Old Foxboy

Hello, probably this has been suggested before, but i wanted to ask if the development team still is aware of this issue: When inflight, you often dock/undock vessels, and while the scrambled staging can be fixed inflight, the action groups cannot. For example: If i dock a ship to another and want to toggle all my solar panels by pressing (2), the game won't allow this. Or if i switch to a ship i haven't activated for a long time (Jool mission return crew saver rescue vehicle you know what i mean....), i simply can't remember i used (2) to activate the drag chutes, and PLOPP the chutes are gone and i don't have a mechanic onboard. Doh! It would be great to be able to re-assign the action groups while inflight (as long as the VAB is upgraded enough of course).

hmmm 8000 m/s is a definite load of kinetic energy. Don't forget that mass is not as big a factor than velocity, which is exponential and not linear as mass. The tiny atmosphere particles have so few mass but the same relative speed. The problem with the conservation of energy is that the loss of energy by slowing such a comparably huge mass as a spaceship down is paid off with extreme heating of the little air molecules - and your ship's hull. Heating means conversion of kinetic energy, so you won't sail on at a 190k periapsis orbit forever. That's a misconception. If KSP really doesn't simulate an appropriate velocity decay, it would be a bug. But one single high-altitude pass-through won't take away much velocity. You simply don't hit enough air molecules, even if they get steaming hot. Think "I am driving a Truck loaded with blocks of concrete through a wall of a single layer of paper". The paper is ripped apart (=air molecule heating), but your speed won't be affected at all. You would have to drive through some hundred walls of paper to slow the truck down just a little bit. Now the truck rips through the paper in an instant, but airbreaking is done for some minutes maybe. The masses are different, and the density is different. It's only an illustration, not a physical example. But think: "I want the truck to be slowed with only one hit of the wall". You would have to make the paper much thicker. First you use cardboard, but no big effect, either. Then you use several layers of cardboard, and the truck trembles a little bit, and maybe the windshield is damaged, but it's not as slow as you would like it to be. A concrete wall will probably not stop the truck completely, but will be enough to kill the driver. Making the wall thicker and thicker (=going lower on periapsis) has bigger effects on the speed of the truck but will damage it more and more. It's better for the truck to drive through 100 walls of cardboard than driving through 1 wall of concrete.

LOL, never flew a real taildragger, did you? They are a nuisance to taxi on the ground, they have a terrible tendency to bounce if you land "horizontal" like you suggested and are the most unforgiving beasts when it comes to landing. The reason they are used so much on bad runways (like bush pilots, wartime, remote islands etc.) is they reduce the risk of getting stuck with the single front wheel - resulting in flips and heavy damage - and have a better overall weight distribution on the two main wheels which helps the airframe integrity on bouncy runways. However, you can flip a taildragger onto it's nose very easily if you apply the brakes too much. They are very hard to taxi because of the reduced sight and have a extreme tendency to perform unintended ground loops, because you steer from behind the centre of mass (like driving a car backwards). Maybe it just works in KSP because taxiing is not a factor here.

You are captured in a wrong paradigm. The question is not how cold the surrounding air is, but what actually happens at the surface of your craft. The air 1m away from your craft might be like minus 150°C, but your craft squeezes the air in front of it so much that when the air molecules finally hit the surface of your craft, they are compressed so insanely high that the whole front (!) is covered in hot ionized gas. No cooling at all. There is a significant heat decay when the air flows around your craft and it's pressure drops instantly, creating a zone where excess heat may or may not be taken away. However, since the pressure of the "rear end" gas is so low again, it hasn't any significance. A fly sitting on an iron girder makes it bend. But it's neglectable. Flying subsonic and in higher pressure lower atmosphere is a totally different thing and the numbers game changes a lot. But don't forget the difference between linear and exponential. Simple logic only works if you stay in the same sphere of numbers influence. Exponential changes can throw your logic very fast.

That's like putting a pizza in a hot oven expecting the air in the oven to cool the pizza as well as it heats it...

Just for your information, the Space Shuttle hits Earth's atmosphere at about the same speed. well, 7000 m/s, but however, it won't "rip everything apart", because the reentry starts high up at 100km above the surface while the main heat is down below 50km. I suggest to enter upper parts of the atmosphere - and don't enter it streamlined, but at a high AOA, so you make maximum use of the little aerobraking. You won't get a capture, but you will save fuel for the orbital insertion. You might also burn before the aerobraking so you can go deeper into the atmosphere without braking anything.

LOL, mmd. The vacuum may as well be in a very real location between our ears.

Th Rocket you need to land on Eve and extract Ore and then lift off again might be as big so that the contract might as well be: "Extract 2800 units of ore from Eve and put Gilly in your cargo bay on the way back"

Just FYI, in the real world, any ship that's returning from just a LEO (LOW Earth orbit!), is travelling at around 7000 m/s and enters Earth's atmosphere at this speed. Just so that you know atmospheric heating in upper atmosphere in KSP is totally crazy off.

Did someone mention you can adjust the opening height of the chutes? 500m is too low in some cases, so better right click on the chute and set it to 1000m to have a safety margin.

When building interplanetary stations, i send a refueller lander (ore miner) with them to refill the booster modules. I have a refueller module and an ore miner always at hand in minimus orbit (well, currently they are parked at Ike, but you get the idea). You can launch a new station, refuel, and just add a new core module to fulfill the "new craft build after..." parts. If you completely build a new station for each contract, you may not get paid like you should.

Here's another Duna story. Unfortunately, i couldn't reproduce it, but it really happened: I directed a craft to intercept Duna and had a valid intercept. However, i wanted to change the orbit a little bit to establish a more Delta-V friendly insertion burn. Suddenly, the intercept was way off. I immediately pressed X, thinking i burned into the wrong direction and checked my attitude. But it was perfectly right. I planned another maneuver, and no matter what i did, the closest encounter was getting further and further from Duna. Until i realized: The planet had stopped moving! Everything was moving except Duna. I loaded a previously saved game, and everything was fine.

orbital mechanics were invented by a very sadistic person.

Had one ship returning from Duna with a juggernaut truck load of science. Loaded my game the next day - gone. Loaded a quicksave BEFORE - gone. Loaded a save with the ship in direct focus - gone. Like KSP hyperedited all of my savegames. It was totally like i never launched it. Even the Kerbals were back in the center. This really sucks.

1. I hate how the graphical stuttering and low FPS problem with high part count craft destroy's any attempt on piloting a complicated craft into orbit (huuuge rockets or even basic MK3 spaceplanes for example). 2. The wobbling on SAS, overcorrecting gimbals. Just annoying. 3. Docking is way too easy. However, with the built in docking controls, better leave it that way. 4. This heating... still a lot of work to do (parts inside cargobays...) 5. The career mode: No real feeling of a sense behind the missions. This should be more sophisticated and provide a better feeling of a continuously growing space program. It's better than in 0.9, but it's still not good at all. There's lot mot. Some has been said already. However, KSP is a great game.

BTW: Does anybody know if the intake air resource distribution bug between air breathing engines has been resolved? Because "my craft starts to lose control at 700 m/s at xx altitude" sound a lot like one engine losing thrust and the craft yawing out of control.

What's with this Jet in the vertical stabilizer? Doesn't it push down the nose or did you adjust it's angle to thrust through the COG?

Some ever forget about the incredible high speeds you hit the JOOL atmosphere with. It's not just 3000 m/s like Kerbin or the inner planets. It's a whopping 8000+ in most cases. Now that's not just more than 2 times the heat, but it means about 8 to 10 times the heat because of the way heat is calculated. Even though you will hit only the very thin upper layers of the atmosphere, it's still incredibly fast, and since the speed of an air molecule is more important than it's mass, the aerobraking maneuver with such high speeds is very difficult. To aerocapture at Jool, better try to approach the planet at the lowest possible speed. If you can't use the moons, try to reduce your orbital speed BEFORE you hit the atmosphere, not AFTER you hit it. Every m/s of velocity you can reduce before the aerocapture will greatly improve your survivability. It's generally much better to use high drag parts and only gently touch the outer atmosphere layer than to enter deeper with a streamlined ship. The drag is not the factor that will rip your ship apart. It's the heat.

mmd

MB, not only at the takeoff. I'll give you this one. However, the afterburners weren't always working, but were also shut down in between - especially for the air refuelling maneuver - and had to be ignited again after that. So, the SR-71 had an ignitable afterburner which wasn't always running.

I quickly tested some of my craft. Results so far: 1. Basic Jet engine: Crafts finally able to go a little bit beyond Mach 1 if designed well. Wasn't possible before. 2. Turbo-RAM-Jet: Awesome nice afterburner effect. However, the SR-71 only used them to take off. Doh! It seems they are much more balanced now. 3. Rapiers: They use much more fuel during initial ascend now, and the buff totally depends on your flight profile. I found out you have to alter your flight profile to some extent to make use of the drag changes. The same ist true for Turbojet-SSTO craft: You now can accelerate the craft to higher speeds in air breathing mode, but you also need to do so to get the most kick out of them Rapiers. Because of the heat/drag issue, i had designed my craft to make a steeper ascend and avoid the heat spike, so i had to completely change my flight profile now and rebalance the liquid fuel / oxidizer mix. Overall performance is nearly the same however.

Nope, the SR-71 never reached this speed. You confused km/h with m/s. Divide your number by 3,6 and you are at about 1000 m/s, which is the Mach 3,x - the speed a SR-71 can fly. And it's pretty much the same performance you get from the Turbo-Ramjets in KSP. A SR-71 never could make it to orbit. Not on Earth, and not even on Kerbin.

Just another tip: You can tilt the wings a little (!) bit to create a lot of extra lift while keeping the rest of the craft with a low AOA in the airstream. That's what they do in real life, too. Use the rotation tool and press shift to make a very small increment.

Just for comparison: A parachute diver that hops from a balloon (aka "Geronimooooo") will hardly break the sound barrier at Mach 1 (Google Baumgartner Jump). A spacecraft that reenters earth's atmosphere from LEO will be travelling at Mach 27. See the difference?

The probe is too small. The drag/weight ratio is too high to make it pierce through the atmosphere into the denser parts fast enough to let it melt.