cantab

I'd like to see them released as an official mod.

To make a direct Hohman transfer between Low Kerbin Orbit and Low [Target] Orbit, then back again, the most demanding target is Moho. 8 km/s should suffice at any window, though Moho does have a reputation for requiring more delta-V than you expect.

In the stock game anything that drops below about 22 km when you aren't flying it is deleted. So you have two options: Design your rockets so you can fly the dropped stages down while the final stage minds its own business. "Single stage to almost-orbit" as Dragon01 mentions is what you need here, you want to get the payload in a stable orbit before the boosters drop too low. Use a mod. StageRecovery will give you your money back if you put enough parachutes on. FMRS will let you actively fly your boosters down so will work for winged or powered-landing designs.

These are my go-to delta-V charts for Joolian stuff (and anything vaguely complex really). http://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalAcademy/comments/1qu5jv/deltav_charts/ Using the Jool set of charts, the Jool map is for dropping your periapsis low over Jool and burning there. To get to the Jool-Kerbin transfer orbit takes 1960 m/s. The Laythe map is for burning directly from Laythe. To get to the Laythe-Kerbin transfer orbit takes 1060 m/s. Vastly less. This tallies with my experience, in that 1120 m/s was sufficient to get one of my ships back from Laythe to Kerbin by the direct burn method. Though I didn't investigate the periapsis drop method. Edit: And it looks like you beat me to the figures numerobis. Your numbers and the chart's agree, which is a good sign. As for Tylo assists, they can work but they're tricky to set up. Firstly bear in mind you need to eject from Laythe with a bit more than the 640 m/s for a Tylo transfer, since you need to cross Tylo's orbit to get the gravity assist not merely touch it. Then the Laplace resonance becomes a nuisance, if you want to encounter Tylo on your way out you can only do that in three positions round its orbit, and they might not be where you really want. If you encounter it on your way back in after apoapsis that gives you more freedom but you then become very sensitive to the delta-V used for Laythe ejection. Finally if you have an inclined Laythe orbit the needed plane change can undo the gains from the Tylo assist.

I renamed my tracked asteroids somewhat along the lines of real ones. A number in order, followed by the name of a notable Kerbal. So the first one was 1 Jebediah. I might use a different pool of names next time though, but will stick with the same general scheme. It just feels nicer to visit a named object rather than an anonymous rock.

Do your own maths. It ain't difficult , just a bit tedious for multi-stage ships. Stuff to know: The rocket equation. Go look it up. KSP 0.90 will tell you your rocket's mass in the VAB. For the time being put it on the pad, switch to map view, open the little i window and you can see the mass. Recover for 100% of the cost provided you aren't using certain strategies. One unit of fuel or oxidizer is 5 kg. One unit of monoprop is 4 kg. One unit of xenon is 0.1 kg. Go look up solid fuel yourself because I forgot.

Let's go back to basics, and I'll try and put things in layman's turns. The special principle of relativity is that the laws of physics are the same for everyone who isn't speeding up, slowing down, or turning. This dates back to Galileo and Newton, and replaced older ideas that the Earth is a special stationary thing. Nowadays we're familiar with this in everyday life; you can walk around and drink tea inside a train or plane and it feels just like doing so at home. If you don't look out the window and don't hit bumps or bends or turbulence you can't even tell if you're moving or how fast. The speed of light isn't just any old speed, it's actually part of the laws of physics. It's related to a couple of other numbers in the laws of electromagnetism, and you can do an experiment with a capacitor and use those laws to work out the speed of light without ever measuring an actual light beam. Now we have the idea of a light clock. It's just a couple of mirrors and a pulse of light bouncing back and forth between them. (Put the mirrors a foot apart and the clock ticks once a nanosecond.) If I have a light clock in my super-fast spaceship, then as I see it it that light pulse moves at the speed of light (dur) and so keeps good time whatever speed I'm going. I can check it against my wristwatch, my heartbeat and other body processes, even the radioactive decay of my ship's nuclear fuel, they all have to be in sync, otherwise I'd effectively be seeing different laws of physics at different speeds, going against the principle of relativity. But if you watch me go past, then as you see it the light pulse has to go further between each bounce off the mirrors, because the whole thing is also moving along, as this diagram shows. Since you also measure that light as moving at the speed of light, then you see my light clock ticking slowly. You also see my wristwatch, my heartbeat, and my fuel's radioactive decay, and indeed everything else on my ship, happening more slowly, otherwise things would just make no sense at all. Time itself on my ship passes differently as you see it than as I see it. It's from these basic ideas of the principle of relativity, the speed of light being part of the laws of physics, and the light clock, that all the seeming weirdness of special relativity can be derived, including the speed of light being a limit for anything with mass. (And yes, other hypotheses regarding how light behaves are reasonable. But Einstein's theory of special relativity is the one that experiments have shown to be correct.)

Unsurprisingly, people are already making it exactly like KSP: https://www.simpleplanes.com/a/4Ku420/Pffft-Planes I admit I'm sceptical as to how my phone would handle it. And on PC, well I have KSP.

The absolute upper limit for a single nuclear-engined stage is just over 17 km/s. For an ion-engined stage it's just over 36 km/s, the greater specific impulse being partly undone by the poor mass fractions of the xenon tanks. But diminishing returns really kick in on either. Anyway, general advice: Don't use Kerbodyne tanks except on very large ships. They have an inferior mass fraction. Reduce payload mass. Consider building a "pilot" craft that just carries a few Kerbals. Shave off unnecessary bits like structural parts unless you really want them. If using ion engines, consider modded or tweakscaled tanks to keep the part count tolerable, especially on a larger ship. Be wary of going too low on the TWR. 17 km/s means little if you can't reasonably use it. Low TWR effectively wastes delta-V too. Finally, expect to need a LOT of fuel.

It spans continents. Most is in Asia. Egypt, of course, is in Africa. Part of Turkey is in Europe.

That's no moon...any more.

When you have to strut your struts.

A slide rule is a device for multiplying two and two and getting 3.9999999999... Any, display wrong values is a very bad idea in any game. Displaying absent or explictly vague values, on the other hand, isn't so unreasonable. But I'm not sure things like uncertain thusts or Isp's are a good idea because the game is tough enough as it is.

When Bill and Jane got engaged, Bill gave Jane a ring with a Jool in it. But it turned out Bill had stolen it, so he got arrested by the Police. They paid a bribe though, so they got out the next Evening. Eventually they did get married, though the ceremony started Laythe because Jane had trouble getting in her Dres. Jeb was the best man but he made a crude joke at the reception that got him Bopped on the head by Jane. As Jeb cried out "Ike!", a brawl broke out between the families and Bill tried Valliantly to calm things down but it was no use, everything had just got very Gilly. Someone got thrown through a wall, and the party was broken up before any Mo holes got made. After the honeyMun the couple moved into their new house. It had been built after the rest on the street so it ended up being numbered Minmus 1. They said Eeloo to all their neighbours and offered them tea and Duna sandwiches. Someone tripped in the kitchen and a Tylo two broke; the sharp edges were unsafe so Jane put them in Ker bin.

I'm dog tired atm and have a stupid early start tomorrow, so there'll be a bit of a wait sorry.

I'll wait for vexx to confirm anyway.

Winds? Or clouds?

Damn that's a tough one. Anyway, our Moon, definitely. Not because it's the most intrinsically interesting, but because you can look at it yourself through a modest telescope and it really comes alive as another world, filling the field of view. It's the only thing that does; the Sun doesn't really have terrain as such, and all the other planets are too far away. Titan. Another easy choice, with its thick atmosphere and active methane cycle, and the whole flying thing. The third choice, though, that's tough. I will get one thing out of the way: not Europa. It's been hyped up as a possible home of life, but it's become increasingly apparent that it's far from unique in having a subsurface ocean. The extraordinarily distinctive Miranda, once thought to be shattered and reformed but that may owe its features to its own geology. So, Io with its intense vulcanism? Ganymede because it's lolhueg, well and that intruiging two-tone surface. "That's no moon" Mimas? Enceladus with its geysers? Janus and Epimetheus (OK that's two) in their delicate co-orbital dance? The yin-yang of Iapetus and its equatorial ridge, a moon readers of 2001 will remember well. Triton, the largest irregular satellite in the solar system and with unusual terrain? It's so hard to choose! But I think I'm going to go with Hyperion. It just looks so weird with its spongelike texture, there truly is nothing else even remotely like it. It's also the only large(ish) body to not have a definite rotation axis, instead tumbling chaotically. If you were to visit, you literally wouldn't know where the equator would be until you got there.

Was the price in the earlier post a typo, or did you just change your mind on the requirements?

The rocket equation is indeed pretty easy to use. The problem is getting the values. As Reactordrone says, you can put the ship on the launchpad and get the full mass, but the method is really non-obvious. Totting up part masses gets very old very fast. Manual calculation is fine for serially staged rockets. It's also simple, if tedious, for asparagus staging. For non-asparagus parallel staging though it's much more complicated, you need to do fuel drain calculations for the core and possibly weighted Isp averages for when you're flying with the boosters. I'll happily let KER handle that. Of course there are situations even KER can't handle. Any ship which expends some delta-V with a payload then more without that payload cannot have its delta-V calculated independently of its flight plan. This includes Apollo-style missions.

Emphasis mine. IANAL but I'd read that as meaning multiple copies are fine. .90 may have a new EULA though.

Sounds? 10char

Completed the assembly of my Tylo ship and attempted to depart. Kaboom. Drop tanks bend backwards clipping into the ship. Eventually something's gonna break, and when it does there's suddenly two ships clipped into each other. Some of the destruction was pretty epic. But now I fear this may be the first mission I abandon because of poor game performance. It's "only" 600 parts, but I'm getting about a .15-.2x physics time ratio and slideshow fps, I suspect the docking ports. If I was just flying I could deal with it, but I now have no choice but to KAS strut the ship. With this bad game performance, that's going to be torturous.

The space program is unsure of the difference between swimming pools and fuel tanks. This is why one of the fuel tanks was built from a swimming pool, and why Kerbals don't float in the KSC swimming pool - it's full of rocket fuel.

The standard for a "Grand Tour" in KSP is a single mission that does a Kerballed landing on all bodies with solid surfaces (apart from Kerbin itself). Anything else requires qualification, for example a "Probe Grand Tour" or "Flyby Grand Tour". Such qualified ones should at least include all planets, though maybe not all moons. "Plant a flag" shouldn't be a requirement because I don't see anything wrong with the Eve or Laythe landings being in the ocean. I also feel it should be a tour. The odd stop back in LKO is fair enough, but running a series of there-and-back missions from an LKO station doesn't feel right. Refuelling seems fine to me.