cantab

Sunrise from orbit is always a good sight. Personally I find the game a little bland visually, but then that's because I have to have the graphics turned down. On a good PC with some visual mods though it can look really great. Wonder if we'll ever get proper looking eclipses? I recall discussion that Unity has issues with actually letting the Mun shadow Kerbin, but it couldn't be that hard to fake by dimming the light levels when an eclipse is on surely?

But surely it's then even more efficient to come in on a trajectory with periapsis level with the surface, and suicide burn at the last minute to zero your velocity and land there.The differences are small though. The main reason to orbit before landing is the same as to orbit Kerbin before departing: getting the time to set up your manoeuvre properly. On the landing end of things this includes being able to select your landing zone and make the appropriate deorbit burn for that.

If the reaction wheels can move arbitrarily then there's no issue with conservation of angular momentum. When you hit timewarp and the rotation instantly freezes, then there's an issue, but that still exists even if you only use RCS.

#Hypeophant

Dementia and psychological disorders are just as grim a topic for the game as cancer and radiation poisoning tbh.

An object distant from Kerbin will have launch windows, and they'll be once every Kerbin year.

Ah, neat find. So on a planet with Earthlike gravity and temperature the atmospheric pressure could be suitable for humans over about 40,000 feet or 12 km vertically. With a warmer climate or lower gravity it would increase. Coruscant is probably close to that then. It may indeed be why the buildings aren't taller.

On the RAM, is that a single 8GB stick? If so, then if your motherboard has four RAM slots consider 2x4GB sticks instead, it improves performance. But if there are only two slots I'd stick with the single stick so you can add another at a later date. On the hard drive, I advise getting an SSD if you can afford it. It makes a big difference to the general responsiveness of your system. If you want to keep the costs down and need plenty of space opt for a hybrid drive, it won't match a proper SSD but will speed things up over a bog-standard mechanical drive.

That figure is what you'd need to ascend from a "landing" on Jool and return to Kerbin. To just encounter Jool you only need to go up to the Kerbin-Jool transfer. Then you can get into a closed orbit by aerocapturing at Jool or Laythe, or catching a gravity assist from Tylo, Laythe, or maybe Vall, or with an engine burn close to Jool to go to the "capture/escape" stage.

I tore down and rebuilt my PC. One of the PCI slots is still broken.

Something that randomly occurred to me earlier regarding Coruscant-style planet-cities: what about air pressure? Coruscant supposedly has over five thousand "levels". If one level is meant to be a single floor of a building, so around 2-3 m, then that would tally with the planet having skyscrapers that dwarf its natural mountains. Considering the tech available, the high levels could be made amenable in pressure and temperature, but then the lower levels would be too hot and too high pressure.

Magnemoe has it right. In KSP - and for that matter in the real world - you can get in an orbit that's elliptical but has apoapsis outside the body's SOI. You'll actually be going slower than escape velocity on said orbit, but escape by virtue of another body's gravity coming to dominate your trajectory.

If KSP2 is released as an MMO this would be lulzy.But as for this new system, I'm assuming it means .25 will have a lot of "back end" stuff that the game won't really use but a future release will take advantage of it. It's like how the game already records who the first kerbals to orbit or land on each body were, but never exposes this to the player.

Performance wise KSP's "reaction wheels" are more like control moment gyros, which work by changing the spin axis of a flywheel whereas reaction wheels change the spin speed. Either real device saturates, but I think it's fair that KSP's don't, not least because we don't have gravitational torque to help unsaturate them.

I wondered why you needed to post the link, but then it hit me that there are people on this forum who are too young to remember Clippy. #feelingold /tangent

Tall streamlined rockets work just fine. If they wobble, well you reinforce them with struts, that's not hard to explain or understand.

There's more problems with your flying than your rocket. Try and avoid having to pitch back up again after you pitch down, and you can stand to throttle back on the second stage too, keep the TWR below 2 or so. And of course you can use a lower parking orbit. The first two stages on that rocket are very similar to one of my most successful designs, except I use just one big tank in the second stage. Gets 45 tons to LKO no problem and with a mere handful of parts so it keeps the lag at bay. Low launch TWR has some upsides - you're lifting less mass of engine and will spend less money on said engines. You do need more delta-V for orbit, but that's no big deal as long as you're mindful of it.

My return landings typically follow an Apollo-like pattern. Two or three serial stages on the launcher. I try and give each about equal delta-V, though I might also consider engine Isp when decided when to drop the first stage and ignite the second. I sometimes use fuel crossfeed on the upper stages to get some extra delta-V, but not on the first stage. A single stage orbiter, and a single or two-stage lander (or landers) as appropriate.

Haha. I've used some slow launchers, like 1.1 TWR on launch stuff, but even they get up to a sensible speed by a few km up.

Is there a reverse time mod? Or would you just edit the savefile?

A viable compromise would be to edit SP+ so its parts don't appear in the VAB/SPH. That way legacy ships still work but you won't accidentally use the parts in new ones.

You can do a real gravity turn in stock KSP. Few players bother because it's not needed and takes extra design effort to make work.

N-body gravity is the easy bit. The hard bit in my expectation is making map mode work with it. That requires the game to calculate not just the next time step, but every timestep for potentially years in advance in order to plot the orbit, and recalculate it for any ship when thrusting ideally every frame and certainly often enough to not annoy the player with laggy map updates. You could duck the issue by still using patched conics for the map mode, but then it won't show the effects of n-body gravity and the paths it makes possible, meaning players will not have the tools to assist them in taking advantage of it and bringing into question why to even have it in the first place.

I wonder if one fly in the ointment wouldn't be air travel. With drag being so high you'd need a lot more fuel to get anywhere. Stimy air travel and you stimy the development of spaceflight.

I had some debris mysteriously appear from my asteroid ship when it was orbiting Ike. It wasn't moving fast though, just drifting, a few parts that matched some on my ship but nothing was missing from said ship. Maybe a similar bug but put a lot more speed on the thing?