bewing

Yes, you get money back when the deorbited item gets recovered. The closer to KSC, the more money, of course. @Victor3:To deorbit an item, you activate all the parachutes in space (with their autodeploy tweakables set properly), then you fire the main engine retrograde until your Pe is around 65km, then you click on the proper decoupler and detach the piece of debris with its parachutes. Then turn the ship around prograde and fire the main engine again until your Pe is significantly above 70km again. Very important: then you have to switch back to the piece of debris and watch it fall all the way back to the ground, because if you aren't watching it, it'll get autodeleted instead.

Not that I doubt all of this academic theorizing, but I doubt all of this academic theorizing. Maybe things have changed a little in 1.1; but if I make my spaceplane with the Tailcone A and Precooler (and any engine!) and measure my fuel in LKO -- then replace the Tailcone and Precooler with a shock cone -- I get much better fuel numbers (and orbital deltaV) with the shock cone.

As far as "landing legs" go, my favorite thing to do with NERVs is to use the Type B swept wings. Fairly low drag during launch & weigh less than 2 girders. I use the offset tool to move the wings down 6 "clicks" until they line up with the engine bell (or a little below). But this rules out the use of fairings for the lander. I just go straight up through the atmosphere as fast as I reasonably can. After you get past the first 35km the fairings are useless anyway.

As FullMetalMachinist said, the game wanted you to make a spacetug with a detachable klaw and parachute on it, and use that to deorbit the cupola. Here is an example craft that I use for deorbiting debris -- it can deorbit 9 items, each up to 8 tons or so, before it runs out of deorbiters and I have to launch a new one:

Last time I tried something like this, the panels did not generate lift -- and those gigantors were able to hold together up to 100 m/s. I actually launched a plane and deployed the gigantors in flight.

Yes, it is surface speed. And your navball switches into Orbital speed mode between 35 and 36km altitude. But I find the easiest thing to do is to have the contract open in the list, and just wait until all the checkmarks turn green, then hit the test asap.

You asked for an easy way to reenter. If you really mean that, then try launching this ship: http://www.virtualrealitytoursllc.com/pix/suborb1.craft Launch it straight up. There are two pairs of tailfins on the top of the craft. When you get above the atmosphere, right-click to open the context menus of both pairs of tailfins. Click the "deploy" buttons on both sets of tailfins. Look closely at how I have the fins set. They suddenly give you maximum drag when "deployed" this way. The ship will reach about 200km and then fall back into the atmosphere. Do nothing -- just watch how the craft behaves. Those of us who use this call it the "fin trick". The lesson is, if you want an easy reentry, you need to use aerodynamics -- and not just some brainless heatshield or drogue parachutes.

Well, there is an additional issue there. Usually people use the "CoM indicator" to aim their ships at the center of asteroids. But now, when you klaw an asteroid, the CoM includes your ship. So the CoM moves as you wiggle your ship around -- if your klaw pivot actually works.

Even in hard mode, there is a lot of science available on Kerbin. The harder you make traveling off-world, the more important all the Kerbin science is. The Kerbin science is grindy too, of course -- but you can probably find those 180 science points pretty fast, for very little kash.

Ha. No way. I have found that the wheesley is totally underpowered compared to the panther, so I was always using the panther exclusively. I much prefer mach 2 to mach .8 -- but this has brought the wheesley back into balance again for me. Mach 1.5 with good fuel usage and a ceiling of 15km is much more tempting -- and I think it'll be better for noobies, too.

I don't remember what the "status" is supposed to indicate. As you say, when you have something in the klaw, it always says "locked". Maybe the fact that it says that is a bug. But the "Free Pivot" itself is working just fine for me. I free the pivot, and I can rotate my ship (wasd), and the klaw angle changes -- without releasing the klawed object. Then I hit "Lock Pivot" and the angle stops changing.

@llanthas: BTW -- have you tried taking your little wheesley plane to 5km altitude, level flight, and going to full thrust? If not, you may be surprised what happens.

That is a "Cutaway view." New in 1.1 on all krewed capsules. Click the little circular button next to the kerbal profile pix.

The one teeny tiny issue regarding this is that in 1.1.2, the prograde hold has a bug and overcorrects at high frequency. There's also a little bit of funny business about how to mount the cores is the most aesthetic way. Otherwise, I love the idea.

True. If I were programming it, I'd keep a list of all the non-focused craft that had solar. Once a minute, I'd do a special scan of the list and do just the calculation of light incidence and solar panel output. Then nobody could complain that it wasn't realistic, and it wouldn't consume much in the way of computational resources.

I'm not sure how powerful of an exploit it is? Certainly no more powerful than just switching focus away from the craft so that it continues running but stops consuming electricity.

The MK1 cockpit just glows for pretty. It actually has just as good heat resistance as the inline cockpit. And better than the crew cabin.

AHAHAHAHAHA! Ooops, I mean, Oh, dear. @OP: I bring my tourist ships down on the runway (vertically, with parachutes and no landing legs) at 10.5 m/s. That includes my suborbital ships that are made with a pair of hitchhiker cans. I have never had a single tourist die from the impact. So something wacko happened to you. Are you running mods? Perhaps it was the water, somehow. I always try to land on the runway for full funds recovery, of course. It's been quite a while (an understatement) since I landed a hitchhiker can in the water.

http://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/1129 Yup, 1129 is a very old bug report indeed. I just updated it, that it was still present. Note: these bug reports say that it is only smallish patches of Minmus that are transparent. Which explains why the bug is not more commonly reported.

Yep, even then it was and is only the craft that has focus that uses electricity.

Even if your GPU can still run it, 1.1.2 uses more RAM than 1.0.5 did. With only 2G, you'd need a massive amount of virtual memory.

I assume that with such a monster that you have struts and/or fuel ducts in there? Those parts (and radial drogue chutes) accidentally got set with new insanely high drag values. It is almost certainly not "generic" drag that you are experiencing. Atmospheric drag itself is unchanged between 1.0.5 and now. For many parts, their drag values are unchanged. For MK1 parts, the drag has been reduced by perhaps 25%.

You've got a corrupted game. If it's from steam, do a "file verification". If you can't access the right-click menu inside the VAB, things are very wrong.

I have a medium-heavy upper stage. In 1.0.5 I launched it with 5 kickbacks in a bottom stage, and 5 thumpers in a middle stage (created with symmetry), and I had big yaw and pitch problems during launch that I "solved" by slapping an enormous reaction wheel on the thing. So, I am still having the problem in stock 1.1.2. The upper stage flies straight all by itself, merely controlled by the reaction wheel in a HECS. So the Pitch/Yaw problems are not coming from there. I've tried rebuilding stage 2 and stage 3 from scratch, but nothing changes. In the atmosphere, the kickback stage can be controlled with aerodynamic control surfaces -- but you can see that there is a constant pitch and yaw control being applied. The thumper stage gets lit in the upper atmosphere, so the aerodynamic control surfaces are not effective to control that one. The reaction wheels have to apply more and more and more yaw/pitch until they max out -- and then the rocket starts to veer, of course. If I simplify stage 2 to being just a single thumper, the problem goes away. If I add 2 radial thumpers to the central one, the problem is smaller than with 4. I've tried the experiment with hammers, and they seem to do something similar. If the thrusts are equal from the SRBs, then experiencing a torque would mean that the radial mountings are not exactly the same distance on one side as on the other. Has anyone else seen this? Can anyone confirm it with an experiment or two?

No, this cannot be possible. Each lab keeps a list of which experiments have been processed into data already -- because you can only process each experiment once per lab. If you could process on one, and then move the data to another, then you could defeat the limit.