Kerbal Space Program

[cardgame]

Save file it is then?

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Save file would still mean the gamemaster can't participate. Plus, I don't know how to do it.

I am not worried about checking accuracy though - with a rule like 'all engines must be jetisoned from payload before it hits 70km on reentry', then the chances that players will all hit the target or all land to close too tell who won goes to zilch.

So I would rather do the 'describe the zone' method instead of savefiles.

 

[warpus]

So does the bolded thingy mean we'll be able to scan planets in .19 and have that scanned data saved?

I'm guessing so, but I haven't done any further reading..

I bet that when you first start the game you will need to "discover" all the planets in order to fly to them.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

With a telescope!


God I love this game.



I will try and get an ICBM thread up and running but honestly it might not be until Sunday due to homework. If someone else wants to give it a go, feel free to do so. Whether or not I make the thread or play gamemaster, I am definately very excited cause this seems like fun.


I am trying to think of cool/fun rules such as:

Payload must consist of at least 2 RTG's
Payload can have no active propulsion (RCS, engines) but can have fins. Active propulsion must be ditched at 70km with a screenie for proof.
Payload must reach an altitude of 105km
Payload must reach a velocity of 1500m/s

Points will be given for:
Closest to target
Fastests speed achieved
Highest altitude
Fastest fligh time
Decoy deployments
SRB-only designs (simulates reak life modern ICBM's)
Lowest total weight
Heaviest payload
Etc....

 

[warpus]

Oh hey guys

this cracked me up

Had an interesting experience tonight.

I'm an airline pilot, and like many airline pilots I live in a different city than I'm based in. This means that more or less once a week I commute across the country in the back of an airplane. When you spend 30+ hours a month in the coach section of an airplane you either go insane or come up with ways of entertaining yourself. For the last couple of weeks KSP has been my source of entertainment...until tonight. Tonight I decided to try making a space plane. As you can probably guess, my first few attempts didn't go well. Neither did the next few. Or the ones after those. In fact, the whole exercise was pretty much a dismal failure. Fireballs, mid flight structural failures, and events that could be described as "high velocity unintentional landings" claimed the lives of hundreds of brave kerbals.

Midway home the woman in the seat next to me broke the social communication barrier:

: Excuse me young man, are you a pilot?
: Yes mam, I am.
: Oh dear...

I had failed to realize that for over an hour the passengers around me watched as a pilot, in full uniform, crashed what looks to the untrained eye like a flight simulator, hundreds and hundreds of times. I think I'll stick to civ V when I'm commuting.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Yes, i also wonder how airplanes work in ksp. Even the existing ones are difficult to pilot, not to mention the ones i have built myself. Maybe in the final release it will be fixed. Meamwhile i am using this ferram aerospace research mod which apparently will make things better.

BTW people in that forum are having the same discussion like us here, realistic orbital mechanics and simplistic interface dont mix well...

 

[warpus]

Apparently the drag you get from a wing isn't modelled realistically at all, leading to behaviour that just doesn't feel right, in some cases. It's also why helicopters wouldn't work in the game.. at least that's what I've seen people say.

I've been playing around with spaceplanes too.. Not much though. I haven't tried building one of mine yet, just flying around some of the stock ones they have prebuilt. I want to fly a spaceplane around Eve or Laythe, but I don't really trust my spaceplane building skills. I was trying to get a rather large stock spaceplane into orbit the other day and it was just a bit too large. Maybe I should suck it up and try to design something smaller.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Someone on here built a spaceplane that they took all the way to Laythe, I have no idea how.

Wings are super unrealistic in this game and my training as an aerospace engineer is actually making it harder for me to make a successful spaceplane.

If you look at the center of lift vectors, you may notice that the upward facing arrow tilts forward. Usually, this is caused by improper balancing of the angle of attack of the wings and tail. Both thr wings and tail create a moment which will try and either lift the nose up or push it down.

To fix this, you play around with the angle of attack of the wings and tail such that the moments they each produce work against each other and cancel out. I try doing just that to no avail. Nothing you can do (that I have tried) will fix that nose-up moment. Consequently, every plane I make does backflips.

I have seen youtube videos where people have made successful spaceplanes and I have seen then post about them on the KSP forums but fot now it's too frustrating to work on for now.


That story is really funny Warpus. Did you find it on reddit?

 

[warpus]

Yeah, got upvoted fairly high on r/kerbalspaceprogram

I check that page at least once a day, there's usually funny screenshots, a cool mission, a funky new mod, or something unexpected like this

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Woaaa! i Finally found some time and docked this big warehouse from the space drydock mod (also note the docking struts from the idem mod) with some spare parts to my gas station so i can design things at my VAB an then mount them directly in the space dock, and just now i realize i already have a huge long range ship with many engines, a nuclear reactor and lots of fuel from the gas station plus its propulsive stage, and the propulsive stage of the drydock itself.

Spoiler :

Now i only need to design a lander at the VAB and then "mount" it at the orbiting drydock, so i have total freedom about the lander shape and size since i have not to launch it (it was supposedly already launched "inside" the warehouse dismounted in spare parts). So what sort of lander can i build now? where are we going now? The suspense and emotion fill the air (or the void)...

 

[warpus]

Okay, now try to land your whole station on the Mun

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I started on an ICBM game thread, but since I'm a space nut, I decided to start it off with a brief history of ICBM's and an overview of how they worked. That is taking much longer than expected and now it won't done today.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Okay, now try to land your whole station on the Mun

Thanks for that sensible advice. But i have built a big kethane drilling plataform (it is another mod ) so i am going to search some nice place with some kethane to plant it to see what happens (first it seems i need to send some probes to look for this kethane thingy).

Here you can see a very reinforced version of my Kethane Drilling Plataform™ which includes a large rover also equiped with a kethane drilling system, doing some landing test at kelbin:

Spoiler :

BTW these kerbinites are a bunch of morons, they can build rockets but cant ascend for a ladder without falling off...

 

[warpus]

You are doing some pretty cool stuff.

I seem to sometimes get stuck in a cycle trying to make something work instead of moving to an alternate project that might be more successful. I haven't done planes yet, so I just keep thinking about wanting to try it but being discouraged by what happened during my last 4 hour long attempt. So in the end I don't even play the game. Maybe I'm just crazy..

It was the same with my first couple missions - as soon I put down a rover on the mun and got back home I wanted to do it with every single body in the solar system.. for some reason.

I wanna find time for a mission tonight..! We'll see, FM is already loaded up. Do post about your kethane adventures, I've always been meaning to try that one but never have

 

[Thorgalaeg]

The first days i was also obsessed with building very large and heavy things and finally i dont know exactly how but i managed to put the 500 tons gas station in orbit with a huge rocket, however to say the truth it was not too funny due to the lag and constant structural fails and such, so now i prefer to do 2-3 launches instead and some docking. It is unwise to insist on doing too difficult things since there is always many different and more intelligent ways of doing it. IMO this game is great because of that very reason.

 

[da dick]

this sounds relevent to my interests but the minimum specs look it could hang my scrappy notebook.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

It most likely will, which is a shame, it's an awesome game.

It's in alpha stage so it's not optimized and is a resource-hog. I run a mini-supercomputer and it struggles sometimes. Though it is markedly better in recent versions.

 

[warpus]

Is unity 4, which is going to be included in 0.19 make physics calculations go a lot faster?

I know they're supposed to upgrade the physics engine to something that will mean a 2x-4x increase in physics calculations, but is that what they mean by "unity 4 support"?

I have no time to google this but thought I'd mention it anyway

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I thought Unity meant it would run on Linux machines, but I honestly have no idea. Aren't you a programmer?

 

[cardgame]

Unity 4 will likely provide some better performance, but not a whole lot.