Better Than Starting Manned (Flower's WIP KSP mod )

[FlowerChild]

Hehehe... nice... Guess I'll leave him there for a couple of months... To think about all his actions that led him to that predicament. Maybe he'll learn something...

Don't worry, if you leave him there long enough, I'll kill him. Any chance I can have his name for personal motivation/satisfaction purposes? :)

[jorgebonafe]

Hehehe... nice... Guess I'll leave him there for a couple of months... To think about all his actions that led him to that predicament. Maybe he'll learn something...

Don't worry, if you leave him there long enough, I'll kill him. Any chance I can have his name for personal motivation/satisfaction purposes? :)

Its Bob Kerman. I guess I'll tell him to start praying for the great overlord Flowerchild if he want's to live. He's gonna have a lot of time up there, and nothing to do, so I'll make sure to give him a vivid description. That'll give him something to think about, hoping that I can retrieve him before huge tentacles come for him from the depths...

That'll teach him to go spacewalking without a proper suit.

[Stormweaver]

Ah, just got done with my first (this playthrough) Wavelength scanning mission to duna.

This time though, I remembered I had solar panels, so I decided to have a bit more fun. So I went to the Mun, then from there to minmus, from there to a solar orbit, into a duna encounter...but decided to orbit it's moon (ike? I can never remember it's name) before finally getting there.

Soo...lots of science was had. And lots of things were learned about the abuse of gravity in saving fuel ^.^

Seeing what's available at the next tech level really has me tempted to jump in before completing this one though. The solar panels in particular, as I'd never make a mission take an extra year to complete because I forgot to turn the ship the right way again. And I might be able to start making ships that actually look different, since from around the first Mun landing onwards, everything just seems to end in a half-sized rockomax tank with a poodle.

Planning to send a second duna probe tommorow, carrying both a lander for ike as well as a...well, lander for duna. Should be interesting, since I know nothing about ike...at all.

[TheGatesofLogic]

Ah, just got done with my first (this playthrough) Wavelength scanning mission to duna.

This time though, I remembered I had solar panels, so I decided to have a bit more fun. So I went to the Mun, then from there to minmus, from there to a solar orbit, into a duna encounter...but decided to orbit it's moon (ike? I can never remember it's name) before finally getting there.

Soo...lots of science was had. And lots of things were learned about the abuse of gravity in saving fuel ^.^

Seeing what's available at the next tech level really has me tempted to jump in before completing this one though. The solar panels in particular, as I'd never make a mission take an extra year to complete because I forgot to turn the ship the right way again. And I might be able to start making ships that actually look different, since from around the first Mun landing onwards, everything just seems to end in a half-sized rockomax tank with a poodle.

Planning to send a second duna probe tommorow, carrying both a lander for ike as well as a...well, lander for duna. Should be interesting, since I know nothing about ike...at all.

Yeah, no kidding. I ALWAY jump from Mun to mimus to save fuel, it's just so much cheaper

[Stormweaver]

Yeah, no kidding. I ALWAY jump from Mun to mimus to save fuel, it's just so much cheaper

I smell sarcasm >.>

The Mun and minmus just made a nice testing ground for actually figuring out how to encounter one from the other without being an idiot and wasting fuel. Kinda useful when the next alternative is sitting in a solar orbit for a year trying to encounter duna :p

[Kazuya Mishima]

That's basically the science you open up when you unlock fins. As long as you can keep your rocket pointed straight up, high orbit isn't very hard to hit.

Yeah that was it. I guess i didn't notice how much altitude i was loosing by allowing my rocket point it's nose down even a few degrees. Thanks.

Getting Gravioli readings now. I think i need Artic/polar, and dessert. I've obtained mountains, highlands, grasslands, shores, water.

[dawnraider]

So, I attempted a mun landing. Everything went well, except for the fact that fuel was extremely tight (though I just had enough to be able to get the job done), and that I had too much horizontal velocity (15 m/s about). When I hit the surface, my lander flipped end over end and landed on its side, destroying it. Nothing but a nosecone and a single RCS thruster remained. <sobs>

EDIT: I did manage to start with a polar mun orbit accidentally, so I was able to get a bit of gravioli data that was at higher latitudes than my orbiter could reach, so not all was bad.

[Sarudak]

I've decided to take a break from ksp after over a half-dozen botched land and return probe missions. The worst were the one time I was reentering kerbin did my final separation and realized that with some last minute modifications to my probe I had accidentally removed the heat shield. Or the last one where I finally landed and noticed that somehow my goo canister had jolted off. :(

[Battlecat]

Finally managed to get a ship into a stable orbit! Just barely had enough fuel to pull it off though but it was enough to get some of my missing gravioli scans. Video of the successful ship is here. Best part is, I managed to do it without tapping into the next tier of technology (tier 4 I think).

The second battery go a lot further for powering unmanned probes than I expected. Four seem to be adequate to transmit 3 scans back to Kerbin.

I guess it's time to start building up the tech for my first munar probes.

[FlowerChild]

Ok, i have another thing to mention about structural fuselages. When you rotate them to be perpendicular to the surface you are attaching it to it clips through but does not prevent placement in any way, allowing for them to serve as early game radial attachment nodes, that just seems REALLY off.

Ok, this one is a little more complicated than it would sound, and I think comes down to a vanilla placement bug/exploit.

I was just playing around with it, and you can do this with ANY fuel tank as well, despite the attachment rules being set to not allow overlaps like that on these parts. Now, not a big deal currently given how heavy fuel tanks are, meaning they aren't really effective for this kind of exploit.

The thing is, tweakables are probably coming within the next few days in .23. One of the things I heard you can tweak is setting the amount of fuel a tank contains. In other words, you'll be able to place empty tanks in order to do the same thing.

So, I can move the fuselage in the tech tree now to make this ineffective, but really I'd just be putting my finger in the dyke as a whole bunch of variants of this exploit are about to become available. All I can really say is "don't do that" as a result and leave it to the player in how far they're willing to go in bypassing the tech progression. I don't have sufficient access to the code to reasonably change attachment rules and such to stop this happening.

I think my best bet for reducing the effectiveness of such exploits in the future will be in integrating FAR as a required mod so that the sillier horizontal rocket designs are less effective.

[FlowerChild]

I've decided to take a break from ksp after over a half-dozen botched land and return probe missions. The worst were the one time I was reentering kerbin did my final separation and realized that with some last minute modifications to my probe I had accidentally removed the heat shield. Or the last one where I finally landed and noticed that somehow my goo canister had jolted off. :(

Don't forget man: you don't have to land goo to proceed. I've balanced it so that it's not a required step, and in my current game, I haven't even bothered with it and am traveling to other planets. It's probably one of the very hardest missions you can choose to undertake.

Historically, I think the USSR were the only ones to have ever pulled off an unmanned launch and return, on a single mission to the moon in the 60's, so I also feel that the difficulty has a certain resonance there.

[Sarudak]

More difficult than a manned landing????

[FlowerChild]

More difficult than a manned landing????

Yup, I'd say so. You require a greater number of individual parts to pull it off, reentry becomes more complicated because you aren't just using the naturally bottom heavy command modules, and as we saw above with logo's missions, this tends to complicate docking rather substantially, and you may wind up with a heavier vessel than if you wait until you have a manned landing pod to send down there, especially if you're packing goo canisters (which are quite heavy). You also can't just transfer goo canisters like you can crew from the landing to command module for return trip, which substantially complicates the overall vehicle design.

The difficulty is comparable, but I'd say the unmanned ones are a tad harder.

I've been meaning to give it a try, likely with a single goo canister, so I can better gauge it myself. I might do that today in just a little bit once I resolve for myself what I want to do with the above placement exploit (if anything), and I'll report back my findings.

[Sarudak]

Well I didn't have any docking involved. The probe core is light enough I could just land the whole thing and liftoff again. I've never managed a docking maneuver but I was imaging it would be quite difficult so I was hoping to do an unmanned landing and return first.

[Stormweaver]

I've found with Goo returns from the Mun/Minmus that it's simply best to make sure you have plenty of electrical charge and then bleed off speed in kerbin's atmosphere a few times before you burn the last of your fuel and reveal the heatshield to the world. And it never hurts to do aerodynamic tests of your return modules. Stick it on a solid fuel booster, fire it upwards, and decouple once you run out of fuel. Watch how it behaves, then repeat without the heat shield. if it tends to points retrograde during both tests, it *should* manage re-entry without tipping over an revealing your parachute.

The Landing probes to duna failed horribly; it turns out having two probe cores uses up twice as much electrical charge (who'd have thought -.-) and the solar panels just couldn't keep up. So I went to eve, got science (and landed on gilly; pain in the ass that was) and am now looking forward to testing my new, 'light', and not-quite-as-fragile solar panels later. Yay

[Sarudak]

You can deactivite one of the probe cores while you're not using it can't you? Just make sure you don't ever deactivate two at once or you'll lose control of the craft.

[FlowerChild]

Well, I just had my own 2 probe core experience, in that I'm regretting I didn't pack a 2nd on this goo expedition :)

My landing module is currently orbiting the Mun wanting to dock with the mother ship. Unfortunately, the mother ship is classified as "debris" due to the lack of a probe core, so I got a question for you Kerbal veterans here:

Is there any way of targeting debris? I can't figure one out.

It's going to be bad enough trying to dock when I can only control one of the vessels, but without being able to target the other one, I suspect this will be downright impossible. Still would like to give it a try if it is though, as this is one of those fun little "oops" scenarios that leads to interesting gameplay ;)

[FlowerChild]

Ah! NM...found the solution for targeting debris:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/thr ... is-in-0-20

Didn't even know you could switch display modes in the map view :)

[E.B. Farnham]

Ah! NM...found the solution for targeting debris:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/thr ... is-in-0-20

Didn't even know you could switch display modes in the map view :)

That's good to know. I had the same problem with my Minmus landing and I ended up tracking the debris from the space center and launching when it was almost above the lander. Luckily I got close enough that I could target it from normal view. That method is however is somewhat easier. :)

Today I landed a probe on Moho. It was damn tough getting there, took about 6000 m/s delta in the end so I've left about an orange tank of fuel in orbit for later, but after all that hassle I think I'll leave manned landings on Moho till the last of the inner planets.

My next mission is to launch a solar array to Duna as well as a rover. Of course my vehicle is over-complicated and required some construction in orbit as I do like doing that. I want to see how much power 16 solar panels gives me in Duna orbit. Call it an experiment.

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[FlowerChild]

Ok, I admit defeat on that first launch. To compound my other problems, my RCS thrusters on the landing module weren't properly balanced for docking which threw translation in with my rotation, leading me to a prolonged dance with the mother ship that eventually resulted in me running out of RCS fuel.

RIP Goo Lander 1:

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That's what I get for rushing my initial design because I wanted to do a "quick test" :)

Will tweak my design by throwing in the extra probe core on the mother ship and putting the RCS thrusters at the center of mass on the landing module, and will relaunch in a little while.

[kjbrona]

FYI - Upcoming .23 features from the KSPTV Squadcast:
* more realistic spacesuit thrusters (wont be able to push your ships around)
* Minmus biomes - about as many as Kerbin
* SABRE Engines (Synergistic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine) - Air breathing in atmo - rocket in space; primarily for SSTO
* Kerbals will be able to walk on things like wings, struts, and ships in the water.

[Sarudak]

There's got to be more features than that...

[FlowerChild]

There's got to be more features than that...

Yeah, there are, that's just the stuff they've just revealed in that vid.

[DaveYanakov]

I am pretty sure I have done something wrong. After getting temperature data from lower and upper atmosphere, the remaining two temp scans and the four barometer scans are only getting me a total of 33 science when it costs 38 to unlock both stabilization and general rocketry. I have run two playthroughs trying to go for stability prior to general rocketry and so far the only way forward that I have found is to go for general rocketry, use the vehicle that boosted me past 70 kilometers and send back a report from whatever biome I can manage to hit in order to unlock stability.

[Stormweaver]

I am pretty sure I have done something wrong. After getting temperature data from lower and upper atmosphere, the remaining two temp scans and the four barometer scans are only getting me a total of 33 science when it costs 38 to unlock both stabilization and general rocketry. I have run two playthroughs trying to go for stability prior to general rocketry and so far the only way forward that I have found is to go for general rocketry, use the vehicle that boosted me past 70 kilometers and send back a report from whatever biome I can manage to hit in order to unlock stability.

Eh? If you take stability first, you have to take survivability second. Which gets you science for rocketry.

Did you think having exactly 15 science left over was just a co-incidence or something?