Starstrider42

Please don't. I love TAC, but it and several other mods with storage containers have already bloated my VAB parts list. Adding even more variants will just make the game needlessly complex (i.e., it takes forever to find the specific part you want) without really adding much to the gameplay.

I suggested multispectral because it's the closest in-mod analogue to imaging cameras -- which is what a probe would realistically use for a "first look" map of a planet. The altimeters are basically radars which, like their real-life counterparts, have a fairly narrow beam. But if it's not happening, oh well. It was a long shot anyway.

This sounds like a question where screenshots would help.

The Wiki page on Jool has a pretty lengthy discussion about how to land (and not land) on Jool. Short answer is "yes you can, but you're openly inviting bugs by even trying".

What they said. It helps if you decide which action group fits which situation (e.g. orbital insertion, engine changeover, pre-reentry), then write it down somewhere. Then meticulously stick to the script. My current career game is pretty much entirely based on multi-part ships, so I can assure you this works.

Sort of. I've noticed that (at least in 0.23) flags are assigned on a part-by-part basis. So if you've launched your orbiter and lander separately, they will keep different flags even after they've docked. Or you can edit the save file to change the flag on just your lander. I assume that the flag planted by kerbals is set by the flag of the part they last came out of, though, so I doubt you can have separate flags for the lander and the... well, flag.

Seconded. I also got problems past 100 debris on a laptop. The quickest solution is to lower the persistent debris limit in the options menu.

I'm using Custom Biomes, so that last part isn't a problem. And I already know how to edit the config file -- the problem is that, without some tradeoff, it feels like cheating to me. I want the original (orbital) scanners to be superior, because orbits are harder than flybys. And since the use case I'm thinking of requires both large FOV and large maximum altitude...

Yes. Type in something in the box labeled "manual delay", then hit enter (I can't tell you how many times I forgot to), then use keyboard/mouse as usual. All commands will get delayed, although things like manual slewing won't show up in the queue. Oh, and set manual delay to zero when you're done. Another thing that's easy to forget, until you start wondering why your ship "isn't responding".

I already knew about Orbit Manipulator; that's not the point. If you have only two hours (of in-game time) to make a burn that takes four hours (again, of in-game time) to complete, you won't get enough delta-V even if you warp through it in a couple seconds of player time.

D'oh! Didn't notice the button lurking under the subassembly drop area. Thanks!

I think it depends on the mission plan. It probably can be made to work, especially if you can discard the nuclear engine once you're done with it. (To clarify: my example was specific to large burns around Kerbin. For smaller planets, with smaller delta-V requirements, an ion engine might still cut it. It's just important to remember that acceleration actually can matter for things other than launch and landing).

Hi, I've found that I can't store more than 10 subassemblies in the VAB before the list starts to flow off the page, and there's no obvious way to scroll said list (e.g. mousewheel has no effect). Does anybody know a way to use long subassembly lists?

No, you're thinking 1E9. The "E" is shorthand for "×10^"

The Voyagers didn't use any inner-system gravity assists. You're thinking of Galileo and Cassini, both of which happened in a much more budget-conscious era (and which needed a lot of on-board fuel for orbital maneuvers). To answer the OP, a gravity assist by Kerbin is likely to only work once, because your orbit changes with every assist (I think somebody told me your trajectory specifically gets more parallel to Kerbin's). So you won't save a whole lot of delta-V. And chaining gravity assists would require more computational resources than any KSP player has at the moment. I'm pretty sure NASA has people whose *entire job* is to work out clever launch windows, it's not something you can do on the back of an envelope. With that disclaimer, here's how to get the orbit you want: Kepler's third law says the semimajor axis of an orbit, cubed, is proportional to the period, squared. So to get an orbit with double Kerbin's period, you want 2^(2/3) = 1.5874... times Kerbin's semimajor axis. The semimajor axis is the flat average of the periapsis and apoapsis. If the periapsis is at Kerbin's orbit, the apoapsis must be at 2.1748... times its orbit for things to work out. Kerbin's semimajor axis is 13,599,840,256 m, so you want to set your apoapsis to 29,576,961,202 m. In practice, it's probably easier to set your orbit by the period, not the apoapsis, if you have a mod that lets you do that.

I actually used a similar design for an ion-powered Dres probe -- an ion engine pushing 10 tons, about half of it xenon. I didn't realize until I got into orbit that, with a TWR of 0.1, it would take more than a full orbit to get to escape speed. By the time I got into a high enough orbit that I could do a reasonable escape burn, I'd already used too much fuel and had to scrap the original mission. So my advice is to go with the nuclear engine, and save the ion engine for light (up to 2-3 tons) spacecraft. It's not just a question of player patience, but whether you actually have time to do the maneuvers you need your ship to do.

Oops, sorry. RAAN is "right ascension of ascending node"; sometimes called "longitude of ascending node". atmoHgt is the total height of the atmosphere (just look at the original file, the values are way too big for the other two). GM is the gravitational parameter, or the planet mass multiplied by Newton's constant. For example, for stock kerbin it's 3.5316×10^12 m^3/s^2; I'm guessing for RSS you should look for a number that's about 100 times higher. As for whether mean anomaly is measured at the RSS epoch value, I think you'll need to ask an RSS expert for that. But probably.

Just copy the old file, and replace the numbers with those in the RSS config file. Comparing it to the wiki, it looks like the units in the bodies file are: epoch: unknown (seconds?) sma, radius, atmoHgt: km inc, raan, arg, mean: degrees gm: km^3/s^2 (= 1,000,000,000 m^3/s^2) You shouldn't need to change any of the other fields.

The second of mhoram's links is quite good, since it also gives you a sense of how precise your timing needs to be. A standalone program for slightly more advanced use (including gravity assists, which are nearly impossible to do "winging it") is http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/36476.

This is the kind of thing where practicing on the launchpad REALLY helps. The trick to getting two docking ports to work on the ground is to make your "base" (heavy and/or immobile) docking port very slightly higher than your rover docking port. That way, the attraction between the two will lift your rover off the ground, which doesn't cause much trouble. Doing things the other way around (pulling your rover into the ground and/or trying to lift a very heavy ship) tends to not work. EDIT: By very slightly, I mean a tiny fraction of the docking port size. Basically, it's a way to make sure any errors in alignment work in your favor.

Another way, that's sometimes easier and sometimes harder: move your mouse over the ship until a diamond with a label appears (usually near the ship's center of mass). Double-clicking on the diamond will (usually) also set it as a target.

Also, try to fire the jets in quick bursts instead of holding down the key. You'll have a hard time grabbing and holding onto the ladder if you're going at high speed.

Right-click on the lab module to access its features: Store data from experiments (just like a command pod, except you can store "the same" experiment multiple times) Boost transmission fraction for experiments (the option will show up anywhere you can see the experiment results, you don't have to store them in the lab first) Reset any single-use experiments that have been disabled

I think everybody agrees on that.