tsotha

Wow. I didn't realize it was so easy to break the universe with the claw.

KSP rarely crashes for me. Maybe... once every twenty hours or so? And even then it didn't start happening until I started my resource playthrough, which meant adding Karbonite, KAS, Toolbar, and Scansat to my regular mods. I've probably had hundreds of ship crashes. Almost all of them Mun landings.

This. I write code myself, and there's no nontrivial program anywhere, ever, that's "finished" in the sense there's nothing left to do. There are always features you'd like to add and always bugs you couldn't find or aren't worth fixing. All you're doing as a developer when you "release" software is signalling the user it's good enough for its intended purpose. That' they'll get their money's worth. Unless it's a twenty line script that does something simple, If you wait until it's perfect you'll never release. Particularly when it comes to features. "This game isn't finished until it has X" isn't a practical attitude to take. KSP is playable. It's fun. Most likely if X is really important to you you can already find it in a mod. The only reason anyone would be justified in demanding features for the release version is if they said "now that it's released we've disabled all mods", and they're not doing that, obviously.

Anything with a lot of extra dV can be a "tanker", though if it's special purpose you should probably make it pretty big. Incidentally, you should never run out of fuel in Kerbin orbit returning from other planets if you're playing stock. Since the atmosphere is thick and there isn't any reentry heat, you can just plot a collision course with planet and you'll be fine.

You're lucky it's on a docking port. The reality is you didn't need that decoupler at all - you could have hooked the next part directly to the port.

Yeah. Realistic ion engines would be impossible to use in the game unless you could accelerate on to prograde on rails. They you could set an alarm in KAC and either warp until the burn is done or do something else in the meantime.

For these contracts you can just replace the word "outpost" with "ship" in your mind. Here's an example of an early Munar outpost that required space for five Kerbals, docking port, antenna, and power: The contract says it needs room for five Kerbals, but they don't actually have to be there. So I included a probe head and only enough fuel to get it to the Mun. No need for fancy exoplanetary construction. It's a small ship. Of course they get bigger later on, as they require more kerbals, research labs, wheels, etc. But even then they don't get particularly large.

My last rover was mounted above the capsule near the top of the stack. At the very top was a monoprop tank with a couple 0-10s connected to the rover with a docking port. After landing I used the O-10s to get it to the ground, unhooked the docking port, and kind of "shrugged" off the monoprop tank using the rover's reaction wheel. It worked really well. I've tried to go the belly slung route but haven't had too much success because that's really where I'd like to put an engine . It just results in too many compromises.

I can't even figure out how to use them in probes. I can always come up with a design that performs better using a 48-7S. By the time you add on multiple relatively heavy Xenon tanks and solar cells, the promise of crazy amounts of dV slips away. They say you can make ion spaceplanes that can actually get to orbit from EVE, which is something. I've never tried it.

As Slugy pointed out (and I didn't see until after posting) this thread predates those restrictions. But continuing on as an intellectual exercise... jet engines and 48-7s aren't in his toolbox. That's why I'm not sure it's doable. On the other hand KSP players are pretty clever about this kind of stuff.

You really only need one seppy per tank. Put it on the top outside edge pointing directly outward and set the fuel to the minimum amount. All you're trying to do is keep the top of the tank from drifting in after it's ejected, and a 0.3 second burst from the sepratron will do that. The reason you want to cut the fuel down is otherwise it will damage your main stack. As to why it worked before and doesn't work now, I have no idea. I would try moving them in the VAB and seeing if that makes a difference.

You can absolutely do it with those technologies. Heck, once you have PV cells it's actually pretty easy. The only questions is what buildings you've upgraded. You might have trouble fitting it all in 18 tons and 30 parts, though I suspect that's doable.

Sure, that's fine if you're doing a suborbital test on a decoupler. It's less fine if you spent a bunch of time getting to one of Jool's moons and had your Kerbal fired into the planet when he steps out to do an EVA report.

This game is still too glitchy to disallow reverts.

And what's the point if he changes back as soon as you do anything?

You get a couple different planes to choose from (use "v" to cycle through them), but his head always points "up".

Does his jet pack work at all when you use the aswd keys? If not, you need to turn it on first.

You can certainly be more efficient if you design around the payload, but I really liked Manley's series on "Completely reusable space program", where he had a standard launcher. Having extra dV doesn't hurt you very much if you land everything back at KSC, and it saved him gobs of time.

The space bar isn't supposed to reorient the camera. It reorients the Kerbal. If you want to change camera modes us "v".

Which makes sense. But you can't do any fancy six contract launches because you start out restricted to only two. Looking at the way your sliders are set I see a long slog to get to that first upgrade, which gives you just two more.

I find the initial hump to be not too bad. The problem is the value of the contracts you get depends a great deal on what technologies you've chosen. I do find I have to be careful to pick technologies that will unlock lucrative contracts, because if you just focus on the techs you want you can find yourself grinding because you're getting mostly garbage contracts, i.e. testing a stack separator for 600, or long distance "do a crew report at X altitude" before you have turbojets. The tech tree problem is particularly acute if you want to research planes early. Part of the problem is the payouts are a bit unbalanced. Suborbital Mainsail testing pays out more in both money and research than a contract requiring four separate EVA reports from the Mun. I think there's some multiplier based on the tier, so you do a lot better if you go deep instead of wide on the tech tree.

He wants them to go EVA. The two modules aren't docked.

Was it? You have to put a new guy on to plant a flag now? It doesn't pay nearly enough for that.

I agree with Tsevion. Something like this:

Yes, the lack of choice in landing gear is a big disappointment for me, particularly with the amount of effort they put into plane parts recently.