problemecium

Giant illuminati symbol taking up 75% of post while the rest of us felt no need to post such a thing. 'nuff said.

TBH I generally skip Step 1. Once you've docked one or two times, it's far more efficient to use the old "'pull' the prograde vector and 'push' the retrograde vector" rule of thumb than to fiddle with getting an exact 0.0 m/s when still dozens of meters away from the target and thus subject to tidal forces. In short, my Step 1 is this: Use the engines (at low thrust in most cases) to make coarse adjustments to the prograde vector until it lines up with the target when still a few kilometers out. This ends up saving a lot of MonoPropellant, so I can easily get away with what's in the pod for most cases and not have to lug around the extra weight of dedicated RCS tanks.

This is good. With some expansions (e.g. a proper blurb about the RAPIER and perhaps something about Isp) and revisions it would make a good wiki article. In the interest of helping, here's some corrections I've spotted that need to be made: - Jet Engines: "flameout" in this context should be "flame out" ("flameout" is a noun while "flame out" is a verb. Blame the language) - Jet Engines: You mentioned low thrust and high efficiency, and then low thrust and low efficiency. Did you mean high thrust and low efficiency? - SRBs: "all of there fuel is stored inside" should be "all of their fuel is stored inside" - SRBS: "best used during assent" should be "best used during ascent"

This person's username sounds too much like "Illuminati Fellows" to be a coincidence o_°

Dude, your signature still says you're leaving as of August o_O Anyway. The RAPIERspike may be dead, but you can still do what Rune did here using a small nose cone, and presumably it still does a bit for drag:

Another bump for the Applied Sciences Division's newest product, the Portable Station Advanced and its accompanying Expansion Kit: This is an advanced edition of the Portable Station, which is less compact but more feature-rich, with several included ancillary probes, an expansion kit, and other upgrades. Details and download link in OP.

-18 Team Zero has added a single digit number of value positive one in the ones place to negative nineteen, which due to the definition of addition has caused the number, through its combination as an added with the number positive one, to yield a result one higher than negative nineteen, which is negative eighteen, having an absolute value lesser than the first addend but a real value greater.

My ships are safe ("Simulations" excluded)!

I can see why it's a little like Minecraft. It's a sandbox game with no plot - you just manage your resources and built what you feel like. In addition you can start and stop at any time (unlike LoL for instance), it's for the most part a single-player game (Minecraft has a multiplayer mode, but the base game has no built-in special multiplayer mechanics), and it's generally a "peaceful" game - it's about exploring and being creative rather than fighting (unless you make it about fighting). That said, KSP is really like Minecraft because you can build Minecraft in KSP:

I continue to proudly claim to have killed zero Kerbals since something like 0.20 (when I was just starting out and before I started counting). Of course I do make liberal use of quicksaves, but recently I've never had to load a quicksave because of a death - only because of loss of an unmanned craft, me seeing that Kerbal deaths were imminent, etc.

-17 Team Zero believes in readers' ability to find the difference between this and the previous number.

7/10 Okay but needs more crew cabins.

-14 Go Team Zero!

I put the Klaw on top of the HECS, because we're going to need it to recover anything.

It's good to hear there's a fix! For anyone curious, I can confirm that this is an EVE bug because I've seen it a couple times and I don't have Scatterer, Chatterer, or Kerbal Engineer. Also, I find that going into the map and back again tends to at least temporarily fix it.

It might be getting ignored because to go there all you need to do is walk around to the back of KSC and stand on the base of the Flag Pole. Okay they patched that but it's still funny. (There was a bug a few versions ago (1.0.2 or something) where when you do Science on the Flag Pole, because it contains the letters "POL" the game thinks you've been to Pol)

To expand on this, "Test X landed / at the launch site" contracts are basically free money because the part doesn't have to actually do any work. For an SRB, for instance, you can set the thrust limiter to 0 and drain out all the fuel, then go to the pad and press space, get full credit for the contract, and then just recover it for 100% return value and no fuel expenses

This should be in Forum Games, but whatever. - When it crushes the launch pad under its weight before you even ignite anything. - When part of its payload is an entire space station. No wait - TWO entire space stations. Much better. - When it's more economical to just stick engines on the payload, use its fuel, and refuel it in space than to build and fly a launch vehicle for it. (All three of these have actually happened to me xD)

^ That second part is actually news to me. I hadn't planned on splitting up the ship ahead of time, but I had briefly considered it due to severe part count lag. I guess I can still split it up high in Jool's SOI if I want. I'll figure it out when I get there :\

Heh. I had a dream last night wherein I built a huge, awesome space station in KSP. I know that feel, bro.

Meh. I don't know what it is I'm doing differently, but I rarely have any trouble at all with engine gimballing. And okay, I guess it does weigh a bit more than 1/4 of the Mammoth, but my point regarding trying to nerf it still stands, if it isn't bolstered. Making it more "accurate" would end up making it even more "OP", so if it gets nerfed it's doomed to become much less deserving of the KS-25 designation.

Oops. Blame the editor. No literally: the url for the link ended up being "/][b". Fixed

Okay so the stream was canceled due to a complete lack of responses, and I just went ahead and did the ejection burn, which brings us to... Part Eighteen: You Thought It'd Never Actually Set Sail, Didn't You? All the preparations were finally complete and Kidonia was at last fully ready to depart. It turned out to be a truly massive beast: Yes indeed, 1398 parts, 1332.42 tons, and at an expense to my space program of well over 3 million funds in total. When Kidonia actually began its long, tedious ejection burn from Kerbin's SOI, its sheer bulk made for an abysmal TWR of less than 0.2, leading to a projected burn time of over 30 minutes. While I had the option of splitting it into several smaller burns across multiple orbits, the already late departure time made me impatient to get going, so I stuck with it and went with a slightly less efficient and much more boring single burn. Due to the massive part counts involved, the physics engine was only able to run at about 8% speed - yes, that's right. Time in KSP was running about 11 times slower than realtime. Thus my 30 minute maneuver, by my calculations, would take between 5 and 8.5 hours. This in itself led me to dedicate an entire post just to the departure burn. In addition, due to some thermal changes that I believe came in KSP 1.0.5, I was unable to run the nuclear engines continuously at full power, so with breaks to cool off and a reduced throttle, the maneuver was projected to take even longer. Fortunately for me, way back at the beginning I had designed Kidonia to withstand up to 4x physics warp, a feature on which I was very happy to capitalize. My real time spent on the ejection burn was cut from possibly over 8 hours to just under 4. Due to the late departure, somewhat more delta-V was spent ejecting than planned, but hopefully my earlier fuel optimizations will end up helping. As it stands Kidonia burned 75,227 units of LiquidFuel, or just under 44%. Since I'll be leaving some components behind, as long as I maneuver judiciously within the Jool system I should, with any luck, have enough left to get back when I'm done. Of course I can't be certain until that time actually comes... As visible here, Kidonia is now on a transfer orbit to Jool, but it still has a small inclination correction to make on the way. Meanwhile, the KSC staff plans to take a very well-earned week-long vacation!

Mock it up in the VAB first. Feel free to use plenty of "scaffolding" (extra parts just to line things up, which you remove before launch), and the ports don't have to actually attach in the VAB - as long as they look attached and aren't embedded more than a smidgen into one another, they're close enough to dock when you launch it for real. P.S.: