Steampunked

Hello again all. So a question about KER / MJ and Delta V readouts. When building ships with KER and MJ to see projected dV but I have a hard time taking drag and gravity in to account when estimating my lifter's dV. Any advice or rules of thumb? Many thanks!

Thank you Streetwind, that is very helpful!.

So I took a good break from KSP for a while and with 1.0.5 I have restarted a new career. One thing I'm noticing is a kill a lot of Jebs on reentry. Before the aero overhaul I just burned retrograde until PE was down below the surface of Kerbin for return and I'd just ride out re-entry. Now I am having to balance descent angle with how much time I spend at a given altitude for heating vs. deceleration. Unfortunately I have not yet found a comfortable return trajectory envelope. Does anyone have any suggestions or advice? Many thanks. ~ash

So the contrast and brightness on my monitor are quite high and bright, yet even in broad daylight, KSP is fairly dark. Do any of the game settings control lighting?

Folks, I wanted to contribute a thought here that no one else has mentioned. It's actually a small detailed and has nothing to do with orbital mechanics or any of those physical stuff that we have learned our way around in our adventures in KSP. This is not a widely known fact, but manned space flight does not function under standard pressure conditions. It is (currently) unfeasible to manufacture a space suite capable of maintaining an internal pressure of 14.7 PSI (standard pressure at sea level, aka "1 atmosphere of pressure"). The problem is that, in the vacuum environment of space, a flexible suite pressurized to 14.7 PSI will become too stiff to maintain any sort of reasonable motion range (this is due to ballooning). To counteract this, space suite internal pressures are maintained very low (with very high partial pressures of oxygen). The Space Shuttle, Soyuz, and the ISS all function at 14.7 PSI (it is worth noting that the Apollo program operated at 5.7 PSI and that the pressure in the LEM was even lower during moon landings). Any diver knows that going from a higher pressure to a lower pressure involves the risk of off-gassing nitrogen in solution with blood (severe off gassing results in pain and nervous system/brain damage and his commonly known as "the bends"). This means that prior to ANY EVA activities, an astronaut must spend HOURS pre breathing pure oxygen while stepping ambient pressure down to control this off gassing (US space suites operate at 4.7 PSI while Russian ones are at 5.7). In short, it will be traumatic to the body to rapidly transition between either the low pressure environment of EVA or the high pressure environment of the ISS/Shuttle/Soyuz. Going from low to high is uncomfortable but going from high to low is lethal.

I choked on a sandwich laughing when I got to this...

I work with one of the NASA project engineers (no longer at NASA...) who led up the transhab/inflatable habitat project. I sent him a link to the OP and he came over to talk to me about it. He thought it was really cool what Porkjet has done =)

Hey folks, I have just started doing interplanetary missions. So far Duna is the only planet that Ive attempted to visit. However, every time I set up my maneuver nodes and tweak them until I get an SOI encounter, I find that once I am in Duna SOI and approaching PeA, once I complete my burn to drop in to orbit around the planet I find that 2 things have happened: (1) I am on a very highly inclined orbit (2) My orbital speed relative to Duna is very, very low. Like 120m/s and my altitude is ~20,000 km. What am I doing wrong here? How can I insert in to Duna SOI such that I will not end up with a highly inclined orbit? Thanks!

I think that the majority of complaints regarding these sort of tests are coming from the fact that these sort of activities are not what the majority of users are interested in doing. We do not play Kerbal Space Program to test some widget at some specific velocity at some specific altitude. It simply is not fun. Now, having said that I completely understand that (1) this sort of contract could be viewed as a challenge and a puzzle and (2) having multiple semi-random parameters to change up keeps us from repeating the same exact contract over and over again. However, I go back to my previous statement of "this is not why we play Kerbal Space Program". Contracts should be about putting things in orbit and putting things on other planetary bodies. They should be saying "put a station with X capabilities and Y crew capacity at Z altitude or geosynch" or "put this proceduraly generated mission satellite in orbit around X planet at Y altitude". Or put a rover with A/B/C/ equipment on Duna at specific coordinates or a lander on the Mun in a specific biome and take a surface sample that MUST first be analyzed in an orbital lab before being returned to Kerbin. These are the sorts of things that players play KSP for.

anyone else having significant issues right clicking on parts to interact with them? (x64 version)

So I enjoy doing Apollo style lander missions. In addition to this simply being my preferred way to go about things, it also serves the benefit that I can leave a lander on the surface and have a return craft to science retrieval (2 kerbals are needed of course). However, I have a very hard time building docking nodes in to my rocket stack. Clamp-o-tron to clamp-o-tron connections are very weak and tend to cause my rocket to turn in to a noodle when launching. How do you guys handle having docking nodes in the middle of your stack? ~ash

Sorry, I should have been more clear. On/Off toggle and if you choose to turn it on, have a slider that will determine how much persistent game spawned stuff you can have. If that's too complicated to implement than just an on/off would do.

Perhaps there could be a slider in the options tab to allow varying amounts of clutter?

Well, to your response about spawned items in orbit... the game could simply have a limit on the number of items spawned around a given body. I would actually like to see some persistence here... in fact there could be a whole series of missions that result in slowly building a station for a client (and possibly de-orbiting it eventually). Also, I think that entities spawned around a body should have less random orbits... instead of randomly spawning at 127567 meters, they could spawn at 5,000 meter intervals on varying inclinations at 5 degree intervals. At the end of the day, I think the devs need to realize that career mode is not a sandbox and that they need to foster more interaction with game created objects.

Good points all around, however I think part of the reason that the Contracts system is set up like it is, is that the devs intend for the player to treat the space program as if it were a private company. My only real suggestions are these: (1) Remove the science rewards from ALL contracts... this will give more consequence to the money we make from missions as we now have to pay for our own science missions to progress down the tech tree. and (2) get rid of the part testing missions once we've moved on to tier 3 parts (some early part testing is fine for quick and easy cash). We need most of the missions to let us interact with in game assets... either putting up a supplied satellite (spawned in to the sub-assemblies) or adding specific parts to a game-spawned space station. To limit the number of stations- the game could be limited to how many stations it can spawn around a given planet... and each one will be in a very different orbit (orbits and declinations that make sense and that are rounded to nice friendly numbers with lots of 0's like 120,000m @ 35 degrees instead of 134,577m @29 degrees). We could also be asked to land and repair or check up on or collect data from probes landed on other bodies or in orbit around other bodies. ~ash