Zephram Kerman

I\'m just speculating here, but I think it\'s safe to assume the game will run more and more slowly as features are introduced, and then speed up when they optimize the code before the final release.

Sorry to be the wet blanket, but... it doesn\'t look like a plateau. It\'s not flat, but jaggedy with peaks and a valley. Also, folks on Kerbin wouldn\'t know who Nebuchadnezzar was, even though it does sound cool. Perhaps something more 'in character', like The Fescue Range. If you say it with a flourish, it kinda works. Eh?

Congratulations! Yeah, that\'s pretty good for just the third day. Were there any close calls? Yes, pics please! As they say around here, 'Pics, or it didn\'t happen.' (But I\'ll believe you anyway.)

I should mention, it\'s 88° or 92° when you leave orbit, not from launch. Your heading at launch will change as you orbit around Kerbin, according to inclination. (For example, launching from KSC with heading 88° means your orbit is inclined 2°. It will change to 90° after a quarter orbit, then 92° halfway around, 90° at 3/4, and back to 88° at the end of the first orbit.) So be sure to set up your inclination at the correct time.

I like it! I like it, a lot!

Those holes are wide enough to fly into. How many can you visit? It depends mostly on your efficiency of landing. When you launch to get to the Munar polar region, you can get a head start on the Munar orbit inclination by modifying your launch heading to 88° or 92°. Leaving Kerbin on a heading of 88° will put you north of Mun, and 92° will put you south. Doing this instead of a 90° plane change in Munar orbit will give you extra fuel for tourism.

Very nice excursion report. You definitely did the right thing to visit KSC2 in a spaceplane. I used a ballistic launcher to send a cart instead, and it took me waaaay too long to get anywhere close. Just one thing... why is your nav ball made of mosaic tiles? Doesn\'t it take a lot of glue to update every time you turn? And where can I get one?

Sounds to me like you\'re running out of fuel before you can reach your goals. That might be due to your craft design being too small for the trip, or it might be due to inefficiencies in your trajectory. (If you get the ascent speed and gravity turn optimized, that leaves a lot of fuel for the rest of your trip.) Check out those tutorial videos. Those are helpful to find other mistakes that might be slowing you down. I prefer Kosmo-not\'s guide.

As it should be! A spaceplane should glide home. And safety margins are for humans.

Reinforcing your engines with (just enough) struts should help. But engines break off mainly due to too much weight resting on too few engines. So maybe your craft is underpowered? Adding engines might make it more efficient, and also solve the launchpad footprint issue. Kerbal rockets often look more like pyramids than aircraft.

I tried it out; the thrust-to-weight ratio is just fine at liftoff. In fact, it can throttle back to 90% between 2-10 km. It was hard to control the first time out. But then I noticed three of the lander engines were missing, which put it off balance. (Or, was the one radial engine not supposed to be there?) Fixing that made it quite stable. I think you could get away with removing one fuel tank from the center stack if you want to. Using standard ascent, gravity turn, and circularization on the second test flight, we had started TMI before it finally ran out of fuel. Usually I jettison the launcher while still circularizing (PE < 24 km), so that it doesn\'t clutter up my sky. The five lander engines are plenty powerful. I tested this by putting it on collision course and doing a nearly vertical descent with the fuel tanks nearly full. Maybe remove two or more of those engines, and use that weight budget for lander legs. (On touchdown, the craft did not tip over. But one of the engines fell off, of course.) Not sure if you want to use those radial engines as an ascent stage, or just for descent to discard on the surface. There is so much fuel, you could do either, or do several landings.

Since we\'re on the subject, what would you guys think of a map camera mode that is relative to the craft\'s radial axis? In other words, the camera still follows the craft but the planet and/or sky rotates behind the craft. I think it would seem more intuitive for most situations.

No, I\'m not a professional rocket scientist, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. Hey, welcome aboard Blueman. Nicely done, too.

Without using the map? Yes, be proud. If I had a spaceship, I\'d hire you.

Mechanical Space Kraken, FTW! 8) Nicely done, ot0_m0t0! Cool space station, well done with the rendezvous, and what a lucky break!

Ooh! Very, very handy graph. Question: does the W/m mean mass cancels out? (Not in real world, only in KSP.) That was noted in the Goddard Problem thread too.

I hope they\'ll make that an option someday. The earlier version worked better for me. (I\'m always disoriented anyway, so upside-down-ness was a small price to pay for being able to see the poles.)

I think this was one of my problems; I had forgotten to change the name on one of the parts. The other problems were likely related to the late hour at which I had done the changes. After starting over with fresh copies of the parts, everything works properly now, and I have a detector in 24km orbit. The detector doesn\'t like the name change, though. The new part appears in the VAB greyed out, with a note that it is not supported. I figure this is because the name is referenced in the mumech.dll somewhere. Not wanting to mess with that, I just altered the main part.

If you\'d rather not hack files, there is a graphical way to level your engines. Simply move the rocket up or down until the first engine nozzle touches the floor. (You\'ll see the nozzle start to disappear.) Then align all the other nozzles to touch the floor in the same way. If you\'re careful, they will all be exactly level. It\'s a bit tedious, but not so bad as editing the .craft file.

It sounds to me like we\'re on the right track. The names Ascensiam mentioned sound great to me. I expect if we were to move the issue into the general forum area in the way Togfox has proposed, these names would be vested by the entire community and would likely be popular. So it\'s a win / win for everyone.

10) See rules 4 and 6. +1, seconded, etc. In fact, the naming of features is important and complex enough to justify its own sub-forum. That would be a nice, tidy way to discuss and vote on the name of each feature. The polls should be changeable, to allow for consensus to shift to better ideas, until each thread is locked. Also, I think regions, continents, and constellations should be named as well. Hopefully someone can come up with a third map of the entire sky. Very nice job on the topo maps!

You\'ve got some interesting looking parts there. What mod(s) did you use?

Not sure, but try looking in the download thread. Or just ask there. Also, I think Sunday Punch pack is now obsolete and has been superseded by the Nova Punch pack. So if you\'re using an old pack, some of your issues might be version incompatibility. Someone please correct me if that\'s wrong.

That\'s what I did. I made copies of the parts first, and made these changes: maximum_drag = 0 minimum_drag = 0 angularDrag = 0 ...but for some reason, the thing seems to have more drag now than the stock parts. Could it have something to do with the mod parts?

I think he meant how to get the craft to the runway in the first place. This hasn\'t been implemented yet (in 0.14.4). While I don\'t have a step-by-step procedure, I can think of a few tips that might help: 1) F5 quicksave just before your deorbit burn, so that you can do some trial-and-error, 2) set your trajectory to overshoot KSC and a few Km eastward to compensate for Kerbin\'s rotation, 3) MechJeb has a landing calculator (not intended for planes, but it should deorbit on time to get you close), 4) this sounds like an extreme challenge, so do some test flights to make sure your plane is stable throughout the various phases. By the way, the techniques used by the real-life shuttle are just fascinating. The shuttle had (relatively) much more control of the reentry corridor than capsule-type craft like Mercury and Apollo. Basically they would trim the ship so that the angle-of-attack caused a constant 2-4 G, then kept doing rolls to steer the thing like a directional conduit borer.