Kasuha

Okay, this is funny. Apparently there is no friction between two ships. Good to know. Both the Kerbal and the rover are in "Landed" state and clearly the only thing that gets evaluated are collisions, not relative movement or friction.

I would probably try something like this. The Claw stays for the harpoon while legs are more of aesthetic part. Of course you can probably also scale it down using mods.

There's only one vessel suitable to carry all the Hype.

I'm very skeptical about part deformations. It's not about complexity of geometry, GPUs are usually not very busy when playing KSP. But collision meshes would have to become way more complex as well - and that would mean increased load on physics engine. Regarding "Kerbal goo", I'm not sure what to think about that. Yes, all pointers seem to lead us to conclusion that it's about Kerbal death, but I would probably also not find splattered Kerbal very amusing. It's supposed to be hilarious.

If your ship has a probe core rather than a command pod with a Kerbal, it may be that it ran out of electricity during the time warp. Solar panels, nuclear electric source, enough battery capacity, and/or a launch clamp may be all you need.

It relieves the game from remembering what stage number is your command pod. The last thing to stay is always stage 0, regardless, of how many stages you dropped while getting to that state. Imagine you have a 5-stage rocket, spend two stages getting it to orbit, then build another 5-stage rocket, get it to orbit as well, and dock with the first rocket making it into another 5-stage rocket. How should these stages be numbered? If the game had to remember them, it would be 5-4-(3/5)-4-3. That does not look pretty. You'd likely also not like if your first stage to drop was always stage 0. The way it is implemented, stages keep their numbers as long as you don't start doing funny things.

The whole setup is provisional at the moment. We don't have all biomes yet, maybe we even don't have all planets in the system yet. Also the part set is not complete and so isn't the tech tree. Nobody has a clue how big the tree will be and how much science points will it require to uncover. The game is set up to be playable - rather easy than hard - until all the main prerequisities are in place. I am certain that once these prerequisities are completed, we will get one or more balancing releases aimed to make the game more fun ... which I believe in this case also means maybe slightly less challenging at the beginning, but significantly more challenging at the end.

You can do fine tuning on current maneuvers using mouse wheel over maneuver icons. If you're careful you can fine tune the maneuver almost in cm/s. Not exactly comfortable in all situations but usable. And of course there is the PreciseNode mod which AFAIK allows doing all kinds of things with maneuvers and can help as a workaround to majority of current issues with them.

Notice how far the inclination line is from the closest approach marker. You're missing Gilly slightly above or below its orbit. To have certain intercept, you need to have the closest approach at the inclination node. So just apply a short normal burn in a suitable place to move the inclination node to the closest approach and you'll be able to get an intercept. I don't recommend matching inclinations completely. It's usually easier to work with slight inclination difference and to position the inclination point precisely to the meeting point than to match planes perfectly and keep that match throughout all burns of the approach. Therefore the 'suitable place' for the normal burn might does not have be the inclination point.

It is hard to tell whether the behavior is intended or if it was just omission in the process of implementing action groups and tweakables. If you consider it a bug, the right place for suggesting bug fixes is the support forum. I agree with you it is annoying and something should be done about it. Hopefully as the game gets near feature complete, devs will have more time to make the game more comfortable to use.

If there is any friction at all, I guess there will not be too much of it. Remember how far can Kerbals keep rolling after a collision. Experiment with longer car could tell us whether there is any friction between two ships or not.

I wish all the followers of the "Realism is the only true path" religion went away playing FAR and NEAR and RSS and showed some respect to people who don't share their belief. Seriously, people, you're annoying.

You know, there are two ways how to play a game. One is to come to it with some idea how it should work, and then cry and swear and ask for fixing it because it does not work according to that idea. That's obviously what you do. The other way is to come and figure out how it actually works, then use this knowledge to have fun. That's what I do. Stock drag model works perfectly fine, regardless whether you like it or not. It is not realistic. Duh. There's almost nothing realistic in KSP wherever you go into detail. KSP is a game and is still in development. I'm not going to be crying or swearing when devs come and change drag model into something more realistis. Actually I will probably like it. But until they do, I'm fine with the drag model as it is. Please realize that what you're trying to put as "FACT" is just your opinion. There is no rule how physics in a game should work. It's always up to developers to decide. For players, the game is the rule.

The matter is to understand how stock drag model works. I'm not suggesting it's realistic, but it is deterministic and once you understand it, actually quite easy to use. In my opinion, best way of building spaceplanes is the way where you don't need to transfer fuel to make them stable.

Demo has other "peculiarities", and the part connection system was completely rewritten since when the demo was released. Seriously, these "issues" or "bugs" are absolutely negligible in 99% of cases. The remaining 1% are cases when your space station starts resonating and either self-destructs or at least destroys its solar arrays. I don't see them fixed in the game anytime soon, there are other, much more important things to do and fix.

For experiments and research, it is good to have a sandbox save. Then you don't have to be concerned about your cosmic program even if you completely break something.

Oh, these are peculiarities of the physics engine. You could try the self-destructive ship, all you need is to deploy it on launchpad: - go to the VAB and start with the standard command pod - attach the long I-beam on top of it - switch to 4x symmetry and attach four horizontal long I-beams to the top of that first I-beam - add small fuel tank at the end of each I-beam Edit: I would also suggest you to start using Imgur albums. They have nice support here on forums, take less space and lower the page loading time.

I don't think KSP is intended to be about math, angles, mass, and delta-v. Actually, KSP devs did a lot in order to allow you flying into space without you actually knowing them. They are an option, and they give you an edge. The more you understand the math under the hood, the more effective you can be in the game. But it is not a requirement. In my opinion, the intent is for the game is to give you "feel" for orbital mechanics. You don't need to understand all the math and you still can understand orbital mechanics intuitively and be able to guess what is good and what is bad. Many players declare MechJeb, KER or VOID are essential for playing the game. In the end, they don't actually need to understand orbital mechanics, they just know which button to push for their ship to do the right thing. I don't think it is any better than following tutorials. They're just following slightly different tutorials.

I think the most correct image of how parts of the same ship behave is this: Each part has a center (CoM) where all mass of the part is located Each part has a set of points by which it is attached to other parts. Some of these points are predefined (axial points), some are ad-hoc set up during build (radial points). These points are rigid relative to the part center. You can imagine these points floating in space around CoM, or connected to the CoM via rigid sticks. Most important point is that this structure is 100% rigid and does not shear, bend or twist under any kind of stress. Parts are connected by their attach points. Initially, attach point of one part exactly touches attach point of the other part. These two points are held together by a "spring" that allows some displacement, bending, or twist in the connection, and applies counteracting force proportional to amount of displacement, bending, or twist already in place. That makes the connection flexible while parts are rigid. A decoupler is exactly this case - a part that has two attach points, one touching corresponding ad-hoc radial attach point of the center tank, the other touching corresponding ad-hoc radial attach point of the booster. A strut may be (and probably is) a different case. Here, the strut itself may be the "spring". As well as connection between two normal parts is trying to hold attach points of two parts on top of each other, the strut is trying to hold two distant attach points in their exact relative distance and position. And the distance may have some effect on behavior and "springiness" of the connection.

I don't think it would mean and noticeable improvement for spaceplane stability and it would cause major stability problems for rockets.

It is not clear to me from your images how exactly is your ship wired up and you use mods I don't so I can't really take a look at your ship. I'll leave this here: Fuel Flow Rules It's probably not in fuel lines between each tank and its two engines, but in some other fuel lines you have there or perhaps how your parts are attached to each other.

Both the decoupler and the strut are sticks to the physics engine. Don't get fooled by their model, even the decoupler has just one point by which it is connected to the central tank, and one point (not necessarily directly against the first point, depends how exactly you attach it) by which the SRB is connected to it. 3D geometry of parts is only applied for collisions between different ships, not between parts of single ship. So the ship itself behaves like if it was built from rigid sticks with springs at each connection point between two sticks. So the central tank, the decoupler, the SRB and the strut together form kind of a pantograph device and it definitely has room to move even in up/down direction. If you look into the .craft file, you can find exact coordinates of each of these connection points. And you may notice that they're not integer numbers, they have a long row of decimals each. However well aligned they look on the ship, they're not aligned perfectly. When the thrust is applied, initially small deviation further increases by the applied force (kind of positive feedback until it is dampened by stiffness of the connection).

They can just put two of them there, one on top of the other. You attach a part and use up one node, then you attach another part and use the other one. Current nodes are not oriented so it's irrelevant which direction will the part go. And once they make them oriented (hopefully, in the future), one can be oriented outside and one inside.

For people with slow connections, there's also profile -> general settings -> thread display options -> show images

I comprehend. I don't disagree with your suggestion to add image storing in form of jpg as an alternative to current storing in high quality png format. The thing I disagree with is that it's going to save the world. It will not save the world. It will help you to upload your images. Or rather, make that process slightly more comfortable as you'll not need to convert them manually which is the option now. And last but not least, there's no way to make whole world respect your connection limits and start uploading images in reduced quality. Such request is selfish and completely unrealistic. But there is still a way out. There are internet proxies that will download images for you and send them to you in reduced quality. I don't need to use them so I don't know any particular one but I'm quite sure they exist. Maybe there's a Google service for that, too.