tsotha

It works from the side, but it's a pain. The easiest thing to do is click on the root part (or shift click anywhere on the ship), use the aswd keys to flip your ship so the docking port is pointing up, then hold down alt while you attach the other port. Make sure when you point your ship back up it's in the same orientation relative to the VAB. Otherwise 90 degrees won't be to the right when you go to launch.

Yeah. 5th Horseman has a neat video where he attaches wings, a tail, and wheels to an asteroid with claws and proceeds to land it on Kerbin. Attaching to something with a claw makes it part of your ship.

I can't figure out how to hit waypoints with any accuracy in stock except with a plane. If you're on a body without an atmosphere you generally need to burn away from your target, so it's always on the other side of the nav ball as you're coming in. I've considered putting an upside-down probe on my ship just so I can guide my ship in.

I don't see anything there that would drain power unless you left the SAS on.

This is a critical for parts testing. There's no reason to drag an empty (or even full) BACC to orbit to test. Just make sure you have one still attached to your stack when the test conditions are right. A good strategy for this test is to use the BACC to launch and then complete the orbit with radial engines (assuming you have them) without decoupling the BACC. In general newer players tend to assume they're under restrictions that aren't really there: Reiterating - you can test a part you used already by selecting "run test" from the right click menu, or, if it isn't available, add an empty stage below it and "stage" it. This saves you tons of dV. An RT-10 test at 30,000 meters requires only three parts - capsule, parachute, and RT-10 (assuming you adjust the throttle to make sure it's going at the right speed at the right altitude). And you can stage it for test purposes when it's still running. The part needn't be configured to actually work. By that I mean you can stage an engine that doesn't have any fuel. That never had fuel, in fact - you don't have to wait for Xenon tanks to test an ion engine or air intakes to test a jet engine. You can set the thrust limiter to zero so that when you stage it it doesn't actually do anything even if fuel is available. This can be handy if the contract calls for staging a part that's still buried in the stack. You can complete the test without wasting fuel or damaging the part below it, then select "shutdown engine" from the right click menu, change the thrust limiter back to 100%, and move it to the stage where you'll actually need it. This way you can, for example, complete an LV-909 test at 10,000 meters during a Mun shot with an engine you won't actually use until it's time for your Munar descent. Take all "Landed at Kerbin" contracts, since they literally cost you nothing in time or money. A "landed at Kerbin" KR-2L contract can be fulfilled with a single probe/capsule and the engine itself. Hit the space bar and recover your craft. There's no fuel so it never goes anywhere and you get 100% salvage on the entire "rocket". But by the same token, read the contract carefully enough to make sure it's actually "landed at Kerbin", since testing a heavy part landed at Ike is a whole different kind of contract you may want to schedule with other activity on the same body. EDIT: I was able to get this into a 105/72 orbit. Splashed it off the coast of KSC (97.8% recovery) for a net cost of 3767 The thrust limiter on the BACC is set to 69%, and the RT-10s to 54.5%. I doubt this is optimal, but it's close enough to do the job.

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.