Bacterius

Not so much the RAM usage (it's not using arbitrary precision arithmetic, and even if it did, at a constant speed you would be hard-pressed to go far enough out for memory to become a problem) but as the numbers involved get larger floating-point inaccuracies would start creeping in, eventually tearing your craft apart. I like to think of it as tidal forces from dark matter around the Kerbol system destroying unsuspecting spaceships...

Kessler would be proud

I think the point is that you can't maintain a consistent 1 m/s away from the black hole, because if you were capable of doing so, then you would be able to move faster than the speed of light without the influence of a black hole.

You can also get your lander to hover for a bit in search of flat terrain before touchdown if you are unlucky with your initial landing spot. Takes a bit of fuel but usually it doesn't take very long to locate a flat landing spot. If you use Mechjeb (or are good with thrusting) you can just thrust approximately 1:1 against the Mun's gravity and use your RCS to quickly move you over where you want to land, or you can just freehand it. The best is, of course, to know exactly where you want to land in advance, but this approach is strangely satisfying. Don't forget to put some lights on your lander for when you need to land on the dark side, it's really, really difficult to judge your altitude, horizontal velocity, or any other quantity of interest without a tool like Mechjeb in those situations. The stock flashlight starts lighting up the ground at around 400 metres altitude, iirc, giving you plenty of time to do any necessary corrections.

Bill: "We have no engines, no RCS, barely dipping into the atmosphere and running on backup oxygen. We're dead in the water. What do you suggest we do now?" Jeb: "I'll be right back." *exits pod*

I've found pure gliders do not work well in stock KSP. They just seem to fall like a rock without control surfaces and only manage to glide - barely - in the last few metres before crashing. If your design weighs more than a paperplane you also need a lot of wings to support it, which quickly looks ugly and detracts from the point of the exercise (which is to create good-looking planes). I think the main problem is that the aerodynamics model used is flawed and doesn't take aerodynamism at all into account - every part has constant drag regardless of its geometry, meaning that gliding would seem to be impossible as as a glider with no control surfaces and no engines would have no way of maintaining horizontal velocity while killing vertical velocity to air resistance and aerodynamic lift (which is what gliders are supposed to do) because both are equally lost to drag. It appears it's a bit more complicated than that in KSP but yeah, atmospheric drag effects are not very accurately modeled at the moment. But then I kind of suck at spaceplanes, so yeah, maybe I am just really bad at KSP I think infiniglide is built into the stock game (basically a hack used in place of proper lift forces) but you can try the FAR mod to have some more realistic flying. I haven't tried it myself but apparently it works well.

Even our computers here are regularly getting memory bits randomly flipped by cosmic radiation. It's not as unlikely as it sounds, some studies suggest it occurs once in 256MB of RAM over a month on average. You just don't notice it because it usually does not result in any data corruption, though if you have an unexplained crash, this could plausibly be it (unlikely, but the probability is far from negligibly low). Now Earth has a thick atmosphere, and a heavy duty magnetic field to protect us from the more powerful stuff. Mars has an exceptionally weak magnetic field at the poles only, and an extremely thin atmosphere. While rovers have more resistant equipment, hardened memory cells, and lots of error-correcting hardware and software, they really do get hit hard by all this radiation, and eventually will succumb to it.

Another option is to use downwards RCS (shift, I believe, or ctrl) to pin your rover to the ground and prevent it flinging itself into orbit. A good design is far superior, of course, but it can help in a pinch.

You can also lithobrake if you're feeling lucky (or are out of fuel). It occasionally works if you graze the surface, or have a lot of parts under your pod to absorb the shock. Of course, you, uh, you probably aren't getting home after doing that, but it doesn't matter because rescue missions are better. There's also a good thing you can do right after touchdown if you don't land on a flat surface - enable autopilot (or SAS or whatever it's called nowadays) to "lock" your craft into position, otherwise it might tumble down a slope with regrettable results.

You can put a docking port inside the cargo bay (top or bottom, but not both afaik) using part clipping. I agree it's not optimal, though.

Same, haha, I landed and my pod just popped off. Raaaahhhhhhhhh

It is stable for me in the sense that it does not crash even with a lot of mods, but the loading times are just horrifying compared to 0.20.

Maybe empty fuel tanks can be repurposed into living quarters by the crew on long interplanetary trips instead of being discarded.

It's done automatically - once the farthest fuel tank is used up, it goes to the next one, and when it runs out of fuel the engines stop. Then you probably hit space to activate the next stage, jettisoning empty tanks and activating more engines with their own fuel tanks, and so on. When there's no fuel left, well, that's it Most parts can carry fuel (look for "Fuel-crossfeed capable") but notable exceptions are decouplers (to avoid having your lower stage eat up all your upper stage's fuel). You can use the fuel duct part to have more control over how fuel is transferred. If you can post a screenshot of the ship in question we can see what it's supposed to do once the first fuel tank is empty.

I'd try to colonize the Moon somehow, setting up a permanent base and possibly creating some kind of biosphere. There's a lot of potential for scientific research there, and it really isn't that hard. I mean, we landed there decades ago. And also, by streamlining resource transfer from the Earth to the Moon and back, and installing a shipyard there, or in Moon orbit, we could make spaceflight very efficient. Then we design a fleet of interplanetary shuttles to go to Mars and create more colonies, and, if at all possible, rebuild a habitable atmosphere. Finally, I'd send plenty of very fast probes towards each exoplanet discovered, so that we can start collecting some serious data on them. Once all this stuff is up and running, figuring out how to make the warp drive work should be a walk in the park, and the rest is history (or will be, anyway). However, if nothing works out and it turns out interstellar flight is truly impossible, the next best thing would be working out a way to protect our little corner of the galaxy against spacebound threats. Obviously not aliens, but stuff like civilization-ending asteroids and powerful solar flares.

Okay, I did some science, see if you can reproduce. I took the 3-man pod, stuck a large heatshield (the one that fits neatly, with 1000 shielding points) underneath, then a decoupler and a mainsail. Hit infinite fuel, and circularized at around 150 km (be careful not to burn up during launch). Next I deorbited with a periapsis of around 20 km, decoupled the engine and turned retrograde for reentry. Heat shield temperatures/status and velocities, at various altitudes follow (this is without FAR): Alt. | Temp. | Shielding | Velocity ------------------------------------- 68 km | -116 C | 1000/1000 | [forgot to measure] 50 km | -3 C | 997/1000 | 2405 m/s 40 km | 295 C | 982/1000 | 2385 m/s 35 km | 401 C | 956/1000 | 2149 m/s 30 km | 433 C | 892/1000 | 1995 m/s 25 km | 415 C | 750/1000 | 1682 m/s 20 km | 384 C | 483/1000 | 1225 m/s 15 km | 433 C | 304/1000 | 733 m/s 10 km | 94 C | 304/1000 | 371 m/s 5 km | -28 C | 304/1000 | 193 m/s 1 km | 2 C | 304/1000 | 122 m/s See if you can reproduce these. Note that was a rather brutal reentry - a shallower angle of attack is suggested for most crafts (I typically aim for a 30 km periapsis). If that doesn't work, then it looks like a mod issue.....

Are you sure you put the heat shield in the right direction? They tend to spawn backwards in the VAB. Also this is rather obvious so likely not your issue but make sure your heat shield is facing prograde when you reenter.. Check the temperature of each of your parts, especially the pod compared to the heat shield, do they make sense? Otherwise I don't know, it works fine for me over here. EDIT: also check the g-forces - you might be decelerating too quickly which is destroying your craft, though that really shouldn't happen with the kind of orbits you give.

One of my first craft I put in orbit around Kerbin was a 15-20 ton (don't remember exactly) manned probe (the 3-man module) powered by three ion engines mounted on a tricoupler and lots of solar panels. It didn't have any functional purpose other than to look cool (and it did) so it didn't have much in the way of payload, however I really liked fine-tuning orbits. I hadn't yet learned rendezvous and docking so I never used it for that, but I did get the craft in a near-perfect synchronous orbit to an accuracy of 0.25 metres. I think that was mostly luck though, since I never managed to do it again But, damn, was it slow! Changing orbits was so painful I had to add an extra stage to my rocket to push my probe into a higher orbit rather than leave it in LKO to minimize burn times with the ion engines. Not really practical.

Just so it's clear, both jet engines don't flame out at the same time. If they did, nothing would happen. But in general one runs out of air before the other (it's kind of random) so that causes your craft to spin around, as if you had an off-center engine on your rocket and nothing to counterbalance the thrust it produces. A good way to prevent this is to only have one engine on the main axis, so that nothing can happen if it flames out and you don't have to sweat about that. Another good method is to gradually throttle down the engines as you get higher in the atmosphere (less flameouts) and when you're down to 1/3 thrust, shut everything off and activate those rocket engines. I've found you can get up to nearly 40k altitudes with good throttling and enough intakes and still be thrusting enough to make a difference.

Yes, basically dV is orthogonal to thrust, so you can maximize your dV by minimizing your thrust (i.e. less engine mass, more fuel mass) but you still care about thrust because: A) you actually need to be able to lift off from whatever celestial body you are on, that is, you require a TWR greater than 1 with a very low thrust you will spend forever in the atmosphere, bleeding away dV which could have been spent on orbital maneuvers instead had you actually gotten in orbit quickly C) you need to complete your burns in reasonable time, else you will be way off and will spend a lot of time thrusting, correcting, thrusting, correcting, and so on (unless you use an autopilot and can accurately compensate) D) as Frederf said above, an extremely low thrust can't take advantage of things like the Oberth effect in any appreciable way So using a single engine does not always result in the best possible craft. Or, in other words, it depends.

I tend to put my power modules (with all the solar panels attached) pretty far away from the station's dockings ports, so retracting them is usually not needed. I came horribly close to smashing into my panels a couple of times, and I clipped one panel once due to pilot error where I had to negate 35 m/s with rcs only... Now EVA is a different matter, for some reason my kerbals seem to gravitate towards my solar panels and always end up bumping into them, fortunately they aren't that brittle (the panels, I mean, not the kerbals).

Thanks! Yes, I figured since it takes so little dV to get to the Mun and back, I'd have the lander make the trip all on its own this time instead of the traditional CSM + lander approach. I probably have to thank the non-stock engines, though, with stock parts it would probably be a bit more difficult to design the lander to do everything (and less historically accurate).

Think of it this way - upon impact (or capture, if your craft can somehow survive a collision with a payload at orbital speeds without losing any parts), the momentum of the payload (mass * velocity) is transferred to the payload + target system, imparting a net change in velocity to the resulting object. That change in velocity will cause your object's orbit to change, possibly decaying into whatever body you're orbiting, or being ejected out of its sphere of influence altogether. As an example, if you have a 100-ton station orbiting at, say, 6 km/second (taking Earth-like speeds here) and send a 1 kg payload at it at a speed of 8 km/second, then we have: Momentum of target = 100 tons * 6 km/s = 600000000 kg * km/s (velocity towards the orbital tangent) Momentum of payload = 1 kg * 8 km/s = 8000 kg * km/s (velocity perpendicular to the orbital tangent) Velocity of payload + target after impact = sqrt(600000000^2 + 8000^2) / (100 * 1000 + 1) ~ 5999.94 km/s That corresponds to a change in velocity of 0.06 km/s = 60 m/s, taking the target craft slightly off course off the orbital tangent. Consider how much you can change your orbit with that much delta-v. Now consider a larger payload (or multiple payloads) and the fact that surviving an orbital collision with a 1 kg payload is basically impossible, and you now know why this isn't done Now if you meant not actually colliding, but having the payload come very close to the target (apoapsis near your station) and then "latching onto it", then something similar happens - the payload has no momentum at its apoapsis (its velocity is zero), yet when it docks with the target, the resulting payload + target system has a greater mass, and the same momentum as the target alone. As a result, its velocity will be lowered, causing the orbit to slowly decay. Reusing the above example, we have a 100-ton station orbiting at, say, 6 km/second (taking Earth-like speeds here) and there's a 1 kg payload hovering at its apoasis "snatched" by the docking port, then: Momentum of target = 600000000 kg * km/s Momentum of payload = 0 kg * km/s Velocity of payload + target = 600000000 / (100 * 1000 + 1) ~ 5999.94 km/s A loss of 60 m/s of velocity (60 m/s delta-v spent towards decaying the orbit). As an observation, in the first case (collision) the speed of the payload doesn't actually matter that much if it is much smaller than the target. From the point of view of the target, the main difference is that it gained mass for no additional momentum, leading to reduced velocity. The only way for velocity to the conserved is if the two momentum vectors add constructively and as such are precisely in the same direction, which is just another way of saying that the payload must be in the same orbit as the target This is really the same thing as having a train going at constant velocity on rails (suppose no acceleration and no friction), then putting a car on the rails in front of it. If the car survives the crash, then the train (and the car in front of it) will be going slower. Add enough cars and your train will grind to a halt. Add a huge obstacle (with a mass far greater than the train) and the train will simply smash into it and stop, period. Similarly, if you shoot enough bullets at such a train, it will stop, eventually. It will take a lot of bullets but every bullet that bounces off will steal some momentum from the train, and every bullet that stays embedded in the train increases its mass (and hence lowers its speed), ultimately the train must stop! Applied to an orbital situation, if it were possible to design materials to survive such high speed impact, your station would still need enough fuel to restore its original orbit after every payload is received, so at that point you may as well just use that fuel on the payloads themselves and get them into the proper orbit to spare yourself the collision (which is what we are doing). You won't save any fuel either way (conservation of momentum).

Hey fellow Kerbals, here's an image album of a recent Mun landing I did. I went for realism so there are no big explosions in this one (maybe next time). I also wanted to document it properly so there are lots of pictures. Mods used: - KW Rocketry, for the reskinned fuel tanks and engines, as well as the fairing - Mechjeb, for the orbital readouts and smart a.s.s when needed - IonCross Crew Support, for life support, though it wasn't particularly relevant (so just mostly to add an oxygen tank to the lander for looks) - IonHybridPack, just for the enlarged static solar panels (not the suntracking ones) - Deadly Reentry (aerobraking damage and heat shields) - B9, for the nifty protective cap part Enjoy

A lot of that delta-v is going to be spent thrusting against the atmosphere to get into a suborbital trajectory. Once you finally leave the atmosphere it takes maybe 200-1500 dV to circularize depending on your apoapsis (the lower the more dV you have to spend to reach orbital velocity at your altitude) and then most orbital maneuvers don't take that much dV e.g. going to the Mun is 800 or so (to get there and smash into it, that is - realistically you will want to get captured into a stable orbit and maybe land, oh and maybe return as well). Interplanetary isn't actually that much more expensive, and if you are going to a planet with an atmosphere you can use that to slow you down upon capture instead of thrusting retrograde at the periapsis, it saves a ton of fuel (see aerobraking).