thadisjones

Then I'd be able to get drunk on alcohol free beer.

And here I've just been opening a copy of my spacecraft in the VAB/SPH to remind myself what the controls are for the things I've left in orbit for a while. Thanks for the tip.

Let's just say that if you play your cards right going into a career in the science/engineering fields, you can get to a point where basically anything science/engineering related can be classified as work-related study. But before THAT happened I never would have dreamed about skipping school or work just to play a computer game a few days earlier. Stay in school kids!

I'm just going to repost my guide to the three basic planet orbiting techniques since people have told me it's informative: "The only reason go upwards is so not go downwards while wanting to get more sideways. The more up you are, the less upwards is needed to not go downwards, then just sideways only! Then get orbit which is sideways, forever. More orbit wanted? Sideways prograde! Less orbit? Sideways retrograde! Always sideways. Not burn towards or away from planet in orbit. Is wasteful like spill drink! Only do rarely, like only rarely throw drink at commissar on purpose instead of drinking. Or if bring lots of drinks, can waste few on ups and downs. Inclination change is being drunk in public. Do it only moving slow at apoapse like walking in park, not while speeding in car like periapsis."

Oddly enough this KSP bug also appears in exactly the same way on OSX if you Command-Tab away from KSP when loading a save. This is funny because it's reasonable to assume OSX and Windows implement command-tab and alt-tab program window switching differently even though the two operations appear the same. KSP thing? Unity thing? Who knows.

Have you ever planted a "Guide Beacon" flag at the end of the runway, and come in SO LOW APPROACH when landing you clipped it?

This is more than a best practice, it's pretty essential. Generally it's important to make sure your time-to-target is always greater than the minimum time at max thrust you'd need to align and cancel your relative velocity. For example, if you're closing on an asteroid 200m away, and your relative velocity is 20 m/s, you have 10 seconds to counterthrust. Otherwise you hit the target, or go flying past it and then waste more fuel trying to reverse relative course and catch up. <plows SSTO full of fuel through space station at 50 m/s>

No, they didn't implement it deliberately. What KSP does is simulate a system of physics accurately enough that a basically correct analogy to the real-world Oberth effect appears in a significant manner inside the simulation.

I always knew about x as the throttle cutoff but I didn't know there was a key (z) that did the opposite, until I hit it by accident once when I meant to hit x. That was a win for the learning process and I guess a loss for that lander and its crew.

Nerd spotted! …mine's sandwiched between an Eppendorf centrifuge manual and "Statistical Practices in Genetic Counseling" in my office.

The question is referencing XKCD What If? #107, which is about sending a letter from New Jersey to Chicago as fast as possible (BTW, buy the What If? book, its a great book and an awesome conversation piece if you are in an academic/science/engineering environment). Normally, a surface-to-surface transatmospheric trajectory between two given points has an optimal arc which minimizes fuel consumption, the transit time of which is defined by the parameters of optimization. This is akin to how the most efficient route to orbit is a form of the gravity turn which we all know and love. However, it is possible to fly a fuel-inefficient surface-to-surface trajectory which gives a lower time in flight than the fuel-optimal arc. Since such a trajectory typically is both lower in altitude and exhibits a more platykurtic altitude distribution, it appears "squashed", "flattened", or possibly "depressed" to an observer.

Learn to mod, make your own fun. Or if that's more time and effort than you want to spend, learn to .cfg edit and see if you can "improve" stock parts to let you do things that would otherwise be impossible. What if you had some really powerful, durable wheels and could literally get from the Munar surface into orbit by "ramping"?

Because I found KSP through a Steam recommendation, and that weekend it was cheaper on Steam than download (I think). Other than that I'm not a huge fan of Steam's quirks, but it's generally less stupid (on OSX, anyway) than a lot of the license management that retail box games get saddled with. Things like limited install counts and the stupid "You must have the DVD in your drive while playing this game, not because it's loading content but just to prove you're the owner" message. I mean, of course you take your legally purchased game and crack all that stuff anyway for convenience but still.

I've tried this as a means to get fuel cans into orbit. To make something easily catchable without intensive precomputation (that is, catching it by being more or less in the right place by eye and then jiggling maneuver nodes), it must be in a high, wide arc. And if you can do that, it means you probably are close to achieving a stable orbit anyway, by adopting a more efficient ascent trajectory.

This might be quite doable with the Hooligan aerostat mod and probably isn't any more a "physics exploit" than slapping five dozen noclip parachutes in a tiny area. But that physics bubble and atmospheric control switching is still going to be a tricky thing. Oh, the problem with both aerostats and the parachute tank re:spaceplane resupply is that in order to dock with a floating or slowly dropping refueling point, you have to lose most or all of your horizontal velocity that you paid for to get to that point, and depending on how thin the air is and the design of your spaceplane, you might not be able to get it back without a horribly inefficient altitude loss. I don't see this ever being a good idea (in mostly-stock) compared to orbital refueling, where you get to keep your orbital velocity and you can detach without plummeting towards the lithosphere. Remember, that's the reason (ok, one of the reasons) IRL why jet fighters refuel from jet tankers, and not fuel blimps or the tops of really tall towers.