nekogod

Some people may not want to use mods or may want a totally cheat free game as hyperedit really breaks immersion. Other people may even want to role play building and testing various iterations of potential landers before making the trip

Intel i7 4470k GTX 780 500GB SSD 16GB RAM Linux Mint +64bit KSP Seems to run fairly well

Pressing Z gets you instant throttle up. Technically you should start the burn slightly after 1m30s, even pressing shift to throttle gradually. This is because your TWR increases as you burn fuel, whereas maneuver node burn times are calculated using current weight and do not account for the increase in acceleration. So a 3 minute burn for 720m/s actually becomes something like 2m40s because at the start of the burn you might be able to accelerate at 4m/s^2 but by the end of the burn you might be up to 5m/s^2

Interesting so something like the aerospike would have almost identical thrust at sea level as in vacuum

Tip: The direction of the light pulses travelling around the orbit shows which direction you need to orbit in.

I've not had a debris hit in orbit, I did once have a ridiculous lifter though that had to stage early, a fact I forgot when I decided to put it in a retrograde orbit. As I dropped the first stage at a height of 1200m or so I realised my mistake too late as it fell down onto and destroyed the VAB.

Ah my bad, it's not one I'm overly familar with, I've been using KER to work it out for some time.

I could be wrong but, I didn't think g was actually used in the delta v calculation. Mostly because 100% g is only subtracted from the delta v budget when the rocket is pointing straight up.

With an AP of 565km you'll have hit the atmosphere at some speed a PE of 44km would not have been low enough, ie the atmosphere is still too thin at that point to have slowed you down into a sub orbital trajectory. Some real life craft do this on purpose, skimming the atmosphere and bouncing back to space, they do this for multiple orbits to slow down gradually to reduce stress and heating of the spacecraft. As for an absolute floor pretty much any PE under 30km will take you sub orbital, at least at the speeds you would normally see in the game, 2-3kms from the mun/minus 3-4kms from interplanetary. I'm not 100% sure how the delta v calculation works for bodies with an atmosphere, Kerbins orbital velocity at 70km is about 2200kms I would assume you take the delta v needed to get to 2200kms at the ground and in space and take the average between the 2, this I'd have thought would get you a figure roughly in the right ballpark. 9.8 is correct for the gravity, it's also true this is earths, but that is because kerbin is modelled on earth, they have the same gravity. Essentially it means that were there no atmosphere to create drag an object dropped on earth/kerbin would accelerate at 9.8m/s^2, the gravity of the other planets is on the KSP wiki http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Main_Page

If you want a way to do it without fuel lines and aren't opposed to modding, then tac fuel balancer works a treat, just open it up and select 'balance all' and it will move fuel around so all tanks drain evenly. It's worth noting that if you do this then your upper stages can be drained of fuel as it can be transferred across decouplers. You can prevent this by locking the tank though. Also this mod will allow fuel transfers before you have the required upgrades to do so manually.

I've got a very boring video I made for another thread that shows me building a simple 2 stage rocket that goes to orbit and back. It's pure stock bar KER and DR (which leads to a hilarious chute failure). It starts with 5.4kms delta v and makes orbit with over 700ms delta v left so around 4.7kms to orbit. Not perfect, but as you can see in the video there is nothing fancy or complex about the ascent path, pretty much any craft with similar TWR's following a similar path will get similar results.

I've made a short video where I build and fly a very simple 2 stage rocket to orbit and back, I do manage to neglect to use the engine slow down enough though and break my chute, killing Jeb =( I do have a couple mods, KER and Deadly Reentry, neither affect how the ship flies and the construction is fully stock. It's up but is poor quality at the moment, once youtube have properly processed it, it'll be HD One thing to note, this rocket has about 900m/s more delta v than needed to get to orbit if you fly perfectly, so there should be plenty of margin if flown badly and can be used to practice to get as close to that 4550m/s ish of delta v to orbit. As you can see I don't do anything particularly complex and get it there about 150m/s over par.

To be honest I would fully expect them to release 1.0 and say right that's it we're launched everyone will need to start a new game from here including new vessels. It's rare in games that you can carry over beta progress to release.

It depends really, planes usually get bird names, falcon this, eagle that kestrel whatever etc Rockets usually get a name based on the function, ie Orbiter or Sky Lab or Duna explorer etc

KSP: We have ignition!

Yeah but it's way more fun to build a ship to collect and deorbit said debris

Can you just not mute the video?

If you haven't unlocked launch clamps yet you can use a stack decoupler and a girder under each engine and put the decoupler in the same stage as the engine.

In the editor at the top (not sure if moved in 0.90) there are a couple buttons, one is action groups. What this lets you do is group several actions to a single key. For example on an SSTO plane you can set your jet engines to deactivate and your rocket engine to activate with a single key press. Or you can group your science junior, mystery goo and gravioli detector to all fire at the same time with a key press. You can also use them to stage, incidentally they are not restricted to the small delay between stages so you can stage several times in rapid succession. A tutorial on youtube that I found

Are you able to use caps lock to dampen your inputs? This may make the craft controllable enough to complete your mission. It's a bit odd they chose to remove the ability of the STAYPUTnik to stay put.

I found that it was much easier to set up the first satellite by taking a much steeper path to orbit. It's a little heavier on the deltaV requirements, but the satellite remains above the horizon longer. Even better if you can burn straight to keostationary altitude.

...And you thought Ions were slow Sometime in the next hour, Rosetta will perform the ‘pre-separation manoeuvre’. This is a thruster burn to place it on course for the separation point, when it will release Philae. The burn is expected to last about 6 minutes. It will alter Rosetta’s velocity by about 0.46m/s and send it heading in towards the comet.

http://newstonight.co.za/content/joystick-used-land-apollo-15-mission-1971-auction

I hear you about Minmus, the last ship I sent there had all kinds of spooky happenings! First it bugged on the launchpad then fell through Kerbin. When I eventually got it in the air it came time to drop the first stage only 3 of the 4 radial engines dropped and it spiralled out into a mountain side, without any changes whatsoever it worked perfectly the next time. I was then completely unable to use timewarp at all even when coasting as whenever I came out of time warp a random part would explode (the flightlog said it had crashed into the launchpad). I eventually got to Minmus and on my descent the entire lander exploded about 6000m from the ground leaving nothing but a landing strut plummeting to the ground.

There is actually a scenario within the stock game which starts you in orbit around the mun I believe, the ship you're given is in 2 parts and is perfect to practice docking. I managed to undock, land on the mun, take off and redock on my first go. Granted though I had watched a video once on how to do it, which took most of the mystery out, the rest was a bit of trial and error. Took a little while to get the rendezvous and I probably used more RCS than I needed to, but was still relatively straight forward. Trying to get to orbit from sea level on Eve however...