cantab

A return mission will always give significantly more science than a transmitting mission - though for unmanned return missions you may need to carry multiple small instruments. A kerballed mission will give somewhat more science than an unkerballed one (since EVA reports and Surface Samples are exclusive to Kerbals, and Crew Reports need a command pod though it doesn't have to be occupied). These factors are independent: there's no reason you can't make a probe return mission. The bigger benefit is from returning rather than going one-way. However a kerballed ship will be several times heavier than an ultralight probe, and a return mission will need to be a few times heavier than a one way (how much by depends on destination). As regards specific cases for one-way missions, well an Eve lander is the obvious one. The easiest place to land and the hardest to come back from, with a big science multiplier to boot.

You've said yourself that it's only actually stopping you docking with a couple of modded spacecraft. Thus it sounds like the mod in question is responsible. It's the job of mods to play well with the stock game and/or other mods if their authors so choose, not for Squad to make everything nice with every possible mod current and future. The magnetic system works well enough in stock, effectively adding some leeway in the docking process. Considering we don't have hundreds of hours of flight training and aren't flying spacecraft precision engineered by a team of professionals working for several years, I think that leeway is needed. EDIT: By the way, show me an official, reasonably recent source calling KSP a simulator.

Wait, does this forum seriously have a censor that falls foul of the Shorpe problem? It's not 1998 any more, there's no excuse nowadays.

Searched for and didn't spot the anomaly in the mountains west of KSC? Anyone know if .23.5 hid it, or is it still there to see? Then failed spectacularly at landing the Albatross 3 that I'd taken for the job. Came in way too high and had to try and dive steeply, realised I wouldn't have enough runway left so touched down on the grass northeast of it instead, applied the brakes and the plane did an endo. Fortunately for Wehrble the pit survived.

*Doesn't press* Press to be teleported to a random location on the land surface of the Earth. No guarantee you won't be inside a plant, animal, or manmade structure.

Assemble the Arkingthaad Lite perfectly with no debug menu, mods, or transferring of fuel.

Note that to get into a polar orbit you need to launch slightly northwest or southwest with respect to the planet's surface. By default the navball is in surface mode when you launch and doesn't switch into orbit mode until quite late. It can help to switch it manually shortly after your pitchover, and then you can keep prograde aimed due north/south

Congrats. With 600 m/s in the tanks, the first thing I might have tried is setting up a normal/antinormal burn from my orbit round the Mun, so that I'd eject much like from a usual departure and have my Kerbin periapsis dropped right down for landing. Whether that would have been possible I don't know.

Ingame I suppose you'd use an autopilot to cruise at certain altitudes, and right-click to read off the engine performance numbers.

In stock perhaps the most helpful thing is to include some drogues. They seem to open more gently than main chutes and will take a lot of the speed off before the main chutes deploy. My suggested sequence of events is drogues part deploy, drogues fully deploy, mains part deploy, mains fully deploy. (For that you'll want the drogues in the stage before the mains).

They're a similar sort of challenge, the landing itself isn't the hardest bit (although Moho is the second-largest airless body), but the getting into orbit to start with. Though I would rate Moho as rather harder, and Tylo on balance is still harder than both. It can do, but it's a bit tricky. You want to meet Eve at the Moho-Eve ascending/descending node, which you'll more or less have to eyeball. I had a job setting those encounters up for a couple of probes.

Scenery by cantab314, on Flickr Last night I flew the Aeris 3A back from KSC West to the main space centre. Just straightforward cruising while I had the football on on the other screen. Had to drop the speed to conserve fuel, I'd took off with 90/300, and doing 135 m/s I expected to have enough to land safely. I got within 80 km of KSC, by then flying at night, when my whole computer crashed There's no autosave in atmosphere and I hadn't quicksaved, so that was a couple of hours flying wiped out. I shan't be redoing it. *Clicks Recover*

Make each rocket a subassembly, then build a framework from girders or beams in the SPH with all those subassemblies hanging off it via decouplers. Launch, decouple the framework and fly it away on some little rockets of its own, and you have your launcher family lined up for the photoshoot.

Regarding control point location, I like to have it close to the engines. After all, when I'm making a burn it's the direction they're thrusting in that matters. It's also likely the engines are attached to the fuel tank stack which is the most massive part of the ship when full.

Have you tried righting the original lander? A relatively light ship with plenty of torque can sometimes pick itself up on the Mun. If your original lander, like your rescue ship, has a reaction wheel you're in with a very good chance.

The problem with using wings is they add weight, lowering your mass fraction and thus your achievable delta-V.

I've carried on more or less as normal. Rather slowly designing a yacht for Laythe. Once that's done I think I'm going to fly my missions out; got Duna/Ike return landers, Eve one-way lander, multi-planet flyby, and a couple of asteroid things underway.

Not been beyond the Mun and Minmus myself. I have a Duna and Ike mission en-route and a Laythe mission in the design stage. We'll see how they go.

Bad. I think there'll be a lot of finger pointing and acrimony, the public and Congress probably more interested in who to blame than in how to fix it. I expect Astrium, the European company who will build the Orion Service Module, will be the media's favourite people to blame in the days after the failure, purely because they're not American. Almost certainly some senior NASA managers would lose their jobs over the failure, while on the other hand if the failure is traced to a part from a contractor, none of the managers there will have anything to worry about.

Here's a suggestion for how to set up your orbit: Period the same as Minmus's. High Minmus-relative inclination. Apoapsis near the AN/DN with respect to Minmus, and higher than Minmus's orbital radius plus its SOI radius. Closest approach near the Apoapsis, and NOT an encounter. This way, every time your probe passes apoapsis, it will see Minmus near Kerbin. The high inclination of the probe's orbit will stop it entering Minmus's SOI. Then you only need to wait for the Mun to be in the right spot too. To get into that orbit in the first place, I would wait until KSC is under Minmus's AN/DN (you might have to eyeball this, in which case you can use the apparent intersection of Kerbin's centre, the Mun's orbit, and Minmus's orbit to guide you), then launch and pitch north or south. That will get you a roughly polar orbit that you can then expand.

I think it's "broken" in the sense that it's overpowered. That's kind of unavoidable for any Orion drive mod, though it might be nice to have an update that prevents you from launching from KSC with it. After all, you're letting off a load of nuclear bombs, that's something that even the Kerbals ought to think twice about doing at their space centre.

Nice station Those are the trio panels from Near Future by the looks of it, good to see them.

If you do want to mix up the transfer windows a bit, say on a new save, you can edit the savefile right after making the save and change the UT value, thus changing the date when you start your program.

I'd say that's an incorrect assumption. The Mk 1 Pod is loosely analogous to a Mercury spacecraft, while the Mk 2-3 is more akin to the Apollo command module.That said, I concur the rover wheels are still too high up. They don't belong at the start, but maybe one or two levels after the first landing legs. (We have the unpowered plane wheels there actually, but it's a bit kooky to use them for rovers.)

Looks pretty neat. I find myself right now wanting some nice wooden panels to make the decking of a swanky yacht, vertical propulsion emporium has one but it's tiny (smaller than the regular 1x1 panel).