Kelderek

Wow, thanks for that link, I'll be sure to pore through all of that info.

I think I might take a well-fueled ship out to Jool using hyperedit to just screw around for a bit slingshotting around the moons to get some practice. For gravity assists, is there any mod that helps to show "combo" launch windows? For example, on the next Kerbin-to-Duna window, you can also combo that to swing around to Jool - or something like that? Am I thinking of gravity assist in the right way here? I know that NASA almost always uses at least the moon and sometimes other planets to help build up speed for long range probes. That's what I think of when you talk about gravity assists. In those cases your launch window would depend on the location of multiple objects, not just your destination target.

Ahhh, well the whole concept of the gravity assist is something I haven't tried to learn yet. Up to this point I just fly places and avoid hitting things, building my ships according to the DV maps I've found. So I guess I have a new challenge to work on: learning all about gravity assists and how to use them to my advantage and not be sacred to fly close to other objects that may be in my path.

Ok, thanks for the responses. It's been frustrating at times for me. I'm sure it's designed this way to make encounters easier so you can get to the moons, and also perhaps to keep the DV requirements more reasonable. I just wish it was easier to have a clear path in and out of the system.

Perhaps I wasn't as clear. I have no trouble getting to Jool, making the transfer from Kerbin and then aerobraking and gaining a stable orbit close to Jool. My problems tend to be leaving Jool to either return to Kerbin or to try to reach the outer moons like Bop and Pol. Maybe I've been lucky arriving and unlucky leaving, but I often find it troublesome. The 3 Kerbin transfer windows I mentioned was for leaving Jool to get back home. Each time I tried it I ended up with a moon in the way that wasn't there when I initially made the maneuver node (i.e. the node looked like it would get me out just fine, but by the time my burn was done I was headed for an encounter that screwed up the whole thing).

Is it just me or is the area around Jool a pain to navigate for everyone? It feels so cluttered with all the moons that seem to have large enough SOIs and small enough orbits that it can be really difficult to move around without encountering something that gets in the way of wherever you're trying to go. Most of my trouble is in getting back to Kerbin, or trying to get to/from the outer moons without encountering the inner ones. On my last trip to the Jool system, I had to skip through 3 separate Kerbin transfer windows until I could find one that didn't get screwed up by one of Jool's moons. That just felt really excessive to me. Does anyone have any tips to make this easier to deal with? Does ship design play any part in this (like longer or slower burn times)?

I was in 5th grade and our class watched the whole thing live on TV. Back in those days it was a rare occasion for us to see anything on a TV at school - there wasn't usually a TV in our classroom. They took us to a special room to watch the shuttle launch, doing all the teaching points about space travel and such. I'm guessing there was a coordinated effort around the country to involve educators in this launch because of the teacher who was to be part of the crew. We had never watched a shuttle launch at school before this one. So we saw all the pre-launch stuff and then watched the whole accident live. I think my teachers were in so much shock that they seemed to forget about everything else and we just stayed there watching the coverage for at least 2 or 3 more hours. Replay after replay, over and over, as the broadcasters tried to figure out what had happened. Eventually they just sent us home. For most of my generation and for many years this was our "JFK assassination" type of experience: where were you, what were you doing, etc. We then had to cope with 9/11. Perhaps it is from being older, but the Columbia accident was never quite the same for me as Challenger. I am most thankful that none of these events stopped NASA from continuing their good work. There may have been some delays, but good people have worked to fix those problems and help to make sure they don't happen again.

NASA Day of Remembrance 2015 It's strange that all of the NASA disasters fall in a week of time (end of January, beginning of February). NASA has done a good job on this page, well worth a look.

They already have fuel flow showing in stock. And you can see numbers when you click on air intakes. This doesn't seem far fetched to me based on what is already in place.

I would assume it was the command pod based on the list you gave. Hard to tell for sure though. One thing you can always do is disable the flow of electric charge for anything you want to remain "powered down". The same buttons that you use for stopping flow for other fuels like liquid fuel and oxidizer are there to use for electric charge too. So if you know you're going to drift through space for a while, then you can manually shut everything down and guarantee no drain at all. I've used this before on batteries when I knew I would pass through the dark side of a planet and lose solar power.

I would think a kid around 8 or 10 could play this and get some fun out of it, albeit in a very non-mathy way. It doesn't take a lot of brains or maturity to click and drag parts together and hit a launch button. Would their rockets be efficient? No. Would they be able to go to Jool? Probably not. But they could probably have fun blowing things up and maybe even getting into orbit of Kerbin with some luck. I know that my 14 year old nephew is smart enough to master about 70-80% of this game if he tried it -- kids these days have a lot of video game experience under their belts. The math and terminology would be the biggest things holding kids back, but if they have enough interest they can usually find the answers they need.

When you view the expanded info panel for any air-breathing engine in the VAB or SPH it shows a flameout %. Once you are in flight though, there is no way to see exactly how much air flow an engine is getting. You can right click on any intakes that you have and see their numbers, but if you right click on a jet engine it does not show anything pertaining to air flow at all. It does show fuel flow, but not air flow. The interactions between multiple air intakes and any given engine can be complex, so it would be nice to see this info when right clicking on a specific air-breathing engine. I suggest you add a simple line on the right click engine tooltip display right above or below the "fuel flow" line that shows "air flow" and the numeric amount that is currently being received by the engine. It would also be good to show that value as a percent too, so that we would be able to see at a glance how close that engine is to having a flameout. Something like this: "Air Flow = 0.012U (25%)". (I made up those numbers as an example, and I don't know if the unit of measurement is the same).

Most weighted objects are only good for holding down one key at a time. I like this method since I get both shift and W. I came up with this years ago playing Oblivion when I was trying to level up skills (this was before I discovered the amazing command console that game had).

You can click on the same part twice to make it the root, but I think you need to move your mouse off that part to something else and then move it back in between clicks. After the first click you will notice the new blue highlighting of the parts as your mouse over them. So you can have both your clicks on the same part, but not as you would expect - it just needs a little movement in between (god knows why, lol).

You have to null out your velocity relative to your target. As you get close to the target, click on your navball until it says "target" (and not "orbit" or "surface"). Then point your ship to the retrograde marker and burn until your velocity drops to 0.0m/s. You should now be parked in space a fixed distance from your target. Now you can aim at the pink target marker on your navball and slowly burn to get some speed which will allow you to close that distance. Keep this speed very low, just a couple m/s at most -- sometimes it's easier to control this with RCS using H and N keys instead of your main engines.

Pat Kerman Chris Kerman etc.? (nostalgically remembering SNL skits)

I'm not sure that statement is true. I'm pretty sure they use whatever size is the most efficient, even if that means making new custom ones. I would imagine that of all the parts that go into making a real rocket, designing custom fairings would probably not be very expensive or difficult. I could be wrong though. Procedural makes the most sense to me as payloads will have a huge amount of variance in size and shape from one player to another and I can understand the desire to not add too much bloat to the list of stock parts by having a set of one-size-fits-all fairings. Presumably they would need ones for each stack diameter size as well as different lengths and maybe even different "bulgy" ones that are wider than the point where they are coupled to the stack.

@Tsevion: where is your rocket engine? Is it placed inside of your jet engine? It's hard to see in your images, the exhaust makes it look like it's in the center somehow, but that's where your jet engine is located. Cool, simple design, I like it.

This is a case of starting with fewer tanks and finding the need to add more later, but not wanting to have to redo all of the various struts and things - I had noticed this myself but decided against messing with it just to save time. Thanks for the link, I hadn't used that one before. Mostly with MJ it was simply new to me, but I had never heard of Porkchop plots before. It didn't take me long to get the gist of it though. It seems only natural that there would be more complex ways to plotting new orbits and transfers.

Do you have a return ship? Maybe some of your colonists want to visit family back on Kerbin.

Hey Laie, go take a look at page 33

The resource panel is the little window in the upper right corner that pops up when you click the fuel icon there. It shows, liquid fuel, oxidizer, monopropellant, electric charge, etc. - whatever consumables your ship uses.

Ok, thanks for the help

Can anyone tell me the altitude for the highest peak on Vall as well as the altitude where being "in space near Vall" would end? I want to park a probe there close enough to do temperature scans, but can't access this info from the wiki (is the wiki down for everyone or just me?). Also, Vall has no atmosphere right?

Electric charge behaves just like any other fuel which means you can control its flow. For example, you might consider adding an extra small battery to your ship and disable the fuel flow from it and viola! you have an emergency power supply. There are lots of reasons why this might be useful: if you do too much activity on a solar powered ship while in the dark shadow of a planet, or if you leave SAS on while time warping at 100,000X, etc. You can also power down docked portions of your ship that won't be used for a long time.