cantab

Partly yes, I think that despite some unrealistic aspects to KSP, a lot of it is the same problems, so the same solutions. Partly it may be unconscious (or even conscious) art imitating life. And there's the KSP part selection.

5177. You see Alain Robert clinging to the outside of the windows.

Indeed. I don't know what all those switches do. Fortunately, Jeb does. Mostly.

Nice beard. Be a shame if something happened to it.

Children of a Dead Earth favours cylinders for combat spacecraft. A sphere would offer the best surface area/volume ratio which minimises mass of armour, but also means the cross-sectional area and thus the size as a target is large. A cylinder reduces the cross-sectional area making the spacecraft harder to hit.

You cannot pass!

Phenomenal ultimate tensile strength, itty-bitty stiffness. (AKA, the rocket bending in half).

Floor 5174: You search for money underneath the corner of the floor, but there isn't any, because that's not what the rules say!

It's not often that I'll play completely stock, but all your reasons are why I tend to keep my modlists short (in any game). I'm adding some parts packs once I get the chance to play Breaking Ground though, stuff like Restock and Near Future is just so good. I do raise an eyebrow at players who play heavily modded and then complain about game performance and stability - and often come across as blaming the core game developers for the problems caused by the mods.

I've not had the chance to get hands-on with JNSQ yet, so does anyone else know how the smaller Joolian moons affect gravity assists in the system? In stock Laythe and Tylo are well known for their powerful gravity assists, and setting them up correctly is a gameplay challenge and one that could bring big rewards (in delta-V savings). Losing that from JNSQ would be a big minus in my view.

One booster lit, one booster didn't.

Wonder if you can make a control moment gyro too? A CMG would have a rotor spinning parts at a constant rate, and you'd then have that mounted on a hinge. Should provide powerful torque.

As mentioned, the Nerv burns only liquid fuel. Which means that if you replace a chemical engine and change nothing else, then the Nerv has less than half the propellant available that the chemical engine had, and it's stuck pushing the oxidizer as dead weight! No wonder that doesn't work well! At the very least you need to remove the oxidizer from the fuel tanks. Better is to use liquid-fuel-only tanks, but in stock the range is limited.

This looks gorgeous, I'm very sold, think I'll give it a whirl once Kopernicus gets officially updated. Just an idea I had: Add a phase angle indication (where relevant) to the delta-V map, to help with finding transfer windows.

Now we have the DLC robotics parts, any thoughts for a challenge with them? Maybe a 4b - Rendezvous with your space telescope, grab it using a docking port or claw attached to a robotic arm (whether Breaking Ground, Infernal Robotics, or krakentech), and use an MMU to replace a solar panel or any other component of the telescope.

In the right-click menu there's an option to set the control orientation. For the lander/rover can you have up, forward, or down. (The option exists on most pods and probe cores but usually you just get normal or reverse.) EDIT PS: This can be switched in flight as well as set in the VAB/SPH.

The launch time is easy. Launch when your launch site is underneath your target orbit. It's that simple. You can see this in the tracking station by angling the camera so your target orbit looks like a straight line through Kerbin. The launch direction is a little trickier. If the target orbit is the minimum inclination for the launch site latitude - that's 45 degree inclined for Woomerang - then you launch due east. (Or due west if the target is retrograde). If the target orbit is a higher inclination you'll need to launch somewhat north or south. This may take some trial and error.

A Mun gravity assist is of limited use. The thing is it takes 860 m/s to get from LKO to a Mun encounter, and in fact the bare minimum won't give you a useful gravity assist, so you need more like 900. It only takes 950 m/s to escape Kerbin's SOI directly and another 90-130 to reach Eve or Duna. So let's say you're going to Duna, it's 1100 m/s (from LKO) without a Mun assist or 1000 m/s with one. For most missions it's not worth the trouble. Other gravity assists can give much more significant delta-V savings. For example reaching Jool directly takes around 2000 m/s, but reaching it via an Eve assist can take about 1100. Using Tylo or Laythe to capture into orbit round Jool can save several hundred there too.

You can try. There's a few ways to do it: If you have multiple fuel tanks, transferring fuel between them may help righting efforts. In career you might not have this unlocked yet. The first thing normally tried is using the reaction wheels or any RCS to rock it back and forth until it tips upright, possibly with the help of extending and retracting parts such as landing legs or antennae. (Note that solar panels will probably break if you're rough with them.) You can also try having the Kerbal fly into the lander with their jetpack, the right impact angle might tip the lander upright. I've never had much luck with this on Mun, it works better on Minmus. Otherwise you can try using the engine anyway, you may be able to take off, but it's very risky. Quicksave first if you're using them. If it's a two-stage lander, decoupling your ascent stage and flying it may work but you'll have to be quick on the controls. Often, though, it's just time for the rescue mission.

In real life rockets may throttle down during ascent for two reasons. One is aerodynamic forces. These reach a peak, "Max Q", due to the tradeoff between increasing speed and decreasing air pressure with height, and throttling back reduces Max Q. The other reason to throttle down is to reduce peak acceleration when a stage is nearly empty, so that it doesn't crush the payload or astronauts. But Kerbal rockets and spacecraft are built strong and heavy. They can take abuses that would utterly destroy any real rocket, like pulling a 360 flip during the ascent, or using the engine bell as landing gear. Kerbals are pretty tough too, and in any case if the rocket has a probe core then Kerbal blackouts mean little. So in Kerbal, we're usually free to go full throttle all the way. The main case we have to throttle back in Kerbal is because of aerodynamic instability, if we're launching something ridiculous. In real life that doesn't really happen - payloads are required to fit in standard fairings or otherwise be aerodynamic. The small size of Kerbin doesn't come into it much. I've spent a lot of time playing RSS with unaltered stock parts and most of my launches don't require throttling back. Even with launchers that hit 7-8 g at MECO, I might throttle back just to better control my trajectory but I don't need to.

The Gemini Direct Ascent proposal is the best evidence that a direct ascent lunar landing could be affordable. Since it would have used the same Saturn V rocket that Apollo did, just with a different spacecraft on top, chances are it would have cost about the same. However the Apollo CSM and LM were more capable than any Gemini-based lander would have been. (And more enjoyable to fly - Gemini was notoriously cramped.) Refueling in LEO isn't direct ascent, it's Earth Orbit Rendezvous. If you're only transferring fuel you at least don't need to worry about assembling your lander in orbit, but you still have many of the other drawbacks to an EOR approach. Spacecraft are only certified for a limited amount of time in space and delays to the fuel tankers could be an issue. SpaceX's starship is built to handle a Mars mission lasting a few years anyway, so delays in LEO are proportionately less of an issue.

Put enough fuel in my shuttle orbiter to take it for a decent jet-powered test flight, and learnt that body lift is a thing. Above about 300 m/s, if it gets enough AoA the thing just wants to keep flipping. It was controllable and I brought it back for a safe runway landing, but I do not want my orbiter handling like that! Wing lift backwards and weight forwards, I hope that will fix it.

Unfortunately Lagrange points don't work that way, so they can't be realistically simulated by the point masses that KSP uses.

Getting back into my RSS lifter design. Seems I forgot the struts... Still made it to orbit though. 12 tonne payload and no Nervs. https://imgur.com/a/d0qVahF It's pretty basic, but something to start on. I plan to make it mostly-reusable, with only the drop tanks expended. (Which is why I use tanks rather than full liquid boosters).

To add to the previous, I've found other oddities with the stock delta-V readout. With a series staged rocket, if I put the decoupler and engine in the same stage, the VAB display seems fine but in-flight I get an incorrectly low reading until I stage. My guess (without having calculated) is KSP calculates the delta-V with the empty mass of the previous stage still attached. I'm currently designing a rocket with drop tanks, and in the VAB KSP seems hopeless at that, it doesn't even display the core delta-V at all. So yeah, it's not perfect.