Hotel26

Quite so. I recommend this great article: Getting Started with Kerbal Konstructs by @Caerfinon

I was able to land my X-37B impression on the Mun at Armstrong Base. The attempt to relaunch it: was madly successful:

Thank you indeed for your post. I got all inspired and did an impressionist (not replica!) version, OTV-37, and have been having a lot of fun with it. It has a small equipment bay and I'm thinking I might be able to jimmy some SCANsat instrumentation in there (but probably not); and I'm about to send one to the Mun and attempt a landing and return from there. For no obvious logical reason. It is fun, anyway, to have up in a 60-degree orbit and then pick an airport to attempt to bring it back to. [I now return you to your SpaceX live feed.]

I'm not a nitpicker, nor a nitpicker's son, yet I'll be a nit-picking simulacrum until a nitpicker comes. There! I used the word simulacrum in a meaningful sentence...

(Welcome to the forum!) You are 'on topic' in that your proposal is about mining ore on Minmus. And I suppose that if you were playing Science or Contract, 'earning' the ore on Minmus is free (except for your time), but this would not be a good solution in Sandbox in which you are orbiting (in LKO) very close to the source of free fuel. You just need a way to get it into LKO or -- preferably -- two ways. I give to you: Titan v2 Titan v3

Monopoly, for instance, yes. Chess, Go, Poker, lots of puzzles: no. (Predictably someone will seize upon the notion that chess has 'knights' and 'bishops'. No, it has fanciful mnemonic names .) What is common about all games is that they have rules. Those rules are set by the creator. They can be entirely abstract, imaginary, creative. Or restricted, in certain genres, to some simulacrum. This is a useful term ( @Lisias ) because it does somewhat differentiate 'simulator' which commonly connotes some rule subset from reality (for a hopefully fun activity at home). As Jack Handy once mused: "Space is not only 'hard'. It is also not 'fun'. Get an aerospace job. See what I mean."

Not ideal, but you can use the scale factor in the static pop-up. You will see it default as 1.0, but you can reduce that to e.g. 0.5 (type it in). It scales the width, too, of course; the size of any markings, etc. The result is plausible on approach, so, hey...

You know... about a day after I built the airport on this strange little island... I had a Simplicity booster return for ASR recovery, that thundered overhead just a couple thousand meters above... Who knew building real estate downrange from KSC was not a good idea! I would have posted screenshots, but it was a night-time return. Anyway, I named it Kobe Island because the Kobe airport in Japan is built offshore on an artificial island. Which I think is totally cool -- because 'aerospace'.

I've had an inkling for some time that this was about to occur. An island has been thrust up suddenly from the seabed... Volcanic action? Kraken activity...? [click + arrow => slideshow] I call it Kobe Island. It is located at 0N 70W about 50 klicks downrange from the Kerbal Space Command. The island is only 1 m ASL but it's still going to need a boat ramp to allow aquatic traffic in and out. Probably a high-speed ferry in its future. It's a nice place to pack a Sunday picnic lunch and take a Gopher for a joy ride.

Hey, I guess I did. I will tell you what the best thing about being this old is... ...one Monday morning, the whole school all being gathered into the assembly hall to watch, live, Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface -- and being 14 at the time: which means I most vividly remember the whole experience and all its excitement. I will add that my country at that time also predated color TV (1975). So we were pretty lucky to see it at all. (Not that the transmissions were in color; just that technology was backward there then.) And I predated TV in my country (1956) also.

Precisely. Bring back Felipe. Fire all the fans full of ideas but no code. "Community input", so-called, should be via code with pull request. Nothing good has ever been done in the computer industry "by committee". Nada... Wishful thinking? Sure, but so refreshing and so very well-earned after five years of listening to the "cargo cult" wail for KSP2.

Be it known by proclamation: The Royal Plus-One Order of Merit has been awarded. -- King Farthur

Overnight, I took a break from playing KSP (!!) and wrote a small Python program to 'cleanse' various add-on MODULEs from craft, in transit through my Export directory, destined for KerbalX. It means that I can keep e.g. AtmosphericAutopilot, RasterPropMonitor, MAS and SCANsat installed but purge traces of those before publishing vanilla craft to KerbalX. The recently-installed SCANsat was the add-on that pushed me over the edge.

There are two things I don't like. 1. The first thing I don't like is clutter. For a long time, I cursed KSP because occasionally when I returned to the Tracking View, it would light up ALL the various craft types by default and show LOTS of clutter, especially relays buzzing everywhere. I would turn them all off except the type I was particularly looking for. Occasionally, when exiting the Tracking View (via the exit door) rather than e.g. switching to a ship, I would turn off that last type selection I had lit, so that everything was clean & tidy for the next use. Well, that was the problem: KSP figures it is useless (and perhaps confusing) to have no types lit, so it helpfully? then lights them all for you. Curses, KSP!! So now I just leave something like EVAs lit, because there are very few of those in progress. 2. The second thing I don't like is programs that make "useful assumptions and then (silently) take unilateral actions" -- such as the above. Double curses, KSP!! I was indeed very happy when I solved this mystery, though.

Very respectable! Precisely why you should get respect.

Just posting this one for posterity, as well. (Not a landmark, since I'm giving the coordinates.) 0.25S 27.7E Diamond Lake is easy to miss. The surrounding grasslands are elevated 600m higher than it. Discovered it on an equatorial ASR sweep for spent boosters and the like.

I recognize both those places, the first at 110W on the equator is the staging point for deorbit to KSC for many approaches. The other one is further West at the shore of the land mass that contains 'Dessert Airfield'. A little south outside the view of that shot, is another patch of submerged terrain, like an underwater island, where the water depth is only about 4m deep, as I recall. But you've asked a good question. Go take a look at e.g. Kayak Club to scratch your itch further...

You should go register at Who's the Oldest Active KSP Player? Then you can get some respect.

well that sounds like "clockwork" to me... Well done, Aviator!

[Caveat: I am no expert on Laythe as I have never deorbited there. [1]] In a similar situation, I would run this craft in orbit above Laythe in my 'Lab'[2] world and devise and tune a 'clockwork' landing. You simply deorbit one at a known longitude and see where it comes down. Then cheat & repeat, adjusting the deorbit location until you can 'follow the numbers', which is a 'clockwork' landing. In addition, I often use an approach in which the deorbit simply lowers the PE above a certain location to a certain altitude. For example on Kerbin, targeting a landing at KSC, 50km above 110W (retro performed opposite at 70E) because 50km is the lowest altitude one wants to fire the final retro (PE:-280 km) and then revert to prograde direction for flight. If I were approaching the skip problem, I'd certainly look at descending into the upper atmosphere for controlled aero-braking being tuned with a little thrust to allow the suborbit to decay, again: "by the numbers". You find out what that whole profile looks like in your Lab world view repeated experiments; then document it with the craft so that you can play it from the can at any time thereafter. [1] Yes, folks: Laythe is still in my future... [2] I run 'Lab' for development, test and experimentation and 'Orbit' for 'production'.

Arrogance. I got off Ubuntu back in 2012 when it "went all Microsoft" and (mostly) enforced its new and radically-different 'Unity' desktop UI. I had just got everything set up the way I wanted it. A grand discussion began about how to "opt out" and Canonical had to eat some crow for its unilateral arrogance. But it was too late for me: I then knew what Canonical was and that it wasn't an "open source" company. I have been happily on Mint ever since. (Same thing with Skype, btw: I jealously guarded a pre-Microsoft version installation for years, while I still used it.)

Dunno. I admit last Wednesday night when I suddenly got really curious about whether it is I[1], Hotel26, who should draw the sword Excalibur from... is the Oldest of Them All, I didn't think anything through very carefully. Can you do it without doxing, or otherwise embarrassing, anyone? If so, have at it... [1] loud, booming, theatrical voice

I really did! (And the humor.) It deserves the title. +10

@Kerbalsaurus recently asked "Who's the Oldest Active Forum Member?" and I thought: "well, that must be me: Rip Van Winkle". Turned out he meant something different -- but then I found I just had to know.. So, "Who is the Oldest Active Forum Member KSP player?". I am going to define old as "of decrepit age"; and active as meaning "plays KSP every week". Don't really care whether you're active in the forum. Just whether you can still command the Flight Director's desk at Mission Control... To play you just need to enter the year and (optionally) the month of your birth. (Sorry, anyone under 18 is strictly excluded from participating.) I'll likely keep a leader board here of everyone weighing in who is older than me. You can add a single-sentence comment to it, if you like. Everyone (over 18) is welcome to weigh in and maybe I'll make a histogram (of the youngsters). Don't feel shy about your age. No fibbing. Cheering: good. Jeering: bad. Same month/year counts as a draw. Notice I'm not promising to do anything (if it turns out to be too strenuous). This is one of the things you learn when your life expectancy gets to be as low as mine: "conserve energy!". I proceed now, bravely, to the next post (merged) paragraph to get the ball rolling... (and maybe now I can get some respect?!) Yes, we have a badge: (for those as or older than me) rmaine, October 1951, "inspired me to apply for an astronaut job" Hotel26, June 1955, "KSP is what gets me out of bed in the morning -- and keeps me late returning"

June 1955. Do I get either a badge or a senior discount for this?