Sharpy

Got that covered... tourists to Minmus Station, groups of 12-17, each one paying 7mln for a month stay. Got funnier once I accepted one of these contracts and realized only after docking to the station they wanted the tour of Minmus BASE. Luckily the base is located at the edge of a huge cliff, and had some spare tunnel endpoints for KAS, so docking and taking off afterwards wasn't hard.

I learned how to use the Alcubierre drive (through sandbox). Now just to get it in Career! Heh... entering the warp is easy. Worse if you exit it at the target... going at some 30km/s

Personally, I'm against. Not that the tethers are a bad idea, but there are far more important and better ideas that wait to be implemented (never mind bugs to be fixed) and doing the tethers right would be a lot of work. Which would take (human) resources away from more important stuff. Finally properly working wheels anyone?!

I wonder, do any mods provide planets more difficult than Eve? Stock Tylo is harder for landing, but if you can't take off from Kerbin, you can take off from Tylo. There are the obvious impossibilities - can't land on gas giants, the Sun. But is there a mod with a planet that is more unforgiving than Eve, and still possible to land on and return from?

Most of the time: this.

Can I request a feature? Would it be possible to add re-enabling autostrut toggles (i.e. make it possible to switch autostruts off) on wheels or landing legs?

> When launching from a runway, the clock usually starts once you hit the spacebar That requires the Making History expansion, doesn't it?

C'mon, I circumnavigated Gilly by a rover... twice! It required an efficient ion engine pointed upwards to keep the rovers pushed to the surface, and the first time over the rover was a bit heavy and got damaged from some jumps...

Do not try to make a rover unflippable on the Mun. It's impossible. Instead, realize, whatever flips, should be made to flip back... and not break when flipped.

Today Sharpy began painstakingly building an artificial ring around Eve. Well, almost. But let's start from the beginning... that is finally collecting science from 4 nearby biomes on Eve. Shallows, sea, lowlands and midlands. Including splashing down. Long range flies terribly in the atmosphere. I savescummed a lot. And was too busy piloting to think of screenies. But hey, got it done... and got nearly full science possible from the seismic hammer experiment. Especially that the ship was acting as a third seismic pod, with the experiment performed at least a kilometer away... Well, parking it into the bay for transport between biomes and recharging (no own power source, just batteries) ended with breaking the docking port... which was painstakingly aligned through the SPH editor, so a hacky replacement from spare parts had to be assembled... Luckily setting SAS to Radial Out allowed for operation of instruments that required ground contact. Then came the launch. Again, too busy piloting to remember screenies. Starting with TWR of exactly 1.00 and nearly 13km/s of delta-V, climbing painstakingly, most of the way below 60m/s vertically up... I arrived into Eve low orbit with almost 2800m/s... and to get to Gilly to refuel, I'd need 1200 for transfer and over 600 for capture. With nothing left for landing too. Never mind that would require perfect burns. Dark Drive takes some two seconds to spin up, and good 10 to shut down entirely. You can't do perfect burns with it. So, what to do? Hah, I went Mark Watney on the ship. The rover and the Jetwing stayed on Eve... but there was so much stuff not necessary for Gilly... First, no need for so much TWR anymore. Docking port? I have twice as much cooling capacity as I need! Compressing important spare parts into two storage lockers, two others have to go! Then I decided I don't need the airlock eiher. Landing legs? Ladders? On Gilly? U mad? Now I have over 300m/s of reserve for Gilly maneuvers and landing. With this sort of budget I can get anywhere around there! And that's Long Range Compact: Whoops. There was a bunch of science stored in that airlock... it was nearly a kilometer away by the time I recalled! And so, tidal forces will spread the junk evenly, and Eve will get its first ring! Now 5 days left until transfer to Gilly... To Be Continued.

@Hotel26: What sort of launch stack do you use for that?

Deployed seismic pod for the hammer (seismic analysis) experiment. First, finding a configuration of Jetwing that won't flip over with the extra payload... I'm sure @Angel-125 didn't foresee putting an engine on the parachute/payload slot... Thrust limiter to 18, and the Jetwing flew perfectly with the pilot carrying a seismic pod. Pod 1 deployed after a rather rough landing... ...and a flight back to base. In addition to the second pod, the pilot got extra fuel... Other than what was in the command pod, it appeared I didn't take a drop of monopropellant, drained the command pod dry. Luckily ISRU on board could renew the monoprop supply, and Jetwing doesn't burn that much...

Spreadsheet... well, OK, might be more comfortable than hunting for all the bodies in the tracking station, not sure what it could add. What I really want is a hot juicy porkchop! Like this: A good transfer window planner for the outer systems... Edit: Not a mod. External. I'm already running out of RAM when playing KSP.

Found it. Somehow the craft got a part of type "KerbalEVA" attached to it. Erased the part, moved "crew = Olivia Kerman" to a part that could take passengers (the lab which already contained the other scientist - just add a second "crew =" line below.

A Jetwing trip on a cloudy day. On the precipice.

Somehow, yesterday, Olivia Kerman, when boarding my long range exploration vessel's lab, ended up in an undefined space. There's no part to click to send her on EVA. No portrait in the lower right of the screen, when the vessel is focused. She's somewhere "on the ship" but not in any crewed part. And the mission can't really progress without her. Plus I'd rather not return to Kerbin to recover her just yet... Probably editing the save would help, but what, where should I edit to move her to a normal crewed part?

Finally finished tweaking my long-range ship, found I have an open Eve transfer window and went to Eve. Landing went without a hitch. (well, almost. It flipped engines up, but luckily I had two parachutes installed just for this purpose - flipped it back.) We'll see how return goes. Insane amounts of delta-V, but only like 1.1 TWR. For now, collecting science and refueling.

Well, it's closer to 15 minutes, not 8, now that I checked. This is KSP loading... And this is when I call it quits. 15.4 out of 16GB...

@steve_vSquad has interest in fixing them properly; they've been trying since the "upgrade". Thing is this is Unity/PhysX problem and all Squad really can do is tweaking the parameters. It's still vastly better than it was in 2.1/2.2 but still, I use landing legs for landing, not for staying in place. The moment the craft comes to a stop, legs go up. Hacks of using cargo bays for landing legs are still fully valid.

Conclusion is " Post still under construction! " and this promises some quite useful tables of what engines, what TWR on them per stage etc. Currently it's not quite "edible for general public". @Cunjo Carl: Consider an option that appears rather frequently in the literature: heavy crappy lowest stage ("big dumb rocket"), and better, more efficient, more expensive engines on subsequent stages.

Ah... so the old, good "Put KIS in stock, dammit!" Yeah. Put KIS in stock. Makes the game much more fun. And especially very very kerbal once you start abusing the ability to "replace some parts" and start assembling rockets off-world from these.

The role of 9.81 is used to convert the units of mass to weight (kilograms to Newtons). You don't need it if you have thrusts and weight in pounds-force and mass in pounds. The physical interpretation of specific impulse in seconds the amount of time a rocket must be fired to use a quantity of propellant with weight (measured at one standard gravity) equal to its thrust. Imagine a rig: engine + dummy weight + hoses delivering fuel, total mass 100kg. The hoses are connected to a tank with 100kg of fuel+oxidizer (placed on the ground, not adding to the mass). You make the rig hover (emit 981N of thrust as weight of 100kg is 981N) and measure time until all fuel is depleted. This is your specific impulse in seconds - and obviously the longer you can get the rig to hover while maintaining the same thrust the better. And while weight of objects changes with gravity, specific impulse of engines doesn't - so the same conversion factor is used everywhere. The interpretation of specific impulse in m/s is much simpler: just the speed of exhaust gas. Divide it by 9.81 (or 10 if you don't want to be so precise) and you have ISp in seconds. ...also, for traditional reason, ISp is always measured in seconds, even for high values. Otherwise one would say the photon drive has almost a year of specific impulse.

Dammit, I don't have the screenshot from the actual crash. Just seconds before it. I crashed runway into VAB.

AFAIK this already happens. The game still rescans all .cfg files to verify if anything changes, but if nothing changed, it just loads the cached/compiled versions. Which still takes obscenely long time but shorter than compiling them from scratch.