Stoney3K

Moar boosterz? In other words, a high TWR, vertical ascent ship is perfectly fair if you have some ridiculous payload, like an entire mothership or a station, that you are unable to turn on ascent (ie. the amount of off-center drag would be insane causing your ship to flip if you move an inch off prograde), and you would lose more fuel fighting drag than you would lose fighting gravity losses. It's difficult to do any numbers on that, because there is no way to determine the (numeric) amount of drag on a ship. Slamming a high drag ship straight up through the atmosphere so fast that it doesn't have any chance to lose energy due to drag may be more efficient in that case. But that's such an edge case that it may not be worth considering.

I tried building a simple base with this mod (as a contract for a Minmus base) but I can't seem to surface attach any of the components anywhere, so I can't stick them to a lifter, unless I attach them end-on or via their roof or floor nodes. Is this intentional? I can imagine it would be hard to put base modules in a cargo bay or on a lifter craft that has a central spine and can carry 2 strings of the basic base modules in one launch. It is possible to surface-attach stuff to the base modules, but it's not possible to surface-attach the base modules themselves to anything (like a radial decoupler).

A few guys already did VR for KSP on a Google Cardboard-like device with some Android apps, including TrinusVR which allows you to send your screen to your phone so you can view it with VR headgear. The results are pretty cool especially if you fly IVA. Not sure if the head tracking works decent enough though. That may still need some work which could warrant a special VR mod.

For an interplanetary transfer or a transfer to the edge of Kerbin's SOI, it doesn't really matter as much anymore. Why bother with estabilishing a parking orbit if you're just going to leave it anyway to escape Kerbin's gravity well altogeher? When you're burning for another planet, you might as well burn straight up at the proper moment.

There has always been a page on RPM for the 'Engine Ignitor' plugin, which I believe has not been updated since 0.25. Is the development of EI going to be picked up ever or is there going to be a replacement page for other stuff in RPM?

Why not land it on Dres? Play planetary pool billiards!

That was not what I was really wondering about. Why is the orbiter ascent upside down instead of flying SRBs down, cockpit up orientation? (Also, time to scale up the Kickbacks and ModuleManager them into having proper gimbals, so we can make decent shuttles.) @Corona688: Your chart shows why a gravity turn is more efficient for LKO. But the more the trajectory is 'vertical' as opposed to circling around Kerbin (ie. going to Mun, Minmus or interplanetary) the horizontal line becomes more and more tiny and therefore less relevant.

Don't use the 'retract' feature of the winch to anchor anything to the ground. It'll just rip the winch off your craft or even crush your craft into the ground.

I suspect that's not implemented yet. Station Science was intended as a mod to build space stations nearby Kerbin and possibly further out without any life support or kolonization mods, but now that it's moving into a more mature mod, that may actually be a good suggestion. Similarly, the way the MPL is laid out in 1.1.3, it would be possible to make it cooperate with Station Science. Just make sure the data payoff of the science lab and experiment modules is fairly low, and the MPL would be a good candidate for a helper component when the labs and experiment modules are so far off Kerbin that it stops being economical (or fun in any gameplay mode) to return them home. You could think of making some experiment results decay over time so that you actually must return them home or dump them in an MPL and transmit them, or they're lost and you'd need to do the experiment again. This would work if you could drop the experiment results either in an MPL, or keep them in the experiment bay, but not do both as is the case with stock science experiments (and the cause of the MPL being massively overpowered). It would also open up the opportunity to make Station Science work with surface bases.

Has anyone tried nailing down their bases with KAS ground pylons or anchors? I've used the ground pylons for solar farms before but I don't know if they can anchor bigger structures properly.

Well, the 'weight per Kerbal transported' was calculated assuming all Kerbals were transported in pressurized cabins. These weigh the same regardless of their payload, so I suspect the weight of a pressurized cabin is the weight of a *crewed* pressurized cabin. Counting the weight of their EVA suits when transporting them EVA seems fair, as it would, in theory, also allow command chairs in the equation. Otherwise the 'transport weight' of an EVA Kerbal is zero.

EVA Kerbals have some weight as well. 276 Kerbals with a weight of 90 kilograms each would add a weight of 24.84 tonnes. giving you a ratio of (26 + 24.84) / 276 = 0.184. Carrying them in EVA is the most mass efficient option but it is a pretty tedious task putting each one of them in a cargo bay (or any other flying box). Of course, you CAN load them using the cargo ramp. The absolute rock bottom would be 0.09 ton per Kerbal, ie. a lone Kerbal in his EVA suit swimming all the way to the island.

Isn't it possible to just generate a crapton of identical vessels on rails in the same orbit? Or do you need the vessels to be different, controllable, and moderately sensibly designed?

I'm gonna try that one again and ferry the Kerbals to their doo... er, transport, with a rover I already have on the pad. And recover the rover.

Seconded. Please give us a long 0,625m fuel tank for upper stages or landers.

Disable all torque wheels and see if the wobble persists. If that is the case, there is some part conflict in one of your modules. Generally on a station you only need one big reaction wheel or RCS to move it, adding more control sources will only result in controls fighting each other and wobble through SAS action.

Welcome to KSP 1.1.3, where legs and wheels turn into under-damped springs that can launch any contraption into the Sun. Try locking the suspension on your landing gear, increase damper strength, or even better: Don't put your base on legs but on a flat surface like an empty fuel tank, heat shield or structural panel.

I never understood why the default orientation for the launch pad is south-north which is perpendicular to the ship's direction as it would roll out of the VAB. A lot of players launch into equatorial orbits for anything beyond Kerbin's SOI, there are only a few scenarios where a S-N launch orientation would make sense (like polar orbits). The interesting thing is, the Space Shuttle launches in the same direction and rolls to face 'belly up' so it's actually upside down. Is that because of the aerodynamic properties of the shuttle and the external tank?

I have never been able to make an SSTO with the FAT wings, only with the Big-S ones. Are the airliner wings too draggy to be any good at supersonic speeds?

When you're going straight up, pitch and yaw are pretty ambiguous. Since there is no way to tell in which direction the 'up' axis of the spacecraft is travelling horizontally, you can't determine a heading. In this case, pitch and yaw are just based on assumptions on your spacecraft design, which by default, is pointing its 'roof' due north and its belly due south (the pitch axis). Usually people do a 90 degree roll before making a pitch down maneuver to start their gravity turn. Only when you have some horizontal velocity (not travelling vertical anymore) pitch and yaw actually start to have their respective meaning and there is a sense of heading.

So tell me what's the advantage of an Mk2 fuel tank over its Mk1 counterpart mounted in a Mk2 cargo bay? The latter has a crapton of empty space which you can stuff with all sorts of support hardware (or more fuel) and the mass difference is minimal.

From my research, the short Mk2 cargo bay will take either four Mk0 fuel tanks (which together carry the same amount as a Mk1 jet fuel tank), which gives you double the fuel capacity or the same capacity with empty space in the middle, or ten Oscar-B's (five on each side) with an FL-T400 in the middle. There's only a slight mass penalty from plumbing a few struts and fuel lines, and the space above the narrow tanks is large enough to store fuel cells or batteries, while still enabling the doors to close.

Most obvious answer: Try to narrow down the payload and maybe assemble the big station in multiple stages in orbit. It's a lot easier to launch an arrow into orbit than it is to launch a tennis ball or a pancake.

Define "stupidly draggy". I usually can't veer off more than 2-3 degrees from my prograde angle before my craft start flipping over, and that's with a simple rocket design which has a payload in a fairing, and 3 or 4 strap-on boosters. When your TWR is massive it means your angle of attack is going to increase as well if you want to make a turn at low altitude. Usually when I can't turn fast enough due to high TWR, I will burn the lower stages, coast and finish the turn, and then ignite the upper stage until Ap.

Splitting hairs here, but that's not a property of a vacuum, but a property of a spacecraft that is not connected to anything else. If an off-center reaction wheel were to result in a translational movement, it would violate the law of conservation of momentum (and it would be a propellantless rocket engine). It still remains very counter-intuitive because it means you can stick a million reaction wheels on one end of a 50 meter long girder with a fuel tank on the other end, and the ship will rotate around the center of it.