Sof

Try playing career with mods such as Tac lifesupport, FAR, deadly reentry and Kerbal Construction time Sending Kerbals to other planets is really hard.

I'm so used to using the old rotation keys that I pretty much use them for everything, but I do remember to use the gizmos sometimes for fine tuning.

Not true. You can test engines you've already used by either manually restaging your rocket (be careful not to break it up) or right click the part and select "run test" at the right place.

If you're getting excessive sideways G-forces, you're probably weren't going to space anyway. But I guess I've never thought of it like that. They are flying sideways into space. I don't think you'd notice it as an astronaut though. I mean, the space shuttle is upside down on the way up. My KSP pet peeve is the missions where you have to rescue some guy from orbit. How did he get there? Those missions make no sense. He'd die before I had time to build a rocket to save him, let alone launch it.

I had one to put a probe in a "Kolniya" orbit around the sun, with a periapsis that would have taken me to the edge of the suns atmosphere. Needless to say, it was impossible and I told Flooyd where to shove it

Nuclear engines are long specifically so that landers are difficult to make with them. You can't put them directly beneath your lander so you need to stick them on the side. This then means you'll need more than 1 to compensate for the symmetry issues. They're also really heavy. If you really want to conserve delta V, just drag along a lander with a smaller yet more powerful engine(s), and use 1 nuclear engine for the transfer stage. The amount of fuel you'll need to get to and from orbit around most places is quite low anyway, and you'll save a bunch not having to hoist that extra 6.75 tons up from Kerbin and through interplanetary space.

There won't be any parts that have inherent failures built in. The KSP devs have stated that part failure is out of the question, thus any failures can be traced back the players mistakes (ideally) Any rocket built in KSP will always fly the same as any identical rocket every time.

As a tip I learned from Scott Manley; if your asteroid pusher has a manned command pod, you can go into IVA and use the kerbals eye zoom function to get a good look at the nav ball. This allows for much much more accurate results when using the nav ball to point the claw towards the COM.

I voted for life support. Sure, the aerodynamic model is a bit sucky, but you only really notice that on a few planets and 1 moon. FAR/NEAR fixes that completely in one easy to install mod anyway. The fact that Kerbals can last forever just floating around in a tiny pod (or even just their spacesuit) is silly. The difficulty in keeping astronauts alive in space is the reason we haven't been to Mars yet. Only a few mods come close to fixing that issue in KSP.

Delta V readouts should be included somewhere in the VAB/SPH during construction. It is technically free after all, since you can just do the maths as they provide the mass and ISP of all the parts. Simply having a computer do it for you is just quicker, and not really cheating. The advent of pilot controls in 0.90 confirms that MechJeb is cheating, pure and simple. Kerbal Engineer simply displays what the game is already telling you, just without needing a calculator.

You're probably looking at when the offer expires, not the deadline. Most contracts only hang about in the contract building on offer for a few days, but they'll have deadlines to actually complete the mission that last for several years. (I don't recall seeing one that is less that 4yrs to complete). Once you accept the mission, you have years to complete it. It is only the offer that lasts a few days. The missions I find impossible are the ones that tell you to put a satellite in orbit around a body, in such a way that it will intercept a moon. I got one contract telling me to put a satellite in retrograde orbit around Kerbin which followed the mun's orbit exactly. The only way that could be possible is if I hadn't upgraded to see patched conics, because it was always going to hit the mun within 1 orbit.

Take the money to science strategy in the admin building. After a few satellite contracts, you'll have enough science to unlock all the nodes so you can skip all the science harvesting from the biomes.

The levelling up system for Kerbals is far too arbitrary. How does planting a flag on Minmus teach someone how to fix a rover wheel? Did they have no training at all before being flung into space? I like the fact that Kerbals have different "jobs" now, but I don't like the restrictive way it limits you before they've levelled up. Just make them good at their respective job from the start, and simply have individual Kerbal reputation.

I play with Kerbal Construction Time. The time spent waiting for the transfer window is spent building the rocket to go there.

So I changed the shockwave exponent to 1.12 before hitting the atmosphere. An circular 70km orbit ~2200ms to reentry with a 25km Periapsis ablates 7 points off the shield. My pod is not that heavy or that big, so I assume the shield was "designed" for much more demanding applications as a threshold, but I'm wondering if this value is typical for similar re-entries in other peoples games?

It is stock sized Kerbin with NEAR installed. Orbital velocities ~2200ms with an AP,PE about 80000m to 25000m with just a mk1 command pod and a parachute on top. Still have 250 ablative shield when I land. Trying to change the shockwave thingy in flight meant that I accidentally changed it to 112 and everything exploded immediately.

Second this. My reentries are not depleting the ablative shield at all on the default settings with NEAR installed. Even stuff without ablative shields can survive. Also, you can't use decimal points when trying to change the shockwave exponent in flight, so I'm unsure how to change them to the recommended "1.12"

Don't know if this has been mentioned, but trying to select the crew with this mod is awkward. It's even more important now if you're playing career that you have the right Kerbals in the command pod, but you have to randomize the crew several times in order to get the right astronaut. There doesn't seem to be any way to manually select the right man for the mission. It defaults every time to Jeb for me even if I selected another kerbal in the VAB/SPH beforehand. When it comes to launching a vessel, you lose all options to manually select the pilot and the flag/logo for a particular mission.

Maybe if you have FAR installed and land on a mountain. 10km/s won't cut it in stock from sea level.

How do you simulate vessels now? I click launch in the VAB, select simulate, and it gives options to choose starting body, simulation time and a tickbox to select for orbit start, but no way to actually start the simulation. I have enough funds to simulate, but not build, the rocket.

I'm still getting all the waypoints staying on the map after completing a contract too.

Apparently 133 isn't high enough to realise this thread was a year old

You need to rotate the camera around, as it is behind the default position (holdout from when KSP was much smaller)

Probe missions go on for as long as they were designed. Once they've collected the science I wanted them too, I just abandon them on what ever trajectory they were on. Mission length for Kerbals is determined by the maximum amount of life-support they have thanks to TAC life-support mod. I don't remove debris No I haven't really bothered exploring Kerbin more than just random landing sites from other missions and "hey, while I'm here" science experiments.

I'm getting weird cutoffs for the atmospheres when I fly through them. Ie high in Kerbins atmosphere, half of the sky is deep blue, and the other half is black with a very distinct line between them.