cantab

I killed Kerbals in a spaceflight for the first time in my .23.5 save. I was testing my ship to fine tune the number of parachutes. Two were not enough. The two who lost their lives were the same who'd made my first Mun landing :'(

Excellent addition I'd already been thinking I might need to add tweaked copies of parts to handle the command pods for my SurfaceNodes mod, so this'll be just the ticket for that.

Most of my friends aren't that interested in computer games at all. One who is I mentioned KSP to but I don't speak to him that often so I don't know if he's tried it. Several others are very in to the Total War series, which I believe is similarly cerebral to KSP but has the competitive aspects, whether vs the AI or other players, that KSP lacks. Perhaps KSP in future will have a competing space program in career mode to put a bit of pressure on the player and recall the days of the US-Soviet space race. And then there are those who I know enjoyed KSP but aren't playing it right now, I'd guess they simply played it out already. I know I'll lose interest in KSP sooner or later.

Well, a few aspects that spring to mind: Lots of missions at once. Makes it feel more like a space program rather than just a bunch of missions. Keep my launchers vaguely rocket-shaped. This showed with my space station core, which was huge, but I had to keep it long and skinny to sit between and above a pair of boosters, I couldn't launch a full "wheel" design. Make things efficient. I'm moving somewhat from mass and fuel efficiency to part count efficiency, but I still don't like to overengineer. Make use of gravity assists. I love setting up a good slingshot. Don't worry too much about stuff the game doesn't include. The game lets me put a Kerbal in a lander can for a year then re-enter at high speed with no heatshield, I'll use that. Try not to revert or quickload too much. Game bugs and silly carelessness get reverted, but "proper" mistakes I should live with. No parts mods yet, though I'm seriously considering getting fairings after the hassle of making stock ones.

^ That. But I bet when the Jool collaboration really gets going I'll raegface at what some of the others have done, and have people raeging at my stuff.

What would be an orbit around Kerbin that's reasonably easy to launch into but hard to reach from more typical orbits, for ships leaving the Mun or Minmus, and for ships coming in from interplanetary space? My thought is a high polar orbit, but still lower than the Mun, oriented noon-mignight. It will certainly be tough to get to from a regular LKO, and the alignment (which will need stationkeeping to maintain since we can't do sun-synchronous orbits in KSP) is unlikely to be matched by an incoming interplanetary vessel. The only easy-ish transfers would be from the Mun or Minmus at the right time, but hopefully the altitude can be picked for the most expensive transfer, factoring that higher orbits make a cheaper direct transfer but lower orbits a cheaper aerobraking one. Meanwhile if I make the orbit synchronous, or perhaps a period of say 2 or 3 Kerbin days, I may be able to facilitate an easy launch to a quick rendezvous from Kerbin. In case you're wondering, I want it for a Kerbal prison. Don't want the miscreants being busted out by their former colleagues.

Play around with alexmoon's planner, http://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/ using the advanced options to tweak the time range to see the different encounters. The delta-V you need varies a lot between Moho windows due to its eccentric and inclined orbit. Moho's the hardest body in the game to get into orbit round, and it's not an easy place to land either being the second-largest airless body.

No, now that I know about the change of procedure that's fine. I'll have to work something out with my asteroid plans, since it'd be hassle to park one in LKO only to have to eject it again. Maybe see if I can get one to reach Jool after the main fleet will.

Off-topic, but what on Kerbin have you done to Minmus?

I'm always scared of doing this. I tend to point zenith-nadir before undocking just to make sure. Or I'll set the ship tumbling then undock so the parts get flung away from each others. This, so much this.Also, the number of times I've been fully aware of a burn coming up, maybe a minute or two away and I'm safely at 1x warp, only to MISS the node because of reading/posting on these forums!

I set abort actions, and I revert any deaths due to blatant game bugs. And I *may* send up an iffy rocket unmanned. But no guarantees.

I believe that artificial intelligences (though they may not be robots per se) will within this century make humanity obsolete, outstripping out mental capacity sufficiently that they become the drivers of further innovation. Whether or not the machines actively seek to kill us off, we will become as irrelevant to them as ants are to us.

I meant to do an unmanned test of the fuel flow but forgot to remove the Kerbals. So I went ahead with the test, killed them because I was firing upper stage engines with the lower stage still attached and something blew up and the rocket fell over, and reverted to the VAB. On my permadeath save.

Ah, we switched to using a parking orbit? I thought we were still hyperediting.

For my only station so far I designed a station core to start with, which I'll then add modules to as and when takes my fancy. I wanted the core to be big, have the main fuel and monoprop storage, and go up in a single launch without stretching belief too much which meant it couldn't be shaped like a wheel or a pancake. Eventually this is what I came up with. It barely fit in the VAB and was launched fully fuelled. I'd planned on using four lifter cores but had the subassemblies with the wrong root nodes so just did two cores and added some SRBs. And in orbit: I've yet to actually add any modules, not counting the semi-permanently docked space bus there now with five Kerbals aboard.

Err, in what way?

Looking good. I was surprised it landed safely being so nose-down. Still no idea what I'll do. Guess I'll make something up when I get the save. Kethane mine somewhere perhaps.

Yet another possibility is to place a stack separator (the blue ones, not the normal decouplers!) between the two docking ports, then strut across. That will steady things for the high thrust burns, and you can then trigger the separator which will break the struts when you want to undock. You can't replace the struts when you redock this way though.

Know what a transfer window is, a way to determine when one is, and a way to determine the correct transfer burn once you're in one.

I feel that I want to run an active space program, of course perhaps it's become a hyperactive one. The asteroid mission has further encouraged that, since it creates in-game deadlines, though I suspect the initial novelty will wear off and I'll take to ignoring any that aren't going to hit. (I feel a duty to deflect the impactors, even though I know even an E class wouldn't be seriously dangerous). The drawback is of course missions, especially interplanetary missions, taking longer. My mission to flyby Eve, Moho, and maybe beyond I started in early April and it still hasn't reached Eve. I might try and focus on existing missions a bit more once I've launched the current round of asteroid interceptors.

To me it doesn't feel "right" using it to replace regular docking. After all, you're jabbing a sharp thing into the side of the target ship. Then again, I've no qualms about terminating debris and having the limit set down low, but that's because my PC struggles to run KSP. Though I do deorbit my launch stages now anyway. For in-orbit assembly, the choice is between autonomous modules and a separate tug. Using the claw on the tug saves you zero or one part per module.

Realised that I'd put the barometer and seismo, which I won't ever use until coming back to Kerbin, next to the hatch and the gravimeter and thermometer, which I'll use regularly, on the other side of the command pod. Cue EVAing round all the time.

Not everyone does. I used the 14400 on my space station and tend to use the Kerbodyne tanks on my launchers' lower stages. The part count is what counts for me, that and reducing rocket length helps the stability. However, there are still issues. The Kerbodyne tank ends look more realistic but it means it looks bad if you attach smaller stuff to it, and there's no single part you can use to "cap" the tanks because the 2.5m-3.75m adapter's own ends aren't solid. To be honest there's a general paucity of extra-large parts at present; no RGU, no docking port, not even a proper nosecone.

If using conventional docking ports it's usually best to do things vertically. You can use landing legs to help raise and lower parts for docking, or just rocket thrust. Attempting to dock horizontally often has issues with the suspension on the two parts throwing the alignment out.

The mod VOID will show the current biome and situation, along with other info. There are biome maps on the wiki. If you have a biome-sensitive experiment you can spam it waiting for a biome change: good choices are a Kerbal on EVA (hold the capsules ladder!) or the gravity sensor.