moogoob

Rockets would be a good start. Ahem. Sorry. I meant BIG rockets. And a skycrane setup to get it from Munar orbit to the surface. Search youtube for "KSP landing big lander on the mun" and it should find some inspiration.

Different atmospheric model compared to the souposphere before 1.0. We can now break the sound barrier at low altitudes!

I play a career game once I get bored of Sandbox and then only until I get bored of that particular career save. I don't max out Mun and Minmus science - a lab around Minmus alone grants more than enough science for some end-game tech. I tend to probe the heck out of each and every explore contract rather than send manned missions - my program makes tons of money that way.

Hehe... this one involves a mun rover, too low a TWR and an unreliable Mechjeb suicide burn counter.

Career also starts with manned pods, where the real space programs started with Sputnik & co, IE probes and sounding rockets. Kerbals are a bit backwards, it seems.

The Aerobraking at Jool bug and random overheating will finally be fixed, replaced with other, equally confusing and game-altering bugs, such as "Never EVA while there's science in the capsule or the game will freeze" or "Using too many fuel lines will cause engines to overheat and explode" or "Pressing F1 while in an atmosphere makes your autosave unusable. Just like how our current confusing bugs replaced "Don't use boosters ever or they'll destroy your core stage engines" and "Long rockets behave like noodles" from previous versions.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the thermal config of the dual adapter the LV-T 30s/45s are attached to? It looks like it's not passing heat through to the fuel tank. I never get thermal warnings on ascent with either of those two engines, but I never attach more than one to a fuel tank at a time.

There's a bit of a gap in Career mode between when you get fuel cells and when you get RTGs. My later missions are always RTG-powered.

I wish I'd read this thread before my last career Jool mission. Arrived at Jool with just enough LF+O to send science from low Jool orbit - not enough to continue on to the outer moons like I planned. Had to do a second launch for that. Hibernation mode by turning off the batteries... makes so much sense I can't believe I didn't think of it.

This is why I always wait until just before launching to do my action groups. It's also why I so often forget to do action groups.

True- I was assuming he was using the 1-kerbal pod and returning from LKO. I've done a lot of that in career mode recently and 10-20km has been more than adequate for that.

Yeah, it shouldn't happen. Is anything clipping the fairing? Have you tried editing and using a different fairing design? If you have a probe core or reaction wheel or battery attached to the fairing, maybe try switching the part order? On my Nastybird shuttle, it turned out that placing a MK2 drone core attached to a cargo bay was what was making it explode in the upper atmosphere upon re-entry (though only while time-warping... weird). I fixed it by swapping the core and the fuel tank behind it.

Thanks for the clarification re: solar visits - I didn't need any in Moho orbit either. I can verify that on a small-ish single-engine nuclear transfer stage, two small radiators and a couple small radiator plates are just enough cooling for 2000m/s or so single burns (high-speed Jool transfers), though my batteries and science experiments start nearing 50% thermal warnings near the end of the burn.

Oooh. Ouch. What does the F3 menu say? What part blows up first? There are known thermal bugs in the game - I had a recurrent exploding station docking fuselage recently in career mode and had to abandon that design entirely. I think Valentina may have been playing with matches or something.

What I do is fire retrograde until my periapsis is inside the amosphere, but still above the ground. About 10-20km up should do it. That way you have lots of time to bleed off speed and should easily be able to open your chutes by 5km. Remember, altitude matters when deploying chutes, but speed matters more. You want to deploy your chutes as soon as you slow down under 250m/s, the chutes should handle the rest no matter where you're landing- once partially open they always compensate for true altitude and by default always start to fully open at 1000m above land, not sea level.

Those angled fuel tanks might be generating more heat than if they were straightened... I have to reiterate the earlier question - is the ship exploding, or are you just seeing flames? If the former, something's wrong, if the latter, nothing is wrong. In the current aero, I see flame effects on every launch, even nice efficient ones.

In the current version, you only need them if you a) are using nuclear engines, particularly on really long burns and/or when used in large quantities or passing really really close to the sun, though I'm not entirely sure how much they;d help in that scenario. Nothing else generates enough waste heat to make much of a difference.

Good find! I thought there'd be a stock control, but never had to use it. My desktop's mouse wheel works and my lappy lacks a numpad.

I've seen it actually done with the small nosecone, though. The explanation is that it won't block thrust if clipped slightly inside, and severely decreases the drag that the RAPIER causes due to the way that KSP treats drag on the rear of the space/aircraft. EDIT: Actually forgot that I tested this myself - it does work. It's not that big a difference but could conceivably make it easier to hit super/hypersonic velocities.

Can't you bind the zoom controls to something using the key mapping options?

I use the basic fin in 90% of all size-1 launch vehicle. It's, cheap, light and more than enough to keep your centre of drag stable. It may be flimsy, but even though I see the thermal warning bars pop up midway through ascent, I've never actually melted them.

No prob, bob. If there's one thing I am it's open minded to opinions, as I have quite a few unconventional ones myself.

Apologies. More for the benefit of others - as had been stated many times in this thread, often even not-often-used parts can have uses, and in my games this part is useful indeed.

I used a similar launching method for the Nastybird (see link in sig) - it's very stable and the wings actually do help maneuverability

The Octo-2 (the flat one) is useful for putting on landers, capsules etc to give it SAS for times when you're flying a small craft with a scientist or engineer.