Broco

I have a few questions regarding the exact time scale for KSP. I read some threads on the forum but there were contradicting times thrown around and the official wiki page only says "about 6 hours" per Kerbin day, while stating 2556.50 hours per Kerbin year. I'm currently creating a satellite network and I want to space the satellites pretty exactly without using any mods so what I'm doing is I have a rocket carrying 6 satellites and I want to position them in Kerbol orbit. I fly them to a circular orbit at 45 million kilometers around Kerbol and then take the time it takes from my position at apoapsis to periapsis and multiply it by 5/6 and set my course so that the new periapsis is reached at exact that time. And everytime I reach the apoapsis I release a satellite and circularise its orbit. However, when calculating I want to be pretty exact, since KSP tells me the time in circular orbit is 3y, 15d, 2h for half the trip I want to basically have that time in hours, better minutes. Basically my questions are: Is the table in the Wiki correct? https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Time Is a Kerbin hour exact 60 minutes long? Is a Kerbin day exactly 6 hours long? How long exactly is a Kerbin year in the game in Kerbin days or Kerbin hours? Is it 426.08 days or 2556.5 hours? Greetings Broco

That actually makes a lot of sense to me, besides the structural problem with "pushing" a rocket from beneath. I withdraw my proposal On the other hand, now I get why the mass driver would make a lot of sense of the surface of the moon. So thanks to everybody, I learned a bit more again today And ye, you're right, basically everything in Russia is gonna be a hot place to live then. But seriously, I would just watch the show, that's fireworks you're not gonna see again (pun intended).

Why's that? Because of nuclear retaliation? The same launcher can also launch non-nuclear payload. Also it's pretty pointless to launch nuclear missiles at a mobile missile platform that already used it's payload when you can just blow up Moscow. Did I really just write that? Cold war logic really got to me, I shouldn't watch War Games again.

Yes, but isn't the de facto usage of fuel higher on the launchpad? Because a rocket at the launchpad has a way lower acceleration than a rocket that used up 50% of its fuel (because it has to move a higher mass). So achieving these initial 0-50m/s use up more fuel than 1000-1050m/s.

I don't know if anyone ever came up with the idea but I just had the weirdest idea: Why aren't rockets launch assisted by a hydrolic catapult? We all know that most of the fuel is consumed for just leaving the atmosphere, I mean the Saturn V burned through ~13 tons of fuel per second and clearing the tower alone takes a good amount of time. So why aren't rockets assisted in getting some initial velocity? I mean sure, it would be a huge construction but nothing too crazy. So If you manage to boost up the rocket to maybe 50m/s with a 100m high reusable catapult, wouldn't that decrease rocket size or increase the payload? I mean something like this (behold my epic Paint skills):

Yes, of course there is life outside Earth. But it doesn't matter that much to be honest. The more interesting question is "Will we as a species ever communicate with an intelligent alien species?" and the answer for that is, for me at least: unlikely, for multiple reasons.

But then again, real rocket RCS fire precisely to the 10th of a second which you cant really do manually, wouldn't you agree?

Now that we have Relays in KSP, many of us want to establish a proper network. One way of doing so is placing 3 relay satellites with 120° distance to each other on the exactly same orbit. While this can be done quite well with the given 0.5 thrust for RCS on smaller orbits, it's pretty hard to achieve when you want to have let's say a 400.000.000 m orbit around Jool. I just couldn't get a perfect 400M apoapis and periapsis with the 0.5 because it's still way too much thrust. I ended up editing the save file and set the limiter to 0.001, which allowed meter precision even in this huge orbit and I achieved my goal of a perfect 400M orbit. But since this value already accepts floating point numbers, why not add a function that if you double click the slider it turns into a text input where you can manually set your thrust limiter? Not as important as getting rid of the stutter but still would be a nice way of fine tuning orbits.

To be honest, I'm not very fond of localization. First of all, KSP is a pretty scientific game and English is the language of science. Translating it will not bring many more players to the community. I would prefer if you guys worked on the core of the game a bit more, e.g.: reduce stuttering (yes, GC is still a major issue) add mission management (like custom sorting active missions or grouping them and manually toggle between mission time and next node time)

It somehow worsens it for me. Any settings suggestions? I have a lot of ram to spare. I think it has to do with the sheer amount of flights I have (~50, refineries on different moons, relays, space stations and missions) since it doesn't occur in an empty sandbox save. I try to reduce it but that's not really the point of a space program. Why are inactive missions creating so much garbage?

Yes I already tried it, but it seems to make things worse at the moment, in 1.1 it worked just fine. I'm using the current version of memgraph.

Hello devs. I know you spent a lot of time reducing the amount of garbage created, but as of now (1.2.2) I have the weird issue that the garbage collection still is a problem. It starts out like before but gets worse the longer the game runs. I've tried it modded and unmodded, only a slight difference. That being said, I have a lot of completed and running missions going on but the interesting part is the increasing part. After 2-3 hours its so bad that I have a stutter for ~2s every ~5s. If I restart the game it returns to "normal" (0.5s every 10 s). Is there anything I can do? Can I increase the heap maybe? I have 16 gigs of ram I would have no problem if KSP took like 8 so i can play more fluently.

Ye, I kinda have problems finding good spots for my RCS tanks and kinda thought it looks cool. Greetings from R2.

Yes he/she knows and hello neighbour I played around with a reusable Eve booster stage but even the small ore tank and a small drill (which, by the way is ridiculously inefficient) + all the solar panels and batteries you need were too much weight. On Minmus I have a landing pad on a refinery for refuelling purposes that works just fine but Eve is so much harder. First of all, landing on point in Eve is really hard because of the insane atmospheric density. It's nearly impossible to always land in the same spot without some correction maneuvers later which requrire more fuel which then makes the rocket heavier etc. But I think the only possible solution is that you have a refinery on the ground and a reusable booster stage with a lot of punch, basically a bunch of FL-T800 tanks, some with an FL-T400 on top, with aerospikes and 2 docking ports in the middle, one facing upward, one downward to dock with the refinery. No landing legs, only parachutes, engines and tanks with 2 docking ports basically, also some fins for steering. Could work but I never managed to achieve it. But a refinery could be easily done, I only do simple designs now since the bigger once tended to randomly explode in old patches

I can't really imagine what you mean with "catch" but I'm interested in pictures, sounds cool.