LN400

One thing to keep in mind is, when the first theories of "pre-Yuri" space travellers emerged, it was dab in the middle of the cold war with paranoid tendencies on both sides, among the public, the media and politicians alike. There was a fierce race going on, Sputnik shocked the West, both sides were desperate to be first at everything. You couldn't have found a better environment for conspiracy theories. Someone picked up something, but what that something was, well, nobody being able to tell or were ordered not to tell, it would have been a miracle of the highest order if there were no conspiracy theories and conspiracy theories have the property of not going away even when the truth is revealed. Call it mistrust, call it whatever you want but the way I see it, what we can tell from official documents that have been released, we have as full a story as we can ever get. Any alternative theories are a complete waste of time and effort the way I see it.

Not much of a reader really but a couple of books I have read to shreds: Lonely Heart Of the Cosmos - Dennis Overby The Code Book - Simon Singh (would love to get my hands on his Fermat's Last Theorem as well) HHGTTG Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut Unknown Soldier - Väinö Linna and a couple I haven't completely destroyed yet: A Higher Call - Adam Makos/Larry Alexander Life Among Billions of Stars, Civilizations in the Milky Way and Beyond? - Nils Mustelin

I usually go with the generic R-xxx for final rocket designs, adding to that a short mission description so I could for example have R-017 Minmus 2 sent after R-017 Minmus 1, a crewed mission to Minmus or R-009 Mun Rover 1. Saving partial rockets like main lifting stages with names equally generic where LL-xxx, ML-xxx and HL-xxx would mean light, medium and heavy lifter respectively. Special designs follow a similar pattern, sounding rockets are SR-xxx, test rigs are X-xxx and so on. I might add a letter to the name too if the design is a minor variation of another (more science parts for instance) so I could have R-017b if I change the original 017 slightly. Makes it very easy to find the rocket I need for a particular mission if I have one already fit for the job.

A bit odd that Wikipedia doesn't mention the Nedelin disaster in their list of spaceflight-related accidents and incidents but I digress. RIP, all those who have died while leading the way for all of us.

An extremely rough case of eyeballing here but just looking quickly at the image, I'd say you could shape it into a rectangle about 2-2.5 km x 5-ish km, that would be an area of 10-12.5 km^2 but nobody ever called me Hawkeye.

It's not far from the truth if one is to believe the given numbers, 4600 feet high, 5 square miles area, deformed to 1000 feet high with same volume and the new area is pretty close to the land size of Manhattan.

You can set each individual servo to inversed and adjust the travel range as necessary.

There have been so many bizarroplanes throughout history, from the unthinkable to the unflyable to the unsurvivable. The Christmas Bullet, widely considered the worst designed airplane in the history of flight Mignet HM.14, perhaps the one design that first spurred on the demand for wind tunnel tests before designs would be deemed airworthy. A contender for the worst designed aircraft in history, the ME-210 which had all the flight characteristics of a disintegrating grand piano but despite its tendency of entering unrecoverable spins and despite being scrapped by the German airforce, was produced in Hungary under licenceall while the new aircrafts kept increasing the absurdly high fatality count. Not as much a bizarre airplane as bizarre business decisions. My favourite and one straight out of KSP, the Sack AS-6, a round winged frankenplane made out of parts from various other airplanes, parts that were prone to falling off during demanding maneuvers such as taxiing.

Just a quick word on landings that works for me at least. Before takeoff, note the natural pitch of the aircraft on the runway and remember it, it will be your minimum pitch up during landing, preferably you'll land pitched up 3-5 degrees more than the minimum pitch since you don't want to land on the nose wheel. Next, in flight, play with the throttle and airspeed but stay clear of stall speed. Note how the aircraft will lose altitude when you throttle down, unless you compensate by pitching up. Use throttle as your main control for the descent rate during finals, with the nose pitched up a few degrees up from your minimum pitch, ease up carefully on the throttle and the plane should descend nicely. If you drop too quickly, throttle up a tad, if you don't sink fast enough, ease up carefully on the throttle and let the engine settle on the new rpm. Use throttle, not W or S to control the descent. If you have a good line-up to the runway (I normally line up from 5 to 10 km out), use yaw to fine adjust the heading, only use bank turn if you're way off and have high enough speed. As you approach the edge of the runway a few meters above ground, close the throttle all the way and do a very careful and smooth flare to bleed off speed but don't overdo it so you climb. Watch the VSI needle. If you bounce, the speed is too great or you're too aggressive on the S key. As the speed drops, keep the nose wheel up and land on the main wheels. At this point you should be near stall speed. Let the nose drop on its own while you engage the brakes. Of course, design matters and some designs have a very high stall speed but most designs that are flyable should have an at least semi-sane stall speed.

For landing, if you look closely there are small tanks underneath the crane and buggy with tiny engines, just enough to land safely. The crane has long enough "legs" that can be rotated down enough to function as landing legs, pop off the tanks and engine (using a docking port since I don't want a decoupler to shoot the thing skywards in the low gravity environment) then simply drive clear of the debris before straightening the legs for normal driving. The rover works very similarily except it doesn't have any landing legs at all but with the reaction wheel I am able to pitch over so the front wheels make contact, then drive/wiggle my way clear of the debris.

Does the rover have a reaction wheel? If so, what I do in those situations is to use the reaction wheel to tilt the entire rover over so I can see the marker on the navball. EDIT: My bad, completely missed the lander bit. Can you use the reaction wheel to tilt it over enough and still get back right side up?

If you don't mind mods, then Infernal Robotics offers some real neat solutions to bringing "oversized" cargo into space and to other worlds, all fitting inside fairings. I've made a crane that is now on Mun and several rovers, none of them needing more than 3.75m fairings. The fun challenge is to come up with a design where you can make it as compact as possible to fit inside the fairings. Mun crane, without and with fairings, and unpacked on the Mun surface: Unpacked it's more than 12 meters long. One of the bigger rovers:

Modular Rocket System has some 0.625 tanks/engines. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/93067-1-0-4-Modular-Rocket-Systems-v1-7-3-(2015-07-07)-Stock-alike-Parts-Pack

Yaw, or rudder would also be the primary control for lining up with the runway for landing. You don't want to bank a lot near stall speed.

I need some help with this piece. It is a WIP for an automated launch->orbit insertion. The problem: I have 1 when/then trigger and while other commands in that trigger seem to work fine (I tested several), the unlock steering does not work so right now I initiate the g-turn but the steering remains locked which is not really any good. Any insight as to why this particular command fails to execute? declare global lean to 0. //for measuring the angle between nose and srfprograde, need global for a when trigger. //P1 Liftoff declare pitchover to r(0,0,0). //Sets steering to vertical climb lock steering to up + r(0,0,180) + pitchover. //prepares auto throttle from liftoff until g-turn. list engines in eng. lock eng_thrust to eng[0]:thrust. lock ship_weight to ship:mass*9.81. lock twr to eng_thrust/ship_weight. set throt to 1. lock throttle to throt. wait 2. //tracks prograde marker for gravity turn lock traject_angle to up:yaw - ship:prograde:yaw. stage. //waits for the prograde marker to hit 40 degrees above the horizon where 90* is on the horizon. until traject_angle < 50 { if twr > 1.45 { set throt to throt-0.001. } if twr < 1.45 { set throt to throt+0.001. } } //P2 G-turn //Initiating set pitchover to r(0,-5,0). lock lean to abs(facing:yaw - srfprograde:yaw). when lean < 0.5 then { unlock steering. unlock lean. } //Performing G-turn phase 1 for a 51 seconds lead to apoapsis. until eta:apoapsis > 51 { if traject_angle > 45.5 { set throt to throt+0.001. } if traject_angle < 44.5 { set throt to throt - 0.001. } } unlock traject_angle. print "done". EDIT: I did some further testing on unlock and the same happened with throttle. It was stuck after the trigger activated. Is this a known issue? EDIT 2: Found the issue tracker and apparently there is a known issue with when and unlock but it appeared they solved it and one more thing: They said it was related to unlock being inside brackets but the latest test i had it with no brackets, just one line with unlock steering. Same problem so it's not the brackets it seems. EDIT 3. For the records: I use KOS 0.17.3.

In my current game I found a good use for the smallest stock fins. I have a 2 pod (Mk I with 2 radial chutes) rocket for single tourist + pilot and by placing 4 fins on the small nosecone the ship went straight as an arrow bottom first all the way through the atmosphere with SAS off and no steering from me. It added negligible drag if any on the way up and saved me all that e-power. Apo was 70100m and with a burn at apo to smooth out the return the peri was at around -350.000 which made for a somewhat hot but perfectly safe (if landing over water) return. The fins never even heated up enough to protest and the reduced (40 ablator points) heat shield shedded off some 7-8 points. Speed dropped below 1000 at around 10km and the rest was standard return to deployment at around 2500-3000m

I am always considering rovers but sometimes it's just not a viable option economically if I have say, a lander on standby around mun who happens to approach a cluster of survey spots. not to mention early in the game when rover wheels are long long hours of playing away. I like the way of thinking, a brick on the keyboard but seeing the sticky walk key in Oblivion as the greatest improvement over Morrowind, I for one sure could use such a function.

Is there a mod somewhere for making a sticky key for walking when EVA-ing on the surface or if not, can it be made? Would have been a real piece of gold that. Doing surveys would be a lot less tedious if one could press the sticky key and go away to make coffee or something while the kerbonaut walks the 15 km to the next objective.

Launched my jumplab to the upper atmosphere, did science, landed in the water and forgot to do the other half of the experiments, before screenshoting a stationary, hovering launch stability clamp at 5700 meters. It kinda made up for the bummer I have to do the water science bit again.

My 2 cents for what it's worth for out of atmosphere landing. Once you know the initial velocity, the mass of the ship, the engine thrust and the body's gravitational pull, you can work out the maximum acceleration of your ship. The reason acceleration is important is because it tells you how many seconds you need to change your speed from x to y. Any TWR above 1 is capable of stopping the decent completely but only if you have time for it, else the ground will bleed off your remaining speed. So know your max acceleration and you can tell if there is time to come to a safe landing speed.

I hear you, Pecan but what I was saying was that it is well worth doing those small launches when you start out, especially when you're new to KSP. There is tons to learn and there is no reason why all must be learned in one launch

Thank you for the reply. As for the progression, that varies a great deal between careers (currently running 6 different ones) from just starting to about 75-80 days game time in 3 weeks real time of getting to 600+ rep and unlocked all 160 point tech nodes. Still the same types of contract there now as when I returned from Mun. In that game, currently I have accepted parts tests and tourists, satelites around kerbin, mun and duna, as well as a fly by minmus contract.

Just wondering if this is a new problem but: I am using PP v1.1.7 (latest KSP) and with the PP SRB the First Launch contract won't trigger (the booster is the first stage of a larger rocket). I have tested the main rocket with and without the PP part, and the PP part alone and it seems it is indeed that booster that is causing trouble. If i knew how to include the craft file in this post you'd get that.

Some good advice in the posts above but I'll chime in anyway. Reentry speed from space isn't as important as the trajectory. Straight down is trouble. Ballistic, or in an arc, is safe-ish for the simple reason it will take longer to travel in an arc downwards and time is what you need to slow down. More time is good, little time is bad. If your mission is just to pop out of the atmosphere and return, don't go straight up. Do a normal launch. That will add that horizontal speed for a safe trajectory. In addition, you can make a small burn at apoapsis. You don't need a lot, 150m/s or so should be enough. Now, on the decent. one trick that isn't entirely safe but if you stay alert it works well. Make sure your navball shows orbital speed and know how the normal marker looks like (blue circle). If you want to bleed off energy faster, at high (70-45 km) altitude, point the nose at the normal marker and have the entire ship work as an airbrake. Pay close attention to heat and if you hear the sound of wind, point the nose retrograde again before the air and drag goes ape on your ship. At around 45 km it is best to go retrograde as things start to get a bit rough. Downwards, work on keeping the blunt edge prograde. You might struggle but don't allow the ship to flip. Early on in career mode you don't have extra batteries but the pod holds some charge you can use to point the blunt edge into the airstream. Be economical about it as it won't last very long but it is enough to get home safely. Expect to drop below 1000m/s at around 10-15km. That's when heat is dropping quick and drag and shock waves are your main concern. Keep the blunt edge prograde. Flipping around is bad news. Watch the speed as you get closer to ground. At around 230-250m/s, it is safe to deploy the chutes. As mentioned above, right clicking on any chute will tell you if it's safe, risky or unsafe to deploy. At this point it is entirely about speed. If you're still coming in a bit too fast for safe deployment say if the speed is more than 300m/s at 3000 meters, spend the remaining charge on pitching the nose over for greater drag. It's not a super brake but will help. Hope this will help you and remember, it is well worth doing small launches for them world first contracts to see how a particular ship design falls back to Kerbin, and even more importantly, how many chutes your rocket needs. As a rule of thumb, 1 chute per 1000 kg will get you down at around 5 m/s. Last: The total mass of the returning ship is important in several ways. One is, if your ship is very heavy say 10 tons, you might want to stage the chutes so that 1 chute will deploy first. Else you risk the g-forces rip the chutes off the ship.

This is driving me nuts. Reportedly, the offered contracts are randomly picked from a pool of contracts. That is definitely not what I've been looking at the past 8 weeks. Here's how it works in every one of my career games (close to 20 different games now from just started to further into the game, 600+ rep, good tech etc) when I reject a contract: Any survey/report/measurement on or around Kerbin contract will without a single exception to my knowledge be replaced by a new survey/report/measurement contract. Only change will be the agency offering the contract, the parameters and reward. Any test thud engine contract will either be replaced by a new test Thud engine contract or the contract will disappear momentarily until I reject another contract. Then another test Thud contract will be offered. No exception observed. As soon as I leave the atmosphere, the tourist contracts appear. They will invariably be replaced by new tourist contracts unless they disappear and reappear when I reject another contract. No exception observed. Any other test part contract will invariably be replaced by another test part contract. No exceptions observed. This is plain not random. This is systematically. Can anyone else confirm they are seeing the same issue in their game, or is it something not right about this install?