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[Starver]

I really think the lack of midrange engines disturbing. 3 ~200 thrust ones and a 2500 thrust one. Devs where mad.(They were also mad with those ion engines, I'm aware that RL ion engines can barely lift a paper sheet here on earth but gameplay>realism.)

Not speaking from experience, here, of the actual ion engines they've now included in vanilla, but (as recently mentioned) this was one of my prior thoughts for something that was needed to fill an actual niche in the gameplay, i.e. a long-burn/low-impulse rocket that can be used to gradually nudge orbit higher/lower/rounder/more elliptical, or whatever it is you're wanting, but over a long time, with a very low fuel rate (and needing electrical energy to accomplish this feat).  I wouldn't imagine an ion-drive being powerful enough to lift itself (never mind anything on top of itself) up from the surface of Minmus, though maybe it should from some of the smaller Joolsian moons that I've briefly seen.

Actually, from what I've seen of the demos, they've actually made the ion-drives over-powered, to what I was imagining.  As to the distribution of power-ratios in-between the standard and super-sized engines, I can't argue.

[Rose]

Spoiler: This actually works surprisingly well. (click to show/hide)

[LoSboccacc]

The problem with realistic ions is that the game forces you to be there and watch all the hour long maneuver.

Whatching my probe slowing by 1500m/s over an hour wasn't exatly fun

[Skyrunner]

I would like it if we could fast forward even with engines on. Is there a reason why we can't?

[10ebbor10]

I would like it if we could fast forward even with engines on. Is there a reason why we can't?

Upgraded Physics engine?

[peskyninja]

I would like it if we could fast forward even with engines on. Is there a reason why we can't?

It's the way the game deals ship aceleration and  time speed increase. Maybe they could add an exeption only to ion engines.

With the docking of the Automatic refuelling drone Dimitri the Terrus station has 2 modules.

And I just realized it is possible to assembble munar stations on space and land them. 

[Starver]

I mentioned (when I first belatedly mentioned ion-drives, and how I'd previously thought about modding them in, long before the current version) how I had also been thnking of a simple companion 'orientator computer '(sounds like MechJeb is a far more complex thing, but never tried that and am just going from recent comments on here) that could keep the craft pointing forward (or outward, or any other relative direction I chose) throughout its orbit.

But all this was to replace my current practice of setting a regular engine on the lowest burn-amount I could possibly manage and every now and then adjusting the orientation while getting on with something more practical on an adjacent computer (or even on the other side of the room).  And, like I said, I'm behind the times.


@Skyrunner: Simulation difficulties?  Different rounding errors between how an engine thrust changes the orbit while running at 1s/s, 10s/s, 100s/s, etc would probably mean inconsistencies.  Fuel use would be linear, but the changing n-th derivative values of velocity, acceleration and onwards might not be so easy to keep calculated so that thrusting under 1x warp gets you to the same position as the same thrusting under 100x warp, for example.

(I remember once having had a highly elliptical (nearly straight-up-and-down) Mun-hitting orbit from being near-stationary just under the limit of Mun's gravitational limit, and was hardly picking up speed.  I increased Warp a few times.  A few times too many, though and I actually found myself coming back up again, having apparently followed the (unpowered) track down to a sub-Munsurface lower orbital node and back up, but no collision occurred because the calculations regarding my orbital progress (with, by that time, much quicker progress along the track) had obviously sent me from a position of "safely" above it going down to safely above it going back up in a single blink of the engine, so no collision.  If it had been timed much differently I would probably have been deemed to have crashed, of course, as one of the 'ticks' would have found me subsurface.  I don't know if this (literal?) loophole is still around in newer versions, though, as I would have thought a simple trajectory-collision-point calculation would have prevented that from ever happening, even if it was part way through a nominal 'calculation tick' period.)

((Further ninjaed, in one way or another, by two others.  Yup, much more succinct than me.))

[Skyrunner]

I say an exception for ion engines would be awesome! Dx

[ThtblovesDF]

>Failed to login


Whatever happend to a plain old download? Can't play mah games anymore : I

[sluissa]

I believe the original idea was to make it so you didn't have to do a full download for each release... and thus put less strain on the server. They just haven't gotten it figured out yet... Patcher is in Alpha too.

[LoSboccacc]

I wonder why bother, since the patcher I had to download both the patcher AND the full game every release, multiple times.

And the mono framework in the osx patcher. Every. Single. Time

[10ebbor10]

Whatever happend to a plain old download? Can't play mah games anymore : I

You could try to find the game elsewhere for the moment.

[Fishbreath]

I mentioned (when I first belatedly mentioned ion-drives, and how I'd previously thought about modding them in, long before the current version) how I had also been thnking of a simple companion 'orientator computer '(sounds like MechJeb is a far more complex thing, but never tried that and am just going from recent comments on here) that could keep the craft pointing forward (or outward, or any other relative direction I chose) throughout its orbit.

MechJeb has a component that'll do just orientations—prograde, retrograde, normal, and antinormal are the ones I use most often. There are other autopilot components, but basically the only one of those I use is the ascent autopilot, after I've flown a rocket to orbit myself. Especially with .18's flight planner, transfer orbits should be easy enough to do manually.

[Sean Mirrsen]

My rockets are usually too finicky to fly up with MechJeb, and any other uses are completely made obsolete by the flight planner, so I really don't bother with it at all. Automatic piloting is somewhat nonsensical in a game where half the fun is trying to get your rockets to fly where you want them to (with the other half being building them).

[peskyninja]

My rockets are usually too finicky to fly up with MechJeb, and any other uses are completely made obsolete by the flight planner, so I really don't bother with it at all. Automatic piloting is somewhat nonsensical in a game where half the fun is trying to get your rockets to fly where you want them to (with the other half being building them).

I just realised that playing without mechjeb has increaased my sucess chance from 50% to 85% due to rockets not exploding because mechjeb goes on fulll power since the begining of the flight.

Also how do I transfer fuel between ships?