herbal space program

I've actually found that my space planes work better than they did before. Of course I hadn't actually built one since the wobbly days 0f 0.21, so I couldn't comment on how it compares to 0.24. The first one I built used Mark 2 components with 2 RAPIER engines. It could almost make orbit on jet fuel alone and took only a few minutes to get to a 1500+ m/s flameout at 27km or so. Control was smooth as silk the whole way. Of course when I tried to add parachutes, cargo bay, VTOL capability, and science instrumentation it was another story, but I eventually got all of that working too on a plane that could make orbit in something like 14 minutes on about 300 units of jet fuel. I don't think I could have managed that with what was available in 0.21. Anyway, when a plane wants to fly backwards, it's usually because the center of lift has gotten in front of the center of mass. This often happens as your fuel gets consumed, since the tanks get emptied from the front to the back. the best remedies for this I have found are to put the bulk of the fuel load as close to the center of mass as you can, and also to run a fuel line from the rearmost tank forward to the one closest to the center of mass. This will cause the fuel to drain from both ends towards the center rather than from front to back. Failing to do this for me always ended up producing planes that were nose-heavy at takeoff and then pitched up uncontrollably after burning half their fuel.

I just managed to land and return to orbit, but I failed to plant the flag because there was a %$@#! light sticking out of the middle of my ladder! Also, I had to use up what was supposed to be my orbiting Kerbin return stage as extra fuel on the descent.

I've had some annoying cases recently where my staging locks (I think maybe if I mouse over the lower left control area for too long) and alt-L doesn't work. Nothing besides exiting to KSC and reloading seems to unlock it again.

Have you tried using a Nintendo controller? I've found that they're supported quite well and that the various functions are very easy to naturally distribute between the different control axes. A full-sized stick would have to be pretty fancy to incorporate enough control axes. Also, most of the full-sized sticks I've owned are recognized as generic game controllers by the OS, so I wonder why it is that you'd be having problems.

I only got to play for about 90 minutes yesterday, starting career mode twice in the process. The second time, I did the first three objectives with the first mission, the orbit objective with the second, and was nearly done building a moon rocket for the third when I looked at my watch and headed for bed. I imagine that's a typical first three missions, but I'd be interested to know if anybody was able to land on the moon in two. I've enjoyed playing "beat the clock" in 0.22-0.23 career mode games, and I like the way the deadlines in the contract system introduce that element naturally. My only quibble so far is that some of the part-testing contracts seem quite persnickety about the conditions that need to be met to fulfill them. Also, I was pretty sure I did everything the MK-16 parachute test required but still no love! Seems like kind of a lot of grinding for not very much reward.

I find that the way I generally mess up in this vein is by accidentally hitting f9 went I meant f5 and vice versa. FWIW, one thing you can do if you accidentally quickload away a lot of progress, as I have done before to my exasperation (5 seconds my SAS!), is to immediately kill KSP using the task manager and then restart the program. That will put you back to whatever state the persistent save file contained at your last autosave. Usually that will be before you messed up, although obviously you will still lose some amount of progress. I recovered about 8 hours of tedious vehicle construction, launching, and orbital rendezvous for an Eve sample return mission that way.

Better tools to manage multiple maneuver nodes for when you have 20 missions going on at the same time?

Hello everybody, This is my first post in these forums, although I have lurked here a fair bit. Please forgive me if this is old hat or if it is already slated to be included in the contracts system. I have been playing KSP since about 0.18, and have done nearly all of the basic exploration challenges in sandbox mode. Once career mode got started, I felt like one of the most interesting challenges I could give myself was to see how much science I could generate in the shortest possible span of game time, i.e. to try to win the "race to space" against an imaginary opponent. Needless to say, this requires both careful planning wrt launch windows as well as launching and managing a large number of missions simultaneously. So my first suggestion is that the amount of money you can get for specific achievement should be in some way related to how quickly you can get it done in terms of game time. I think this would add an interesting level of strategy to career mode. Again, please forgive me if that's already what is planned. In that vein, the main headache in playing this way for me right now is the danger of missing your window for one of the many maneuvers you have to execute at the right moment for each mission. This headache has been significantly mitigated by having maneuver nodes become persistent in the last update, but it occurred to me that it would really be cured if somewhere in the game there was a "maneuver node manager" window, that lets you view all the maneuvers you've plotted in chronological order. Perhaps it could even pause and alert you if you're about to timewarp past one of your plotted nodes from another mission. At least for me, that would significantly reduce the number of "$%@#! I sailed past Jool into interstellar space!" facepalm moments. So?