ZootinZack

Just played and that's what it was. Thanks a lot!

Aaaaah mf thanks a lot this might be it. I was really raging!

i recently started playing again and I really can swear I remember there was a "focus on part" function. I can't find it anymore and it's making any kind of land docking with robotic parts a real pain. In short I simply need the camera to focus on one part of a ship, usually a docking port. Or any way I could focus the camera freely around a ship, I'm all ears!

I swear I plundered the Farside Crater of all its Mun Stones looking for a a Mun Crater (mission control says they should be there). I know the trick of zooming out so you can see a shadow to spot formations, but it quite literally always brings me to a Mun Stone (barring maybe two instances. I gathered probably 30 Mun Stones already and getting a bit frustrated.) Any tip besides "just keep trying"? (I mean.. in other news I have become extremely proficient in the spotting and subsequential recovery of Mun Stones. Ask me questions.)

Pretty routine Mun landing with a 1-kerbal crew.. or so I thought. somehow I mess up the landing and realize I'm gonna crash. Hard. No vehicle around has the capacity to rescue the now soon to be dead Kerbal (unlike a lot of players I tend to take deaths badly). EXCEPT a 10-year old miner ship I kinda forgot about. Outdated and very awkward to maneuver... well it's either that or letting that dude crash unceremoniously. I managed to reach the fast-falling ship - while switching back and forth between both ships to use the little fuel I had left for adjustments - match velocity, rescue the doomed Kerbal and land the thing while that poor thing was holding on the ladder for dear life because there was no space on the ship... What a rollercoaster.

To be clearer, I think it's a good idea to do things manually and reliably without the use of MJ. When a new version rolls about I usually don't use MJ at all until I'm sure I can still do everything perfectly. I'm also very much from the school of "crash 100 times and learn" instead of "learning from MechJeb" because sometimes that leaves us with a lack of curiosity, exploration and experimentation that, to me, are very "Kerbal". If I do something the wrong way 20 times, and I slowly figure it out, that's super interesting, whereas just imitating MJ can not only be dull, but also flat out wrong sometimes. It got me learning about a lot of space flight stuff that eluded me at first. I wouldn't recommend using MechJeb to a new player... But man, I personally don't care for plotting a Mun course for the 5000th time (I don't even think I'm exaggerating). Even in-game i have more interesting things to do.

Back when the Mun was the only and absolutely penultimate goal... I remember trying SO hard simply to achieve orbit, let alone actually get there and back. I didn't know jack excrements about gravity turns, hohmann transfers... newfound respect for the pioneers of space exploration. Funnily enough I don't remember the frustration as much as the thrill of learning stuff.

I think it's a fantastic tool. Once I did the same liftoff to orbit with the same ship a hundred times, I'm glad MJ is there. Same goes for the tedious rendezvous or any routine endeavours like docking. I'm not interested into repeating over and over stuff I'm proficient in and I'm glad there's a tool for that. (I still land all my ships though, I don't trust the mf.)

I used to send rockets straight up as far as possible before burning sideways for an orbit, and thought that was super efficient.

I'm gonna chime in and repeat, you don't need to know anything but you'll have to learn stuff by trial and error! One of those: there are no straight lines in space.

200k is way overkill, you can use your fuel better by going to 10k-25ish and escape westbound to a kerbin orbit from there. As far as rescuing, fuel-wise you're overall better off with a high, Mun-like orbit than an orbit around the actual Mun - that's terrible advice. If you leave your craft around the Mun you have to account for capture burn, rendezvous burn, escape burn and back into kerbin atmosphere. Waste of a fuel.

I usually land a miner of sorts to explore almost any body besides Mun and Minmus. Much less of a pain than to carefully plan dv...

Are there right now any mods geared towards finding anomalies through contracts in career mode? I found an old one that doesn't seem to work anymore. I think anomalies have a great potential for storytelling and would love for a "campaign mod" thing to happen unless it's already a thing...

Jesus Christ... a bit of debris discipline

Ah I came here to check about that and now feel like a dumbass. Usually I never fickle with fuel capacity!

I was really just playin'... Hiring is fine. Just sayin if you're diligent and rescue Kerbals on the reg, you won't run out of anything. But if out of luck sure. Also rescue missions are very time consuming so if that's not your cup of tea you might want to hire instead.

Bruh no animosity intended but how long have you played? More difficult rescue missions happen (rescuing BillyBob and his wreckage from the *surface* of the Mun) so if you're looking for a challenge it's there. (My current save has over fifty Kerbonauts and I never hired any of them. Hiring is for chumps who can't rendez-vous.)

As an early player when the Mun was the only body out there, there's a special place for it. Landing on the Mun was an exhilarating accomplishment. I prefer Minmus though. Easier to land on, etc.. it has a chill vibe.

I've been playing KSP since the Mun was the only body in existence. I consider myself a pretty seasoned player. Yet I routinely forget to put up antennae or backup solar panels, ending up with perfectly functional crafts fkng around Kerbol and no way to activate them. It's a special kind of hell.

Even simpler, think of throwing a rock in water, it slows down when it hits. Air is matter too, just like water. Slows stuff down.

One of my two front doors always opens when you close the other and my mind went "damn the hatch is not secured"

For either docking or capturing objects with the Claw, I like to get close (50m or less), usually I use MechJeb because the process itself is tedious. Remember to switch to "control from here" on the port that's going to do the docking. Make sure you're on Target mode of course. Then use HIJINK keys. They get a few tries to get used to but it's quite literally impossible to mess up a dock after that. Sometimes it gets finicky so remember to use the rotate Q and E keys...

The safest way to do it would be to land a combined mining station and escape ship nearby. Land, fuel up, ditch the ore miner, get the f* out of dodge. Pretty expensive though! And yes docking using RCS on Duna is pretty much a pain. I prefer to use wheeled vehicles.

For mods alone it's worth it so much. Once you've launched 100s of ships in orbit MechJeb makes the game way less tedious. You can also use hyperedit for testing in specific conditions (like, you know, most space agencies would do). The kerbal alarm clock is also such a great mod, if only to plan transfers to other planets. These are mainly the three mods I use, but there are a lot of others, like life support, that can drastically transform the game.

Not a complete new chapter, and severely lacking in multimedia... But as I'm working on chapter 4 I thought you would enjoy this tidbit of background. (And to be honest... We all need to enjoy some of that 0.17 goodness!) ============================ SUMMARY OF PREVIOUS CHAPTERS ============================ Strange readings from the Mun have revealed debris floating beneath the surface of the satellite. A capsule of three Kerbonauts were sent to investigate, but their mission was cut short by mysterious malfunctions and apparent mental breakdown of the crew. After Jebediah Kerman, from Kerbin, took the rocket down in a catastrophic landing, two of the Kerbonauts, obviously mentally unstable, disappeared on the surface of the Mun, leaving Tomson Kerman alone. (Read Chapter 1 here: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/showthread.php/17281-Writing-Pictures-PHADE-The-Phantom-Debris-Initiative) Sent on a rescue mission, Jeb and Bill Kerman managed to land near the crash site, only to see Tomson vanish as well beneath the surface of the Mun. After a heroic, successful rescue, they are ready to go on, when Bill discovered a photograph in the crashed capsule, showing a mysterious and seemingly unnatural structure. Tomson, agitated, vehemently refuses to leave the Mun, claiming they "have to be there". (Read Chapter 2 here: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/showthread.php/17990-Writing-PHADE-chapter-2-First-Kerman-in-the-Mun) As Bill, Jeb and Tomson make their way to the mysterious anomaly, things are brewing back on Kerbin. Bob Kerman, their trusted friend, finds that the KSP, or at the very least high officials inside the KSP, have known about the anomaly for a long time. He reveals that J. Edgar Kerman, actual KSP director, found the artifact himself while orbiting the Mun. After the crew makes a catastrophic landing near the anomaly due to an unknown force making the rocket unstable, Tomson flies his jetpack under the Arch, disappearing in a cloud of smoke. (Read Chapter 3: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/showthread.php/20013-Writing-Video-Pictures-PHADE-Phantom-Debris-Initiative-chapter-3-Lies) ===================================== CHAPTER 3 INTERLUDE: PROJECT ODYSSEUS ===================================== Bob was rummaging frenzily through the files. The sheer amount of information, combined with the mess that was this filing system, if one could call it as such, made the job almost impossible. At breakneck speed he was sending request upon request to the computer... To no avail. After feigning extreme disinterest in Bill and Jeb's cause, he had somehow gained J. Edgar's trust, and was able to move around a little more freely. It hadn't been very hard: over the course of the past years, after landing on the Mun, Bob's only interest had been to bury himself in tedial, meaningless work. He had become the perfect bureaucrat, mulling over minute, unimportant details such as what exact number of pens and pencils was optimal for a KSP worker - too few, and they would end up going back for more too often, resulting in a loss of productivity; too many, and they would carelessly leave them lying around, which meant in the end buying way too many pens and pencils. In truth, his trip to the Mun had deeply affected him. Space is mind-bogglingly big, had written Douglas A. Kerman, and he had been right: Bob's mind had been totally, impossibly, irreversibly boggled. His ego couldn't take it; his sense of purpose had been crushed to the point of non-existence. Where Jebediah's self-worth thrived on the accomplishment, Bob had only found there his own insignificance. He had needed those small, trivial things, because they made him feel huge in comparison. Like he actually mattered. Luckily for the trio though, that meant he had taken a keen interest in the rich history of the Kerbal Space Program, and it looked like the answers to the Mun Arch might be lying not in the present or the future, but in the past. Of course all the official, main files from the Odysseus Project had been either deleted, intentionally corrupted, or simply never written at all. "Gotcha," Bob said, pulling up a file on the screen. But the Space Center Psychological Help Department was, and had always been, a completely separate entity, prone to clerical errors, neglect, and often plain lunacy. At least for Bob, this was finally paying off. Bob quickly copied the file, and headed for the door. He gasped as he opened it and stepped out. "It's a little late for work, Bob. What in Kerbol's name are you doing in PsyHelp?" The towering, menacing silouhette of J. Edgar Kerman was blocking his way. "Yes, I am... I'm concerned with the rocket, sir." The director raised an eyebrow. "So?" "So, I was looking up the psychological profiles of Bill and Jebediah Kerman, sir. I'm suspecting they might be unstable, I'm trying to find a way to make them come back, should they ever try to, uh, take matters into their own hands." J. Edgar Kerman reflected on this lie for a few moments. "Those psychological evaluations are classified, Bob. What you're doing is very illegal and I should arrest you immediately." "Yes I know but..." "...However seeing as the situation could easily get dire, the director continued, I will let it slide. Just tell no one you or I were here. And no more... Personal initiative. Are we clear?" Bob sighed. "Yes, sir." "Go on home now. It's going to be another long day tomorrow." "Yes, sir." Bob walked out of the building, and looked up, not believing his luck. Inches from him had stood the man who had killed two fellow Kerbals. The director could have crushed him here and there, had he been discovered. The Mun was shining in the dark sky. Bill and Jeb were up there, and they needed him. He looked over his shoulder, and started sprinting to the control room. He had to let them know. He had to get on the radio now, and tell them to stay away from whatever that thing was. As he got in the control room, Bob stopped dead in his tracks as a thought hit him. He had been panicking so much that he hadn't even given it a thought, in the moment. He didn't have any business in PsyHelp at this ungodly hour. Fair enough. But what was J. Edgar Kerman doing there in the middle of the night?