palioxis1248

Thanks! Although I'm running into problems trying to delete the Science progress; the resultant Save File refuses to work on KSP. Any pointers?

It's important that your escape trajectory is aligned opposite the direction that the Mun is travelling. This gives you the biggest decrease in Kerbin periapsis for a given amount of fuel. As to where you should start burning around the Mun to achieve that, barring calculation it's mainly a matter of trial-and-error.

Ahhhh, I only have Wordpad and Word. Any text editors to recommend? EDIT: Does Notepad work?

So 0.24 is out, and I kind of have a save going already. I want to completely reset the science and part progress (including science data stored in the labs), ceteris paribus. Anyone knows how to do this, or could direct me to a tutorial on how to do this? For starters, I'm not even sure how to open the save file and edit it. Thanks in advance!

Only the planets? In most of my figurations by the 22nd century we've hopped to the nearest stars in the very least.

I read somewhere that it's technically possible for dust/plasma clouds to form self-replicating structures, if sustained appropriately and not dispersed.

A 100-ton payload SSTO is in the works! Hopefully I can get it on here soon!

Gee thanks! But I see you didn't count the extra NERVA pod... In any case, thanks a bunch for the awesome challenge and the awesome score!

Doing a 5 degree inclination change with control fins while barrelling through Laythe's atmosphere at 7kps just 18km above the surface.

How I do solar rendezvous is the Zeno method. Inefficient, but hey, we've got ARM parts. Burn for escape, while making sure your escape trajectory seems to be pointed in the general direction of the asteroid. Once you're out of Kerbin's SOI, try and get a good camera angle that allows you to see both your trajectory and the asteroid's trajectory. From here on in, assuming you've packed enough fuel, you can actually treat the two trajectories as straight lines. Then setting your maneuver nodes becomes somewhat more intuitive. Now here comes the reason why this is called the Zeno method. On your first node, don't aim for a close pass any shorter than 100km. After you've completed the burn, warp to close half the distance to your intercept. Set up another node, and this time you should be able to aim for a closer pass, ~50km. Repeat ad infinitum until you've got <1km close approach. Then it's just standard rendezvous.

Twice as large?? Hot Damn. Seems like I have a bunch of struts and RCS quads to rip out. But even with the doors closed it's really alright, the ship in question is just a to-orbit shuttle, doesn't need EVA capability. Just have to make sure I don't need a reason to bail out. Ever. But thanks a bunch for the advice!

Actually the real reason I opined for tracking beacons instead of just rendering for every booster with parachutes on or something like that is this: Say your 1000 part rocket undergoes rapid spontaneous unplanned disassembly at 20km. Not saying that it would happen, but let's assume pessimistically that the thing breaks apart into as many pieces as you've got parachutes, each piece attached to a parachute. Now the game will try to render each piece, even if the piece was not designed to be recovered/was actually part of a single piece in the first place. The worst is when you have your jumbo 64 tank with 8 parachutes on it, and it explodes and all 8 parachutes end up getting rendered for no reason. So yeah. I felt beacons would be more elegant, because the game only ever need render as many parts as there are beacons. Actually come to think of it, I just realised that activating beacons should be a stageable event, such that they only ever activate if everything goes as planned. Then the game need not render them at all if your ship just blows up. As for why I'm not comfortable with the simplified physics calculation idea, I think cpast's post pretty much explains it.

The Mk 3 Cockpit seems to enjoy belting out "Hatch is obstructed" messages to me no matter how empty the area surrounding that little door is. Anyone has advice on this area?

Thanks for all the great answers, guys!

Thought about that too, but the problem is short of modelling the whole process for itself it's pretty hard for the game to decide what constitutes a successful landing. Any rules of thumb implemented would discount certain... interesting recovery methods methinks. I dunno. Maybe this is easier...