CrazyJebGuy

I think they all have the last name "Kerman" because it's not a last name like we use it now, but like a medieval one describing your job (hence names like Taylor, Smith, Miller), or maybe it's a title, for astronauts/rocketry/space things. Kerbals that don't have anything to do with spaceflight aren't in the game (I think). "Werner von Kerman" is kinda weird for having a 'von' though. Maybe he has a regular last name but somebody screwed up his paperwork or something for the KSC.

Everybody has that one game. I've played KSP and warthunder both since 2014. KSP updates annoy me when they make all the decouplers and parts look ugly (is there a cosmetic mod to return the old look? If just the decouplers, they all look the same so I can't tell the size from the icon) but they're mostly improvements, and I can disable some things like re-entry heating. Warthunder peaked about 8 years ago, gets worse almost every update. And it's an MMO, it's not like KSP where I can go back and play 0.90 if I want to. The core gameplay is excellent, but the company keeps shovelling excrements on top and these players linger on for years complaining, quitting, coming back and repeating.

I feel blessed that I didn't even know there was a launcher until people ranted on the forum. Hasn't it tanked the recent steam reviews by about 40% though? Truly it must be a terrible launcher.

I've always thought the "Kerman" surname was everywhere in the game because it's to do with spaceflight, like how a lot of surnames come from people's jobs, even if we don't really use that anymore, there are still tons of people named 'Smith' or 'Miller'. This doesn't really explain tourists though, so either they get "Kerman" as an honorary title while in the space centre, or there's a caste system, and among other castes, the 'Kerman' caste (probably the highest) is the only one rich enough to afford or participate in space travel, or maybe there are laws limiting the other castes from it. I like the first explanation a bit better, but both are plausible. The 'seemingly inexhaustible' line seems like pretty weak evidence for cloning. Imagine earth, there are over 200 people born every minute (and I refuse to believe only one is a sucker), I don't think I could bomb through that many kerbals if I tried. The lack of buildings? Not sure. I know one of the crew/eva reports (i think flying low in grasslands) says "I think I can see my house from here".

Might it be possible to make the keys, by flying to those places and using science reports to tell what biome is what?

I use https://imgbb.com/ No account required, you can drag and drop photos right onto the homepage. You can use any image uploader though I'm sure, just cope-paste the image link into the forum.

Wow, just noticed. Click the little water thing: And it switches from sea level to radar-altimeter mode. I have played this game for 8 years, how didn't I learn this sooner? I thought you needed mods for radar-altitude, so I did all my Minmus/Mun landings by eye and looking at my shadow. (Certainly made darkside landings interesting)

Mun's polar rescue mission went well. Had enough dV left over to swing by Minmus, but I couldn't get a transfer maneuver set up from polar orbit. Gave up, then nailed it accidentally. The lander works quite well, very stable the whole way down. Worth noting I play with re-entry heating at 10%, because I remember 0.90 too well. Nice.

Goodness man, a limited transmission window? Why live with that? If you do not like the "right" and high precision approach, do what this thread is about, and set off a handgrenade of relays or something. Although then again, if you're not playing with probe-control-requires-signal, why bother I guess?

Speaking of rescue missions... I can still nail precision landings. We brought friends to Val's rescue. (So that if this goes wrong, we need rescue nine kerbals!) Getting the XP on my inexperienced crews. The lander had to be wide, to deal well with angles, and this design turned out to work pretty well. The sideways-mounted fuel tanks are staged off when done. That whole top array thing has about 3,000 dV. Launched on a twin boar carried by twin Clydesdales (which fit neatly under the "wings") and it's actually quite a cost-effective passenger lander. ($84,000 & seats nine) Also, I made sure to bring a couple of scientists because on the first trip I accidentally did a materials study in LKO, collected the data (0.1 science) and broke the experiment. Oops. The de-orbit maneuver node also went crazy after I landed, blew itself up to 4,000 dV and was coming back down when I screenshotted.

I like the idea of spinning a ship quickly to fling the relays outwards. And yeah: the basic prinicple of chaotic netowrks is fling enough relays at the problem, chances are that at least one will be in the right position; precision is irrelevant. And that chance gets exponentially better with more satellites. If each relay has a 1/2 chance of covering a point on the planet, then the chance of having coverage is 1 - 0.5^n. If I fling ten satellites out, that's 99.9% coverage. And 1/2 is a bit of an underestimate generally, or rather it is the worst case for when you are operating right on the surface of a moon/planet. Further out, the orbits are relatively larger compared to the body so each relay's chance might be more like 3/4 or 4/5.

Didn't think the Mun's north pole would be so hilly.

I found out my launch profiles were wayyy too steep. Held the old habit over of "start turning at 10km" but also got a bit lax over time about actually turning, so oftentimes I'd be at maybe 10 degrees before 15-20km, and come out of the atmosphere at 30-35 from vertical, so it was steep even for the old steep approaches. Did some testing with a Kerbal X, comparing to some competition thread I found. My normal profile got to orbit with 3780 dV and 3719 dV (two tries). I tried one that I wrote was "wildly shallow": 40 degrees (from vertical) by 9.5k, it took 3462. My best run, when I read the best modern profile, got down to 3351 dV by turning 45 degrees at 8km. The worst run was when I did the L-approach of burning upward, to space, then sideways, to orbit, ("L" for the shape, and "loser") but also restricting the throttle so the apoapsis was never more than 50s away. 4398 m/s of dV. When I repeated the run, but full-throttled it all the way to 80km apoapsis, I got 3989 dV, which is bad but not too bad. Oddly, this was tied for being the fastest way to orbit. TL;DR: Learnt I've been doing it wrong since 2015.

But yes though, Tedvey did get rescued from orbit of Minmus, he's back on Kerbin.

Tedvey is still out there, on what is basically a chair with 2,500m/s of dV. I have launched a rocket to Minmus, which I had to do anyway for another contract, and I've given it an empty command pod for him. The pan is to land it on Minmus, mine some ore (the other contract), and precision-land him beside it for the trip back home. I trust my ability to land precisely on Minmus, so it will be fine. Currently he's in low Minmus orbit waiting for the rescue-rescue, currently transferring to Minmus.