Mr Shifty

I still have a copy on my computer from 2015 (saved with KSP version 1.04 and compatible versions of its compatible mods intact.) Fired it up this evening for nostalgia's sake and it is still awesome. What a magnificent experience this mod was: far better in every way than stock career mode and better than any other mod I've ever played. Too bad it's gone forever. Criminal that the forum wipe killed the original thread.

But what if you want to rebuild the rocket for your second flight without reflying your first one?

After the first mission, you can exit to the space center and then enter the VAB. Your rocket design is saved, so you just load it up and relaunch. Yes, it should let you revert directly to the VAB, but you can workaround it for now without having to redo the whole mission.

Indeed, it's also possible to steer/glide on the way down. That said, this mission is the very first one in Squad's list and this very first part of the mission requires some pretty advanced skills: SRB thrust limiting, aerodynamic wing placement, hitting a tiny target unpowered without SAS. It might have been nice to have something to ease into the harder stuff.

Not sure what you mean by "direct burn", but if you mean pointing at a planet and firing your engines, it's mostly only a coincidence when it works. For Moho, for instance, it would never work even if Moho were co-planar with Kerbin because the angles are wrong. It sort of works for planets that are close to Kerbin (e.g. Duna and Eve) because their years are less than a factor of 2 different than Kerbin's year, thus the phase angle for transfers is slightly ahead of (Duna) or behind (Eve) Kerbin and the prograde or retrograde ejection angles point in those directions (though not exactly.)

This looks great; I'll keep it on my radar for my next career save. Any compatibility with life support and/or end-game mods--MKS, Interstellar, etc?

Forgive me for being dumb, but where in god's name are these settings located? All of my Kerbal costs are the same in the Astronaut complex UI. Is there another UI I'm supposed to use for recruiting?

That said, another piece of information you can pick up is that if you turn off ocean shaders, the floating tile problem disappears, even in 1.3, and everything else seems to work ok.

No worries, take your time. I was just providing another data point.

I get this kind of thing too. Seams in the terrain. Missing squares with stars in the bottom. Floating terrain in space.

Why isn't the touchpad used for the cursor, one wonders.

In the Board Game Geek forums for the excellent space board game Leaving Earth, a question came up about rendezvous to fly-by (as happens in The Martian, for instance.) I realized I don't think I've ever attempted this in KSP and wonder if anyone else has. If you're trying to catch a fly-by, do the normal rendezvous rules apply? (Speed up to fall back, slow down to catch up.) I'm tempted to set up a HyperEdited scenario and try it out.

For sure, but most responders didn't respond to the OP's post, but to the one from this month. Especially in the help forum, it strikes me as ok to necro a useful thread.

You don't need to match orbits, you just need an intercept that passes closer than about 20km. I usually am for 1km or less, but it's not necessary. Once you're within about 20km, it's all velocity control. You should be able to see the target and a readout of its distance. I tend to keep closing velocity at about 20x the distance e.g. at 20km I try to be closing at 400 m/s. 10x is probably more reasonable if you're starting out. You're wrong about vectors, you want your prograde marker on top of the target marker, and your retrograde marker on top of the anti-target. Another way of saying this is that you want to be moving toward the target. If your relative velocity is too high, point your vessel toward retrograde; if it's too low, point your vessel toward prograde. When you fire your engines, it will "pull" the prograde marker in the direction you're pointing and conversely will "push" the retrograde marker away from the direction you're pointing. You can use this to position the pro/retrograde markers over their respective target markers. If you keep the markers aligned and continuously slow down as you approach the target, your obit will align with the target's automatically. Once within 50m or so, dock using RCS. Note the tricky part of this is orienting your vessel properly, since there's no indication of this on the Navball. Using a helper mod like the Docking Port Alignment Indicator or the NavBall Alignment Indicator can help. On non-north/south docking ports, you really have to dock quickly. The relative vessel orientation will rotate through 60° every 5 minutes in LKO.

This sounds like a blast! I will check your file out as well.