JayKay

I have MechJeb and KAC recently installed, but was running without add-ons for quite a while on this build. A couple days ago I went to check a space station in Kerbin orbit, and found it had no orbital track, and when I switched to it, it was motionless (surface speed was about 1mm/s according to MechJeb. I could not operate anything on the station or undock any ships. I looked back at the orbital map, and its status said "at VAB Tanks" I just upgraded to Windows 10 a few day ago, not sure if that matters.

http://i83.photobucket.com/albums/j314/Goof112/screenshot12.png The Leaning-too-much Tower of Pisa?

..or you can just tweak the landing coordinates slightly so the touchdown is offset a bit.

I use 4 Thuds around the bottom of the rocket early in my career to boost the thrust of the Skipper on the main stage until the Mainsail is available. JK

I had heard about the lack of SAS in the Stayputnik when I was doing my first satellite contract, so I put the in-line reaction wheel on it to compensate. Unfortunately, the in-line wheel does not count as SAS, so there was still no stability from that. I solved the problem in a NASA way. When I had to do a burn, I pointed the ship as close to the node on the nav-ball as I could and then I spun the ship on its axis. I think space programs call this "spin stabilized" and used it on a few space probes. Though the gyroscopic action isn't quite like in reality, it did allow me to accomplish the burns when I needed, and I completed the contract.

I've been trying to design ships so that insertion stages have control cores and enough control and fuel so that they can be deorbited after separation. If I expect to exhaust a stage while approaching a planet or moon, I try to aim the ship towards the planet before separating the stage so that it will impact and then adjust the ship to go into orbit afterwards. This doesn't always work out, though, so there is often debris left from various missions. I leave the debris that's left, though I sometimes think about building a debris collector ship (I just never get around to it...)

You either have to deploy the chute by hitting the spacebar to activate the stage or you have right click and hit "test part." Just right clicking and deploying won't work.

That looks so much like something I saw on Thunderbirds...I really didn't think something like that would fly.

Why does that thing look like it should have propellers?

Yeah, apparently, they used a lot of iron and steel in 50s sci-fi rockets. . . and apparently also the Enterprise-E (First Contact.) Magnetic boots would be useless on aluminum or titanium ship hulls. Of course, in Kerbal-space anything is possible.

They're Kerbucks; why make it complicated?

I use the radial ant engine to balance the mass of a side-mounted SCANsat scanner by mounting it on the opposite side of the body from the scanner (they both have a mass of .03.) I tweak the thing down to no thrust so it doesn't fire by accident and end up in the "this will not end well" thread. But more on topic, I only used them once or twice as ascent engines on small landers if there was a decoupler mounted below the lander for payload or something.

I think there are aliens or something on Eve that doesn't want me to go there. I lost two probes that were supposed to land there mysteriously in this save and a previous expedition crashed on Gilly. It showed a clear orbit, but when I was waiting for it to come around to the light side for a landing I suddenly saw the tell-tale sparkle of ground scatter appear and didn't have time to reorient the ship to avoid the ground. I found one of my probes marked as debris, and when I switched to it, I was looking at an asteroid. Yeah, Eve is trying to tell me something.

It took a few tries, but I put one down in one piece: I will have rematch someday and do it better next time.

OK, it's not a bug, it's a feature.

I wonder if that particular breed of kraken is associated with KAC. I had that happen when I switched to my Eeloo probe last week using KAC. I quit the game right away and when I reloaded all was well again when I selected the ship through the tracking station.

I've found that many asteroid trajectories are indicated as orbits around Kerbin on the map view once they are within a certain distance, but the reality is that once they leave Kerbin's SOI they are no longer in its orbit and return to heliocentric orbits.

Yeah, it would be nice if there was a way to attach a notepad to a command pod where you could write notes, such as what action group does what. I've been putting action group info on the drop down description in the VAB, but it would be really good to have that same note available and editable in-flight.

Actually, if you have a docking port on the nose of your ship (like I almost always do) you can select that port to "control from here" and it will straighten your nav ball problem out.

I picked cubic girders because they are a lot lighter, even with so many of them. As for the connections, all four trusses are connected, even without struts. The key is using Jr docking ports at the top of the frame where it connects to the upper quad adapter; the program allows multiple connections through docking ports in the VAB.

I haven't had much luck with the small wheels. They break easily and tend to make things top heavy. And they look dumb (IMO.) The thing which makes this thing unusual in my experience is that it involves splitting the structure in four directions and then successfully reintegrating them into one again, with all the parts actually connected properly.

Yeah, cargo bays are clean. I just can't get a science rover to fit in one of those.

Maybe this is old hat to some, but I never had success with this before. I came up with a way to carry a rover within the stack of a more or less normal rocket: It's made from a pair of quad adapters and a lot of small cubic girders. A Jr port holds the rover in place by its back end. Four small decouplers allow the rear of the frame to be jettisoned while descending so that the rover is free to be deployed after the ship has landed. Then the port holding the rover is decoupled, and it drops on its nose. It hits with the stack of cubic girders first which kicks it back onto its wheels, ready to rove. I had strapped rovers to the side of ships in past, or made them out of hab modules which were just part of the stack, but this struck me as a more elegant solution; at least it stays within the outline of the upper stage this way. It can also be transfered from one ship to another because it has Sr ports at each end. I also successfully rigged it as a parachute drop from altitude and used sepatrons to blow the one half of the frame away after touching down so the rover could be deployed.

I put down a hab lander alongside the main ship that way. I set up the chutes to deploy one after the other and separated the docking ports early. They stayed together until the main ship's chutes deployed, then the hab module dropped a short ways until its chute also opened all the way, then they drifted down within metres of each other until touching down.

That's just crazy talk.