04:39 <SporkWitch> must place more satellites... i love the laser light show on the tracking screen :P

04:44 <UmbralRaptop> glowy

04:51 <SporkWitch> what does signal strength percentage actually affect? or is it just letting you know how close you're getting before losing connection?

04:54 <Althego> i never noticed anything. so probably it is there just to inform you

04:55 <SporkWitch> thanks. been watching lots of vids (and picking up little things i missed about how things worked that aren't as well-documented in-game or in the wiki) and one just talked about setting one of his constraints as 80% signal strength, which made me curious if this was arbitrary or had a gameplay reason

04:56 <SporkWitch> will also never understand how someone that's actually intelligent, like scott manley, could be a goon...

04:58 <SporkWitch> i'm now money-bottlenecked until i can get the last upgrade for the R&D, but i'm torn between sending a probe to duna and hoping the world firsts pay enough (but then adding duna contracts to the rotation), vs time warping to get some different contracts. It keeps giving me all these ones in annoyingly high orbits, or scattered widely around planetary/moon altitudes that would make them a PITA to reach efficiently :(

05:01 <Althego> yes the rnd upgrade is expensive

05:01 <Althego> although in normal mode you are not really short on money

05:04 <SporkWitch> i haven't generally found myself to be, but that last million credits is making me wary of doing stuff, hence the dilemma

05:08 <Althego> If CommNet is enabled in the difficulty settings, then transmitting science through a connection with high signal strength will give a bonus the transmission efficiency of up to 40% (to a maximum of 100% value). This bonus decreases non-linearly with signal strength. For example, a Gravity Scan from low Jool orbit would give 90*0.4=35 Science if transmitted with CommNet disabled or over a marginal connection, but if transmitted

05:08 <Althego> through a connection with an overall strength of 100% would give 90*0.4*1.4=50.4 Science.

05:08 <Althego> from wiki

05:19 <SporkWitch> how did i miss that...

05:19 <SporkWitch> thanks for the find

05:43 <Althego> but ultimately, does this matter? i mean you cant transmit more than the actual science anyway

05:44 <Althego> or does this increase science in case the item is 100% transmissible?

06:18 <SporkWitch> i would think it'd never be able to exceed the manual return value. in terms of mattering, probably not without adding tech tree mods that require more science, though it would certainly reduce the number of interplanetary trips required

06:20 <SporkWitch> traction tweaking has my minmus rover actually roving now, though slowly. no monoprop limitation, though. really need that R&D upgrade, first thing i'm doing is sprinting for mining and fueling lol

06:21 <SporkWitch> definitely need to look into the various mods for automating rover travel so i can send it on its way and do other stuff; not even being able to time warp while it's driving is... tedious... heh

06:22 <SporkWitch> usually try to stick to stock, but like the elder scrolls games, this is definitely turning into one where mods are pretty much a necessity, if only for little niceties

17:15 <Althego> zombanwa

18:32 <SporkWitch> having some trouble planning it out, but if i need a high circular orbit, would it be more fuel efficient to repeatedly wait for periapsis and do a bunch of burns and then repeat once at the desired altitude to circularize, or flip 180° and burn again at apoapsis, just extending each on each orbit? (not paying attention to circularization until at the desired altitude, just doing 1 minute burns at each node to maximize

18:32 <SporkWitch> oberth)

18:32 <SporkWitch> contract wanted a keostationary satellite over a particular target, so trying to be cost efficient, hence an ant engine and a couple oscar tanks :P i should have enough deltav, just trying to leave margin of error by being efficient

18:34 <Althego> it is best to have all burns at the periapsis, and once you reached the desired apoapsis, and your phasing is correct, just circularize at the apoapsis

18:36 <SporkWitch> that's what i was leaning towards. and i can effectively just use a single maneuver node and just stop the burn when it gets inefficient, wait for the next pass, and repeat, simplifying things.

18:43 <Althego> if it is tiny, you can prnanly do it in a single burn

18:43 <Althego> 6 minutes is ok

18:47 <SporkWitch> yeah? it was estimating just shy of 5 minutes, so i decided to at least split it in two before i saw that. after the first burn of 2 minutes i'm up to a 0.2 TWR; so once the marks go off saying i'm over the target at apoapsis, i should be able to just do a single 5 minute burn without screwing up the orbit too much? I'd have thought it'd make for much more drift off the target, though i suppose "over the target" has a

18:47 <SporkWitch> fairly wide margin that far out...

19:32 <Mat2ch> the chop sticks are getting their crane ropes. Nice!

19:41 <umaxtu> whenever I read about steel cables, I start thinking about Project Azorian

19:42 <umaxtu> and how they needed to order miles of weldless steel cable

19:43 <Mat2ch> uhm

19:43 <Mat2ch> what was that project?

19:44 <umaxtu> the cia trying to pick up a wrecked soviet sub from the ocean floor

19:45 <umaxtu> the sub was something 16k feet down

19:54 <Mat2ch> oh. wow

20:07 <SporkWitch> aggghhhhh just 50k more for the R&D upgrade lol

20:11 <Mat2ch> That's what the short position a sat contracts are for ;)

20:25 <Althego> keep some money in reserve

20:25 <Althego> maybe 100k

20:26 <Althego> the final upgrade gives you the gravioli thing, that just pumps out science from everywhere

20:33 <SporkWitch> Mat2ch: yeah, had to put a heavily inclined retrograde one around the mun (which took a minute to figure out before i realized i was overthinking it; i'd gone for a distant encounter knowing i'd have to change inclination then the obvious occurred: literally just turn around, THEN adjust inclination at the ascending and descending nodes)

20:34 <SporkWitch> i do wish it let you set target on the contracted orbit, though, so i didn't have to eyeball where they were on my own orbit vs the desired one. That said, their "margin of error" is MUCH wider than I'd set mine (but then I was also going for 3-satellite commsat constellations when i was really worrying about it; even a slight mistake would have them out of phase in a not terrifically long time)

20:36 <SporkWitch> other one was keostationary orbit, and i guess i had good timing on my launch / took the right amount of time for the mun one (which i had running at the same time), because when i came back to it after returning the kerbal that delivered the mun one (wanted to give him some xp and he hadn't been yet), literally the very next time the probe hit apoapsis it was over the target and i just had to circularize lol

20:37 <SporkWitch> honestly, the contracts are a better tutorial than the actual tutorial, at least for people like me that don't mind doing their own reading once given an end goal and list of constraints lol

20:37 <SporkWitch> (though i will still bounce clarifying stuff or stuff i can't find off you kind folks :P)

20:42 <raptop> hrm

20:42 <raptop> (I guess it's good that the contracts are working like that)

20:43 <Althego> i noticed contracts challenge me to do stuff i would normally never do

20:45 <Althego> like getting a long shuttle srb from the surface of the mun. only an rng could come up with this

20:48 <SporkWitch> Althego: exactly why it's useful as a tutorial. It gives you ideas of things to do in the first place, as well as giving you specific problems to solve. It's honestly one of the few reasons I went back to uni after the USAF; I didn't need to be taught, so much as I needed a basic framework of goals and constraints to guide my own reading and research.

23:01 <SporkWitch> ... if i'm going to use the tiny probe engines, i'm definitely going to have to install a mod that lets you time warp during acceleration lol; 8 1/2 minute transfer burn lol

23:09 <packbart> it's only 2 minutes in 4x physics warp

23:09 <packbart> https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/205529-ksp-any-measurizer/ - huh. that looks useful. but it might go against my rule not to get carried away by too much detail :)

23:15 <SporkWitch> i played EVE for nearly a decade and a half, it's all about obsessing over tiny details :P lol

23:20 <packbart> I was thinking about optimizing fairing mass or fuzzing about with struts. "Good enough" gets to orbit, too :)