Just getting through last minute parties before school starts.

I wonder what everyone has been doing during the downtime. i bet mete has been playing the brilliant crusader kings 2

I've just went to lectures, slept, played Skyrim and watched subbed Korean variety

Hello AoE3Hers, what's up?

hi

I wonder what everyone has been doing during the downtime. i bet mete has been playing the brilliant crusader kings 2

amazing shrink you are like psychic or something




i just spent two hours on a moon landing flight on kerbal space program, and i had a great approach on to the moon and everything, but i overestimated how easily i could slow down with my engine and came in to fast and exploded on the surface. poor kerbals. may they be remembered as heros.

their fate is better than the one that went on a solo mission around the farther moon. i made it around the second moon nicely, even went really low and was only 3 km off the surface, but on the way back i used too much fuel just goofing off and messed up coming back to earth, so now he's stuck in an elliptical orbit around earth for the rest of eternity (or at least a long time, idk. he gets pretty close to earth, but not close enough to hit the atmosphere apparently). now i see that flight on the map on every subsequent flight. maybe i should simulate a rescue mission or something.

(this game has totally interrupted me from my matilda of tuscany ck2 game, . i'll never do anything productive again)

just crashed on the moon again . i might need to rethink my design. or maybe i'm coming in the wrong way. i don't know.

I spent most of the downtime harassing the higher ups for info

This Kerbal Space Program thing sounds intriguing I may have to investigate, do you have the full version or just the demo mete?

the "full" version, but the demo is great too. it has less parts and only one moon (it's missing the farther, smaller one). probably a little more challenging. it's also missing all the airplane parts and the hangar/runway, but i've yet to get a plane to successfully fly so that really doesn't seem like a big loss.

i'm currently about 30 minutes away from landing on the moon with a new design. hopefully it works. i crashed two other times on the moon with my last design before making this one. i have way more fuel now (i also figured out how to use less fuel in getting to the moon, which helps a lot), plus this time i have three engines on my moon lander instead of one while having less than three times the mass, so hopefully i'll be able to slow down more easily this time.

one thing that bothers me is that there's no way to speed up time with your engines on. the slow approach to the moon is taking me forever, but i don't want to turn off my engines and fast forward time because idk if i'll be able to slow down it time. right now i'm 200 km from the surface at about 180 m/s. hopefully this isn't too fast.

i'm starting to wish i had taken a little more math in school, as maybe then i'd actually have the slightest clue what i was doing here (not that randomly shooting myself at the moon and praying isn't a great strategy for space exploration).

I had a play with the demo last night, my main strategy was to attach as many rockets as possible to the command module and head straight up, didn't manage to escape "earth's" gravity, took a while to even get enough thrust to get out the atmosphere, and every time I came in to land my parachute hit the ground at some point and blew up the command module

I was starting to think YouTube might provide me some valuable help.

yeah, if you want to land with a parachute safely it's best to make sure it's over an ocean. also if you have anything attached to the command module besides the parachute, that might be too much for it to handle, idk for sure though.

it took me a while to get out of the atmosphere in the demo. i actually was never able to get a stable orbit in the demo, although now i know enough both about how to build okay rockets and how to fly them in a sorta reasonable manner that i could probably do okay. five minutes looking at the wiki helped a lot.

i haven't tried this design, but it looks like it would work for the demo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8SfnFGyDh8

i still crash every time i try to land on the moon though. i think part of the problem is i can never get the camera right so the ship is too hard to control.

The command module landed fine, then slid down the mountain (for some reason I always manage to land on the side of a mountain) at which point the parachute hits the ground, blows up and takes the command module with it.

I'll have a look at that video later, and had a quick read of a wiki, I now know why my rocket was disintegrating on the launch pad most of the time. Game seems a bit like minecraft where some wiki reading is required to be able to actually get into the game.

finally landed on the moon successfully! have a buttload of fuel left, just not entirely sure how to get back to kerbin/earth.

unfortunately the way my lander is set up, i don't want to have any of the kerbals step out because i dont think they'll be able to make it back in.

OK, almost got a ship into orbit last night, and should be able to actually get to the mun with a bit more practice, finger crossed.

Really tempted to buy the game now.

i've successfully landed on the mun a few times now, both with the one person capsule and the three person capsule. last time i did a nice moon walk and everything. i'm getting pretty decent at it. i've also orbited minmus and returned just to see how easy it would be to land on it and whether i'd have enough fuel. the thing about minmus is that there doesn't appear to be a lot of flat ground, so it might take more fuel to rocket around looking to a landing spot. on the other hand, i'm pretty sure it has less gravity than the mun, so that might not be such a big deal. i'll probably organize a mission there soon.

i wonder if there's a good way to return from the mun (haven't watched other people do it yet). so far all my attempts have left me drifting in a wide, circlish orbit around Kearth, which is okay, but it'd be cool if my escape from the moon put me in an elliptical orbit that brought me closer to earth so i wouldn't have to decelerate so much. i'd feel more comfortable doing moon operations/explorations with my rocket if i knew i could leave the moon and not need much fuel to adjust my trajectory on my return. i guess it doesn't take that much as it is, but still.

i'm also getting a little better at getting into stable, circular orbits. next step is to put something into a stable orbit and try rendezvousing with it. i tried it a little while ago and after 2 hours of tinkering i was only able to close to about 200 km, but by the end i finally figured out the best way (or at least a viable way) to go about it. afterwards i watched some videos of people doing orbital rendezvous and confirmed the method, which is basically orbit at a lower or higher altitude until i catch up to the object i'm trying to rendezvous with, then pushing my orbit out to meet the object once we're close. seems easy, but from what i've tried it's really hard to pull off. :/ i guess the key is to bring lots of fuel so there's enough to correct for the multitude of mistakes.

still haven't gotten any aircraft to fly in a reasonable manner. i see videos (or at least video thumbnails) of people on youtube with aircraft. i wonder if i'm just terrible at building them, or if they're using mods that make flying them easier. i'd love to be able to build some kind of space shuttle, right now every rocket i make uses a capsule and parachutes down at the end.

disaster: http://imgur.com/a/qQCPn#Px06R

for some reason the second image isn't displaying right in the album view.

anyway i went to discharge my boosters once they were empty, and because of the fins on them they go kind of wild once they're free, and this time they hit one my main engines at the bottom. this caused two of them to break off, which is why in the second picture the big fuel tank only has one engine attached (it's supposed to have three). the whole rocket then began a slow cartwheel. thankfully i was able to separate from that stage safely, and while i was unable to regain control, i did manage to maintain a stable enough tumble that i could separate from the other two stages and parachute down with my capsule.

good times. i guess i should put the fins somewhere else. last time i flew this same rocket, i landed on the mun with it.

And shit. I used a YouTube bot to dislike things with a couple of accounts. Now 12 of them are all down

I would need to provide an SMS for each one, but I don't own any real phone. Would you know a free service that provides an SMS-receiving number ? I heard about Gmail, but can't get it working.

Is it wierd that this thread always seems to show itself as containing a new post even when there hasn't been a new post?

Finally found out how to resolve that. I used k7.net to send a vocal message to my email. The site gives you a telephone number and sends you faxes and voicemails by email, everything's free.

What kind of backwards hillbilly life do you live without a mobile?

Kerbal Space program owns and I have been playing the hell out of it for the past year or so.

For those of you with the full version, if you're having difficulty getting to the other planets then this handy tool might be helpful!
http://www.kerbal.net/mod.php?id=36

http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/showthread.php/21544-Plugin-Part-17-Protractor-Planetary-Lunar-Rendezvous-Mod

the worst part of travelling to other planets is when your ship disintegrates coming out of time warp.

second worst part, accidentally pressing period instead of comma when you're close to a planet and want to slow down time warp. happens to me so much.


i try not to use quicksaving because it's more stressful and later more rewarding to complete missions when you know it's all or nothing, but with those two things i really have to use quicksave (the second one is obviously completely my fault though).

that mod looks useful. i've been trying to eyeball the planets, and i've been able to get close consistently enough, but it takes a lot of fuel to correct since it's hard to know which direction you're off by until you get fairly close to the planet.

I think that's a problem with the floating point numbers unity uses everywhere. Cones out if warp and has to recalculate and suddenly the inaccuracy of the float puts things in impossible positions and they break.

this kerbal space thing sounds great. i think you should keep posting what is happening in your games cos i'm enjoying reading about the disasters and successes. don't think i could play it though - it sounds complicated and i'm pr stupid

I started a new save today, using a few more mods.
Well I just finished my new commsat network, this time making use of Molniya Orbits instead of the standard go-to geostationary (Mostly because I always forget the precise altitude required for geostationary in the game).

Having done that, I'm making use of the ISAsat (topology/anomoly mapper) and Kethane (a versatile methane like gas that you mine and can transfer and different things) to locate kethane deposits on the moon, from which I will develop an orbital fueling station for my interplanetary missions.


Also Mete, if you're still using that plugin and haven't updated it, check it again as it's getting updated quite frequently and is much improved with help for course corrections and such.

Also have this: