cantab

If you ever use a star map, you'll be used to east and west being "reversed", because they're done as though you're looking up at the sky not down at the ground. It's the same idea on the blue part of the navball.

IIRC career at the moment was meant as much as anything else to help players get into the game. Certainly when I started out I found the full parts list daunting, the limited selection in career makes things simpler.

Lately, my ship randomly disintegrating into a zillion pieces. Something on it seems to be kraken bait. Probably my rover, that does have some conspicuous part clipping.

I lol'ed here. Evidently it's not possible to directly drill and convert without at least a small kethane tank as a "buffer" then?As for your electricity issues, well I believe (but am not sure) that if you waited in orbit you'd have got sunlight in due course. Your orientation relative to Kerbin would stay fixed (if you weren't spinning), but Kerbin's orbit round the Sun would change your orientation relative to the Sun. But I don't blame you for taking a little help given you'd launched the thing four times already.

Rendezvoused with my Duna-bound asteroid during its Kerbin flyby and set about rearranging the various bits. Here it is with everything together. Next stop: Duna! And the return vessel, to take the original crew and some science back to Kerbin: The engine section here is the original one from the asteroid tug. For the return I've given it only just enough fuel to deorbit shortly before it would leave Kerbin's SOI.

In general a ship that can make a Munar orbit-and-return can make a Duna or Eve flyby-and-return or orbit no return.

Except that the Mainsail and the LFB are in the same tech node on the stock tree. So yes, I do feel that the new parts do outclass the Mainsail in most if not all situtations. The LFB is a superior first stage engine, though do be mindful it lacks an alternator and doesn't gimbal as much. For upper stages, the KR-2L is almost always better than Mainsail in all respects except compactness. Of course, if a Mainsail will do the job, a Mainsail will do the job. And remember, fuel on the launchpad is cheap. Squad have recognised this, and plan on changing the performance in the next release. In the meantime, you could try the Stock Rebalance mod.

Despite the half version number, .23.5 was effectively a major update. It wasn't meant to be, hence not being .24, but Squad found that just adding the NASA parts and the asteroids wasn't enough, that they needed to make some more significant changes for the mission to work out. We know what the planned resources "flowchart" was - a whole network of make-this-from-that using primarily fictional substances like "propellium" and "blutonium".

VOID now uses the same calculation library as engineer, so they should be the same. My thoughts on the three:Engineer Redux: Probably best for building, and good for in-flight info. Mechjeb: Goes beyond basic info with its assistance and autopilot tools. Good for building and for in-flight info, but the power brings with it complexity. VOID: Best for in-flight info with its HUD, displaying the key info tidily either side of the altimeter. Best I think for career since the HUD includes the current biome and situation, relevant for science. Not good for building since it only shows a stage at a time.

Your statement that burning prograde lowered your orbit suggests you're not controlling the ship from a part facing the same way as the engines are burning. You can right-click any command module or probe core and choose "Control from here" and it uses that part for the navball orientation. Once you have that sorted, you have two main options. One is to simply burn retrograde when you're near periapsis. Only burn enough to just close your orbit. Then target one of Jool's moons (either the one you plan to visit, or else Laythe or Vall since they both have 0 inclination) so you can see your ascending/descending nodes. Set up a manouevre at whichever node is furthest from Jool, make that manouevre a combination of normal/antinormal and retrograde, so that you correct your orbital inclination and lower your periapsis for either encountering a moon or aerobraking at Jool itself. The second is to set up a manouvre soon that's a combination of radial and normal, to put your periapsis in Jool's atmosphere for aerobraking and at an angle that will get you an equatorial orbit.

You could simulate the effect by making periodic stationkeeping burns over the poles to rotate your orbit around. With an ultra-high-Isp thruster this could be very practical.

In the stock game memory usage isn't an issue. Chances are that performance will be virtually identical. Differences would mainly be down to graphics drivers (if you don't have hardware 3d acceleration working properly KSP will run like a total dog) or system overhead (stuff like search indexing and antivirus software being the usual suspects for that).

For calculating manually: Open the map screen, hit backspace to focus on the current ship, then click the i on the right. Read off the full mass. Subtract the mass of the fuel AND the oxidizer available to the current stage. It's 5 kilos per unit. Plug the full and dry masses into the rocket equation. I recommend using only the KR-2L for your interplanetary burns, it's a fair bit more efficient than the Skipper. To shut the skippers down just right-click them.

As much as I'd use for any game, I think, not that I play PC games much. Besides the obvious, there's right shift, which typically replaces Alt since I'm on Linux. There are the various shortcuts added by Editor Extensions: V for vertical snapping, and I think Alt+R to enable surface attachment and save me a cuboct strut. And that's about it.

I don't get concerned about this. If I have to stick with .23.5 for a bit, I'll stick with .23.5 for a bit. Heck, I'll probably wait for a few days to let others test mod compatibility at least.Regarding .24, I'm kinda hyped by the new Vernier and OMS engines, but then again that's something I could surely get with mods if I wanted anyway. I'm a shade apprehensive about any balance changes, just in case it breaks my launchers. And to be honest I'm not feeling interested in career, I'll probably just hack myself infinite cash or something. I'm minded to wait until .25 when I expect some balance improvements before taking career "seriously".

Doesn't the little Rockomax engine have 30 kN of thrust? I also wonder if the Ant engine wouldn't get more delta-V than the Rockomax. It's the same deal as with the RCS, lower engine mass making up for lower Isp. Of course, the key with the RCS is that you've put 1 thruster on there, but you could put 7, maybe even more, with no penalty except for part count. Modify your design to have 3 of the RCS tanks, and put enough thrusters, and you should have a one-way Tylo lander.

If you really want to rationalise it: what matters is not what you learn about the biomes on Kerbin, but what you learn about how the science instruments (and the astronauts) behave after having endured a rocket flight.

Nice challenge. The Oscar-B's and Round-8's poor tankage will certainly make it harder to squeeze out the delta-V. I also wonder how RCS-powered ships might compete with LFO ones. The tankage and Isp are both worse for RCS (Isp being much worse in atmosphere), but the RCS thrusters are massless in .23.5

Bear in mind Kerbin's surface already has an extremely low science multiplier, just 0.3. The atmosphere is better at 0.7, and orbit is 1. But then make Munar orbit and you're getting 3 times the science. With that in mind, it shouldn't be hard to complete the tech tree eschewing science from Kerbin's surface and atmosphere. You can certainly make space with the tier 0 parts, even if you don't exploit explosive decoupling.

Ubuntu is based on Debian (though it does add a lot of stuff particular to Ubuntu). I've been playing KSP on Ubuntu no problem. In terms of variants, regular Ubuntu is a pretty different UI to Windows. You might like it, you might not. Linux Mint (separate, but based on Ubuntu) has a more familiar interface and is well-regarded. If you want something quite streamlined, along the lines of XP interface-wise (but without the fisher price looks), try Lubuntu.

I've never really thought about it much.

Eat a sauna in a bowl of ice cream without you freezing.

It's true that you may need an extra correction to ensure your intersect point is at the AN/DN, but I believe in most cases that correction should be small. You then just make a normal phasing burn at the intersect so you get a close intersect on a future orbit. You will have that extra normal velocity to kill when you make the close intersect, but if you're talking a few degrees it's not going to be that much. - - - Updated - - - It's true that you may need an extra correction to ensure your intersect point is at the AN/DN, but I believe in most cases that correction should be small. You then just make a normal phasing burn at the intersect so you get a close intersect on a future orbit. You will have that extra normal velocity to kill when you make the close intersect, but if you're talking a few degrees it's not going to be that much.

Tried to drive my rover about Kerbin for a bit. After returning to it after I'd parked it, I found it seemed jammed on something unseen, driving forward or backward wouldn't budge it and just broke wheels. And yes, I had released the parking brake. I then enabled all wheel motors and reversed, and the chassis split clean apart The crewmember was outside the rover when this happene. When I recovered the greater part of the rover his marker was still apparent, but now he's not in the tracking station and is listed as "Missing in Action" in the astronaut complex. On a permadeath save, where every other lost Kerbal is list as "Dead".

When I was looting the spaceport before its closure, I came across a mention of a gravitating part plugin, that had been used to make a (pre-ARM) asteroids mod where the asteroids have gravity. If that plugin is still available, it might be possible to mod the LPP in.