Zephram Kerman

I've used the claw a lot. Even multiple claws work fine as long as they are all on the active vessel. The only time I had a glitch was when I tried to "daisy-chain" (claw attach to a station that was claw-attached to something else). But yeah, definitely putting an engineer there would solve all your problems. For the docking alignment thing, I like to use aircraft wheels. But, like Dilli said, a burst of thrust, RCS, or torque will usually nudge things into place. But on small moons like Minmus, it's just easier to land on top of things.

Like Mono, I've only seen the heating bug once. The culprit was a hecs probe core inside a service bay. Opening the bay doors would allow it to cool, closing them would make it slowly heat until it exploding. So I tried moving the probe core around inside the bay; turns out it was attached to the outside node and clipped through the floor. Once it was attached inside, everything worked nicely. That was a bit tricky to do because that probe was the root part.

I'm too lazy to mess with the .craft file. Could you post an image instead? (Or even cooler, one of those Sketchfab thingies.) But, just based on your description, I'm pretty sure you can get more out of those whiplashesesh by nosing down some around 10,000m. I usually start out at 30°-45° like you said, but then temporarily level off to only 10-15° or so. The reason for this is the turboramjet really hits its stride here; at mach 2-3 you'll get several Gs of acceleration. If you time it right, you'll run out of intakeair just as the skin is getting too hot. Then gently pitch up to 45° again to finish the climb out on rocket power. Doing it this way gets you hundreds of m/s of extra speed, which means more fuel left over.

Good point! By refueling on the pad, you can get around the weight limit. That'd be especially handy if your payload is a tank of fuel for delivery. Well to answer your question, I always just assumed the crawlerway is upgraded at the same time as the launch pad. On the other hand, RL rockets are always fueled after they are delivered to the launchpad. So maybe the limit just needs a name change? Or maybe they should be split like you said?

The 115/230V thing is the input voltage. It means you can switch it to use line power in USA or Europe just by moving that switch to the correct setting. The Current number is what you're interested in right now. 10 amps * 12 volts is only 120 watts. So I'm a little confused about that result on a 500 watt power supply. I haven't seen a power supply smaller than 250W since the 1990s. Maybe one of these more knowledgeable folks can straighten me out on this. Hopefully I don't hijack your thread by asking: what about laptops? In that case all of them are integrated graphics. I'm in the market for one of those right now, hopefully about 2-3 years old, and it would be nice to be able to KSP on the road. So I don't get withdrawal symptoms.

I had a similar issue where the contract was to recover a kerbal and his MPL stranded on the surface of Mun. The spot was on the side of a hill, so the MPL must have spawned with one corner slightly clipped underground. As soon as it came into physics range, it would sink all the way up to the top wall. I could dock the claw to that wall, but the MPL would explode as soon as anything moved it. IMO, the correct action is to edit the .sfs file so that the module is sufficiently high up that it falls to the surface in a normal way. Then you can proceed with the mission. After I did this, it was a simple matter of keeping it upright while the three occupants got their flag points.

I just activate the SMEs and use infinite fuel cheat to blast off down the runway. After a couple minutes of that, the ship has enough energy to turn around and land in the usual way.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/24594-1-0-4-%282015-07-04%29-Telemachus-%E2%80%93-Telemetry-and-Flight-Control-in-the-Web-Browser Pretty awesome!

You can use the small nose cone to cluster reliants around a swivel. Use whatever combination of engines you need for just the right TWR. Put some of them on an action group to take advantage of the swivels' better ISP in vaccum. Control surfaces have a "deploy" feature, which makes it fully deflect without any ASAS. So I've been putting my fins in pairs. During early reentry, deploy one pair so that the whole rocket flies a little bit sideways and slows down greatly in the upper atmo. If your rocket is light enough to land with chutes only, consider putting them at the empty CoM. It will land sideways on a chute and fin, but cannot tip over.

I'm no expert on nuclear power, but I've learned a few things lately. I think you should focus your research on the different types of fuels used by various reactors and weapons, especially what that fuel turns into as it decays. That will lead you to understand what K^2 wrote about breeder reactors. I agree with Brotoro, and I'll expand on it a little: power plants don't corrupt countries, people do. The source of corruption is hidden within the hearts of people. By the way, there's a lot to be said about the improved safety systems of Generation 3 reactor designs, as opposed to earlier designs.

Mine has been intermittent. I really don't get it! However, eventually I noticed you can right-click on the flagpole in front of Admin to change that flag. It got "better" after that, but still I see the white KSP flag at the launchpad sometimes. Sometimes I even see it while the Admin flagpole has my correct one. So weird.

Warzouz answered your question directly, but a more fun way might be to get KAS and have Bill go EVA to do the repair manually. It's traditional that kerbals would notice a mistake only after launch, and then fix it in orbit.

Nice photos. I appreciate how they are well lit, not night time. What happened when it arrived at Duna? Did it accomplish the mission? Also, what fuel tanks are those? For your next mission, I voted for Polar Lander. If you land near the edge of a polar region, you can have a rover visit at least three biomes within a close distance.

Nicely documented! I couldn't quite see why the torque problems, but maybe that's just my eyes not focusing so early this morning.

I don't mean to spoil the fun of exploration. But since you mentioned 'mobile base on Minmus', be aware the game has an issue that rover wheels don't work very well there. Due to the very low gravity, they don't get much traction. They do work, sort-of. But it looks more like 'garbage trucks on ice'. What I did instead was to land my MPL, and use it as a base to send out a tiny RCS hopper with the experiments. That didn't work very well either. How should it look? "Pointy".

I've never found one on Mun, but Minmus has at least one spot on the south pole with full-time sunlight. From a spot like this, you could mine continually with no batteries or fuel cells at all. The trouble with Munar poles is, of course, the extremely rugged terrain makes it hard to land safely. If you happen to have a good deposit at a polar location, consider that a very lucky break! Otherwise, the poles are great for the MPL. A simpler solution would be simply to let the drills stop at night.

Confirmed; my orbital station contract would only complete if each of the required parts were built after acceptance. I tried docking it to my lab already in orbit, but that wouldn't work. On the other hand, I was fortunate to get two base contracts at the same time. So the LKO station contract was satisfied while I was assembling the Minmus base. (All I had to add was two kerbals on the external seats.)

Welcome to the KSP community! In addition to Snark's good advice, I'll add that Duna's thin atmosphere means it takes too many parachutes. But one or two chutes augmented by a few seconds of rocket thrust works very well. If you like designing planes, giving your lander some kind of lift will help you control the landing site. Bring a scientist so that you can reuse one of each science experiment. Rovers work well on Duna, so try to land at an intersection of three biomes.

IMO, pick a spot within easy reach of some biomes. Drive a rover to three, four, five of them. By the time you do that many, you'll have a lot more tech and need to repeat the process someplace farther from home. By the way, Mun is the ideal gas station site. Minmus may be higher and easier to land/launch, but the very slow orbital period means it rarely coincides with interplanetary launch windows. Mun, on the other hand, orbits much more quickly, so you can more easily launch from there into a transfer window.

Just found this story after following the link in your sig. Great stuff! Best base I have ever seen, and I really enjoyed your writing style. I hope you do something like this again someday. +Rep, of course, and 5 stars to the thread, too.

I've noticed this with the maneuver nodes, too. But that is a separate issue. The node handles are oriented according to the former orbit, and do not update as the new orbit changes. So, for example, what was 'normal', gradually includes more and more 'prograde' or whatever. Any time your burn has a prograde or retrograde component, Pe and/or Ap will change. (If it averages out, you'll see them change then return.) With that in mind, is your ship turning to follow 'normal', or locked to the original attitude?

I'm a bit late to the party here, sorry. In those cases where you need more power for a rockomax tank, before unlocking Heavy Rocketry, you can instead "cluster" multiple engines under the fuel tank. Use the tiny nose cone, surface attach with radial symmetry to the bottom of the tank. This leaves the nosecone attach node available for a bunch of Reliants with one Swivel in the center. You can do this with 3, 4, 5, 7, or 9 engines! For the the one with 9 engines, atttach them to the sides instead; it looks a bit like SpaceX's Falcon 9. I think it was Temstar that discovered clustering way back in the day. If you add a probe core, a tiny battery, and four radial parachutes, the Swivel alone is enough to (sometimes) soft land the thing for refunds. This was inspired by Brotoro, who has several fun to read mission reports that involve 'reusable' launchers.

Sounds familiar, much like my first "landing"... Seems to me that's a classic KSP moment. Did your rescuers need rescue?

But, that's not kerbal. That's kerbal!

Ok, did it! Spent a peaceful afternoon cruising around Kerbin in the spotter plane, and found a coastal location that reaches 288K twice each day. At that moment, the density reading was 1220 g/m3. Almost exactly like you said; I think the difference was due to the 5.21m height of the equipment. Built a mobile launcher for Sniffer4, got it there, and redid the experiment. The yellow line is the new data, launched from 288K beach. Thanks for the tip! I'm enjoying AeroGUI right out of the box.