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

[BinoAl]

Errrr...you realize everyone else got that gag about 10 seconds after hearing it, right? :)

Sshhhh. I felt smart. Just let me have this.

[PatriotBob]

Welp, kinda sad now. After watching Icy's LP, I went to give the mod a full play through. I Quickly realized that the version I had is not the version Icy had. :( There wasn't nearly enough 'deadly' in my reentry process.

I guess I'll just wait impatiently like a 2 year old...

[Tsugumi Henduluin]

That's actually a vanilla bug that Squad already knows about. They're saying it will be corrected in .23

I see. I probably should start paying more attention to those things, then.

-

After a whole lot of seat-of-pants flying, as well as liberal application of duct tape and rabbit feet, I finally managed to get a probe in orbit of Mun and get enough science to unlock all the shiny stuff in T5... I think I have never felt happier than when I launched my first strudded rocket with SAS enabled. The difference was like night and day. Great feeling.

Guess it's time to start experimenting with docking ports for a while. Don't want to ruin the experience by proceeding into WIP territory and I have no idea how those things work anyway. Should be fun.

[PatriotBob]

Should we start a fund raising campaign to clone FlowerChild? I think one per project should suffice for now...

Any one know the going market rate for human cloning?

[FlowerChild]

Welp, kinda sad now. After watching Icy's LP, I went to give the mod a full play through. I Quickly realized that the version I had is not the version Icy had. :( There wasn't nearly enough 'deadly' in my reentry process.

I guess I'll just wait impatiently like a 2 year old...

Yeah, sorry about that man. I was intending to be done with this release a week ago :P

I'm in this weird "just one more day" state where I don't want to put it out as is due to all the work I've already invested in it and wanting to get it just right, and constantly finding little things that I want to tweak to that end that individually always seem like they'll just take me a few minutes :)

I really need to get this wrapped up. .

[Psion]

Lol, i've been playing with this mod and loving it so far. Someone mentioned a tip of using spin to stabilize a flight that I... maybe took to rather big extremes. I love the idea of my rocket being essentially an oversized bullet to space though, and it works pretty good on the times a slight error doesnt send the whole thing exploding into bits XD

My worst/best one was one i dubbed "pyramid scheme". It was essentially a bunch of short solid fuel rockets strapped in a pyramid shape, each one slightly set at and angle from the last to cause the whole thing to spin like a top as it fired off. after many explosions and tweakings i managed to get it so it was stable...ish and flew off into space with a peak height of about 337,000 m XD.

[Stormweaver]

I really need to get this wrapped up. .

3 years later:

Guys, I'll be wrapping up BTSM soon, as I'm working towards starting my new project; Return to Kerbin!

:p

But nah, it's alright. I'm still having fun toying around with the limitations of the release we have - Figured out I was in a position that could get me to Eve in 16 days.

...16 days is a lot of batteries. Orbital assembly, for science!

[FlowerChild]

But nah, it's alright. I'm still having fun toying around with the limitations of the release we have - Figured out I was in a position that could get me to Eve in 16 days.

...16 days is a lot of batteries. Orbital assembly, for science!

Hehe...btw, you were totally right about the cubic struts the other night in IRC. I did some playing around with them after our conversation, and beyond the staging exploit you mentioned, there's some absolutely bat shit insane stuff you can do with them that makes a whole host of other parts obsolete.

So yeah...those babies are now safely tucked away in tech level 9 ;)

[Stormweaver]

But nah, it's alright. I'm still having fun toying around with the limitations of the release we have - Figured out I was in a position that could get me to Eve in 16 days.

...16 days is a lot of batteries. Orbital assembly, for science!

Hehe...btw, you were totally right about the cubic struts the other night in IRC. I did some playing around with them after our conversation, and beyond the staging exploit you mentioned, there's some absolutely bat shit insane stuff you can do with them that makes a whole host of other parts obsolete.

So yeah...those babies are now safely tucked away in tech level 9 ;)

^.^

I did watch a few videos where people used struts to destroy planets. That is pretty OP.

[PatriotBob]

Did I miss something? Is a "cubic strut" something different from a normal strut?

[Stormweaver]

Did I miss something? Is a "cubic strut" something different from a normal strut?

Cubic Octagonal Struts; They're the little rectangular bits that look like scaffolding. Also the Strongest Material known to kerbalkind, as far as I can tell. Wiki

[PatriotBob]

Oh... yeah... I've had fun with those...
It's a shame the physics act that way, it's terribly useful just because of it's size.

[FlowerChild]

They allow you to do a lot of cool shit like clusters of small thrusters attached to a rockomax tank for greater fuel efficiency and so on, but yeah, they largely blow the part progression right out of the water once you start really realizing what they can do. I fired off a big orange tank the other day with something like 20 small rockomax thrusters attached to its bottom and it flew great, which is when I decided that I had to do something about where the cubic struts were placed in the progression :)

I'm really wondering what Squad plans to do with all this stuff in the future. They've got a lot of parts like this that just completely nuke the usefulness of a huge number of others, and again, there seems to be a real identity crisis going on in the design. Like, you got stuff like a range of stack splitter parts, and then you got one cubic strut to rule them all, but meanwhile they seem determined to unlock the vastly superior parts early in the progression, meaning the lesser ones really have no place at all.

And this is why I suspect I keep running into the "one more day" thing. The amount of work to resolve all these little issues and turn this thing into something resembling a game is rather staggering.

[dawnraider]

After looking at this mod, I may have to try out KSP once life becomes a bit less hectic. Damnit, FC, why do you have to pull me into so many good games! I don't have time for them all!

[Stormweaver]

inb4 FC

Spoiler

Show

Episode 3!

[Psion]

Er, did i do something wrong? I got the first cockpit that let me put a kerbal in, the command pod MK-1. I guess it's tech level 4? I thought it was supposed to kill my kerbal if I went too high into space, but he went all the way up to 800,000 meters without dying. <_<; Was I misled into trying a fun new way to murder my kerbal?

Two other questions. first, what is that yellow-yellow green circle with 3 lines coming out of it represent? It seems to be pointing straight up at first, but it moves around as i do... but the movement seems unpredictable, other than it usually follows the direction im going in... eventually.

Also, is there an easy way to make a target to the mun? like, i try to add a maneuver on the projected flight, but that requires me to be in flight in the first place, making it awkward to aim for the mun when i have to be fairly high in space to begin with just to have time to aim it, rather than aim ahead of time of launch. And trying to manipulate the maneuver to line up with the mun in the first place is an artform, much less set it with time to spare before you even reach that target point. x.x

[FlowerChild]

The version Icy is playing is not publicly available yet man. What's happening with him and his Kerbil's dying is in the Mk0 cockpit, which you don't have.

[Psion]

Aaaah, ok then. I must've missed that part. Can't wait to see how horribly I suck at flying in the future then. XD

[Mason11987]

Regarding the mun, you gotta first get into an orbit, then plan a manuever. Try following this:

http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki ... into_Orbit

If playing BTSM feel free to vary the rocket design, but those are the steps once you have a good enough rocket design to do it.

[kjbrona]

I have over 90 hours in KSP in the last 19 days so I am definitely a big fan of the game.
I tried BTSM but want to wait for the next version before getting into it.
When I removed the BTSM directory to go back to playing regular Career mode, my Kerbals still don't have space suits even in a new game save?

Spoiler

Show

Any time I try to EVA I get "...realizes too late that space suits are a good idea." *poof*

Is there some config that may have gotten modified in another directory?

[FlowerChild]

That shouldn't happen man. The code that does that is contained in the BTSM directory, so if you deleted it, there's really no way it can be running :P

I assume you aren't in violation of Rule #1 and restarted the game after deleting it?

[FlowerChild]

Thank the fucking gods of tentacled spikeyness...

Ok, I must admit I was getting rather frustrated here as the number of parameters I have to tweak just wasn't sufficient to balance things right. I'd adjust something in one part of the tech tree in order to balance the early game, and it would fuck up something else entirely in the later game.

One of the big problems here, that I've mentioned before, was the inability for me to specify which celestial bodies experiments applied to, and which didn't. This would cause weird effects like not being able to perform a surface experiment on the Mun for example, unless I also allowed it on Kerbin, which lead to the need for those stupid "calibration" experiments on the launchpad.

Try as I might over the past few days, I just couldn't figure out a reasonable method to change that through code either. The modability of the science system is rather lacking at present, and without any decent documentation or source code to refer to, I was largely stumbling around blind and it was beginning to piss me off more and more.

It got so bad tonight that I almost threw in the towel entirely as I couldn't get things just right and I was getting increasingly frustrated by my inability to make what should be simple changes to get it there, and instead having to jump through crazy hoops to balance a system that I really felt needed to be changed at a lower level.

That was when I had a bit of a lateral thinking moment just now and asked myself "well...I can't block science experiments on certain bodies, but I wonder if I can change the multipliers associated with certain bodies?".

A few minutes of digging through the code later, I ran a quick test where surface Kerbin gave me 10X the science value it normally would and I almost shouted with joy.

Now obviously, I don't want a ten times multiplier on science on the surface of Kerbin (more like I want a zero multiplier to completely blank it out), but it was the quickest test I could think of to see if my method works :)

So...much happiness. For example. I no longer have to worry about the Gravioli meter providing sufficient science to advance in the early tech tree, and then nuking the whole progression when you orbit the Mun because of the 4X multiplier being applied. I can just change the multiplier on the Mun instead. I can nuke the surface experiments on Kerbin entirely and be done with it. I can adjust the value of the other planets later in the tech tree so that a single interplanetary trip doesn't buy the entire tree because of the ludicrous modifiers currently applied.

<dances>

Ok, now I think I can really get the sucker done instead of endlessly fucking around with values trying to hit the sweet spot that will somehow make everything work without breaking everything else.

[dawnraider]

It's good to hear you finally found a solution for that that will work.

Thank the fucking gods of tentacled spikeyness...

I thought you killed them off when you took over the universe and established your own spiky tentacled supremacy.

[kjbrona]

That shouldn't happen man. The code that does that is contained in the BTSM directory, so if you deleted it, there's really no way it can be running :P

I assume you aren't in violation of Rule #1 and restarted the game after deleting it?

I did restart but apparently 1 dll didn't delete when I deleted the folder.
Got rid of it and all is good.

[FlowerChild]

All right, here I go starting over with a rebalanced tech level 1 yet again. Now that I can tweak the scientific value of other bodies though, hopefully this will be the last time.

One last temperature sensing upper atmosphere probe for the good of all Kerbalkind! I swear that if I have to launch one more of these I'm going to lose it ;)