strigon

Shoot, you're right. Firespitter was stopping my game from launching, so I deleted it and hoped for the best. Thank you for the quick - and shockingly accurate - reply!

So, I can't seem to get the kontainers to work. The parts themselves exist, but they don't actually hold anything, and there's no way to switch types in the menu that I'm aware of. I seem to recall from my last playthrough that you'd just put the kontainer on your ship, then right click it and cycle through options there, much as one would change the colour of a fuel tank. But there's no option there for anything to do with changing the type, or filling it up. It basically acts like a giant structural piece. Am I mistaken, and that's not how they work, or am I experiencing a bug? Every other part works fine, afaik, including the kolonization modules like the habitats, which can store a small amount of the same materials. It's just the shipping kontainers that don't work.

I can confirm that they're very, very rare. I literally searched all of my Greater Flats for one, almost at a "comb the desert" level of detail without finding one. Then I happened to hop over there for an unrelated mission later, and found one lying within a few klicks of my landing zone on the "flats". I don't know if the rest of the planets will be that frustrating, but I hope not.

Nope; just a plain old scientist. Plus, whenever I change the settings to allow hab, they change back again as soon as I enter another screen.

Aha! Thank you, my good Kerbonaut; you have solved my problem! Edit: Blast! Even that didn't work; I edit the settings, press save, and they stay there. Then when I go to the VAB, I still see indefinite. So I go back to check, and the settings reset themselves! I've done this three times now, and yes, I clicked on save not cancel. As long as I simply stay in the Space Center, the settings remain what I chose, but the moment I leave, they're back to default. Edit 2: Well, the in-game menu still isn't working, so I edited the config file and started a new save. Annoying, but it solves my problem. Still not sure what caused the issue, though.

Well, it does behave differently. Unfortunately, it behaves differently in that it's a completely blank window:

For some reason, my hab and home stats don't seem to be working - I've tried reinstalling the mod, and even trying with a fresh install. Regardless of what my ship looks like, or where I go, it always says my hab time is "indefinite". For example: Here I am, orbiting Duna with nothing but a lander can, yet Sidney seems content to simply float there until he runs out of food in 40 days. Also, I can't find any difficulty options for the Life Support. I suspect this may be related. They aren't in any of the standard difficulty tabs, and the only modded tab shows this: Thoughts?

Okay, I can't tell a lot about your craft from those pictures, but it looks massively overengineered from what little I can see. You do not, in any way, need eight parachutes to land a probe core on Eve. You don't even need two. If the rest of your craft is like that, it explains a lot about why you're having trouble. Can you take some pictures from the Vehicle Assembly Building, and share them here? It has much clearer lighting.

Yeah, we're going to need a lot more than this. Some basic tips, however, are to make things as light as possible. You don't need dozens of batteries and the biggest solar panels, for instance. Heat shields are quite heavy, so that might be part of your problem. It also took me a while to seriously consider engine weight; many times, a smaller engine - even if it's less efficient - will get you much further. A simple probe core, with a decent antenna, and a full science package with the half-sized 1.25 metre tank and the "Terrier" engine can make it to Eve from LKO, I believe. As far as entry, go for a shallow approach. I don't often land at Eve, but 40-50 km is probably the lowest I'd go. If you have to make another pass to actually land, so be it. Aerobraking is notoriously dangerous. Another tip you might like to use is what's called asparagus staging, or onion staging if you can't make that work. And, just to make sure, how are you transferring to Eve? Are you waiting for a transfer window? Are you leaving Kerbin's orbit and then trying to force an approach? Walk us through what's happening. Because, at a guess, you're either not launching at a transfer window or brute-forcing your approach, wasting a ton of fuel, and resulting in a ridiculously fast approach. So you either run out of fuel, or come flying in so fast your whole craft disintegrates.

A big tip is to make sure each vessel is pointed along the same axis - most people like Normal/Antinormal since they don't drift - before docking. Just use SAS to hold that position on both craft, and the biggest problem - orientation - is solved. As previously mentioned, use the navball. "Eyeballing it" doesn't work for docking. Use the more delicate control mode by hitting Caps lock; it makes fine maneuvering easier. When building your craft, use reaction wheels only for torque, no RCS. Go to each RCS port, and go to show actuation toggles, then turn off pitch, roll, and yaw. If you don't, your thrust will make you spin, and then the counterspin will make you thrust. It's maddening. Here's a step-by-step guide that should work, as long as you keep the craft simple (IE, attach them end-to-end, not side-by-side). 1) Assuming you've rendezvoused, make sure you've set your target to the docking port - not the vessel - by double-clicking it. 2) Tell your ship to hold Normal orientation, and the mating ship to hold Antinormal. 3) Back up your ship until the target indicator can be clearly seen on the navball. 4) Using the navball, translate your ship until the target marker is aligned on either the vertical or horizontal axis. 5) Repeat the same for the other axis. 6) Move forward cautiously; 1-3 metres per second is plenty. Watch the navball closely, and gently correct any drift with small puffs of RCS. Again, make sure you've hit caps lock for fine control here. 7) On final approach, slow down to ~1 metre per second, or less. Disable SAS, and drift in while still correcting any last-minute drift. That's by no means the fastest way, or the most efficient, but it should be reliable. As with all things in KSP, (and life) practice is key. Just like orbital maneuvers, rendezvous, intercepts and landings, things may not seem intuitive at first, but as you gain more experience you'll gain an instinctive sense of how to dock. It opens up a whole new world, so stick with it!

I'm simply appalled by the lack of integrity of some of the users here. I'll have you know that with every new save, my #1 rule is that I'll never use the debug menu for anything other than actual debugging. If I make a mistake, I own up to it and pay the price. I stick to my guns, too; right up until the first time I lose a spacecraft to it

Lots of things haven't been used for real spaceflights. Like SSTO spaceplanes. I realize this has been said many, many times, but KSP is fundamentally different from real life; if you're desperate for realism, you'll have to do some serious modding. To my mind, the only way to gauge the "cheatiness" of a part is by looking at whether or not it's overpowered, regardless of the real-life analogues. If we discovered a real-life engine that weighed 50 kilogrammes, had a TWR of 1500, could fully throttle and restart an unlimited number of times, and had 1500 ISP we'd use it for every mission. Nobody would say it was cheating, but if it were then put in KSP I think most people would agree it was cheap. Why, then, is a well-balanced engine that would work fine in real life, but is simply unsafe, cheating?

Why's that? They're very useful for a certain circumstances, but they're a far stretch from game-breaking. The weight, low TWR, and fact that it uses solely LF make its uses quite limited. If it's almost cheating to use an engine that works very well in its niche, an awful lot of engines are going to be "cheating". RAPIERs? Fantastic for SSTOs. Ants? Phenomenal for small probes. Vector? Ridiculous thrust, massive vectoring make it wonderful as a first stage on a mismatched vessel. Dart? Great all-around, but really comes into its own on planets like Eve. Mammoth, Mainsail and Twin Boar? Incredible heavy-lifters. All sorts of engines are just as handy as the Nerv, when used in the proper context. What makes the LV-N so overpowered?

I'm having a very similar issue; when I go EVA, everything is fine unless I pull out a flag. In that case, it explodes, and none of the controls work at all, aside from the map. I went to the map, switched to a different vessel and then back again, and I could move fine, but the gravity seemed to be ridiculously high; I was on Minmus, but my jetpack wouldn't lift me off, and even jumping got me barely an inch off the surface. Could this be related?

I've yet to do anything that's even close to a full colony; my nearest attempt was a mobile science rover with a Lab attached that I sent to the Mun and Minmus; usually, by the time I get to the stage where colonizing places is feasible, there's been an update and I start again from scratch. However, I've got MKS installed - among other mods - so I'm hoping to fix that! Probably looking at the Mun as my first colony, since if anything goes wrong I won't have to wait for a transfer window.

Designing spaceplanes - like everything else - involves making sure you optimize the vehicle for what it has to do. Since you called it a spaceplane, I'm assuming you want it to reach space? If this is the case, takeoff speed doesn't matter, and - as others have mentioned - decreasing takeoff speed comes at a cost to other aspects of your craft - specifically, speed and efficiency, which are important to a spaceplane. If anything, this is a sign that you should tone down your craft's wing usage. Now, if you didn't intend for it to go to space, and you instead want a glider or low-speed, low-altitude plane, then yes, increasing wing area will decrease takeoff speed. But before looking into those options, I'd recommend switching to a more reasonable engine for that task (smaller), or decreasing fuel capacity, as those will likely have a more immediate effect for a lower cost.

Not necessarily, since that directly affects how much fuel you can haul at a given time. Plus, with Minmus, you can use less powerful engines to get into orbit, and the less powerful engines are pretty much always the more efficient ones. I mean, technically it's the same both ways, except for the time required, but then technically bringing a base to Moho is best done with ion engines, except for the time required.

Southern Ontario. How do I use it? It varies, but I like sending rovers, spaceplanes, and other not-disgustingly-large creations to other planets. Strange though it may sound, if my design requires 3.75m parts to launch, I decide it's a bad design, and I'll move on to something else. Usually a virtually identical design that's assembled through docking. Common misconception, actually. We're much more likely to talk about Canadian cuisine, like Timmie's or poutine.

I'm assuming you mean to land and then return? If it's just getting there, it's no different than going from Kerbin to the Mun, only slightly more intensive and finicky. For landing, don't bother with a heat shield; Duna's so small, and its atmosphere is so thin that it shouldn't be an issue. Make sure to pack a drogue chute, as there's a good chance without it you won't be able to slow down enough to deploy your main chutes, and leave some extra fuel for a powered landing - just a bit of a boost, even with a drogue and backups, parachutes are still not great on Duna. On that subject, also make sure to maximize deployment altitude, and minimize deployment pressure in the tweakables. No real trick to takeoff, though; just keep in mind that there is an atmosphere when you build your return vessel, so don't go too overboard. Fins shouldn't really be necessary, but you might want a gimballing engine just in case.

KSP's physics are a good simplification. They are advanced enough to model rocketry and aerodynamics with enough accuracy to teach a layman the core concepts of each. Considering it's just a simple game, that's impressive. The issue becomes when we use broad phrases like "realistic". Yes, the physics in KSP don't hold up under close scrutiny by anyone with actual experience in the matter, but so does, for example, the expression for momentum you learn in high school. And just like the expression for momentum, the accuracy and realism of KSP can range from "More than adequate for our purposes; anything else would actively confuse matters" to "nowhere near good enough".

Ooh; I have an idea for this. The basic principle I've seen around the forums before, but AFAIK nobody's ever actually used it for anything - mostly because it's incredibly inefficient, but hey; this is KSP!

Ah, that makes sense. Shows how often I look at the ground in KSP

I must confess to being confused. Isn't this the literal definition of what an eclipse is?

I give them the following designations: A brief description of what it is, followed by an appropriate name (often a pop culture, or historical, reference). If I can't think of any appropriate names, cool-sounding ones are an acceptable substitute. For example, my first mun and back craft is usually called the "Munar Lander 'Luna'". If I send something to the moon that stays there forever, it's something like "Impact Probe 'Nightmare Moon'", and if I send a probe for data from the sun, it's the "Solar Probe 'Icarus'".

I don't use them all that much, but I use them for a few things. My primary use is for EVA "rigs"; small, barebones ships that are hauled into orbit with nothing more than a seat, some RCS thrusters, monoprop and the puff, with storage space for KAS/KIS items. It helps with longer missions, or missions in gravity which is a bit heavy for the standard jetpack. As others have mentioned, I also use them in SSTO spaceplanes, and on occasion I'll use them to deorbit a ship I sent up to top off the monoprop of a space station.