Greep

More like harry potter... better suited for Volte-morte

Well the bright side of it is at least you get really experienced at aerobraking altitudes, as that cuts off a lot of the circularization inefficiency. But yeah... that looks pretty horrid for eeloo/moho/dres Nah, just go to ksp and warp ALthough if you do that, it's probably a good idea to get 80k altitude at least so you don't run into krakens. Edit: or warp before launch of course. Not like Duna's going anywhere in 10 minutes.

So I was thinking, I've been starting over career a few times just because I've been having fun seeing what I can do as I get better, and I've noticed something odd. Despite the "randomness" of contracts, my career is basically the same o.o Usually it will be like.. okay orbit... then do a rescue mission, then try for the moon, then minmus and maybe some satellite and temp scans along the way... Sure sometimes I'll get a part test that's profitable... maybe one... but that's pretty much it. Solution: Currently contracts are handled by what seems to be a mix of reputation and achievements. Why not just have all contract types and locations all the time? You think you can bring an asteroid to eeloo with 140 tons? Go ahead! Given the slightly spoilery nature, of course it would probably be disabled by default on normal or lower difficulty. While I get the idea of progression and all that, I think I can speak for anyone who has tried a second career attempt that it is always exactly the same, and kinda boring. I know ahead of time what ships I'm going to build since the early set of contracts are all the same. And while it essentially kills reputation as a resource, reputation loss and use is pretty meaningless to even a mildly experienced player.

Once the admin building gets balanced you would just do rep for funds, and buildings are just too darned costly. This sounds more like a bandaid fix for a long term problem. I think also that it's simply a mistake for default hard to change building prices at all. The current 60% contract funds 60% science 200% building costs is probably more "hard but fun" as 20% contract funds 60% science 50% building cost. Which kind of implies buildings just cost too much period on any difficulty... I think anyone who plays on hard says that rocket cost is negligible.

Yeah but if he can't even see his ship in space that sounds unusual :/ Usually there's a graphics setting called "gamma" in every game, try changing that.

Ah yeah.. I've tried it... and I always end up spending more fuel than I would've saved. Except in that one case, changing inclination close to jool is almost a non-option, but the method is just "set a maneuver node and wing it until I don't spend much fuel". I was just wondering if there was a more.. scientific way of doing it.

Ah yeah, that is true. Not efficient, just not horrible. It's pretty annoying that it's so hard to slide the Maneuver node while in kerbin to get the perfect ejection angle, though :/ While we're on the topic, is there a way to fix inclination for interplanetary while in kerbin? Or any situation where you're in an orbit trying to transfer to an orbit within the same system. I've been trying to figure out how to get from, say, pol to bop, and it's a pain.

Well you don't necessarily have to use the transfer window, here's an easy fuel efficient way of getting to another planet: 1)Just barely escape kerbin 2) circularize and get inclination with planet to 0ish by either burning anti-normal on AN or normal on DN. 3) Make a maneuver node anywhere and burn prograde or retrograde until you intersect with the planet's orbit, and then burn a few more dV 4) Pick the Maneuver node by the circle (not prograde, the center of the maneuver node) and slide it along your orbit until you get an encounter. Tada! When you think about it, this is exactly the same as the transfer window method, you are just letting the maneuver node show you where the transfer is! Technically, I think this can be inefficient if you're aiming for an ellitpical orbit... but not by much. Keep in mind, if you use no method or a bad method, being off by 1000 m/s is not as bad as it can get, you can be several thousand dV off, and if there's no aerobraking option, you will end up paying that offset DOUBLE.

This could seriously depend on what you're trying to do... especially now that there's base construction contracts, dropping a base and returning would pretty much always necessitate more than one stage. Otherwise, it also does depend on funds vs mass a lot... e.g., if it were decided on mass alone, for a probe you might want to have a lower rockomax stage, with an upper monopropellant/ 0-10 stage. But that makes no sense whatsoever if you cared about funds...

Absolutely this. When you say "hah, I'll try and fail and do minmus without patched conics" and find out it's not that hard :/ Just figured out how to find out where the ascending nodes are by eyballing orbits

Well, I've used the stayputnik, and it's pretty great Problem though: is this REALLY what we want new players' first encounter with unmanned probes to be? Lack of SAS and reaction wheels essentially means newbies have two big obstacles to overcome... I mean SAS is solved with piloting skills and torque is solved (sort of) by slapping on an inline reaction wheel... But it feels weird.

Well there's only so many ways of slapping together 18 tons when you have 120 science, so near duplicates are bound to happen. Like I think there is exactly one way to orbit at start. And yeah, I used to go for launch upgrade first but now I do the tracking station first... it's surprising what 18 tons can get you Now if only I can get to duna without patched conics :3

Eh I've been finding the T45s more and more useless as time goes on. I'm pretty sure a T30 with a tier-2 (or even tier-1) reaction wheel outdoes it anywhere.

Well if it's temperature scans, you don't need to worry about landing as much, just build a probe But yeah, imultiple kerbin survey scans at once is harder than minmus/mun if you don't know how to use jets. Remember, kerbin has an atmosphere, so you can't just orbit at 10k altitude as you would the mun, that's what is making it difficult. If you are determined to try to do it without wings/jets, you will need to break out of the atmosphere and go sub-orbital, then crash on the site. Well, you don't even necessarily have to go 70k, it should be a low arc, but you pretty much need to stay above 45k for most of the trip.

I wish there was simple "other" option xD I think there should be an ISP/thrust slider in the difficulty settings, in place of buildings taking more funds. This way, newbies can get to space easier while better players have less grind (there's not much but it is there) but harder contracts. I remember when I first played KSP and could not get things to orbit period for quite some time. I treated it like a game, not some research sim like people here do, so I didn't use the wiki or anything, I just kinda winged it. By the time I was doing moon landings, I still didn't even know quite how ISP worked, and I probably wasted a good 1000 dV from orbit because I couldn't land for crap. I still don't use Tsiolkovsky's equations, but I've developed heuristics over time that are good enough.

The reason for conflicts is there is no point in having a strategy that converts funds to science and one that converts science to funds at the same time. Even at max commit, it results in a net loss for you. Since each of the 6 resource based ones have a counterpart, you can only have 3 of them, while you can choose both of the two unique ones, making for 5 total.

I think the idea is you use them on, say, the .03 ton probe, with weightless thermometers, batteries, and science gear. If your engine is weightless too... you can get some pretty crazy efficiency. And TWR is no problem at all They're weightless just add 400 of them. Although with a probe you only need three, and only because that's needed for landing purposes. Edit: Actually, funny that TWR was mentioned. Since they're radially mounted and are weightless... the solution to an ion lander (Edit: this actually probably sucks, but the idea works for anything that just barely needs more TWR. Nukes e.g.): And while inefficient generally... it is pretty hilarious...

Well I personally don't care about proving a point, I was just curious myself, which is why I tried out slashy's experiment for myself xD I'm just saying, if I personally spent hours working on an equation, I'd want to test it out. Whether you post it to the forums or wish to discuss it is another matter. I mean, we're not ancient greeks here Although to be honest, if the aim of the equations was to just prove that excessive TWR doesn't really provide much improved efficiency, it's not like arkie's does either, in fact arkies says that efficiency drops off even sooner, so I'm not sure there's much merit in really doing all this arguing :/ But I guess "someone's wrong on the internet!" heh.

So anyways, in practical ksp terms, think I get what arkie is saying. When I was doing the experiment, with a TWR that is very low, like 1.5, you actually burn for a very long time. If you go straight horizontal for, say, 10 seconds, you can maintain altitude. However if you keep in that direction, you're altitude rises significantly over the course of the burn, so I had to go from pointing at 40 degrees to 5 (eventually 0, but the stupid hill :/). At a high TWR of like 12, I would've just started at 7 degrees and stayed there. Is this the "lift" arkie is trying to explain? Edit: Can't do video as I'm using a laptop and KSP is a RAM beast, but I think you can get my flight path from this post. Basically I just minimized apoapsis as much as I could for 90% of the burn. Precision of dV calculation is pretty much perfect, I added up the masses by hand for the initial mass, and for end mass I calculated total fuel mass (.5 tons), and percentage used, and used 3 decimal points (since display only shows two, no point in even going that precise), then subtracted the amount. Landing altitude was about 3400 if you need more precise I can check, I didn't realize it was that important to be very precise there. I will try again in a minute if you want a start and final screenshot. Same location? And this is the correct flight path right described here? Edit: wait this is silly heh, it is pretty easy to test. If you want improved accuracy and to know the flight path is correct, why don't you try it yourself?

Well, if you aerobrake, you don't have to fix your orbit at rendezvous right? So that's a few hundred dV. Brute force sounds like the way to go for duna, what with the atmosphere and near identical orbit inclination. I always "fail miserably" when trying to rendezvous with eve. But then I just bring extra dV xD

Hey, so I tried GoSlashy's approach and got essentially the exact same results xD Initial conditions: altitude: 3k. High, but flat, so I could just go straight horizontal, had to aim for 4k apoapsis after hitting about 200 m/s as there was a hill somewhere around that altitude far out intial mass: 2.0025 (big parachute, 2 radial chutes, full fl-100, capsule untweaked, engine) thrust limit of 16.5 with rockomax dV 875 to SoI, slight overshoot, though, since I didn't throttle limit towards the end. So I think it literally may have been exactly his answer of 871 :/ Admittedly, since this is "SoI" and not "escape velocity" I have no idea if this is a confirmation of LD's or a refutation lol, I'll just leave that up to you guys. If you want screenshots I could upload them, but if the results are identical I don't see much point :/

Ah yeah but I've never used hyper edit and it's getting late. So I will try this in the morning, though

Ah okay, Well I'll check it out in the morning. Right now I was just going to quick check the masses for tsiolkovsky, but kinda hard to do that if I don't have 100% the same parts as you

Yeah mine and wiki shows 250 and tweaking the fuel still has it show 260 for "full" capacity in the ship information :/ Is yours edited to have 100 or something?

Soo... anyways, I tried looking up the part masses of GoSlashy's ship and... couldn't find an RCS tank that has 100 capacity? I'm just a little confused, wondering if this is a modded part or if I'm just missing something obvious.