AbacusWizard

^--A miraculous recovery!

I'm sick of all these career pilot-icians running Krashington D.C. into the ground. We need more ordinary kerbals from ordinary careers, like scientist or engineer.

Recently I've been experimenting with the challenge of manually removing low orbit debris rather than using the big red X in the tracking station. I've got a small two-seater orbital skiff with a rear-facing harpoon gun that I call the H-Wing. It rendezvous with a piece of debris, snags it with the harpoon, tows it into a suborbital trajectory, detaches, and speeds itself up until it's in orbit again. Works remarkably well; I've gone from over 30 pieces of debris in low orbit to just 14. Soon the nearby skies will be clear of everything except Starbridge Station and the H-Wing Supply Depot (with extra fuel, spare harpoons, demolition charges, etc).

Speaking of stickies... Some months ago, in response to too many "AAAAGH! NOOOOO!" from my side of the desk, my wife made a couple of IVA-style post-it notes saying "ADD MANEUVERING JETS AND LIGHTS THEN LAUNCH" and "REFUEL BEFORE UNDOCKING" in crayon and stuck them to my monitor. They have been an even better reminder than the "engineer's report" panel in the VAB. In another recent mission I watched in horror as my spaceship, upon clearing the atmosphere, jettisoned a pair of nearly full fuel tanks instead of a fairing... "CHECK STAGE LIST BEFORE MASHING STAGE BUTTON" might be another good one to add.

Career mode by far. I love the contracts.

"Pardon me, captain; do you have a few minutes to talk about our lord and savior MOAR BOOSTERZ?"

I recently accepted a contract to recover a part from low Kerbin orbit... which turned out to be a Mk3 16-seat passenger cabin. Huge. I designed a very clever recovery system for it, involving a large rocket with a klaw and a heat shield plus two small detachable side pods each consisting of a klaw and a bunch of airbrakes and parachutes. Sent it up to orbit, rendezvoused with the cabin, grabbed it with the main klaw, deployed the two pods, maneuvered them around to the other side, attached them reasonably well, burned retrograde to de-orbit. Was waiting for re-entry when I happened go glance at the resources menu and suddenly realized: this craft is gradually losing electricity. I had completely forgotten to include any solar panels! Of course I didn't really need electricity for anything except SAS and keeping the probe core alive, but I still needed to maintain a retrograde facing (to keep the heat shield facing into the wind) and issue a few more commands with the probe core before landing. As soon as re-entry heat became visible, I (permanently) deployed the airbrakes, and as soon as the speed dropped to a safe level, I deployed the drogue chutes... and then ran out of electricity. No main chutes for me; they're just dead weight at this point. I watched anxiously as the speed gauge and altitude gauge both spun down, desperately hoping the former would decrease fast enough by the time the latter hit bottom... 100 m/s, 60 m/s, 30 m/s, 20 m/s... and 20 m/s it remained until touchdown. *BOOM* went the heat shield and most of the main klaw stage--but when the dust settled, the cabin was intact! Mission accomplished!

I've seen (and I think tried once or twice) designs like that as well--the entire ship consists of a small lander with enough internal fuel to take just the lander from Mun orbit down to the surface and back, plus a large external fuel tank with enough fuel to take the whole shebang from low Kerbin orbit to low Mun orbit and back. They're connected by a docking port, with the lander essentially pushing the external fuel tank. Seems to work rather well, especially for a small lander in which saving the mass of that extra engine really makes a difference. - - - Updated - - - Another reason for landers that I don't think has been mentioned yet: thrust-to-weight ratio (TWR). Consider a large interplanetary mothership with a small lander docked to it. The mothership's engines should be chosen based primarily on efficiency; out in space there's (usually) no need to have much thrust. The lander, on the other hand, MUST have a (local) TWR greater than one if catastrophic lithobraking is to be avoided! It is of course easier to get a high TWR on a smaller craft--put small engines on a small lander rather than building a landable mothership with both efficient engines and enormous landing engines. This is even more important for long-term multi-target missions. If you're just going to Minmus and back, sure, make an all-in-one craft that can get there, land, and get back; if on the other hand you're planning on visiting both Duna and Ike in one trip, or all the moons of Jool, or even setting up a permanent Minmus science base, it makes far more sense to leave the excess fuel (and interplanetary engines, science lab, crew quarters, and anything else that won't be needed on the surface) in orbit with a docking port.

I used to play a lot of NetHack, Dwarf Fortress, Warcraft III, and whatever Humble Bundle stuff looked interesting. Then a year ago I bought Kerbal Space Program. With a few brief exceptions, I haven't played another computer game since then. Whenever I have spare time to play, I want to build rockets!

Hey, it worked in Tintin on the Moon... I should go back and re-read that now that I know how space travel is *supposed* to work. I recall the scenes on the moon itself being reasonably realistic for the time, but thinking back to it as a Kerbal player, the way they got there seems kinda ridiculous. - - - Updated - - - Also worked in Tintin on the Moon!

Am I remembering correctly that SQUAD's previous experience is in marketing? Many marketers seem to think that the most important thing about promoting a product is getting lots of people talking about it all the time--whether they like it or not is irrelevant.

Hostile aliens. In hard mode they have photon torpedoes.

"Hard Mode" isn't hard. EVERY mode is hard. This is rocket science, after all. "Hard Mode" is grindy.

Could use special moves from fighting games. Forward fireball for action group 1, reverse fireball for action group 2, double dash forward for landing gear, double dash backward for brakes, etc. Seriously though, what exactly is the point here? Are there that many people who have a PS4 but not a Mac/Windows/Linux machine?

Not something I did, but something I saw: a mini-bicycle that had been modified to be powered by an electric drill bolted to the back. VWRRRRRRRRRR

She's sad that KIS/KAS aren't stock yet and therefore there isn't much for her to do on EVA.

You know what I like most about this forum? Discussions like this get responses everywhere from "Finally made it to orbit" to "Sent a probe to Duna" to "Colonized Laythe" to "footprints on Eve with safe return," and none of them are met with "ha ha noob I did that years ago." All these accomplishments deserve--and receive--enthusiasm and congratulations!

Wow, I thought I was the only one! This happens to my copy every time I load a saved game and switch to another application while waiting for it to load. I have to keep the computer focused on KSP at least until the "Timewarp x 1" text pops up.

When I press the green "Launch" button in the top right of the VAB, it's because I want to launch, not because I want to wait for two minutes and then launch.

In my opinion as a physics teacher: it doesn't bother me at all that the numbers for Kerbin don't match the numbers for Earth. The important thing is that the equations and techniques I'm learning (Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, speed and altitude for synchronous orbit, orbital rendezvous, transfer orbits, etc) are real equations and techniques. If I ever need to apply what I've learned to a real-world scenario, it's a very simple matter to substitute Earth's stats into the exact same equations. (In fact I do this at least once or twice a quarter in the physics classes I teach.)

Yeah, pretty much. Wireless power transmission from Tesla and array of relay satellites in synchronous orbit from Clarke.

Of course that just means you need to build a receiver dish that is (r^2) times larger than the power transmitter. Sounds like Kerbal engineering to me. - - - Updated - - - For electrical power supply, yes; of course the lander still needs its own reaction mass to shoot out the rocket jets. The one difficulty would be that the mothership would have to be in synchronous orbit over the lander's position (or carry around two or three small power relay satellites to guarantee full coverage). Which also sounds like Kerbal engineering. Or perhaps an unholy hybrid of Nicola Tesla and Arthur C. Clarke. Which would be awesome.

That's true; it is still spreading out three-dimensionally, so even if the spreading is very small it's still decreasing with r^2. I guess the difference would be that intensity at distance r would be P/[f*4Àr^2] instead of P/[4Àr^2], where f is the fraction of the full sphere that the beam is limited to--proportionally more power than a full spherical spread but still decreasing by inverse square law, so the net effect would be equivalent to a full spherical spread with (1/f) times more power.

Could compensate for that by attaching just enough extra thrust during testing to simulate the different gravity.

Actually, secret deals with an offshore drilling supply company would make sense in light of the ISRU introduced in 1.0. We're drilling for fuel IN SPAAAAACE; how much more offshore can you get?