nhnifong

Warping at any speed works just fine with erkle's clamp. Just don't pass through two SIO transitions without going back to 1x. In general going back to 1x every 10 weeks or so of in-game time is a sound way to avoid explosions.

Speaking of kethane controllers, I would really like to have more than one on a ship for legitimate reasons. I want to be able to disconnect debris with mechjeb and fly it around, to create rover and satellite swarms for detecting kethane, all deployed in one mission... that kind of thing. At the moment, I'm doing it by retroactively editing the controller onto the debris vessels after decoupling them but thats so hacky. What do you think? is that even a remote possibility?

Sheesh that was a terrible reply. Invalid part configuration just means you have more than one Kethane controller. You can only have one on a ship. simple as that. I have never seen the message for any other reason.

I've got a computer science degree, but all it taught me was that academia is 20 years behind the curve and it doesn't matter any more in this field.

ended the reign

I've been playing with ORDA and Erkle's mod lately and I love them. I want to share with you a few things you can do with docking that I think are cool, and I hope you will share some ideas too. 1. You can make re-attachable small rovers which hang under your lander. When you are ready to land, decouple them from wherever you mounted them on your rocket (I put mine on the top) and then dock them under the rocket. when you land, the wheels will be just touching the ground. just un-dock and go exploring. when you are ready to go, just drive the rover under the rocket and press dock. And watch it hop up and connect. 2. You can bring re-configurable engines with you! Mount on the side of your rocket, a single atomic engine, and a single powerful landing engine, each with small fuel and rcs tanks, and rcs thrusters and mechjeb for control. detach and dock them in orbit. When you want efficiency, put the atomic engine on the bottom of the rocket, and when you want to land, dock the powerful engine on the rocket and leave the atomic engine in orbit! 3. You can rescue a weak lander by landing a powerful booster stage nearby with a docking node on top. assuming your lander has a docking node on the bottom, which the previous two suggestions also require, just carefully balance the lander on top of the booster stage, dock it, and use the assembled rocket to get to orbit.

In Gimp, if that's what you are using, flatten the image before saving it as PNG. this saves it with an alpha channel for some stupid reason.

Typically when this happens to me, I just forgot to add the fuel lines symmetrically. so one side of the rocket is draining, while the other side is not.

Had to get all my kerbals outside for a picture of all the ships they just docked together around Vall closer

With something that small, I don't think anyone would notice. besides, if they shoot it down, I don't even mind. I'm trying to keep it cheap, I can't go wasting money on permits. (this is more of the theoretical discussion anyways, but thank you for informing me) As for the $/kg being higher for small rockets, is that because of the dry mass not scaling linearly? If you extrapolate, what does it cost to put 0 kg into orbit?, surely not $0

I want to have my own satellite camera one day. Maybe that is a ridiculous pie-in-the-sky sort of dream, but it might not be that hard. How much do you think it could cost to get a few grams in orbit? Just a camera, microcontroller, antenna, and collapsible foil sail? Is there some lower limit on $ per kilogram to LEO? could I do it with a baloon and a model rocket?

I'm going to be the sceptic unfortunately and say that humans are only ever going to live on earth. We are symbionts with the rest of this world, and it requires massive expenditures of energy for us to live in isolation from it. Some other life form, possibly artificial, might one day colonize pockets of this solar system, energy permitting. At best, we may be the cultural ancestors of these beings, meaning that our ideas, and if we are lucky, entire simulations of our minds will be the only traces of humanity in space.

When using different types of RCS thrusters ships will sometimes translate as well as rotate when the rotation keys are pressed. It seems that the code which determines how strong to thrust each RCS thruster doesn't care how strong they are or it would compensate. I think it just sets their trust percentages and not the desired amount of newtons. For example, try placing linear RCS trusters on the bottom of a small ship, and radial rcs thrusters near the top. any attempt to rotate in space will also translate you. you can tell this by looking at your speed or looking for changes in your orbit. Does anyone know if this is by design, or if its a bug? Does anyone know how to work around it? I'm having trouble building a balanced micro-rover (with mj instead of a pod) it needs to be able to rotate without translating itself using only rcs. Could it be a mechjeb problem?

Never done one of these before but it sounds like fun! Sign me up for one. Please, somebody PM when when it's time, if you can. I'll put an interplanetary return craft in orbit around Eve, in case anyone wants to try coming home.

Canadians (Are loony)

Its not that hard to hit a moon of a planet several days out on interplanetary approach. Just get your trajectory in the plane of the moons orbit, and "scan" it from one end to the next.

1/10 Who is this guy

ancestry (has no arguments)

My rule of thumb is that for every 5 meters above the surface of the moon, I want to be traveling down at 1 additional meter per second. SO at 500m above the moon, I want to be moving at 100 m/s and at 10 meters above the moon, I want to be moving at 2 m/s. Then, as long as I can decelerate at a rate of about 2/3 m/s^2 I know I can land on the moon. If a craft can accelerate upwards on kerbin at about 1/6th times this rate, then it is capable of landing on the moon. And just about everything I've ever designed can.

Landing works fine in mechjeb right now.

You can't enter an SOI directly into orbit. Without slowing down somehow within the SOI you will swing by the planet and exit that SOI at the exact same speed you entered it. You will need to slow down at your periapsis, and lower your apoapsis under the edge of the SOI. Or you can place your periapsis in the atmosphere while you are outside the SOI, and then it will slow you down when you get there. it's difficult to predict without mechjeb though. You could also do it with a gravitational assist using a moon of your target planet. set your trajectory so that you exit the moon's SOI going in the retrograde direction of that moon.

Dani, thank you for all your hard work. Kethane is one of my favorite plugins

Nice I hope to see your pictures. I have a few ships out there with kerbals, but everything has proved insufficient for landing except on bop which can't be landed on anyways because you will explode. I guess I'll have to design some better landers. Layth is easy to land on because of the atmosphere, and though a few of my ships have parachutes, none could get back to orbit. I'm kind of running an abandoned space program out on Jool right now. Several years ago the Kerbals sent 5 versatile ships out there with the latest in docking, kethane, and ion technology and then lost interest. Now the ships in Jool are fending for themselves using what they can find. Time to revive the space budget and send more ships!

I made a space station with so many parts it ran at 1 FPS in space. and I couldn't even see it from another ship that was going to dock with it 5 km away. Come to think of it, I can't see the runway from orbit, and I have no chance of making anything as big as the runway. But don't let us rain on your parade. Go ahead a make one.