eataTREE

It's one of the most educational games I've ever encountered. Not only does it teach orbital mechanics, physics, and rocketry, but it also has taught me much about design and good engineering principles generally. But, as a modern "sandbox"-style game, there is no predefined victory condition. Everybody gets to play it the way they like. (I keep getting distracted by airplane design, and spend days building planes that resemble various classic aviation designs, then tweaking them to fly well in KSP. This entertains me greatly, but it's only one of many possibilitities.)

The more you know!

You know, I never thought of this before, but aren't runways named for the heading you need to be on to land on it (or the heading you will be on after taking off from it)? Meaning that Runway 27 should really be Runway 90, since it faces due East.

There is only one pet peeve worth mentioning: the dreaded Wife Bug (playing KSP too much annoys her).

You wildly overestimate my EVA piloting skills. I did try this, but every attempt only ended up with Bill tumbling off into space out of control. Wait a minute. You're saying he doesn't have to push the spaceship... he can just re-enter in his spacesuit and survive?!

Restarted with a slew of mods (TAC Life Support, Karbonite, MKS/OKS, ScanSat, RT2, Spaceplane Plus, Fine Print). First launch (suborbital): Flawless. Second launch (orbital): Flawless. Third, fourth, and fifth suborbital launches to fill contract requirements: all go off without a hitch. Then I get overconfident, and send Bill to the Mun in a pitifully underdesigned and underpowered rocket and a bare minimum of life support supplies. It takes 4500 delta-V to achieve LKO, does it? Not if your rocket has a TWR of 1.02 in every stage and you forget it isn't a spaceplane when hand flying the launch. So when we get to Munar orbit, there isn't enough gas left in the landing stage to actually land. Oh, well, that's okay, we'll just borrow some fuel from the reascent/return stage. We'll still have enough, right? Ooops. No matter how crazily I try to fly the reascent (through multiple reloads down to "clear the crater rim by about one meter"), Bill and I are exactly 30m/s short of getting home after depleting all the fuel and all the RCS fuel. Now Bill is in a highly eccentric Kerbin orbit with three days worth of oxygen. The net result of a rescue attempt seems likely to be the loss of two kerbals instead of one, so Bill bravely elects to trigger the Self-Destruct Charges. Lesson learned: no more underdesigned craft; life support supplies for five times mission duration; plan abort modes for every mission phase and USE THEM. (Also, now I know it's possible to get into low Munar orbit for less than 200 delta-V, although it didn't help in the end.)

*sniff* *sob* Hmm, what? Sorry, I'm distraught over the loss of Bill. It's my fault. I totally underdesigned his ship with tiny delta-V tolerances and a pitiful supply of food, water, and oxygen. Stupid high-gravity Mun. We told his wife and children that Bill crashed on landing to avoid revealing a grimmer truth: having exhausted even his RCS propellant in a desparate bid to get home, Bill was trapped in a wildly eccentric Munar orbit and facing a slow death by suffocation as his oxygen supplies depleted. Rather than risk the life of another Kerbonaut in a dangerous rescue mission, Bill elected to trigger the craft's self-destruct charges. Yeah, emergency procedures: something I haven't been designing enough of into my craft. Now that I have a life support mod, "Leave him in a stable orbit somewhere for a couple of years until I come rescue him" is no longer an acceptable failure mode. Bill, your heroic death shall not be in vain: the Redundancy and Failure Engineering Committee has been formed and must approve all future kerbed launches. Their requirements include life support supplies sufficient for five times expected mission duration, generous delta-v allowances, and appropriate contingency planning for every mission phase.

My experience has been that they're mediocre jet engines and mediocre rockets, but can be preferable for small designs where there isn't room to stick on dedicated jets and dedicated rockets. Their poor ISP in closed cycle mode is definitely a problem -- try to be going hella fast already in airbreathing mode, so there is less delta-V to burn in rocket mode.

Are the other planets visible in Kerbin's sky, or just the Mun and Minmus?

Struts are the greatest invention of Kerbalkind. They hold everything together, but only as long as you want them to. I think struts may be one of the fundamental forces of the Kerbalverse....

I like to live dangerously, so I let the IntakeAir go down to .02 or lower before cutting the turbojets. However, I also like to fly enormous twelve-engined monstrosities, so flameout on a single engine is pretty recoverable.

Jeb required so much rescuing in my game that I "promoted" him to Commander of the Space Station. Now he sits in a nice safe 120km orbit around Kerbin where I can keep an eye on him and always make sure where he is.

Awesome, thank you!

1. Press F5 to quicksave, F9 to reload that quicksave. Press Alt (or Option if you've a Mac) + F5 to make a specific, named save that you can restore later. 2. So, "rocket juice" is measured, both in KSP and the real world, in a quantity called delta-V. You can look up the exact equation if you want, but basically the more fuel you have left on board and the harder you can burn that fuel, the more delta-V you've got. Everything you want to do has a fixed "price" in delta-V: getting off Kerbin into orbit, transferring to the Mun, and so on. There is a big chart of these costs here. The point being that if you know how much delta-V your rockets and landers have, you will know if you can successfully fly to the Mun and pick up your dudes or if you are just adding to the Munar dance party. To calculate your delta-V you can either do a whole bunch of math or use a mod like Kerbal Engineer, the latter option being rather the more convenient one. 3. You need some sort of stabilization system, or you're not going to be able to counteract any unintended rotational forces -- as you are seeing! Attach a stabilizer (the "inline stabilizer" from the "Control" tab) to your vessel, and make sure it has electrical power to operate. This means batteries and probably a solar panel or two. Other options for stability include RCS -- monopropellant tanks and thrusters located around your vessels, and, within an atmosphere, control surfaces, i.e. wings and fins. Without some sort of control system and power to operate it, you will inevitably tumble out of control as soon as you are not under thrust (assuming your rocket is gimbaled and you attempt no particularly wild maneuver, otherwise you'll tumble out of control then too). 4. Docking is tricky. Get to the point where you can reliably fly to the Mun and back before you start assembling your orbital space station. There are good tutorials on orbital rendezvous and docking on this subforum. 5. Lifting a large mass is exponentially harder than lifting a small mass. You will need to use multiple stages and boosters. 6. Yes, you can transfer any resource between two things docked together, including fuel, oxidizer, monopropellant, electrical charge.

I've searched the forums but there doesn't seem to be an obvious answer for this. Is there a known means (with a mod, or by placing music files in a certain folder/place, or whatever) of replacing or expanding the default KSP soundtrack? I'm thinking the soundtrack to the original Cosmos TV series (the old one, with Carl Sagan) would be awesomely appropriate. Yes, I know, I can disable in-game music and run iTunes in the background or whatever, but Jeb ought to be able to crank his own tunes, right?

MechJeb managed to dock my enormous, ungainly space station lower section to the equally enormous and ungainly upper section last night, so just on the basis of personal experience I'd give it a thumbs up. The only docking I've actually seen it fail was one where I started in a very stupid position and ran out of electrical power on the one probe before it could get things finished. What I really appreciate from MechJeb is the rendezvous autopilot... matching orbits by hand is painful and tedious.

Well, I'm a noob (playing for about two months), and in that time I've gone from "completely hopeless" to "sorta okay" at building and flying rockets, so I thought I would contribute my two cents. 1) As many others have said, bigger is not better. It is easy to get into this sort of tail-chasing design mode where you are building a bigger rocket because you built a big rocket and now you need a bigger rocket to lift your big rocket; adding weight, cost, and complexity to your design without actually increasing the payload mass or the delta-V all that much. When adding to the design is no longer improving the situation, try taking away instead. 2) Use a mod that shows you your delta-V during construction, like Kerbal Engineer or MechJeb. Yes, you can design perfectly fine rockets by eyeball, but do you want to do ten test flights or one before you get it right? A little automatic number crunching can let you spend your gaming time flying Jeb through space instead of watching him crash and burn repeatedly. 3) There is no rocket so well-designed that it can withstand lousy piloting. Learn how to perform the "gravity turn" maneuver for efficient ascent, and how not to waste all your fuel landing (MechJeb's autopilot can actually make you a better manual pilot: watch how it flies ascents and landings, and then do what it does!) 4) Patience and perseverance. My first successful Mun landing was my twenty-third attempt, but now I'm a decent journeyman rocket jock (if I do say so myself). Hang in there, and enjoy this wonderful game.

Hi there. Newb here, just picked this game up less than a week ago and I LOVE it... actually it would be more accurate to say that I am obsessed to a degree that makes me fear for my sanity, but I digress. Anyway, let me present the background for my question: I sent Thoemone the Kerbal to Minimus for Science, which mission went pretty well. I had plenty of delta-V left after ascent from Minimus, and so put Thoemone Kerman into an elliptical orbit with periapsis around 20km. So far, so good. Then... I got impatient. And I had seriously overdesigned my Minimus rocket, so I had a ton of fuel remaining. And so at about 200km out I decided, hey, let's use this fuel before I separate the last stage, turned retrograde, and burned it off. Yes, that's right, I did a suicide burn, and accomplished the exact opposite of slowing down. Oops, well, I have no fuel left, nothing to be done about it now. Into the atmosphere we go at 2.5km/s straight down. And over the course of the next 20 seconds or so the atmosphere slows me from 2.5km/s to 250m/s, during which time I see the "g-force" meter pin itself in the red at over 20G's. But slow down I did, so I fired my chutes, and splashed down apparently intact. But... when I hit "Recover Vessel", I didn't get most of my mission rewards -- just the science experiments that remained attached to the lander. And in the astronaut roster, Thoemone is no longer visible. It would appear that he was subjected to fatal deceleration! So, now I know why they call it a "suicide burn". My question is simple: how many G's can a Kerbal endure? It sucks to send them millions of miles through space, only to have them turn into red goo on the capsule floor upon re-entry -- what's the limit here? Ruefully, Tree.