AlexinTokyo

I use this strategy on my career mode for two reasons: 1. It means I can miss KSC by quite a large margin and still get OK fund recovery. Since I use the Trajectories mod, this isn't much of a benefit for equatorial orbits, because I can pretty much pinpoint the landing site, but it's nice for saving time with inclined orbits which don't pass directly over KSC every revolution. 2. TNSTAAFL. Because of the 6% difference between launch cost and recovery value there are no longer any free parts (launch clamps, for example, cost nothing unless you use this strategy), and testing parts or vehicles on the pad also has some cost, which provides an incentive to optimise testing programs. The real advantage of this strat is for people who can't, or won't land at KSC. If you land somewhere you'd normally get 15% value for recovered parts, this strat will literally double the amount returned.

Reserved for future stuff

A New Challenge for KAXA Dateline: Kerbal Space Center By: Walter Kronk-Kerman Following President Joneff Kerman's speech to kongress last month, the Kerbal Aerospace Exploration Agency (KAXA) has announced the creation of a new program to meet the president's goal of "landing a Kerbal on Eve and returning them safely to Kerbin." The program, which will consist of several missions over a potentially multi-year time frame, will be known as 'Suzaku', and will require the development of several new designs, and even new technologies. To date, no program so ambitious has been attempted by the fledgling Agency. Head of R&D at KAXA, Wernher von Kerman, speaking at the program-launch press conference earlier today, noted that, "Very little is actually known about our cosmic neighbour, Eve, except that it is very massive, and also very, very purple. Even getting there will be a significant challenge, let alone returning from the surface." KAXA Mission Controller, Gene Kerman, who has been officially appointed as Head of Flight Control for the Suzaku Program, expanded on this sense of the unknown. "Before we can consider sending Kerbals to Eve, we must first learn all we can about the purple planet. To this end, the first Suzaku Program mission, which we've tentatively nicknamed 'Trailblazer' will consist of probe craft loaded with scientific instruments designed to thoroughly investigate Eve and its surrounds. It is hoped that we will be able to launch this initial Suzaku mission within the next few weeks, at the latest." He added, "Testing of lander and ascent vehicle designs will require significant time and resources, and this means that a fully manned mission will be impractical for some time to come. While excitement runs high over the new program among KAXA scientists, concerns have been raised over the dangers inherent in sending Kerbals to other worlds, and regarding the large budget that will surely be required to see the program to completion. In particular, KAXA veteran and owner of Jebediah Kerman's Junkyard and Spaceship Parts Co., Jebediah Kerman, has gone on record saying that he doesn't believe that they could pay him enough to go to, "that horrid, purple place." We still await an official KAXA response to this comment. It is the desire of this reporter, however, to wish all involved with Suzaku every success with the program, and I hope to be interviewing Kerbonauts returning from Eve in the not too distant future. The newly unveiled program flag for the KAXA Suzaku Program.

If that's happening to you in the stock game, then it's definitely a bug, and it needs to be reported as such in the bug tracker or support forum. If you have mods (especially multiple mods) installed then it's far more likely that one of the mods has a problem (or you have a synergistic failure) and you need to figure out which one it is, and report to the mod author. I have never seen a ship, other than one on the launch pad, go to anything other than 0% when switching to it.

Minmus is in an inclined orbit around Kerbin, so it's possible the reason you can't get an intercept is that you're passing above or below its orbit. The easy (not necessarily the most efficient) method to account for this is: Get into your LKO parking orbit. Set Minmus as your target - you should see two yellow triangles on your orbit, marked 'AN' and 'DN'. These are the ascending and descending nodes, where your orbital plane intersects with that of Minmus. If you mouse over them, you will be able to see the angle between the two planes (about 6 degrees for Minmus) At one of the nodes (doesn't matter which) place a maneuver node. Then use the purple node 'arms' (normal and anti-normal) to create a maneuver so that the angle between your orbital plane and Minmus' drops to 0 (the nodes will move around the orbit - don't worry about this). Perform the planned maneuver. You should now be in the same orbital plane as Minmus, and can burn prograde (at the appropriate time) to get an intercept, just like going to the Mun. Hope this helps

Hi. Tried this for the first time last night, and absolutely love it. One question, though: Are there any plans to integrate SCANsat with the stock app-launcher toolbar? I don't use blizzy's toolbar, as I don't use many mods, and have no need of it. I would, on the other hand, like to be able to open SCANsat maps without having to switch ships and stop/start scanning to do so. I understand that this may well be a very low-priority request, but I would appreciate it if you'd consider it for a future version.

The part-testing contracts will give you criteria that need to be achieved to complete the contract. These will be some combination of: Body - Early on will always be Kerbin, later can be other bodies depending on progress. Situation - IIRC this can be Landed, Splashed Down, Flying, On a Suborbital Trajectory, In Orbit Around, or On an Escape Trajectory from. Altitude - ASL altitude (or datum altitude for bodies with no sea level) to perform the test. This will have upper and lower bounds. Speed - Speed at which to perform the test. This will have upper and lower bounds. Test method - Either staging or 'right-click and select test'. The part must be tested using the correct method, while all other criteria are met. In flight, you can open the contract pane from the app launcher (toolbar), and you will see a green check mark by each currently met criterion. When all are green, perform the test and the contract will be completed. Since you note that two parameters were completed after you had landed the craft, I suspect the contract is 'Test $PART landed at Kerbin'. If this is indeed the case, you'll need to stage off a spare decoupler either before launch or after landing. Hope this helps.

Not a Mac user, so I don't know how much help this will be, but: Can you launch the game directly using the executable, rather than the launcher? IIRC some people have had trouble with the launcher (on Windows), but the game itself runs fine.

The light at the bottom of the staging display - it will glow pink/purple when staging is locked, and green when unlocked. Additionally it will flash when unlocked under some conditions (launch, for one) which I think means the game thinks you should stage. The light will go out (black) if there are no stages left untriggered.

Barefoot Friar is correct. The official, in-game name is the Sun. Kerbol is a popular name given by the community. So strictly, the adjective should indeed be Solar, (from Sol, Latin for Sun) as there is AFAIK, no other adjective form for the English word Sun. Personally I still like Kerbolar, and just assume that Kerbol is the word for Sun in some ancient Kerbal language analogous to Latin on Earth.

I like it And 'Evil' for Eve, too.

I'd like to collect a list of the adjective forms people use for the various bodies in the game. Some are pretty common, I think, like Munar for Mun, but what interesting ones do you use? Some of mine are: Kerbol - Kerbolar Kerbin - Kerbal/Kerbin Mun - Munar Minmus - Minmusian I haven't been much beyond the Kerbin system, so I haven't really given much thought to others (yet).

<IPA>ˈleɪð</IPA> tenchar

AFAIK (since 0.23), Gravioli has always had different results for 'near' and 'high over' situations, as well as 'landed'. That's one reason it's always worth running along the tech tree to unlock it as early as possible.

You can switch ships with the '[' and ']' keys (by default, on QWERTY keyboards. So unless the tutorial disables some functionality that should work.

Around here? Pretty often, in my experience. It's one of the things I love about this place.

Weird that it should be a game version issue, because it worked fine in 0.25 with the final 2.x version - I've only seen this behaviour since I switched to 3.x, and I wasn't using beta versions (I only switched yesterday when the in-tool update checker told me that 3.0.2.0 was the latest version. So the 2.x jump-to-ship-while-paused code works fine (for me, at least) if that data point is of any use to you. Again, please let me know if I can grab any data that would be useful for you to troubleshoot this. EDIT: haven't tried 3.0.4.0 yet. If it's fixed there then apologies for this post.

In terms of design: Wide base - you can use girders or radial decouplers to extend landing legs further outside the body if need be. Low CoM - put the heavy stuff at the bottom and the light stuff at the top, and don't build too tall. RCS - properly balanced RCS thrusters so you can impart/cancel horizontal velocity in both planes without needing to rotate away from vertical. Contingency fuel - pack enough propellant to allow for hover time while choosing a landing site. In terms of piloting: Constant altitude landing - gives you more chance to spot a good landing site. Zero horizontal velocity - reduce the horizontal velocity relative to the surface to zero before landing. Very low landing speed - on slopes, reduce vertical velocity to as close to zero as possible, this can help prevent the up-slope legs from bouncing and tipping the lander. Also, mods like KER, MJ, VOID, and Trajectories can help by giving information on the slope under the lander, and by enabling more precise choice of landing sites.

Not sure if this is a bug or expected behaviour, but in 3.0.2.0 the game unpauses when I jump to ships from a 'pause game' alarm window, whereas in 2.x.x.x it used to stay paused until I closed the alarm. That is, the game pauses as expected when the alarm fires, but if I select "Jump to ship" in the alarm message, it jumps and unpauses, with the following message: The previous behaviour was that the game was still paused until 'Close alarm' was selected. This is (for me, at any rate) the preferred behaviour. Reproduced so far on maneuver node and raw time alarms. 32-bit KSP running on Windows 7 x64. Is this change intentional? If not, please log it as a bug. If it is intentional, would it be possible to have an option for the game to remain paused? If you need any further information to troubleshoot this, please let me know; I would be happy to provide it. In a separate issue, I'm not sure if the version checker is working. I get the following result when I force a version check from the settings menu: This used (again in 2.x.x.x) to say "2.x.x.x @ {date}. Again, not sure if this is a bug or working as intended, but I thought I'd bring it to your attention just in case. Anyway, many thanks for such an excellent (and essential) mod.

AFAIK there's no way to display the coordinates of a non-landed craft in the stock game. I use KER (Kerbal Engineer Redux) as my information mod of choice, and its Surface Info screen has latitude and longitude data. Now if you mean landing at a given set of coordinates, you probably want to go for either MechJeb (which I believe can do it, but I've never used), or add the Trajectories mod, which can display your landing site taking both atmosphere and the body's rotation into account.

I've never done an Eve return, so I can't really comment on the overall mission, although I think it looks pretty good. Would you be willing to share the craft file for that probe glider? I would love to add it to my upcoming Eve exploration mission.

You can recover funds for any parts which survive to come to rest on Kerbin. There are two big gotchas, though. One, you don't get the recovery screen for debris (meaning any collection of parts with no controlling pod or probe). You get the funds, but you have to compare your balance before and after to see it. Two, any parts discarded during flight will be deleted by the game if they are both under ~23 km altitude ASL, and more than ~2.5 km from your controlled craft (i.e. out of physics range). Because these parts do not land, you cannot recover them in the stock game. This applies whether or not the parts include controllers or parachutes. There are mods that allow recovery in the second case. DebRefund is one, and I'm sure there are others. However, I don't use them, so I can't tell you anything about them.

I'm going to record myself in the 'No' camp for Kerbal Experience altering physical properties of rockets. As yet another alternative, here are some things I would like to see Kerbal Experience affect. G-LOC: If G-LOC were implemented (which I think would be cool), more experienced pilots should have either or both a higher tolerance and a shorter recovery time. Automated maneuvers: Again, this is an "if it's implemented", but I think it would be great if, having created a maneuver node, the Kerbal pilot could be instructed to carry it out. More experienced pilots should be able to carry out maneuvers better (more accurately, using less fuel) than less experienced ones. However, as a caveat, NO pilot should be able to exceed the mathematical limit on efficiency as determined by the stats of the rocket. For this to be genuinely useful, this should be able to happen while the vessel is unfocused. This might make it difficult to implement, though. Science output: No problems with this; a more experienced scientist should be able to take better, more useful, readings than a relative newbie. I would especially love it if 'science over time' were a thing, because then choosing personnel for your space station would be important, too. Reputation gain: Famous Kerbal is famous. No problems with this. Speed increases: On processes that take time (e.g. MSL processing and cleaning of experiments) more experience could mean quicker completion. If EVA repair of more parts were added, this could be quite a critical skill in certain situations. Certification restrictions: This one's alread been given a fair bit of air time, but I'd support restrictions on inexperienced Kerbals using certain technologies or taking part in certain missions. I'm sure I'll think of some others, but that's probably long enough spent writing one post.

Staging is also locked if the mouse cursor is over the staging icons on the left of the screen.

In the latest updated, they added navball markers for normal/anti-normal and radial in/out, as well as the original prograde/retrograde. The symbols are the same as on the maneuver-node 'arms'. Also, the arrow that you mention. AFAIK that's all the changes to the navball.