cantab

Have you checked that your engine even moves the station? Because it looks like you've got the decoupler pointing the wrong way, so it's stuck to the engine and will block the thrust. If you do need to rebuild I suggest making it symmetric, that'll ensure it flies straight. If you turn SAS on then the game will use the controls to try and keep on course but it can only do so much.

Yeah, you'll have to work around it. You could simply crop the video, if you don't mind reducing the resolution. Alternatively, set up a mod such as telemachus, that will then let you see your instruments on another screen separately from the main game.

Lol. You can land on your engine, you just have to be more careful. Back in the early days of KSP before there was landing gear or even winglets that's what you had to do.

The LV-N's often the best engine but not always, other engines can be competitive, so no it's not cheaty. 48-7S spam is worse in terms of exploiting parts in "unnatural" ways, but even that's not really cheating - I'd fault the game for having wonky part balance, not the player for taking advantage of that.

Ah well, the Galileo sats can circularise on the monoprop right. Right?

That's a good escape system, but the stock LES in a similar test will peak the acceleration around 10 g.To be honest in KSP escape systems are more for show than anything. I've rarely had problems with simply shutting down all other engines, decoupling the upper stage and flying away. There's a thread in the rocket builders forum on construction techniques, I believe it includes how to mount a parachute below a docking port as seen in Romphaia's example.

If you have a station in a very high orbit, then for departures from it on interplanetary trips you should burn retrograde so your periapsis is low over Kerbin, then burn for ejection there. Delta-V wise this does indeed take less than departing from LKO. Here's how you can work out how much delta-V you'll save this way. Put a ship in LKO, then set up a transfer to a higher orbit. The delta-V saving for a ship departing a station in the higher orbit is the first burn minus the second burn. The thing is you need to make that retrograde burn in the right place. With a station too far out it orbits so slowly that by the time it's come round to said right place you've missed the transfer window! Minmus is manageable (except for going to Moho) and a popular choice for kethane users.

"Detailed numerical calculations show that orbits at or just within the Hill sphere are not stable in the long term; it appears that stable satellite orbits exist only inside 1/2 to 1/3 of the Hill radius. The region of stability for retrograde orbits at a large distance from the primary, is larger than the region for prograde orbits at a large distance from the primary." - Wikipedia For Earth the Hill sphere is about 1.5 million km, so an orbit of radius 500-750 thousand km would be stable.

If you've already played flight sims somewhat, you might be better off installing FAR or NEAR for a more realistic aerodynamic model. And if you can't be bothered to land properly, you can always stick a few chutes on your plane and come down that way.

I have now been to Duna, but I'm 0/2 on walking away from the "landing".

I have found that rockets with low TWR upper stages need a steeper ascent profile, which I believe is to reduce drag losses when said upper stage is firing. I still start the turns at 10 km but might only pitch to 60 degrees or so.

Indeed, that's something you need to look at. There are some known bugs with AMD processors, fixes for them exist. Anyway, KSP's a bit unusual in terms of demands on the PC. The physics is single-threaded and gets heavy with large ships, so it's less a case of "can it run KSP on ultra" and more "can it run an xxx-part ship without lag?" That CPU's decent enough, lots of people including myself play on worse and you'll be fine up to a few hundred parts on a ship, but a current Intel processor would do better. It's not so demanding on graphics, at least in stock (you can get mods to make things look flashier), so I wouldn't be surprised if the AMD integrated graphics can max them out.

I believe that Squad have said they plan on a "tycoon" direction for the game, but I really don't think it should go too far in terms of the management aspects. The spacecraft design and piloting is challenging enough - it's quite literally rocket science - and should be where the game's difficulty curve comes from, not from being a complicated management sim.

Though I don't think a manned rocket would use an automated range safety system. The destruct would only be initiated at the button-press of the range safety officer. And would probably include the firing of the LES to get the astronauts out of dodge first.

I do what suits the mission at hand. My cheap little probes: lots and lots of gravity assists planned. The initial departures were tricky because I wanted to arrive at Eve at the Moho/Eve node for the assist onto Moho. Even worked in a Munar assist on the way out for one of them, that took AGES to set up. My one-way Eve rover: Straightforward Hohmann. Good thing too because it left me some delta-V for an impromptu stop at Gilly. My Duna asteroid ship: First rendezvoused with an asteroid in solar orbit, then set up the gravity assist at Kerbin to go onto Duna. The transfer looped out somewhat beyond Duna's orbit and the encounter was on the inward crossing. My Eve asteroid impactor: Along similar lines, but it'll be making several solar orbits before it hits. My Laythe mission: Took an express transfer to get there in about half the usual time. The transfer orbit was closed, but with apoapsis out beyond Eeloo.

Tell them it's the cockpit heater

^ That. The ready-made LES offers a very high and slightly off-centre thrust, making it more effective at getting the command pod away from the rocket. If you suffer a structural failure and have got still-firing engines behind you that's important.

If caught by a pregnant woman chickenpox can cause severe disease in the foetus. As for flu, while most strains aren't dangerous to healthy fit people and thus said people aren't advised to get vaccinated, there have been exceptions, including the 1918 pandemic that killed over 50 million people worldwide.Anyway, I don't think compulsory vaccination is a good idea. It's liable to foster hostility between people and the health service, and encourage opposition. People by and large don't like being ordered to do things by their governments.

So the same kind of energy storage and power outputs as current planes have then. Those energies did indeed make aircraft hijackings "more interesting" back in 2001. Anyway, advanced aircraft will always have the advantage that they're highly flexible and don't require massive infrastructure investment to go anywhere. Never mind vactrains and maglevs, electric aircraft could be a serious threat to conventional trains, which at the moment benefit from much cheaper fuel costs to offset the slower speeds and greater capital expenditure.

That's what I was thinking. Let's say some aliens just give us a cool spaceship that can fly us to Mars. We wouldn't deserve that, we wouldn't have done anything towards it. But when we design and build our own spaceship to get to Mars, then we - both humanity as a whole and whatever group has built the ship - will absolutely deserve it. We'll have earnt it.

WooDzor, really nice video. Are the Kerbal voices from a mod or dubbed in? And nice ship too, I'm amazed at how you hid the moon buggy on there, didn't even see it until it was driving around. Frank_G, that's a pretty neat rover. Do the front wheels get grip being angled like that? As for me, the Magellan arrived at Laythe. I made a direct aerocapture at Laythe, shedding something like 2 km/s in a white-hot glow, entering a somewhat eccentric and inclined parking orbit. The orbit was deliberate, I did some science and kethane scanning, which I wanted the eccentricity and inclination for respectively. (Besides, circular equatorial orbits are boring). Then aerobraked down to a low orbit ready for landing, I took several passes but still overdid the last one and had to thrust to keep apoapsis above the atmosphere. Next is to finalise a landing site. I might pick the area around the antimeridian, there's land nearby including a large kethane deposit (never mind that the Magellan doesn't have mining gear!), and it'll offer views of both Jool and the close approaches of Vall and Tylo.

Yeah, I think the size of a "serving" is what's at fault here, it's unhelpfully small.

If you haven't already, right-click the rear wheels and disable the steering. Unless you want to make tight turns in a big rover you're best off with front-wheel steering only, like a car. You can also disable the motors on two of the wheels to halve the power consumption and slightly drop the top speed.

The new spaceplane parts and a further enhancement to career mode. The big coding project and the big modelling project - which might be the same thing or two separate things - won't be done for .25, they're for a later release.

It would be a bit kludgy, but I wonder if you couldn't make the anomaly a vessel that's pre-placed where you want it, then make the game think it's an asteroid. That way they will show up on the stock map, but the player won't be able to view them without physically going there.