AbacusWizard

Still easier than mining ore from Jool and delivering it to Laythe.

I do really like the new IVA. It has great visibility and the crosshairs help Cattrid the Engineer aim her harpoon gun.

To be fair, that sounds exactly like how I'd expect Kerbals would make a cockpit.

Sadly not; the mere existence of contracts to test Launch Stability Enhancers off-world is a bug. Idid once witness a launchpad explosion that somehow resulted in a couple of Launch Stability Enhancers in low Kerbin orbit, but that was even buggier--when I attempted to approach them with another ship, my speedometer went all wonky and the distance-to-target display refused to change.

I would love to see "destructible terrain"--not only for the hilarity of meteor craters, but imagine the possibilities for excavating! "Mining" ore could actually mean mining, and we could make dug-out underground colonies.

And worst of all, it would void your warranty.

"Test Launch Stability Enhancer on [anything other than launchpad]" is definitely the hardest.

If you were creating a vacuum behind you, I'm guessing that would just make things worse--any increase in I_sp would be balanced out and beyond by the fact that you've got way more air pressure in front of you pushing you back than air pressure behind you pushing you forward.

I have no crew hatch and I must scream.

Crew transfer can't be EVA, though, because you can transfer tourists, and tourists aren't allowed outside the ship. My theory is that kerbals actually have crew teleporters built into every internal seat, but they're very limited teleporters and require physical contact to work.

"The thing's hollow--it goes on forever--and--oh my God!--it's full of bugs!" - - - Updated - - - Hot diggity, it's fixed! Starbridge Station is back in business! The fix described in the Reddit link didn't quite work exactly as written (the relevant lines in my persistent file didn't look quite like the link said they should), but I finally tried deleting the three relevant lines (anything in a heatshield part starting with srfN or attN) and replacing them with srfN = None, -1 attN = None, -1 attN = bottom, 2 attN = top, 0 and it worked!

Thank you! I was having this exact same problem and had no idea what was going on; was afraid I'd have to, ahem, "teleport" the crew back down to the surface and decommission the whole station, docked ships and all. On closer examination one of the docked ships does have heatshields; I'll try the linked fix. (That's supposed to be Kerbin. My first thought was that the Monolith Makers ignited fusion in the core and turned it into a second sun.)

I recently built, and have been flying quite a bit because it's awesome, a small two-seater spacecraft with a forward-facing inline cockpit for the pilot and a rear-facing inline cockpit for the harpoon gun operator (using the winch and harpoon from Kerbal Attachment System). IVA view makes it easier to aim the harpoon. It's remarkably useful for towing debris out of orbit. Behold... the H-Wing.

Sounds like a job for... Kerbal Inventory System!

Might I recommend using a single solar panel instead? It's less mass, possibly a little more visible, and serves a second purpose as, well, a solar panel.

I see you have constructed a new lightsaber. Your skills are complete. Indeed, you are powerful, as the Kraken has foreseen.

Always include a docking port on the "front" of the craft... that way if your perspective is backwards, you can just right-click the docking port and click "control from here."

While it turned out to be a rather useless mission, for sheer visual "cool"ness it's tough to beat this Outrunning The Fireball moment.

Are you using a mod? I've been doing a fair bit of mining in one spot on Minmus and haven't noticed any depletion of ore.

Generally whenever I'm planning a major project (visiting a moon or planet, sending a bunch of rookies on orbit to get experience, building a space station, etc.) I spend some time browsing through Mission Control to see if there are any available contracts that I could easily do at the same time. Tourists want to orbit Minmus? Sure; I have a couple of spare seats in the crew cabin. Science from surface of Mun? I was going to land there anyway. Space station orbiting Kerbin with a science lab and bunks for five kerbals? Exactly what I wanted to build in the first place. The funds add up.

Once I've science farmed my way up to the ISRU converter, I have millions of funds already anyway and am pretty much just doing contracts for fun.

It's also possible to measure your true absolute acceleration, no matter what's causing it. One simple example would be to attach a mass to a spring (or network of springs, if you want more than one dimension) and watch the spring(s). If there's no displacement, there's no acceleration; if the mass is displaced from equilibrium, the amount of displacement (times the spring constant divided by the mass) tells you how much acceleration you're experiencing. (Ostensibly this is what's going on inside the Accelerometer when you right-click it and tell it to display data.)

I don't like having it on the lander because an extra four tonnes (I think it's four tonnes?) can make a big difference... but that doesn't mean it has to be in orbit. My current setup is a large wheeled mine/refinery--I call it the Mobile Ore Combine--that extracts ore AND refines it into fuel, to be pumped directly into a docked surface-to-orbit tanker. That way the tanker itself doesn't have to have any converters or drills--just fuel tanks, engines, and landing gear. (The central column sticking up out of the Mobile Ore Combine is an engineering bay--living quarters for two engineers to keep the drills running smoothly. It can detach and fly, or jet around the flats on wheels--useful for picking up waypoint contracts nearby, and originally useful for scouting out a good ore deposit for mining.)

In 0.25 (all stock, all honestly launched) I developed an amazing interplanetary infrastructure with several "programs": • The Wayfarer Program I placed a small ion-engine science probe in orbit around ever celestial body in the solar system. It took a lot of setup but paid for itself in "science from space around X" contracts. The one big thing that went wrong: I sent a "six-pack" of Wayfarers to the Jool system (one for Jool, one for each moon) all on one central atomic rocket, to be detached when they got to Jool orbit and sent to their individual destinations. My mistake was forgetting to retract the solar panels before hitting the stage button to detach them all. BOOM, all the solar panels shattered. No power generation capability left at all... except for the one RTG I had included in the original design as a backup. So they weren't dead... they just maneuvered veerrrrrrrrry sloooooowwwly and had to wait a long while between transmissions to recharge. Very annoying but not unrecoverable. • The Phoenix Program This started with a series of long-range atomic-engine exploration motherships with reusable landers (Phoenix I to Mun and Minmus; Phoenix II to Eve and Moho; Phoenix III to Duna, Dres, and Jool; and a smaller Phoenixette toe Eeloo), and at some point I redesigned the Phoenix III into the "P3-Class Atomic Drive" by removing the landers, the lab, and the crew quarter, launched several duplicates of it, and used them as tugs to haul large cargo (such as the bases described below) to its destination. • Colonization Smallish, single-launch orbital outposts around Kerbin, Mun, Minmus, Gilly. Surface outposts on Mun and Minmus. Better surface outposts on Duna and Laythe, each with a dockable rover, an orbital station overhead, and a rocket (Duna) or a spaceplane (Laythe) for ferrying crew between surface and orbit. Overall they worked very well. One small problem: the surface outpost on its way to Duna was scheduled for its flyby and a braking maneuver to slow down into orbit... and I completely missed it. Must have been working on other stuff at the wrong time; happened to glance at the en-route outpost in the Tracking Station and realized to my horror that it had already passed Duna. Had to make very careful maneuvers with what was left of the fuel, wait another year or so for the orbital insertion, and then send a tanker to provide more fuel so it could actually de-orbit. Whoops. One bigger problem: at some point Gilly Orbital Command just vanished; didn't show up on the Tracking Station and all crew listed as MIA (or dead? I forget). Not entirely sure what happened; I presume it was just orbiting a little too close and crashed into the lumpy surface.

Check the Resources panel in the toolbar. Add together the numbers shown for Liquid Fuel and Oxidizer (this tells you the volume of fuel) and then multiply the result by 5 (the density). This should tell you the mass in kg. (If you want tonnes, divide by 1000.)