VoidPointer

I really should have thought of conservation of momentum. That makes it make a lot more sense! Thanks! I'll edit the category thing. And yes, I meant purely in terms of the forces involved - I know reaction wheels aren't massless.

I've been wondering about the physics of a certain situation for a while now, but I don't know if the answer I have is right. So, suppose I have a rocket whose center of mass is not in line with the vector of thrust, due to an unbalanced load or whatever. I know quite well that this creates a torque on the rocket. Now, suppose I slap on enough control surfaces or SAS units to counteract this torque and keep the rocket pointed in one direction while I fire it. My question is this: Will this have any impact on efficiency? I can't visualize the free-body diagram of the forces and torques well enough to figure out if the whole force of thrust will act in the proper direction through the center of mass without losing any energy in the process (electric charge notwithstanding). I think it will work fine, but torque is one of those things I never really understood that well.

I use MJ and I'm thinking about adding KER into the mix, but I don't know if it has any features that MJ doesn't. But I don't think either should be added to the core game. Delta-v and TWR may seem like basic, intuitive concepts to a veteran player, but for someone just starting out, having all of these complicated numbers pop up would be intimidating. The most likely response would be for them to just give up because "how am I supposed to learn all these numbers?" However, if you give a player time to get used to rockets and get an intuitive sense of how rockets work first, they can then download a mod and start doing things like an engineer. Besides, legends speak of players who like to just eyeball it.

My first Mun landing, in the demo. I'd promised myself that if I could land on the Mun, I'd buy the game. I started off knowing nothing about orbits or delta-V, and thinking that going straight up was how you got to orbit, so obviously I wasn't the best at Mun landings. I stopped in midair several times on the way down. Looking back, I probably had enough delta-V to make a return to Kerbin if I knew what I was doing, but as it was, I ran out of fuel about a kilometer up. Luckily, I had overengineered my RCS so much that I was able to land safely using the translation controls! To this day that's still my favorite landing.

My personal canon is that there is no such thing as "Kerbal civilization." There is only a whole bunch of Kerbals at the KSC, making and flying rockets and doing science. They just appeared there one day and started doing rocket science. The idea that there's just a space program, nothing else, has a certain conceptual purity which I find appealing.

Another possibility is to shuttle your Kethane into low Kerbin orbit and keep a fueling station there. I'm not sure how the math works out on efficiency there, though.

Okay, I must have my L numbers wrong. I was thinking of the one that's on the other side of the planet from the Mun. Oops. It would probably work in the Kerbolar system, though. Maybe. Depends on the SoI to orbital path ratio... thing.

That said, it's (almost certainly) possible to set up an orbit that's so close to a Lagrangian one that it would probably take years for the difference to become significant. Especially at a point that isn't L2, since they require crazy levels of stationkeeping anyway. It's the power of IMAGINATION.

Sorry about the italics. I'm on a phone and there's no italics button in this thing. It's like trying to fly a mission IVA in here. I'll fix it when I get home and figure out whether BBCode works here. Edit: Okay, fixed it.

It's not that I can't. It's that I don't have time. I used to have time. Then my fiancée (whose computer cannot run KSP) was like, "Ooh, what's this game?" XD

So, I had heard of KSP, but it sounded way too hard. I mean, rocket science? Something called aerobraking? Whatever man. Lucky for me, one of my friends got into it and recommended it to me. My finances aren't in the best shape, so I downloaded the demo and made myself a deal: I would buy the game if I could put a man on the Mun. My personal Apollo program had far more failures than the real one. My first rocket was just the Mk1 pod attached directly to an SRB. I didn't expect much out of it, but I had no way to calculate dV (and only the barest notion of the *concept* of dV) and I didn't know about the parachute parts yet. About ten dead Kerbals later, I discovered staging and parachutes and decided that a good practice run would be to send a Kerbal on a Kerbolar escape trajectory. That was fun. So was figuring out how much dV I needed to get off Kerbin. I can't remember how many of my rockets tipped over and ditched in the ocean before I discovered how to make the ASAS work. But finally, I pulled it off, and with my new knowledge of very basic rocket design, I set off for the Mun, mostly by guesswork. I actually never crash landed on the Mun, which was miraculous, considering that I still hadn't been to the forums or anything. I did, however, run out of fuel on the way down. I had to use RCS translation controls to land the rest of the way. But it was a good landing, and Jeb walked away from it. I read the Apollo disaster speech and bought the full game. Then I discovered how to make REAL rockets, and discovered how much of a Whackjob my designs had been. No offense, Whackjob. You can actually *pull that off*. I cannot. I'll stick to asparagus. Eventually I got around to posting this. I've been lurking for months. I really need to find more time to play. I haven't even been to Duna yet.