Gaarst

The lonely guy with the beard is going to die.

KSP's camera is confusing. It is set up in a way so that the North is always up (at least in orbital view), and that's great, but if you craft is rolled 90°, what you see facing up is the left side, the up is facing right, the right down and the down left. Which means that when you press I to go up, the craft goes up from its own point of view, not from yours. There are several ways to "fix" this: Place a part on the up side of your craft (a battery for example) so that you can easily orient the craft to tell the same thing as the camera Use the navball for docking: the navball rotates with your craft, so pressing L will always move you towards your right when looking at the navball Press V to change camera view until you hit "Locked" view. The camera will adjust to put your craft upside up, and will rotate along your craft to keep the up side always up.

Do you have Module Manager installed? The loading usually freezes for a brief moment on a specific part (might be this antenna, not sure) just before loading MM patches, because it takes some time to do so. Because the loading screen freezes there doesn't mean the issue is with this part in particular, it can be with other mods (here I'd say MM). As @Phineas Freak said, we need a bit more info to find out. Though the .log files are not inside the GameData folder, but inside your main KSP folder (KSP_win64 if on Windows).

Use Vectors: the real RD-180 has sick gimbal range that helps making the rocket go straight up even in asymmetric configurations. The real Atlas V uses boosters that have fixed but oriented nozzles: instead of being directed straight down like in KSP, the SRB's thrust is headed slightly away from the center; that way the thrust vector of the booster is roughly aligned with the CoM of the rocket, making it going a bit sideways but reducing torque to a minimum. Unfortunately there is no way to replicate this in KSP, apart from clipping a thrust-limited Flea inside your booster but that usually ends up looking terrible, so you won't get as good behaviour as the actual rocket.

I usually stick the functional parts such as probe cores, solar panels and batteries on the orbital upper stage so that the station part I want to add contains the necessary minimum. I dock with the station and then decouple the upper stage and let it burn in the atmosphere. This also removes the RCS, fuel tanks and engines from the station itself if not needed.

Nah to all first three, yea to last one. A planet is easy to design, no need for such teasing. Real looking plumes wouldn't make sense when looking at the state of the game graphics as a whole (though a thorough rocket engines revamp is possible). There's already nothing to do in the Kerbin solar system besides time warping to destination, planting a flag, and time warping back home; no need for even more time warping. I'd enjoy life support. And it would make sense following the communications update: right now Kerbals are superior to probes in every aspect, which really shouldn't be the case.

SMURFF changes part masses and specs to be more realistic while keeping the simplicity of stock, so your rockets will be a bit closer to real rockets in terms of size. I'm not aware of career modes specifically designed for RSS or Kerbol x10, you'd have to edit configs yourself (to increase funds gained per contract to allow for bigger rockets for example)... Or you can go full RO and play with RP-0.

New design, with SRBs this time. 463m/s (1667km/h, Mach 1.36).

1.0.5 is a pretty old version, unless you have a good reason, you might want to update to 1.2.2. Anyway, we need more information to be able to help you, please read the following thread:

Yeah sometimes you get torque with perfectly symmetric designs. I know that some models are off-centered (Mainsail) but I'm not aware that the "placement" of engines or other parts can be off-centered as well. It's probably something to do with KER, and I'd bet on floating-point errors: 0.01kNm of torque is really small and that Boar is very powerful so it could happen that KER doesn't round the values to 0 properly. One should check with other mods to see if the same happens (RCS build aid, MJ...).

Are we allowed to openly express disagreement with moderator actions?

@Sharpy@Red Iron Crown I know I can do that, but ground clearance with launch clamps is buggy, even with rockets.

Launch clamps mess with the craft height when spawning. Add a launch clamp to a plane and it suddenly spawns 5m above the ground.

I don't care about Doppler effect in particular but we are indeed in dire need of proper sound design in KSP.

^ This. KSP in unlike many games as it needs intense physics processing. Even with a "better" engine you will still have the problems that the engine was not build to handle hundreds of parts interacting with each other in many ways at a time. A dedicated engine would be the best solution, but this is not happening.

If you're allowing mods, you'd be better off with a Canadarm.

It was indeed initially based on it, though I ended up doing quite a few modifications to save weight and increase the braking power. Edit: pushed it to 360m/s (1296km/h, Mach 1.06)! (Don't think I can do any more with this design though)

Got to 353m/s (1270km/h, Mach 1.04) in stock on jet engines only. Though my design uses some parts that are jettisoned: two structural fairings with nose cones to let the engines power up without starting too early; and the fairing nose for the braking sepratrons to operate.

Actually, I've read up a bit and it seems like Apollo 13 was not on a proper free return trajectory at the time of the incident. Because of the land site, free return trajectories like the previous missions were impossible; so the TLI got the CSM in a free return orbit that didn't pass around the Moon. They then adjusted the trajectory for landing; and when the accident happened, the changed trajectory to a circumlunar path that would get them back to Earth.

Adjustments are always done to have the safest reentry possible or shorter transfer time (especially important for Apollo 13), but the TLI is done so that even if the CSM doesn't do a single maneuver, it will reenter Earth. You can do a free return trajectory with the Mun, you just need to come in front of the Mun and a lot of tweaking until you find the right spot.

In KSP it doesn't make a difference, the revolution velocity of the Mun is too low. In real life, it is more efficient to go in a West to East orbit (prograde) for a Moon landing just like it is more efficient to launch to the East: you add the body's rotational velocity to yours. Though being tidally locked to the Earth, the Moon rotational velocity is small. Now, Apollo used free-return trajectories to ensure they would go back home if something happened on the way to the Moon (cf: Apollo 13). These involve using a gravity assist from the Moon to slow down, and therefore to pass in front of the Moon as opposed to behind normally. This implies a East-West orbit.

Language. What is your orbit height? The scanners need specific orbits to be able to scan. What is your orbital inclination?

It's a drag-reducing aerospike. When going supersonic, you have a shock forming at the tip of your plane; if you plane has a slightly blunt nose it creates large amounts of pressure and turbulent flow, ie: drag. The spike creates a shock that is detached from the nose, thus it is not in contact with the nose of the plane and reduces supersonic drag. Wikipedia does have an article on this. Edit: if you want to go further, Wikipedia also has nice articles on nose cone design and wave drag (the drag created by shockwaves I mentioned above). Edit2: apparently I'm an idiot. See the post below for an actual answer.

Anything time related will not work in KSP's career mode. You can easily land on the Mun in less than 10 in-game days after starting a new career. And going to Duna is just a matter of time-warping until the first launch window. At the moment when you need the most money, early-mid game (when you need to update buildings to launch large-scale interplanetary missions and are stuck grinding contracts on Mun/Minmus), you can basically launch dozens of missions to Mun/Minmus and complete as many contracts. It's long and tedious IRL but takes no time IG. Time starts to make sense when you go interplanetary, but unless you're playing on Hard settings, at that point you have several million funds and money isn't a problem anymore. I find that money in career mode is unbalanced and not really a constraint of any kind. You start with way to much money, doing a simgle LKO mission gives you more than enough to pay a Mun mission, and going to the Mun gives you enough to basically launch any mission. Adding a way to get more instantaneously isn't going to help it.

L O L Edit: also, yeah, there was only 1 Beta (0.90) and a whole lotta patches to fix the mess that was 1.0.