The Kerbal Space Program Thread!

I’ll add “Enginish” to the whitelist and you can hop on whenever you like :slight_smile:

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Are you running the Windows version? For me the linux 64-bit version is rock solid. If you have a partition lying around you might want to give it a try. Historically (from a KSP perspective) the linux 64-bit version has always worked relatively flawless IIRC.

Yes Windows. I know the linux version works flawlessly, but I only have linux installed on my laptop, not my desktop. Most games tend not to work too well on it :stuck_out_tongue:. It’s ironic that it’s the best os for kerbal in my opinion. I’ve been debating myself for a long time whether installing a second partition for linux on here is worth it.

Allright, I set up mapsats on kerbin and both moons, as well as a resource scanner on minumus, which has so far only found water. If anybody wants to adjust them to a better orbit, they all have plenty of fuel.

Those mapsats are going to come in handy soon. I’m working on orbital construction of spacecraft over Minmus with a mining operation on Minmus providing the raw resources. I want the mining operation to be entirely unmanned (maybe even kOS scripted at some point), which means I need really good comms coverage!

So far I’ve put up Kerbal commsats:

Near Kerbal are a load of low orbit commsats, each has a permanent connection up to the geostationary commsat. Off the the left is the geostationary commsat, which has a permanent connection to mission control and another up to the deep space communications array (off the top of the picture).

The satellite in a high polar orbit around kerbal is the Deep Space Communications Array. This has a permanent connection to the geostationary communications satellite as well as to the trailing lunar/Minmuscomm satellite (to the right of the picture). It also has one seriously long range dish which is targeted at the active vessel, so if you lock your dish onto the DSCA you’ll usually have a connection out to anywhere closer than Jool.

The trailing lunar/Minmus comm sat sits in the same orbit as Minmus and trails behind it by about 15 degrees, this has connections down to the commsats nearer Minmus.

Finally we have the up close space around Minmus. The highlighted orbit is the orbital construction dock, which currently doesn’t have an antenna (i’ll be sending up a module soon). The four satellites in a very rough square have omnidirectional antennas which reach the surface, in theory the entire Minmus surface (except near the poles, possibly) should have the coverage I need to land a drone without ever losing connection!

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Well that took a bit of getting used to… All zoned ATM.

Anyway, there is now a fuel resupply vessel in ~650km equatorial orbit, it still has its second stage with its own tank untouched so you can move it to wherever, it has a 1.25m and a 0.625m docking ports, engine will need to be detached to dock to the 1.25m dock.

There is an unused directional antenna on there if you need it too, just don’t retract the other one.

There is a lot of good mods in there, nice automation systems and all, hope this stays active. :slight_smile:

Massive success! And utter failure: delivered to you by Kerbal Space Program.

On the left is a metal miner constructed by the orbital construction dock in 19 hours. In the middle is the dock itself. On the right is a metal miner which came from Kerbal, landed on Minmus, mined 2000 ore, docked with the construction dock and provided the resources to construct the new miner.

Unfortunately there have been some tiny little problems. Turns out that when you finalize a build the construction dock pulls in resources to fill the tanks… so all the fuel which was in the docked metal miner is now in the new one. Unfortunately I was so busy solving this problem I forgot to deploy solar panels on the new one and so it’s out of power!

So we have have one metal miner with fuel but no power, and the other one with power but no fuel. :weary:

Edit: For players currently on the server

I assumed that the construction dock would construct a ship with full tanks, this turns out to not be the case and that means there’s a bit of a hole in the modpack as it stands at the moment - we can manufacture ships but not fuel them (unless they’re using one of the vanilla fuels).

I’m looking into modifying Karbonite to be able to convert to RealFuels and will probably have a new mod to add to our pack soon™

Mod Pack Updated

Ok, that was easier than expected! There was already a mod which added support for RealFuels to Karbonite. I made some modifications (it didn’t support all fuels) and it’s ready to go. I’ve updated the non CKAN part of the modpack, you can download it from here. Installation is the same as before, simply merge into GameData.

This adds a new Karbonite Convertor, and a new Karbonite Distiller which can convert to all RealFuels (yes, that is a lot of conversion options).

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When I try to connect I get the message “Handshake failure: You are not on the whitelist” :sob:

Also I’ve added you on Steam where my name is Ominous_Penguin.

Woops! I typoed your name in the whitelist, sorry about that.

I’m on mobile at the moment, so I’ll add you back on steam later :slight_smile:

Thanks. On now.

I think my first mission might be to tidy up these satellites.

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I’ve been paying attention, but haven’t had the time to sit down and set much up yet. I played around with designs for electric probes and craft. They are completely overpowered for small probes, excluding that they require massive amounts of electricity. We need some sort of heavy electrical generator to attempt to use electric engines. Karbonite can work for larger craft, but there is nothing that our small craft can use. Even with a ton of e-storage, these engines suck through ~150-250 ec/s at the smallest scale.

For larger craft I think we can get by using karbonite generators, but unless we get near future’s electrical pack(with capaictors and nuclear reactors) I’m not sure how we can use those engines.

Also, the balance between RF and near future is horrible. RF won’t allow me to reset the xenon numbers for the normal stack xenon tanks, but it does for the radials. This means that the stack tank gets around 5k(maybe 7k, can’t remember) while the radials allow me to store around 20k xenon, for less weight! This allowed me to get 50km/s dV on a probe with a TWR of around .8! This isn’t true TWR because it was before I added power generation however. I could not even find a way to come close to the 100 ec/s needed to power these engines though. Solar panels add around 1-10 ec/s, unless you get the station scale ones. Karbonite generators are your best bet.

Oh, I found this awesome video using new models of the robotics parts too. Check it out!

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Both the RealFuels+NearFuturePropulsion and RealFuels+Karbonite connections were kinda thrown together… I’m kinda regretting using RealFuels to be honest - it adds some really cool stuff but makes all the management of modpacks a helluva lot more complicated. We’d need a universe reset to get rid of RF now though, so I personally think we can stick with this until we have to reset when KSP1.0 rolls around (probably a month or two).

Regarding power generation we could include NearFutureElectrical. It’s not in there at the moment because it’s not on CKAN, and it’s not on CKAN because apparently it has some known bugs and the author is going to do a total rewrite soon™. I believe the main problems are that it doesn’t really do heat properly, and then there’s some bugs to create infinite power by toggling certain parts on and off in certain ways. We could probably deal with both of those problems though, shall I add it to the pack? For probes I usually just go with vast solar panels.

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Well there is a rescue mission for that miner of yours underway, it just been a pain to get up to speed with MechJeb, also love forgetting to extend solar panels or forgetting to activate the comms, so many launches…

All zoned as expected, feel free to rescue that miner, rescue ship is called rescue ship. :slight_smile:

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I switched to the Fuel Bin vessel and it spontaneously exploded. :confused: Sorry

Electric engines have very specific applications and are not appropriate for most vessels. If your ship has massive arrays of overlapping solar panels that dwarf the ship, you’re probably doing something wrong.

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That’s because the mods aren’t compatible and being unbalanced when used together. It’s no fault of the panels or the engines themselves, it’s just the combination we are using. There is no other way to use .625m probes except stacking tons of solar panels or rtgs to use this electrical engines due to the power use.

It’s nothing to do with unbalanced or incompatible mod combinations. The stock ion thrusters require massive amounts of electricity as well.

IMO it’s inappropriate for a satellite that only needs a tweak to it’s orbit every few years, and unsightly to have solar panels intersecting through each other.
I guess we have very different design philosophies.

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Compared to post-modded it’s a paltry amount. Stock thrusters require 8.7 ec/s. That is either 2 or 4 medium size solar panels, depending on which you choose. I can’t remember the exact ec/s of stock panels, and I don’t have a stock copy installed to check, but 4 should be sufficient or close to sufficient for 1 engine. I just checked the wiki, and at Kerbin 1 panel produces 2 ec/s. So 5 panels is more than enough to power 1 engine and sas with 10ec/s.

This is radically different than one near future engine requiring 150+ ec/s which would require ridiculous amounts of panels. I feel we share the design philosophy. I have no desire to throw 75(stock) solar panels on a single probe just to use an engine. It doesn’t look nice, nor is it good to use so many parts to accomplish 1 job(EC generation).

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Martin, she is all yours. :smile:

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Awesome, thanks :smiley:

I also sent up a rescue mission (of sorts). I shipped up a load of fuel and manufactured another mining vessel so that I could mine more ore/fuel and manufacture a rescue ship like yours. Looks like you beat me to it!

I’m going to mine more ore later today and then, hopefully, the orbital dock should be ready for everyone to use :smiley:

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I don’t know if this is due to realfuels or if it’s normal, but holy crap capacitor tanks are heavy.