Zephram Kerman

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.

So I\'ve decided to mod some parts and make a friction-less orbiter. (See this thread for why I would want to.) I\'m using Tosh\'s cart mod, and R4mon\'s MechJeb and Muon scanner, otherwise only stock parts: half fuel tanks, LFE3s, struts, hoses, parachutes. I don\'t know why, but the thing seems to have more friction than normal, and is difficult to control if airspeed is greater than terminal velocity. Has anyone made a frictionless craft for atmospheric orbital use? Any suggestions?

So we\'ve all been using the Muon detector to scan Mun and Kerbin for munoliths and other anomalies. Now that the very last one is still eluding me, I\'m getting serious about the search. So I tried to figure out the optimal orbit, and realized some of my math has rusted beyond serviceability. Could someone help me figure this out? (I swear I could do this in my head 20 years ago.) Part 1: The width of the swath of ground covered by the detector as it passes overhead is (using the good ol\' Pythagorean theorem) = 2 * ?slant range2-altitude2 For example, at minimum altitude of 70km, the path width is 264 km. ( 2 * ?1502 - 702 ) Part 2: The surface of Kerbin rotates at 175.6 m/s (according to the in-game instrument). This means that in just over 25 minutes, the 264 km swath will move far enough that the next orbit will not overlap. ( T1 = 264 km / 175.6 m/s * 60 sec/min ) Part 3: How to calculate orbital period for a given altitude? (T2) If T1 < T2 then the swaths do not overlap, and parts of Kerbin near the equator might be skipped. edit: Thanks to MechJeb orbit info, we know that a 70km circular-ish orbit has T = 1834 seconds or 30.56 minutes. Looks like I should mod some parts to make a frictionless orbiter for low altitude surveys. But I\'d still like to find a formula for orbital period, to determine the proper altitude target.

We will be watching your progress with great interest, young Jedi. >D You can also simply attach images to your forum posts. They don\'t look quite as cool, but it\'s simple and adequate for images you don\'t want to keep forever.

An easy way to check if your rocket is under- or over-powered is MechJeb\'s autothrottle. If it\'s at 100% all the time, you should add engines somewhere or remove mass. If it\'s throttling back too much, you can remove engines to save mass without any performance penalty (in atmosphere). I like to use stacks with one engine for every three fuel tanks. Depending on the payload mass, I\'ll surround it with more of those stacks.

Found #4... BTW, I keep an image of the locations with lat/long for confirmation and posterity. PM me if you want one.

So, I\'ve heard all of the Kerbin munoliths and stuff have been found. But I haven\'t seen a screenshot like this one yet. Has anyone else actually found this one? Jeez the terrain was steep in this area. I did quite a bit of rock crawling to get close-ish to this one.

One of the KMA (Kerbin Muonic Anomaly) orbital surveyors has a strange way of looking at his brethren in polar orbits around Mun.

Yikes! That base looks more like some kind of industrial equipment, about to grind up a munolith and its friend.

Looking forward to clouds, weather, and stuff like this.

Like this:

The only scenario I can think of is a ship with only one stage of solid engines. But why do that? Agreed! 8)