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[andrea]

I am using 6 docking port to link modules in my interplanetary spaceship. the results is that the docking ports wobble very little, making for a good connection.
they are also in a relatively large circle, so that may help.
I suggest always having at least 3 docking ports, not too close to each other. that should give best stability.

[nogoodnames]

Presenting SpinStation 1, the first space station with artificial gravity!

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It comfortably houses 32 kerbals along its outer ring, with space for 6 additional crew members in the two central pods. They'd better have a strong stomach though.

This thing was absolute hell to get up there. It's definitely the heaviest thing I've ever gotten into orbit. It had so many parts at launch that 3 minutes of the first stage lasted half an hour in real time, and that's on my fairly powerful desktop computer.

But it'll all be worth it when I load it up with kerbals and give them the ride of their lives! A shame that rotation is not saved.

[Techhead]

You going to do the math and find out what speed to spin it at, or are you just going to wing it?

[da_nang]

I wonder if the accelerometer would work for that.

[nogoodnames]

I've got some accelerometers on the engines so they should tell me the force of the artificial gravity. I'm not even sure if the stock parts can take the strain from running this thing at 1g but we'll see. On a few of the failed launches I got it spun up to about 0.05g (hard to tell because numbers kept bouncing around) and the engines flew off, but that was at full throttle. Hopefully a gentle controlled burn can get it going a bit faster without it flying apart.

I still need to get a couple engines docked onto it to get it into a better orbit, and design a ship to populate it.

[SP2]

For the people who can't get the patcher to work, Squad have decided to put a full download up of 18.2 as a .zip file.

Read their blog post here.

[andrea]

nogoodnames, I love your space station. I also love how you can create artificial gravity that way, even if it is not quite useful for anything at the moment.

[ank]

Do i just move my save folder from my old install then?
will that break anything?

[andrea]

yes. however, keep in mind that you may have trouble with RCS fuel. both fuel drain and fuel capacity were increased.
but in odler ships RCS fuel tanks will still have the older, smaller, capacity. which may leave you with too little fuel, even for a ship that didn't use any exploit.

For example, the ship I posted earlier in the thread actually seems to turn better with new RCS ( probably due to being very long). however, having 200 units tanks with a system balanced for 700 units tanks leaves me quite short on RCS fuel. I am not sure if I should just replace RCS module , or just design a new ship.

edit: some fuel lines are working oddly however. an engine is drawing from more tanks than it should. if it worked for all engines, wonderful! no more need to transfer fuel during burns. however, as it is now, it is only for one engine.

also, while the ship works fine, I now doubt my lander will be able to redock. it has too little RCS... well, I'll see what I can do. I wish tanks on older ships would upgrade.

[nogoodnames]

I test fired the SpinStation and there's a small problem in that the game limits rotation.
Even in space there's a force that counteracts an object's rotation, and it seems to rise exponentially the faster the object is spinning. This means that the engines on the SpinStation will eventually run into a wall where no matter how long they burn, they won't add any more velocity to the station. I can run the engines at, at most, a quarter throttle before they start flying off. This gives a maximum force of around 0.2g, a little bit stronger than the Moon's gravity.

Andrea, you could go into your persistent.sfs file and replace every RCS tank's resource values with the correct numbers.

[sluissa]

How exactly are you measuring the g forces? If it's the gauge next to the nav ball, that'll be measuring the capsule's forces, which will be significantly smaller than out at the arms. If you're doing the calcs by hand, keep in mind that a lot of the stuff in game is scaled down, compared to real life things, so if you're using some real world numbers, things might not be exactly right.

[nogoodnames]

Each of the arms has an accelerometer on it. The readings get kind of wonky at high speed, but it seems accurate enough.

[sluissa]

Ah, duh... I forgot about the new science instruments...

[ank]

I don't think the accelerometer works like that, you are reading the rotational acceleration relative to the accelerometer.

I think you gotta go to some calculations to find out how fast it has to be spinning.

[da_nang]

I test fired the SpinStation and there's a small problem in that the game limits rotation.
Even in space there's a force that counteracts an object's rotation, and it seems to rise exponentially the faster the object is spinning. This means that the engines on the SpinStation will eventually run into a wall where no matter how long they burn, they won't add any more velocity to the station. I can run the engines at, at most, a quarter throttle before they start flying off. This gives a maximum force of around 0.2g, a little bit stronger than the Moon's gravity.

You know what to do. Unleash your inner dwarf and make it bigger.