THX1138

I'm trying to place octagonal struts with eight-symmetry but for some reason it's only letting me place one. I can get eight to appear while I'm in the process of placing but as soon as I place the piece the others disappear.

I'm not sure what you're asking but if you press Alt while clicking a part, you will be able to position a copy of that part and all the daughter parts attached to it.

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We need better ways to see markers than printed on the navball (a moving arrow could work). I can't look for the green marker without pointing my engines in different directions which is not conducive to a good landing and avoiding unintended disassembly of the space craft. Here's a screenshot of where I'm at. I've wasted all of my fuel looking for the exact spot. You can't zoom in very much in the game so I used GIMP to enhance the image further. According to the map, the spot I'm looking for is right in the middle of my massive ship. Bloody useless. I pressed F5 before I began hunting so I can go back and hunt again with more fuel. This isn't much fun.

The ladder is on the capsule. It is part of the capsule. It cannot be removed and it was put there by the SQUAD team. This worked but I don't understand why. I think this is a bug. It really shouldn't matter what orientation things are in?

I accepted a contract to rescue an orbiting Kerbal. Every time I press F to grab the command module ladder rungs, the RCS jetpack is turned off and I'm flung away from the craft. What's going on? I tried pressing F repeatedly in the hope I'd board but I just keep getting flung away and eventually I'm going to run out of RCS. I wonder whether it's related to the bug where I'm sometimes ejected violently from the command module when I initiate EVA.

If it needs mods to achieve it, it shouldn't be offered as a contract.

It IS! That's the whole point! You cannot avoid constantly whizzing passing the damn moon! I can't believe I forgot to make that clear in my original post!

If you get one half of the orbit correct and then rotate around to the other side to get that half correct you'll meet the moon somewhere in between and be thrown off. I think the only chance of success is if you deliberately have bad ascending/descending nodes. After getting the apoapsis and peripasis correct, assuming you can get the ascending/descending nodes to zero in a single move then you can do it, notwithstanding a chance encounter near the ascending/descending nodes. Either way, this is surely unintended and should be fixed so these contracts don't appear.

Edit: I forgot to emphasise the fact that the orbit direction is against that of the Mun so every orbit has two encounters! I just want to confirm before I give up that this mission is indeed impossible. The screenshot shows my attempt to put a satellite in the orbit specified (green). It was fairly close until a Mun encounter threw it off. I'm pretty sure that this orbit will never be stable because Mun encounters will always send the satellite off somewhere. (click to enlarge)

Somehow I didn't notice your reply. Whack-a-Kerbal sounds like great fun but doesn't seem to do anything. I guess "MMB" is meant to be middle mouse button, right? Nothing seems to happen when I press it.

Guys!! I did it! With inspiration from Yukon0009, I set the temperature of the part to 4000 and when I took control of the ship from the tracking station the part was gone with the sound of an explosion! I tried just deleting the part but that seemed to delete most of the ship and Mun itself but I noticed a setting called temp which I changed from -200 to 4000 to eliminate that part. If you try anything like this remember to back up your save first!

I guess this engine (Poodle) isn't powerful enough because that's not happening. I'm now elbow deep in save game code but it's not very user friendly! Jeb has a suggestion! Perhaps I can ram the decoupler into something!(?)

Sometimes I overestimate the fuel needed for a mission and come back with excess. I was thinking it would be smart to have some kind of space station where that fuel can be transferred before returning to Kerbin (obviously I'll need to keep enough to get from the station to Kerbin). Where would be the smartest place to put that station if the intention is to supply ships headed outside of Kerbin's sphere of influence? Minmus, right? Or Kerbin? I'm guessing many of you already did this. I know that you can set fuel tanks to be empty in the VAB. Does anyone have any other advice? I will be sure to include all three dock sizes and include RCS tanks. Should it have Xenon gas as well? What about premium unleaded? Should it be self-service or attended?

In the screenshot there is a small docking port (where a satellite used to be) on top of a large decoupler. I want to deploy the decoupler so that the engine can be used on my upside-down lander. The decoupler sends the small docking port hurtling away but the decoupler housing itself and the engine shroud stay on the engine and although the engine's jet of gas is visible and appears unobstructed, it doesn't actually provide any thrust. Is this my fault? I don't think it is! I'd rather not waste my lander (and disappoint the enclosed Kerbal) by having to cancel this part of the mission! (click to enlarge)

Well the game could handle the situation in different ways. For a start it could warn the player that they have another ship entering the atmosphere of planet (that seems a pretty user-friendly thing to do). Then, if the player doesn't want to switch to the ship in question (madness!), the game can just put the calculations "on the back burner" and perform them when the spare GPU cycles are available. If the player tries to change to the ship in question before the calculations are complete, they can watch the simulation as a recording of what happened. Not all calculations should need to be performed in real-time if the user is off lollygagging elsewhere.

I edited the post because I forgot the screenshot. I did it immediately so I guess it doesn't count edits that are made within a certain time limit. Does that mean that the orbit wouldn't change at all on the unsupervised craft? TBH that's still not ideal, I don't think. It's probably saved some people some heartache but I still wanted the air-braking to occur while I did my other stuff.

In the screenshot you can see the situation. I have two craft that I'm controlling on similar timescales. One is returning to Kerbin using air-braking to expend excess energy (periapsis is 42 km) and the other is placing a satellite before heading to Mun. My question is, why KSP just declare the unattended craft a wreck if it enters the atmosphere without me controlling it? Or will it do the calculations properly and realise that the unattended craft should actually be able to orbit a few times before landing happens? (click to enlarge)

Right now I just want bigger solid rocket boosters. My computer performs very poorly during the first stage of launch due to the ~50 S1 SRB-KD25ks (and associated struts) it takes to get my payload en route.

I wonder what their source of energy is since it doesn't seem to involve a need for food or oxygen. Radiation exposure isn't a problem for them either. Are they silicon based?

I try to tie together multiple missions if possible. You should definitely consider rejecting contracts that don't cover their costs unless you would have been doing it anyway (e.g. a parachute test, since I'm using parachutes often enough anyway). Right now I'm about to spend 370 K launching a vehicle that will put a satellite in orbit, land a surface station on the Mun and land a separate lander on the Mun with a Kerbal in it to collect some surface samples per a contract (and bring them home). The satellite contract returns 250 K but the surface station returns 450 K. I'll also get like 200K total from reporting science from around Kerbin (money for old rope) and completing the surface sample contract! So the trick is, where possible, to make sure you're completing multiple contracts in a single mission. It can be a bit of a kerfuffle but it's pretty rewarding if done right. Make sure you understand each contract and dot every i and cross every t. Spending 250+ K to put a base somewhere but not having an antenna on it earns nothing!

Thanks a lot! Incidentally, how do I determine the proper angle for launch from the data specified in the contract?

After accepting a satellite contract, the desired orbit is visible in the tracking station. There are some bright dots moving around the orbit in a particular direction (the opposite direction to which the natural bodies orbit each other in this solar system). Does this indicate that I need to launch the satellite moving in the opposite direction to the natural bodies?

Thanks, I guess I'll do that. In the interest of fairness though, I must press my original request for maximum experience points to be granted to all Kerbals that EVA while landed and not only those brandishing flags. I cannot stand injustice! I try to fight it whenever I can!

Why should planting a flag grant more experience points than simply performing EVA while landed on a planet? I don't think the flag should be necessary. (If you remove the flag right away (so the solar system doesn't end up littered with flags) does that affect the experience gained?)