herbal space program

In this vein, I wonder what happens if you put some MK1's on a rover and point them towards the approaching planes at a 45 degree angle. Anybody done that?

I definitely agree that some sort of achievement tracking would be both really easy for the devs to implement and make playing a significantly more satisfying experience. They could even add some sort of Kerbal tickertape parade cutscene for particular milestones like first return from orbit or Munar landings. The bearded Kerbals after long missions is cute, but I'm not sure it has quite the ROI for the devs of the other idea.

Yes, it looks like that mod does exactly what I was thinking about, and thanks for posting it. Nonetheless, I think this is an issue that really ought to be fixed in stock and I hope the devs take it on soon.

I finally got my VTOL SSTMAB space plane designed so that it's always balanced for both the rear-mounted jet engines and for the 4 downward-pointing RMA3 engines. Alas my screencaps are all on my home machine. I got it to a low Munar orbit with it with about 600 units of fuel, but I suspect that will not be quite enough for me to land and get back to Kerbin. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if there's any way I can beef up this 6-engine design so that it can make the whole round trip, but I'm proud of myself that the dern thing even flies without constantly shifting the fuel load around. It took hours and hours to figure that out.

I've built some humongous space stations that were awesome but basically unusable as fueling depots because they were so laggy. Start the final docking approach, go have dinner, make a correction, watch TV for an hour, dock, go to bed!

Short answer, 90% probable to be correct: you got too much junk in the trunk because all the fuel is gone from your nose. As you fly, the program takes fuel from the tank farthest from the engine first, which is usually the one in front. As this happens, your center of mass moves steadily backwards. Once it creeps behind your center of lift, your plane will only want to fly bass-ackwards. Either pump fuel forward during your flight or redesign so that the fuel drains in a more balanced way using fuel lines etc.

Cuz it's shoart, so your spaceplane won't leave it on the runway trying to take off!

As to MechJeb, I never used it, and the game is far from unplayable without it. If you spend 20 bucks on a basic game controller, you can learn to do every maneuver in the game manually without difficulty, especially now that they've fixed the horrible issues in previous versions of wobbly rockets and shaky SAS. Having said that, I can understand why somebody who is building a 20 part space station on orbit would not want to fly every single mission by hand, but that's no reason not to learn how to do it manually first. That's where the fun is in this game.

Until you are actually stuck, which will almost certainly happen at some point, don't let everybody else show you how to do everything. Half the fun of the game is figuring out how to make a spaceship or space plane that can get the job done, and if you just go to the forums or YouTube to be shown how, you're cheating yourself out of the best part. Once you really can't figure out how to do something hard, like rendezvous and dock for the first time, then by all means avail yourself of the many tutorials out there. In fact, I would say that the ones on asparagus staging, basic orbital maneuvers, and the correct use of the maneuver node are fine to look at once you actually make it to space. They basically amount to user manual-type material. Remember, there is nothing in this game more satisfying than successfully landing on and returning from another celestial body in a ship you designed and piloted yourself. The fewer crutches you employ in getting there, the bigger the smile on your face will be when you manage it.

Working through the frustration of trying to create a VTOL space plane that stays balanced throughout its flight, I've been thinking quite a bit about how to make fuel work better in this game. Although I understand this has been discussed a lot before, there was one more thing I wanted to suggest before giving up because it seems particularly easy to implement. How about letting us set each tank's draining priority number in the stage hierarchy under its tweakables? As I understand it now, tanks within a given stage are drained in the order of furthest from the motor to closest. Simply allowing us to set that order rather than have it be always pre-determined by the physical arrangement of the tanks would make keeping things balanced immensely easier. It would be better still if we could assign two tanks the same priority within the stage so that they would drain simultaneously. I apologize if I am beating a very dead horse here, but something like this just seems so dirt simple to implement and IMO would improve the gameplay experience so much that I feel it bears some harping on. Anyway, I would love to hear whatever anybody else might have to say about this question or what the devs plan to do about it if anything. Thanks!

I never sit down and try to calculate how much deltaV I've actually got in a package, nor do I spend nearly enough time testing stuff on Kerbin before sending it up. As a result, I landed on Tylo successfully, but only by using the orbital tug that was supposed to take my lander home as a descent stage. When I actually got to the surface, I then couldn't plant the flag because I stupidly left an MK-1 lamp sticking right out of the middle of my descent ladder (D'ohh!). Fortunately I had other ships in the system that were able to rescue my stranded lander, or else poor Anfrod would have been stuck in Tylo orbit forever.

When night after night, you spend hours half-dreaming fitfully about docking your last space station segment or trying to squeeze just a LITTLE bit more deltaV out of your SSTO.

Looks like that idea got a serious beat-down from most of the experienced Kerbals around here! I don't particularly like it either, and I'm glad they decided against it. The whole concept of a given ship performing differently depending on how hard you've ridden Jebediah without killing him seems like no fun. I wouldn't mind a system though where Kerbals with low courage/stupidity can decline particularly dangerous (and lucrative) contract missions, and more experience can boost those attributes. That would not affect the performance of any particular craft, but would still provide a rationale for the existing Kerbal characteristics.

I've been working on a VTOL-capable SSTMAB (single stage to Mun and back) space plane. I'm using all stock parts except for the wing-mounted vertical rocket engines, which I think are from KW. So far, I've only been able to land and get back to a low Munar orbit, but I think I can still shave a few more units of bipropellant off of my ascent to Kerbin orbit. I'm also having some recurring problems with balance using the vertical engines at low fuel levels. It's really hard to design it so that it stays balanced the whole time without using any fuel-balancing addons ! If I ever get it fully working, I'll post it in Spacecraft Exchange and solicit others' designs with the same capabilities....

Wow, I'm surprised so many people use mouse and keyboard! Once I started using a Nintendo-type game controller, I never looked back. I don't think I could even manage docking or EVA without one! I am left-handed. I use the left joystick for pointing the ship and the right one for RCS up/down/left/right translation. Roll, forward/back translation, and EVA maneuvering are on the HAT switches. Throttle up/down is the left-hand forward buttons, SAS/RCS toggle is the right-hand ones. Button 2 cuts the throttle, and I haven't mapped the other 3 to anything yet. Anyway, I find this FAR easier than using the keyboard.

A fuel generator part that requires electricity to hydrolyze water or ice. That seems like all you really need to me! You need to land it on a planet in such a way that it can drill down into the ground, and it will generate fuel at a fixed, fairly low rate if it has enough power. It will fill whatever tanks are part of the same vessel. Fuel transfer to another vessel is through a docking port. If you want to refuel a ship that lands nearby, you'll need a rover with a tank on it and a docking port that is either mounted at the right height/angle or somehow adjustable.

I was going to suggest the same thing. To make it more realistic, I would say you should only be able to set the ratio in the VAB/SPH. You could also make this type of tank a more advanced part that has to be unlocked through the tech tree. This would be immensely helpful for the design of nice-looking and functional SSTO's.

Thinking about the things that detract most from my enjoyment of playing KSP, I have to say that the inconvenience and grindy endlessness of futzing around with fuel distribution is one of the biggest issues. I looked at the "already suggested" thread on this topic and I didn't see something that seems like a really obvious fix brought up: How about allowing tank-to-tank fuel transfers to be set up in action groups? I looked for this feature trying to build my latest SSTO, and saw it was not there. It does not seem like this would be very difficult to implement, and it would make the problem of balancing complex SSTO designs in flight far easier. You could also maybe set up an action group for a set of tanks that says "fill through X docking port", that takes fuel out of whatever is on the far side of that port and puts it into tanks on the near side. Also, it would be great if you could set up fuel lines between any two tanks without actually having to place the part. It is often very difficult or unaesthetic to do this, and placing this structural barrier in the way of internal fuel transfers is inconsistent with the way you can transfer between tanks using alt-click. Anyway, it seems like implementing these changes would require a fairly trivial amount of development time, and would make the game significantly more fun to play, especially once you get into large and complex ships, space stations, etc. My apologies if this is all well-trodden ground, but I feel like this issue is important for gameplay.

If all it did was trash some building at the KSC, it might not be a game-killer, depending on the repair costs. If it's late in the game and you're rolling in Roots, maybe you don't care at all!

Oh I will sooner or later. It's just I'm in Career Mode, so it would be nice if I could get some revenue out of it. I can always tack on a bunch of dorky "test x while y at z" experiments to offset the cost.

Awwww! That is a MUST FIX before 1.0! I want explosions AND craters dangit!

Hello all, I have unlocked all but one node of the tech tree in career mode, and although there are asteroids flying all around the place, I have yet to get an asteroid capture mission from mission control. Is this not implemented yet, or does something else (like completing the whole tech tree) need to happen first? Also, has anybody ever dropped an asteroid onto the Mun or Kerbin? What happens?

Just run a fuel line from the back tank to the front and you should be A-O good.

Step-by-step: If you've mastered the orbital rendezvous part, the rest is really pretty straightforward. You should first boost either towards or away from your target (i.e. towards the pink circle to close distance faster, towards the pink tripod to close slower) until you are closing at around maybe 3-4m/s. You also want to roughly line up your prograde/retrograde vectors, i.e. the yellow open and crossed circles respectively, with the target and anti-target vectors (The pink circle and tripod thingie). The thing to remember here is that the prograde vector will move towards wherever you're pointing when you boost and the retrograde vector will move away. The maximum movement is when you're pointing at a 90 degree angle to each vector, so what you want to do is point as far away from the prograde vector as you can while still seeing everything on the navball, in a position that puts the target vector directly between the two. You can also approximate this procedure using the maneuver node, by dragging things around until the orbits match perfectly and then executing the burn. Once you're 500m away and closing at that speed, right click on your docking port and select "control from here" if you have not already done so. Then line up your ship on the pink circle and switch to the other ship (just hit right or left bracket when within 2km) . Do "control from here" on the docking port for that ship, then set your first ship as target and again line up on the pink circle. Now you should have you two docking ports pointed right at one another and be around 300m apart. Go back to the first ship and turn on the RCS. Your yellow prograde vector marker should be very nearly aligned with the pink circle. If it is not, use the IJKL RCS translate keys to move it so that it is. You will have to keep making this adjustment repeatedly as you close the distance. Once you get within 200m or so, use the forward-back translation keys to cut your relative velocity to 2m/s or less. Remember you can always time-warp if it's going too slowly. Keep pushing the yellow circle on top of the pink circle with the RCS translate keys as you close the distance. Once you get to less than 50m separation, slow down to 0.5m/with the forward/back RCS keys and then switch back to ship number 2. Make sure that ship is still pointed directly at ship number one and switch back again. At 20m or so, slow down to 0.1-0.2m/s and just let the two ships glide together. As long as everything stays lined up, you should dock successfully. If you make contact at an odd angle, wait for the bounce and translate forward just a tad to stop your recoil. You should than come to rest with the two docking ports in contact. If you then disengage your SAS, your ship should gradually swing around to the right angle and dock. Practice practice practice. Also, I have found that using a Nintendo controller for this is VERY helpful. Good luck!

FWIW, I also felt like building a successful SSTO in the latest version was substantially easier than it was back in 0.21 or so.