinstall and try to keep it a little more sane.

I've been playing with one of the hyper jump mods - so much less painful being able to build a ship and jump it straight to a ship/station you have already got into place rather than building it, a launcher and praying that it all holds together long enough to get you out into space, let along somewhere vaguely near where you want to go

I ejected a piece of my rocket earlier, and accidently sent it into kerbin escape orbit, nearly crashed it into the moon, and it's now on course to get caught by Duna.

Man.....stroke of luck.

Nice one, I do try to avoid getting any debris in Kerbin orbit although even I have yet to accidentally send debris out of Kerbins SOI.

I mentioned that I've been mucking about with group engines and I think I've finally settled on a design I like. It's 4 fixed engines and 1 smaller gimbalable (is that a word?) engine. This is all stock no mods needed.



This by the way is the crew transfer vehicle for my station and the final stage may also become the command module for any future Mun/Minmus missions, once I actually design the lander and a launch vehicle capable of getting me there.

This is my launcher of choice - it can lift reasonably big payloads and the fuel tanks are set up to drain the outer tanks into the inner ones for seperation (and so you don't have to boost around the weight of dead tanks and rockets).

The only extra parts are in the nose cone where I have a rather cool set of payload enclosures and the jump drive/targeter.

You can easily use it to launch a probe to Mun or the outer moon.



In orbit - the larger outer tanks and rockets are released when empty (but are more than enough to get you into orbit by themselves. The outer ring of small boosters can also be released when their tanks run dry.



Eventually the probe inside the payload shields is released; the solar pannels on the booster ensure that the whole thing remains charged even on long drifts to higher orbits/etc.

I just finished my first successful Mun landing (it's taken a while). I've had plenty of space craft hit the Mun at high speed or topple over fall apart on landing but this time I actually got something down without anything breaking.* Unfortunately for a lander the design is a complete failure as it doesn't have enough fuel to take off again, on the bright side however it was unmanned so I don't have to mount a rescue mission. I've redesignated it a permanent research station on the Mun. Hopefully once I get a lander that can take off from the Mun working I will be able to shuttle Kerbals back and forth on a regular basis and possibly add new modules to the base.

* Note: something did explode on the launch vehicle during the acent from KSC but it didn't seem to cause any problems so I kept going.

Here's a screenshot of my new Mun Base

So, I fired off a prototype probe, hoping to achieve orbit. Imagine my surprise when I got Mun orbit....but the annoying thing is I can never seem to circularise the orbit around the mun, I can get to within 100k km of the mun, but not down to the surface. I don't want to crash either.

So going to use protractor and mechjeb.

Huh strange, I don't have any problems at all getting a decent Mun orbit. I've got 2 spacecraft and a satellite around it at the moment all in fairly neat orbits.

Just a heads up version 0.18.2 has been released there's a new dwarf planet and a ton of bugfixes.

Excellent - I think I will do a clean re-install as I kind of went overkill on the mods

I generally do that with every update, as a result I've got about 7 or 8 different versions of the game hanging around.

BTW that new dwarf planet Eeloo looks like a right pain to get to, it's on an eliptical orbit beyond Jool. Considering how much I sturggle with the Mun I can't see myself getting there any time soon. Oh well on the bright side I have at least developed a series of standard launch vehicles for probes, now I just need to come up with something similar for manned vehicles and station modules.

news....

This got streamed on Yogscast, with ridgedog....

Yes, A few people are getting KSP

Watching the recorded stream (or some of it atleast) at the moment, I'm not normally a fan of the Yogscast but the chairty livestreams they've been doing this month have been very entertaining so far. Ridgedog's death count is alarmingly high even by my standards.

Anyway I've been working on a plane, not a space plane just a regular plane. It actually flies fairly well for one of my designs. Managed to get to over 18000m which is pretty damn good for a plane using only the basic jet engines and minimal intakes, only started to descend again because it ran out of lift.

On the lighter side, I've now developed a nice ascent vehicle, composed of 5 mainsails, and a nice little pod at the end for my manned missions. It sailed into escape orbit, and ended up in a nice circular solar orbit.

I just managed an Eve flyby, not enough fuel to perform an orbit burn but I did get close.



Already got a modified rocket ready to go for another try.

EDIT: yup that did it, got a satellite in Eve orbit now.

EDIT: Same rocket got to Duna, just landed a probe there

Well, managed to launch a docking spindle/crew transfer module into Mun orbit (though it since got dragged out of circular orbit by the Mun ):




I also managed (after several pancakes ) to land on the Mun. Unfortunately my struts got dragged along the ground and ripped off, meaning my engine also got ripped off




I've since made a sturdier lander and will try again. Also just re-downloaded a bunch of the lander systems from the Spaceport for subsequent launches.

Hmm

How are you guys making landers and such? I'm only seeing a way of having them be strapped to the outside not really a way to have a cargo bay of any sort

is there a way of banning some engines from drawing from some fuel tanks?

You'd have to add some reversed fuel lines.....

yeah I figured that out after I posted it, am getting into orbit pretty regularly now, its way easier than the demo since its mostly just "lol red rokkit to spayse!"

Next step is making a rocket where i can change the payload to whatever I want, oh and actually have these green guys survive the encounter, that would be nice, lol.

How many rotational/positional thrusters are you guys using on the bigger ships, and how many rcs fuel pods? I've a feeling I'm skimping on them

With most of my rockets I generally only need 8 rcs thrusters (2 sets of 4, one at each end of the final stage) and a single tank of RCS fuel.

This rocket conforms to those standard easily and has more than enough RCS fuel left by the time I reach Duna or Eve for plenty of orbital maneuvers. Then again it's not really a very big rocket.



Speaking of Duna does anyone else think Ike is an absolute menace? When I got my lander probe to Duna in the process of setting up my orbit (takes a while with the NERVA), I had 3 encounters with that little lump of rock one of which nearly caused me to escape Duna's SOI.

Unless I am making something absolutely huge I don't put any RCS on there, when I do I mostly use them for rotating the structure to align with whatever direction I want to burn in, so I usually have a single large tank which is plenty.

Wow this game looks intriguing. Is there a resource management or is it just "build stuff, launch, repeat?"

There is a mod for adding in oxygen, water and food as resources, but to be honest when you are starting out just ensuring you have the right fuel/power/mass and so on will be more than enough to keep you going

You can also dock and refuel/crew transfer, so you can launch a big ship into orbit (which is inefficient due to their mass) using up the on board fuel to power the launch, then send up more efficient tankers to top up the larger ship so it can then fly off into the rest of the local/solar system.

At the moment there is only a sandbox mode with unlimited of all the parts, but there is a greyed out "campaign" mode which may be started at some point. I think there are also some tutorial type senarios and some fan made senarios as well.

Gah I need another game like I need a hole in the head but this sounds damn fun.

Something to bear in mind if you try the demo, it's very stripped down compared to the current version of the game. The demo only gives you a basic selection of rocket parts and the only locations you can visit are if I remember correctly Kerbin itself and the Mun.

The full game on the other hand has a far larger selection of parts. Aside from rockets you can also build spaceplanes, space stations, satellites and probe landers. There's also the option of taking your Kerbals out on EVA so walking on other planets and crew transfers are possible. Plus the solar system itself has massively expanded, there are now 5 planets from the tiny Moho to the gas giant Jool, plus a couple of dwarf planets and a load of moons to aim for.

For resource management, just managing your fuel, electricity and mono propellant is enough early on, but I believe there are plans to add stuff like oxygen supply and food later on (plus mods already of course). When the campaign mode appears you'll also get a budget to contend with but as far as I know that's some way off.

Hey, can you do anything with your guys after they land/enter orbit/whatever?

Im curious if that space station was rocketed up with all the panels deployed and such, or if you actually had your little zim dudes come out and deploy them

I've also dubbed this game LEMMINGS IIIIN SPAAAAAACE

I did mention EVAs aka extra-vehicular activities. ie getting out on a space/moon walk.

Solar panels do have to be deployed to be useable and to put it simply flying in an atmosphere with solar panels deployed is a bad idea unless you like seeing debris fly off your space craft. To deploy a solar panel you don't need your Kerbals (otherwise satellites would be in trouble) you simply right click on each solar panel and deploy them or you can bind them to an action group when designing the rocket. Action groups are simply a series of actions bound to a single number key on the keyboard.