vidboi

This should be in Gameplay Questions and Tutorials, but I'll answer nonetheless. Basically, you're thinking of a traditional compass which is designed to show you the direction to other things. However, the navball shows you the direction you're pointing in, which is slightly different, and so East and West are swapped. (You only notice this as North and South because the default orientation on the launchpad is East) Some orienteering compasses are designed like this for exactly the same purpose. Also, the Orange half points radially down (as in towards the planet you're oribiting) and the blue half up, as simple as that.

This whole thread made me wince. OCD isn't a character trait, it's a serious disorder (after all, that's what the d's for...). It's a much more complex problem than just being excessively neat. I don't want to come across as angry at anyone, but please treat these sort of issues with some sensitivity. Anyway, I think the term you're looking for is "perfectionism". Thank God for editor extensions and vertical snap, trying to place my parallel boosters level with the core would be an aggravating task otherwise...

What was that you were saying about the island runway? Also power and control isn't something you always have an excess of... I successfully landed my C-130 alike after shearing off one engine and the ailerons on one wing, as well as a sizeable chunk of the wing itself. Not that was a landing...

Very similar to this, except it was also my first manual moon landing (yes, I used to be a mechjeb junky, please forgive me for my sins...). Designed a minimalist 1 kerbal Apollo craft which completed the whole trip with about 100m/s spare from launch to splashdown on a very tight trajectory. Landing on fumes was probably the tensest moment I've had in the game, and performing a perfect launch to immediate lunar orbit by eyeballing it and ending up with less than a unit of fuel remaining prior to docking was just the icing on the cake

I apologise to C7 in advance, but I really don't think the modelling and texturing on the new parts is very good at all. The modelling is very chunky, it lacks the crisp lines of the other parts of the game. For example, compare the new booster engines with older engines such as the LV-T30 and the skipper. The new engines are much lower res, the engine bells are thicker with the insides not corresponding to the outsides and the exhaust pipes just look very low poly. The fuel line down the side of the new large tank looks very rough, especially compared to the orange tank. I guess the texturing was done to make the parts look worn and slightly poorly made, but it just comes out looking amateurish. The tanks especially annoy me with their blurred paintjobs and off centre markings (the black/white stripes are rotated 2.5 degrees from the centre, incredibly annoying for lining up parts). It's kind of like comparing the old space centre with the new one. Next to the fantastic parts by B9 and Claira Lyrae they just don't quite live up to spec. Then there's the new KR-2 engine which is beatiful, and seems to have taken up most of the effort in this project. Only problem is it's pretty inefficient and makes my slower laptop lag just by mousing over the part in the VAB. Really I think all the new parts do need a little TLC to make them really good.

Hmm, just had an odd bug which caused the space centre screen to not load (i.e all black, time warp bar and KCT menu present). Series of events was launching a craft through the launchpad (probably a bad idea) to simulation, reverting to VAB, adding to the build list and then leaving the VAB. Threw a ton of null reference errors. Log is here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6-QPW5ZXeYhaXBSQmJvTldHWGc/edit?usp=sharing

Two stage to oribt is pretty cool. I've starting doing this rather than using parallel boosters, although I also like to add a third kick stage to circularise the orbit without reusing the second stage. Suppose that sort of counts right? "You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to sgt_flyer again." Awesome!

Delta-v is the single most important thing when you're in space. For a lift vehicle, that's not the case, as all launchers should have a set amount of delta-v (enough to get into orbit). Other things like the rocket's TWR and aerodynamics (although not in the stock game) will determine what this delta-v requirement is, but it's roughly the same across all lift vehicles. Your real measure of a lifters efficiency is it's payload proportion - how much the payload weighs in proportion to the lift vehicle. A more efficient launcher will be able to heft a heavier payload for its weight. On the topic of SLS parts it's only the engines that are more powerful due to both their highish ISP and very good TWR. The tanks themselves have the same wet/dry mass ratio as the older tanks, and so your rocket will have approximately the same wet/dry mass fraction for each stage and therefore similar delta-v. Hope this helps your understanding!

Engine power shouldn't have any effect on delta-v so I'm not sure what you've done there... does look like it has quite a lot of delta v though!

That's interesting, in Scott Manley's demo video he showed the Ion Engines power requirements being the same. I guess there's some changes between the dev builds so I'm not sure exactly what to expect with the final release.

Not quite. The new ion engines have 4 times the thrust for the same electricity usage (i.e. they still use 12/sec at full power). The OP just doesn't make it clear that the reduction is 1/4 of the amount of electricity per unit thrust.

Yep, turns out despite outside appearances the soyuz spacecraft has quite a bit more internal space than the Apollo capsule. The soyuz re-entry module shape is specifically designed to be a good compromise between aerodynamic properties and to maximise internal volume for the surface area.

In fact, it's both the name of the spacecraft and the R-7 derived lifter. The spacecraft is only ever launched with the soyuz rocket, but the lifter itself is also used for other payloads.

From a 10km orbit, landing in Minmus takes an absolute minimum of 184m/s. This is of course an ideal case, so I'd take atleast 250m/s to give a reasonable margin.

Mission control, we have a guidance problem, losing pitch and yaw control... ...ah...