cantab

Agreed, the sheer power of a nuke more than offsets concerns about wasted energy. After all, as I think someone else said, deflecting an asteroid with a nuke amounts to an informal Orion drive. Orion drive's performance is reasonably well established.

Well said by vexx and Feichinger. As I see it the early access thing doesn't mean we're testers, not in any more than an informal sense. Rather it's a warning: This game's not fully finished, it might never be really finished, and updates might break your old work. Certainly I, and I expect the vast majority of players, bought the game because I want to play (and have more parts and places than the demo), not because I want to bug-hunt.

Spamming any engines doesn't really overcome a low TWR, since the overall TWR can never exceed that of the engine. Rather, it overcomes a low total thrust and the lack of a scaled-up version of the engine.

One counterargument I have come across, and I think it carries weight: How is clipping for a certain aesthetic or performance effect any different from using a mod part for that same effect? Mods, though some are acknowledged as overpowered, generally aren't seen as cheating.

The Basic maneuvers page on the wiki taught me how to rendezvous. It took a couple of goes, but now I find it pretty straightforward. I also made my first docking with two parts of the ship I'd just undocked, making things a bit simpler. And if you're using main engines, to align the yellow-green prograde/retrograde markers with the magneta target direction markers, remember "Pull prograde, repel retrograde".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_of_inertia is how "hard" it is to turn your rocket. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_moments_of_inertia has some calculations. For rocket-shaped rockets the thin rod approximation is probably suitable. For any shape it shows that doubling the mass will double the moment of inertia and thus the torque needed for the same handling, while doubling the length will quadruple the torque requirement. And this applies to however you're turning it: not just reaction wheels, but engine gimballing and RCS too. And I'm pretty sure reaction wheel/SAS module placement does matter. With 16 reaction wheels in a somewhat loosely-attached payload, my rocket bent severely back and forth when I tried to make the gravity turn, and with a bit of deliberate input I made it snap. I admit I never tried 16 reaction wheels at the CoM. I may try some experiments. If KSP's physics is right, then if I have a reaction wheel at the end of a long thin object it will take four times as long to make a turn (without SAS to avoid confusing things) than if the wheel is at the middle.

This seems like a popular approach, and it's what I've done for my asteroid tug. I only expect that one to push around C's and maybe small D's, but better safe than sorry.

This approach is perfectly viable but it has its drawbacks. It involves more hardware, more docking manouevres, and may make the ship less stable since it's now held together by docking ports not by solid connections and struts. (Though I believe KAS or Quantum Struts can fix the last issue).Of course in the real world there's been debate over whether it'll be cheaper to have orbital fuel depots or just use heavy-lift launchers. If you have a docking port at each end, I've a feeling that gets a bit tricky to dock and undock. If you have just one docking port, you don't really need the "holder" for anything other than looks. If you do this, you can instead park the ship a few km from the station, out of physics range, to reduce lag.

So far I've encountered the odd issue but none of the major bugs others have - though I may just be lucky, or not pushing the game as hard as some in terms of stuff like part count. As for the new parts, whether they should be unbalanced has caused ugly rows on the forums, but IIRC Squad have stated that they're deliberately unbalanced. So, no, it was not released too early. Also, speak for yourself about GTA. I put loads of hours in the GTA games just mucking about doing what I felt like. Probably far more than I actually spent on the missions.

It's a toss-up between first rendezvous, back in the demo version, and first Minmus EVA landing and return. The latter's a real test of skill.

On the other hand, humanity doesn't have any nuclear rockets at the moment. We have loads of nuclear bombs. Sending up a rocket with a few nukes to give an asteroid a shove would be relatively simple and relatively safe. The main concern is to actually push it rather than just turning it to gravel, but that's a concern with any method.And now I'm wondering if KSP's physics permit shoving an asteroid with an explosion. Anyone tried yet?

Being short on power doesn't actually affect the delta-V though, it only worsens the already-probably-low TWR. And then you have to get into what people's personal tolerance for burn times is.

Nice work. Pity the D and E are so similar. You should find a >2000 ton E, pronto.

Timewarping through SOI changes can shift your orbit. Annoying, when you line up the perfect periapsis from a long way away then find you're thrown way off and need to make a delta-V-hungry correction. Whether those shifts can result in an autocapture I don't know for certain, but it seems entirely plausible. Also possible is that the orbit is just escaping, and the Tracking Station is showing it wrong.

Thanks for the heads up! I vaguely recall reading this before, but had totally overlooked it. Yes. 1 Kerbin day = 6 hours. Years get put as the correct number of Kerbin days too. You can change it back to Earth time from the settings on the main menu - which I suggest doing if you want existing launch window planners to work and don't want to convert manually.There's also been some discussion that planetary orbits were slightly changed, but I believe not by enough to throw launch planners out unless you let the clock rack up a few centuries. Big errors at early times are down to the Kerbin/Earth time discrepancy.

Manned, but I do the risky (either actually risky or just roleplayingly risky) stuff with unmanned probes. For example my first rendezvous featured a 3-manned "orbiter" that approached to a few hundred metres away before the unmanned "lander" made the actual first clawing. Then with things confirmed safe I docked the orbiter to the still-clawed lander for the Kerbals to get out and take a look. My second mission has an asteroid tug that takes a 2-man crew, but I launched it empty since it was a bit experimental and brought the crew up after in a bus. Good thing too since the first launch went...not as planned. Nor did the second launch, for that matter, but at least that time it still made orbit. Despite NASA intending to do the capture unmanned, I just feel there should be some Kerbals on site to supervise the operation. And in the case of the first mission, visit their asteroid namesake 1 Jebediah.

What gets you that green info text at the top?

Until you come to turn your ship. Then you're moving moment of inertia, and getting a more compact rocket makes that easier.

When I first played I didn't use timewarp, but then that's when the best I did was reaching orbit and going once round Kerbin. Going beyond the Mun in real time would just be more waiting than it's worth I reckon.

I believe the ion engines will be capable of giving more delta-V for any size ship. However, using them will involve more parts and longer burn times.

Ion engines have been proposed for big spacecraft. The actual uses thus far have been on small probes, but that stands to reason - engineers are going to use a relatively new technology on a small cheap mission first.

I designed my first serious attempt at an asteroid tug, the Macbeth 1, and launched it. The launch wasn't entirely trouble free: on the first attempt the rocket started bending like a banana with all the reaction wheels on the tug, and on the successful launch with said wheels disabled I found I had no control of the third stage due to using LV-T30's: I made an orbit, but it wasn't precisely the one I wanted. Circularisation burn Now to crew it, possibly add more fuel, and head to rendezvous with a C-class potatoroid.

I don't think that's a good trade-off, tbh. I'm fine with having to make small performance compromises for aesthetics, for example I routinely use the RGU's and the multi-couplers, but I'd rather not have to give up masses of power that way.

Well, my Brunel launcher was nothing like that. 18 to 42 tons to LKO, depending on configuration. I decided part count was reason to drop my initial plan of joining multiple ones of them together.I think I'll have to stop worrying about tankage and fully go for the new parts for my serious heavy lifter.

Folks, if you have a lot of reaction wheels on your payload, consider disabling them for the launch. Otherwise this happens when you try to make your gravity turn. Funnily enough, despite the severe bending it held together until I deliberately pushed it to breaking point.