Racescort666

Yes! With RemoteTech, my probe list is hugely cluttered with my satellite networks. It makes finding the actual probes in the tracking station a little hard to find and the list and orbit paths are very cluttered.

Ironically, I got pretty much the same contract so this is the working version of my lander/recovery rover. I'm not sure what I want to do with it exactly this is the idea behind what I was talking about.

I can't remember if surface kerbals are automatically on Eva for their recovery or not but you can look in the astronaut complex and it will tell you what module the Kerbal is in before attempting recovery. If they are just on EVA, this method won't work for obvious reasons. That being said, I would recommend a "rover" that uses the aircraft retractable landing gear rather than the rover wheels and RCS for propulsion. I'm at work now but I can throw something together tonight if you'd like to see what I'm talking about. You have a rover with the klaw on the bottom and you can slowly roll over and align above the debris, then retract the landing gear to drop down on top of it.

There are a few people who have done it and posted videos to YouTube. I want to say that ShadowZone had a good video but I can't remember and I couldn't find the video I watched. With the introduction of ISRU in 1.0, an Eve return mission might be easier than it was previously although getting it down without burning up might be a bit more problematic.

I haven't read through the entire thread but from the first few pages and jumping around on it, it looks like you guys are looking for references for mechanisms and such. Is this still the case? I came across this thread while trying to figure out if I could use Solidworks to model parts for mods. (The answer is still unclear but I'm leaning toward no.) Anyway, my whole desire to do mods was that I thought it would be cool to make mods that had cool moving bits. Well, since I know more about cool moving bits than how to make mods, I figured I'd offer to help make some. My background is in mechanical engineering and I currently work in automotive but I worked briefly in aerospace.

The way to keep pilots relevant later in the game is to give them some skill/feature that the probes don't have, I don't really know what that might be though. I know that MechJeb does this and it's probably part of why people consider MechJeb to be the "easy button" but maneuver node execution would be useful. Probes might get this with the future requirement of antennae on probes. It's considerably more difficult to play with RemoteTech without the ability to execute nodes while occluded.

Until you get one with a highly inclined, highly eccentric, retrograde solar orbit. Not even once. - - - Updated - - - Yeah, somewhat exploitative. The thing that I've been doing (since I like the rescue missions) is to just accept the contract bring them back to KSC and dismiss them. The Kerbal version of "welcome home, you're fired."

I kind of agree having the profession of the Kerbal labeled in the contract since the profession generation is one of the more weird things in the game. That being said, you can check in the astronaut complex what their profession is and what type of capsule they are trapped in before launching anything to go rescue them. It's worth noting that the Kerbal professions are based off of their name only. There doesn't appear to be a clear way of how the name affects the profession of the Kerbal though. I tried messing around with it one day trying to change a profession to scientist and ended up going with Bonnie when numerous other names didn't work.

Well, if we're all chiming in about our dismally underpowered laptops we use to play KSP, I have an HP with 2.4/2.0GHz AMD Quad-Core A8-6410 APU and AMD Radeon HD 8210 graphics. Not terrible. I get about 6-12 fps during regular gameplay which varies a little depending on part count. I occasionally get as high as 15 fps with like 10 part satellites but average ships and space planes in the 50-200 part range I'll get around 8 fps. It's noticeably slower during atmospheric flight. I have been holding off building a new computer out of some leftover desktop parts I've got until 1.1 comes out. Hopefully the performance boost brings me from the verge of hating myself to merely being cautious about high part count space stations.

Try adding a small amount of dihedral to the wings and see if that helps improve stability. When you start to yaw, it'll change the angle of attack of the main wing and start to roll and bank rather than just yawing out of control.

I found that setting up rockets to stage without debris is easier later in the game with more fuel tank and engine options. That being said, I wasn't above editing the save file to make the orbits of my debris easier to get to and thus remove. Like Warzouz, I had a piece of debris that was incorrectly identified as a probe so I had to go in and change that anyway.

To some degree yes, real rockets can throttle. SSMEs could throttle to like 65% which is pretty good for a real life rocket engine but there are many engines that can't throttle that much if at all. The first stage of the Saturn V would shut down the center engine during ascent to reduce the thrust which I understand is a pretty common practice. Side note, the gif in your signature is awesome.

What about being able to toggle the altimeter between surface and altitude kind of like how you can toggle the speedometer (for lack of a better word) between surface, orbit, and target modes?

If you are trying to synchronize orbits of 2 or more satellites, it's important to make sure they have approximately the same semi-major axis. Kerbal engineer will display this value and I think it's in the game file too if you want to just edit it directly. The satellites will perturbate slightly relative to one another but they will be pretty well synchronized. As mentioned, the game uses a large number of significant digits as well as having issues with rounding error. If I had to guess, this would be the cause of the changes to your orbits.