fommil

just ONE twin-boar? wow, that's pretty awesome. You may well bow out, after taking the prize! I'm very interested in what you have to show here! To keep things simple, I always pick a solid booster that gets me to space, then burn horizontal with my stage 2. I keep reading about gravity turns but I've always found them to be more hassle than they are worth. I play career in Hard mode, so for me safety of the crew is more important than cost, so I've perhaps erred too much on the side of stable rockets that don't rely on aerodynamics too much. BTW, you might have missed my response to your design here:

Awesome stuff! This is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping to see :-D I did a test flight and messed up my circularisation angles, but I got into 250km orbit to deliver 5872 units, giving an efficiency of 38.76... but I'm not counting the recovery costs of the earlier stages and of course this trajectory could be optimised. A few questions: how do you see how much you are recovering from parachutes on the earlier stages? I wonder if my solid boosters can survive an apoapsis of 70km... you don't have any RCS, so docking is... tricky you put your reaction wheels in a utility bay: why did you do that? I'm going to have to rethink my entire rocket design ethos... but at this scale of up-front cost, it might bankrupt me in Hard Career mode! (it'd be cheating for me to use your design, but I'll certainly learn from it)

But what efficiency are you getting for the challenge? The Gauntlet has been laid down :-P But friendly competition is the point of this thread :-D No restrictions except no spaceplanes or ore mining (I've not unlocked the rapier yet and I don't want any plane design spoilers... so I'm ignoring those kinds of designs posted here).

Which engines are you using there? (also what is that in units of liquid fuel, not mass... units are easier to count because that's what the resource panel shows).

I totally forgot about the KAS port. I like to have those incase of emergencies. Stripping that off could be enough to get me into space with the solid stage. Boosters burn out low yes, but the apoapsis just about hits space. I can dock with this setup: I have vernors to slow down. It saves mass not to take RCS and mono fuel. Very interesting about pointier shells, I didn't realise this is how the physics engine works! I will experiment. How on earth is mech getting 2k to orbit? I'm circularising to about 80k, then one prograde to rendezvous, a speed adjustment, then trivial fuel to dock. Looking forward to your fuel bus! Nice! I agree about that Rhino must be the killer, despite its awesome LSP. I was so excited about getting two stage: maybe dropping down the tech tree and getting higher on earlier stages with slower burns off lighter engines is more sensible after all.

What efficiency do you get for this? The thread is a challenge to do better, you can't compete if you don't take your own score :-p Delivering any less than 1500 units of liquid fuel (plus oxidiser) don't count... too much game repetition. I've not reached spaceplanes yet ;-) read the question again If you think you can do better, why not try to put something together ;-) 1500+ liquid fuel plus oxidiser rendezvous at 250km. No spaceplanes or ore mining. Ok, I'll upload pics and a non-mod ship when I'm at my computer tomorrow. It's basically a huge fuel tank with a docking port, with a rhino surrounded by as many big solid boosters as can fit. Solid boosters go up 68k.

That is an interesting thought, I've picked this orbit only because it's easy to rendezvous with. Perhaps there is a better sweet spot. But I don't think it saves much: especially on recovery the dv is all to slow down at 50k to avoid burning up. I'd have to land on the launchpad to make the recovery cents worthwhile. And I don't think the outbound ships save anything here, indeed I think that might make it more expensive to break SOI of Kerbin.

I'm trying to work my way up the tech tree towards space planes, because my designs tend to require a fuel stop in Kerbin orbit. But until I get there, I have to make do with wasteful trips to my station at 250km. I've considered building an ore refinery on Minmus, but it sounds like a lot of work. I have a design that delivers about 1,700 units of Liquid Fuel (and matching Oxidiser) at a price of 47.9 per unit. I tried experimenting with recoverable rockets, e.g. by adding 12 parachutes to my design, but the recovery cost didn't make any sense when return costs were factored in (500 liquid fuel left in for deceleration, plus apoapsis/mass losses on the way up due to the parachutes). I was getting about 10,000 - 15,000 recovery. I challenge you to do better, my refuel ship is attached! (has an Engineer Redux) https://gist.github.com/fommil/272ef721db825ee8e1d4a458c219922d This translates into 75.85 / unit at 100km orbit of the Mun (I can send 6480, with 4092 arriving).

The wiki suggests that the fancier nose cones are a waste of cash and mass: http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Advanced_Nose_Cone_-_Type_A http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Advanced_Nose_Cone_-_Type_B "The Advanced Nose Cone - Type A is a part introduced in version 1.0. It is an aerodynamic nose cone. It has a drag coefficient of .1 and a mass of .075, .045 more than then Aerodynamic Nose Cone part which is considerably less expensive and has the same drag coefficient making it a purely aesthetic part." "The Advanced Nose Cone - Type B is a part introduced in version 1.0. It has a drag coefficient of .1 and a mass of .075, .045 more than then "Aerodynamic Nose Cone" part which is considerably less expensive and has the same drag coefficient, additionally its slanted shape provides no lift." Is this really the case? I'd have hoped that the parts would have some small reduction in drag coefficient to make them worthwhile? It's far from scientific, but I've noticed that swapping basic nose cones with the Type A have increased the solid booster stage of my launch from 65k to 66k. It could just be that the craft is slightly more stable on the way up.

I hadn't even thought of quicksave... I am practising my landings in sandbox whereas I usually play in Hard career. This certainly improves things! It would be better if I could do this for new planes, but I'll take what there is.

After playing KSP for many years, I've finally decided to work out how to land one of these plane thingys. My experiments have shown that I need practice landing. A LOT more practice. But my practice involves: take off climb turn 180 fly to the mountains (around that nobbly bit) at about 10km turn 180 again then the landing begins: keep correcting my angle glide to 1km-ish just as the grasslands end, speed 150m/s-ish combine pulling up and aerobraking to reduce speed to sub 50m/s keep correcting my angle hope plane doesn't blow up hope plane stops on the runway keep cursing myself for forgetting to deploy the parachutes From watching youtube videos, this seems to be pretty normal... but the first bit (getting to the mountains) is a really boring pain. Is there any way to skip straight to the landing?

I love this mod. I never need to change the settings, can the icon be removed? I don't want to install a toolbar plugin to have it appear there, I just want to turn off the menu entry... even if it means editing a text config file.

Back in pre-1.0 it used to be essential to use Ferram because the stock aerodynamics were so rubbish. Now I'm playing 1.1 (about to upgrade to 1.2 but Ferram is the only mod not available) and I'm reading about how the stock model has improved, e.g. http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Nose_cone I'd like to go more stock (looks like we can ditch RemoteTech and ScanSat) and I'm wondering what exactly Ferram adds to the game now. It's surprisingly difficult to get an overview of what it does, the README is too much detail. e.g. it used to do gradual change in air density, instead of boundary shifts, and calculate drag based on cross sections, plus velocity dependent throttle efficiency. I'm not sure what it stock now. And how does it now affect gameplay? I've been using it out of habit, so if I remove it can I expect my launchers to go higher/lower, be more/less stable, reentry to be cooler/hotter/scarier? Will planes just completely change?

I posted the craft file, so you can check and see that this is not the case. But I'm already doing "control from here" on the probe I attached. I'll try the dock approach but that is a waste of space and mass. Did none of this improve in 1.2?

wow! This worked! I've always recalibrated the joystick before playing but I don't believe I've ever centered this axis. What a totally weird bug in KSP, I really wish they'd fix it. But I have a workaround now, so I guess any joystick would work well.

I have a Logitech Extreme 3D Pro and although it is fantastic for KSP, the throttle has never worked on GNU/Linux for me. The throttle only goes up to half way and I think it's because the linux kernel is sending a range of [-Min, +Max] instead of [0, Max]. I've never been able to fix this, and although this isn't the main topic of this post, I'd be interested to know if anybody has successfully got this working (please no suggestions unless you've confirmed that it actually works on GNU/Linux - I've tried pretty much everything you could suggest right down to considering compiling a custom kernel). I was wondering if anybody has any suggestions for a better joystick that they can confirm does work on GNU/Linux and gives the full range of throttle. For example, I'm considering the Thrustmaster T-Flight Hotas X and a few others, but I won't buy anything unless I know for sure that it works.

I incorrectly posted this in unmodded tech help http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/151142-rovers-and-the-navball/ Could a moderator please move it to "Gameplay Questions and Tutorials"?

(I'm using 1.1.3 as I'm finishing off a campaign and I'm waiting for 1.2.1 because my KSP is reasonably stable right now and I don't trust dot releases) I know this topic keeps coming up time and time again, it's even referenced in http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Rover#Navigation but I have yet to find a satisfactory answer. When I build a simple 4 wheel rover with the RoveMate (e.g. just some wheels and a battery), the navball points straight up. In fact it even drives the wrong direction, I'm forced to either invert the steering or the drive direction. This is inconvenient when designing the rover, but it makes data collection missions almost impossible, because you can't see the navigation waypoint. The standard solution is to add another probe, like in the wiki, and this does indeed fix the navball and now I can see the waypoint. However, when I do that (exactly the same as the example in the wiki), the steering no longer does anything (either keyboard or joystick). I can see the joystick/keys moving the yaw to its extreme values, but the wheels don't move (moving forward/back works). Is RoveMate really as good as it gets? Are there any better best practices other than just living with the RoveMate's terrible navigation? I've put an unmodded craft in https://gist.github.com/fommil/012d4476512571314698ac2edae2092b (but a few mods I've installed add in some inactive modules) I'm using the ArchLinux distribution of GNU/Linux.

that's awesome, I didn't know about this module! Reason for not upgrading is that I want to get to a particular point in this career mode before starting fresh with 1.2.

I've seen a few older google hits for "docking port bug" and so on but there is no definitive workaround that I can find, I'm hoping somebody can help because this has now hit me a few times and it's making the game unplayable. I am building a space station with three parts right now: mobile processing unit tin can holding a kerbal probe lander the idea was to put the MPU into place, then fly up the scientist, then make multiple trips to/from Minmus with the Lander (optionally with/without the scientist for surface samples). I managed to dock everything, but now parts 1 and 2 won't undock! I click undock and nothing happened, then the option just disappeared! It's not like I can just try again, the same bug will probably hit me. Is this bug still present in 1.2? I'm in the middle of a career mode and I am not ready to upgrade just yet.

I'll look forward to hopefully somebody updating the wiki. I should really write a scraper that reads this from the config files... if anybody would like to do that, it would be fantastic.

are there any changes to http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Parts required? I transcribe the settings for my calculator http://fommil.github.io/kerbal/

wow, I would never have guessed! Thanks for looking into this. I'll just design my rockets differently and discard fairings earlier... which might be a bit tricky for this particular rocket design :-/ It would be really amazing if a 1.1.4 patch came out with critical bugfixes like this. I'm in the middle of a career campaign on Difficult mode (although I've loaded previous savegames when this has stung me) and have no plans to upgrade until I've completed the tech tree. Another workaround might be to use the Procedural Fairings plugin instead of stock. @Kerbal101 can you please confirm if this bug is still present in Kerbal 1.2?

Kerbal101 I've posted my craft to the bug tracker, thanks for linking to it.

No, is not this. Although possibly related. No point in me sharing my craft if it isn't going to get fixed in 1.1 line. I'll just have to live with it. I have a long running career mode running and I went be updated to 1.2 for a few patches because I'll have to start again.