Goddess Bhavani

Into the fires, all shiny and chrome! (Do Kerbals take out a can of silver cake paint and spray their mouths with it? ) Earlier I had 128 tons of meticulously designed, cutting edge assembly went up 2000m into the air then try to flip itself sideways due to lack of struts. My excuse: "It's just a simulation!"

This made my day. *Adds breading:chicken ratio to cooking knowledge*

Oh the last pic must be some sort of concept art for the real jet. The one in the hangar right? No I'm using the free Sketchfab, which amongst some other restrictions, is limited to stock backgrounds and 5 annotations. Quite alright for KSP showcases actually, at least for smaller craft.

Kerbal Engineer tells me my Proton rocket replica has a first stage surface TWR of 1.36, which is perfectly fine considering fuel burn will lose a lot of mass right after liftoff. Lo and behold I was doing and 'overweight' launch of a Salyut style space station core, and neglected to inspect the crucial atmospheric TWR before rolling out to the pad. Have you ever tried to launch a 140 ton rocket with a TWR of 1.2? The SAS doesn't even work right and the stack wants to tip over even before tower-clearing altitude! Worse, I had already quicksaved the game and resumed it with the faulty rocket on the pad so I did not want to revert to VAB. So how did I fly it? Probably something like the real Proton, which appears to rise into the air very, very slowly straight up, and start its gravity turn somewhere high in the air. No wonder the second stage of that rocket looks so huge. Thankfully I had a generally similar configuration (albeit the first stage has 6 outer BACC boosters instead of 6 LF engines in fairings) and the launch went without a hitch, although now the core module is short about 20% fuel needed to compensate for upper atmosphere drag and circularize itself. No matter, I just launched another service module to act as its transmunar injection stage, after hooking up a small flotilla of mini landers and a crew escape shuttle to the station core exterior.

Indeed, I like sitting in the lander can amid space station assembly sessions. Not only is it cosy, with RasterPropMonitor installed, it has just the right number of MFDs to monitor every single security camera or flight data display needed to make me feel like an evil imaginary space station overlord.

I've just been reminded I've been playing since 2012 and have never left Kerbin SOI

Being pressed into service as a scientific survey aircraft, Hellblazer's Wallpaper Factory contributed an awesome screenshot of the Skorpion with a payload of dropsondes and a drop tank over the mountains.

I don't see any practical purpose of spaceplanes in my career game either but planes are all round fun to build and fly even if as previous mentioned, science bombing has no purpose whatsoever unless I have experiments that I somehow never conducted during the normal course of gameplay. I'm looking forward to building turboramjet craft though but in the meantime, making simple aircraft replicas is really a lot of fun. As I use DMagic science parts, short takeoff and landing (STOL) capable planes can be very useful to obtain science, and unlike sub-orbital science payloads, I can 'sell' the plane after landing for the full build price. So in short I don't use planes a lot, but when they do, they look like this: Polish Air Force PZL-230F "Skorpion" with dropsonde payload on a mountain survey mission. Screenshot edited by Hellblazer's Wallpaper Factory You also could try building maneuverable re-entry vehicles, you know, capsules that fly back to the runway after re-entry. Something like this rocket-launched micro-shuttle. Sometimes the top part of the stack generates so much lift, I need to add plane wings on the rocket to balance it out, something like the real-life X-20 Dyna Soar / Winged Titan Booster concept.

I tried to dock a micro-shuttle to my station with a partially fuelled ascent stage still stuck to it, with no RCS on that rocket stage. This is somewhat easy to rectify, just stabilize the ship near the station, switch to the station, and fly the station over to the incoming craft Basically have your orange tank be the "passive" target in the docking maneuver.

Splendid advice all around. To make things even simpler, do this: 1) Launch a passive docking target into a 150x150km equatorial orbit. It does not need to be a ship, just a junior docking port connected to a probe core and maybe a structural girder if you want it to look bigger. The probe core has SAS so it can orient itself whichever way you want. Leave it there and return to space center. 2) Send aloft a Mk.1 capsule with junior docking port at the top, an RCS tank (or two) and a small fuel tank with LV-909. Bring bigger fuel tank if you're not up to speed on orbital interceptions. Wait for the docking target to complete 3/4 of its orbit, coming back to KSC from the west. When it passes the desert area, spawn the interception capsule and target the docking target. It doesn't matter if you launch too late to intercept on the ascent itself. In fact what you want to do is launch eastwards behind the docking target, and establish a 70km x 70km orbit "under" and "behind" it. You will then be able to plot a maneuver node to intercept the docking target at a very low relative velocity, brake when you're about 2km from it and use RCS to slowly dock. Once you cancel target relative velocity to zero you are in the exact same orbit. This practise will rapidly enable you to proceed onwards to space station assembly, crewing and maintenance, plus rescue missions, because you will be doing active interceptions on passive targets all the time. If you miss or run out of fuel, that's fine, just watch how the orbits affect craft motion - lower orbits are faster, higher orbits are slower, that's why launching behind a docking target is simplest. 3) Go on to do practise rendezvous with debris, random satellites including those requiring orbital plane matching, moons, etc. You'll get a hang of the difference between a slow transfer and a fast one, and note the differences between a direct ascent to target (requiring huge dV to match velocity due to extreme closure speeds but insufficient orbital velocity) and a gradual rendezvous (like the first test scenario, the closure should be something less than 50m/s).

True! I've been wondering how to embed gifv like the imgur albums though. Maybe still unsupported. The gifvs ripped from youtube videos are after all, quite large. Here's an earlier one V-44 Quad Tilt Rotor Folding Mechanism

I've been playing KSP actively for quite some time now and enjoy sheninigans with simple craft. It's just glorious when I sift through an hour of gameplay footage and see this: (Sorry the forum doesn't support gif I think, so) Playing KSP makes my head hurt!

Playing KSP makes my head hurt (gif) http://i.imgur.com/EXpyUmq.gifv

I may have some wallpaper-worthy shots but this is the first time I've 'photographed' a space station-like object, so take your pick! In particular I'm looking for epic starship style effect for one or two of these images:

OMG..... can you deploy all the thermal control systems and post a pic... It will be glorious

In order to foster a more permanent munar exploration presence I decided to use the Earth Orbit Rendezvous concept and assemble a munar transit station for 2 mini landers and 1 micro shuttle in LKO. The whole shebang was constructed with Level 1 parts (meaning to say, I'm too el-cheapo to want to spend 900k on the research center upgrade...)

Enjoying using MRS on my early orbital stations and very small manned landers. Just a handful of parts from MRS and things suddenly become nicer to play with. Oh I'm talking about the 1.25-2.5m cone fuel tank and the 0.625m rocket engine of course

I love how you touched up the plane and the micro-shuttle stack. Amazing what a little touchup can do to provide lighting atmosphere and immersion not present in current KSP engine.

I'm at an interview, I didn't have to bring my resume and certificates because I already emailed them to the company way in advance. Welcome to the 21st Century. I'm then told by the hiring manager my background is not in IT and so unsuitable for the job. In my resume, I listed 7 years working as an IT administrator and listed my desktop and network troubleshooting experience, albeit, that wasn't my job title as I pulled double duty as head of department for a property trading outfit. Yeah. Ever heard of "career change" - its mentioned in my career goals on the front page of the resume, backed by 11 certificates I got last year from attending IT certification courses. And 7 years of troubleshooting expertise.

I second this - although the current SAS Implementation is "good enough" for basic piloting, it will be nice to have a manually adjustable target attitude as indicated by the OP. Currently to adjust the "attitude fix" our control input totally cuts off the SAS temporarily and this can disrupt the craft's balance significantly. In addition we need a slider to control SAS strength for reasons we already know. To prevent over-control and wobble.

This. Is. Awesome. 10/10 will test drive today. I wonder if anyone has constructed a Mad Max vehicle in KSP? If so a render made of a whole group of Mad Max vehicles with Jeb standing in front of the monster cars/trucks with the caption "What a lovely day" in handwritten script might be so amusing Edit, like this! http://www.flickeringmyth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/mad_max_fury_road_ver11_xlg-600x874.jpg Kind of fun I think if we had a thread where everyone built Mad Max vehicles for this render scene. I in particular would lol so hard if anyone made the Doof Wagon (the monster truck with the hundreds of speakers and flame shooting guitar!)

Okay here's a couple shots that need sprucing up Plane could use some gratuitous motion blur and faux navigation lights on wingtips. HotRockets style contrails would be nice to if its feasible to paint them on. http://i.imgur.com/yCh6ZKB.png The micro shuttle lighted by spotlights mounted on the launch clamps needs a bit more JJ Abrams http://i.imgur.com/9t80XaT.png

Day 44 of my 1.0.4 career, all rescue contracts are male. Must be something borked due to the large number of contract packs installed. Will wipe the contracts to stock after a round of mun mission and see if it ever goes back to gender parity.

My first 2.5m first stage tried to boost a 20 ton payload to orbit. Due to level 2 launchpad restrictions I could not use Kickback boosters. With 6 BACC SRBs the TWR was something like 1.2 at launch and there was a serious control issue causing SAS to try and tip the rocket on its side immediately after blast off. This is one rocket I delayed starting the gravity turn until above 4000m when there's enough airspeed to ensure stability. I did not want to revert to VAB either as I previously quicksaved with the rocket on the pad and then the game crashed on engine ignition. Still, with a souposphere style ascent profile the launch went well and the second and third stages pretty much flew a level flight path at 50 to 70km altitude and circularised precisely thanks to precise vertical velocity readouts from Kerbal Engineer. The self propelled Salyut style habitation module had in excess of 2k dV remaining, and will soon link up with two munar landers and a fuel tanker to add another 1k dV to it before doing transmunar injection with the landers attached. Conclusion: If using stock parts use Mainsail for Salyut / Mir / Zvezda sized payloads or use moar boosters.

After blitzing a whole lot of 'planes that (could) never fly in reality' in 0.90 I ventured on the edge of burning out sometime in 1.0.2 when I noticed myself building propeller planes from the 1930s of all things. And a fishing boat! Wat... Thankfully some moons ago I purchased Mass Effect 1 & 2 on the cheap via Steam Sale and got horribly addicted to them for a while, and this set my mind back on track for 1.0.4, which to me is perfectly alright as the aero model resembles old FAR and the new jet engine balancing made contruction of early jet fighters hassle free and rewarding. Crucially, looking at extreme amounts of sci-fi eyecandy in ME makes me want to adapt other peoples' spaceplane designs to see if I can come up with a certain stealth frigate for exploration of the solar system. Whenever I progress my 1.0.4 career enough to do so, that is. Probably in a few months of playing KSP - theres just no replacement for sending little green men to their doom, except maybe Mass Effect 3 on sale :3