SkyRender

Just slap a copy of your main stack directly to your rocket using symmetry. With all that extra fuel and engine power, of course you're gonna go further!

No matter how good you get, no matter how skilled you are, no matter what precautions you take, you're still going to have difficult missions on occasion. Don't panic, and remember that safety margins are there for a reason.

Best time and fewest launches for me was my 2-launch master plan: out to Minmus for EVA science on trip 1, then out to the Mun for the full deal with an ingenious lander/station combo that I cooked up back in 0.21 for science harvesting purposes. The overall time it took was about the usual for a round-trip Minmus event and a round-trip Mun event, with a little change.

This seems to be a side-effect of how the current stock rover wheel code works, actually. There's something transposed somewhere, that's for sure, as multiple users have tested and confirmed that the stock wheels will practically soar up highly-inclined planes, and struggle like they're on the steepest hill imaginable on a nearly-flat plane.

Many of the absolute fundamentals (that you have to be going fast sideways to orbit, and that multiple stages are required to really get much of anywhere) I already got. What I didn't understand was the actual processes behind orbital mechanics. I learned those quickly enough, and handily the Mun was added not long after I started playing so that I could also learn about orbital transfers.

Here's the problem with going straight up to escape Kerbin: gravity. The whole trip up, you're fighting gravity, and as a result you spend a massive amount of fuel pushing away from the planet's pull. When you perform a lateral burn to escape Kerbin instead, you do a minimal amount of fighting the planet's gravity since you're just extending your horizontal velocity for the most part. Of course, the longer your burn takes and the further you get from perfectly horizontal in your burn, the more of your fuel you start surrendering to fight gravity once more. Now strictly speaking you don't have to stay in the orbit you eventually reach when trying to make an interplanetary burn, but unless you do some serious maths, odds are good that you won't arrive above the atmosphere at a point where burning laterally is going to get you where you want to go. Short version: we go into orbit first because that way we don't fight gravity and we can get a much more precise launch out into interplanetary space.

Actually, 100x time warp generally doesn't cause that bad of a shift in the end orbit; usually you can correct the error with less than 15m/s dV. 1000x or higher, though... no. Just don't do it.

Anything that gets dropped counts as a stage, including the final vehicle that returns to the planet ("stage 0" since it generally has no propulsion of its own). Technically a vehicle with multiple engine-firing phases that doesn't drop anything does have multiple stages, but practically speaking it does not since nothing ever gets dropped and what goes up into space is exactly what comes back from space.

I did not expect this thread to go on this long... Although the massive discussion that's resulted only reinforces my suspicions that changes to aerodynamics are going to be met with dissent no matter how they're handled. I've observed several different fronts on how things will be done and how they'll turn out, and not a lot of concessions going around on any side. Then again, it is largely a matter of opinion, so what can you do? Perhaps we can redirect the topic to the question I had hoped we'd get into: other placeholder systems that are going to run into some player backlash when they get polished.

We would see Kerbal Space Program 2, Kerbal Space Program 3, Kerbal Space Program: Origins, and Kerbal Space Program: Relaunched all released within 5 years of each other, each one being a barely-modified variant of the previous game.

As Kerbal Space Program approaches scope completion, we are coming upon a time when existing systems which were left in a prototypical state are going to be revisited and revised. This has the potential to be one of the most awkward and upsetting parts of development, for both the devteam and the players, because of one simple truth: we are used to the systems that don't work right. Let's take the biggest one, the elephant in the room, aerodynamics. The current aerodynamics model in KSP is decidedly off in how it works. There are mountains of problems with it, and completely un-physical side-effects are possible as a result. Fixing this placeholder engine has always been on the list of priorities, but here's the thing: fixing it has the very real potential to make most players of KSP very, very angry. Realistic drag modeling will cause many of the most popular rocket structures to be completely infeasible. The lack of stock fairings will severely limit how craft can be designed, and the addition of them will serve to cause even more problems as players have to learn not only how to deal with a new aerodynamics model, but also how to design their craft in an entirely new context. Just look at the results of pretty much anyone getting into the Ferram Aerospace Research mod without knowledge of how aerodynamics actually work to get an idea of just what we have to look forward to. Now picture that on a scale of every single user being switched over to using FAR, like it or not. It's not pretty, is it? How on Kerbin are we going to deal with a change of this scale, then? The only real solution is a gradual implementation, making the aerodynamics model slightly better with each new release for several versions until old and new players alike are comfortable with having to deal with aerodynamic design principles. New indicators will have to be added. We'll probably have to have a "wind tunnel simulator" option at some point. A lot has to change in small steps for this feature to reach a point where it is both acceptably realistic and accepted by the player base as a whole. It can be done, but going straight from the current model to FAR-level aerodynamics modeling in one version is the worst possible way to go about it. There are other system upgrades and changes that are going to cause upsets if not done gradually as well, of course. What other "choke points" do you see in the refinement of various subsystems from placeholder to complete feature?

And now I shall introduce the Centipede's Dilemma into the mix with: any maneuver you've done a thousand times before and have down pat can and will fail the moment you stop to think about it.

My current record is around 30 Kerbal days, with 2 launches. Launch 1 goes out to Minmus and exploits the infinite EVA fuel oversight to get EVA reports and surface samples from all of Minmus' biomes, and launch 2 sucks the Mun dry of all possible science.

The difference with Kerbals is, the survival rate for getting on the "exploding roller coaster ride" is decidedly sub-50% in most players' space programs. Kerbals may be a bit on the slow side, but I doubt their pattern recognition is that poor.

Reducto ad explodium. Yeah, it's not proper Latin, but it sums up the most amusing KSP launch failures nicely.

Actually, if you followed my primer on the species (shameless plug), you'd know that Kerbals don't sign up for the job of astronaut unless they're quite insane. Most of them are actually coming in for other jobs, and the motivation comes from their "This Could Be You!" posters of scientists, engineers, and janitors at the KSC. The ones that get stuffed into spacesuits are the ones who were deemed inadequate for any of those positions. Why do you think most Kerbals scream their heads off the moment the rocket lifts off? There's some vague promise that if you run enough missions you'll get taken off of active duty and be promoted to janitorial staff, but no Kerbal has ever survived the minimum number of missions required (which is "at least one more, as always").

Maybe it's a robotic Kerbal, so people can stop complaining about how they have to start with manned (er, Kerballed) flights in Career mode.

It would take 6 hours at constant 100,000x time warp to even get to that point. And half of a 32-bit integer is the hard limit for displayed time; the game appears to be able to keep track of time units larger than that for overall elapsed time.

The maximum time listed is always 2,147,483,647 seconds (or half of a 32-bit integer). That's 99,420 Kerbin days, or about 233 Kerbin years.

Kerbals answer to their Commander-in-Chief, a piece of rotting seaweed. Below the C-i-C is the Ministry of Snacks, which are also all seaweed. The military is lead by the Grand General, who is a particularly tasty variety of seaweed. Yes, the Kerbal government is seaweed all the way down. Kinda explains a lot, doesn't it?

The original plan was for Kerbals to draw from the monopropellant stock on board their ship when going out on EVA, but that somehow never got implemented even though monoprop was added to every command module. But yeah, there's not really anything "cheat-y" about it, since it will inevitably get fixed at some point. In the meantime, EVA to Minmus to your heart's content. I know I managed to unlock the entire stock tech tree in 2 launches thanks to that "feature".

Quicksaves aren't a bad thing, especially not with a game that's prone to glitches (as KSP still is). It's unnecessary quickloading that you have to keep in check. Me, I quicksave a lot, but rarely ever quickload; pretty much only when a glitch ruins my day.

Mods are not evil. They are not good either. They are entirely neutral; it is upon you to control yourself in how you use them. I have a strict "max 10 mods" rule I've followed since 0.21, so I tend to only pick ones that particularly enhance the experience for me. Comparatively frivolous part packs that add no actual new functionality, utility, or environmental visual enhancement aren't going to make the short list.

SSTOs are fun for getting Kerbals to and from orbit, bus-style. They're not really practical for any sort of operations outside of low-Kerbin orbit (all that extra atmospheric flight hardware is just dead weight in a vacuum), but they're quite nice for getting a ton of Kerbals into orbit. I've managed to get 9 Kerbals to LKO on a fuel load that would barely lift a single Hitchhiker to orbit in rocket mode. (Granted, I WAS using Ferram Aerospace, but I'm also referring to a fuel load that would have gotten that Hitchhiker rocket to orbit in FAR.)

KSP is using patched conics to calculate all forms of intercept. There's a known shortcoming in KSP's patched conics in that it will often miss a "first pass" closest approach in an orbit if there is any sort of potential for an encounter further along in the traced path. This is why you will see an encounter "disappear" sometimes, and why you can have a much closer encounter when doing a rendezvous than you would otherwise. I unfortunately don't know the exact math that causes this to happen, but I do know how to reproduce it pretty reliably: as I said, all you need is for a potential solution further along in the orbit, and it will overwrite its memory of the first potential encounter.