suicidejunkie

The point would be that a Kerbal can only safely maneuver 1000kg of mass alone, due to momentum and the dangers of getting fingers/bodies crushed between it and the rocket or station while moving it. Separately, a Kerbal can dead-lift only 100kg of weight while in the suit. Which would mean 1000kg from the mass limit on Minmus and 60kg on Eve.

After a very classic mining rig-with-no-radiators goof, Val was sent with some spare parts for the local engineers to bolt on. She's in low Munar orbit, with roughly 550m/s in the tank. Rather than wasting time docking for more fuel at the orbital station, the thought occurs that she's landing at a mining rig, and might as well fuel up on the surface. All of the 550m/s is needed to cancel the orbital speed, but the difference between surface and orbital speed should surely cover the extra for descent if it is a well done suicide burn, right? Many of you, unlike me at the time, will instantly remember that the tidally locked Mun's surface velocity is only a couple m/s... Thus, despite a perfect suicide burn, this left her about 30m/s short at the surface. The craft was decimated in the non-traditional sense, leaving only the mk1 capsule, a docking port, and two loose landing legs scattered a couple hundred meters from the mining rig.

You can also switch to the debris, and watch it aerobrake down below the PE cutoff. If it is a constellation of debris, they they'll all be in physics range and pretty nifty. Leave to the space center despite the warning any time you like, since it doesn't matter.

Really, there should be a separate mass limit and weight limit. As of 1.0.5, you could simply reactivate your jetpack with R after grabbing a part, which is a huge convenience. Haven't tried it since so I don't know if it still works or not. It also lets you cheese momentum by grabbing a part, jetpacking to Minmus orbital speed, then putting the part in your inventory before it leaves physics range. But there isn't really any practical value to spending all that effort hauling 500kg up and down when a cargo rocket is so much faster and simpler.

What goes to Space, stays in Space. (except for early game return capsules, contracted ore drop-pods, and spaceplane shuttles) The boosters don't get deorbited, because my payloads all push themselves the final bit into orbit, then head off to do things, refuel, and get reused until they are disassembled with KAS at the Minmus branch of Jeb's Junkyard and Spare Parts Emporium. No probe cores are needed for re-entry, since the chutes are pre-armed at the time of separation.

When I was trying to make my first SSTO spaceplane I had a lot of complete failures, but when I finally got a design + flight profile that made it to orbit, I did the math and found I had enough dV left to land on Minmus too.

Is the small influence on G-force resistance not a stock thing? Or is it just the profession of the kerbal doing that?

What is the best breakfast cereal to have early in your space program?

Construct a surface base on Jool, using a KAS-deployed launch clamp to keep it from being destroyed if that works?

I was sending a big food delivery to a base on Minmus by tweaking a standard shuttle, and when it came time to launch, I accidentally loaded it with tourists instead of leaving the back seats empty. A few days out from Kerbin, I got the alert that O2 & H2O were running out. I burned almost all the remaining fuel to redirect into a very high energy transfer and catch a 1km/s flyby of Minmus. Bill, already on Minmus, spent the 5 hour ETA using KAS to bolt together a 909, a set of fuel tanks and a capsule from the scrapyard, and then scraped together all the dregs of fuel in the area for a completely hand-crafted rescue ship. Fighting the lopsided craft with no SAS, popping up above Minmus and hovering until it was time for the rendezvous burn, he was able to slap on a spare can of air with 9 minutes left on the clock, and then docked to share fuel and prevent the ship from swinging off into interplanetary space. Some say he did it for the 5 years worth of snacks, others say he did it to show off his skills with the wrench, but really it was just following the Kerbonaut's Kode.

Yeah, the classic 3-parts SSTO (vertical take off, no landing) is simple and fun. With a launch clamp at the right angle, it can even be a spacebar to space SSTO. Personally it is a toss up between my mining spider and my spaceplanes, so I'll have to go with the random option.

Slap a couple LV-Ns on your fuel station, and it can sneak off to refuel itself on Minmus then return to its original orbit and whistle innocently. Stick a claw on the other end, and it also makes a great way to get asteroids captured without consuming them. For an actual stationary station, mods make them quite a bit more useful. eg: - KIS/KAS : Spare parts, Scrapyard, Upgrade & Repair center - TACLS & Such : Supply storage, Greenhouse/Recycling depot - EL : Orbital Shipyard. - RT : Heavy comms relay for faster ping time to local probes

Liquid fuel is elemental explodium. Eve has seas of it. Oxidizer is air with a job to do. Kerbin is covered in it.

The toilet is simply built with the same engineering principles as everything else. And it has a very impressive TWR.

Oh, nifty! I didn't even notice that it wasn't needing the mod anymore.

When your rocket tips North or south and you just can't figure out why, rotate the whole ship 90 degrees in the VAB so that it now tips East automatically! Also, if you're using the landing lights, try grabbing the BULB mod, and set them to different colors. You can do boat style with red and green for port/starboard to help you remember which way is which. Or what I did, which is 3-way symmetry and red/green/blue. As I approach the surface, the light beams start to overlap; when I see the cyan/yellow/magenta arcs, it is time to slow down, and when they merge to white in the middle, it is time to slow to 1m/s and touch down like a feather.

This sounds like a fancier pantsier version of the type of thing the design warnings do, and I like the idea if it isn't too much work. Should be a don't-show-again option on it like most tutorial hints have. Karen pops up with a Dubious Fry expression when you design a ship with a parachute on the first stage. Mod makes a Jeb cameo in the background stuffing doughnuts into his flight suit when your lifesupport supplies are short. Given the nature of dV and the fuzziness of rocket calculations, I expect it would factor into challenges quite quickly. EG: Win the bet! Design a rocket that Kelly thinks won't make it to Minmus, and go there anyways. (No EVA pushing allowed)

I believe that easy dV numbers take away from the Kerbalness. The game starts out as Space Cowboys venturing into the Wild Black, but once you've internalized how space works, that shine of excitement and danger and heroic rescues wears off. It is the sort of thing Jeb is famous for. Refining and measuring your missions and dV budget to run a tight and efficient ship is an entirely different kind of fun. I mostly associate it with Val due to the timing of her introduction as I played. However, I feel like once you've gone down the road of calculating dV for things, you can't truly go back to that Space Cowboy life. I wouldn't want to deprive new players of the experience. I also wouldn't want to make dV calculations a chore for those of us who have passed on to the math side, but mods and spreadsheets have that covered. Personally I use the side spreadsheet method for sanity checks before attempting a landing, and for checking my 'score' after a really good gravity turn but try to avoid using it for mundane things. Kerbin's SoI is already a quiet paved suburbia to me rather than the wilderness full of tumble-roids it used to be, and I don't want to industrialize it more than I have to.

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That's not how gravity works. As your ring goes off-center, parts of it will be closer to the parent body, but that also means more than half of the ring is on the other side to get pulled back. This cancels out as long as your struts keep your ring circular. However, it also doesn't have a restoring force, so it'll drift around freely until it does hit something, hence the need for station keeping thrusters. You may have problems with KSP trying to calculate the orbit based on center of mass of the two bodies and division by zeros may entice the Kraken to take up hula hooping.

I think this could be clarified; it isn't so much that the weapon is designed to only go off when you want it to, but that everything has to go exactly right in order for it to work... in order for the warhead to detonate by accident, it would have to be quite carefully designed to be able to go off in that situation, which makes it not an accident anymore. As noted in the previous point:

For Minmus fuel stations, I suggest adding one LV-N per 50 tons. You can land, refuel, and put the station back into orbit without messing around with multiple haulings and dockings. And you can sneak the station into orbit of any body without making much of a dent in the fuel supply.

No. On ignition, if something goes wrong, throwing the capsule's chute is generally the best idea for me. The rest of the rocket may pinwheel around until the SRBs burn out, or clip the ground and stop burning early. Some amount of lithobreaking is guaranteed, but the capsule should impact last and safely. Early in the launch, if something goes wrong and the crew isn't immediately dusted, then it is a matter of cutting engines, and then waiting for deceleration. Throwing out chutes and firing separators (not necessarily in that order) will then allow a safe landing, and the amount of vehicle that will attempt landing is decided by the pilot based on the situation. Mid to late in the launch, the upper stage can abort to orbit, or flip+burn to decelerate / tumble to decelerate and then make a standard landing.

PSA: Do not aim vessels directly towards the sun. Burn orbital retrograde relative to the sun instead.

Technically zero. But in career mode, I've cleared Kerbin's SoI on training flights and it could escape if I wanted to try.