Michael R

Me, too. Rebel FM. I purchased it in April, 2012, so it must have been before that.

Grand Theft Kerbal

When you're burning full throttle retrograde and suddenly your suicide burn counter starts to rapidly run negative because you've shifted your landing zone from the plains to the mountains.

I was listening to the Rebel FM podcast, and when asked what he had been playing, Anthony Gallegos said something like, "I've been killing a whole lot of aliens." His enthusiastic description inspired me to check it out. I purchased it April, 2012. Played 1194 hours since it migrated to Steam, and I'm still not very good at it.

I did it on a Mun mission many versions ago, not having heard of it, so not knowing it would actually work. There was nothing else to try, and I was really close. The thrill upon realizing that I had actually pushed the capsule into a capture and saved my kerbal was on par with my first (non-explosive) Mun landing.

Really useful thread. Lots of new tricks to try. I've developed a rule of thumb that works for me, maybe it'll be useful to someone else: If I give my first stage 1500dV, my rocket will invariably be high enough when staging that the second stage doesn't need in-atmo ISP efficiency.

I've never accumulated much junk because I constantly start new saves, and I also terminate. However, I will admit that on more than one occasion I've stage separated after achieving orbit, then collided with the spent stage when I began my next maneuver.

I would guess that Mechjeb isn't auto-decoupling, it's just auto-hitting-the-space-bar. So auto or manual, you've probably got a different problem. At least, I've never seen anything like out of time decoupling of parts in the same stage. My guess would be that you're ejecting your boosters into different air flows due to the rocket's attitude, so they seem to be coming off differently. A booster that's under a heeled over ship might get lift when ejected and fly right back into the rocket. Or so I've been told.

I wonder if you could apply enough decoupler ejection force to raise periapsis out of the atmosphere.

I just decouple right before or right as the landing legs touch ground. The lightened sky crane then is firing enough thrust to take off and fly away. I've never tried this, but I suppose if you put a probe core on the crane and switched to it after decoupling, you could fly it to a controlled landing.

Drove a truck for about a month in Africa that had no starter motor. The starter was on order, but I needed the truck. The key is to park on a good long slope. Oxy Acetylene as a fuel combo in a PVC potato gun is overkill. The potato traveled less than a quarter of the way down the barrel. The majority of the energy went into disassembling the combustion chamber into centimeter sized chunks and delivering them over a wide area. We were behind a wall and didn't know what happened, until we heard the sound of rain. Go back to using hair spray? No way. A 1/2 inch thick steel combustion chamber, and 8 foot long steel barrel, and the pressure is held and directed nicely. And a golf ball flies. . . well, we don't know. Somewhere over the neighboring farm they get too small to see. Also, I'm pretty proud of a very simple fix I just made on my lawn mower, splinting two breaks in the handle with sections of curtain rod and duct tape. You would have to see it.

This is a properly Kerbal solution to an otherwise catastrophic spacecraft design oversight.

It's hard to know what exactly is going on with your rocket without more info (or, especially a picture, or even a craft file), however, I think it's safe to say that if you decide you're better off not using certain engines at launch, you might want to consider whether you need them at all. If you are sure you'll need them later, then it's probably best to put the launch stages below them, rather than radially, to the extent possible, to minimize drag. The fewer the stalks of asparagus, the lower the drag. Before 1.0, I believed in a design philosophy that said that as many of your engines as possible should be firing at launch, or you were hauling unnecessary weight and lowering your efficiency. This lead to a lot of asparagus stages with a lot of engines. With the changes since 1.0, both aero and engine ISP changes, I'm really seeing the benefits of designing with vertical staging rather than horizontal. And my rockets look better, too.

Instead of suffocating all Kerbalkind, you could hyperedit your lander right to Tylo orbit for testing.

I'm fairly sure that no NASA astronaut manually piloted his rocket off the launch pad, nor routinely had to bet his life on his ability to manually start and stop a maneuver burn with precision timing (absent an Apollo 13 type incident). These are arcade game skills, and while I highly recommend everyone learn to do everything in KSP manually first, to me, adding the automation to some of these steps adds realism, and doesn't take me out of the experience the way that key mashing does. If my rockets fail, it should be because I designed them or used then incorrectly, not because my finger slipped. But I appreciate that other value different experiences in KSP. For an extreme example of play that's totally opposite of my style, watch . That's why this is such an incredible game. There are so many different things to do, and so many different ways to play. It's a single player game. There's no such thing as cheating. Do what's fun.