Sidereus

>Rescue Kerbal from surface of Ike. >Rendezvous with orbiting fuel refinery/space station in order to refuel. >Transfer Kerbal to the space station while awaiting ore, as there's not enough oxidizer >Receive ore, process it all into LOx, refuel rescue craft. >Send rescue craft back to Kerbin. >Complete aerocapture and landing. >Realize that the rescued Kerbal was never transferred back to the rescue craft and is still orbiting Ike, and that there aren't any saves to revert to.

Built a large orbital fuel refinery/space station destined for Ike: The station consists of three different vehicles: a resource scanning satellite (because I didn't bother sending one first), a robotic surface mining rig, and an orbital station that has the ISRU and has a Mk3 passenger module, so it has a 16 Kerbal capacity. It has one Docking Port Sr., two regular docking ports, and two Jr. docking ports. It's powered by a single skipper; I didn't really feel like dealing with LV-Ns, since the skipper alone will get it there and has a reasonable TWR.

I find that the sweet spot for the Whiplash around 18-21km. At that altitude you're unlikely to explode anything, so long as nothing rated below 2000 degrees is exposed; you can go balls out as long as you have O2. Below that, and you have to do a lot of throttle feathering to keep it below 800m/s, which, while realistic, is annoying. We really do need an engine that's between the Wheezley and the Whiplash in terms of performance. Something that will go mach 1.5-2.0 at most.

The tripod is necessary. You need a fairly long exposure to get anything to show up at night, and you can't hold a camera still long enough by hand. You also need to be able to trigger the camera remotely somehow, as pushing the button will cause vibration. The timer countdown method works, as does a remote trigger. And if your camera has a mirror, it's not a bad idea to use the mirror lockup feature, if your camera has it; mirror slap also causes vibrations. I saw a couple Iridium flares a year or so back while stargazing. I didn't know what it was at the time. It looked to me like something was breaking up and/or reentering because of the huge variation in brightness levels. Then it happened again a short time later. Pretty dramatic.

Managed to get a few pictures of it: ISS moves fast.

The moon has a very low albedo and only appears to be bright because of its proximity and because you're comparing it to space, which is far darker. If you were to take a chunk of the moon and look at it in normal light on earth, it would look like worn asphalt. Its brightness is due to an optical illusion called color constancy. Ceres is also much farther away from the sun than the Moon is, and also much smaller, so it's not going to reflect nearly as much light thanks to the inverse square law.

Or, you know, they're making it easier for human eyes to see so people can see what's going on and don't have to read the raw data, but sure, we can go with that.

I voted "LV-N", though I suppose it's mostly the fact that it doesn't have a very wide variety of fuel tanks for it atm. It's pretty much Mk3 or go home. It'd also be nice to have a 2.5m version....keeping part counts low is important on my computer, and having to cluster 4-6 LV-Ns to get a useful TWR is murder on my framerate... Also, we need some bigger versions of the jet engines and RAPIER, as well as something that goes in between the turbo and the basic jet engines - I'd like to get above mach 1 without having to constantly feather the throttle in order to keep from melting my wings off. Something that would take you to about mach 1.5-2 or so would be nice.

I'm a little surprised those wings make it into orbit; their temperature limit is 1200K, where as all the other wings are 2000. I almost went with those for my SSTO space plane, except the way I get into orbit almost always gets some parts up past 1500. I lost several shock cone air intakes before I realized that they had changed them so that the Ram air intakes take in more air, and have higher temperature limits. And yeah, MOAR ENGINES seems to be the way to into space with SSTOs these days. I played with several different designs for my MK3 SSTO before settling on 6 RAPIERs. I could get it into space with 5, but the design didn't look as good and it took some doing.

So that's what killed my Eve lander.... I had it parked in LKO while I was waiting for the launch window. I had already had problems with the utility bay on that vehicle; two of my four solar panels were counted as "stowed" when the service bay was closed because apparently they touched it somewhere, even though they weren't mounted on it. Then I clicked away to time warp (since it was only at 75km), came back and half the solar panels were destroyed (probably the two that were touching the service bay), along with several other parts. Anyway, I chalked it up to a random glitch. Guess it was the service bay wigging out.

I just use Kerbal Joint Reinforcement. It puts a stop to wet-noodle syndrome. I actually started using it in .90 to stop my Mk3 vehicles from coming apart from harsh glares, but it also keeps the use of space-tape for other designs to a minimum.

Minor nitpick: I was curious about the Atlas V 412, so I tried to hunt down some info on it. It turns out the 412 configuration has never flown. That's probably a 411. From what I can find, there have been three 411 launches, and zero 412 launches. Anyway, the way the rocket is designated is kind of interesting. The first number designates the diameter of the payload fairing in meters (it can be either 4 or 5 meters), the second digit is the number of SRBs (up to 3 with a 4m fairing, and up to 5 for a 5m fairing), and the third is the number of engines on the Centaur stage (up to 2). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_V#Variants 511 and 512 variants are also possible, but haven't been flown either. A fourth 411 is planned to be launched in 2016 and will carry the New Frontiers 3 OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, followed by three in 2017 to send up GPS and military com satellites, as well as one in 2018 to send up another GPS satellite. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Atlas_launches_%282010%E2%80%9319%29

I thought they fixed that in 1.1. I remember running a test right after it came out, and ejecting my fairings caused the vessel's weight to go down.

I think my biggest annoyance right now is the heating system. Besides it not being quite balanced for both plane and reentry yet, certain parts conduct heat far too readily. Stuff I have in service bays to keep safe is overheating, even when the bays are tucked safely behind other parts. In a real craft, insulation would be used to keep that from happening. I think the service bays need to be tweaked so they act as if they are heavily insulated, and do not conduct heat to or away from other parts nearly to the same degree they do now.

I think the bigger question is...why does your fairing look like a mushroom?

Not a huge fan of the way the heating works. Seems too much for fast planes, too little for reentry. Or maybe the turbo jets just need to be toned down....hard to keep things from blowing up without feathering the throttle a lot. Also, the temperature gauges make my plane look like it has the bar pox after a while. Thinking maybe they should be replaced with a single gauge somewhere that tells you the temperature of the hottest part, and have all the little ones be an option that can be enabled using F9. Other than that, I like it.

Meh. Lights are a resource hog, so I hardly ever use them except for planes (they're a useful indicator for how close you are to the ground, which is important when you don't have ground scatter enabled). I just make sure to land on the day side.

Yeah...I noticed the costs went way up with each new Kerbal you hired. I suppose that's one way to balance it vs. having overhead operating costs that get deducted from your total revenue each month or year, but it gets to be a lot of cash to put up front... Perhaps with this feature the price of the base level Kerbals could remain the same (or at least not go up nearly so quickly) so as to ease off the grind early in the game, while the leveled ones would give you a place to sink all your extra cash late in the game. Because they keep stranding their Kerbonauts, or just not liking they're never actually shown?

Just how fast are you coming in, and at what angle? Sounds like you're coming in waaay too steep and too fast. I landed a simple probe today (an OKTO probe core, a FL-T400 fuel tank, the LV-909 engine , some legs, 8 OX-STATs, and science gear) without any problems. Didn't even use a heatshield. Took a somewhat shallow approach coming from Ike - periapsis was around 10km IIRC. Once I got down to about 15km I slowed down some using my engine , then as soon as I came in under 500m/s or so I killed my engine to conserve fuel and popped my Mk16 parachute at about 5000m, with it set to open at 2500m. That slowed me down to about 30m/s, then when I got down to about 80m I fired my engine to kill my velocity until I was going around 4m/s. Easy landing.

Oh yeah, I was going to put something in there about leveled Kerbals being more expensive to hire. LOL

We know there are other space agencies on Kerbin, given that we have to rescue their Kerbalnauts from time to time. This is currently the only way to "poach" (i.e. hire your competitor's employees) Kerbalnauts. However, I suggest that you be able to recruit your unseen competitor's employees directly through the Astronaut Complex, and that these Kerbals come pre-leveled, as would be appropriate for an experienced Kerbalnaut. The level of the Kerbals you could recruit would depend on your reputation, along with the chance that a pre-leveled Kerbalnaut would submit an application. So someone just starting out and having <10% reputation might have a 1% chance of seeing a level-1 Kerbal show up in the astronaut complex, while someone who has a 90% reputation might see a 50% chance of a level 4 or 5 Kerbal applying. The cost of hiring leveled Kerbals would be commiserate with their level. This would take some of the grind off of leveling Kerbals for career mode, particularly for players who have many active missions.

The way I've been completing these contracts that require high altitude flights is make the main core of my plane a rocket, and stick a couple of basic jet engines with liquid fuel out on my wings. Then I get into the target area, start climbing vertically and hit the rocket until I reach the required altitude. Pretty easy. For example: (this one was also used to test the hydraulic manifold at 6000 or so feet, which is why it has one attached)

What mod allows you to offset the navball like that?

You never experienced the memory leaks in 0.90? Not sure how that's possible...it was much worse then. But it does seem there are still memory leaks in the game. I'm not using the -force-opengl option, and I'm getting them too. Keeps crashing my game, though not as often as it used to. ETA: one thing you can do to minimize it is use the lower resolution textures. I'm running quarter res right now, and that keeps the crashes to a minimum without having to go all the way down to eighth res...also turn off ground scatter.

I just had Mission Control explode on me today after I accidentally hit one of the street lamps outside of it with a science rover going about 5m/s...The buildings are really touchy.