Uberick

I don't really care if they break saves or not. . . they should do what needs to be done to make the best game they can in the most timely fashion possible; if losing a few saves along the way is what that costs, then so be it. I, personally, would rather see an accelerated development schedule that leaves us with a more rapidly changing game that results in broken saves MORE often. Sometimes I wonder if the Dev's are slowing down the progress of development for fear of annoying the large user base that already exists and has poured a ton of time into the game.

First, I'll head to the moon(always the first thing I do when a patch comes out), then I'll get back to putting a station around every planet.

I'm teaching a friend how to play in anticipation of the update coming out. . . then he's all on his own because I'll be busy

I've very much enjoyed the game so far, but after having put 200 hours into it, I've almost everything there is to do as it stands. Without any further updates, I would put the game down and probably play it only sparingly from this point on.

TWR doesn't reduce your efficiency in space, your burns will take LONGER, but they won't require any additional delta V. As a general rule, the most efficient engines(delta v), produce the lowest thrust(Nukes, Ion, etc). For interplanetary travel this doesn't pose too much of a problem, unless you hate really long burn times(my ion probes have burn times of 2-5 hours). However, if you are trying to land on(and take off from) a planet, you WILL need sufficient TWR to escape its gravity. The wiki has a handy list of gravity values for each planet, and the mod Kerbal Engineer will calculate your TWR on each specific moon or planet to see if you can actually escape the gravity well.

Welcome to the dark side! I also bought the game before the Steam sale, so I used the Steam sale as an excuse to buy more copies for friends. Spread the word! Happy Launchings!

I was playing the Warthunder beta, but now that the Steam summer sale is on, I'm mostly just watching my money disappear

If they're adding features significant enough to break saves, then I say that's good news:) I could use an excuse to go and visit all the planets again!

Probably about and hour and a half. I just went through the walkthrough of the Gemini missions on the wiki; it did a pretty good job of explaining some of the basic mechanics and what to do. I did that during my first week of playing. I got better at it as I went from moon landings to Duna landings, and got faster and more reliable with each attempt. Funny enough, I didn't really fully understand how to do it properly until I downloaded Orbiter to give it a try. Docking in orbiter requires a much more comprehensive understanding of your orbit and what variables define it. Once I figured out how to dock to the ISS in Orbiter, all of the "black magic" behind docking disappeared, and I can now dock things quickly, and with very little fuel usually. Practice makes perfect, but also a solid understanding of the mechanics helps. I highly recommend grabbing Orbiter and giving their docking tutorials a shot.

I don't have any pics I don't think(will check later), but when landing on Ike, I didn't kill all of my horizontal speed properly, and when I "touched down" my craft bounced and proceeded to spin end over end over the landscape. Luckily, it was JUST above the ground, so nothing was damaged. I managed to regain control and point it skyward, but it bounced AGAIN on the second landing, and did two complete spins before "landing" a third time for good. All in all, nothing was damaged, but I almost gave myself a heart attack. Now I use retro RCS to plant my landers onto low grav planets to prevent that from happening.

I just did the exact same thing I also got the new 4770k, and I can say that it made a world of difference coming from a gen II i5 in my last PC. My framerates more than doubled without overclocking. What you have there looks like a pretty good setup, the only thing I would recommend changing is a more powerful CPU cooler to get a better overclock on your CPU(you can take most of those to 4.5Ghz or more). Overclocking helps quite a bit with KSP framerates, seeing as how the game is not really optimized yet. I bought and use a Noctua NH D14(http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835608018), and it keeps my CPU temps around 40c even under load with ambient temp at around 75 degrees F(which google tells me is about 24 degrees C) Liquid cooling solutions might be better, but I have no experience installing those so I avoided them.

Anything can survive reentry right now(they havn't put in reentry heat). However, if you barrel into the GROUND at 3km/s without a parachute you will most likely die in a fiery explosion. In regards to docking. . . if you get into a habit of doing it you can dock most anything with less than 100 RCS(I usually use about a quarter of that when docking big ships). The trick is to make small, precise movements and make sure that every move you're making adds up to your final goal.

I'm not a programmer or anything, but I have to think that changing out the whole engine at this point would be an exercise in futility; the developers would probably be better off heavily modifying the existing engine to better optimize it. I'd assume that there's at least enough room for optimization to probably double current frame rates, assuming that they haven't done much yet(which I don't really know). If they could get the optimization to the point where most people could assemble a decently sized 400-500 part station without lagging too bad, I think that'd be a great start.

I highly recommend KW rocketry, also, if you want the aerodynamics to matter, go get FAR. That will put in a more realistic model for drag.

I find the parachutes more useful for guiding the descent and descelerating vessels to under 100 m/s than for actually landing. For small probes and rovers they seem to work, but for any manned vessels I have to throw on so many parachutes to do a pure parachute landing that it starts to get crazy. A single small engine can usually do the work of a dozen parachutes, and saves on part count. If you are planning on using just parachutes though, try to aim for one of the craters to give yourself more altitude to slow down. It might seem small but a km or two makes a big difference for parachutes!

Thanks for all the hard work putting that together!

I'm going to second the motion that I would LOVE some optimization. . . but if I have to wait for it until the game is feature complete. . . so be it Firstly, go into your config file and change the delta physics to some very small number. The default the you can turn it down to is .03, but if you go to the actual file you can input a small number(like .0000000000000000000001). That will encourage the game to give you more FPS at the expense of "slowing down" the gameplay. It looks like slow-mo, but it gives you more FPS so there's less jittering. go to your KSP file, go to "settings", and change the MAX_PHYSICS_DT_PER_FRAME to some low number There's a slider in the game settings menu that does the same thing, but it will max out at .03. I seem to find a couple extra FPS performance boost by changing it to some fraction of .000000000000000000000000000001 Also, this game seems to be VERY clock speed and processor dependent. I just built a new PC with a 4770k, and it's getting 30~FPS where my second gen i5 was getting mid-teens, as well as my laptop 3rd gen i7(which is a laptop core, so it's slower by default).

I highly recommend struts. There are very few structural problems that a liberal application of struts cannot solve. Also, sometimes if you add some RCS or fins to give you more control in addition to engine gimbal, that can help(just put RCS on your droptanks so you don't waste too much energy carrying it into space.)

Oops, didn't read the ion vs RCS OP. (sorry!) I should think that RCS would be fine; if you turn on "fine controls"(default capslock I think), then the RCS operates at reduced power, allowing you to make finer adjustments without overshooting. You could use an Ion engine, but it might be a bit of a pain to keep spinning your ship around to fire the ion engine in the appropriate direction(assumine only one Ion engine). Still, it would give you more delta-v, and the ability to make very fine adjustments.

^^^ The mechanics are going to remain the same as normal docking, you're just dealing with much greater distances.

I'm gonna throw in another vote for "burn reto to kill all speed, and drop straight down" If you put yourself in a low orbit first(say, maybe 5000m alt), and then burn retro at your periapsis, you won't pick up THAT much speed from gravity, so it'll be reasonably efficient. If you have decent acceleration(using chemical engines usually), you can set your altitude even lower, and burn off all of your horizontal speed before you start to drop down to the surface. As you descend, you can fine tune the retrograde marker(make sure to set your nav-ball for "surface") to make sure you're coming straight down. Keep your final speed below 10 m/s(there's a handy "radar altitude" indicator in most capsules), and you should be good to land. Good luck!

Good luck on your new beginning; I hope it goes well for you! I, myself, bounce between using mechjeb alot for some things and not at all for others. When I'm using probes, or anything with really long burn times, I automate pretty much everything. I usually do burns on my grand tour probes while I make my morning coffee and such, and it's nice to let them "do their thing" while I'm off doing something else. I've never used the docking or redezvous autopilot because I tried it once and it burned so much fuel I got annoyed and turned it off. . . haven't used it since. For my manned missions, I try to do everything manually; I find that I get sucked into the piloting and the game can get very immersive very quickly. I'm trying to cut back on quicksaving(which I think is just as bad as Mechjeb addiction as far as killing immersiveness), I do that too much.

My first moon landing was stressful as all get out. I didn't know that I could autosave, so every action had significant consequences. I got into orbit, and then burned off enough speed to drop my orbit to the planet. That put me into a very shallow descent, with very little vertical speed but a TON of horizontal speed. I wasn't able to burn off all of the horizontal speed, and my lander ended up bouncing off the mun and rolling end over end until it finally ground to a halt. The crew survived, but the vessel was not capable of re-achieving orbit.

Congrats on a successful Duna landing! My own engineering team would advise yours that your lander might have an abundance of redundant engines. While we understand that the traditional Kerbal design philosophy of "MOAR ______" is usually the best way to go in any situation, the addition of engines is one of the rare exceptions. My own team has found that for a lander that size, a pair of nuclear engines or 909s will often result in better fuel efficiency, while having just enough power to lift off. (The exact reasoning behind this gain in efficiency is much debated and not fully understood, but the results speak for themselves) good luck on your rescue mission!

If you're planning on having outgoing ships rendezvous with the tanker on the way OUT of Kerbin's SOI, you might want to put the tanker as close as possible to Kerbin itself(70-80km orbit). That will allow the outgoing ship to launch, refuel, and make a very efficient burn in low Kerbin orbit. If you make an ejection burn while very far out from Kerbin, you will not be able to utilize the gravity well(Oberth Effect) to make your ejection burn as efficient as possible. I don't know for sure if that's correct(haven't done maths), but that's what I'd guesstimate. maybe someone more qualified can give a concrete answer