cantab

OMG thanks. I'm fine now though. But wait...when did I even say I was sick on the forums

Well I've only landed on the Mun and Minmus. (Not tried anywhere else either). Both have given me their share of trouble, but the Mun's probably been worse. My mission in .23.5 turned into a farce, owing to a combination of a typically fallen-over landing, a runaway rover, night falling, and a game bug or two. All Kerbals did return safely though.

There's always the stock rockets. The Kerbal X can land on the Mun, though it can't get back afterwards.

There is no data for planetary positions in a save file. That should be sufficient to show that the planets are on-rails with their positions determined solely by the in-game time and date and their predefined orbits.

I feel a complete debug menu ban is too draconian. In the VAB, whether a part places or not is often so incredibly arbitrary and random that enabling clipping is quite justifiable to avoid annoyance. In flight I routinely use the "flight debug stats" to monitor game performance, and people may need to use it for actual debugging. Edit: Also, I'm not sure we should have such a "global" ruleset. While it may be a bit silly for every challenge to be basically repeating the same rules, it's a good way to separate a well-considered challenge that's had effort to put in from a random idea someone decided to throw up in two minutes. If there is to be, I think some more should be: Don't rules-lawyer where the intent should be obvious. The challenge setter's word is final on entry admissability. Don't argue when your clever loophole abusing entry is disqualified, and don't argue about the eligibility of other people's entries. Challenge setters, don't be too quick to disqualify an entry that's within the rules just because it's not what you had in mind.

We know the main thing is going to be a career mode overhaul, with "contracts" - specific missions you'll have the option of taking to get a reward if you succeed in them. This is indeed expected to be the function of the mission control building in the space centre. Though it's not part of the game, we also know there are plans to revamp the Spaceport (the add-on website). Besides that: Bugfixes: Near certain. New parts: As likely as not. I'd like to see some 3.75 m ancilliaries, there's a bit of a shortage ATM. Part rebalancing: Unlikely but plausible. .23.5 did a fair bit of that, so .24 will probably leave it alone. Part remodelling, including possible cockpit IVAs: Unlikely but plausible. Though heaven knows there's plenty of parts in need of a visual revamp. New celestials: Unlikely but plausible. I can see somewhere getting an extra moon thrown in, but certainly not the second gas giant. Significant physics changes: Extremely unlikely. New demo version: Unlikely but plausible. I can see Squad wanting to put the better manouvre node system and the stiffer joints in the demo, but to be honest I reckon a demo update should wait until KSP moves to Unity 5 and gets the big performance boost from it.

Yeah, this boils down to a part count contest I feel. Send up one launch with a huge bunch of satellites, attain your chosen orbit, and drop them all off.

This is my usual basic delta-V map, but it's not very good for the Joolian system since it assumes you're going via low Jool orbit, which is silly unless you want to go to low Jool orbit for the science. http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/w/images/7/73/KerbinDeltaVMap.png These ones on reddit are more comprehensive, if a bit trickier to use. For interplanetary travel you'll typically need to use multiple maps, "linking" them on the transfer orbits. So say you want to go from Ike to Gilly, follow the Duna map from Ike to a Duna/Ike-Eve transfer, then the Eve map from the Eve-Dunar transfer to Gilly. I honestly didn't believe it when they told me you'd need just 1100 m/s to get from Laythe orbit to Kerbin, but as per above comments apparently that's right. http://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalAcademy/comments/1qu5jv/deltav_charts/ And remember for any delta-V map you may be able to provide delta-V by aerobraking which means you don't need that figure from your engines. This is typically indicated by an arrow pointing in the direction aerobraking is possible.

You need a TWR of 2 to hit terminal velocity in a vertical ascent, since that's the thrust that will result in a net upwards force equal to the rocket's weight. However, since the TWR rises as you burn fuel a liftoff TWR of 2 results in needing to throttle back. The "ideal" launch TWR is going to depend on a lot of factors - the size of the first stage, the engines available, and the staging used.

I don't imagine Kerbals will give a very solid foundation. Anyway, a tallest tower challenge isn't unreasonable, but I think it needs 1) launch clamps banned, otherwise making 2.5 km is trivial, and 2) a requirement for minimum time to stay up.

Well nukes will need the least fuel, but you'll want a big cluster to get a reasonable TWR. That can send the part count up. An alternative is the KR-2L. You'll need a lot more fuel, but with one KR-2L giving as much thrust as 42 nukes you might be able to really bring the part count and burn times down.

Well I don't really have a checklist as such, but for launch my procedure is: * Check I have the right number of Kerbals on board. (Can be a problem when I want to send a mannable ship up empty.) * Turn on SAS. * If applicable, switch the "Control From Here" location. (I tend to put a probe core on a lower stage of longer rockets, so the SAS isn't affected by the tip swaying.) * Throttle up. (For some reason I do this even when my first stage is only solid boosters.) * Hit space. I don't really have a checklist for anything else, although I possible SHOULD, given I've been caught out by having the wrong Control from Here location when doing burns, and by having the wrong amount of resources (the worst being no electricity or no RCS fuel) when undocking.

There's no reason to think Squad have deliberately put bugs in KSP, no benefit they could gain by doing so. Yes the "Hell Kraken" is weird, but these things are often a result of different parts of the program interacting when they weren't meant to.

Finally got the lights on my station. I did a lot more ground testing to make sure I'd get good coverage of the station, needed ten lights on each pole. Found there's a bit of saturation when they combine with sunlight but it's not too bad. Next thing to add is a bunch of senior docking ports for parking the modules in my new modular ships, since the station core only has two.

Scott Manley mentioned that you need to be able to get some angle of attack on your wings to lift off (just as you would on a real plane). If the wings are level when the plane's on its wheels, and the elevators are too close to the rear wheels, you can end up unable to lift the nose for takeoff, which results in no flight until the drop off the end of the runway lets you free.

Well in KSP we have at most 3 degrees of gimballing (on the Mk 55 and the Rapier). The Space Shuttles engines had 10 degrees, which was required to keep the thrust pointed through the changing centre of mass. It's small wonder shuttles are hard in KSP.

Aerospikes seem to be widely used, mainly because Eve's dense atmosphere means you're stuck at Kerbin sea level Isp until you pass about 10 kilometres. Eve in any case is a considerable outlier. If you want a ship that can return from an Eve landing, you have to design it for the task. The same generally goes for Tylo, a Tylo landing and return needs more delta-V than a launch to LKO. Laythe also warrants special consideration, though you can probably get away with using a Moho lander with added parachutes if you're precise enough to come down on solid ground.

Sure, there are plenty of things that "should be stock", but a propulsion system capable of getting you off Eve with a single stage isn't one of them. Not when an Eve return is one of the biggest challenges in the game, and not when it requires more delta-V and higher TWR than real rockets reaching Low Earth Orbit and there's never been an Earth SSTO.(Yes I know FAR drops the delta-V requirement, but it's still high. If improved aerodynamics alone is enough to make an Eve SSTO possible then I'd say Eve's atmosphere "should be" denser to render that no longer possible.)

Not without mod parts Edit: Or glitch exploitation.

My efforts to dock my ion drive module with my station made a good impression of a Chihuaha humping a Great Dane. I got it docked, but decided that while engine-only docking is possible, it's a horrible thing to do and I never want to attempt it again, so I deorbited the sodding thing. Having consigned the payloads, a couple of lighting poles, to the same fate earlier that's a good few hours of time wasted in frustration for no result :@ Then I redesigned the darn things, putting RCS and a reaction wheel on the drive module, and a reaction wheel and better placed lights on the lighting poles. Built a small chemical drive module too which I might use instead of the ions for my next attempt, much less delta-V of course but more thrust and far fewer parts. The ions were hilarious overkill just for reaching a space station really.

12,500 m/s sounds like a good amount then. But there's a catch: That figure will drop when you're pushing a lander around. How much depends on the dry weight of your transfer stage and the weight of your landers. Really you'll need to check your transfer stage delta-V with a test payload that you think will cover most lander requirements (not Eve and possibly not Tylo). I'm not sure what the best weight is for that, I'm using 18 tons (one Rockomax 32 tank) but haven't built many landers. And of course you'll be lighter for the return trip (assuming you don't want to send the lander back to LKO) so it can get a bit tricky to figure the delta-V there.

http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/w/images/7/73/KerbinDeltaVMap.png Note the figures are generally towards the low end. Moho in particular can be much more expensive to reach in a poor window, and I prefer to have more like 4700 m/s for launching from LKO, gives a margin of error. I'll give all my figures from LKO. For flybys Eeloo is the hardest in delta-V terms, but 3250 m/s should do it. I'd aim for like 4000 to flyby anywhere. That assumes direct transfers, you can do significantly better with gravity assists. For entering orbit, Moho's going to be the toughest. 7000 m/s on a good day, but Moho's got a habit of catching people out, I'd go for nine or ten thousand to be on the safe side. For landing, trying to build one lander for everywhere is a bit silly because there's such a huge range in what you need. But one lander for everywhere the Mun's size or smaller - so that's Gilly, Mun, Minmus, Ike, Dres, Bop, and Pol - is not unreasonable. That'll want about 1500 m/s in it. Might handle Duna too with some parachutes.

This stands to reason, since the Space Center screen shows the "real" view (though it doesn't load ships), rather than being a pre-rendered image. You can move the camera about in the space centre screen.

I don't bloody believe it. So after having carried out an RCS-less docking followed by a docking with off-balance RCS and hardly any torque, and wrestling the two payloads into a rendezvous with the station, I separated the payloads so I could take them into the station on their own power, switched to them and went to nudge away from the drive section, and Nothing. No response at all. Because the brain-dead algorithms in the game have decided to completely drain the little batteries on the payloads, and the even littler batteries in the probe cores, despite the fact that the drive section has FIVE of the giant Z-4k batteries that still had more charge than anything but its ion engines will ever need. Well screw this. When they come into the light I'm deorbiting the payloads on their RCS and sending up remakes with reaction wheels this time.

Mostly other people's KSP ships. Though the Macbeth Block II resembles a baby version of 2001's Discovery: crew space at the front, nuclear drive at the back, connected by some girderwork.