Nice one. Very surprised it isn't top heavy as hell. I've worked out that I might be having centre of mass problems on my rockets (trying to put too much on the rocket, too high?). I've never seen any good guidance on that stuff. Anyway, here's a shot I took while I was experimenting. SEPRATRONS!
It certainly doesn't require anything beyond keyboard control though there does seem to be a joystick/cpad mapping section in the settings that I haven't investigated.
I have decided that I am having two, main problems with my rockets: 1) I need to count the weight of each stage to do the "twice the fuel, half the engine mass" calculation for the next stage. 2) I am not being careful enough with struts on my asparagus ships. Unless you are quite careful (and/or doubling the strapping so there is something on both "sides") your rocket WILL go crazy as stages separate and torque from slight booster movement plays a bigger part with two and then four boosters missing.
How to make engine clusters - this is choice! http://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpace...ine_clusters_howto_xpost_from_ksp_forum_this/ I am guessing we will get base plate parts to make this easy soon.
Yeah one of the big issues at the moment is that the updater/installer is pretty crappy. I read on the forum that they are in discussions with Steam so I'm hopeful that it will someday be easier to deal with these updates.
And he's home! Bill Kerman is home ladies and gentlemen! I came in at a crazy angle due to a total lack of knowledge of how to get Kerbs home from the Mun without wasting a ton of fuel, but we did it! He's safe! Now I think I'm going to switch over to .18.
blerg. An hour to download the patcher, two hours to download the game, and now the new version doesn't have the basic tutorials.
Ok so this is embarrassing. I created a launcher for my simple space station. Then I launched it. It started wobbling back and forth suggestively and suddenly I realized that I had created an interstellar dildo. :( This was not intentional I swear!
Bzzzzzzzzzz! If you do the multi-engine thing make sure you build on a single fuel tank before attaching and mirroring. Otherwise it is blood impossible.
Ok last screenshot for the night. My first space station. Bill and Jeb are up there hanging out. They've got plenty of electricity, no food, water, or extra air. If they run out of electricity they have two escape craft. The only problem is that the remaining fuel in my small maneuvering tank is probably not enough to deorbit the thing. Up next: Jeb's inlaws visit and criticize his docking skills.
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF! The orbiting tutorial allows you to run out of fuel before the tutorial is complete. I know it's alpha and whatnot, but this isn't going well.
Hang in there! Eventually as you struggle through the first phase of the game where everything explodes and nothing makes it into orbit you will move on to the phase where everything makes it into orbit and then sits there uselessly and then to the phase where things do what you meant them to do! Then you repeat the cycle when trying to get to the mun! Best game evar!!
I'm back to the early game. I'm trying to get 13.5 tons in orbit and I simply can't do it. I've had a core of 3 Rockomax 64 and then 6 x 2 height Rockomax asparagus boosters, all of them with the cluster style engines (which, by the way, feel much more "controlled" than the mainsail. I put one vectored engine in the middle and 6 non-vectored around it. I love clusters!). I can't get my payload into orbit, and my payload is a non-puddle engine and 4 tons of fuel! I'm so confused :(
Wait, mirroring, say what? I was trying to do this last night and only got it working on the main tank. Hmm I guess I could detach that, set that in the "setaside space", then add a real central one and then turn on reflecting/mirroring with the setaside one, huh? I didn't think of that last night; good trick. Edit: tested it at lunch. Yep, works - although the middle pillar Rockomax tank vanished mysteriously during decoupling separation. Not sure if it spontaneously combusted or bugged out, but I had 4-around-1 configuration, and after separation there were only 4. :D Soooooo cluster at your own risk.
Has anybody successfully built a plane? I can't get one to take off, let alone fly. Did I miss an earlier post about how to actually build one? I think part of my frustrations are due to not understanding the controls. Is up actually up? Down actually down? If so, that's confusing.
I've been trying to dock to pieces of a space station tonight but other than a vague sense that the orbits have to overlap in some way I'm having great difficulty understanding what to do to use the target system. I grokked the ascending node/descending node concept well enough to match the orbital paths into a plane but after that I'm kinda lost. This tutorial seems to explain the process in the comments and around halfway through the video. I'll have to see what I can do.
This video should help a lot. More detail on the approach. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/32179-How-to-use-maneuvering-nodes-to-rendezvous
Today I got the Remote mod, launched a comsat into a kerbostationary orbit. Then I saw it was midnight, said why not, and launched another comsat into a kerbostationary orbit 180 degrees opposite, leaving no debris and landing within 30km of the space center. Now I'm going to go to bed. Edit: actually, I wanna talk about my rocket. It has four stages: 1: 9x Rockomax SRBs, radially coupled to... 2: 3x Rockomax 64s with tricouplers and the non-gimballing engines, crossfeeding and radially coupled to... 3: 1x Rockomax 32 with a tricoupler and the gimballing engines, stack coupled to... 4: The orbital stage: a nuclear engine and normal fuel tank, the comsats (solar panels, antennae, and dishes), and the piloted module (an LV-909, some of those toroid fuel tanks packed together, and the command pod). It got to orbit with Stage 3 still mostly full of fuel, which bodes well for future, heavier lifts.
My cluster rocket. Looks awesome, flies awesome, can't get a payload of 4t into orbit. Is 4t really so much? It is a small or orbital tug and a light satellite! Arrggggggg. Two nights trying to get this stuff working!
Basically every rocket I've worked on so far has seen the following design process: 1) Build it really really big, because big rockets are better. 2) See it fail to get any reasonable payload into orbit. 3) Make it smaller, and 4) Add lots of SRBs. Then it does mostly what I want it to. Are those six boosters with double mega-Rockomax fuel tanks absolutely necessary? Just how much are you trying to get into orbit, anyway?
Man Calistas that thing is a monster! Now I don't really have a point of reference for how much four tons (metric tons?) is in the game. I don't have any sense of how the mass figures in the designer relate. But from what I've seen I would think you have to be really worried that all that extra thrust is just being wasted on lifting all that extra fuel into the sky. But I'm awful at Kerbal so what do I know :D
I bet you are ignoring terminal velocity! If you go faster than 100m/s at 1000m and faster than 160m/s at 5000m you are wasting a lot of fuel. More thrust often actually makes a rocket less efficient/able to reach orbit if you just blast away at 100%. At a certain point adding more fuel/thrust makes your rocket less efficient because the ratio of weight/overall thrust energy is too far in the weight direction.
I want to go on record as saying that the docking procedure is VERY HARD the first time. At first I was trying to use some of the more basic tutorials about how to get close to the target but honestly the vid that Calistas linked is essential. Using the node system and following his step by step process is tricky but ultimately doable. Behold! Habitat for Kermanity Mk 2! Now to make it bigger.
Turns out I am the king of over-engineering. This simple rocket got my mapsat into a perfect 80k orbit without a hitch!
Tonight, I may be able to squeeze in some more rocketry. The goal is to get two satellites into highly eccentric polar orbits over the Mun, for dark side communications with unmanned probes. I'm going to fiddle with my launch vehicle so I can get both up in one launch, and I'll probably make it an unmanned flight, too. It still bugs me that there isn't a way to switch command pods without rebuilding the whole stinking rocket. Maybe I'll attach the manned pod to the top of my rocket, pop it off with staging, then control from another part...
If you pull in RemoteTech you can base the platform off one of the remote controls and then simply add a manned pod. Then you can control the thing "locally" when it is actually inhabited and remotely when it's not.
That's a good idea. I guess I'll rebuild it with a remotecontrol core tonight, and then never have to worry about it again, I hope.
