Srpadget

Nope, sorry, that wouldn't do it either. The Shuttle's guidance computer could steer with the SRBs via thrust vectoring (unlike KSP solids) but it couldn't throttle them (they were no more throttleable than any other solid rocket). They did have a thrust profile that varied with time (unlike KSP's solids), but that was accomplished through clever design of the shape of the hollow center in the solid-fuel grain, and was preset when the motor grain was cast at the factory. Once those puppies were ignited, they were going to burn through their canned (pun intended) thrust profile until tailoff and separation. For your problem, it seems to me that what you need is some way to tweak the thrust-limiter tweakable of BOTH your strap-on boosters simultaneously. I would think there should be some way to do that with scripting (though I am not a scripter nor a modder, so take my opinion in this with a large grain of salt).

SAS on. 100% throttle. Call up resource screen on HUD, set to "Stage Only" (usually; depends on vehicle) Go to Map View. Bring up Navball. Rotate and magnify map view so the view is of the launch site, looking north. Back to Stage View. Hit SPACE to fire engines and release launch clamps simultaneously. [Resist 3 decades of training and experience and STAY VERTICAL because stock soupmosphere] Accelerate vertically to 100 m/s, reduce throttle (if/as required by launcher design) Roll 90 degrees (because a gravity turn is a PITCH maneuver, dangit, and I do it the way God(dard) and von Braun intended!) Begin pitchover and gravity turn at 10km (stock soupmosphere; I really do need to install FAR and DRE one of these days....) [Resist 3 decades of training and experience and perform "gravity turn" at ridiculously high negative alpha, because stock soupmosphere] ...and it's usually around the time I'm circularizing that I notice that whoever's currently at the top of the roster has STOWED AWAY (...again...)

But more seriously--what Taki said. Aerobrake at Duna first.

In my experience, the best way to get an Ike intercept is to send out a mission to Duna with a fuel load and mission profile that assumes a direct-inject to a Duna aerobrake. Ike will be RIGHT THERE in your approach path, every time. :-D

It takes pretty substantial amounts of dV to land on Mun and re-orbit. But it takes less than 300 m/s (if I remember correctly) to leave Mun orbit on a trajectory that will re-enter Kerbin's atmosphere and let you parachute to a safe recovery. So my recommendation is to get what science you can while in Mun orbit, return to Kerbin, and then revise/improve your spacecraft so that you can land on the Mun next time. Apollo 8 and 10 were real-life manned missions to Moon orbit, which were intended to come back without landing, as "practice runs". So if you come back now, you've made a perfectly acceptable successful mission that follows in NASA's footsteps.

Has there been any word (or even rumors?) about whether 0.90 will break existing 0.25 saves? (While I'm salivating over the new Mk III spaceplane parts, I confess I'm getting a bit tired of rebuilding all my orbital infrastructure from scratch after each upgrade...)

...when you catch the number "69,851" out of the corner of your eye and it GRABS YOUR FULL ATTENTION AND SEARS YOUR SOUL OMG I FORGOT TO RAISE MY Pe!!! And only then do you realize it's the odometer... in your car... and you're driving your daily commute....

I've always sucked at precision landings on airless worlds, so Jeb and Bob went out to Minmus to practice. Because everything is always easier on Minmus, right? Results were ... mixed. On the plus side, Bob got impatient after the third less-than-successful attempt, jetpacked over to the target plateau, and won the prize for the snarkiest flag name ever:

Ooh, nice touch! The problem with my "flag at KSC" marker is that there isn't a convenient way to get "time until node" from it except by eyeballing and estimating. You may have just come up with a genuinely USEFUL reason to put a satellite in synchronous orbit (in a game without Remote Tech, Fine Print, etc.)!

A reasonably-simple way to keep track of Minmus's nodes, usable in a completely-unmodded stock install (any data-displaying mod like MJ or KER should allow you to do something similar, but more easily). First, you need something in as perfectly-equatorial an orbit as you can manage. Put something (doesn't matter what, as long as it can do a bit of maneuvering) in low Kerbin orbit. Set Mun as its target, and match planes. Since Mun has a zero-inclination orbit, you now have a reference for Kerbin's equator. Next, set Minmus as the target of your zero-inclination satellite. Voila--you now have a visual reference to Minmus's node line. For added fun, send out a Kerbal to plant a flag at the Kerbal Space Center, so you can easily see KSC from the map view also. To use this: Get ready to launch when Minmus is 90 degrees away from its line of nodes. (Midway between the ascending node and descending node.) This ensures that when you make your transfer orbit along the node line, Minmus will be there when you arrive. For most rockets, time from launch to LKO is something on the order of 5 minutes (your time may vary, depending on vehicle design and launch trajectory profile; airbreathers take quite a bit longer). So you'll want to launch a few minutes prior to KSC crossing Minmus's node line. To do a direct injection into Minmus-transfer orbit, of course, you'll want to launch at the node line opposite your Minmus-rendezvous point. As with anything worthwhile (in KSP or in real life), it probably won't work perfectly the first time you try it. Keep at it, it gets easier and more reliable with experience.

I'm not sure that even the resized SAS will be an actual PROBLEM. I had one of those on a ship in transit when 0.25 arrived. (We'd gotten the heads-up to return/recover all spaceplanes, but I hadn't seen anything about the SAS.) It was even an important structural part in the middle of the craft. And...it looked really weird, with all the parts attached to it just FLOATING like that, seemingly unattached to anything. But it worked fine. The craft went through reentry and landing and everything with no problem. (For which Bob is very VERY thankful!)

Oooo-kayyy, I've never done THAT before... I've been spending quite a bit of time building up Kerbin-SOI infrastructure (fuel stations in Kerbin, Mun, and Minmus orbits, a fleet of nuke-powered tugs shuttling between them, reusable landers docked at the Mun and Minmus stations, an SSTO fuel lifter and a crew-launch spaceplane) to get set for a big interplanetary push. Finally got that done, and realized that at some point it had turned into a "chore" rather than "fun". So I made a quick pleasure-jaunt with one of the Minmus landers (Minmus is one of my favorite worlds; partly because of the low gravity, and partly because of the Kerbals' delightful "delicious minty dessert" flavor text). And...I crashed. On MINMUS. I have NEVER crashed on Minmus before. Even my very first landing on another world, when I forgot to extend the landing gear, worked out okay. (Crashed on other, heavier-gravity airless worlds, oh yeah. But... MINMUS?) So I followed up by taking one of the Mun landers off to the middle of those horrible corrugated badlands near the South Pole just to prove I still knew how to land. I have obviously been spending WAY TOO MUCH TIME doing all those rendezvous/dock maneuvers and not enough time actually GOING PLACES lately.... (The good news is that the Minmus lander crew are okay. That Mk 2 lander can zipped along for kilometers like a flippin' hockey puck, but it finally did slow down and stop without hitting anything lethal. I guess tomorrow it'll be a rescue mission. Or possibly jetpacking back to Minmus Orbital Station. I never have jetpacked to Minmus orbit before. And being the first to jetpack from surface to orbit just might help reduce the teasing my poor pilot is going to get for being the first Kerbal to lose a ship to MINMUS's gravity....)

Explanation #1 (plain Engish, no math; uses reasoning to illustrate, but doesn't 'prove' anything): Rockets do 2 things simultaneously. They add energy to the vehicle and push it forward, AND they add energy to the propellant and push it backward. If the vehicle is moving slowly, then a great deal of the total energy is "wasted" shoving the exhaust backward at tremendous speed. HOWEVER, if the vehicle is already moving very fast, then even after being shoved out the back of the vehicle the exhaust is still actually going FORWARD...and thus lots more of the total energy went into the spacecraft instead. Explanation #2 (uses math; less accessible to many people, but actually proves the point rather than merely armwaving about it with a woefully-inadequate appeal to "common sense"): Energy and velocity are DIFFERENT THINGS, and they do not scale linearly. Kinetic energy (the energy bound up in a moving body) is given by: KE=1/2mv^2. Note that the equation contains velocity SQUARED rather than just velocity. We can get mass out of this explanation by noting that the KE *per ton of vehicle* is just 1/2v^2. (That's called "specific kinetic energy", for those who care about such things. It's got units of energy per mass, or equivalently length-squared divided by time-squared. I'll be calling it m2/s2 from here on out, though it probably makes more intuitive sense to call it Joules per kilogram.) So. Let's assume that your vehicle is sitting still (initial v = 0, KE also = 0) and you give it a boost of 100 m/s delta-v. Now your KE per ton of vehicle is 1/2 * (100)^2. 100 squared is 10,000; divide by 2 for 5000 m2/s2. With me so far? Good. Now for comparison, let's do the same thing again... but this time let's do it to an object that's already moving at 2000 m/s. That means its initial KE is 2,000,000 m2/s2. Now when we give it an additional dv of 100 m/s, its new velocity is 2100 m/s, for a KE of... 2100 squared is 4,410,000, divided by 2 is 2,205,000 m2/s2. Which means we have now ADDED 205,000 m2/s2 of specific kinetic energy. Go look at the first case, now look at this one. We just got FORTY-ONE TIMES as much energy added to our vehicle with THE EXACT SAME FUEL BURN. Yeah. Looks like magic, doesn't it? Here's the secret: the square of those two velocities added together in the second example is NOT the same as squaring each of the velocity contributions and adding them together. Or, in math-speak: (a+^2 = a^2 + 2ab + b^2; it is NOT a^2 + b^2. That "+2ab" in the middle there? THAT is where Oberth lives.

When a long thread of emails AT WORK have a subject line that includes "Need Docking Station and Monitor for New Employee", and EVERY TIME that subject line crops up you misread "monitor" and wonder why they're HIRING someone to dock at Minmus Station when they already have YOU....

Chalk up yet another "convert" due to repeated references on xkcd, over here!

I finally decided to try a fresh new game with V0.25, to check out the new KSC-area biomes and play with strategies. (I have been playing in an existing 0.24 save until now, migrated to 0.25 and playing with the new spaceplane parts mostly). Went with Hard mode, but allowed for quicksave/reload because the game still has too many bugs to 'play without a net' (that's my story and I'm sticking to it. My ineptitude with powered landings on airless worlds and jetpack EVAs? NOTHING to do with it. That's my story and I'm sticking with it!) :-D Scouting around KSC, gathering up surface samples, etc was fun but did get a bit grindy. I built minimal-capability sounding rockets to just BARELY reach each of the altitude targets in turn (in 0.24, I always just went straight to orbit with my first launch, so I didn't even know until recently that there WERE intermediate altitude targets.) Eventually unlocked the first tier of airplane parts, and built a little jet-powered wingless 'runabout' so Jeb could scoot around KSC and explore the local biomes in a more fun, less grindy way (and with science modules, too!) Realized I now had a decent 'nest egg' of Funds (400k or so, more than I could reasonably spend that early in the game), and could probably muck about with strategies now. Was a bit strapped for science points, so I set up the Funds -> Science strategy at 50%. Promptly got a 'test LV-1R in orbit' contract...and I already had one of those sitting on my obligatory 'probe core with thermometer in orbit' Funds-generating machine, from a previous similar contract. A couple minutes later I had something over a couple Science points (I rang the 'science in Kerbin orbit' cash register a couple times while I was there), spent 'em in R&D, then promptly got a 'test LFB 1x2 in escape trajectory'. Better than 6000 science, and even with 50% Funds from the already-reduced Hard mode, STILL raked in 6 figures in Funds. I now have most of the "important" (to my playing style, anyway) nodes of the tech tree already completed, just filling in a few less-important bits still to go...and I have only been to low orbit three times with crew, once with a probe, and of course the one escape trajectory test. For practical purposes, I've never been further than LKO. And the dang tech tree is almost complete. Oooo-kay. That Funds -> Science strategy is SOOO broken... especially when paired with the occasional appearance of an obscenely-overpaying contract offer. (Yeah, I know, everyone's been saying so. I "knew" it before. Now I "feel" it....) I think I'll be going back to my old 0.24 save now...

Congrats on your successful design! Based on the pics posted above, though, I do have one piece of additional advice: lose the bi-adapter and the two rockets. Those big LVs are adding a bunch of mass to give you vacuum thrust that you don't need. All you need back there is a single LV-909 (really, all you truly NEED is a dinky little Rockomax 48-7S for circularization at apo and for your deorbit burn, but nobody ever believes that until they've done it themselves). But that's fine-tuning. You designed a spaceplane capable of making orbit, and successfully piloted it--that's a major accomplishment! Well done!

I think the bigger lesson here is to learn what constitutes a "reasonable" altitude/velocity combination for your playing style, and then pick your contracts carefully. It's perfectly okay to reject an offered contract--there are NO negative consequences to rejecting one on offer. I reject at least 2/3 of the "test parts" contracts offered, due to some combination of high-velocity/low-altitude, low-velocity/high-altitude, unreasonably narrow altitude/velocity targets, or inadequate money/science payouts. There's precious little downside to canceling a contract after you accept it, for that matter--the only consequence to that (as far as I've been able to tell, anyway) is you lose the "advance" money that the contract paid when you accepted it. That doesn't count as "failure", and doesn't invoke the "failure" penalties. The only way to invoke the "failure" penalty is to neither fulfill nor cancel the contract *before time runs out*. And the time limits are ridiculously long for early-game contracts, when a successful parts test mission is typically measured in minutes (even a "test in orbit" mission can be launched, circularized, test completed, reenter, and land at/near KSC in no more than 2 orbits). tl;dr version: If you're having that much trouble with any specific contract, feel free to just "cancel" it, move on, and resolve to be pickier about contracts and pay more attention to the fine print in future.

I certainly meant it to be taken at face value. Detailed instructions were exactly what I asked for, and that's what you provided. When I say "not condescending", I meant "I've seen too many of the nigh-violent responses that sometimes crop up when yet another round of 'how do I complete the Rescue Stranded Kerbal mission when I can't get control of the rescuee' comes up". I was a bit concerned that someone would go all "aggressive alpha geek" and give the stoopid newb a slapdown designed to put me in my place, given the elementary nature of my question. Or. as we'd say it in my native Texan: Ya Done Good.

Micha, thanks. Straightforward, informative, and in no way condescending to the newb. This should be very helpful indeed.

Okay, so now it's time for me to reveal the profundity of my total ignorance. The sum total of the installation instructions for EVE (at least that I've found) is: "Dump the contents of the zip file into your KSP install folder. Make sure to MERGE contents." But when I go to the GitHub link where EVE resides, I see TWO .zip file download options, with file sizes that imply they are VERY different beasties. There is a *7-4-LR.zip at ~9.5MB and a *7-4.zip which is over 35MB. Do I need them both? Do I need to install them in some particular order? And what does it mean to "dump the contents of the zip file into my KSP install folder", anyway? Dunno about you, but my KSP install folder has a whole raft of subfolders, many of which have their own sub-sub-folders. Do the contents automagically know what subfolder(s) they should go into? Are these zip files self-extracting, or do I need to scare up a zip/unzip utility? (Yeah, I could find out the answer to this question via simple experimentation, but as long as I'm asking questions which doubtless sound stupid to most of you...) What is this "MERGE" that is apparently so important? Is that an option that will show up when unzipping and be self-explanatory, or is there a whole fresh series of questions I will have once I get that far, which I do not yet know enough to ask now? I assume that, as always, it's basic good practice to back up my entire KSP install prior to adding any mods, in case I screw something up...

We all do it. Some of us just don't admit it.... :-D

Huh. That's almost exactly the opposite of what I've experienced in 0.25. Mind you, I seem to have escaped the worst of the "high-speed ejection upon leaving the capsule" but. I have noticed weird behavior with ladders, which may be related or may be a completely different bug. But what I've seen with ladders is that they exert a W-direction force. I have to FIGHT to get a Kerbal to descend a ladder; it's generally easier to just have them jump and fall to the surface of a low-gee world. OTOH, to get them back into the ladder, I usually just have to "grab". From there, they LEVITATE up the ladder and my challenge becomes getting them aboard at the exact moment they're opposite the hatch, before they drift right past the hatch and past the top of the capsule. Maybe there's more than one EVA bug? Or the bug affects different users in different ways? (Perhaps it changes with mods installed, or the bug expresses itself in different ways depending on details of craft construction?)

In the months I've been playing KSP I've stayed totally stock while learning the ropes. I think it's time to make the jump to mods. (I'm sure this will please the folks here!) I'm looking to start with something that doesn't actually change gameplay (idea being it's less likely to 'break' when KSP updates) but still improves the overall user experience. Art upgrades (i.e., EVE or something like it) would seem to fill that bill. So: EVE seems to be the "go-to mod" for things like adding clouds/weather to planets. But (unless I'm misunderstanding) a quick look at the mod list suggests that EVE is just the foundation for a bunch of other stuff. Question, then, is: what all should I be installing in order to make those ever-so-pretty planets and better lighting that I see in other people's videos? (Newb needs help!)

I confess I have begun experimenting with VTOL SSTO "rockets" powered by large numbers of jets. Complete with jets firing for landing ... at high subsonic speeds ... tail-first, inlets in the vehicle's wake. And I am an aerospace engineer by profession, so I know what a terribly-unrealistic abuse of physics that is. But I am seduced by the prospect of delivering a full orange tank to LKO with a completely-reusable, low-part-count vehicle at a total cost of around 6 tons LF, 2 tons O, so I do it anyway.