wossname

That's the "letter of the law". I'd say the "spirit of the law" mandates this only in situations where in-game feasibility is in question. From a technical point of view this challenge is certainly possible, as it is (at the very least) a sequence of docked sections adding up to 100 Kerbal accommodations. There is much scope for imagination and ingenuity however which is why I quite like the idea. If we all slavishly adhered to rules then we'd never actually build anything fun.

As far as mods go, I only really use KER. I think KSP is very stable in its natural form and I congratulate the developers in this respect. Since 1.0.2 came out I have not had a single major problem and no game crashes. It's pretty great

What are "persistent trails"?

I share this sentiment. I find a very nice substitute to be the Kerbal Engineering Redux mod -- it's a great compromise between MJ and stock game. It gives plenty of flight data to guide the pilot's inputs but doesn't take any skill away from you. And it takes all the backbreaking math out of building sensible rocket stages. Another reason that real-life missions use autopilots is that some maneuvers are measured in microseconds (RCS burns spring to mind) and a squishy green pilot is in no way able to do these reliably. The only known exception to this is Jeb's famously fast reactions after 3 pints of Ike Pale Ale.

Technically you do two suborbital flights in an orbital mission - once on the way up, then once going home. She's really cheating you twice!!! You should shove her out of the airlock at apoapsis to teach her a lesson.

It was probably the soul of Leonard Nimoy, boldly going...

...when you realise that if KSP was real life, you'd be getting 30x the salary of your *actual* day job. To be honest though, my day job products are 30x less dangerous. I guess it balances out.

Tried KSP a few years back when I had a crummy computer. Gave up for a long time until I bought a shiny new one with more numbers in it. Then I remembered KSP and got fully medically addicted to it, when i could get 60fps all the time . Then I began to watch Scott, Jack, Danny and Robbaz and a few others -- their mad antics have improved my constructions and my skills hugely. I would not be good at KSP if it wasn't for watching Scott Manley's KSP tutorials, which I heartily recommend to players new and old. But Youtube was something that came after I learned the basics. But it certainly helped with gathering more advanced skills.

I remember my first successful Mun landing, it was probably my 50th launch overall, maybe the 10 before it were all lithobraking practice. It was a real heartpounding moment actually, once you're committed to a landing by deorbiting it's a hectic task to keep track of all the variables you have to keep under control. Now I've been playing for a while it doesn't seem so stressful, but the fun is still there. It took me a few launches early on to figure out the main key piece of advice I'd give to new players... While steering your Mun rocket -- DON'T look at the rocket itself -- you should be using the NavBall to drive it while you're still new to the game. About 3 years ago when I first played KSP, I tried to launch a rocket and got frustrated with the steering because I couldn't work out what the navball was telling me and then gave up for about 18 months without playing it again. I'd hate for that to happen to others. THe navball is all important when landing - it is simply impossible without it. Navball for president!

Thanks for the tips guys. My career mode game hasn't yet advanced to the mining stage yet but it sounds like a great project to build a fuel factory on Minmus! I'm definitely going to try that.

Say we have a tanker in LKO (100,000m circular). It's empty now since it expended all it's go-juice getting up there in the first place. I want to fill it up again by sending up several smaller vessels with fuel to replenish the tanker. This sounds like an expensive thing to do if done naively. Does anyone have any suggestions about the most *cost* effective way to re-fill a tanker in LKO? Lets assume that the tanker has 5 large orange tanks on board and we want to fill them to at least 80% capacity. Supply ships may be salvaged for re-use where feasible. Would it be most cost efficient to do many launches of a small supply ship or one or two trips of a big supply ship? I suspect the answer to this isn't simple but I would like to hear your ideas on this. Does anyone have a handy "rule of thumb" for this sort of thing?

These moments are thrilling. Good work, pilot. I've never actually visited the Mun Arch, I should probably look it up some time.

It simply presents an added incentive to gameplay... try to keep the orange-suited heroes alive as long as possible and level them up as high as you can. The other ordinary kerbals are basically cannon fodder and can be dispensed with without a second thought.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenge_coin I'd pay silly money for a KSP challenge coin. But, alas, Google returns 0 relevant hits for "Kerbal challenge coin" at time of writing. Just thought I'd put that idea in people's heads, sorry. Maybe one of you talented graphic artists can design a KSP challenge coin that Jeb himself would carry with pride. I am no good at graphic design, but I was thinking something dignified and not silly or gimmicky would really rock, perhaps something along these lines...

297,418,095.773kg. Give or take. Slightly more if it's raining.

Are there any mods that give you a realistic ground-track shadow for a solar eclipse? I would love watching the Mun's shadow sweep across the planet Kerbin.

My only mod is Kerbal Engineering Redux (version 1.0.16.6) on KSP version 1.0.2. It seems quite easy to reproduce this bug, but I think it is a nasty one, although I can recover from it by "wiggling" the ship around a bit with RCS. Wiggling is a technical term. 1. Build a rocket with a tall fairing at the top and add 6 radially attached long fuel tanks in such a way that the fairing shells will collide with the fuel tanks when the fairing gets jettisoned. 2. Get in a vaguely circular orbit, 100km will do, the altitude seems unimportant. 3. Turn on SAS, throttle down to 0% and kill all rotation. You just want to be drifting and holding attitude. 4. Add a new manoeuvre node say 10 minutes ahead of you. 5. quick save here for convenience. 6. Jettison the fairing - ideally you want at least 1 of the fairing shell parts to get tangled up in your ship between the fuel tanks. 7. switch to Map view and enjoy the weirdness that has infected your manoeuvre node GUI. Use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out and you'll see that something is very wrong. On my machine (even with KER disabled) this happens reliably with a fairly typical "asparagussed" rocket. If you have RCS you can try moving in reverse to attempt to free the tangled fairing shell part. Once the shell is clear of your ship the problem seems to go away and all is back to normal in the map screen. I noticed that while the shell is tangled in the ship, I cannot use time warp to get rid of the shell fragments (as you can with a clean jettisoning) because it complains of "cannot warp while in flight over terrain" error message. Also the blue orbit path does not appear when this particular bug is in effect. Sometimes the shell parts don't look like they are touching the rocket, but SAS seems to be trying to do some heavy corrections very fast, the ship appears to be vibrating slightly, although it remains responsive to user flight controls (yaw, pitch, roll etc). Pitching hard up seems to throw the shells out of the way sometimes, unless the shells are actually clipping through the ship and then you're in trouble. This has happened twice with two different ship designs (although the placement of the parts is similar). edit: This bug can also happen when in sub-orbital flight above the atmosphere, which might explain the terrain remark above.

Any parts test that takes longer to load the launchpad environment than to perform the contract is a pain in the bum.

I hope nobody from the Fan Art forum sees this.

The "Aftermath" video is rather an excellent way to revive his channel. Looks like he's on vacation for another month now (sounds like he needs some leisurely downtime) so we can get busy firing up the hype train for his inevitable KSP 1.0 adventures. IMHO, this guy does some of the most cinematically beautiful KSP videos out there. Long may it be so.

I'd say don't be afraid of using SRBs as an assistive force while launching. It's a good idea to have a vectoring liquid fuel engine in the middle to provide some level of thrust and directional control but it's great to have the brute force of the SRBs to get you off the ground ASAP. Use some struts to ensure the SRBs don't flap around and tear your ship to pieces. If you have roll issues, then look carefully at the symmetry of your design - are your SRBs twisting? Add more struts if so.

I wonder if you're colliding with something else before you get to the docking distance. Try adding a couple more octagonal struts to push the docking port out a bit more (sometimes size does matter!).

Nice landing! Looks like fun, I'll give it a try.

Sounds like fun but perhaps not suitable for newbies (I used to be one not long ago, I remember the pain and the electro-shock therapy after landing)... IMHO, there are too many constraints on the lifter stage to make this an "easy-to-moderate" challenge. Currently it's more like a solid moderate with many fiddly details.

I'm still waiting for the contract that goes something like... "Jettison annoying d-bag hipster tourist into the cold, dark void while in high Jool orbit for +1,000,000 funds and 4000 science."