moogoob

It's up to you, but if you like experimenting with robotics parts, you can do things like this:

"well you could make a new craft and just make it one of the tanks, then check its mass. " I COULD... but I keep forgetting. :p The laptop I post from was made in 2009 and can barely run KSP. My desktop is downstairs. C'est la vie.

I once spaced one of the largest new 5m tanks, full. I tried looking its mass up in the wiki, but it seems nobody updates that thing.

Ascent, if only that while I CAN do it, that's the one area of KSP I prefer to let MechJeb handle, so it's the one I have the least practice with.

OK that made me laugh. Haven't tried mine on Gilly; the 5-minute jumps would be agony. I think he hit escape velocity.

So for some reason or another, I've been spending some time playing around with Breaking Grounds' parts. And an idea hits me - what about using the pistons like a grasshopper's leg to get around on low-gravity worlds? It's oddly effective, getting around Minmus at a fairly decent clip, even compared to wheels. Haven't tried it yet on higher-gravity worlds like the Mun (I'd put way larger reaction wheels if I did). Is this something anybody else has tried? It just seems so bizarrely obvious. :p

I'd recommend a readout mod that gives you a Suicide Burn countdown - Mechjeb is what I use. That's ALL I use, actually. My deorbit burn puts the trajectory where I need to go, and I start burning when the SB countdown reaches 4 or 5 seconds, easing off when I get slow enough to land. If I have low TWR, I aim shallower, if I'm trying to be picky about landing site I go steeper. It's is about as efficient as I've been able to make it so far, and it works on any atmosphere-less body. The key is that if your countdown ever falls below 0, you can tilt the craft upwards to remove more vertical velocity, causing your countdown to start going up again. The opposite is true, if your fall is slowing too fast you can aim more at the horizon and start losing horizontal speed faster, but at the cost of your countdown going down at an accelerated rate. It's actually hod Apollo did it with the LM only having so much throttle control, most of the fine tuning of the landing was done through attitude control.

To be fair, Gilly is the absolute extreme of low-gravity environments in the game without counting the microgravity of orbit, so it's possible they weren't tested on it. Perhaps file a bug report?

There's not much use on spacecraft. AIRcraft, now there's a use (moving centre of mass forward and back), but as others have said, you're already carrying a heavy substance that can be shifted between tanks - liquid fuel.

All hail the almighty Cubic Octagonal Strut. Better than duct tape and WD-40 put together when construction gets awkward.

The only back-version I kept an active copy of was 0.9.0 as I had a career save in full swing when 1.0 came out. Since then I update when they come out and if it kills any of my paltry 2-3 mods, then I play something else for a bit until everyone gets their stuff together.

Am I seeing things or are we still using the same parachute part?!? THAT has to be the oldest part in the game that hasn't been overhauled yet.

Hard to pick just one... -Landed at least a probe on every solid-ish body in the solar system. -Built a working single-engine-to-orbit mostly-reusable shuttle. -Built a working horizontal-takeoff SSTO based on the Skylon design. It even has a meager payload!!! -Built a Minmus science grinding station, with re-useable lander. Currently remaking the mission in a new career mode. -Made multiple successful Tylo gravity assist captures. It's the only way I approach the Jool system now. -Managed to get a 160+ ton fuel depot to orbit, and in doing so finally found an answer for the question "What do you use the Rhino for, anyway?" KSP is just a never-ending series of "coolest things you've ever done" for me.

Brilliant work! The bits about using the robotics controller with throttle are exactly what I needed!' Thanks!

Launch to a temporary orbit, then a simple hohmann transfer, fine tune and then a velocity match at closest approach, courtesy of Mechjeb's maneuver planner. Sometimes I put too much delta-v in my orbital maneuvering stage, any excess helps top up fuel depots and whatnot. :p I'm finally getting back into a career save, for the first time in several updates. Just finished setting up my mobile Minmus orbiter station, which is a dry run for a later manned Duna craft. Each station/spacecraft/mothership/thing is four parts so I've been doing nothing but rendezvouses recently. Now I just have to somehow get another 2500 kilos of liquid fuel there to finally claim that "build a station around Minmus" objective. :p

Is it just me or are all these re-balancings just nitpicking? I'm not trying to say that squad not do it - by all means, it's your game. I mean people complaining. The reason being - even moderate changes in ISP, at least at vanilla scale, make very little difference. For example, people used to complain about how useless the Thud was. So I, curious, made a bunch of launchers using only Thuds. For an awful engine, it worked great. Sure, I had to carry a bit more fuel but some of the other strengths (TWR for one) made the launchers very practical, and I still sometimes use Thud-based launchers to this day. In regards to recently-added engines, I'm talking mostly about the Wolfhound - which is an engine that going to (or has? I'm not on top of KSP news much these days) receive a buff according to this chart, which makes it, like the Thud, a "terrible" engine. I use it all the time. Its ISP is more than sufficient and its TWR is in a nice sweet spot. Plus, it looks cool. I think it's a great engine. Which means either two things - either I'm crazy. or shaving 5 seconds of specific impulse and a few kilos mass just doesn't make much of a difference. (Side note: a part's place in the tech tree and cost DO make a huge difference, however. I just ignore those like I ignore the "Science mode" and "Career mode" buttons when making a new save file. )

...are you suggesting that simply melting salt produces a time dilating effect? Extraordinary claim MUST have some extraordinary evidence.

Working out a horizontal-takeoff SSTO that was reliable over multiple missions and could land back on the runway with no dropped tanks or stages. I've been playing KSP for a long time and this type of craft always eluded me. I mean, I could make them once in a while, but they never really worked consistently or easily. The HITAIL below is both.

How... how well does it fly?

Reminded me of this UNDER-engineered lander that I sent to Minmus: And I did it again on Gilly: Hey, I was in the area, spent a lot for the engine and probably needed the "landed on Gilly" science to unlock some node or another.

Digging up old screenshots we find amusing? Back when Nukes used LF & O and fairings weren't yet a thing this guy, the SpaceM Interstellotron, powered all my early interplanetary flights. It had WAY too much delta-v because I didn't trust my flying skills. Served me well, but in the era of post 1.0 aero and fairings it's a nightmare to get to orbit. This tiny shuttle amused me. What amused me more is that I actually managed to fly a proper mission with the thing, launch, orbit, docking with a space station, re-entry and landing at KSP's ruway intact. Not to brag or anything. Oh, and the time I flew a Nastybird to Duna for no reason other than to see if it could be done, stranding Val and Bob until I deleted their save. EDIT: OK, one more: I designed this for a Stock VTOL challenge I posted in the challenges section. Thing went through iterations where each one was just me shoving more intakes where ever I could until I could ensure the engine always had full airflow no matter what direction or speed it was traveling. The parachutes are there for a reason.

Dead? Doom hasn't received an official update since 1995 yet still isn't dead- there are mods, source ports, speedruns, multiplayer servers etc to this day. For a quarter-century-old game. Sheesh, this topic popping up four times a year was one of the reasons y'all haven't seen me around here in a while. Things haven't changed much.

Mechjeb and (as of recently) Ven's Stock Revamp. That's it. I used to use a few visual mods and stuff like chatterer, but a few caused performance issues for me so I tend to run mod-light nowadays. Now my Skyrim install, on the other hand, is more mod than game at this point.

I haven't been around he forums in a while as I've been going through it too - just not very inspired to play KSP at the moment. Though from time to time I'll still do a moon landing or just spend time liquiding around in some jets for a while

I get a ton of use out of the small cubic octagonal strut. I've landed on it, used it to attach skycranes and command pods (so as to spawn with a crewmember even though I used the rover seat) to rovers, made roll bars out of it, and even used it as an ultralight aircraft's framing. A close second would be the almighty strut. The two combined are quite useful indeed: