cantab

I feel that in the next year or two Squad should do that. Once KSP has its essential bugfixes and much-desired performance optimisations I'd like to see Squad work on something else. While KSP is somewhat amenable to "expansion packs" the core game engine has big issues that I feel could only be resolved by making what amounts to an entirely new game. Also while I'd like a KSP 2 I also wouldn't mind seeing what else Squad can come up with.

This, so much this. I still used struts mind you, but it was a while before I found out they didn't need decoupling separately.Other things? When I first played the 0.18.3 demo I didn't know about the whole "don't exceed terminal velocity" thing in the soup-o-sphere. So my first rocket to make orbit was this: Note the speed, gees, and also the angled fins - this thing spun like a whirling dervish to stabilise it. I did know that reaching orbit requires going fast sideways, and for at least one launch I even remembered that it's best to go in the direction Kerbin is spinning. So I pitched west. D'oh! I thought controlling a Kerbal on EVA was difficult. In fairness the first time I tried it was. So when I needed to rescue a Kerbal stranded in orbit, I made sure he'd be able to grab onto the rescue ship:

With the stock solar system there's no axial tilt, so the day and night are each 3 hours no matter where you are and what day it is.

6000 m/s seems optimistic. In any case the drag may be less but the effect of Eve's atmosphere on the engines is brutal. At Eve sea level the Mammoth and the Aerospike lose a third of their thrust and efficiency at Eve sea level compared to vacuum, the Mainsail and the LFB have their performance halved, and other engines suffer even worse. Eve might now require less delta-V but the battle for TWR is worse than ever if you want to launch from sea level.

Maybe something for modders to play with? I can imagine some uber-heatproof modded parts being in a futuristic mod. Maybe something like Karborundum Evaporation Cooling, that kind of thing.

I really hope KSP 2 is a new game and not just another update. Above all else I'd like to see a new game engine that's much better suited to the scale of a solar system, but I feel that more generally it would be great to see some new good ideas and some old minus points done away with, as well as a game that's visually a lot more detailed.

For a capture at Laythe you want your trajectory compared to Laythe's orbit round Jool to look like this. On the "Good" trajectory you will hit Laythe's atmosphere at around 3 km/s. Fast, but possibly survivable. Bear in mind you only need to barely capture around Laythe, or even barely capture around Jool itself, you don't have to go straight to a low Laythe orbit or a landing. On the "Very Bad" trajectory you would hit Laythe's atmosphere at around 8 km/s. Kaboom. To arrange a "Good" Laythe encounter you want to set up a course correction. I usually do one around the orbit of Dres, then another just after entering Jool's SOI if needed. Then the secret is to trade off pro/retrograde and radial/antiradial components. By doing that you can change your arrival time at Jool periapsis while keeping the height of that periapsis the same. (Around 27,000 km, the radius of Laythe's orbit round Jool). Reach your periapsis when Laythe reaches the same spot and there's your encounter. The same general geometry applies for encountering any planet or moon if you desire either an efficient powered capture or a gentle aerocapture. For a gravitational capture into the Joolian system you want to use either Laythe or Tylo for the gravity assist. Vall is a maybe, I've never really tried, Bop and Pol are definitely too small and too slowly orbiting. I find the exact trajectory hard to visualise myself and often end up trying stuff until I see a promising capture. The same technique as above is needed to set up your gravity assist though - a course correction using pro/retrograde and radial/antiradial components to tune the trajectory through the Joolian system and the timing of that trajectory independently from each other. You may also need to add normal/antinormal components to avoid being kicked into a highly inclined orbit. However your gravity assist works out, you still want to finally encounter Laythe in a similar fashion to above, with your orbit round Jool just touching Laythe's orbit or close to that, not sharply cutting across Laythe's orbit and definitely not meeting it when it's going the other way to you. For a gravity assist out to Jool itself you want to use Eve first of all. If you need more than one assist then Kerbin itself is good too. Duna is usable with repeated flybys but not really worthwhile. Then there's a crucial trick. You cannot use a gravity assist at peri to raise apo, or at apo to lower peri for that matter. So what you need to do is get on a trajectory with a Sun periapsis lower than Eve's orbit. This takes a little more delta-V than the most efficient Eve transfer, but that small extra delta-V gets repaid many times over by the gravity assist. Whether you encounter Eve before or after your solar periapsis doesn't matter, and yet again the same course correction techniques will come in handy, but now with the additional variable of your Kerbin departure time. Once on course to the Joolian system you're then looking at either an aerocapture or a gravitational capture as covered in the two sections above. On a final note, for any sort of gravity assist work I strongly recommend the mod Precise Node. In particular it makes changing the timing of a burn, which can be very important, far far easier than with the stock system.

Jetpacking from Minmus orbit down to the surface and then getting back to the ship afterwards, and with no mods to help me. That was real seat-of-the-pants stuff. I've done countless EVA landings since, usually assisted by mods like KER, but none nor anything else have felt quite the same as that first time.

Not necessarily. If you and your target are on opposite sides of the planet you will see high relative velocities.Checking is easy though. Hover your mouse over the AN/DN marker. Close to zero degrees is good. Close to 180 is going the wrong way.

While I agree absolutely with this, I strongly suspect it's not unique to Squad and that you will find similar development process issues in virtually any game development studio, where flashy features not stable bug-free code is what sells well and where the pressure to release yesterday is always there.

If two things are in the same orbit they'll be going at the same average speed so will not get closer. You need to have one in a slightly different orbit so that one orbits faster than the other and they close up. If you're patient it doesn't need to be much, just put one orbit a kilometre or two lower than the other and wait.

Set up my modded install and built a satellite to check out the new Ore scanning as well as that from the venerable Kethane mod. This was a nuisance. I had nasty VAB lag, problems with docking ports not acting as decoupler, seemingly random thermal runaway events making bits blow up (and it has two deployable radiators on the back!), and my own lack of docking skill. I evidently need to do some bug-hunting and may be forced to axe some mods. First launch ever in nuFAR too, it seemed much like the old FAR.

You need to fix your PC Part Picker link texasflyboy

A gravity assist from Jool can kick you onto a collision course with the Sun for not much more delta-V than it takes to reach Jool. You'd then need to make a course correction to not impact, and then arrange further gravity assists to get back to Kerbin at a reasonable speed for re-entry. There's a trick to those gravity assists. You cannot use a gravity assist at apoapsis to lower your periapsis, or at periapsis to raise your apoapsis. So what you need to do is get into an orbit round the Sun with an apoapsis somewhat *beyond* Jool's orbit, and then you can make the gravity assist to lower your periapsis into a Sun impact. It will be a time-consuming mission but one with not unreasonable delta-V requirements. 3 km/s from LKO should do it. As ever I strongly recommend Precise Node for gravity assist work.

It's still in the game but the option only appears in flight, you can't set it in the VAB/SPH.

I've been doing the whole manual fuelling as part of my Kethane Space Program, but that's a gimmick for that one save really. More generally, I usually if not always use do destination orbit rendezvous, ie a separate orbiter and lander a la Apollo, even though for the Mun and many other places it's not the most mass-efficient. I enjoy building to size and sometimes mass constraints. For example my Moho lander was built to fit in a 2.5m flush fairing, even though I could perfectly well have made it wider and expanded the fairing. Back in .90 I specifically opted for fixed-size fairings rather than procedural ones. And I always like a good gravity assist. Whether it's a flyby of Eve to make getting to Moho easier, or a clever Tylo assist to capture into Jool orbit without the perils of aerobraking, I'll spend the time and effort to get things just so.

It can be tough. Things that will help: Decent-quality full-size binoculars. 40-50 mm apertures and 7-10x magnification. Better holding technique. The obvious way (for most people) to hold binoculars isn't very good at keeping them steady, there are less intuitive but better ways. Mounting or support. A tripod, a monopod, even an upturned broom will help. Keep in mind that binoculars are heavier than many cameras and often their weight is off-centre so beware of flimsy tripods. Getting away from local lights and letting your eyes adapt to the dark. This is a big one. General light-pollution you can put up with but if you've got a streetlamp or a lighted window shining on you it's going to really spoil your night vision. Use dim, preferably red, light to read your star charts, and avoid getting an eyeful of mobile phone screen. Not looking for Messier objects when the Moon is up. Not looking for objects too close to the horizon or in the direction of urban areas, the light pollution tends to be worse. Target things when they're high in the sky. Patience. These things rarely "pop out", especially if you're a novice observer. Deep sky objects are generally faint and subtle. On a closing note, I live in an inner city area, Bortle 7-8 skies. I've seen many Messier objects including M31 through 10x50 binoculars, and more through larger binoculars and a 3-inch telescope. Even under light-polluted skies I prefer deep-sky observing to lunar or planetary when using binoculars and small scopes. It's not easy to see these things, but it wouldn't be as much fun if it was

I wonder how much impact not using primitives affects performance? KSP really suffers from that because rockets are mostly collections of cylinders and Unity offers no cylinder primitive.

Yeah I had this issue, my heatshield slowly boiled away on my Moho mission and I was left with only a tiny amount remaining. It doesn't seem realistic or desirable I don't think.

Quoted for truth. There has been a lot of general discussion of KSP game performance but the fact is something is wrong with fisto roboto's system, as evidence by the processor not even reaching its top speed.To fisto roboto, I can only really suggest the obvious. Redownload a clean copy of the game and test it with no mods at all, ensure that v-sync is turned off and the framerate limiter set to something appropriate. Beyond that the usual things like checking the system drivers, and making sure there isn't background software running interfering with the game. As Red Iron Crown suggested, you could test Prime95 running a single thread and see what happens. And be assured that the performance you are getting is far below what's normal and expected for that sort of hardware and therefore you can hopefully fix it.

I just point my usual online backup program at my KSP folder. I have it set to check for changes every 30 minutes and it keeps all the old versions.

You know, maybe I could have used a smaller lander, but this is a Tylo lander!

6 or even 8 years ago to me still feels recent. Old games to me are Playstation 1 era and earlier. "Earlier" will in turn often imply a game that was old when I first played it. As for my favourite, well, .

If only Unity had a cylinder primitive.

"Station keeping" could easily be abstracted away, handled automatically in return for a slow drain of fuel. It would give satellites and similar things finite lifespans and encourage the player to make tradeoffs - a light satellite with little fuel that's cheap to launch but will soon lose stationkeeping, or a heavier satellite with extra fuel that's more expensive to launch but will maintain its desired orbit for longer.