suicidejunkie

One thing I miss from long ago was when I had some config in which the low level clouds were sometimes thick enough that I couldn't see the nearby hills on stormy days and I scrubbed some flights for safety reasons. I've no idea what I did to get that, so any suggestions on how to reproduce such an effect would be appreciated. Update: Astronomer's pack is the thing I wanted, with some tweaked up volumetric clouds.

Extremely low (3-5km) kerbisynchronous orbits which guarantee that the relays do not drift. Also, if I did the math correctly, a 50m tall tower at the pole holding a probe with longer range dishes should almost always have line of sight to everything in the system.

It seems plausible to me that a combo variant of the "Oh, you've got a base Y? Add/do X to it!" and "recover lost part X" contracts could be used. "Hey, that asteroid you've clawed? We want it recovered. There's science and rep in it for you if you do!"

The jetpack does not have TWR >1, but the Kerbal's *legs* do! See:

If the planet is small enough, then jumping + jetpack will get you past the distance where the jetpack has >1 TWR. If the planet is small enough, then running eastwards could get you the required orbital velocity and the jetpack merely has to circularize.

Oh. That's a good idea. So; what needs to be done is to make some wacky mechanical contraption that counts the number of Kerbals who walk through its gates and displays a 2-digit result. And land that on Eve to keep track of the number of Kerbals being stranded there.

That would be pretty awesome for me. I'm on 1.3. Hotseat when available, otherwise a network share to dump craft files one way and savestates in the other direction. Just to have fun with the challenges of flying and design. After making orbit, we'll have to negotiate some safety requirements for a Mun flyby, and then depending on the state of lifesupport tech, a Minmus landing. To actually get all the stuff, we'll have to go interplanetary, so that's probably in the cards for 2020.

Well, so far, we are still just trying to make orbit and do part testing & tourism on a shoestring budget of 20% science modifiers. But the plan is to upgrade the tracking station and then have mission control (aka Dad) plot maneuver nodes from the map to follow before I jump back into the cockpit for the burns. I suppose it would also be possible to do the eyeball mun transfer, but I'd demand a far better cockpit window or at least a good camera placement because I really don't want to die on impact or have to wait for the O2 to run out. In terms of launch windows, I've only launched two interplanetary missions, and the games ended before I arrived, so I'm not very good at those.

I'm the friend :) And as above, RPM is the one doing the heavy lifting. There is a lot more stress when your rocket is built by the lowest bidder, with unclear design requirements and limitations, and then not being able to see much of what's going on. *Cockpit shaking wildly* ... er, was this stage supposed to be an explosive decoupling? *Noise and numbers dropping* It doesn't seem to be burning through... We might not be going to space today. *BANG* Uh... *clickety-click on cockpit screens* Uhm... I dunno; lets hope that was just the thermometer burning off.

If you're really picky about your orbital periods, you can deploy a satellite constellation at 5km geosynchronous. Deploying them is quite inexpensive and scenic, particularly if you've added clouds and scatterer and such.

That would simply waste time and velocity. The 100% inputs are for correcting attitude in between the 0% inputs generated while doing trim adjustments. I should probably look for a mod to make large trim adjustments easier.

If you're flying, then that would be the curvature of the planet you're seeing. If you're landed then it is probably the rotation of the planet instead. If you're driving, then bumps that overload the reaction wheels enough can cause the SAS hold point to reset. (the yellow looping arrow icon near the SAS indicator will light up when that happens). In fact, I find that last one the most annoying in flight. If aero forces require pitch inputs of around 75%, then if you touch the controls it can go into a permanent spin mode... the inputs cap to 50% of max, and it drags the SAS hold point around. Triggering that means manual piloting for the next quite-a-while, while trying to alternate between jacking up the trim controls towards 75% and keeping the craft level with intermittent 100% inputs.

The other attitude control keys also reset the hold point, but tapping F resets it without additional control inputs. It is quite noticeable when aero forces are causing your craft to have a different orientation than the hold point. Such as when it is balancing at 40% pitch input and 3 degrees below the hold point for example. Tapping F resets the hold point to your current attitude, which results in your craft dipping another 3 degrees before the SAS inputs come to a new balance. Added: F is also quite useful for truncating the wobble-down when SAS is overshooting the mark. Tapping it when the craft has become stationary and SAS is inputting maximum torque will make it mellow out since you're already at the new hold point and not rotating.

Try putting jump jets on the MPL. You need a good deal of thrust, but not much fuel since you only need to bounce high enough to press the science button. With ISRU you can refuel it indefinitely. Or go for a straight aircraft to get the science, and analyze it while in flight to your next biome. Jet engines will provide plenty of electricity, and parachutes can be repacked for short and/or vertical landings.

To be fair, it is a battle that can't really be won. We can only hope to enlighten people faster than they die of old age. The forum adding a tooltip to spell out the acronym when you mouse over it does help a fair bit.

Do your crane payloads have any engines themselves? Basically all my payloads put themselves into orbit since they have engines anyways to do what they were going to do, and there is infrastructure to refuel from. Main booster drops into booster bay for recovery, and the SRBs from the high velocity launch pad stage drop onto the beach. Might be nice to have some high thrust tugs for dragging things around, but I don't mind a 3 minute burn for efficiency's sake.

Your rockets probably have far too much useless extra weight themselves. An SSTO needs only three parts; Capsule, Rockomax-64 tank, Skipper engine. It is the safety features that drive up the cost and mass, like the parachutes, and the snack bins and the solar panels and even the frivolous stuff like the autopilot comprised of an angled launch clamp and three basic fins which make it gravity turn automagically. (One press operation! Space bar to space! Three more clicks to circularize.) You may be thinking "spaceplane", but that's completely independent from SSTO-ness. A number of people make spaceplanes that do not SSTO. Many also make non-spaceplanes that do SSTO. Wings and wheels are for the truly decadent that want to SSTOAB (ToOrbit...AndBack) with an assurance of 100% recovery value.

If your station is at the very edge of the SoI, then a ~20m/s burn to drop down to the atmosphere I expect should save you something on the order of 1000m/s from Oberth. And vice versa on the way to the station. Couple hundred m/s (aero)braking burn, and an RCS scale rendezvous burn rather than a 2km/s rendezvous burn. Timing arrivals and departures will be a huge pain however.

That's silly. It can't be currently phoning home when your network is unplugged, but as soon as you reconnect the plug it can start doing whatever it does again, unless you've actively locked things down.

My dad had a design that would very consistently do a 360 degree flip around 10km when the fuel burn caused the CoM to move, and then make it to orbit anyways. It had at least 4 successful launches. Pretzel award: I once put an LV-N onto a science station, intending to have it able to putter around the system collecting Science. A draggy station connected via an LV-N to a big booster is a bad idea; it jackknifed on the way up, but somehow held together. Between throttling back, lucky piloting, coasting into thinner air, and having lots of dV to circularize due to the nuclear engine, it got to orbit. It went on to Mun and Minmus as planned. Check Yo Staging badge: There was also the time when I was launching a resource scanner satellite on top of a low tech crewed rocket. I failed to double check my staging, so the satellite was separated at the same time as the mid-stage engine. Jeb then had to maintain low thrust and carefully steer to keep the satellite on the nose and nudge it the final ~500m/s into orbit. Least % of intended craft to orbit: And I suppose the barbecue incident in which my tourism spaceplane (SSTO) ran a bad ascent profile, and burned off the wings (and brakes and control surfaces) at 45km on the way up was pretty bad too. The tourists still got to visit the surface of Minmus, since the dV went up, but I didn't get much of my deposit back. Longest delay to orbit: A dubious month-long 'success', but there was also the time when I rolled the above spaceplane out from Munbase alpha after refuelling. I got it up to speed, pulled back on the stick and promptly scraped the engines off due to an extreme aerodynamic deficiency. A month later, new engines were shipped in to be KAS attached, and the craft finally completed its take off, vertically.

Why not simply start the game with 500 or so science points, whatever gets you into the meat of your fun? You can then set the science income slider to 20% or 10%, so you stay in the zone while making progress via interplanetary missions.

The big orange tanks. Rockomax-64s IIRC

In that case, why use a booster? Skipper + Popsicle + nose = SSTO, and then you've got a tank in orbit with no waste. If you support it with a single launch clamp on the west side and a small angle tweak in the VAB, then it doesn't even need steering since it will auto-gravity-turn; just use throttle control to make orbit.

If fuel cost is an issue, fill the tanks with LFO mined from Minmus before you land. (LKO gas station doesn't care which way you go after you leave)

I managed to jackknife a rocket once. It involved putting a small science station with one tiny LV-N as the joint between it and the Rockomax boosters. I learned not to design with flimsy pinch points between draggy bits and thrusty bits. No struts required.