StuntMax

Wherever you "control from" doesn't change a bit.. RCS always rotate you around the COM of the ship, and also they always translate you a bit unless the torque from the RCS is perfectly centered on the COM. SAS can dampen this effect (and try to make you rotate around the component you are "controlling from"??? Not sure about this), but it does no miracles if your RCS thrusters are badly placed. Surely it can't make you rotate around a target....

The stranded craft may not have thrusters, but it may have reaction wheels. Navball in "target" mode, approach the stranded craft, kill relative velocity, then switch to it, roll around so that the docking port faces your rescue ship, engage SAS if available, switch back to your spaceship, give a gentle push forward et voila le docking. If the target is as dead as a brick and can't even rotate, it's trickier, you have to fly your rescue ship in front of the docking port, stop, turn towards it and push forward. A plugin showing the target docking port orientation (such as navball docking port alignment indicator) may come really handy.

Scaricata ieri, più veloce di quanto pensassi. Mi piace molto. E' difficile, anche dopo aver giocato con BTSM. Bisogna reimparare a camminare. Per ora il massimo che ho fatto è qualche voletto suborbitale (ah, questo viziaccio schifoso di voler lavorare per forza!) e ho fatto secchi un paio di volontari, con quella cosa che il rientro atmosferico non è più gratis

I don't think it's necessarily a bug. If you leave mun's SOI with a fairly elliptical orbit and at the ejection you are moving towards the apoapsis, when you cross a second time the orbit of the Mun you may intercept its SOI again (mun has been in a lower orbit, thus it took her less time to reach the second encounter). After leaving mun's soi for the second time, you are still slower than her , and also slower than Kerbin (probably you took a pair of reverse gravity assists), enough to be dumped out of Kerbin's SOI.

Did they upgrade to 1.0 in Baikonur?

"Far Centaurus", A.E. Van Vogt, Astounding Science Fiction, 1948

....Life on Europa? Any chanche there is oil underground? If so, then I may have a pretty vivid idea.

In WWII, crew in B26s and B29s flew at some 10-11000 m with no pressure suits (only oxygen mask... and a cozy warm sweater, of course), while retaining strenght and awareness reasonable enough to operate a war plane (including defending it with machine guns, that were hand operated), so i'd say that for a fit person, 12.000 m without a pressure suit may not be impossible. Still, an oxygen mask would be mandatory.

This is true, problem is how high to set the bar of the "acceptable risk/benefit ratiio". Obviously, vaccines for smallpox, poliomyelitis, tetanus, hard cough, epathitis and dyphteria offer strong immunity for life threatening diseases (some of which have no other known treatment and lead to unavoidable and painful death), and have really remote risks, that anybody having a sound mind should not even remotely consider not to vaccinate his son... Chicken pox IS a risky disease. Maybe not as deadly as epathitis, but it can cause encephalitis in about 0.1% of cases, which can evolve in death (~15% chance) or permanent brain damage (~50%). Keep in mind that chicken pox is higly infective, before widespread vaccination it was considered "normal" for a child to contract chicken pox at some point, so we are talking about some thousands of kids risking death each year in the USA. It is well documented that Wakefield's alliegations of MMR shots causing autism were based on a fraudulent study; side effects other than "mild" are rare (<1 on 10.000), and severe side effects extremily rare (single case studies over millions of doses), so i'd say that if I had a child, i'd have him vaccinated againist chicken pox. "Influenza" (here is called "Seasonal influenza", to distinguish it from the major influenza pandemies such as Asian or Spagnola) is benign, not life-threatening for a fit adult, vaccine effectiveness is moderate, it has pretty common... influenza-like side effects, and offer no long term immunity... and that's why flu vaccine needs TV advertising and is not paid by public health services (if not for people with weak immune system: elderly, sick or immunodepressed people). Besides, I think that a vaccine that every single year gets reengineered (in ONE YEAR?) to cope with "the new upcoming viral stem"... well, is at least a bit "suspect". The problem is that LOTS of people, who thinks that we now have a life expecancy of 80+ years (50 years ago 60 yrs people were considered senile) because of "good karma" and NOT because of developments in medicine, is now starting to question the WHOLE vaccine research (usually with, pardon my french, bullshamble arguments) and are refraining to vaccinate their children for ANYTHING, exposing western society to new potential epidemies of diseased that our grandparents knew (and feared), but we consider extinct. Antibiotics are a completely different cake. Nonchalant use of antibiotics is simply criminal, as it can speed up bacteria evolution in antibiotic-resistant stems, thus rendering medications useless right when they are needed. One should use antibiotics only on strict medical prescription, period.

It's NOT. Vaccines (as any other drug) aren't 100% effective, and some individuals can not be vaccinated for various reasons. People who can't be vaccinated or unlucky individuals for whom the vaccine is ineffective benefit of what is called "herd immunity": the disease fails to spread in an environment in which vast majority of potential hosts are immunized. The mother is absolutely right. Anybody else should ALWAYS remember that until the development of vaccines, hospital wards looked like THIS: (Late 1950s. Each tank sustained a kid affected by Poliomyelitis, who could NEVER leave the tank, not ever for 5 minutes. The disease is nearly eradicated in western world thanks to the vaccine. At 2014, there still is no known cure for developed polio.)

Cool... and conveniently, i'm on night shift tonight and weather forecast is clear but my favorite sky chart reports a puny +11.0 magnitude, where d'you get the +2.0?

The "ticks" are not enough... ex. if you have to test a booster at a given speed and a given altitude over Kerbin, you get the "tick" as soon as that specific requirement is met; when all the requirements are met, the test can be run. Some contracts require you to activate the part via staging: having the part already running when you meet the conditions doesn't count (and you can't right-click and select "Activate engine"). Other contracts require that you right click on the part and select the "run test" option; in this case, you can use that part however you like (you can also never use it at all), it can also be depleted of fuel.

THIS. Great, thanks. (Eyeballing with the balls just can't cut it)

Hi all, I'm going to send up some pretty complex structures for a mun base. My problem is that the structure, with all the landing engines and other ancillary junk, isn't even remotely symmetrical, so I need to place some ballast to balance the launch vehichle. Is there a way to know how misaligned are the COM and the COT? A mod or something like this, the stock "balls" are way too approximative, i ended up with a vehichle that spins during the LKO ejection burn....

Luna 6 missed the moon. Probably even other Luna probes had a similar "airbag landing system" (Except for Luna 1 and 2, that were designed to lithobrake, and luna 3, that was not supposed to land - and it didn't). Luna 9 (1966) was the first probe that successfully used an airbag to land on the moon. Earlier crewed (either with men or dogs) spacecrafts such as Korabl-Sputnik and Vostok used to eject the crew upon landing*, while probes usually landed hard, slowed only by a parachute. * I still use this system to save kerbals from a hard-reentring vehichle.

I only use rovers for Fine print plugin generated missions. And for fun, of course.

My call with BTSM is: a fair load of life support canisters, an insanely large solar array (my first duna mission had like 40 panels - melius abundare quam deficiere ), and take all the time it needs to. And carry no unneeded kerbals... one for the mothership and one for the lander, the third seat on the capsule is good to store one more bag of snacks. these guys eat life support like sharks.

Hi all, lately i'm struggling with some specific add-on problem, and seeking for help in the add-on releases forum is a real P.I.T.A., as the most popular add-ons tend to generate gigantic threads (FAR has more than 500 pages, MJ beats 700, Interstellar a whopping 1090 pages!)... Do you think it's coincevable to open subforums dedicated to the most common mods? e.g. Mechjeb subforum, FAR subforum, Kethane... Trying to trace a specific problem in a single 10.000+ replies thread is't fun at all...

If it wasn't for the atmosphere, you'd have to use your engines to *fight* the gravity... or else, you'd go litobraking really hard at a freefall-straight-from-the-orbit speed.... try landing on Tylo with less than 3000 dV under the hood

Ok, then try this. When you are at 1 km, switch the navball to target mode. Burn to green retrograde marker to kill relative speed. When your relative speed is about 10-15 m/s, your target is to "drag" the green prograde marker directly over the target prograde marker: remember that when you burn, the prograde marker is "pulled" towards the center of the navball. If your relative speed rises, slow it down with a retrograde burn. When the two markers are aligned, it means that you are pointing straight to your target; gradually reduce your relative speed, at about 200 m you can switch to the target craft to align the docking port, and you're done.

How close can you get to your orbital lab? I don't mean docking, just RV. Can you easily get at 300-500 m?

Crap, this happens when you forget switching on your brains before posting. You're right (...and even in RL, not only in game): I was (wrongly) limiting the issue to a docking problem, that should take a short time compared to an orbit.

I don't agree. They only rotate relative to the surface, and this won't be a problem (at least if you aren't trying to dock with the surface...) But they DON'T rotate relative to each other. Try this: two ships in identical LKO. A is 90° ahead of B. Both pointing prograde. Then wait... after 1/2 of orbit, both of them will be pointing retrograde. They are rotating ath the same identical speed, and this means that tey are perfectly still relative to the other. Early players are advised to point normal simply because it is a fixed reference point that is always available, does not change in all the orbit, and doesn't require a "target". If you point both ships at it they WILL be aligned even if they are on different orbits; for all that matters, you could use ANYTHING as a reference (the Sun, Moho, a third craft... not Mun, it moves too quickly) and obtain the exact same result. Try it.

Well, they shouldn't. If engines are off and no RCS is used, then there's no force applied on one of the crafts that is not applied to the other. All the relative movements are uniform, and if you stop them, they won't "restart". Try this: from craft A, set target on craft B, then turn unitl you face the purple navball marker (target prograde). Engage SAS, make sure you aren't moving. Then switch to craft B and do the same. Now you can wait as long as you want, the crafts WILL keep facing. Even if they are on completely different orbits.

Wat? ....crafts in orbit DO NOT rotate. Better: they DO rotate if your reference point is the surface of the planet, but if your reference is the centre of mass of the orbited body (or another orbiting object for what it matters) it does not rotate at all. Demonstration: if you point your nose towards the sun, it will keep pointing the sun fot the entire orbit (better: it will move soooo slowly you probably don't even notice). SO... if you are RV'ing and there is a relative rotation between the vessels, and no thrust is applied, then the rotation is uniform (you can stop it with SAS or manually, and it won't restart, or if you have no time to waste just kick in timewarp for a second: it kills any rotational movement). Then install the navball docking alignment indicator, and live happily ever after.