What? That interface is great! It’s all keyboard shortcuts, but once you know them, it’s a super easy / quick to use interface.
The Dwarf Fortress UI is great in the same way the Linux Command Line is great: It’s powerful and fast if you can bothered to spend an effort learning it, but the vast majority of humans just want to click appropriate looking buttons.
Oh I personally have no issues with the DF interface. I can do it in my sleep at this point :) I just meant I could see how others might complain about it.
It lives! After two launches today, to add the service module (the two open docking ports near the bottom) and the fuel containers (on the sides), my Munar station is operational and ready to start fueling missions across the Munar surface (by means of the tanker lander docked below the service module).
Pretty, Fishbreath! My favorite part of KSP is building cool space stations and docking and undocking stuff to them. Although I usually opt for multicolored lights. :)
Odd, it seems that my favorite part of KSP is building cool space stations and then doing absolutely nothing with them. I have a horrible track record for actually using anything I put up.
The 1.1 pre-release branch is available on Steam: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/133680-general-information/#comment-2445993
So I messed with the pre-release last night, and they still have some bugs to squish but one thing I noticed right off the bat is the performance. It seems to me to be running twice as fast. And by most accounts online, it seems now you can build those 500+ part spaceships and they won’t bring your computer to its knees.
No! I just got all my plugins up to date!
On the plus side, ‘all my plugins’ are beginning to cause out of memory errors, so the move to Unity 5 and 64-bit should probably help with that, once the plugin updates commotion dies down. >.>
Definite performance boost. Also KER is now compatible, and Scatterer. If I had AlaramClock, I’d be content =)
As an interim fix, I used the community 64-bit hack: drop the 64-bit Unity executable and support library into the 32-bit KSP install. It works well enough for such a hacky solution, although the extend-once solar panels display incorrectly. (If you want a real I’m-gobsmacked-that-it-worked hacky solution, ask me about compiling Battle of Britain 2 in Win10, but that’s a story for another day.)
Anyway, with my Munar exploration program proceeding apace, I took my science lander up for its first suborbital trip. I went to the Mun’s polar crater, a trip which would have been delta-v-prohibitive from equatorial orbit. Here’s the lander back in the Vehicle Assembly Building.
Astute observers have noticed the problem. It takes about 640 m/s of delta-v to reach a stable Munar orbit from the surface. The right trajectory for a long suborbital trip (and going from the equator to the pole is long-ish) takes about 400 meters per second of delta-v. About. I could probably fly better. That discounts the delta-v spent on landing, which ends up being about 200 m/s on top of travel costs, given my landing skill. “Easy!” I think to myself. “2200 m/s is more than enough for that.”
Astute observers will continue to have noticed the problem. 400 m/s + 200 m/s is not my trip cost. Instead, it’s 400 m/s + 400 m/s + 200 m/s (for a launch to the right trajectory, for killing the trajectory velocity, and for landing). So, on a long trip, I don’t have quite as much of a buffer as I’d like. In fact, I have very little buffer, and thanks to some inefficiencies on my polar trip, I touched down at my Munar base with a grand total of 75 m/s of delta-v left in the tank. Yikes. This just wouldn’t do.
Back to the vehicle assembly building! I designed a larger lander, based off of the Rockomax-size parts, and got well along in the process before I realized its fatal flaw: a larger vehicle takes more fuel, and the amount of fuel I can get to the Munar surface is already very limited. Rather than fueling three or four missions, my tanker shuttle could only fuel one, and every time the shuttle goes to Munar orbit, I have to send a tanker to the station from Kerbin. No bueno.
So, obviously the answer is to go smaller and lighter. The second crew member is probably not needed, as long as I have a probe core for control, and if I pack some batteries in, I probably don’t need to worry about solar panels, either. The engines are running for most of these suborbital missions anyway. The added compactness requires the docking port to stand out from the hull a bit, but that’s not too bad, right? And three engines is overkill for the Mun anyway.
3,770 m/s of delta-v on the same fuel load as the first iteration. Progress!
Then I got to thinking, though, that I should probably have two crew after all. The probe core does the pilot’s job, but having an engineer (who can fix damaged landing legs if I fail to stick the landing) and a scientist (who takes better surface samples) is super-handy. Then I had an epiphany, which brings us to the final design:
While we’re removing unnecessary parts, what good is the actual lander can, anyway? It isn’t like the kerbonauts have to worry about atmospheric buffeting. Walls and a roof are luxuries. As long as they have a chair, they’ll be fine, and it earned me a good 10% extra delta-v while letting me keep two crew.
Come to think of it, the ladder is probably also unnecessary. They have RCS packs, right?
Yep! Ladder can go! So, my magic number for the Mun is 6500-7000 which includes launch craft. You can usually get out of any shenanigans if you carry that much dV, and if you are really efficient you might be able to skip the lander to two biomes and then head home. for science!
I decided to start a new career for 1.1 and have been having fun all over again. One thing that seems to be even more emphasized: heat. I never used to use drogue shoots before, now I have them everywhere. and keeping SSTO’s from burning up on entry is proving very difficult.
This is mainly why I’m doing the suborbital lander and Munar lab—saves on time-consuming Kerbin launches and trans-munar injection burns, excepting the occasional Kerbin->Mun-station tanker.
So, the lander above is now halfway to the Mun, and will obviously be making an unmanned landing, since I can’t really expect a Kerbal to make the trip on the command seat. (Although, come to think of it, that might have worked if I’d put a fairing on.) In any case, I don’t remember if I put enough battery on it to make the landing, which could lead to yet another new crater on the Munar surface—a frequent feature of this program to date.
I’ve used the tripod tank setting like yours often and to great affect. This time around I’m trying this orientation and I generally like it:
It is really easy to land and has all the amenities. Under this I put a poodle top stage that gets me to the Mun, circularizes, and eventually slow orbit for landing before it runs out of fuel. That leaves about 2k to finish landing, fart around, and get home. I imagine this will be more variations on this theme as I unlock more of the tech tree. I’m not very far in yet.
Looks good! My Munar lab has the same setup, mostly. I go with the super-squat landers because I’m terrible at landing landers, or rather finding properly flat ground for landers, so every bit of stability helps.
So, since the author of Kerbal Alarm Clock has 1) a day job and 2) a job with Squad, doing KSPedia things, he won’t have time to update the plugin to 1.1 standards for a little while.
Fortunately, it’s on github, I’m a software engineer, and I have some time to spare, since my main personal project is presently stable, and I don’t want to embark on my next big task there yet. I found a thread at the KSP forum talking about what has to change, so hopefully it isn’t too, too much effort. Fingers crossed.
Good luck Fishbreath; hope all goes well. I for one can’t play without KAC. That, and KJR.
The other night, I was watching some videos of the American Sprint and Russian Gazelle ballistic missile interceptors, and thought to myself, “I have a rocketry game to mess around with.”
Turns out it’s surprisingly difficult: my waggishly-named Jog missile doesn’t have nearly the same pop out of the notional silo. (Which is reasonable. Sprint accelerated at about 100g, so a second after leaving the silo it was already going three times the speed of sound. Sprint being the second-fastest-accelerating powered vehicle humans have built, besides rocket sleds, I suppose I’m not surprised it takes some specialized parts for that sort of get up and go.) I am pretty proud of the visual similarity, though.
KAC and Transfer window are the two mods left that I really wish I had right now. I like crowded space, and being able to queue up a dozen or so missions can be very fun. Also, I’d love to see either Science! or ScienceAlert, just for ease of tracking your science stuff. Other that that, everything that says it is 1.1 compatible has been working fine for me. Scatter and EVE, along with real plume are making the game look very nice. And practically everything from Necrobones and Roverdude works great.
I actually finished KAC last night, and it seems to work, mostly (although it doesn’t hide correctly when you hide the UI).