cantab

Well, since the topic's come up, is this a reasonably accurate simple explanation? * Wings moving through the air deflect it downwards. As per Newton's Third Law, that means there's an upwards reaction force on the wings - lift. * The shape of the wing means the air flowing over the top sticks to it and gets deflected downwards, not just the air flowing under the bottom. That gives more lift than with a flat board.

Chilling out with Bob and Bill on the asteroid named after him.

For getting home, 700 m/s is plenty for making course corrections, so long as you don't need to make a big inclination change. If your orbit crosses Kerbin's, you should be able to get an encounter though you may be waiting a few orbits. If it doesn't, either burn retrograde so it does or look for another Duna encounter and make a gravity assist.

The poorer tankage is rather a nuisance IMHO. It leaves us choosing between using the new tanks for a cleaner appearance and lower part count, or kludging around with the old tanks to squeeze out more delta-V. It also means the equivalence to the old tanks depends slightly on what you're interested in: a 14400 is 2.25 orange tanks in terms of fuel capacity, but 2.278 orange tanks in total mass. Then again, it seems bad expressed as a mass ratio, 8.2 rather than 9. But when you put it that if you use a 14400 rather than equivalent Rockomax tanks you only need 1 extra ton for storing 72 tons of fuel, it doesn't seem so bad.

Nice launch accuracy

The Skipper was always lousy, I thought that was reasonably well known. Clusters of LV-T30's or T45's are better than a Skipper in all respects but structural convenience. The same arguably holds, though by a smaller margin, for the Poodle vs clustered LV-909's.As for the main topic, well comparison methodology is always a bit tricky. "Real game" tests will capture things like the impact of the atmosphere well and are perhaps more convincing, though I would advise the use of an autopilot. However they can't practically explore the same "space" as calculations. Ultimately I'd say the main performance criterion is payload fraction (payload mass/launch mass) for a given payload. Maximising that, though, requires exploring a massive design space, we can't be anywhere near comprehensive enough "by hand".

I'd want to see an actual Lego rocket design first. The main problem I see is that the best known stock craft, the Kerbal X, lacks the most iconic single part, the big orange tank. I'm not sure how this could best be resolved.

Really old thread. I believe the defaults in the current version of the game, .23.5, are 3 and 3. This version brought a new change though. If you shift focus to an object you're set to enter the SOI of, it automatically switches to mode 0. Mode 0 is incredibly useful because it shows the orbit around the current position of the body, and you can focus and zoom in on said current position to get a close-up look at the encounter and make precise course corrections.

The medium-gain antenna is six times heavier than the low-gain one though, and is liable to throw a small spacecraft off-balance. Certainly it did to my Smith probe when it was mounted on the side (and I decided it looked too stupid on the top to be worth saving $50 with). Jasonden's manned craft is heavier and has more torque, but the off-balance load still might cause an issue.

My savefile editing. I've no idea why the planetary orbits were changed.

So far my stuff has been pretty little, with a couple of 25 ton ships being the biggest. The Space Hotel USA in .23 went into an inclined Medium Kerbin Orbit on a rather shonky lifter. It could almost certainly have put more into equatorial LKO, but I never tried. The Tycho 1 spacecraft in .23.5 also weighed about 25 tons and was launched to LKO by a somewhat more elegant, though still not fault-free, lifter. But I'm going to work on a modular lifter design soon, making more use of the new parts. I'm thinking 125 tons to LKO, for at least one configuration, is a good target - that's three orange tanks plus ancillaries.

It won't with the stock aerodynamics. With FAR I think it only will if FAR recognises the large ASAS unit as a fairing.

We had one, the Space Shuttle, and NASA retired it because it was too expensive.There are situations where it's cheaper and easier to just build a new machine rather than repair the old one for reuse. We're all familiar with this in electronic devices, and spacecraft have tended to be the same way though for different reasons. That said, you mention SpaceX, well they are working on making the Falcon reusable, planning to land the core and boosters under power. Time will tell whether that actually brings the launch costs down.

It's unlikely, but KSP has enough players that SOMEBODY is going to get their ship or station clobbered by a space rock. Especially the somebody who deliberately puts them in the general vicinity of an asteroid's path! And both these behaviours would royally hack me off. If the flags were off by default I'd be right-clicking every part trying to find which supported the flag. If the flags were locked into symmetry I'd be forced to choose between having them on all my symmetric parts or none, when I probably want the flag on just one of them.

If you can accept the form factor, a KR-2L, even with the adapter above, will always give more vacuum delta-V than a Mainsail. Always. Even if you stick an Oscar-B and an Okto-2 on top of it. For many reasonable scenarios it can often give more delta-V than a Skipper, for example with an orange tank propelling an 18 ton payload the KR-2L just shades it, though to be honest that says more about the Skipper. And for clusters of Mainsails, the delta-V benefits are even greater since you can replace them with fewer KR-2Ls. You might not even need to tweak the stage much: I was able to replace 7 Mainsails under 7 orange tanks with 4 KR-2Ls and just added a few fuel lines; The KR-2Ls clip through each other but without the use of the debug menu.There's no performance reason to use the Mainsail any more. Only aesthetic considerations (my 4 KR-2L example looked ugly as sin) and personal preference.

None of the above. All the parts warrant a rebalancing at some point. It should not be limited to "make the new parts balanced with the old ones". Plenty of parts were unbalanced in .23: the 48-7S was always overpowered, the non-steerable winglet is naff, the Mark 55 is pants even with the convenient form factor, the fuel lines are massless and dragless so have no penalty at all for their huge benefit, I could go on. There needs to be a good think about what should be easy, what should be challenging, and what should be nigh impossible, and the parts tuned with that in mind. And, for that matter, the environment too: while I predict major uproar if it happened, changing the sizes and distances of celestials should not be out of the question.

The increased thrust does result in more "effective" delta-V. Firstly because if you have the same number of ion engines your burn will be shorter, and the shorter the burn is the more efficient it is. Secondly, if we assume you have a maximum burn length tolerance, you can now meet that with fewer ion engines and thus less dry mass; the reduced electricity requirement lowers the needed dry mass even further. That said, the effects are likely to be minor. EDIT: @zarakon: Not that I know of. Even after the buff you still can't do it by a vertical launch, you'd have to use an aircraft. But I don't know if you could get enough speed up to reach orbit, given you've so little force to overcome drag with.

Yeah, I'm another who more often has the opposite problem of Kerbals putting themselves in the pod for what's meant to be an unmanned test. I took to clicking EVA on each and having them fall to the ground and walk away, while mentally shouting "OUT! OUT! OUT!" to them. Then one time one managed to clobber a solar panel on the way down - a retracted shielded panel, mind you

KER's one thing that I've found really does lag my game out. I updated it with the development dlls to get proper support for the new parts, it wasn't so bad with the stable version on .23. So for the moment I'm sticking to just the build engineer. Otherwise, things are much better. Still not perfect though, but that's probably my wimpy computer.

This was one of the less-publicised .23.5 features. Actually it did work in .23, but the mousewheel would also zoom at the same time making it often impractical.It's not "linear", one notch on the mousewheel is indeed a small change, but a quick "flick" makes a proportionately much larger change.

We've rendezvoused with them, pushed them around, built stuff on them, set them down at KSC, and done any number of things with the asteroids - but what have we all called them? Do you rename them? Is there any sort of naming scheme? Myself, I'm giving the ones I track a number like real asteroids, then a name of a Kerbal. So far I've only tracked three, so they're 1 Jebediah (a ~3000 ton class E that was truly awe-inspiring to rendezvous with), 2 Bill, and 3 Bob. Hopefully I won't run out of names!

Congrats. I've done a bunch of flybys of stuff, but only landed on the Mun, Minmus, and an asteroid so far.

A one-off collision isn't really Kessler syndrome. That said, people have reported Kesslering in KSP. LKO is a much smaller space than LEO, both because Kerbin is smaller and because most KSPers nearly always launch into an equatorial orbit. If you manage to break up something with a lot of parts, and you don't have a limit on debris, it can become quite hazardous.

Reinforce the heck out of it with girders and struts. Or wimp out and assemble it in orbit.

Spin-stabilisation is a valid technique, and does indeed work reasonably well, though I'd only recommend it for smaller rockets.