DonLorenzo

What kind of coding do you do that you need patients for test subjects? This I want to learn! (couldn\'t resist )

I am sorry that I am unable to find a single man worthy to become president of the United States. This one is funny, first you slag off the country as basically being worthless, but somehow it still needs an incredibly worthy man?

Good luck! What are you using for lander \'legs\'? I take it you are trying an RCS only return stage?

And look, taking the screenshot actually worked!

I just landed and returned safely. That was amazing. I\'ve been trying it for weeks on a netbook and the framerates just wouldnt allow accurate enough control. Now I\'m home and my desktop makes the galaxy and everything in it look amazing and also made the milestone possible. It felt extra epic that just like in the RL moon landing (well, sort of) I ran out of RCS juice 0,1 seconds after touchdown on the Mun. Journey back was uneventful. Good luck to you, here I\'ll share my massive rocket, it flies like a brick, mainly I think because it is one

wow that looks efficient. My stock munar rocket is two or three times larger. But then again I like that triple tri coupler 9 engined bottom that gives it that soviet R5 (was it the R5 that had a million engines?) look. Also are you landing on your engine? I\'m trying to land on three improvised legs (decoupler + R8 winglet) but I\'m not having a lot of success. Might budge and get some lander legs mod parts.

good point, however in the case of kearth it isnt enough to \'catch\' up i think

I would say yes. Ground distance has a set frame of reference (\'the ground\') though whereas \'total distance\' is more ambiguous. I can\'t imagine a frame of reference (except something silly like \'the spacecraft itself\' where the distance would be 0 always) where total distance would be less than less than ground distance though.

how does it do it?

well the catch is, ofcourse, that the lower the orbit means the higher the distance. Crucially though lower orbits also mean less time acceleration. I don\'t know off the top of my head but you should probably shoot for a orbit 1m outside the boundary for 1000x or 10,000x

After reading through the development forum and Nova\'s thread with his ideas for the future I thought up Challenge or Mission that might fit in developing an actual space program. This stems mainly from the posts saying a lot of launches would have to be cheap and routine. Cheap means efficient, so not a lot of overkill or room for error. So here goes, for this challenge. Use the attached rocket (or rebuild it while using the same or less parts) and put a \'sattelite\' (1 full fuel tank + 1 RCS fuel tank) in as high a circular orbit you can. Interpret this as a \'mission briefing\' you might get which boils down to \'we need x sattelite in orbit and we have this heap of parts, good luck\'. Bonus points for using less parts than I did (I would start by trying to eliminate the ASAS and winglets), and for getting it as high as possible obviously Rules: -stock parts only, and only as much as I used in my rocket (list follows below) -only circular orbits count -the \'satellite\' has to be 1 full fuel tank + 1 RCS fuel tank. You are allowed to drain the RCS tank prior to release though. -kerbonauts must return safely My best so far is deploying the satellite in a 153,3km x 153,0km orbit and returning I don\'t require screenshots or anything, include them if you like but there\'s nothing quite extraordinary about this that needs proving. the rocket 1x command pod + parachute 1x stack decoupler 1x SRB 1x stack decoupler 1x LFT 1x RCS tank 4x RCS thruster 1x stack decoupler 2x LFT 1x gimballing LFE 1x stack decoupler 1xASAS 1x stack tricoupler 9x LFT 3x ungimballed LFT 3x radial decoupler 3x uncontrollable winglet 3x SRB 3x struts So total list of parts 1x parachute 1x command module 4x stack decoupler 4x SRB 12x LFT 3x ungimballed LFE 1x gimballed LFE 1x ASAS 1x RCS fuel tank 4x RCS thruster 3x winglet 3x struts 3x radial decoupler 1x stack tri coupler

Why? Because of no orbital map? I\'m curious

There is no cockpit view, and apart from the windows on the command pod there is no real way to tell the orientation of your spacecraft visually. There is the navball in the center bottom of the screen, which takes about 5 minutes to get used to and makes it easy to orient yourself in relation to KSC, the celestial body you\'re orbiting and your velocity vector. Orientation in deep space can be tricky, yes, however AFAIK there\'s nothing to really aid you with that except developing that gut instinct.

Hey guys, decided to sign up, since the game and boards are pretty awesome. I\'ve stumbled onto this little gem through friends and being a massive space-buff (both sci fi and actual real exploration) instantly fell in love. Slight problem though, I\'m travelling South America at the moment and all I carry in computing power is the absolute cheapest netbook I could find. (think 1ghz atom processor, 1gb ram of which 512mb is shared video mem). Still I soldiered on at relativistic framerates and have now landed a stock rocket on mun. It\'s been one way missions so far since landing in any kind of non explosive way at 1/2fps is really really difficult At least the kerbals survived in their little pod. Funny anecdote, the other day I was in a very bumpy bus ride from Medellin to Bogota (lots of mountains in the way) and tried to build and launch a rocket. I now know what being jeb feels like on every mission since with every second bump in the road i\'d accidently press some wrong buttons (mostly igniting and seperating booster stages at the wrong times). That was funny and I laughed. That\'s my intro story. tl;dr: hi.