mrclucks

If you have a high twr for landers, you can add some extra tanks via decouplers that extend below your engine. It's a good way to have makeshift landing legs and extra Dv, as long as you add fuel lines from the drop tanks to your main craft. If your twr ratio isn't as high as you want you can still do this method and then add some smaller engines onto the drop ranks

It's usually only when returning to kerbin and after getting into an orbit. Good thing is that I'll usually have a pretty elliptic orbit and only need a couple Eva's to bring my periapsis into the atmosphere. Once periapsis is below 60km I'll just wait out the grind(warp through space and and physical warp through the atmosphere) untill I get an orbit that will reenter. If my orbit is roughly circular before trying to return, then its my own fault for wasting dv when I could have the atmosphere slow me down

I have a Sig?! I'm almost always on my phone when on the forums so I never see SIG's regardless

When you shift click you are able to move it around as well as basically everything else you could do with one part. Click again to place it there Middle click on a part will display specs and even work on parts that have been tweaked to included parts resized by tweakscale mod

Pre 1.0.5 I had a kerbal with an AP of 100km and PE roughly 30 km who I thought was gonna die for sure. Tried desperately to keep him in orbit but lacked the required thrust so after I entered the atmosphere I figured what the heck and watched him survive re-entry(still amazed that 6 minutes of being on fire didn't kill him) and was sure he would explode when hit the surface . Instead he bounced a couple meters and promptly stood up. After that I promoted him so much that he doesn't have to go to space at all or do anything risky

You could give yourself the max science allowed on the sliding bar to remove alot of the grind, but not unlock the whole tree with one swoop. I personally max funds and science and then start pretty much doing anything I want that I can afford.

This thread has flipped my whole process of re-entry on its head. Faster is always better.....

Going interplanetary is hard. This is the first time in a year and a half that I have played a science/career mode and had both the know-how and proper tech to build something to go interplanetary, muck about, and return home with some nice science or screenshots but I do not have mechjeb installed and thus have to do all interplanetary transfers myself. I do know the general gist of how to transfer and a very rough approximation of on what angle is need from kerbin to other planets, but I'm still wasting hundreds of DV on very rough and inaccurate burns. KSP really needs to change their manuver system to enable players to easily manuvers tend or hundreds of days in ahead instead of only 1 orbit at a time( and a LKO orbit isnt even an hour so there's alot of clicking)

Using jools moons to give you a 'gravity brake' is probly the best thing since the oberth effect. I've even had a tylo encounter that brought my PE down so far that I would of gone inside of jool if I had not changed my tylo PE. Since it takes close to 100 days to get to jool PE once you've entered it's SOI, you can even adjust your orbit to try different moons to slow you down for a relatively cheep price

Gravity turn where you just keep burning to transfer to the mun is more efficient. Once you get high enough, the oberth effect starts weighing more than the atmospheric drag(somewhere between 60km and 45km if I were a betting man)

I've found interstellar to be too much of a pain since 1.0 but you don't have any radiators at all and the reactors won't start if they don't detect them. Besides that I know you need a reactor, generator, EC to start the reactor and reactor fuel but I'm not sure what else you may need.

Assuming you're already in an orbit, you first want to align your orbit fairly well from the ascending node or descending node (not actually necessary but its much easier if you do). Then you want to get an orbit where you can intercept your target at a relatively low speed. You can do this by having your AP or PE touching the target orbit and playing around with the other end so that you will eventually pass pretty close to your target after a few orbits, or you can get into an orbit outside or inside your target orbit which will help you get close to your target faster. Next step is when your next orbit will place you fairly close to your target (~20km for kerbin orbit) you'll want to set up a manuver node to finely adjust how close you will actually intercept and bring it down as close as you can, but 5km is usually the max distance for LKO. Once you have that close intercept, you will want to change to target mode and burn retrograde to the target when you get close so your relative speed is low. Once your speed is relatively low you've basically just rendezvoused. For docking I typically have the module that I'm docking to have its docking node face the craft that is doing the actual maneuvering. Then I use RCS and adjust the relative prograde vector align with the target vector while closing the gap between them. 1m/s per 100 m is typically fast enough but can be adjusted depending on how fast the RCS can change my velocity. Once I reach 50 meters I slow down to .2 m/s .

So the ad right below KSP says that it's 39.99$??!! Is this true? I got the game for 20$ and even though that was in .90 I don't think the price has doubled in a year and a half

Holy poop, for science seems like the best mod ever! Sorry mods for going off topic...

I have also found reentry to be a pain in 1.1.x. Coming in how I used to in 1.0.5 just has Me heating up uncontrollablly even though a PE of 30-40km should be good enough. The way I got around heating too much is to use active radiators so it can disapate heat and not blow me up

It all depends on what kind of satellite you want. Generic satellite in a vanilla install, I'll put a small probe core, a small fuel tank, the terrier, a couple hundred EC, a few solar panels, a few science expirements and a simple antenna. If I'm playing with Scansat or any other mapping mod, I'll take the generic satellite and increase my battery size while also putting on every mapping part available so I can do all the different scan in a relatively short time from each other. If you're playing with remote tech then its a whole other ball game and it would be best to ask in the mods thread or look for a guide/tutorial to help you out

After making a copy of my old save, I completely delete it and then download the new version. I personally don't trust save game compatibility between versions so I start fresh each and every time

Have you heard of galactic neighborhood? It's basically all of the planet packs

I usually just download the latest version and then copy the clean install in a dedicated KSP hard drive. I'm not sure how to get previous versions but I believe both steam and KSP store will allow you to go back one or two versions. As for mods, some of them will work properly between versions and some need to be updated for ever version including hotfixes(IE 1.0.1-1.0.2, 1.0.3-1.0.4-1.0.5, 1.1-1.1.1-1.1.2). Usually if you look in the mods thread, it will tell you in the OP or last few posts if it's been updated to the newest Version

I always build a custom lifter for my payloads because a. Making rockets is one of the top things I enjoy about the game, and b. I've tried creating standardrized lifters but its too boring for me. Only reason why I'll reuse a creation is because I want to send the same thing up multiple times, or Im just changing something minor to the payload and it won't effect the launch

This is the exact reason why I copy clean installs of every KSP version I download as well as mods I use, as well as the latest modded game when you go to a new version. It also helps you with your KSP fix when you grow tired of the current latest save you're playing (IE: I have a .90 save with remote tech where I'm slowly getting 100% coverage for all the whole kerbol system)

How are you getting thrust underwater? Do intakes and jetengines work unaffected?

I've run into this bug many times with various solar panels, but I have also had the solar panels act properly many times as well. Since I always land on a flats biome, I think it just has to do with some random spots on minmus which make minmus see through

WWJD What would jeb do

Depending on how much ore is needed will determine how big and what kind of craft is needed. You could make an SSTO with overpowered airbreathing engines to accelerate you to a ballistic trajectory with a high apoapsis and then use a vacuum engine to accelerate you out of orbit. Your orbit would almost always be a complete orbit around jool. Depending on how high your orbit is and how much your craft weighs, you could use ion engines to accelerate to an escape orbit from Laythe after using the overpowered airbreathing engines. You could also use one craft to mine the ore and then dock with your mother ship and escape out of laythes orbit. As long as you have the required amount of ore on that ship, you should have your contract completed