For some reason I am finding career mode to be much more enjoyable in 1.0 than it has been in the past.
The tech tree seems better somehow. Instead of there always being obvious choices, now there are different paths you can choose depending on what kind of things you want to do. The new aerodynamics also give you new concerns that need to be handled.
The missions reflect the choices you've made and the milestones you've reached. The percentage of nonsensical missions is much smaller. Flying tourists around is surprisingly rewarding.
The scientists are also suddenly very useful now. Instead of just getting a percentage boost, restoring single use experiments yields a whole lot more science and gives you further reason to keep sending kerbals and not probes to space.
Career is still not perfect. Unless you pick exactly the right difficulty, you often end up too rich or progressing through the tech tree too fast. The engineer is still relatively useless. I don't know why you're allowed to remove carefully placed satelites 10 seconds after putting them in the right orbit. And why are new kerbals so expensive but rescuing new kerbals from space is free? The game also encourages you to drive or hover around your space center for easy (but boring) science because there are 1000 biomes there. The limitations of the VAB and launch pad are also pretty harsh at the start which forces you to make dumb rockets until you get them both to level 2. I don't understand how adding an extra thermometer counts as much as adding a giant SRB.
Those limitations were added because it used to be pretty silly once you unlocked the 1st tech node, which didn't even require you to leave the launchpad. It was possible to collect Duna+Ike (or Eve+Gilly) orbital science with the 2nd launch, after that you could unlock pretty much everything.
Can someone give me a run-down on how to properly rescue kerbals from orbit? I can fly to duna and back but managing an orbit around kerbin has me frustrated beyond belief
On May 13 2015 08:57 Fecalfeast wrote: Can someone give me a run-down on how to properly rescue kerbals from orbit? I can fly to duna and back but managing an orbit around kerbin has me frustrated beyond belief
I don't know if I can do a run down exactly, but when rescuing a kerbal floating in space, you have to treat it as you would any other orbital rendezvous. Get into low Kerbin orbit, hopefully somewhere close to where the hapless kerbal is (think of it as similar to transferring to Duna - try to time your launch so that you are circularizing your orbit close to where the kerbal will be in its orbit). If you miss, you can also try for a phasing orbit (an orbit higher or lower than the kerbal depending on whether you want to approach from the front or the rear) to decrease your distance, but it might take awhile for you to get close. Set the Kerbal as a target, and try to get the closest intercept you can with the Kerbal. Once you actually get close enough to the Kerbal (it was <1k last time I did it), you should be able to "switch vessel" to the Kerbal using the bracket hotkeys. Once you can control the lost Kerbal, you then use its RCS to maneuver it into position to board the ship.
I'm assuming you can get a stable orbit around Kerbin... I mean, you're not doing a direct burn for Duna, right?
On May 13 2015 08:57 Fecalfeast wrote: Can someone give me a run-down on how to properly rescue kerbals from orbit? I can fly to duna and back but managing an orbit around kerbin has me frustrated beyond belief
Make an elliptical orbin with the periapsis at the same height as the kerbel's orbit and the apoapsis at a point further. Then set a manuever node near the periapsis such that you match the kerbel's orbit (which will make you match speeds as well) and that you are close enough to the kerbel in his orbit. It may take a few rotations around your system to get the timing close enough. After executing the manuever, you should be on a trajectory that leads you near the kerbel going the same direction. Switch to the kerbel, and have him thrust his way to your ship.
On May 13 2015 08:57 Fecalfeast wrote: Can someone give me a run-down on how to properly rescue kerbals from orbit? I can fly to duna and back but managing an orbit around kerbin has me frustrated beyond belief
The lazy way is to get an orbit that is similar but not identical, then go to the tracking station, timewarp until your rescue craft is close to the kerbal, then use a manouver node to get yourself within 2km whereupon you gain control of the stranded kerbal. If you are unable to get within 2 km, but are still somewhere in the 10km range, you can click on your speed display on the navball until it says "target". Then you use the navball to make your ship always go towards the target.
Adjust speed by pointing prograde or retrograde. When you thrust in a forwardish direction, the prograde vector moves towards where you are pointing. If you thrust retrogradish, the retrograde vector will move away from where you are pointing. If you use these to push and pull your prograde and retrograde vectors so they are always pointing at the pink target markers, you will eventually rendez vous. Be careful to watch your speed though. You don't want to slam into the target.
You'll save a little time if you take off 20ish degrees in front of the target, That should put you nearby by the time you reach orbital speed as long as your launch trajectory is reasonable.The number might not be 100% optimal, but taking off too early is better than taking off late since it is harder to catch up than it is to slow down when chasing an object in LKO.
On May 12 2015 21:39 stenole wrote: For some reason I am finding career mode to be much more enjoyable in 1.0 than it has been in the past.
The tech tree seems better somehow. Instead of there always being obvious choices, now there are different paths you can choose depending on what kind of things you want to do. The new aerodynamics also give you new concerns that need to be handled.
The missions reflect the choices you've made and the milestones you've reached. The percentage of nonsensical missions is much smaller. Flying tourists around is surprisingly rewarding.
The scientists are also suddenly very useful now. Instead of just getting a percentage boost, restoring single use experiments yields a whole lot more science and gives you further reason to keep sending kerbals and not probes to space.
Career is still not perfect. Unless you pick exactly the right difficulty, you often end up too rich or progressing through the tech tree too fast. The engineer is still relatively useless. I don't know why you're allowed to remove carefully placed satelites 10 seconds after putting them in the right orbit. And why are new kerbals so expensive but rescuing new kerbals from space is free? The game also encourages you to drive or hover around your space center for easy (but boring) science because there are 1000 biomes there. The limitations of the VAB and launch pad are also pretty harsh at the start which forces you to make dumb rockets until you get them both to level 2. I don't understand how adding an extra thermometer counts as much as adding a giant SRB.
I'm having too much fun to care, though.
This is obviously just a bunch of thoughts and not fact but... maybe it will help flush some of the niggle...
- Engineers can repair stuff. It's not often useful but a busted wheel on a rover is disastrous. Busted lander legs can be a pain but generally I've found I can get by without them being able to retract in nearly all situations. Also if you use kerbal engineer (and decide not to use the parts that do the same job) you need an engineer to see the info anywhere outside th VAB.
-Yea, you can move satellites, but it's mostly pointless to so... why would you?
-I guess they just want you to explore the immediate area. I didn't but... maybe they are proud of Kerbal Space Center? Ultimately I really think they need to give you wheels earlier. Honestly having a rocket powered car during the early game would be enough to make me ride round and gather science there.
-The dumb rocket bit I liked, it's a (different kind of) test of creativity . And there's a weight limit on the pad so a thermometer isn't quite the same as an SRB.
There are other things that nag me but... I try not to think about them or rationalise them out of existence (see above).
So, remember that insane rocket I was trying to launch? Yeah, it needed some modifications, and along the way I discovered that when bits of fairing get trapped inside the rocket structure, the game behaves strangely. ("Cannot go faster than 1x when moving over terrain!" But I'm in orbit!)
Also, for some reason I have yet to determine, the fuel flow on the rocket leaves two of the early stages very slightly out of sync - half the stacks don't run out of fuel at exactly the same time, which lead to me having to throttle back and drop some tanks with residual fuel still inside. It's not elegant, it's not efficient, but I do now have 16 full orange tanks with six empty orange tanks, in orbit. (500+ parts on the pad, 108 parts in orbit, for a mass of 636.15 tons.)
As I don't think I want a spoiler that large, this is a link to the imgur album of the first successful launch to orbit. (I say that because the launch previous wound up in orbit... without the upper part of the center stack, which includes the probe core.)
that's not really a fat/pancake rocket, it's just a bit wide. The cross section looking down on it is not that bad at all, and you're not even going for a particularly fuel optimal ascent there as long as it gets up
also:
tl;dr basic jets only really useful for fuel economy. Best when moving at ~200-250m/s-ish at ~6-7km.
Rapiers will get you faster and higher than turbojets, but they're a bit less efficient, don't generate electricity and - because of lower thrust to pressure ratio at low speeds/heights - tend to get stuck more at the mach 1 air resistance cliff unless your craft is pretty light and non-draggy - which means that you're not going to space today (or anywhere in a timely fashion)
Is anyone else having problems with kerbals kinda slipping through the ground and then exploding?
It looks like their feet just clip a bit then whole body falls through and poof, dead
it happened to the only kerbal i sent on a recent minmus mission, but now again today and it's kinda anticlimactic after an hour-long almost failed mission, though quicksave saved the day the second time
aaaaaaah
Not even related to time warp, i have a quicksave before it~ just sat and watched it for 3 minutes before SOI switch at 1x speed and it still dumps me in this unusable orbit (and apparently fixes itself a few minutes later, yay)
Very quickly designed minmus-capable spaceplane.
first flight out of the spaceplane hangar, looks like experimenting with mk.3 parts will bear fruit
But uh, there wasn't enough fuel left for minmus orbit with the way i flew it that time. Sorry Tanrey~ xd
edit: I actually landed him too! Even at a similar place. The plane is going back 'round near kerbin, but not low enough. Flown a bit more optimally, it's probably capable of a free-return trajectory that lets kerbals land on minmus using EVA suit propulsion only - and that's just the "hey, lets put 20 rapiers on this thing and hit launch to see if it gets off the ground" version.
It has a pretty crazy 5.2km/s of delta V - just as a cockpit, fuel tanks and that one rocket engine. It would be insane if it -wasn't- orbit capable.
Nowadays, for a circular 75km orbit you need about 2.1km/s of speed, plus ~1km/s to combat drag and gravity if you build a sleek craft with a very nice TWR. It's actually much less DV needed than 0.9, because the atmosphere was so crazy thick you wasted probably over 2x as much fuel between fighting against it and having gravity ruin your day a lot more due to your low TWR's (appropriate for thick atmosphere)
Bugs like the ones you mention is the main reason why I change the standard settings in hard difficulty to allow reverting to launch and quicksaves. If you crash and kill the kerbals due to bad planning or execution is one thing, but when the kraken eats your kerbals (or spaceships) is quite another.
I've had ships that are on rails disappear because the way crashing into the ground is calculated there is different (and stricter) than ships that are actually simulated. It really sucks when your lander has finished gathering science and is about to go back to the orbiter and the orbiter is mysteriously gone. If you are smart keep orbiters around Gilly, Pol and Bop flying at high orbits.
Ships on the ground have also exploded when they got wihin range and got simulated. This has been in sandobox mode on the KSC buildings, so it hasn't been a big problem.
The funniest bug though is when I clicked the EVA button and then instead of the kerbal grabbing the ladder outside, he got violently propelled into space so fast that he couldn't get back with the EVA monopropellant he was carrying.
Something I saw during my ascent with the big rocket... I kept on regenerating launch clamps at altitude, which would suddenly then fall to the ground and explode. Except for the one launch where launch clamps suddenly reappeared at about 10k, and two of them stayed with the rocket for about another 4k.
And Cyro... what the hell, no nosecone on that Mk 3 cockpit?
Something I saw during my ascent with the big rocket... I kept on regenerating launch clamps at altitude, which would suddenly then fall to the ground and explode. Except for the one launch where launch clamps suddenly reappeared at about 10k, and two of them stayed with the rocket for about another 4k.
YES, you can be in space and like some fucking crazy launch clamps fly past you at 5km/s :D
And Cyro... what the hell, no nosecone on that Mk 3 cockpit?
Ahh fuck. I forgot to make it aerodynamic
I didn't even check the ISP on the rapiers vs the other engine, i should have disabled them at least after establishing a stable orbit (but probably before then?) if the big rocket engine is notably more efficient (i think it is)
can make that a lot better. I was half asleep and just wanted to see what mk.3 could do (spoiler: pretty much everything)
Been playing around for a few hours. There's a part with the procedural fairings mod which is very useful for connecting engines etc, basically you can connect it to something and then it has ~4-16 connectors on the other side, you can decide how big it is, how far apart the connectors are etc. Pretty customizable so you can just dump 16 engines on something instead of having to deal with stacking quad-couplers and them taking up 5x as much room as they're supposed to and fuel crossfeeds breaking etcetc.
Wrote a small rant here
tl;dr
GIVE US AIR BREATHING ENGINES THAT ARE 4-8X MORE POWERFUL AS A SINGLE PART (squad or just modders, plz)
i'm putting 20 engines per wing on my actually good planes and then they need 2-3 intakes each and thats 160 parts for the wing engines alone and 20fps on any available hardware and blargh
You should try that mod that allows you to change the size of every part in the game (tweakscale), you can make a 3m diameter rapier with it and it scales the power accordingly.
And if you check the Devnote Tuesday message that came out from Squad today, at least performance improvements may be coming once they finally get the game geared and moved to Unity 5. (Apparently they're also re-writing the GUI. Or using the Unity Native GUI tools instead of what they have now.)
I got a few mod part packs for now, like 5m wide stuff for rockets and additional mk.2 parts/engines etc. Also some more engine-attachment plates. When i played a bit earlier, i lifted the biggest tank in the stock game (the max length ~3.5m one) to orbit with a single stage using:
2 huge fuel tanks
1 engine array
~5 reaction wheels (they were pretty cool, they're actually set up to fit outside the side of the 5m stuff)
1x 5m control part
1 decoupler+fairing
ran at like, 150fps which was cool. Lifting that kind of load before would cripple my system no matter what i did.
EPT
. And there's a weight limit on the pad so a thermometer isn't quite the same as an SRB.![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/yciepgi.png)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/AZZK1hp.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/xfAYi7O.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/48lUuUP.jpg)
