adinfinitum

That's probably why they've got it facing east, that way we don't have to do a u-turn at the beginning of our flights. Also, with the way my spaceplace test flights go, it's a lot better for everybody's safety that the runway launches over the ocean, otherwise the mountains west of the space center would be covered in craters.

Yes, Kerbin still rotates while you are flying, but it does not rotate in reference to the aircraft while you are still in the atmosphere, because your aircraft is also rotating with Kerbin, due to atmospheric drag forces. Like Psycix and Ralathon said, whether you go east or west, it is not going to make a difference in the time it takes to make a circumnavigation of the planet. If the atmosphere didn't rotate along with Kerbin, there would be a constant 170 m/s wind blowing to the west, and planes would be able to take off just by sitting still on the runway.

Since the drag on the ship due to the atmosphere is calculated relative to the surface of Kerbin, it shouldn't have an affect on the time it takes to circumnavigate the planet. Because drag determines your max speed while you're in the atmosphere, it isn't going to differ going east or west. In short, until you get out into space, Kerbin isn't going to rotate underneath you until you are out in space. One way to think about this is to imagine a blimp, hovering above the surface of Kerbin with zero surface velocity.In order to get 0 orbital velocity floating above the surface in your blimp, you'd have to be moving westward at about 170 m/s. However, once the force that is moving you at that speed stops, drag will slow you down until you are once again at 0 m/s surface velocity, and abou 170 m/s orbital velocity. Now, if you were to compare a retrograde orbit to a prograde orbit of the same size and eccentricity, then a retrograde orbit would return to the same point over Kerbin faster than a prograde orbit because now the planet is moving relative to your orbit. Edit: Looks like everyone decided to answer well I was typing my reply up haha

That would be nice, especially since it seems to know enough to not try and load the ship up on the pad if it's missing something

I guess first click on the Insanatron 15k, the little tab next to it should turn green and the name and description should show up over by the mission flag. If it's got a probe core, then it's good to go, if not, make sure at least one kerbal is in a control pod. Then just press the green launchpad button above the flag, and you should be good to go. If that doesn't work then I'd just try launching it straight from the VAB instead of going to space center view and clicking on the launch pad. It might just be bugging out on you right now.

If you want to practice the skills needed for an interplanetary mission, without waiting forever for a launch window and having to build a ship with enough deltaV to go interplanetary, you could practice transferring from the Mun to Minmus and back again. Doing that uses the same concepts as traveling from Kerbin to another planet in the system, in that you have to account for changes in inclination, and you are transferring between two bodies that orbit the same parent object.

You would have to spin it continuously, if you stopped the reaction wheel the momentum would be transferred back to the ship. Also, I was running through some quick math, and if kerbal reaction wheels are comparable to those such as this real life reaction wheel, then a single 1.25 meter SAS module would be able to rotate a 10 tonne ship about the z axis at a rate of about 1.9 radians a second.

However, by the time it does eventually stop, my kerbals will no longer bother with trivial reaction wheels and will need only bend the curvature of space to change their direction/orientation. Perhaps after that quantum metastability even reaches us it will create a universe that leads to planetary bodies which are ten times as dense, and provide shelter for little green bug-eyed men.

Perhaps the kerbals, with the amazing engineering prowess, have come up with frictionless bearings to use in their gyros. That way the wheels, and the ship, don't stop turning until you stop the gryo yourself.

I was just doing some thinking as I was cleaning a few dishes, and I practically typed it out but didn't even realize what it meant as I typed it up. In this simplified case of constant velocity and thrust in a straight line, the equation reduced to the thrust-to-weight ratio of your vehicle.

With wikipedia as my source, it looks like power is the integral of force times velocity, with respect to time, if you are traveling in a straight line. If force and velocity are constant then it just comes out to power being force times velocity. With that in mind, lets try it this way. COT = p/(m*g*v); p = F*v, so... COT = (F*v)/(m*g*v); The velocities then cancel out and... COT = F/(m*g); Looking at this, it seems that the equation has come out to thrust divided by weight, which is interesting, and I hope I didn't do anything wrong. Let's continue on... The thrust is in kilonewtons, so we need to convert to newtons, just multiply by a thousand... Now COT = 100,000N/(1000Kg*9.81m/s^2) Which gives us a unitless Cost of Transport of 10.2. Let me know if I did anything wrong in that, having the velocities cancel out that easily makes me a little wary of my reasoning.

Just looking through what you've got there, I was wondering where you got P=0.5*F*Isp*g? Working through the units gives me something weird for units of power, I think what I got is kg*m^2/s^3.

I didn't build this station in one piece in the VAB, but I did have to do some planning for it using the VAB. It's easy to plan out a station that's just a ring without any spokes or pieces in the middle. For that all you have to do is figure out how many pieces you want it to be then find out how many degrees away from 180 the docking ports need to be. Since I wanted this station to have a center section and beams coming out to the rim, I had to figure out how long to make the beams with a little bit of trial and error. To do that I made a little model of what the station would be like in the VAB, and I could add and remove pieces from the long beams as needed until everything looked like it fit right.

Sorry it took awhile, but I just got around to adding the .craft files. If anyone still wants them I added them to the bottom of the original post, along with a few notes and construction tips.

You could make it a giant buckyball instead of a giant cylinder, I bet that would add some new challenges to the build. Something shaped like this

I'll get the craft files up as soon as I'm able, I'm going out of town today and won't be near my computer for most of the day. For the most part construction isn't too hard, but it does leave just a little bit of debris in orbit. I usually try to keep my space clean, but with this I couldn't find a way to keep it debris free without making construction a nightmare.

Nice mission! I really like how clean your design is, I always like efficiency in ships. And your kerbals look oh so happy to have their backs strapped to a couple of fuel tanks

I present to you the station Minos Phi, complete with that new station smell! Composed of 31 different sections, and with a diameter of 22 and a half meters, this station is a testament to what Kerbalkind can achieve when they put aside their love of snacks and work together. It has room for up to 52 kerbals to live comfortably, but if the need arises, it can hold up to 104 kerbals. The station also has a drive section consisting of 6 atomic engines, which allow it to make orbital corrections as necessary. Because of its ring shaped hull, the Minos Phi station is capable of creating artificial gravity for its little green inhabitants. The station is able to rotate at a rate of up to 11 rpm before structural instabilities begin to show themselves. This means that any gravity up to 1.5 Gs is able to be simulated, allowing the brave astronauts who live there to prepare for almost any mission without worry of atrophy. Between work and university it took me about two weeks to finally finish this station. All the pieces are docked with two Clamp-o-tron docking ports to try and keep everything aligned, but even that isn't foolproof. Once it got down to the final pieces of the ring, it took a lot of wiggling and jiggling of the pieces of the station before all the docking ports would properly dock. Danman Kerman, the pilot of the tug that was used to construct the station, had a close brush with death during construction. While switching through vessels in the 2.5km radius, I switched to the tug and the cockpit decided to spontaneously and violently remove itself from the rest of the tug. Poor Danman had to evacuate and EVA over to the station before he became kraken food. Here's the album documenting the construction of the station from start to finish, with some IVA views of the construction thrown in. Let me know what you guys think! Edit: Here are the .craft files if anybody still wants them. When you are constructing the station, I recommend flying the launchers to rendezvous with the station, then dropping off the cargo. The rim beams and rim habitats all have a Sr. docking port on the piece that holds them on the launcher, so they can be attached to the station station then decoupled piece by piece without the rest floating away. Ex: Here you can see the piece that held the rim beams attached to the station after they've all been decoupled. Also, make sure that the SAS on the station is off during assembly, until all the pieces of the ring are attached, it likes to try and wobble itself apart. The station core: The first piece of the station to go up, it has room for 9 kerbals, solar panels, and lights to light up the station. The fuel and RCS modules: These two pieces go up next, they provide fuel and RCS for whatever tug you are using to construct the station. The RCS module will need a tug with a Sr. docking port on it. The long beams: This craft has the 3 main spokes of the station, after they attached the bicouplers are ejected leaving the docking ports open for the arm habitats. After these are attached, deactivate the SAS and ASAS modules on them. They are only on there so that the beams would end up being the proper length. If they are left on then they make the finished station unstable with SAS on. The arm habitats: These are the habitats that go on the ends of the long beams. I didn't want to make three separate flights for these, so the craft is rather ungainly. However, it is definitely capable of rendezvous with the station, it just takes a careful pilot. The rim beams: These small beams go on the sides of the arm habitats, and once all are attached the bicouplers can be ejected. The L rim habitats and R rim habitats: These are the habitats that attach to the rim beams. If you don't care whether the Hitchhiker modules are oriented up or down relative to the station then the R and L habitats can be used interchangeably. If you want all the Hitchhiker modules to be oriented up then the R habitats will go on one side of the arm habitats while the L habitats will go on the other side. The M rim habitats: The last pieces of the ring, these can be a pain to get all the docking ports to dock properly. Make sure you take care in aligning the rest of pieces of the station during assembly, and attaching these will be a lot easier. When I was putting them on my station, I had to realign a couple of the R and L habitats so the M habitats would fit right. Finally, the drive section: The very final piece of the station, this allows the station to perform orbit changes, and it 'should' have enough dV to get to the Mun and back, but I haven't made the trip myself yet. When using the engines, don't go anymore than half thrust or it will drift off course. I think that's everything you need to know to build this station, so if anyone attempts to assemble it, I wish them the best of luck!

I'm not going to waste time arguing the topic scientifically when they are a species that live on a planet with no other animal-like lifeforms. I see the kerbals as a realization of what we as people have been unable to do. They embody our desire for space travel and exploration, at a time when budgets are being cut from government space programs, and private companies are starting to fill in some of the gaps. The kerbals have a single-minded desire to go to space, and even if they have screams of terror going up, once they are there they show their blissfully happy grins. They represent what we aspire to be, a species who have put aside the differences and problems of the world and focused onwards and upwards to the future. Since they are, to me, a symbol of what we as humans love about space, I see no reason why we shouldn't include female kerbals in this.

This times a thousand! I made a tug a couple weeks ago which had a Mk1 cockpit located just to the side of a central docking port, and it made docking so much better and more enjoyable. It gives you a sense of what all this stuff looks like to the kerbals, and also makes the magnetic force that pulls the docking ports together seem a lot more violent.

I can also confirm that it will work, I've done it before, though not since 0.17. All I did was add some fuel tanks and rockets onto docouplers near the top of the rocket, and then decouple it at the same time as the bottom stage

If you look at the stats for the command pods and probe cores in the Vehicle Assembly Building, you should see that there are some values labeled pod torque, or something else to that effect. If I remember right, the manned capsules have values of 10-20, while the probe cores are closer to 1.5. For the torque, a higher number means you have more power to turn, so it helps you to turn faster. If you want to be able to turn a ship with just a probe core faster, then you should place an SAS/reaction wheel module on your rocket. That will add torque, at the cost of additional electricity use.

I'm not exactly positive, but from what I've read the ship should be saved in almost the same format in the persistent file as they are in the .craft file. So if you found the ship in the persistent, and looked through the .craft files of your other ships to get a feel for their layout, you should be able to at least make a .craft file for what's left of the ship up in orbit.

I've only edited the persistence once before, and that was to try and fix a docking port not wanting to reactivate so it could dock again, and my lazy bum didn't want to take the 10 minutes to undock the part and then the tug, then redock it all. Took about an hour and a half messing with the persistence file, and it still didn't fix it. I just gave in and did the undocking/redocking and it fixed it. Honestly, I hardly ever use the quicksave so I guess the issue doesn't come up for me very much.

Are you bored of docking your space tug the old fashioned way, moving a bit, checking alignment, move a little more, and on and on...? Maybe you don't want to mess around with any fancy pants docking cams? Well then give this here tug a try, it might bring a little joy back into your boring life as a space tug pilot. I present to you the dully named LKO Tug mk V It comes complete with all the handy features a discerning kerbal looks for in a tug. It has forward and rear thrusters, an extra set of RCS thrusters, and dual reaction wheels so that you can handle heavy loads while still being maneuverable enough to navigate crowded construction areas. Also included with your tug are both a spotlight and area light. And of course, the most important feature of all, is the side mounted cockpit with a transparent aluminum canopy. The side mounting of this canopy allows an unobstructed view of the entire docking process, from start to finish. No more having to bother with tedious checking from different points of view to make sure you're still aligned to your target. Here are some additional pictures that show more of the craft. A small note: The craft in the pictures has the docking clamp cover obstructing part of the view. This is because the engineers at KSC put it on upside down on the prototype craft. It should be fixed in the current version of the tug. As far as docking procedure goes, it should be fairly straight forward if you have a good handle on docking and rendezvous already. The one thing that is different is how you know if you're aligned or not. As far as rotational alignment goes, you're going to just have to go by eye on that, there isn't really any other than "it looks good". Which has worked just fine for me, it has given me really nice dockings where it just fits like a glove and there's no wobbling around trying to attach. To determine if you're aligned along the translation axis, there are a couple things you will need to keep in mind. 1. The cockpit is located to the side of the docking port, so you want to aim a bit to the side of the docking port you are approaching. 2. On the cockpit where the canopy meets the panel, near the sides, there are two metal clip things. If you draw a line connecting both of those, that is your horizon line. Anything on that line is what the ship is pointing at. Here are the .craft files, one with a launcher and one without. LKO Tug, with launcher LKO Tug, no launcher I did a quick search on the forum and didn't find anything else similar to this, so I hope you guys enjoy it