AbacusWizard

Personally I find it much more fun to do the calculations myself, though that may be related to the fact that I'm a physics teacher. For me, some of the most satisfying moments in KSP have been situations when I'm far from home and low on fuel and (USI Life Support) food, but instead of panicking I run some calculations to figure out exactly how much ∆v I have and exactly how long my brave kerbalnauts can survive, and then mess around with maneuver planning until I've found a trajectory that just barely fits in my ∆v budget and gets everybody home alive. (Or, if that turns out to be impossible, I know in advance and can send out a resupply probe full of fuel and food to meet them halfway.) As John F. Kermedy once said, "We choose to calculate ∆v and TWR without mods not because it is easy, but because it is hard."

That may be a reference to a novel of the same name by Kim Stanley Robinson in which a similar monument is found at Pluto's north pole.

You have given me a new idea for decorating my Orbital Space Disco.

For a medium-sized (and reusable) Duna-lander, I'm fond of a combination approach: two or four aerobrakes to start slowing down as soon as the atmosphere gets thick enough, a few drogue chutes to deploy as soon as it's safe to do so, and then just use the main engine to come to a complete stop once the ground starts looking close enough to be frightening. Everyone gets out, plants flags (and picks them up again, because I am not a litterbug), smiles for the camera; the scientists do science and the engineer repacks the parachutes; everyone back in, and return to orbit to rendezvous with the mothership.

I second the recommendation for Community Tech Tree, with Near Future Tech and whatever other "more parts to play with" mods you'd like to try out. (The CTT forum thread includes links to several such mods.)

Does it look anything like this? That's a problem I saw frequently in an older version (0.90, probably?) and couldn't figure out why. It seemed to be completely fixed in 1.0.x; I haven't seen it in 1.1.x yet, but I haven't played 1.1.x much yet either.

Yeah, take a look at the orbital altitude from which the screenshot was taken--150 meters? Not kilometers, 150 meters. That's a tiny planet, that is.

I used to be pretty careless about launches, and left a lot of empty tanks and discarded engines in low Kerbin orbit. Eventually I got worried about it, and designed the H-Wing, a small two-seater vessel armed with a rear harpoon gun (KAS). I sent it out to rendezvous individually with each piece of space junk, harpoon it, tow it into a suborbital "disposal trajectory," detach, reel in the harpoon, return the H-Wing to a parking orbit, and start planning a rendezvous with the next piece. Fun project. These days I just design all of my launches to discard all stages except the ship itself while still suborbital, and use a bit of the ship's own fuel to get the last few dozen m/s to a stable orbit, so the only debris I end up with is single-piece cockpits from lazy rescuees who can't be bothered to clean up after themselves.

That's the second biggest mushroom I've ever seen!

I wrote a TI-BASIC program for calculating ∆v about a year ago that starts with a menu to allow the user to select engine and type of fuel. It may be out of date; I don't know how many Isp values have been changed since then, but it should be easy to make any required changes.

My favorite speed relative to the [surface/target] is 0 m/s, because it means the [landing/rendezvous] was a complete success. Of course it's also pretty satisfying every time I see a new spacecraft reach 2300 m/s for the first time.

Yeah, it's very much a use-it-or-lose-it sort of thing. I teach math and physics, so I see it all the time. Fun story: a couple of years ago, mere weeks after I started playing KSP, I was teaching an optional support workshop for a first-quarter physics class--mostly just following along with the material covered in the class with better explanations and more practice problems. A week or two before the end of the quarter, the class itself had gone through all the material listed on the official curriculum, so I was sitting in my office an hour before the workshop and wondering what the heck I was going to teach about. That's when I got an email from a student in the class, saying "In today's workshop could you talk about gravity and orbits and geosynchronous orbits and escape velocity and stuff like that?" My brain started screaming "YES! I HAVE SPENT THE LAST MONTH PREPARING FOR EXACTLY THIS MOMENT AND DIDN'T EVEN KNOW IT!" The workshop went remarkably well that day. And that's when I realized that, for me at least, KSP is far more than just a game.

Build a fuel harvesting outpost on Mun or Minmus and enough support infrastructure that you can refuel anything in Kerbin orbit for free!

Hooray for math! Here's the formula I usually type into my browser's search bar (because that's faster than grabbing my calculator from the next room over): AAAAA * 9.8 * ln ( BBBBB / ( BBBBB - 5 * (CCCCC+DDDDD) ) ) where you'll need to make the following replacements: AAAAA --> your engine's specific impulse BBBBB --> your ship's current total mass in kilograms (multiply tonnes by 1000) CCCCC --> how much liquid fuel your ship intends to burn DDDDD --> how much oxidizer your ship intends to burn (The 5 is there because it's the density of both liquid fuel and oxidizer, thus converting "units" into kilograms. If your ship is using monopropellant or xenon or whatever, use a different density as appropriate.)

So overall your calculation should look like 345 x 9.8 x LN ( 3.59 / 1.59 )

First of all, the "specific impulse" is actually the exhaust velocity divided by Earth gravity (this standardizes the units so it doesn't mater if you're using metric or, for some bizarre reason, imperial). That's why you need to multiply by 9.8 m/s^2 (Earth gravity) to restore the correct units of m/s. The "ln" is short for "natural logarithm." The natural logarithm of a number basically means "to what power must e (2.718) be raised to produce this number?" and it shows up all the time in calculus due to the way it interacts with rates of change. So you'll need to take the natural logarithm of the FullMass / EmptyMass ratio.

I've been playing 1.0.5 with RemoteTech for quite a while with no problems, and yesterday I tried installing Near Future (Propulsion, Electrical, Solar, and Construction only; not Spacecraft). I loaded my career save; everything seemed fine... but the Flight Computer from RemoteTech (for issuing maneuver commands in advance) seems to have completely vanished--the button that activates it is not visible, and clicking on the place where it should be does nothing--and the display in the upper left that is supposed to show the signal delay just says "N/A." Any idea why Near Future (or B9PartSwitch or CommunityResourcePack or DecayingRTGs, the other pieces bundled with it) might be causing this conflict with RemoteTech? It doesn't seem like they should be interfering with each other at all, but there it is. Never mind; I tried installing an older 1.0.5-compatible version of Near Future and now everything seems to be working fine.

Also, all this "Get Out and Push" stuff reminds me of the excellent board game Galaxy Trucker (which is itself very kerbally, in that it involves cartoony little astronauts building rockets out of spare parts that tend to go wrong in hilarious ways): one of the alien crew members you can get is an "engine expert" who grants +2 to the speed of your ship, but only if you already have at least one working engine--the rulebook specifically justifies this requirement by saying "he's not going to get out and push"! (The other available alien crew member is a "weapons expert" who grants +2 to your ship's firepower, but only if you already have at least one working cannon--"he's not going to get out and bite the enemy.")

I just recently discovered Leaving Earth and I think this would be a MAGNIFICENT idea.

There's a fellow named Finagle on the phone who wants to talk to you.

In this case the "rescue craft covered in ladders" thing wasn't because of lack of skill--it was because of lack of EVA propellant! I had to maneuver the ship close enough to him that he could just reach out and grab on.

Depends on what mods you use. My Minmus mining outpost has plenty of N.O.M.S. containers and a greenhouse on top. Nah, it's bioluminescence from the kerbals themselves.

The first time I successfully landed on Mun, I was pretty low on fuel but tried launching again anyway, figuring that if I could at least get into a stable munar orbit, I could send a rescue ship later... but I soon realized I wasn't going to get anywhere near orbital velocity. I had the pilot get out and push at apoapsis but it quickly became clear that the weak thrust wouldn't speed up the lander fast enough to achieve orbit before it crashed. I made a drastic decision: hop back in the cockpit to refuel the jetpack one more time, extend the antenna and transmit all science (I didn't know kerbalnauts could take data out of the cockpit at the time), abandon ship, and use the jetpack to at least get the poor pilot into a stable orbit. It worked, but the poor fellow ended up using nearly all of his jetpack fuel circularizing. Over the next few days I built a rescue ship COVERED in ladders, did some research on orbital maneuvering, and got REALLY good at rendezvous!

There's a single-part mod (requiring KIS) that adds a little backpack with an antenna that EVA scientists can use to store and transmit data.

I'd say the most unrealistic part is a kerbalnaut on EVA. Spacesuit with unlimited life support, jetpack with ludicrously strong thrust and immense ∆v, and enough armor to survive high-speed collisions.