Ape_Descendant

Most recently I have done this to make my life easier - Download the Kerbal Protractor for telling you when to launch for interplanetary travel. then attach one to a little lander with enough TWR for Kerbin flight and land it on one of the helipads ontop of hte VAB (or anywhere around KSC I guess I just wanted it to look cool sat up there). You can now always switch to a craft that will give you launch windows without cluttering up the launchpad.

Yes this caught me out last night! I had them inside the cargo bay of my SSTO and attempted to retract them just before reentry. I had flight engineer Lemgun Kerman out on EVA desperately trying to push the damn things back in only seconds before reentering the atmosphere. Suffice to say they were swiftly ripped off at around the 25,000m mark.

Right click one of the fuel tanks then holding down [ALT] right click the second tanker. Can then press the in/out buttons to transfer fuel *Edit Ninjad :-)

Although I do watch a lot of YouTube KSP vids, it was actually the XKCD comic that lead me to search about it. Downloaded the demo, played for about 10 minutes and then ....OMGIHAVETOBUYTHISGAMEHEREHERETAKEMYMONEY.

Indeed, when in doubt just attach some bits to some other bits...tis the Kerbal way.

Yeeeeehaaaaaa. My first ever SSTO....i am so chuffed with myself. I had an odd fuel balancing thing going on and actually had a lot more dv than KER said. Once i pumped the fuel from the front tanks to the back ones the dv remaining went up from 300m/s to 540m/s, not sure what thats all about? But....it worked.....yay me. I am so happy. And, clearly, easily pleased

I would recommend using a mod like Kerbal Engineer Redux to be honest. Then at least you will get information of the total Delta-v produced by the rocket. As long as you can get it above 4000m/s then should reach orbit no problem. Its really tricky to work it out by "eyeballing" the rocket. Adding MOAR! boosters doesnt always work as you are just adding more mass...and therefore need more thrust...so you add more boosters...which increases the mass...and so on.

......I have a large hand shapped slap mark on my face now....that is sooooo obvious. Thanks :-)

OMG this! I put a simple processing lab/station into orbit just to fulfil a contract. It only has the little solar panels on it. I went EVA and stored the data and then kicked off the processing, then i realised that the solar panels were not pointing at the sun (as in the entire station was pointing the wrong way!) but the scientists on board were so busy sciencing that they paid no attention to future power requirements. I realised too late and now there is no power for the SAS modules to turn the thing around.

I have no where near that many hours but I have noticed thatI, more often than not, need to lock the gimbals (certanly on the bigger engines) to avoid the rocket attempting a hula hoop dance everytime I change direction.

Poe alarm tingling...

Steady on. They were only after some rule clarification

I find that the little Android app "KSP Calculator" works pretty well. Still needs updating for the new aero but i sue it all the time for interplanetary requirements nad take off/landing with not atmosphere.

You could try that but the only thing with that plan is it can be quite tedious flying planes a quarter of the way around the planet to get the sciene that way. Better, i think, is to build a simple orbital rocket which should be pretty straightforward with only a little of the tech tree unlocked. Get a Kerbal into a Polar low Kerbin orbit and pick up EVA reports from each of the biomes as they pass beneath you. Advantage of that, over the plane plan, is that you get more science from EVA in space and you can safely use the time warp feature to pick up all the biomes. Kerbal Engineer mod is another one that will tell yo uwhat biome you are currently in/flying over.

The different areas on Kerbin count as different biomes (for example Grasslands, Dessert, Water, Highlands, Launch Pad, Runway ....). You can collect science in each of these. The same is true of the other planetary bodies (for example on Minmus you have Flats, Greater Flats, Lesser Flats and so on. E.g. if you build a "space plane" in the space plane hangar that is just a command pod and lauch it you will start on the runway, this is another biome so you can do your collection thing there. Once you have all this science you can use it to unlock parts in the Research Facility.