Reactordrone

Current atmosphere is actually more dense than the pre 1.0 atmosphere it's just that drag is lower now. But on the topic at hand, in my first Mun landings I used to stop dead in my orbit at about 50km and drop straight down keeping my retrograde marker aligned using translational RCS burns. Those ships used a lot of fuel.

I real life the orientation is due to actuator strength and whether you want the brake out permanently or temporarily. An F-15 pushes the brake up into the airflow then air pressure helps push it back down into the closed position but a snake eye retarded bomb tailfin will pop out the other way so that airflow helps to keep them open. In game the actuator is always able to move the panel so it's largely down to aesthetics.

You should be able to see the orbits when in the tracking station or when you're in map view within the same SOI.

I launched my last mission three days past optimal with no real noticeable impact on the delta v requirement. A few days either side should be fine.

If you right click on the chute it will indicate whether it is safe to deploy or not. All of the chutes have been made very fragile and can't be deployed reliably above 260m/s or 500m/s for drogue chutes. If you've accidentally deployed the chute in space or in the upper atmosphere right click on the chute and set the pressure to above 0.5 atmospheres and it should deploy when you're low and slow.

Recovered Micca and her vessel from the Mun. After getting her into Munar orbit with that contraption I docked her pod to a recovery vessel and flew her home.

From memory, I think about 20km. It slowed me down but I had to burn a little to get the capture.

I just landed a base with no heat shield and had no problems. After capture I was in an elliptical orbit of about 460 x 60 km and then dropped the periapsis down to 20km for landing. It was a pretty basic 2.5m stack but carrying 1000 units of monoprop for a contract so it was reasonably heavy.

Damn it I clicked mechjeb instead of non mechjeb. If I'd been using mechjeb that wouldn't have happened I've never installed mechjeb. I figure I can do most things it does except maybe super precise landings and I enjoy the flying anyway.

As long as one command part hits all of those targets I don't think it matters if it docks to transfer stages on the way.

As said above the flexibility is the problem. The SAS is trying to correct the flight path using the tail fins but the tail of the rocket is pointing in a different direction to the SAS unit so the control inputs are actually exacerbating the wobble rather than damping it out. Turning off the SAS and flying it manually in the lower atmosphere will stop the SAS induced oscillation and struts will reduce the flexibility at the neck.

Try opening the service bay, that's usually the culprit when you get a "cannot x while stowed message".

I've successfully brought the kerbal X lander back from the Mun in 1.0.4 so it's definitely possible with a shallow re-entry, periapsis of around 35-40km. You also have to get out of the 0.25/0.90 money saving habit of bringing the whole ship back and just land the capsule. Having said that, the drag setup of the capsules is much lower than in real life which is why they're coming in too fast and hitting the insta-death heat wall at around 15km.

There's a lot of experiments on the station to keep them busy and there's always the space medicine aspect. Even without anything specifically to do the presence of astronauts in zero g conditions for extended periods advances our knowledge of human physiological changes in that environment and methods to combat those changes.

There's a reason the chute deployment height was changed from 500m to 1000m. A Mk 1 pod with a Mk 16 chute will lose about 650m altitude while the parachute fully deploys.

Were you in IVA at the time? I've had a station go into massive wobble mode while looking around inside the modules. It was quite disconcerting to see a docking port suddenly come into view outside the window.

I assume it's a fueldraulic system or other gas pressurised tank system.

That's odd. The current Kerbal X works fine and doesn't have the basic nose cones, it has advanced nose cone- type B on the boosters.

I'm not sure the radiators help dissipate reentry heat but they certainly add extra drag which can slow your vehicle below the heat spike threshold.

Then congratulate the engineering and flight teams on a job well done. Not killing your astronauts is a good thing

Souposphere is something of a misnomer since the actual atmosphere hasn't changed since the release of 1.0.0 and the pre 1.0.0 atmosphere was actually thinner than the current version. It's only the way drag is modelled that has changed since the 1.0.0 release..

And just for completeness I've done the test with FAR as well. It's surprisingly draggy especially in the upper atmosphere. I guess part occlusion is where FAR gets most of its drag benefit and since there's nothing to be occluded in a basic pod drop the drag is a little high. -(just to make sure the installation was correct I flew the test ship into orbit which took 3239m/s vacuum delta v so that looks fine).

Stock game, 28 seconds. Intel i5 3350P processor and 8G DDR3 memory, Windows 8.1.

Just tried it three times and hitting reset brought me back to the staging view looking at the lander every time. You will need to press M to get back into map view but you should be where you were as you were just entering the Mun's sphere of influence.

I realised I still had an installer for 1.0.2 on my computer so I was able to load that up and do the test. As expected the 1.0.2 results fall in between the 0.90 and 1.0.4 results. 40km__1553m/s 30km__1578m/s 25km__1576m/s 20km__1530m/s 15km__1386m/s 10km___975m/s 5km____279m/s 3km____226m/s 1km____184m/s 0km____170m/s Graphed up the drop curves look like this, The reduction in drag once the capsule goes subsonic is very noticeable in the new aero (except in 1.0.0 which never went subsonic) with the steeper drag curve of 1.0.2 giving similar velocities to 0.90 at 5km and 1.0.4 being about twice as fast at that height.