Kelderek

That's what I guessed. And don't worry, this was just a hyperedit test and not the real thing anyway.

Does it matter which way you place airbrakes on your ship? Take these two (crude) examples: <-- direction of flight ______/__ or <-- direction of flight ______\__ The top one is more deflecting the air away, and the bottom one is more like scooping it up. I've tried both setups and it's hard to tell if there is a difference. Does it matter in KSP?

I'm a big fan of planting flags at either end of the runway, you can see them from miles away and you can use the two of them to see if you are lined up correctly.

Does anyone know what the rest of this message is on this drill? I'm guessing the word there is "contact" and it thinks the drill isn't reaching the ground. I thought it might also be "concentration" or something indicating there's no ore at this location (despite what my resource scan showed me).

Re-entry heat does not behave like I would expect. If it is using a "shock cone" then I'm not seeing it. Take this ship for example, the ladder at the bottom is blown off by overheating every time, shortly followed by the drill - I can understand the drill overheating if the heat is in a cone shape, but the ladder? That should be completely safe in my mind, yet it is the first to go.

I've started to do some testing and planning for an Eve ascent mission and I'm really amazed at how poorly all of the stock engines perform at low altitudes on Eve. First of all, it looks like the "ASL" numbers listed on each engine for thrust and ISP (which are meant to be sea level on Kerbin) correspond to roughly 10.6 km altitude on Eve. At 223m altitude on Eve every stock engine I looked at had an ISP below 200 with the "mammoth" engine topping the list at 198.3 ISP. Some engines were abysmal though like the "swivel" at only 64.6 ISP and 40.4 kN thrust. The SRBs were the worst with ISP numbers in the 30s and 40s and thrust numbers that are only 25% as good as when at sea level on Kerbin. Even the "aerospike" engine (189.5 ISP, 100.3 kN thrust) seems like a poor choice. All of this seems to point towards needing a really huge ascent vessel with a lot of "mammoth" engines to get you up the first 20-30km. The downside is that landing something that big or even flying it there from Kerbin will be all that much harder, plus you need for all that size to be aerodynamic if you want to control it at all. We may only need 7500 m/s DV +/- to get to orbit on Eve now, but getting that much DV seems to take a bigger rocket in 1.0.x than having a 12km/s rocket did in 0.90. Does this mesh with what you guys have found so far with Eve ascents in 1.0 or am I just doing something very wrong here? P.S. I wrote down a lot of numbers on paper for ISP and thrust when I did my testing at 223m and 900m altitudes on Eve and I could post them her if you guys think it would be useful.

Transfer fuel and fly it back?

The cheapest is to burn close to the AN or DN when doing an inclination change. If Kerbin is not near one of those nodes at the time of your transfer window (which is based more on phase angles), then you would need to do a course correction en route when you get close to the AN or DN.

In other words, this is a challenge to see who has the beefiest computer. Bonus points for not using 3.75m? All that is does artificially raise your part count. I like the basic concept of this challenge, but I think the rules and bonus points need to be define better/differently.

Why do you need a second MPL? Is the one you took to Duna not capable of landing back at Kerbin? If so, you don't necessarily need a MPL for landing on Kerbin, any container able to hold your kerbals and science data should work fine if you transfer over the data by EVA.

I personally would like additional runway AND launch pad facilities that offer completely different challenges: -- different altitudes -- surrounding area is not always water -- not on the equator I think the stock game needs this for polish. I like the island runway, but it is too close and similar to the KSC (close to equator, close to water, similar altitude).

I tried your craft and I'm getting the same result (I edited out the scansat stuff so I could load the ship). My guess is it's a bug. You might try to rebuild the ship with the same design from scratch with a new craft file and see if it has the same problem.

I agree that the overheating is lame - especially when you consider the abysmal TWR that leads to extra long burn times anyway. I can think of a couple more options for balancing: 1. Adjust the funds cost. Make it 10x more than any other engine. 2. I don't know enough about how the engine is meant to work, but to me the word "nuclear" implies radioactive which leads me to think of Uranium as a possible resource. This is a whole different can of worms, but I think it would be cool if resources could be used as building materials. If that were possible then you could have uranium required to construct the engine and the usual LF to fuel it. Apart from that, I also like your idea to just make it much more massive.

Unless you're using a spaceplane with wings (lifting surfaces) then you can safely ignore the CoL. For rockets, you want the CoM as high as possible. If you are having trouble with your rocket flipping then that usually means you are straying too far from your prograde marker while you turn. Your rocket needs to be streamlined, so use nose cones or fairings and make sure any turns you do in the atmosphere (like the main gravity turn) are very slow and gradual. If you do more searches you should be able to find a ton of threads talking about this exact problem and how to fix it in 1.0.2.

The one I built for Tylo could not actually return to the surface of Kerbin. I used a passenger ship to rendezvous in LKO to bring back my 10 kerbals. The ship landed just fine on Tylo though. It just happened that an aerodynamic design to get off of Kerbin made for a cool retro-style look in space. I especially liked the way the Mk3 passenger cabin hatch worked on the side with a long line of ladders reaching down to the surface - that reminded me of every space cartoon I saw growing up.

Take a look at this tutorial, it may be useful for your situation. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/120406-PSA-you-can-build-open-ended-fairings-and-combine-them-with-a-little-trick

For those contracts I usually land on struts and retract them to set the whole thing on wheels, allowing for contract completion. It helps to find a nice flat place to land, and build your ship wide instead of tall to make the landing more stable.

I brought 10 kerbals to Tylo and back to Kerbin safe and sound: Took a few refueling stops along the way, but it was fun and my rocket had a nice retro look to it.

My Tylo lander ended up having a retro look to it: It looks better after the side boosters are decoupled. I was proud of this mission, I took 10 kerbals to Tylo and back to Kerbin and the vessel looked really cool too. EDIT: I found a second image during the ascent. The ship managed to get to a 30x30 km orbit with about 200 m/s DV to spare for rendezvousing with its refueling tug.

It's all about balance. It takes less DV to get to space from the launch pad now, this means that with the same rocket you would have a lot more DV left over for vacuum use. In order to keep vacuum maneuvers and interplanetary transfers and such a challenge, the vacuum ISPs were balanced to bring it back in line. Imagine a rocket that had 10,000 m/s DV before. You would use 4500 just to get to space leaving 5500 to do something else. Now a similar rocket would have a split of about 3500 : 6500 if they did not balance the vacuum ISPs too. Everything you could do in the past can still be done now, you just might have to choose a different engine to get it done. I think the balance is fine, we just need to get used to the new system. There are no one-size-fits-all engines any more, you need to carefully choose which ones to use low in the atmosphere and which ones to use in your upper stages and in space.

So does this mean that diagram 3 would never happen? If I use a 2.5m heat shield and further back I have some parts attached to a 1.25m core then they should be safe? Or is there still some dangerous drag present? I guess this idea of shapes wouldn't be exclusive to using heat shields, I'm thinking of streamlining designs in general with respect to atmospheric drag.

Try setting your focus in the map view to either Dres or a vessel in orbit of Dres, I think that's how the asteroids started showing for me.

What is the shape of the slipstream of hot air diverted around your vessel when you use a heat shield? Please forgive this *very* crude paint drawing: I can think of 3 different ways this might work: 1. In this option the air would flow out in a parabolic shape. You could conceivably have parts radially attached further away from your heat shield that are wider than the diameter of the shield itself as long as it's far enough behind it. 2. In this option the air flows straight back along the prograde-retrograde axis. Any parts outside the diameter of the shield would likely get blown off. 3. In this option the air flows inward and parts inside the diameter of the shield, but too far behind might overheat. 4. Other shapes? I think this might be useful to know for placing heat shields on things other than the usual command pods. Does anyone know how this works in the new aero system?

Taking that a step further, there's a fun topic on the challenge forum where people specifically attempt to make the fastest possible trip to other worlds. I managed to make it to Duna in only 16 days 3 hours and 35 minutes. You can see my challenge entry here. This is the far extreme of using an extremely high amount of DV to accelerate fast enough to make for a shorter trip. The transfer window planners go for the opposite: they give you the point to launch that uses the least amount of DV, but you can find a happy medium if you want.

People have been asking for spaceplanes too, custom categories would be nice also.