PlayMp1

I can't seem to figure out what part to attach to make an optical transmitter. The big pivoted light mirror only appears to be for relaying, and the FELA is far, far too large to put into orbit reasonably. I know you have to have a free electron laser beam generator onboard. I can't seem to find the medium parabolic optical transceiver either.

Yeah, I just realized I was a moron. Disregard me.

I'm using No Empty Tech Tree Nodes and I think I'm missing some parts and upgrades (in particular, I don't have any access to lithium fuel). You suggest/recommend it on CKAN, so I figure there would be full compatibility.

Does it work in 64 bit?

Nope. It's 5x. 500 data gives you 2500 science. Very powerful, but they're difficult to move around.

Okay, I can't tell if I'm being a moron, but I can't seem to get the Thermal Rocket Nozzle to produce any thrust with any fuel except Hydrolox (which of course has pretty poor dV). I have it attached to an unupgraded Gas Core reactor and I've tried every other form of fuel, and none of them work. That said, I am trying this from the launchpad. I need to know if this is working as intended, where the fuels don't work on the surface of Kerbin, or not.

I have a pretty good computer and I use MSI Afterburner. Very speedy. And besides, for KSP it's pretty simple for me to throw the recording software on one thread and leave KSP on another

I did the exact same thing. It was my fourth mission in career mode, and my first ever trip to Jool. Using a pair of nuclear engines and plenty of fuel on an unmanned probe, I orbited Jool, Laythe, Vall, Tylo, and Pol, and then landed on Pol. Went back to the science center and unlocked all of the tech tree from there. Of course, then I added in Interstellar. 10,000 science for warp drive. That took a while.

I docked for the first time. It was hell and I wonder how others manage to do it so quickly and easily, but I did it. The purpose of my first docking was basically the fact I couldn't do my absurdly large launches while using FAR, so I had to build the craft out in orbit. The interplanetary transfer stage is a KSP Interstellar fusion engine with a 3.75m nuclear reactor and electrical generator to power it, and the thinnest 3.75m fuel tank from KW Rocketry filled with nothing but Liquid Fuel using the modular fuel mod. The crew module/lander is just a bunch of science parts slapped onto a 3 man command pod with four small 1.25m fuel tanks and one small 2.5m fuel tank powering four LV-909s. It's haphazard, but it should be fine on Moho. After all, I only have to get into orbit with it, I don't have to get back on the lander like I'm used to . I'm on my way to reach the only planet (not moon, I still gone to Bop, Ike or Gilly) I haven't yet reached: Moho. Thankfully the transfer windows are frequent, so I won't have to wait long like I had to for Eeloo (that mission took like 11 years). Once I get there, I'm gonna do a whole bunch of SCIENCE! in high and orbit, land for more SCIENCE!, then head back to Kerbin. That 10,000 science requirement for the Alcubierre Drive in KSPI is just brutal...

Real fast question - is it possible to turn off nuclear reactors? I'm planning an unmanned mission going to Jool (no warp drive yet), and if the reactor is running the whole time, by the time I arrive at Jool, most or all of the nuclear fuel will be gone. I don't want to have to bring along a science lab just to reprocess uranium hexafluoride, making the mission no longer unmanned.

Indeed. I'm far from an advanced player at all (still have trouble actually landing on the Mun - not getting there, taking off from there, returning or anything, just actually landing), but my fourth mission, which finished my tech tree, was a probe to Jool. Just by spamming all the science parts and sucking all the science out of all the areas I could get to (high/low for Jool, Laythe, Vall, Tylo and Pol, landed on Pol), I had some 7000 science by the end of the mission.

My reaction.

Be careful roving on Gilly. Escape velocity is 35m/s, so driving too fast will send you off towards Eve.

Hopefully as Google Fiber expands, this will be fixed. 1Gbit connections. Imagine all the por- I mean musi- I mean movi- I mean gam- cats! Pictures of fluffy kitties you could download with a 1Gbit connection! I have an 80Mbit or so connection, and it's the fastest available in my area.

I was only relating that the Kerbol system is smaller than the orbit of Venus, not how much smaller. The person I was responding to thought the entire Kerbol system could somehow fit inside an orbit around Venus. I had to illustrate it.

I get fine performance with craft under 225 parts, and so long as I don't look at Kerbin's oceans while in space, or at the horizon while launching (not sure what's with that, really...). Specs: FX-8350 @ 4.0GHz Radeon HD 7850 2GB GDDR5 8GB DDR3 RAM Windows 7 Home Premium

That would be especially cool. Go to an anomaly, do a surface sample/EVA report, and get between 500 and 700 science for each, perhaps even more (kinda want to balance it around experts who know the location of every anomaly). Maybe prorate the science reward depending on anomaly difficulty/distance from KSC.

Today I went to the Jool system for the first time. I found out why people seem to go there so often: it's a blast using the various moons to slingshot yourself around the system. It was going to be my final science-oriented mission in career, as well, which was beyond successful. Got tons and tons of science, I don't even know how much, but at least 7000. This was with only a probe, and I only landed on Pol, so I didn't get crew reports, EVA reports, or surface samples, and very little in the way of surface experiments (as I mentioned, only landed on Pol).

Look at the entire diagram. There's an asterisk. Not to scale.

Yes, the orbit. As in the area of the entire solar system in KSP is smaller than the area of the ellipse describing Venus' orbit.

The key is to load up your spacecraft with experiments and repeatedly transmit science back. People on this forum have already tested everything out and basically laid the entire science system bare, and they've found that transmitting data back only increases the number of times data has to be received at all by KSC, basically. You basically get to either return with a large load of data, but then you have to go back to get more, or transmit as much data as you can while on site. Right now, there's not really any detriment to transmitting anything except maybe surface samples and EVA reports (because they're so difficult to get most of the time), and even then, a sufficiently repetition-tolerant player could easily hop in and out of their spacecraft to get those reports transmitted back a bunch of times. I had a similar progression as you, but I just finished the tech tree with 4000 science to spare after doing one final mission that was a lengthy probe mission to Jool (did high and near in space for Jool, Laythe, Vall, Tylo and Pol with every possible experiment, landed on Pol and did all possible experiments - this alone netted me tons and tons of science, I don't even know how much). My Duna mission in particular was profitable, getting me some 5000 science. Are you making sure to do as much as you can science-wise?

I got 3500 earlier today by going to Duna and being very obsessive about transmitting as much data as possible. Currently parked on Minmus for a touch more SCIENCE! and I'll be heading to Jool later on (once I design something to get there) to see if I can max the tech tree, since it apparently is very valuable.

QFT. I understand that one's initial thought at hearing "infinite range transmissions" is "preposterous! I can't get my house's WiFi signal at work, why should you be able to transmit complex scientific data across an entire solar system?" However, these transmissions are just light waves, almost certainly radio waves - and you know that light can travel indefinitely until absorbed or reflected by some medium. Since space is a nearly perfect vacuum, light can go a really friggin' long way, which is how we can see quasars 13.7 billion light years away. tl;dr: limited range is far more unrealistic than unlimited range.

Hm. I haven't named mine yet. However, I am a huge W40K fan. So... Adeptus Kerbales? No... I'm a Chaos guy. But the Kerbals are like Ork- that's it! Mad Dok Kerbstompa's Kustom Krooza Krew!

You have a 3.2% chance (approximately) of having a Munar encounter coming from a random direction aligned with the ecliptic/the Mun's orbital plane (pretty sure they're the same). For Ike, its inclination and eccentricity is so minimal that it fails to particularly matter when you're talking about back-of-the-envelope calculations like this - you get a roughly 5% chance of encountering Ike when approaching Duna from a random direction along Ike's orbital plane. This means that one in every 20 Duna approaches will encounter Ike, since no one plans so far ahead as to account for Ike's motion around Duna (I almost said that no one plans around the moons, but then I remembered how obsessive people can be about their Jool missions). For Kerbin, one in every 30-ish approaches will encounter the Mun.