finally played around with it last night. Loving the new aerodynamics and heat
Planes actually seam to fly now
If by “unpacking” they mean “exploding”, I’ve seen that one. Sometimes when I go into high warp rates, my ship just randomly explodes.
That was the result of a bug that’s fixed in 1.0.1
Basically the mass of the heat shield wasn’t being added in the correct location resulting in chute/capsule/heatshield combos being aerodynamically unstable when they should be perfectly stable in the correct orientation.
Ahh, nice.
I wonder if that explains another weird thing that I observed. I built a ship with a heatshield behind an engine, with the intent of jettisoning the shield when I was done with it so the engine would be exposed. However, I noticed that the engine would fire perfectly well with the heat shield still in place. This ended up being really convenient, but I figure is a bit of a cheat.
Why can’t I seem to build the basic probe? Nothing wants to attach to the probe, the mini parachute and the first engine and the mini decoupler will not attach. I have no idea what is going on.
>What follows is a typed transrcipt of the past week’s entries in Kerbal Space Program Acting Flight Director Knorf Kerman’s recorded voice journal<
April 27. Monday.
Had a great weekend blowin’ stuff up in Bill & Bob’s backyard. Beer may have been involved.
Today we received word that one Frovis Kerman, scientist and yet another employee of that sad rival space program, which will be here left unnamed, is marooned in orbit. Honestly, how do they manage to find new recruits with such a record? Even we [del]kill[/del]“lose” fewer test pilots and [del]ballast[/del]valued scientists and engineers than they.
We’ve made contact with Frovis and have proposed the usual contract: we rescue you, you defect to our program. Frovis through the garbled static appears to have agreed. Also, we’ve been offered a handsome reward. Not sure who ponied up the money for his reward, but it appears to be someone connected to O.M.B. Demolition Enterprises. I’ve heard rumors that they are working both sides.
Anyway, it beats paying the usual stupid fee to hire and train a newbie recruit.
April 28. Tuesday.
We duly set up the venerable and semi-reliable Lawndart Mk. 1 for launch. Already, there’s a problem. Jebediah has sneaked aboard. “No, Jeb! This is to be a remote-probe core controlled launch…We need that seat for Frovis!” That narcissist thinks every launch is about him. Time to plan that mission to Eeloo, Jeb. Yeah.
After successfully dislodging Jebediah, the craft is launched and reaches low Kerbin orbit, as expected. Already, there’s a problem. The standard issue Lawndart Mk. 1 is engineered…pardon me while I stifle laughter at carelessly using this word…ahem…for missions in low Kerbin orbit, or slightly higher but still equatorial orbit. Apparently someone forgot to check the trajectory of Frovis’s derelict at mission control. The base Lawndart Mk. 1 simply does not have the required Δv to make the orbital plane change we failed to notice as well as reach the orbit of Flovis’s derelict. He’s almost as far out as Minmus, for Og’s sake!
Do you think that agency which I will not name had thoughts of trying to reach Minmus? Ahead of us? …
Back to the design board.
April 29, Wednesday.
With some refurbishment and beefier boosters, the Lawndart Mk. 1a rescue vehicle is ready for launch. Someone somehow managed to keep Jebediah distracted—Valentina may have been involved—so the capsule is properly vacant in anticipation of rescuing the wayward Frovis.
Launch commences and low Kerbin orbit is again reached, with, thankfully, more than adequate fuel to make it out all the way to Minmus. We’re not sending it there, but we could, is the point. Also, we were more intelligent stifled laughter…and…er…responsible in planning the launch, so we managed to match the inclination of Frovis’s orbit to within 3 degrees.
Commands are sent to the probe core to make the required plane change, and a burn to set an apoapsis with a rendezvous with Frovis’s derelict. Everything goes well and we are looking good.
April 30, Thursday.
We spent the day waiting for the craft to drift out to the renezvous listening to Jebediah retell stories of his “glory days” as a test pilot in the Kerbal Air Force. I admit some of the stories are very impressive, but for Og’s sake, Jeb, enough already, you crazed maniac. Isn’t there a new space place for you to [del]crash[/del]test?
May 1. Friday.
It’s May Day. That means nothing new to the Kerbal Space Program. It’s May Day everyday, here.
Stupid commies.
Anyway, the craft reached the rendezvous with Frovis’s derelict and we were alarmed to notice that someone…I’m looking at you, Bob…made a wee miscalculation. The craft was nowhere near as close to the derelict as was planned. We had to burn more fuel to get within reach of Frovis’s EVA range. Apparently he’d been wasting monopropellant keeping himself entertained. The monopropellant is not a toy!
Anyway, Frovis had to EVA over to the Lawndart Mk. 1a a bit farther than we had planned. Fortunately, it turns out that he is not as incompetent as we’d feared. Perhaps it wasn’t his fault his vehicle left him stranded in near-Minmus space. He made it over without incident. We immediately insisted that he sign the pertinent documents for his defection to Kerbal Space Program before we’d unlock the controls and permit him to return to Kerbin. We learned the hard way that you need to get that defector contract signed before they land. Before.
So Frovis it appears isn’t a terrible pilot, for a scientist, but in the end we still used the remote probe core, and scheduled the burn for insertion back into Kerbin’s atmosphere at apoapsis. Already, there’s a problem. Because SOMEONE coughBobcough made a wee miscalculation, the craft does not have the Δv remaining to successfully lower the periapsis for aerocapture in Kerbin’s atmosphere.
For a change, another engineer’s error worked in our favor. In the mission schematics, we indicated that the monopropellant that is usually stocked in the capsule was to be left empty. Someone failed to not fill the monopropellant tanks. But this was a good thing, it turns out.
Since the craft was out of fuel, the only option was for Frovis to get out and push. Bill swears this wasn’t intentional, a prank of some sort to haze the new defector.
Anyway, Frovis got out and pushed. And got back in and resupplied his EVA suit, and went back out and pushed. This had to be repeated a few times. It might have been fewer times, but for Frovis’s recreational use of the monopropellant on his derelict. In the end, the computer reported a sufficiently lowered periapsis for guaranteed re-entry.
The only other event worth reporting is that one of the solar panels on the capsule overheated and exploded during re-entry.
That one is coming out of Bill’s salary.
Also, Frovis apparently brought with him an epic stack of printed erotic material. How long did he expect to be out there alone, anyway?
Typical.
>Transcript concludes<
You mean the spherical one? It only has an attachment point (the green balls) on the bottom. Some things like antennas and some types of struts don’t need a separate attachment point, but parachutes and decouplers do. If you have them unlocked, try putting a “cubic octagonal strut” on the top to give you another attachment point. Or use one of the other probe cores, like the Probodobodyne OKTO.
Also, you should place the probe core first. One part will be the heart of your rocket to which everything else attaches. If another component (like a fuel tank) is attached first, it can be difficult and confusing to attach more stuff later on.
The new patch is horrible. Parachutes are worse, heat shields are worse, lift is worse and drag is worse. Parachutes now burn up and heat shields aren’t massless, which are not too offensive, but then they added insult to injury by making changes to the global variables that nobody asked for. A week ago I might have told somebody to hold off on starting the game until 1.0 came out since they’d probably have to start over with all the changes, but right now I’d say not to start because this shit needs fixing.
Things will not connect properly. There are engines that I can’t attach to fuel tanks. I thought that it may have been because I didn’t have something researched but it still happens in sandbox. I am going delete the folder and reinstall.
I quite disagree with your assessment of the 1.0.1 patch.
Physicsless objects in general were changed in 1.0. Where historically they’d been completely massless, dragless, etc, they were changed to add their mass to their parent body. This is a good thing, because it eliminates all kinds of stupid exploits like covering your ship in a bazillion batteries at zero mass penalty, all without incurring the computational penalty of calculating the physics of lots of little not-individually-significant objects. This change was in 1.0, and has not been modified by 1.0.1.
It had a side effect, however, in that heat shields were flagged as physicsless, and so added their mass to the capsule, which resulted in an aerodynamically unstable package for re-entry with bad consequences. Removing the flag from heat shields doesn’t make them worse - their mass was already being added to your craft. It just makes them add their mass to the craft in the correct spot so that it doesn’t fuck up the aerodynamics. Capsule/heatshield combos now point their shields into the airflow in a stable fashion without requiring control forces. This makes them better, not worse.
Parachutes were completely broken in 1.0. They were completely impervious to aerodynamic and heat damage, which is just ridiculous. I mean seriously, your heat shield is glowing red hot and your nylon or kevlar chute somehow avoids melting? Or you can deploy them at 1000m elevation at mach 3 and they won’t tear off? But worse, their drag was completely messed up. Initial deployment was putting crazy g-loads on the ship (I got over 100g’s a couple times, poor Valentina would have been kerbal jello in the bottom of the pod) and the chutes in partial deployment mode were producing way to much drag. They’re now roughly back to how they performed pre-1.0, except they’ve added Realchute-style slow transition from partial to full deployment so you don’t get yanked around so much crossing 500m. 1.0.1 makes chutes better, not worse.
I didn’t even notice the global drag modification until I saw people whining on about it on the forums. You can still get to orbit for under 3500m/s delta-v, so I’m not sure what the problem is.
I agree that the parachutes were ludicrous. The solution now is to not autostage them and only deploy the parachute(s) when well through the worst of re-entry heating. Without question, they’re better and more realistic now. Same with heatshields. Better now.
For some reason, I’ve not done well getting to orbit for the low Δv everyone else is reporting. Maybe I’m stuck in a rut with the old way to ascend to orbit…
Are you looking at vacuum delta-v or atmospheric delta-v? Some engines are more heavily penalized at low altitude than they used to be.
Looking at Δv used.
I’m having no trouble getting to orbit, but am getting Δv numbers to get there that are more like the old “souposphere.” Bah. Obviously I need to retrain my thinking about the ascent profile, which is fine, even welcome.
I love the new aerodynamics for planes. Flying feels SO much more realistic now, and designing them is more intuitive if you ask me. I haven’t designed a SSTO, yet, though.
Some people on the forums really could do with some more fiber in the diet , and maybe switch to decaf. that said, a 0.95 release would have been a better idea.
Still the enhanced realism is great, the heat system adds a lot of complexity ( insert kevin Bacon in Apollo 13 ranting ’ we are going to hit the atmosphere and skip right off and they know it " clip here)
but.
.
.
launching wobbly ludicrous rockets with googly eyed kerbals was fun. As the great physicist Sheldon Cooper once said “What’s life without whimsy?”
Not sure what I feel about the contract system, it is good for guiding tutorial missions, not sure how it will launch people into a " do syuff we haven’t thought of but get rewarded anyway" style. Then again that is a massive challenge for game design anyway.
I think I will just go sandbox for a while, but that’s the joy of this game, make of it what you will.
I’m not going to get into whether this is a “true” 1.0 release* or should have been something else (like 0.95), but well said otherwise!
I’ve had fun playing with re-entry scenarios. I recently had a capsule actually skip out and back in again (just controlling the angle on the capsule effects its entry profile in atmo!) Which needless to say never happened quite like that in pre-1.0.
I think’s there plenty left. Check out my post on the previous page.
There are, and will always be, ways to bend or break the game physics, which you know people are going to find and exploit and make hilarious videos out of. Already happening! I prefer to attempt to be realistic myself, but even that still leads to some wonderful drama and hilarity in this game. And wonder.
It has already for me…
You got that right!
*OK, I lied. I think the argument about whether it should or should not have been labeled 1.0 is very, very silly. Name a game that at release still didn’t have problems…The important point is that the game at this time is fully featured and incredibly well designed, not to mention really fun.
For those who might be interested in 3D printing their spacecraft: https://eucl3d.com/ksp
If you contact them and get a quote, please give us a ballpark idea of how much it costs.
Also, you can turn on the aerodynamics and heating overlays. They’re useful to understand what’s going on, on top of being interesting to look at.
I’m finally getting better at minimizing my Δv…consistently getting launches to LKO for about 3600 Δv, which I think isn’t spectacular but is for me an improvement. The biggest difference seems to me to be in doing two things differently from the old way, actually three things:
[ul]
[li]Use fairings.[/li][li]Start your gravity turn more or less right away.[/li][li]Don’t coast to space but rather burn the whole way. Drag above 45km is all but non-existent, just manage your throttle so your apoapsis doesn’t get too far in front of your craft. It’s been working for me to keep it about 30-45 seconds in front of the craft.[/li][/ul]
You probably all have this figured out, but I’d thought I mention it anyway just in case it helps someone else.
I’m very much enjoying the new science labs. They’re so much more worthwhile now.
One odd thing: so I’ve been rescuing stranded Kerbals to bolster my crew, forf the saved expense. The result of this, though, is that I’m leaving a large amount of debris in orbit because the new game release always puts the stranded Kerbals in derelicts of some kind or another, which you are obligated to leave behind.
Incidentally, for those who like me enjoyed Macey Dean’s series using KSP, “K.S.S. Spirit of Kerbin,” it seems he’s back, after a very long hiatus. Here’s “Aftermath.”
I just accidentally recovered a Twin Boar rocket stage from 400,000 meters up with lithobraking. Apparently a 300 kilogram heat shield is sufficient to protect ten tons of rocket engine from impact at terminal velocity.
Starting over makes me realize how much I was leaning on MechJeb. Getting back into orbit at the start of a new game, was like playing the game the first time.
Do you have to research maneuver nodes or something now? I got into orbit and then did a fly by of the Mun with out the nodes. The nodes would be easier to use.