cantab

It's basically the same problem as the planners of Voyager faced. Someone's made a mission planning tool for this kind of stuff in KSP too, you could give it a try. I'm actually trying a flyby grand tour at the moment but I do have a lot of delta-V on my probe so don't need to be super-efficient.

I've been with nVidia on Linux basically forever, though I've rarely done anything that really needs 3d acceleration. As for KSP, it crashes on rare occasions, typically in the VAB, but is generally fine once I fixed the XL decoupler bug. As a workaround, have you tried manually installing the 13.10 package? Download it from http://packages.ubuntu.com/saucy/fglrx-updates and install it with dpkg -i packagename.deb or by opening the package in the GUI.

First docked my ion drive module to a payload, a lighting pole for my space station, on ion engines alone. Then docked those two, which made the most RCS-imbalanced assembly I've handled and with hardly any reaction wheel torque either, to the second (identical) payload. Dang that was tough. And I've still got to dock the lighting poles to my space station. I might undock the ion drive for that and just handled the payloads, which have probe cores and RCS. With any luck not having a 9-ton weight attached will make the payload handle better. AND I've just realised the lighting isn't even much good anyway, I've got the lamps angled wrong so they won't properly cover my station. *facepalm*

You can use the trim function, shift+WASDQE, to set a sort of "cruise control" for your rovers. Saves having to hold down the key on long drives and might make controlled low-speed travel practical. Shift+X resets trim to neutral.

IIRC you can't claw celestial bodies, unfortunately.

I'll assume it's 32 tons full. Fuel weighs 5 kilos a unit, so you have 3 tons of fuel, and assuming your ratios are balanced 3.67 tons of oxidizer. Plugging the numbers into the rocket equation, 800 * 9.82 * ln (32/25.33) = 1800 m/s of delta-V. http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/w/images/7/73/KerbinDeltaVMap.png That would have easily made it from Ike back to Kerbin. As you've shown it also sufficed to land on Duna, but I reckon you'll be very close for getting back into Duna orbit.

Even if it is, what do you optimise to? Launchpad mass, in which case you go with asparagus. Part count, in which case you probably don't. Or build time, in which case you make one big lifter and use it for everything.

Haha. A fair point, but I want to build a space prison. And yeah, I'm considering the somewhat fanciful idea of a bust-out being attempted from outside.Eve would be good if I wasn't so hopeless at making precision landings on bodies with atmosphere, based on my performance on Kerbin at least. I'd end up with less a prison and more a light sprinkling of cells over the planet.

Sounds like one of the bugs associated with the claw. IIRC it's more likely to occur if you do a lot of switching between ships.

worth bearing in mind is the fuselages have poor tankage ratios (full:dry mass ratio). It's worst for the Mk1, but all the fuselages are better in tankage by regular tanks drained of oxidizer. The fuselages do have much higher impact tolerance though.

SpaceX by themselves aren't going to do much cool space stuff beyond launching. It'll be down to others to do the inspiring missions, perhaps contracting SpaceX for the launches.The problem then I fear is whether political interests would let SpaceX take a high-profile "prestige" mission from a foreign country. Unmanned stuff is one thing, but let's say the Indians want to do a manned lunar orbit mission launching on a Falcon Heavy, I can't see the powers that be in America letting that happen, certainly not if there's any chance they'll beat NASA to it.

Centre Of Lift Behind Everything Relating to Thrust? (ie an aeroplane in a tractor configuration rather than a pusher).

I'd be happy to call this a game bug and edit the save file. I had a similar thing once and just found the Kerbal's altitude and changed it to be higher. Loaded up and he dropped down onto the ship and bounched clear. If you change the state you might be able to take control with the EVA pack too.

Yup, I've encountered this bug before. Bit annoying, but generally not too hard to replace the ladder.

Added the first actual module to my space station. 4 Hitchhikers and a cupola for my Kerbals to hang out in. Had a bit of hassle getting it there, used an 8 ion drive section and it was my first use of ion drives so still getting a feel for them, plus two big batteries wasn't enough, I ended up resorting to RCS to finish one of the interception burns. Also found a weird bug when deorbiting the drive section. All controls seemed normal, but the throttle and speed indicators on the navball were frozen. https://flic.kr/p/nu2wK4

The same stuff, maybe a bit less stingy with the OX-STATS. But I'd fly it more quickly.

Depends what you want to do with it. For sending stuff up into orbit, anywhere on Kerbin is the worst place (because you already have KSC). Eve's also terrible. Even if you want to get to Eve orbit, in delta-V terms it's cheaper to launch from anywhere but Eve, even a launch from Moho or Eeloo's surface and no Eve aerobraking uses less. On the other hand an Eve surface base is perfectly reasonable for exploring Eve itself. KSC is probably the most pointless location for surface exploration that's actually on a surface, though this may change when money is introduced. If you count asteroids, then a base on an asteroid on an impact course with the Mun or Minmus, and no means to change that course, would be pretty terrible. All that effort and inevitable destruction.

My sentiments exactly. You are absolutely right...I'm surprised I've not noticed this either.Anyway, I have to say yes and no. When it was hovering in the air I rotated the small gear bay as I wanted, but as soon as I tried to put it on the bottom of a lander can it flipped every which way. I think it's the surface attachment that makes for problems. Other times when I get the wrong key it's nothing wrong with the game, it's me not knowing what direction I'm facing in the VAB. The SPH, on the other hand, well let's just say there's a reason I've never made a serious effort at building a spaceplane.

Only "funny" name I did was probably the Brown Smear series of ships in my .23 career. In .23.5 I've been naming designs after historical figures. Examples include the Macbeth asteroid tug (rather tempting fate there, and indeed the second mission to use the design is a fiasco so far), the Smith el-cheapo probe (named after economist Adam Smith), the Occam simple heavy lifter (yet to have any close shaves with the design thankfully), and the Nobel asteroid blower-upper. Now I'm trying out some modular ships, which I'm hoping will give me more flexibility and let me keep some handy in-orbit assets, but is leading to less snappy names like the Alhazen-Hilton-Lucas-Brunel. (Respectively a science returning command section, habitat module for a space station, ion drive module, and medium lifter.)

This can be a problem in the stock game, especially with hyperbolic (escape) trajectories.

I find framerate less instructive than the "physics time ratio" which you can get by opening the debug menu and clicking show flight debug stats. For me only the simplest ships will keep things running around 1x, but anything slower than about half speed starts to get annoying. A couple of hundred parts is generally OK, 900 was painful. I've got a Phenom II X3 710, 4 GB RAM, and a GT 610. I believe a considerably worse video card than yours (I picked mine for silence, not performance), and not sure about the CPU, the Phenom should be faster overall but the Core 2 might have faster single-core performance which tends to be what matters for KSP.

Yup, took the fuel out with the tweakables. I indeed picked them because they're the single longest part so I could make a satisfyingly expansive station without the part count skyrocketing.They actually wobbled more than I'd hoped, my first launch failed because of it and I had to add a temporary strutting arrangement. In hindsight I should have put the struts to stay there, it's still not rock solid in orbit. I suspect having a reaction wheel between the radial attachment point and the SRB at the core end may account for the weakness.

Ah Kerman, I just managed to make a huge screwup of an asteroid rendezvous. In setting up my ejection burn I chanced across a helpful Munar encounter, which I then tuned to get a sub 10,000 km intercept on the asteroid in solar orbit for an ejection burn of just 900 m/s. I then timewarped, trusting Kerbal Alarm Clock would stop me for the manouevre. It didn't. By the time I'd manually stopped, it was 30 seconds past. No matter, I quickly oriented the spacecraft, turned on the engines, and throttled up for the burn. Maybe a minute or so later, I realised that something wasn't right. The delta-V requirement was hardly dropping, certainly not as fast as it should have for a five-ish minute burn. I went back into normal view, killed the engines, and wondered what was going on. Were my engines blocked? There was a fuel tank between them, though nothing behind. But I'd used them before hadn't I? I considered sending one of the crew out to EVA behind the engines and see if the thrust was blocked or not, though it'd be a bit of a problem if it was fine and the Kerbal got sent flying. Then I thought, is it some kind of bug? What happens if I use RCS? So I turned on the RCS and pushed down H. And the RCS jets clearly pushed the ship sideways. What the? Then it hit me. I still had the docking port on the side of the ship set as "Control from here". Meaning I'd been thrusting at right-angles to my intended direction, wasting just over a hundred units of fuel and doing Kraken knows what to my orbit. Well, I figured I'd better get on with my burn, so I sorted things out and finally started watching my delta-V requirement drop. I didn't want to wait another orbit, I might not get the Munar assist. It wouldn't matter for a planet, but this asteroid is considerably out of the ecliptic and the Mun really helps for the inclination change. As I burned I watched my path pass through the Mun's SOI when I'd completed nowhere near the whole thing. Trusting the navball and the node, I kept burning, but then after watching my path drop out of the Mun's SOI and stay out I stopped and took a wider look on the map view, ostensibly with about 200 m/s left on the burn. It was instantly obvious that I was way off course, my apopasis 60 degrees ahead of where it should have been. *BLEEP* I was already in such a high orbit that going around wasn't an option, I had to fix things now. The obvious way was a radial burn to deflect my course, and I set up a node in five minutes to put me back on for the Mun flyby and onwards for asteroid intercept. However, this intercept was a full three days later than the original. Finally this burn at least went smoothly, but the cost? An eye-watering, for what was essentially a course correction, 600 m/s. So my cheap 900 m/s ejection burn turned into a 1300 m/s one. And this is a mission to aerocapture a D class around Kerbin. I'm probably going to WANT that fuel I just wasted.

See my current signature (If you're havin' launch problems I feel bad for you son, I had 99 problems boosters solved every one.)

Watch the vertical speed dial next to the altimeter, and throttle gently up or down to keep that near zero. The speed on the navball can mislead when it's affected by horizontal speed. It can take a few moments to get in the right area to start with, but once done it's easier to keep near.