SAI Peregrinus

Sandbox with Contracts and Science reports! IE Career with enough starting science to unlock the whole tree and ~50m spesos. Contracts can provide amusing challenges, science parts are fun, but grinding funds/science points isn't fun or difficult.

Squad is a viral marketing / web design company. HarvesteR worked there, and wanted to create a game. He went to management to resign so he could start his own game company, but they liked the idea of making a game so they made it an official Squad project instead. Some other people have been hired since the early days, but the initial design was done by people without much experience doing this sort of software development. It's now somewhat "baked in" to the system and difficult to change, though it can be done.

Minimum delta-V to get to 70x70km orbit with 1.0.2 stock aero is on the order of 2900m/s. See for a demonstration.Orbital speed at 75km is about 2426 m/s (sqrt(GM/a) where GM is the standard gravitational parameter (3.5316000×1012 m3/s2 for Kerbin) and a is the semi-major axis (for a circular orbit of Kerbin, orbital height + radius of kerbin = 600070m). As losses (drag and gravitational during ascent) approach 0 the delta-V required should approach the orbital speed. And you get 174.53m/s of that for free from Kerbin's rotation.

From the FAR changelog (it's in the OP...): 0.15.3V "Froude"------------------------------------ Update to MM 2.6.5 for greater nyan nyan Allow display of pressure coefficient (under assumption of axisymmetric flow) over the vehicle Tweak subsonic drag to be lower for slender shapes Fixed voxelization breaking due to combined memory leak + hard memory limit for voxelization after many editor -> flight cycles Fixed some race conditions in voxelization that could break aero properties Fixed deadlock in threadpool if many voxelization events triggered simultaneously Fixed possibility of deadlock if voxelization settings were updated Fixed voxelization errors for some cargo bays and other parts Fixed voxelization errors for pWings; includes support for any parts making use of mirrorAxis Fixed some longstanding wing interaction issues, including permanent stalled wings Fixed a newer issue with wing shielding on symmetry counterparts Some main axis determination improvements Fixed an where certain user atmospheric settings would not take The blue wave drag line is the pressure coefficient line.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/85353 That's probably the most useful mod for landing if you've played any other flight sim, or otherwise know how to use a HSI.

64-bit isn't really even the issue. A lot of it comes from the utterly ridiculous memory management policy KSP has of "Load all the assets at startup, and keep them loaded even when they're not in use." If I'm building a station in the VAB I don't need the IVA textures loaded. If I'm flying a space station around Minmus I still don't need the IVA until I actually hit the IVA button. And I certainly don't need Eeloo's textures to be loaded. Or the inside of the VAB for that matter. If things were loaded as needed and unloaded when not in use most people would never notice any issues with running out of memory, even with lots of mods. It's very rare to use every single part on a single vessel.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/108591-WIP-0-90-Pre-Release-AmpYear-Power-Manager-Reserve-Power-Ion-RCS-v0-12/ has a "Reserve power" system, and can automatically shut off some systems when power gets low. It's not quite what you're asking for, but it can probably accomplish most of the same things.

NRAP + Infernal Robotics Gantry to move the weight back and forth.

No, the way to make it harder (as in, more difficult to complete objectives) instead of more tedious is to nerf the Isp of various engines, the fuel fractions of tanks, the torque of reaction wheels, etc. That would make the actual design/piloting harder, instead of just requiring more grind for science/spesos/rep. Or go RSS style and make things 1/1 scale instead of 1/10.

32-bit isn't actually the problem, really. It just makes the problem (terrible memory management, where everything is loaded all the time whether in use or not) very obvious. EG all 110 or so MB of IVA views are always loaded, even when building ships in the VAB. Or flying around in EVA. Etc.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/57173-Music-KSP-Main-Theme-Transcription-%28Piano%29 That's got a transcription of HarvesteR's piano version. There's also Carbon Maestro's arrangement: He has sheet music and the MIDI used to make that arrangement in the description.

Bah! Anyone not manually calculating the 10-year average for the delta-V to reach all the different planets with nothing but paper, a pencil, and a slide rule is a dirty lazy cheater! If it was good enough to get to the moon it's good enough for me! In all seriousness, no, of course it's not cheating. They're just charts with the averages pre-computed. They're not hard to generate, just tedious. Reducing difficulty is cheating. Reducing tedium isn't. Where the line is between the two is up to the individual.

Oh, I've never had a NEED to launch a payload that big. I was just making & testing a bunch of launchers (1T, 5T, 10T, 25T, 50T, 100T, etc) and got carried away. Almost anything over 50T I build in orbit. Though I did see a contract to mine 140T (14,000 units) of ore from Eve and deliver it to Gilly, doing that in one go would require a monstrous launcher.

That uses modded parts because stock engine clusters & tanks could work for such a payload, but they'd lag to all hell. And I'm not Whackjob, so I don't like having craft that turn my game into a slideshow. Anyway, 1000 Tonnes to a 100km circular orbit, reliably. Behemoth Aerospace engines, Procedural parts for the tanks & decoupler. NRAP test weight.

Or disappears for several years, only to reappear in low Jool orbit, with the crew dead and their eyes missing...

That hasn't been proven. The Copenhagen interpretation is one of many, and there are reasons to believe it's wrong (eg, Schrödinger's cat thought experment.) (The correct interpretation probably involves pan-galactic gargle blasters.)

Well, there's DRE.

It gets easier. Especially with the Docking Port Alignment Indicator mod, and RCS Build Aid. Once you can see the alignment of the ports and have properly balanced RCS it becomes downright routine.

There are several kinds of engine in (stock) KSP: Solid boosters, Liquid fueled engines, Jet engines, and RCS thrusters. Solid boosters come with their (solid) fuel and engine attached. Things like the RT-10 are solid boosters. Liquid fueled engines use Liquid Fuel and Oxidizer, and require both. These are things like the LV-T30 and LV-909. They can NOT take intake air in place of Oxidizer. For an IRL equivalent, they'd be burning something like unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine as the liquid fuel and dinitrogen tetroxide as the oxidizer. Jet engines take Liquid Fuel and Intake Air. They also require both to operate. They can NOT take Oxidizer in place of intake air. RCS thrusters take monopropellant only, and are used for precision maneuvering. Right-clicking a part in the parts list will show what fuels it takes in the detail pane. There are also some niche engines, with more specific purposes. RAPIER engines are a sort of hybrid that can act like jet engines or like liquid-fueled engines, depending on their mode. They're good for space planes. NERVAs are nuclear-thermal engines, they use only use Liquid Fuel (no oxidizer) and are only good in space (not for early stages of lifters). They're highly efficient but weak, good for interplanetary transfers. Ion engines use electricity and Xenon. They're very weak, and don't work in atmospheres to any appreciable level. They're mostly for very light probes.

MKIII cargo bays are buggy, that might be part of the problem.

Did some tests on the OTTOs, jettisoning fairings at 23km, and using Procedural Fairings. MechJeb ascent to 80km orbit, AOA limit to 5 degrees, 40% ascent path, 100m/s / 1km automatic altitude turn. Using stock fairings: OTTO-1: 3663 m/s delta-V in VAB, 339 m/s delta-V in orbit. OTTO-2: 3531 m/s delta-V in VAB, 311 m/s delta-V in orbit. OTTO-3: 3511 m/s delta-V in VAB, 385 m/s delta-V in orbit. Using Procedural fairings: OTTO-4 (Egg-Shaped Fairing): 3625 m/s delta-V in VAB, 425 m/s delta-V in orbit. OTTO-5 (Conical Fairing): 3626 m/s delta-V in VAB, 446 m/s delta-V in orbit. So with FAR, of the stock options the pointy fairing wins. Procedural fairings are better still, with the conical fairing being best (for this long and narrow payload). Both procedural fairings used auto-shape and auto-strut. I used a 2.5m fairing base ring. Even without FAR I'd expect somewhat better results for fairings if you don't hang on to them all the way to orbit.

Check your system event logs. Check your temperatures, and clean your heatsinks just in case.

Unity isn't exactly the most cutting-edge of game engines. It's good enough and cheap enough for most purposes. For cutting-edge stuff you want Unreal Engine (Or CryEngine, or...), but that's got a rather more expensive license (and wasn't as available when KSP was first being developed, and is in C++ which is harder to deal with than C# even though it gives you much more low-level access.)

If you want outposts to be more practical, the following modset will give you both reasons to build them and the tools to make them how you want: KIS, KAS, MKS/OKS, Infernal Robotics, USI Life support, Karbonite, Karbonite+, ScanSat, RemoteTech, Extraplanetary Launchpads. KIS & KAS give you winches, Infernal Robotics helps making cranes. MKS/OKS + USI Life Support gives quite a lot of cool tools for building bases. Karbonite and K+ give a super rare resource that powers some highly efficient engines. But they require long-term mining bases... ScanSat and RemoteTech give you resource scanning and an extra incentive for a manned base, respectively. I also like the other USI mods, especially FTT. Extraplanetary launchpads lets you build and launch rockets from your various bases. So build a base on Minmus and launch from there. Or one on Gilly for Eve trips. Etc. In stock, mostly just an ISRU refining base on Minmus. They're also a common feature on Eve, though how many permanent Eve bases were designed as such is less obvious. Another option is to send drone refineries to your intended destinations ahead of time. Then you land next to them with a lander that has low/no fuel, and fuel up for the return trip at the destination. That means less fuel taken on the initial trip, which means much lower delta-V required for the manned launcher, which saves costs quite nicely for many destinations.

Which one? Soyuz 1 was a parachute failure, but it was on re-entry, with only one cosmonaut. Soyuz 11 was accidental decompression after undocking from Salyut 1. Challenger was an explosion at launch, but it was a spaceplane (the shuttle) and looked totally different. Colombia was a disintegration on re-entry. The Apollo 1 fire was in a rocket, but that was on the pad. It's a weird cross between Soyuz 1 & Challenger, with a rather different rocket (closer to an Apollo 1 capsule strapped on to a Delta IV Heavy with MOAR BOOSTERS). It's certainly not a re-creation of any real disaster, unless all fictional rockets exploding are to be considered recreations of real disasters.