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And Then It Just Clicked...


Kommikazi

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Hello, I am starting this thread for people to share what for them just "clicked" for them. I'll give an example from just today...

I have been searching the forum and YouTube trying to understand docking(specifically the rendezvous), I never could, at least not until today. I was looking at the physics of it and then it hit me like a rapidly decelerating crew cab Mk1. The way to rendezvous two ships in orbit is to take one into a higher or lower orbit to match velocities. I am sure for many of you this is child's play, but for me I had not realized it until a few minutes ago. I will provide a few pictures below, showing how I figured this out, but I am very glad that I did so because I can now build better space stations than one launch versions. Hope this sparks some discussion!

https://imgur.com/jIs3efS

https://imgur.com/IdOqvFb

https://imgur.com/I6is6BB

https://imgur.com/uVkMC2F

(Edit: Hope that fixed it...)

 

On to some Space Stations!

Kommikazi

 

 

Edited by Kommikazi
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I can't think of something quite like what you're talking about, though it probably happened a fair few times, but I have an example of a different sort of epiphany:  the "bolt from the blue".  

I never really bothered with the tutorials, which is unusual for me.  I fooled around in the demo long enough to justify the full purchase and then dove straight into career.  But I recently decided to do the asteroid wrangling one because I want to do that sometime hopefully soon and don't want to screw it up.  

The tutorial vessel had RADIALLY MOUNTED ENGINES!

I had conceptually limited myself to the adapters, and they're great and all, but this idea was revolutionary for me.  I immediately used it in a heavy lander design.  

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I  was  always  matching  orbits  then  wasting  all  my  dv  trying  to "catch  up" to  the  other  ships.

Then  one  day  I  was  watching  Scott  Manley  and  it  just  suddenly  clicked  and  made  since.

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For me learning to rendezvous was easy, but for the longest time I couldn't dock to save my life. I learned how to dock by practiceing using kerbals on EVA, I had an epiphany that flying a kerbal back to its kapsule is the same as docking to ships, just a lot bigger! After that I've had no problem docking ships! 

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14 minutes ago, Cydonian Monk said:

For years I just didn't grok some of the more detailed parts of polar and spherical calculus. Then I played KSP for a bit and it all just clicked. 

Yep.  Not KSP related, but back around 1980 (yes, when dinosaurs looked terrible on a movie screen because they were stop-motion animated instead of CGI), I took three tries to pass basic calculus in college -- the third time worked because, instead of teaching it as "you don't need to know what this is good for, just learn it," the professor did things like deriving the volume formula for a sphere by integrating the area of an infinite number of zero-thickness slices (or cylinders, I think he did it both ways), derived the formula I'd learned in high school for distance under constant acceleration by integrating the simple equation of motion with a time-variable speed substituted for the velocity, and so forth.  All of a sudden it made sense -- because I could grasp it in a visual or physical way instead of having to treat it as "pure" mathematics.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

A few days ago SSTO's were like a far off dream to me, but I decided I would attempt it anyway. My SSTO failed miserably so I looked up how to fly an SSTO. Someone told me RAPIERs work better at higher altitudes and then it clicked. I flew my SSTO up to around 10000m and then nosed up and boom my apoapsis was rising! My next flight was a success and now I've made an SSTO that can land and return from minmus.

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