FleshJeb

If I could weld 0.625m batteries together, I'd use that size almost exclusively for satellites. 1.25m for 1-3 man missions. 2.5m for stations and fuel tankers.

One basic technique I have't seen mentioned here is to orient your ships north-south. That way, when you're docking/fine-tuning your rendezvous, you're not perturbing your matched orbit as much. I'm not sure if this is in fact true mathematically, but I saw someone do it on youtube, and it seems easier. EDIT: Silly me, the BEST part about this method is that the ship orientations don't shift as they orbit around the planet.

I just want to see a team that has both Cupcake and Whackjob...

Brilliant! I wasn't planning on downloading it, but you just convinced me. :-)

Warning! Your sarcasm has achieved escape velocity. Please apply seriousness boosters in a retrograde direction or risk violating Poe's Law. Thank you, and don't forget to pick up your free strut on the way out.

Hehe, that is SO ugly. I love it! I think I've deleted all my truly awful planes, otherwise I'd share. :-)

This is just amazing. Great work! I volunteer to make a Borg cube out of STOCK parts. :-)

FYI: You can edit your MechJeb readouts to show RCS delta-V. I'm not sure if it accounts for massless parts or not. (You could always edit the part files to 0.)

That's a sweet ride! I bet it's really hard to pitch over when the orange tanks are empty. Is it landable when it's out of fuel?

Do you happen to know of a good forum for discussing public policy as it applies to space exploration? (Anyone is also welcome to PM me--We don't have to agree) May I start another thread discussing gov't agencies that use space-based instruments, without delving too much into policy? I'm a private land surveyor who frequently uses the online tools that are provided by the National Geodetic Survey, and I think their work may be very interesting to some of the people here.

Do ODIN satellites count as bombers, or can we have multiple guided weapons installed?

Thanks for the videos. I think you seriously underestimate the power of marketing--ESPECIALLY in America. Look what it's done for environmentalism--It's hip and it's cool (to a fairly large demographic), and it's a serious money-making business now. It makes up a giant chunk of my income. I agree that big research science is on the decline--I've read the articles on funding shortages. However, I'm not ready to wet my pants on the subject quite yet. Times and conditions change. Marketing is one of the tools used to do that. Singing has everything to do with being a human being. Your average ground-pounder doesn't know what they do on the ISS, nor do they care that Cmdr. Hadfield might have run an experiment on how crystals grow in microgravity. They don't have the background to see how it applies to THEM. The creature in the cupola might as well be an ivory-tower alien. So, he sings a (very cool) song in space. Huh, suddenly, that's just another Person up there, not so different from you and me. "Hmm, I wonder what he's up to, and what this ISS thing is all about. Maybe I'll google it..." Secondly, Space Exploration is a long game...hopefully forever. Kids who learn to think of space as "cool" grow up to be engineers and scientists who think space is cool. Perhaps as importantly, the grow up to be congresspeople and senators. Change the zeitgeist, win the game. We got to the Moon because Kennedy was A) cool, and sold us on the idea that we had to keep up with the Soviets. There are a million great, rational reasons to explore space, but that's not what got us there. Don't fool yourself--Humans are NOT primarily a rational species; we're a lot more Kerbal than we'd like to admit. You have to get to them through their hearts and their guts. The mind will eventually follow. Yes, the spaceship of progress appears to be running out of fuel. In times like these, you just have to put on your big-boy EVA pack and get out and PUSH. ;-) Tangentially related concept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

This man, right here: (Chris Hadfield sings Space Oddity on the ISS) Or musicians who can turn space into a powerful emotional experience: (Pink Floyd's Marooned)

Completely agreed. (Except I now roleplay my RemoteTech requirements due to the mod's bugginess). I had a realization: I'm also disappointed with the direction of development--KSP at it's best is an AMAZING sandbox, full of wonders and challenges. It seems as though the devs want to go down the road of encouraging even more micromanagement and railroading of experience. We (I) need more stuff to do, but less restrictions on HOW and WHY to do it. I don't play Career, because collecting science is tedious, and sometimes you just want that one part for a great design, and it's way up the tree (Ladders, anyone?). I'm not interested in Contracts, because I don't want the game providing me with goals or limitations (outside of physics); I have plenty of my own. I also have a life and a job where I get to fulfill contracts and manage money. I don't really want to do it in my spare time. My favorite moment so far in the game has been hovering a VTOL 20m off a cliff face looking for a damned monolith that I had located with ScanSat satellites that were hooked up to my RemoteTech network. Days had been spent designing the infrastructure and the plane. Multiple attempts and crashes had been made, parts scattered all across the landscape. Kerbals needed to be rescued from mountaintops. Eventually, I found the the Monolith, and everybody went home. What a great day. MOAR planets, MOAR easter eggs, MOAR sensors that do more than just return a boring text result. Plus a few tools to make easier and less tedious. (The subassembly manager is the best thing ever). In short, things that spark a desire to DO, and tools to remove unnecessary obstacles or tedium in getting them done. For all those complaints, KSP is still the best game ever made. Thanks, Squad. :-D (And thank you to the forum mods who put up with our crap.)

If you want an interesting (fictional) read on the importance of all those muddy human instincts, and how valuable they are to our decision-making process, here's a little a little story about a man who can switch back and forth between pure intellect and normalcy. https://archive.org/stream/ScannersLiveInVain/SmithCordwainer-ScannersLiveInVain.txt

This is a really fascinating exercise. Please post some pics when you can. I'd really like to see if it can be scaled up enough to fling processed fuel off of the smaller moons.

While there's no substitute for a prospector probe, you can have a lot of fun with ScanSat, and have it make slope-maps of the whole planet for you.

I think there's some good solid advice in this thread. I can only add that you should always turn off thrust vectoring on your side boosters. They can really magnify latent instabilities. Likewise, the location of your command unit makes a big difference. If you have a slightly wobbly upper stage, and you're trying to command from there, the stabilizers will try to correct the flight based on that wobble rather than the rocket as a whole. I always put a probe on my second-to-last stage and fly from there. It's typically more stable, and it also allows you to deorbit that stage. Lastly, the lighter payload is going to result in a much higher TWR. As you near burnout of any particular stage, you're going to have a lot of thrust at the end of a long empty tube, and a heavy weight on top. Lots of turning torque + very low moment of inertia = welcome to flippy land.

So I was goofing around and made a BattleStar Galactica Viper replica. Then I thought, what the hell, and decided to try an tricked-out, extended-fuel version for the race. Smaller is always better in KSP, right? Held it at 35km and 2250m/s at a slight nose-down angle, except for 5 minutes where I had to coast to conserve fuel. Yes, I drained all the oxidizer out first. Time 33:36. Next time I'll remember to go West.

This is really fun. I've taken about 10 passes at it. I'll be satisfied with 3rd place at 23:10 (Stock + MechJeb + KER) Flight: Launched West and tried to hold altitude around 55km at a speed of about 3600m/s Surface. Start: about 18,300 m/s dV, NO asparagus on the bottom: Finish: 2,000 dV remaining after a nice 13g crash dive.

THIS. Dear Kod, I used to do it all from underneath, until I saw someone do it on youtube. I'll add: Get SelectRoot. It makes the subassembly manager a LOT more useful. Don't feel bad about using MechJeb. It's good to learn how to do everything manually and practice a bit, but if you find something tedious, automate it.

That's a beautiful craft, and I'm enjoying your process. Thanks for sharing. You said earlier that you were having stability problems; I suggest that might be the canards. I have a really hard time designing small craft with them. Right now, you have more control authority in the front than the back. Definitely add more wings--It'll lower your AoA so that you can get more speed out of the turbojets. My rule of thumb is 1 lift unit per ton of mass. To that end, my spaceplanes are "lifting bodies" with Structural Wing panels on the underbody. Another fun thing to do (but ugly) is to put rover wheels on the nose of the craft. Place them higher than your extended landing gear, and you can truck around on planets by raising the nose gear.

Make a giant airship that cruises the skies of Eve using: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/23774-0-21-Hooligan-Labs-Airship-Submarines-and-More Have it navigate using just wings and buoyancy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_glider Then try and land a rocket on it. ;-) (Anyone know the height in atmo at which things DON'T get autodeleted on Eve? Kerbin is 22 km, so I'm going to guess 30.8km, based on atmosphere heights. ~42km based on pressure.) Well, I know what I'm trying tonight...