Plur303

The only problem is that mechjeb doesn't do these tasks properly in the first place so you are learning from a flawed method.

A challenge I have found fun is to build rockets realistically. No huge un-aerodynamic cargo on the top of your rocket held in place by 50 struts. Everything must fit inside fairings (using mods). No asparagus staging. Rockets must be vertically staged like traditional rockets. This changes everything and makes the game challenging again. There is no asparagus staging in real life. The fuel flow demands for rockets are huge. The Saturn V had 50,000 horsepower worth of fuel pumps for the main engines. A simply little yellow fuel line that weighs a fraction of a ton is a complete joke compared to what a real rocket fuel transfer line would require. There are also mods to make the Kerbin system realistically scaled. Did you know that Jool is actually about the same size as Earth is in real life. Jool's PE is 65 million km The real planet Mercury's AP is 69 million km Jool is about as far from the sun as Mercury is in real life. Bumping KSP up to realistic scale makes the game so much harder and turns an expert KSP player back into a noob that can barely make orbit.

Please tell me when I said mechjeb was cheating? I never said it was cheating. I say it is a crutch, training wheels etc. A tool for people who don't want to learn how to play a space game yet insist on playing a space game. If you find the game tedious without mechjeb then guess what, you don't enjoy space flight simulation! What mechjeb does do is take away from the game experience and keep your from learning basic skills that make this game fun. There have also been plenty of manual dockings in space. I used mechjeb for a few months and found I was relying on it completely. I stopped using it back in 0.18 and I enjoy the game much more now. Not only that but My launches and dockings are much more effiecient than mechjeb. Mechjeb actually sucks at docking and uses easily 10X more RCS fuel than I do manually. I'm not bragging. That is how bad mechjeb is and how efficient you can be at flying if you just learn to read your navball and use your brain a little.

As other's have said, you just need to practice and get a feel for it. It all depends on what kind of orbit your are de-orbiting from. Saying "make a PE of 30,000 meters here" doesn't make sense because it depends on your velocities and orbit characteristics that you are coming from. Deorbiting from an orbit with a AP of 100,000 meters and an orbit of 250,000 meters will have different outcomes even if they both have a PE of 30,000 meters in the same spot.

I agree 100%. Squad is dumbing this game down so much that I am downright angry. Multi-player doesn't suit this game very well. Especially when you consider the difficulties with utilizing time warp in a multi-player game. I WANT RESOURCES. I also want interesting places to go. Planets are boring at the moment and "biomes" are just arbitrary regions with nothing even remotely significantly different about them.

To everybody using mechjeb, shame on you! Docking is easy. Before starting the docking procedure set the docking port of your target ship so that it is facing normal/antinormal. This will make it so the direction the port is pointing remains constant throughout the orbit. This makes it MUCH easier!!! (If you are in a standard Eastern equatorial orbit this would mean pointing the ports North or South) 1. Use maneuver nodes to get your encounter between the two ships down to about 2 km or less 2. When you get close set the other ship as your target 3. Set your velocity display so it is showing speed relative to your target 4. Burn retrograde until you have essentially zeroed your speed between the two vessels 5. Now approach slowly and adjust your speed so your prograde vector is pointed right at your target. 6. When you get close enough click the docking ports you will be using and "control from here" on your ship and set the one you wish to dock with as target. 7. Now just keep your prograde vector and target vector ontop of each other. If you can follow these steps you don't even need to look at anything. I have even docked using map view just to see how good I was. If you understand how to read your navball you don't even need to look at your ships. Don't use mechjeb, it's just a crutch and makes you a bad player. Basic understanding of how to read your navball will let you dock using 1/10th as much fuel as the horrible mechjeb docking will.

Anybody who thinks fuel lines are just tubes and a basic technology doesn't know anything about rockets. Rocket fuel pumps are incredibly complex and take hundreds it not thousands of horsepower to operate. The Bloodhound SSC landspeed record car is going to have a Cosworth F1 race car engine that does nothing but drive the fuel pump for the liquid fuel rocket. That's how much fuel needs to be moved. And this is just a small rocket that isn't even trying to make orbit. This is why asparagus staging is not utilized in real life. Here is a quote from the wikipedia page about the engines and fuel pumps on the Saturn V rockets. "A gas-generator was used to drive a turbine which in turn drove separate fuel and oxygen pumps, each feeding the thrust chamber assembly. The turbine was driven at 5,500 RPM by the gas generator, producing 41 megawatts (55,000 bhp). The fuel pump produced 58,560 litres (15,471 US gal) of RP-1 per minute while the oxidizer pump delivered 93,920 litres; 20,659 imperial gallons (24,811 US gal) of liquid oxygen per minute." 55,000 horsepower to pump the fuel for the first stage on the Saturn V. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocketdyne_F-1 Thinking rocket fuel lines are just tubes...

An Eve return mission is the only true challenge in the game. I think Eve should be left alone. Consider it the final boss of the game. Until you have performed an Eve return you have not conquered KSP. I have a hyperedit tested Eve return lander that actually uses a capsule but have not figured out hot to get it to Eve yet. I'm wanting to do it in a single launch, no refueling. In my opinion that is the "holy grail" mission of KSP. A manned mission to Eve and back (using a capsule and not rover seats) in a single launch from Kerbin. Making it easier is just moving goalposts and detracts from the accomplishment of achieving an Eve return. Eve is supposed to mimic Venus. Venus has an atmospheric density approximately 92X that of Earth's. Eve's super thick atmosphere is appropriate and actually not even thick enough to represent Venus.

I've been playing since the release of 0.17. I like how the game is progressing and personally I dislike the whole "LOL so kerbal" attitude lots of players have. Don't get me wrong, you are free to play however you want. I just personally find the whole "LOL lets strap Jebediah to a SRB and crash LOL" crowd annoying. I enjoy executing very complex and difficult missions. But I admit the first few days I played the game I was just happy to reach orbit and some of my first designs were just laughable. I crashed hundreds of crappy designs to finally understand what a good design is. Truth be told I learned how to play the game from other online communities which are much more advanced than the forums.

I must agree. Today's stream is just painful to watch. Not even being able to build a rocket with a positive thrust to weight ratio for several minutes straight, crashing on purpose over and over and over... How is this worthy of an official stream?

They way I got my pod racer to work is by using clipping and hiding several small control surfaces inside the engines. The engines are essentially a functioning aircraft and the cockpit/pod is just being dragged behind it.

It is my opinion that the flying is the fun part. There is no career mode or goals in the game yet so the voyage is the entire purpose of playing the game right now. Automating the voyage removes all satisfaction of playing the game for me. Play the game however you like. But personally I cannot understand why people play a game about flying space ships if they get bored flying space ships... Some people argue it is about designing space ships but once you understand the concepts of thrust to weight ratio and delta V you can build ships just by looking at those values. As long as your ship is assembled reasonably then it is pretty much guaranteed to work as long as you have the delta V and TWR to do what you want to do. There is nothing left to do but fly it. Automating the flying makes this one of the most boring games I can imagine. I don't see the fun in automating a flight to a different planet/moon just to land and have nothing to do. The experience of the voyage is the destination in my opinion.

I also agree that mechjeb is intolerably bad at flying. I tried it back in 0.18 and 0.19 a few times and was more annoyed by it than it was worth. I have not even considered reinstalling it since. I also consider it cheating. I foresee the thread being closed pretty quickly though. Mechjeb discussions ALWAYS end up very hostile. There are a lot of people in denial about not being able to play the game without training wheels that will defend it to the bitter end. It's not just ascent. Mechjeb burns through RCS when auto-docking, doesn't do very efficient orbital transfers, doesn't know how to exploit the Oberth effect, and simply can't fly certain large or wobbly ships. It also likes to pulse between 0 and 100% thrust and rip apart very fragile ships that are docked together. Mechjeb is a very crude hammer and can be blamed for many things. It is not a precision tool.

I have Enemy Kerman in my game. Buthert is my favorite name. I suppose you could read it as B-You-Thert but I read it as butt hurt.

Yeah I misunderstood the rules, removing my post...

Yes I made a small hang glider with only 3 control surfaces and it easily exploits the infinite glide bug. As you can see it can hit 1000 m/s without any propulsion of any kind. So this can just fly forever until I get bored... This challenge is flawed. The only limit on how far a glider can fly in Kerbal Space Program is how long you feel like playing the game.

Very impressive Metaphor! I will have to try that. I was just attempting to do a Duna landing. Gallery of my submission:http://imgur.com/a/ivMM5 Kerbin orbit 1 Mun encounter 2 Kerbin escape 3 Duna encounter 6 Duna orbit 2 Total 14 Multipliers: 2X for Kerbal onboard and 2X for landing on Duna 14X4=56 points Mun Encounter Stable Kerbin Orbit after Mun encounter Duna encounter and aerobrake stable duna orbit after aerobrake and burn at apoapsis Coming in for a landing on Duna landed on Duna

Could you please write out how you are going to calculate the score in equation form just to clarify. It makes a big difference how you apply the multiplier for kerbals inside the ship. Also, are decouplers allowed as a launch mechanism? If you go to the max altitude in 30 seconds thread there are guys who can toss a command pod over 40,000 meters in the air using nothing but decouplers. I forsee this being used in this challenge and am just wondering if it is allowed or not. I'm currently working on a ship but trying to decide my strategy. That's why I would like the scoring system defined as an actual equation. Thanks.

Just turned 31

I would still really like to set up a race course by dropping probe cores and naming them pylon 1, pylon 2 etc. and sharing the save file but there are a few issues I am predicting. 1. All of the terrain around Kerbal Space Center is flat and boring. The island airport is the closest thing of interest and it is a few minutes away. I don't think anybody wants to participate in a race that involves several minutes per lap of boring flat race course. 2. How to enforce the course and penalize cheaters. The only thing I can see is very carefully and slowly flying the course and mapping the distance very accurately. Anybody who posts a screenshot with a distance shorter than the minimum course length is disqualified.

Very nice. That seems really stable with the 3 airbrakes. It might not be as fast as some of the others but stability is probably more important that speed if more speed means crashing...

Sorry if this has already been asked. Does this mean that it is also possible to make procedural fuel tanks? Ever since I have first started playing KSP I have thought it would be awesome to just click and drag and create custom sized fuel tanks that would fill with the appropriate amount of fuel based on their size. This would not only lower the part count of the rockets but also make them more rigid and get rid of the annoying floppyness that is inherent in columns of tanks hooked together. It would be great if the fuel tanks would just stay the standard diameters but be as long or as short as you want them.

Mechjeb... Boo!

The pen story is a myth. The nitrogen pressurized ink cartridge was invented by a private inventor and sold to NASA. NASA also used mechanical pencils but decided against it considering graphite is a very good conductor and a piece of broken pencil lead floating into a circuit board can cause lots of problems. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen#Uses_in_the_U.S._and_Russian_space_programs