Kelderek

For #2 there is a setting relating to patched conics that you can change. The Draw Mode setting will change where the lines appear and the Limit will allow you to see more future orbit paths. You can fiddle with these two settings to get the display the way you want. I use "Local to Bodies" and a limit of 5. http://imgur.com/a/Lrdoa

Yes I know, but I had expected to be able to use just a command pod with a non-pilot along with an avionics nose cone and have that be enough to fully control a vessel (just like a pilot can) and not need any probe core or antenna with a signal. If not having a pilot means that you must use a probe core plus antenna and signal, then what purpose does the avionics nose cone serve? I would love it if someone running an older version like 1.1 could test out a non-pilot with the avionics nose cone and see if you can make maneuver nodes. If the nodes worked before, then I am curious if it is intentional that they require a signal in 1.2. I personally think it should not require a signal at all.

I guess what I'm wondering is if this is new in 1.2 that this nose cone does not allow maneuver nodes or has it always been that way? Perhaps someone still playing 1.1 might be able to check. Slap an avionics nose cone on a command pod with Bob or Bill inside and see if you can make a maneuver node. If this is new in 1.2, then it would seem to really negate the usefulness of that part because you would always need a probe core and antenna anyway and the probe core would do the same work that this nose cone does. My own opinion is that this part should remain and provide the SAS control and also maneuver nodes, essentially treating any scientists and engineers as ordinary pilots. It would fit that niche use of sending kerbals into space even if you don't have a communications network yet and not always having to rely on pilots. It would only work with a kerbal on board, so it doesn't circumvent the use of probe cores for unmanned missions.

I've always wanted something that was somewhere between science and career games. When I play a science game I wish I could upgrade buildings because I think that's a fun challenge to work within those limitations. I've often wondered if we could upgrade buildings using science points in a science game how that would be. I like contracts on occasion, but I hate having to rely on them as my only source of funds -- this is why I always upgrade the admin building to tier 2 asap and grab the "Leadership Initiative" strategy at 60%, using funds from milestones better fits my play style. I still like having contracts though because they might align with what I was already wanting to do anyway -- planning to go land on the Mun?, then grab a contract to put a surface base there. At the same time it is nice to be able to go somewhere even if you have no contracts and know you won't come away empty-handed. Anything that gives us more control to play the way we want gets my vote.

I am playing a 1.2 career game and just had an unexpected experience on one of my missions. I flew to Eve to drop an unmanned station onto the surface for a contract. It was my first mission to Eve in this save, so I wanted to bring back a bunch of science. To maximize my return I decided to bring a small command pod with Bob on board so he could restore the materials bay and goo experiments a couple times for in space high and near Eve science. Once I dropped the station down to the planet, Bob was ready to return home. The only probe core and antennas I added had been for the station which I left behind on Eve, these allowed me to control the entire flight up to that point. For the return home the ship was mostly just a command pod, a science storage box and a fly-by-wire nose cone. I soon discovered that I could no longer fully control the command pod because I did not have a signal back to Kerbin (My tracking station is fully upgraded, but with the built in 5k antenna of the command pod, I had no signal in orbit of Eve). With this setup I'm not sure how the problem splits up, but with a manned non-pilot command pod and a fly-by-wire nose cone and no probe core I could not create maneuver nodes -- has this always been the case even before CommNet signals? Does this mean that the only way to make new nodes is to have a pilot or a probe core with a signal? If so, then that really lessens the usefulness of the fly-by-wire nose cone - you would always want to use a probe core + antenna instead. If this is new since the CommNet was added, then I would question whether it really makes sense for the fly-by-wire nose cone to not allow maneuver nodes.

So are you saying that when you staged the parachutes and they semi-deployed that was enough to cause the damage? I had assumed your problem was with full deployment, not semi-deployment. In that case, I can see why manually popping the parachutes one by one instead of through staging worked better.

Before you go completely back to the drawing board, you can try to adjust your parachute settings. First, take one of your parachutes (use a drogue chute first if you have one, otherwise go with your largest one) and have it deploy at the maximum altitude on its slider. Then have each additional parachute deploy in 100-200m increments lower altitude (depending on how many you have total). Then as you descend, target the first parachute and watch the part that shows whether it is safe to deploy and pop it immediately once you see it is safe. Your parachutes will semi-deploy all at once (you haven't changed staging), and then they will fully deploy in a staggered sequence. By starting at a higher altitude you reduce the strain on the vessel because they deploy in thinner atmosphere and by staggering the chutes it breaks up the total deceleration into smaller events. It may not work based on your design, but it's worth trying before you go back to the VAB.

Well if you are landing then this is no issue, just be sure to lift off toward the east after you are done on the surface and you will be going west to east for your departure orbit. If your orbit ends up being retrograde or some other wonky orbit like a polar one then you just need to remember the following: 1. You must ALWAYS burn prograde to leave your current body, just use your location on the orbit to control where you go. 2. If you are trying to leave a planet to go to another planet in a lower orbit around the sun, then you want to choose a location on your parking orbit where pointing your ship prograde will also be be pointing as close to that planet's retrograde as possible. It is the reverse if you want to go to a higher orbit, choose a spot on the parking orbit where you can burn prograde and also be going roughly in that planet's prograde direction.

I have no idea about the specifics of drag for the fairing, but in my own anecdotal experience, a more rounded fairing makes it easier to steer a rocket in an atmosphere than a pointy one - especially for for wide fairings. I find that pointy rockets really want to go straight and struggle with turns. No matter what you do with or without fairings up top, it really helps to have fins at the bottom and enough control authority to stay on course. Here are a couple examples: http://imgur.com/a/a9YJT

If you fly to Duna from a proper launch window, by the time you get there the two planets have moved and you are no longer at the right phase angle to return. Chances are that Kerbin is now ahead of Duna, but you need Kerbin to be behind Duna for a good window. When moving to a higher orbit, like from Kerbin to Duna, the target needs to be ahead of you -- the launch window planners and mods will show you this. When moving to a lower orbit, like from Duna back to Kerbin, the target needs to be behind you when you start. So generally you need to plan to linger on Duna to wait for a good return window -- I would recommend doing this before actually lifting off the surface as you can access full time warp while landed. If you don't want to wait for a good return window then prepare to need a much higher DV amount for the burn to get an encounter. I flew from Kerbin to Duna with only 9 days of travel time once for a challenge, but it was a crazy amount of DV for the burn and I was going too fast to do anything more than zoom past the planet or crash into it. Nearly anything is possible, but most people prefer to design around efficient launch windows to reduce the DV requirements. Your ejection burn will always be aimed with a prograde attitude with your pilot controls or very close to it. The point along your current orbit for that burn will generally be on the night side for going to a higher orbit (such as Kerbin to Duna) -- or alternatively you could say that your ship is pointing in roughly the same direction that your current planet is moving around the sun (prograde for that planet). If you want to go to a lower orbit, like from Duna back to Kerbin then you will burn from the daylight side -- which is the same as pointing your ship in the direction behind the planet's path, the planet's retrograde -- this will be prograde for your ship, but retrograde for the planet. EDIT: assuming a standard west to east parking orbit.

Thanks for this explanation RoverDude. In my case I am only using 100 Gm antennas apart from the tracking station itself. It was confusing to me that I could move up to 5.9 Gm apart before I saw it drop from 100 to 99% signal strength - if it works like you had said I would have expected roughly 94% strength at that distance. I'm probably not counting the tracking station which is a huge number like 250 Gm. At any rate it looks like if you really care about having a high signal strength (for science!) then you need a lot of these relay antennas. The 100 Gm ones say they are combinable so I should look into making my outer solar system relays use 4 or more antennas each. It works on a square rule right? So I would need 4 antennas to get double the strength? I'm just screwing around in sandbox right now, so the science gain is a non-issue, but I hope to apply what I'm learning of this new system to a future career game.

I don't think so. I have two of these relay satellites 41 Mm apart and they have 100% signal strength. I may run some tests with the cheat menu to see if I can figure this out better. EDIT: I had to get to a distance of 5.9 Gm before the signal, strength between two of the best relay dishes drops from 100% to 99%. With 62 Gm between the two relay dishes the signal is down to only 31%. A direct line of sight to the KSC from 62 Gm gives a 65% signal strength (250 Gm DSN power + 100 Gm relay dish on satellite)

I don't think the positioning is changing from any sort of bug, I just suspect that I was not as precise as I needed to be with my orbits and once I fast forwarded 29 years those small inaccuracies end up looking much more obvious. I'm going to try to see if getting perfect orbits from the cheat menu will work. If all 4 satellites in a formation have the exact same orbital numbers except for the longitude of the ascending node (0, 90, 180, 270 degrees) then I would assume they could stay in formation indefinitely - I'm running a time warp test of this right now.

1. I've been messing around with setting up a relay network in a sandbox game in 1.2 and am having difficulty understanding what I am seeing for signal strength. I have a set of 4 equidistant relay satellites between the Mun and Minmus at about 29 Mm altitude above Kerbin and another set that is out past Dres at 50 Gm from Kerbol. Since this is a sandbox game the tracking station is tier 3 and I altered the game settings so that there are no additional ground stations beyond the KSC. When I fly one of the deep space probes I can see a signal strength of only 32%. The signal detail shows me exactly which of the Kerbin relay satellites it is connecting with and in the map view I can target the other relay probe and see that that satellite is about 62 Gm away in a direct line. All of these relay satellites have the largest relay dish installed with ratings of 100 Gm. Since 62 Gm is well inside the range of both 100 Gm dishes, why am I only getting 32% signal strength? I have read through the design document here, but the description doesn't seem to explain it well enough for me to understand. How close would two 100 Gm relay satellites need to be to still get 100% signal strength for that leg of the path? At the time I checked the signal was bouncing off two of the inner Kerbin relays which both showed 5 green bars of strength, but the first hop from beyond Dres is only 2 orange bars, hence the 32% strength. 2. I'm finding it difficult to have my satellites stay in formation. I set up 4 equidistant relay satellites at 29 Mm above Kerbin, but by the time I finished setting up 4 more relay satellites at 50 Gm above Kerbol, the 4 inner satellites were all out of position relative to each other, a couple of them were only about 10 degrees apart instead of the 90 degrees they started at. I suspect this has to do with the fact that it took me more than 29 game years to establish the outer relay orbits (GAWD we need a higher time acceleration than 100,000x!). Does anyone have any advice for how to avoid this? Should I avoid formations altogether and just put more satellites out in different places and hope I get good enough coverage? I used this wonderful calculator to set these orbits up to begin with.

Nicely done! Grats on a mission well executed!

There is a separate area for 1.2 here --> http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/forum/82-12-pre-release-branch/

I just had this bug during my Apollo-style Mun mission and was forced to abort the mission and return home from Mun orbit. I came here to report the bug, but it looks like you already know about it and have a fix, thanks! I was happily surprised that I was able to safely renter Kerbin's atmosphere in my Mk1-2 command pod with half of the lander still docked. The landing can got to 97% heat before it started cooling down during re-entry:

I just saw that the spacecraft will have a 35 minute long orbital insertion burn tonight. That gives me a whole new perspective thinking of my 8 or 10 minute LV-N burns in KSP, lol.

In that scenario, I wonder if it makes sense to leave a month or two before that optimum window, so that you would get to mars and be able to leave within a month or so after the optimal return time. I realize that by leaving earth early it may take longer to get there, but a month or two of time efficiency for each leg of the trip would be a lot less than being forced to spend a year or more on the surface. I know that every extra day before or after a launch window makes the time/energy efficiency worse, but I'm willing to bet there is some wiggle room there so that the timing could work out for a full mission.

Are there porkchop plots that account for both the arrival and departure legs of the mission? The one you linked looks like it only shows a one-way trip. I assume that when send people to Mars, we'll also try to bring them back home That's what I'm really getting at, how do they plan for the entire mission including: time it takes to get there, time to screw around on the surface and time it takes for a return trip back home.

How would NASA and others go about determining a launch window for a manned mission to Mars or somewhere else far away from the Earth and Moon? For an unmanned mission it would be much simpler, they just choose a window that gives a fuel efficient (delta-V) journey. But for a manned mission you would have to add time efficiency as another very important consideration due to limited life support resources. When playing KSP I couldn't help but notice that if I send a mission to Duna at the optimal launch window and stick around at Duna for a couple of game days, if I were to attempt to return home to Kerbin after that it would be an awful time and highly inefficient for delta-V. The planets are not in the right phase angle for going from Duna back to Kerbin. I usually have to calculate a new launch window from Duna back to Kerbin and use time acceleration a fair bit before I start my journey back home. So for NASA, how would they go about solving this problem? Does planning a trip that lasts a reasonable amount of time require them to use higher than normal delta-V to balance it out? Do the launch windows coming and going work out in such a way that force the mission to last a certain duration on the planet like Mars? In other words, would a manned mission have to plan on being on the surface many more months just so that the return voyage happens in a reasonable window (for time and delta-V efficiency)? I believe that the launch windows are based on the synodic period between Earth and Mars which is over 25 months. This would be the case for going in either direction, so going from Earth to Mars has windows every 25 months and going from Mars to Earth has different windows (a different phase angle) that are also 25 months apart. The important question would be what is the time offset between the two? I suppose people who play with some type of life support mod in KSP may have already addressed this, but as I haven't used any of those myself, I am curious how this problem is solved. EDIT: here's an example of what I mean for KSP with Kerbin and Duna: Leave Kerbin Y1 D236, Arrive Duna Y2 D69 (258 days flight). The next available launch window from Duna is Y3 D242, arriving back at Kerbin Y4 D84. You have to sit on Duna roughly 600 days before you can have a good launch window to leave. It just so happens that then previous launch window to leave Duna is only about 59 days before you arrive, so you just miss it and have to wait a long time for the next one. Since time is such an important commodity for manned spaceflight, I'm guessing they have to choose less than perfect launch windows and I'm curious how those are determined.

I'm not entirely sure which version introduced this problem, but contract completion messages are not properly persisting when loading or unloading the game for a career save. Let's say for example I run a long mission to another planet/moon, completing a couple contracts and a bunch of world firsts along the way. If I exit the game (or if the game crashes) and come back these messages will be gone. In the past these messages would remain for you to peruse and delete on your own whenever you want, or to possibly save indefinitely (which is what I like to do with my world first message, allowing it to grow over time - I still wish I could archive world firsts but that is another issue entirely). This problem seems to happen when I exit the game normally and also if the game crashes - any messages that were waiting for me for my career game are lost when I come back. I use Stage Recovery mod which is the only mod I know of for the ones I have installed that will add its own messages to this list and these are also disappearing on their own whenever the game exits, so I have no way to go back and check to see if I succeeded in recovering any stages. I am running 1.1.2. My mods: KER, MechJeb2, Stage Recovery

This is going to date me a bit, but my favorite old game is Stars! (circa '94 or thereabouts). My first 4X game and also the first game I purchased over the internet (shareware) -- the whole thing fit on a single 3.5" floppy disk and can probably still be played (it worked on all Windows versions up to Vista, but I haven't tried it yet on Windows 10). I have installed it on every one of my computers for the past 20+ years and played it for countless hours. I found this screenshot with a google search: I should give it a try again, I'm sure I have it on a CD somewhere.

I've needed to use ballast on a couple designs, most notably on a 1.25m design with a command pod and a few other items like science Jr. and small service bay, I added a small fuel tank just before the heat shield to ensure the correct end of the vessel points retrograde for re-entry. Those command pods are notorious for wanting to flip..

As long as you can control your vessel all the way to orbit and not explode from overheating in the process then generally go for as high a TWR as you can. The only time a lower TWR is really needed on my rockets is when the design is less streamlined and has more drag -- this makes it harder to control and benefits from lower acceleration to keep it stable. If you ask for "optimal" you're going to get a lot of different answers because everyone has different criteria that they care about. I once launched a rocket with 1.03 TWR and got to orbit -- that is an extreme example, but it worked for me in a special case where I had a gigantic rocket (something like 10,000 tons) and the only thing that mattered to me was reaching orbit, which I was able to do. Determine what criteria you care about the most and then choose a TWR that allows you to achieve it.