cantab

I landed fine. Wasn't sure what to do when I was down mind. The physics is a shade iffy - turning without thrusting gives you lateral speed - but hey, take it as a first draft.

That's because the ejection burn will be virtually identical.Anyway, what you'll probably need to do is set up a mid-course correction, and play around with that to see if you can get an encounter with the moon in question. I suggest trying with something like Ike or Tylo before you attempt to hit Gilly, mind you. In terms of delta-V, it's only really worth going direct to the moon if it's big; helpfully, it's the big moons that are easy to hit the SOIs of. For a small moon, you're better off setting up a low equatorial periapsis over the parent planet, then making a capture burn or aerocapture there to put your apoapsis level with the target moon's orbit. Then make a phasing burn at apoapsis to get an encounter in a few orbits.

As far as mods go, VOID includes inclination in its HUD.

If your projected apoapsis is beyond Dres's orbit, I believe you should still see the intersect distance markers when you pass near its orbit, even if you're not set to hit the SOI. And if you want to plan your manoeuvres with numbers instead of draggy handles, try Precise Node.

I think Claw has it right. For almost all experiments, there's a limit to how much science you can get by transmitting, which is some percentage or other of the total the experiment can give. To get the rest you'll need to return the data to Kerbin. So if you've ever transmitted data from experiments run in the Sun's SOI before, for example during an interplanetary mission, then chances are you already got all you can from transmissions.

IIRC something like it was the last Reddit weekly challenge.

I think the "Extra requirement" thing is needed to make this interesting. SOI: Laythe Mission Type: Lander Return: Yes Requirement: Water landing

Stick them on and they act as a slow power source, keeping your batteries topped up. They're 100% reliable: unless they become physically disconnected they will always keep your craft powered. As such, IMHO they should be put on any craft heavy enough to not worry about the weight. Solar panels might be left undeployed, and OX-STATs can still end up shaded. As for "tricks", well rotate them so they sit flush with the surface they're on for a sleeker look, and they weigh the same as a QBE and a similar amount to other probe cores so you can use that for balance instead of taking a pair of RTGs.

SAS generally on on the passive ship, if only because I don't want it drifting. On the active ship, SAS off when the magnetism kicks in, but then if I see the active ship starting to overshoot I'll turn it on to help deaden the movement.

Adding the Water Launch System gizmo from Firespitter, and configuring it properly to drop our rocket in the ocean on launch. It can go on the lander can, sideways just above the window.

I have. I don't think it's random though, I think it occurs when I accidentally click in such a way as to unset the target.

It wouldn't work. Fusion requires the nuclei to be crushed together under immense pressures. In a thermonuclear warhead the fission stage isn't surrounded by hydrogen, it's side-by-side with the fusion stage, and one of the biggest challenges is to contain the immense energy released by the fission bomb in order for the nuclei in the fusion stage to fuse. The atmosphere of Jupiter is just too rarefied, even in its core, for sustained fusion to be possible.

Another vote for binoculars. You should be able to get a decent pair of 10x50s for that price, though do a bit of research to find a good model since Amazon carry some real rubbish. Point them in the general direction of the Milky Way and you'll be rewarded.

On a tangent, how does this work for aircraft when the same idea doesn't work for rockets: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendulum_rocket_fallacy .

That's gorgeous, what mods did you use?

Pretty much. The "orbit" is clearly not a parabola or a hyperbola, because those are both open trajectores while ours is closed. I'm not sure eccentricity is properly defined for the degenerate ellipse, but in any case it's not needed to get a decent approximation of the total fall time. If you want to be more rigorous, you could consider an ellipse with some small semi-minor axis, then let that semi-minor axis go to zero.

The orbital period formula is valid whether the orbit is circular or elliptical, and an object in an elliptical orbit will of course experience changing gravitational acceleration. IIRC Kepler's laws and the orbital period formular can be derived from Newton's laws of motion and gravitation.I assumed, of course, that both the Earth's own radius and any atmospheric drag could be neglected. The distances involved are small compared to the total fall, the speeds are high meaning the times involved are yet smaller, and the two errors have opposite sign, so I think this is justified. I also neglected the gravity of the Moon. The moon's sphere of influence is about 60,000 km in radius, so if the ship started 300,000 km from Earth then unless the Moon was near perigee the ship would be comfortable outside its SOI.

I'm going to add six of the Firespitter airboat fans (with symmetry), placed on the side of the upper jumbo near the top, thrusting down.

There's Simple Rockets, which is a 2D KSP clone on Android. I think the original Spacewar had physically correct gravity, the clone I have (KSpaceDuel) seems to, screen wrapping nothwithstanding.

I think you have to decide what you want to teach (and know what the school are expecting). You've got the very fundamentals - play with things like mechanical logic gates, build an adder, that kind of stuff. Or "models" of a computer that have the children following defined instructions. Then you've got stuff like coding, which is pretty neat but I'm not sure how much you can cover in an hour. Then there's user-level stuff, which might be less "inspirational" but things like how to stay safe online are definitely worth teaching. And you've even got hardware maintenance, build-your-own-PC type stuff, though I wouldn't recommend that for an 8-year-old class since computers are pretty spiky inside and you don't want kids wearing plasters at the end of the class.

A "straight down" fall is a degenerate orbit with semi-major axis equal to the half the starting height, and semi-minor axis zero. So all you need to do is calculate the period of an orbit with a=150000 km. Punching the numbers into the orbital period formula, T = 2À√(a3/μ), I make T = 578160 s, or 6.7 days.

Adding a decoupler is indeed the correct approach. Make sure the arrow points to the capsule so you don't get left lugging the decoupler around. Note that if you're tipping your capsule with a docking port you don't need a separate decoupler. You can just right-click the docking point and choose to decouple whatever is attached to it. Or use an action group to simultaneously decouple node and fire the LES so it blasts itself clear. If you want to combine the LES with a nose-mounted parachute, have a look in the craft construction techniques thread in the Spacecraft Exchange Forum, there are some techniques there you can probably adapt.

Rendezvous with it in solar orbit. It'll take you more delta-V to get there, but you can then make a small correction to set your periapsis for aerocapture. For bigger asteroids it's the way to go. Provided the asteroid is due to enter Kerbin's SOI, you can get to it simply enough by leaving in the direction it's predicted to enter. There's a fuller tutorial on this on the forums. Here's my standard asteroid tug, using the same approach Stickyhammy mentioned of having little control sections to dot around the asteroid. I've fortunately not hit the bug he described, but be aware it is a risk. I suggest pointing a backup tool at your save folder so you can roll back if need be. All set up by cantab314, on Flickr That's a 500 ton asteroid and I only had about 100 m/s of delta-V once I'd grabbed it, but 100 m/s will be plenty since I'm aerocapturing.

I thought the kraken drive was something very different. SAS trying to destroy ships generally occurs when the ship flexes so that motion of the "Control from here" point lags behind that where the reaction wheels are. The kraken drive relies on parts like landing legs not implementing reaction forces properly.

You could always try adding an extra probe core. An OKTO2 has 13% of the weight and 2.5% of the torque of a standard reaction wheel, so may be good for craft where you want to keep the weight down but need a bit more torque than one core gives you.