herbal space program

I've been asking for them to do something like this since before 1.0. Career mode is in serious need of help, and among many other other ways it could be improved, giving you some kind of motivation to go take surface gravity readings at location 3QxsZZm-blablabla, even if it's just some silly Easter egg, would already make grinding through all those silly contracts a lot less tedious. I personally like the idea of finding alien (human, even!) artifacts at some of those locations, which might give you some kind of a tech bonus (like access to a single part from up the tech tree) if you excavate them and return them to Kerbin. In the end, a chain of clues and ever more powerful and difficult-to-recover artifacts could lead you to the capability for interstellar travel, which you could ultimately use to visit the great new solar system they're making for KSP 2.0! Yeah, I know. Not holding my breath....

What happened to your snazzy space plane? That thing looks like a pile of spare parts that came to life on its own and escaped from from the VAB.

Not while it happened to my knowledge, but I guess I might have still been at 2X and not realized it. It did happen kind of shockingly fast. I will include that in my tests later.

It was just the capsule and the chute, and maybe a heat shield I was testing (can't remember now). The capsule doesn't flip by itself, but that early in the game you can't lock to retrograde, so you have to try to keep following it manually all the way down, which is kind of challenging because with just the capsule it's very easy to overcorrect. Anyway, I'm finding that with a little too much deviation in the 25-25 km range it flips, never to be righted again, and then more or less accelerates all the way to the ground. I dunno, maybe all I needed to do was turn off SAS and stop trying to control the capsule at all once it was pointed retrograde. I'll give that a try later in the sandbox, to see if that works and the problem was all of my own making. Either way, I don't think I've ever seen any other part defy atmospheric drag quite like that Mk1 capsule pointed prograde.

I'm playing a PC game too, and higher up during re-entry, I guess that's about how it was. But down around 25km, where the deceleration really kicks in, it seemed like there was much less margin of error than that. Once flipped, it seemed like the capsule had a TV of at least 900 m/s, accelerating or holding steady almost all the way to the ground, even though it was coming in at a pretty low angle. Pointed the other way, it rapidly slows down to a safe chute deployment speed on the same trajectory. For my (re-started) hard career game, I dealt with it by just doing more silly missions at the start and getting the drogue chutes before I even attempted to go to orbit. Those seem to deploy successfully even at 800 m/s, so they greatly shorten the time spent in that zone of instant death. Still, the pointy-end-forward drag of the Mk. 1 capsule + chute seems implausibly low to me, out of step with the other front-end parts. I'm going to do some drop-testing in a sandbox game on the side and see what it shows me...

What I'm mainly talking about is that in those first few missions, where there's no way to mount more than 1 chute on your craft and no attitude control besides the reaction wheels in the Mk. 1 pod, safely re-entering from orbit is currently really, really tough. Maybe that's by design, to force you to scrounge science from a bunch of ultra-boring early-game missions so you can buy the tech to not die coming back from orbit. It doesn't take much -- just some higher-speed drogue chutes or radial-mount chutes. And it's not like I can't turn the corner on even that game -- I just can't currently do it without killing multiple pilots and losing a lot of rep along the way. It definitely does make foregoing F5/F9 a recipe for frustration. It's probably been at least that long since I played a Career game. In Sandbox, with all the parts available, the advantages of less drag have always outweighed the drawbacks for me, so I never noticed this. Anyway, it just seems excessively hard to me now until you get more parts.

As it it had been a few years since I last tried playing Career, I decided to give it a whirl to see what was new. While in prior attempts several versions ago I found the first few missions to be a fairly perfunctory exercise, to my consternation I have discovered that in the current version, re-entering with the Mk. 1 command pod is unreasonably difficult. Specifically, atmospheric drag seems to have been nerfed so much that if you make the mistake of getting off a totally prograde retrograde heading by more than 2-3 degrees during mid re-entry, you are irrevocably dead! And not because you will blow up with the wrong end pointed towards the ground, but because your nose will lock to prograde so hard from the aerodynamic forces that you can never change your attitude again. That in itself wouldn't be so bad, but now the air is so thin you can never even slow down enough to safely deploy a parachute before you drill a hole in the ground. It definitely wasn't like that before. Do they really want it this way? I think they either need to increase the drag numbers on the Mk. 1 capsule or strengthen its reaction wheels, because the way it is now I think it is going to turn a lot of players off, even if they have the benefit of F5/F9. Besides, "career" games in general ought to start off relatively easy and then get harder as you go. Under this regime, hard career starts off nearly impossible and then becomes trivial and boring as you finally get the parts that actually let you fly missions effectively. I've always had that complaint about it, but in the current state of affairs it seems worse than ever. Anyway, just my $0.02, but I'd be interested to know if others have had the same experience.

Absolutely this. All of my long-range space planes tend to be low on lift and nose-heavy on takeoff, and keeping them pitched up enough early in flight using SAS is always a big struggle for this reason.

My current record with a 5m craft from SL is 5,202.

This is an easy question. Getting to Eve with an all Nuclear (and Rapier I presume)-powered SSTO is totally a blue run.Getting off Eve with an all nuclear-powered SSTO is utterly impossible. My $0.02 would be that as more-or-less payload to get you wherever you might be going after you make orbit, nukes are as good on Eve as anywhere else. But if you're counting on them to substantially help you in the actual process of getting to orbit, you're asking quite a bit of them.

"Your Mileage May Vary", as in "This is a purely subjective judgement, so nobody's opinion is any better than anybody else's".

Congratulations! Also, I think I can say with complete confidence that with that ship you could not only make orbit, but get your command pod all the way back to Kerbin. All you have to do is start turning sideways at a lower altitude.

Yes, for that sort of application I think they'd be great there. I remember the days when one used to be able to use Ions for that to essentially the same effect, but I think maybe those have been nerfed now to the point that they don't work so well anymore.

What you may or may not find satisfying has no bearing on what OP may or may not find satisfying. For my part, If I ever SSTO anything off the surface of Eve successfully, I won't care a fig in my elation if I used Hyperedit to put it there in the first place. I don't need to prove to anybody, least of all myself, that I can find a way to get it there from the KSC in-game. YMMV!

Just install HyperEdit, plug those coordinates into the "planet lander" window, and hit "land" while on the Kerbin launch pad. If you raise the altitude so you have more time, you can go to the orbit view, change the coordinates, and see where you land on the map. This approach bugs out after a few iterations, but eventually you can zero in on the spot you want.

If you look upthread at the coordinates shown in the HyperEdit window on any of my recent flight posts, those are for a nice, flat spot at 4000 m, that is right next to the tallest peak. If you poke around a bit from there, I'm pretty sure you can find it fairly quickly.

I just want to reiterate that you definitely have the juice to make orbit with the rig you already have. You just need to stage and fly it a little differently.

90 seconds is an acceptable length for an efficient single ejection burn, but if you take 10 whole minutes from a 200km parking orbit, you are wasting quite a bit of dV. It's much better to go to a 70 km circular orbit and do multiple shorter kicks at its PE, until you are nearly on an escape trajectory, before doing the final burn. I guess if you're going straight to Jool that might still take a while, but I never actually do that because it takes too much dV that way.

I can't honestly say I've ever used one either, since at 3.75 m they take up rather a lot of cross-sectional area for that amount of thrust, and for general orbital maneuvering I'm more inclined to live with the low-TWR Nervs. But looking over the engine stats it appears that nothing else with that amount of thrust and TWR comes close to its vacuum ISP value, so I guess stuff like a really big Tylo lander would be a niche where it would really shine. It might also be really good for the final stage of a large Eve lifter, where you need to circularize relatively quickly to maintain altitude. In fact, I might just give it a whirl for what I'm doing on the big Eve thread....

You and me both! I don't know how much they would really help on Duna, but on Eve they would make it a whole new ballgame.

I think the only good reason to use 5 ants instead of 1 Spark is if you want to use them for lander legs as well as engines. They're good for that on very small vessels.

In that case, meh. The really annoying, totally needless thing about action groups in the current game is that you can't look at them any more once you're in flight, much less edit them.

How about if you could just open up a tab during flight that shows you what your action groups are, and (gasp!), maybe even lets you edit them during flight? Madness, I know!

It's only wrong if you entered a challenge that forbids it and then use it surreptitiously in your official submission. Other than that it's your movie. For a lot of particularly hard things, not using it and/or Hyperedit during the design phase makes developing the required craft prohibitively tedious.

For my own part recently, I've been trying to see how little of my dry mass I can stage off and still get to orbit, and this is the best I've done so far: The whole 78-ton core stage gets to orbit from 4km, with only the two side stacks getting staged off. That represents a bit over 16 percent of the total starting mass and 70 percent of the dry mass of the vessel making orbit. I feel like that's a pretty good start but I can still do better. If not an actual SSTO, I think I can get pretty close to one this way....