herbal space program

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.

The difficulty of landing on a body is not determined solely by the deltaV required to get there. I actually found Minmus a fair bit more challenging to land on than the Mun, because the low gravity made everything all bouncy and also because the terrain was so steep. For Duna, you can say that you'll land on only chutes, but you'll need a heck of a lot of them to slow you down enough. As to Eve, there's the problem of not landing in the ocean. And of course the other thing is that Real Kerbals don't just want to land, they want to get home again. Try doing that for Eve and then tell me how hard it is!

In addition to mis-aligned landing gear, too much weight on the front wheel will also often produce veering behavior. You might try lightening the front of the plane or moving your nose wheel back towards the center of mass to increase the angle of attack. raising your elevators part way once you get above about 35 m/s also helps quite a bit. All these things take weight off the nose wheel.

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?