SlowThought

Hi. I'm new to the game, but I have relevant real world experience, and I couldn't help but notice that a straightforward Apollo type re-entry was imposing something like 15 g on my little green guys. They seem to take it with aplomb, but it seems needlessly cruel. This has been a concern to the KSP before, but with no solutions offered. I have taken to planning my final periapsis at about 60km, just skimming the atmosphere. With each atmospheric encounter (and yes, there are many more than one) the apoapsis is lowered a bit, making the subsequent skip just a bit longer. When final re-entry occurs, peak g is greatly reduced (per the end of mission stats, peak g went from 15 to < 5; I think the peak was during initial launch, as I observed nothing > 3 during re-entry). If you are in a hurry and you have fuel left, a retrograde burn at periapsis can cut a few of the extra orbits out, or even all if you have enough to circularize. Do the Kerbonauts care? Not that I can tell, but I feel better.

HUH! Absolutely NOTHING! say it agaaaiiin. At least so it seems to me. My craft seems harder to handle with it on, I was always coming home with tons of fuel, and leaving it off, saving that mass, has only seemed to help me. As I progress to larger vehicles, does ASAS reach some limit where it can't do the job? Or does it just become painfully slow?

Well done! I had already settled on a "mission module" that appears identical to yours, and tried vertical hops at the Space Center (ugly, very ugly, but I'll bet easier in zero G).

THAT was the key! Thank you (and thank you to the KSP blogger this morning who put me onto imgur, and who I cannot now find -- I'm happy I found the links to the photos I uploaded).

I suspect KSP uses quaternions internally to express vectors. Your "(x ? z) -> (0 x ? z)" mapping supports this. You can think of quaternions as an extension of complex numbers, with three different "imaginary" directions, basically a 4D number. The complex extension works for the arithmetic. In this context it's better to think of the first component as a scalar, and the last 3 as a vector. Consider Newton's third law: F=ma -> (0 Fx Fy Fz) = (m 0 0 0)(0 ax ay az) Quaternions make sure the mixed vector scalar works out, and allows a common data type for the programmers to work with.

Greetings. I've been playing with the demo version a few days now, and have made several successful Munar orbits (including one Kerbanaut on permanent spacewalk), and have been looking at some of the things the KSP community has been doing on YouTube. It strikes me that nuclear reactors, plasma drives, (WARP drives? Really? I thought KSP was about GOOD physics?) etc make the game way too easy. I may change my mind once I've thoroughly explored the demo world, but there's a lot of fun to be had trying to be creative with such a limited number of parts, and such limited performance. Anyway, you'll be hearing more from me.