kball

I wouldn't mind doing it myself if possible. I'll look into it and if I need some assistance I'll hit you up. I'll take a peek.

Are you on 1.2.2? I used to have this problem a lot, but not recently.

Did that a little while back... except the mission was to Ike Fortunately realized it just a couple days later and they were base modules with docking ports so I quickly launched a bunch of wheels in chase.

This is strange to me because I don't remember having that experience. I'm 600+ hours in, still on my first career, haven't even reached Jool yet and I feel like the career progression has been serving me really well, but perhaps it's because of the particular approach I've taken. I've got vast reserves of science points (over 6000) and haven't even unlocked the final couple of nodes simply because I haven't needed to yet. I don't remember ever being forced to mindlessly mine science, and only a few times did I launch missions specifically to collect some science and unlock a node. Is it possible that's because early on I made use of Mobile Science Labs before realizing how OP they are? Could be. As many people have said, the various game modes provide a guide of sorts, but it's really up to you to define your own goals and challenges in a way that you find rewarding. It was apparent very early on that if I just blindly picked up contracts it was going to get tedious fast. And it was simultaneously clear that the Kerbol system was finite and it would be a sad day when there were no more planets and moons to conquer. So I decided: I would pick up every contract I was capable of but had never done before. Whether it was a new type of contract, or an old type in a new location, that's how I would define the progression of my space agency. And for each new contract I wouldn't just do the bare minimum, but I would plan it, design it, and execute it in a way my Kerbals would be proud of. A base on Minmus with 5000 units of ore? I'm not just going to stick an ore can on a lander and cash in. It's going to be a full base, with living, power, mining modules; the capability to dock with surface-to-orbit shuttles; some rovers for exploring. Why? Because that's how I imagine the space agency would progress. And then the lessons I learn in building it will go into making the inevitable base on Ike even better. 600 hours in and I'm only now trying to figure out how I want to land base modules in Duna's thin atmosphere. (My assemble-in-orbit landers for the Ike base were a serious pain in the ass that scattered debris everywhere) I can see how if someone is incredibly eager to just get to every corner of the Kerbol system as fast as possible the game might feel like it's either holding you back, or running out of achievements, depending on how much you're being throttled by the tech tree. But if you realize the whole game, no matter what mode, is really just a playground for your imagination then I think there are a lot more rewards to be had.

I'm not sure if it's what you're talking about but I've experienced a walking animation glitch too. Haven't pinned down exactly when it occurs, but their animation seems to go from the the normal dozens of frames to two. They look like stiff lego people shimmying across the landscape on one heel. I'm running on a somewhat old macbook pro.

Not sure that's entirely accurate. Depending on the circumstances I often get <craftname> Probe or <craftname> Ship. Haven't worked out exactly what those circumstances are. Possible it has something to do with being on the launchpad?

I know what you're talking about... but unfortunately that doesn't mean we're not still just that old. That movie spawned so many space travel fantasies for me when I was a kid, but I think I must have fallen asleep mid way, because years later I saw the whole thing and boy does it get weird.

I did exactly the same thing for exactly the same reason.

Right. This unbalanced benefit of oberth and assist was exactly my suspicion. Your note about the radial effect of this fly by seems correct and does leave me wondering why the maneuver pictured has any effect at all. Whereas I was initially looking at burns in the 2200-2500m/s range this appeared to get me down to 1800-2100m/s. Was it just my imagination? This is my first interplanetary return. I'm sure I'll learn a lot when I start exploring Jool.

Thanks for the reply. I wonder if I'm not getting as much experience with these maneuvers because I'm always over engineering rockets, taking more direct routes and relying on big insertion burns. When zipping through a system at breakneck speed the effect of any other bodies always seems negligible. This is what I settled on for this one, which I think saved me 2-3 hundred m/s on the final burn. Far from what I was originally shooting for which was a burn at periapsis and then a subsequent assist by Mun for capture. Couldn't figure that one out.

I'm still working to to get an intuitive understanding of the various ways to employ gravity assists. Right now I'm wondering how to use a moon to assist an insertion. I don't even know if that's possible or practical. Maybe it's only possible if a retrograde final orbit is acceptable? Even then, does attempting a maneuver out by a moon essentially throw away the benefits from Oberth that would otherwise be had for a burn near the planet? In any case, started poking around the interwebs to read about them and stumbled on this visualization depicting various assists which I thought some might find useful. from: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/2013/20130926-gravity-assist.html Edit: Realizing now I may have just been thinking about it incorrectly. I guess the trick is not to go where the moon is when you get there, but to go when the moon will happen to be in your path when you're arriving.

Thank you so much for hiding this! I wish everyone would do that. I get nervous browsing this thread because I'm afraid of spoiling the surprises.

Cool. I'll keep an eye out. Is there a dev thread for KER?

I'm experiencing an issue and I'm curious if anyone else has encountered it. I'm occasionally getting a hang that might be caused by the Rendezvous window. It intermittently hangs at these times: switching to a vessel that has a target and the rendezvous window is open. when entering text in the rendezvous window target selection when selecting a vessel in the rendezvous window target selector I'm not sure, but it's possible this only happens when the target of interest is nearby (though not necessarily loaded, say, within 100km) There is no log output and the only way to recover is to force quit. I can't say for certain that KER is the cause, but this is my suspicion. Has anyone else experienced this? I'm on a Mac OS 10.11.5, KSP 1.2.2, KER 1.1.2.8. Also using MechJeb and MemGraph.

Dug up an old thread discussing these: And an old challenge: