Zephram Kerman

Can you post an image of your ship? That might help to figure out what\'s going on. Or download one of the ships in this thread. In general, use: only one ASAS, enough control authority, and enough engines for at least 2 G\'s at launch.

It helps to watch the nav ball more closely than the animated rocket. In other words, the camera angles look cool but make navigation confusing, while the nav ball is always properly oriented.

Those two are right up close together. Nicely done! Congratulations. If they\'re still there, you might want to fast-forward until Kerbin is rising / setting behind them, and get a nice long-lens shot of that.

That\'s a very small Munship! Congratulations! I have three ideas for you: 1) drag the icon for the lander engine so that all engines start at launch time, and put fuel lines from the bottom of the boosters to your lander fuel tank, so that it is full when they separate; 2) optimize speeds on Kerbin ascent and Mun descent, 3) remove the legs and attach struts between the lander engine and its fuel tank. (This makes the engine strong enough to survive the landing. It\'ll be tippy though.) edit: Using the LTV-30 engines and my suggestions #1 and 2 above, I landed on Mun with half a tank to spare. It was almost enough to get home. Almost.

Oh weirrrrd! ;D

I, for one, welcome our new Aussie overlords! Congrats on even more publicity.

Radial is in reference to the planet. Right? No? It\'s in reference to the velocity vector? Oh, that would explain a few recent crashes. :-[

For that 4k figure, he was referring to Mun. For Kerbin\'s minimum orbit altitude, I can now confidently say: about 24 km. I de-orbited a ship with the hopes of exploiting the 'no drag for unfocused ships' thing. My plan was to send it to periapsis over KSC at 500m altitude, and get a screen shot of it whizzing by. Watching from another ship on the launch pad, Lo Yo Yo was on-course with a non-decaying orbit at 24 km, when the poor thing suddenly vaporized.

There are mods for submarines, articulated robotic arms with claws, silly wooden parts, Legos... Great googly moogly, I could be here for a long time. Dirigibles, you say? I\'ve got to get me one of these!

Finding these things is quite a challenge. Feel free to give it a shot. Can you find all three of the Munar ones? They\'re so small as to be nearly invisible until you\'re right on top of them. This challenge kept me busy for a long time.

Burning radially raises your orbit only if your motion is nearly horizontal. In which case, it is the same as '90° from your velocity vector in the 'skyward' direction', as Kosmo-not said. But in the case of a collision course with Mun, the correction would be done far away, while the radial direction is close to retrograde. Very hefty fuel penalty indeed.

I do something similar to your approach, but quite a bit more conservative. I try to keep my descent speed about 2-3% of altitude. (For comparison, in these terms your method would be 10%.) So I guess adjust the factor for your conditions and desired adrenalin level.

If you do this early, immediately upon entering Mun SOI, then the fuel cost is small because you have time and momentum on your side. Later, as your speed increases, it is more difficult to change direction. Also, this diagram is similar to changing inclination as you approach Mun. (Adapt the diagram by rotating your mind 90 degrees.) Burn north or south and a bit inwards to make your Munar orbit inclined, or even polar if you want to. Also handy for correcting when the inclination is accidental, just do the opposite.

Yep, me too. Did a sub-orbital trip to put a cart at KSC2. Too fast, too low, too proud for parachutes... too many pieces to clean up.

This is the sort of thing that used to (like, just ten years ago) take CGI programmers months to do a static video to simulate the concept, and even those didn\'t look as cool as this. Oh jeez I love living in the future.

No worries. The 'That\'s not Kerbal; that\'s Kerbal' thread is part of what got me hooked on KSP.

Oh... wow... just, wow... This is the dawning of so many possibilities.

Wow, that must have taken all night! I once experimented with aerobraking at various PE. I quit trying at 60km after the at least a dozen orbits. Now I shoot for 35-40 km, or else I call them 'lost'.

I\'ve been warned to use Notepad++, which is different from the familiar Notepad and is freeware. The issue is two different kinds of EOL character. Not sure if the issue carries over to the Mac side of town; I\'m afraid to cross those tracks after dark.

Oh, I hate it when that happens!

Very nice animation Sordid. In other words, the engine nozzle can pivot, so that the thrust comes out at an angle. That helps steer the craft, but only while the engines are running. It looks like this: (Skip to time 1:48.)

Are you saying perfectly round orbits drift more than eccentric ones due to rounding errors or something? That would explain a lot.

Oh guys, I was wondering about making it a feature request. The configuration I referred to would be deep in the software code, not something we could tweak. At least, not at this stage of the game\'s development. Kerbol is just a powerful light point, so I\'m not sure he counts at all. But Mun is an exception to the 2 km rule, which makes me wonder if the devs can make certain objects visible farther away than other objects. By the way, Kerbin is a spaceship, and we are all Kerbanauts on some kind of trip, man....

Heyyyy, another undocumented keybinding! Nice tip! Finding these are just as fun as the Easter eggs in game.

For stuff that still has a crew, use the observatory to go to those flights, then 'end flight'. This deletes anything associated with the command pod. I think it does not delete anything called 'debris'. For the 'debris' floating around after a flight, go in the settings and change the 'max persistent debris' setting to 25 then apply. You can always change it back if you want to rebuild Kerbin\'s rings. Going forward, if your ship crashes in such a way that stuff is still floating around, do 'restart flight', even if you don\'t want a do-over. This has the effect of rewinding time so that the debris never happened.