cantab

Is ScanSAT equipment affected by heat? I have a spacecraft affected by the overheating bug which I've been working around with the "Ignore Max Temperature" cheat and a save edit to have enough Ec. When the craft is hot the scans don't work and the map shows static. If I enter high timewarp switching the craft to a cool state they work. If it is affected, can there please please please be a way to turn that off? I consider the heating system a festering pile of dung and don't want it ruining my missions for no good reason.

Yeah, now we have a realistic atmosphere drag losses aren't a concern. Ascent speed tends to instead be limited by aerodynamic instability. Many rockets are mildly unstable aerodynamically and if you fly too fast too low you'll flip out of control, slowing down reduces the aerodynamic forces. Many real rockets including the Space Shuttle throttle down to reduce "Max Q", as the maximum aerodynamic stress is known. Practical launch TWR is also limited, in real life and KSP alike, because engines are heavy and cost money. A wide range of liftoff TWRs can work. Looking at real rockets the Saturn V had 1.15 TWR on the pad, while the Space Shuttle had rather higher. New Horizons was blasted off with 2.15 liftoff TWR, though that was an extreme case.

Was forced to repeatedly edit my savefile because of stupid overheat bugs killing my electricity. This is turning what should be an enjoyable epic tour of the New Horizons Jool system into a chore.

With a circular accelerator the forces involved end up about the same as with a linear one. The potential advantage is a lower power requirement. I can't see that being applicable to a small relatively low-speed coilgun, but if your projectile is either large or superfast then a circular design may have promise. After all, the extreme example of "superfast" is the LHC and that's a circle. (To keep the projectile moving in the circle requires theoretically no energy. Of course there will be efficiency losses, but if they can be minimised things look promising.)

This made me do a double-take. If your aim is low fuel usage and you want to go from one satellite to another you should just transfer between them. Dropping to a low periapsis over the primary is only relevant if you want to escape it altogether. But when time is a concern as in the described scenario, then there *may* be cases where whipping round the Sun is worthwhile.

If you're counting deaths and injuries then it may well go to black powder, because any idiot can buy a firework and get themselves injured by it.

It's hard to compare. My thinking has long been that Kerbals use rugged, cheap, low-performance rocket parts, whereas we humans use stuff that's much more sophisticated and expensive. That's because the Kerbals have it easy on their mini planet.

Hmmm. If we think about the trip from Earth to Mars, our spacecraft needs to be going slower relative to the Sun when it reaches Mars than when it leaves Earth. It follows that during its journey an ion ship will be thrusting prograde but slowing down on average, but slowing down less than if it just coasted.

It was Dr DRE's fault. Instead of rocket parts, the parcel that arrived at KSC contained a bobcat.

Succumbed to the inevitable Not too bad a drive I guess. If I'd just been a bit more cautious...

Yeah, I'm on Kop 0.4. Guess I'll have to wait until it's fixed, I don't want to roll back and cause issues with other planets. I got a couple hundred science out of the mission so it's not all bad.

The trajectory called for an Eve aerogravity assist. At the time of launch this was well-understood as harmless, but since then the anomaly known as "KSP 1.0" occurred and resulted in the destruction of the lander. At the conclusion of an otherwise perfect mission, an erroneous activation of the landing jets less than a second after touchdown on Kerbin lead to the capsule skidding along the ground and crushing its crew.

Depending on mission profile the third point may be wrong. The delta-V to get anywhere from Minmus (via a low Kerbin PE of course) is less than to get there from LKO. A pit stop at Minmus therefore allows you to use a ship with a lower maximum delta-V and so the ship can have a lower dry mass - less tankage, possibly fewer or weaker engines too.The mission profile you just described is of course not a simple LKO refuel. I think it rather amounts to adding a booster to your interplanetary ship that does much of the ejection burn, and then contriving to reuse that booster. The reduction in maximum delta-V requirement is a little better than with a refuel at Minmus, though only by 200 m/s or so.

Anyone else had trouble with lag on Asclepius? I hit severe issues with a mere 30 part rover, while I've not had problems elsewhere. Lots of mods involved in my current install, I've yet to test in a minimal install.

Based on what I've observed KSP's "thermal" system is a fundamentally flawed mess. I have zero respect for it and no qualms about enabling the heatproof cheat, not when with that cheat on vessels routinely reach temperatures high enough to start a new freaking Big Bang.

Yeah. I've run my share of ultra-low-TWR ships. After they're launched to LKO I set them to hold prograde and just spiral outwards, before I get into a high orbit from where I can execute a more normal manoeuvre. With realistic ions you'd be doing the same spiralling outwards approach in solar orbit too.

Drove a rover all of 300 metres. I had big lag issues for some reason, even with a 30 part craft.

Cherenkov Radiation, incidentally, is freaking awesome. It's basically a sonic boom for light.

A .cmd or .bat file will close after it's done. If you want to read the output, end it with the pause command.

Staging was outsourced. Take it up with them. The entire events of The Martian.

I've started to get vaguely competent at approaching in the correct inclination to start with. Key is to make a mid-course correction and play around with the timing of said correction. There are probably still situations when I'll need to make a plane change after initial capture though.

A world made of solid chlorine...that's...utterly terrifying actually. Can't it just be nice friendly water ice with some transition metal compound in solid solution making it green?

The stock aerodynamics works on a part-by-part basis, and so it ignores parts being clipped into each other, they make just as much drag as if they weren't clipped. Anyway, what you were suffering was a classic aerodynamic flip. As others have said hold close to surface prograde at all times until you're way up high, and if that doesn't help then add fins. It's then just a case of figuring out how much you need to pitch over early in the ascent.

I doubt it's possible generally in stock, though it might be on occasion if the pixels fall just right. It's hard to spot Jool from the edge of its SOI, though that says more about the lolhueg SOI.

There's a whole subforum for craft designs http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/forums/20-The-Spacecraft-Exchange As well as a dedicated fan website http://kerbalx.com/