FormulaRedline

I wouldn't mind an answer here either (or would also like to point it out as a bug). I took a 4 person tourist mission before I read the fine print. I haven't even been to Duna yet in 1.0...this seems like it should be much further along in the career given the delta-v requirements.

Before I had read the forum or knew this challenge existed, I attempted this mission. I launched a massive mothership to carry 8 Kerbals to Jool and land all the moons. The mothership contained a MK2 Capsule, a habitat, and a science module. It was joined by Jebediah flying up a SSTO space place (that was refueled in Kerbin orbit) and a more traditional lander. However, as it ended up, the lander did not have enough delta-V to accomplish the Tylo landing (on paper yes, in practice no). So despite the mothership returning with fuel to spare, I only got science from low orbit in Tylo. I'll have to send a return mission that can also hit Tylo and do this mission proper. Since the first mission mostly collected science and then transmitted back after processing (the space plane and lander each returned to Kerbal's surface, but that only gave me 2 sets of instruments), I should still have some collecting to do at the other moons as well!

mpink, if you draw a diagram with the thrust vectors from those engines you'll see why you get no self stabilizing effect. The "horizontal" components of the thrust all just cancel each other out and "vertical" component of the thrust provides the lift as per a normal engine. If you draw similar lift vectors on a dihedral wing, you'll find much the same thing. The difference comes in the airflow. Since an aircraft is also traveling forward, the lift vector of the rolled aircraft pushes the aircraft sideways (versus the rocket's direction of travel being generally aligned with the thrust vector). This is true for any type of wing, dihedral or not, but the dihedral makes the lowered wing of the side-slipping craft present a higher angle of attack than the raised wing, creating a wings level restoring roll moment. So the short version is that for either rocket engines or lifting surfaces the force vectors cancel (no rolling moment) and it's an effect cause by the geometry of the airflow over the wings. Here's the wikipedia article on the dihedral effect if you want some more detail: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dihedral_(aircraft)#How_dihedral_angle_creates_dihedral_effect_and_stabilizes_the_spiral_mode

Here's another vote for TrackIR integration. And another one for banning ignorant posters! Don't worry, you aren't the first and won't be the last forums users that don't get it. This happens for every game, even the obvious use cases, and it keeps on going despite your lack of understanding. From a dev point of view, this should be an easy sell. It not only adds immersion BUT it gets you on the TrackIR supported list. This is a good way to drive heavy sim users (generally people that can afford to buy $30 games...) to the game even if they've never heard of it before, and this is a game for simmers if there ever was one!