bewing

Do you consider prepositioning a space station in permanent orbit to be "losing a part"?

Even in low orbit, a polar orbit gets you 25% more light than an equatorial orbit in a year (ie. 75% instead of around 50%). Which is still better than a high orbit.

Build the ship with a center line (made out of girders or anything you want) -- ie. don't put in that klaw initially. Use symmetry to build the radial stuff attached to the perfectly straight center line. Then trash the center of the center line. Then add your klaw.

The system is absolutely required to be able to generate an infinite number of contracts. To imagine that all those contracts could also be meaningful at the same time is ludicrous. Keep that word "infinite" in mind when thinking about contracts. In the real world, contracts are what someone else wants you to do -- and their desires do not usually perfectly align with your own. So to imagine that contracts would always be helpful in pushing you along to do exactly the things you want to do is also ludicrous. Career mode makes KSP into a strategy game. You gather resources to make progress in the game. The resources are: science and funds. Contracts are the chores you do to get funds, just as science activities are what you do to get science. If you don't have the patience for strategy games, I can understand that. Maybe career mode just isn't for you. As said above, if you want to exercise your mind while performing contracts, then invent ways to fulfill 3 or more contracts in a single mission -- it can get very inventive and imaginative if you try. And dragging a booster up into midair to fire it does teach you things about the game. Using the sliders in the VAB to adjust weight -- so you can get the altitudes correct. Using aerodynamics on rockets to adjust your orientation, lift, and drag in midair. Which parts have more drag. Which boosters can lift what loads, how far. Details of what staging methods give you more altitude, or more acceleration, or which don't do anything useful at all. Contracts encourage you to do wacky things with your craft (which you can then learn from), that you would never otherwise have tried. I am currently practicing doing precision aerodynamic landings of return vehicles on the launchpad, to maximize my recovery funds. I expect that this may help me do a lot better on my next mission to Eve. In the past, I thought the panther engine was woefully underpowered, until multiple contracts forced me to actually learn how to use that engine. Now I love it 10 times more than a Wheesley.

I'm using vanilla, not FAR or anything -- my planes never disintegrate in the air. There are two main ways they meet their demise: either I try to force a landing (with no parachute) out in the wilderness (often at night, on the first pass), or I'm simply boarding the cockpit after an EVA while floating in the water and the Kraken gets me. Since I'm using a keyboard for control, the all-on/ all-off nature of the controls is very unforgiving.

Wow! I'll have to try that out to make sure I understand, but that sure makes the small drills a lot more interesting.

Are you using a modded version? I'm using vanilla, and when I switch away from watching a ship with a drill, the drill stops. Yes, I know. But I'd rather have drills running on 5 planets and moons simultaneously, in a perfect world. Just provide power and cooling and come back to them in a week when I need the fuel.

^^ That's it exactly. It's not an intelligence question. It's the psychological traits of obliviousness to danger, and a lack of common sense.

Considering that you have to sit and watch them run, I'd rather have a drill that runs 5 times faster.

Orbital debris tends to be valuable. I carefully gather it up and attach it to my space station hub to make it grow. Pods from rescue missions have electric storage, monoprop storage, science storage, living space, and reaction wheels. I specifically build my second stages so that they can be captured, refueled, and reused. While they are attached to the hub, they provide liquid fuel storage tanks. Deorbiting that stuff is silly and wasteful. You can build entire interplanetary ships from "debris" if you try.

The way I see it, the Mun/Minimus are the trees, not the forest. If you look beyond the immediate goal, you really want everything that is already in orbit (including "debris" of every sort) to be reusable in space -- unless a contract specifies that you must bring it down. Stations with dedicated fuel transports, space tugs, landers, ore extraction, etc. In the real world, it takes so much money/fuel/deltaV to get stuff up there that bringing it back down is a crime.

Well, actually, they do always spawn a half meter in the air above the pad and then drop onto the pad, unless you are using the "Launch Stability Enhancer". Which is the thing that provides the motive force to make them fall over.

A klaw, so you can dock with things that have no docking capability. (Klaws are sooo much better than docking adapters! I don't see why people don't realize that.)

Rockets fall over if you place them off center on the launchpad, because the launchpad is not quite flat. You place them off center on the pad by moving them off center in the VAB. Also, rockets sit better on the central engine in the cluster. If you attach a couple engines to the side of the central one, and move them so they are lower than the central one, then your rocket will also fall over. You might think it should provide stability, having the rocket rest on the outer engines, but it doesn't.

If you build a seaplane with submarine capabilities and a small positive buoyancy, then takeoff is not an issue. You just dive, then bring the nose up -- and let buoyancy do the rest. This allows you to avoid all the issues with having parts be off the centerline, or of needing a long takeoff run. And there are definitely still bugs in the water crash calculations. The worst one being that when a kerbal boards a floating module, there are random sudden huge forces that can instantly destroy a craft and literally send parts 1000 meters into the air (probably an uninitialized variable bug). Beyond that, I have seen craft take water damage and be destroyed on leaving the water, into the air. Also, once a craft is in the water, it rotates around a different point than the CoM, but that new rotation point does not seem to be properly taken into account when calculating the impact velocities of the individual parts. I have seen rockets splash down very safely into the water, then the top slowly rotates over, and some fuel tank or science lab touches the water at .05 m/s -- and BOOM! Half the rocket turns to shrapnel.

After a few experiments having low-tech reentry vehicles explode into bits at 35Km or hit the ground at 300+ m/s, I decided that passive reentries just don't work very well anymore (with heat shields or whatever). So I either put a descent engine on everything, or make sure to have a bit of fuel left in my last liquid fuel stage. This gives the advantage that I don't need to discard the last engine before landing, and recover some money on landing. Another thing I did notice was that there is a big difference between a vehicle coming in stabilized tail first, or one that is unstabilized and intentionally rocking 90 degrees to either side or tumbling slowly. A craft coming in tail first will accelerate as it falls because of the current very low drag coefficient on engines. One that is tumbling or rocking will slow reasonably quickly.

Well, more biomes would certainly make the science points come easier at the beginning. But I actually have just more than enough of those to do what I want -- it's money to upgrade my R&D building that's my grinding bottleneck (as with several other guys on the other thread). But the thing about other non-structure biomes is that all 9 of the current ones can have a status of both "SrfLanded" and "SrfSplashed". So the nice thing about a SeaCave, or DeepUnderwater, or an additional "Ocean" biome is that you can still become both landed and splashed in each. (Where splashed means "not touching the ground", and landed means parked on the bottom of the ocean or on top of the sea cave.) And then the kerbonaut's RCS jetpack suit needs a slight negative bouyancy so you can do EVAs and take surface samples down on the bottom just like on land. And then the Ocean biome would be out even farther offshore than the Water biome, of course.

Actually, I've tested that in detail. (In fact the R&D Main Building is available at tier 1, but the Tracking Station Main Hub is not.) At a full tier 3, the VAB South Complex no longer exists -- and I'm sure it did exist in some previous version of the game. And it's not listed on the wiki Biomes page, anymore, either. And if you spend a minute and count all the Kerbin biomes that are on the Biomes list, it comes to 41. If you look at the Kerbin wiki page, it says 42. And includes the South Complex building. My whole deal is simply that if one "biome" disappeared from KSC, then I'm hoping a new one pops up somewhere else. And I'm wondering if anyone has seen it, or if there is a rumor that it will appear in a future version -- once the bugs get worked out of underwater travel, for example.

On the wiki, in one location, it claims that there are/were 42 total biomes on Kerbin. A very propitious and philosophically important number. In previous versions, apparently the 42nd was a structure called the VAB South Complex Building -- which seems to no longer exist. It is certainly not listed in the wiki under the VAB biomes list anymore, and I can't find it. So can it truly possibly be that there are only 41 biomes on Kerbin now? How could such a travesty be true? I was hoping that "Deep Underwater" would be the new 42nd biome, but the other submariners and I tried that, and it doesn't work. (But i think it would be really cool to make people explore underwater to get more science points!) Maybe a tiny cavern someplace? You park on top of it to be "landed" and then float inside to get "splashed" maybe?

I had this problem during a reentry to kerbin. It was the SAS that caused it. In my case, SAS was unneeded for the rest of the reentry, so I turned it off and landed just fine.

That's amusing to make a nosecone out of it. Not something I would think of! Have you tried a Juno nosecone? But I'd think that the answer is that when an engine is in it's proper location, that it is completely out of the airstream. So you either need a clever and complex airflow model that calculates the microenvironment around the part and has reasonable drag values -- or you program it up using the same airflow for all the parts and then put really low drag values on things that sit at the back end of the jet/rocket. And KSP currently does the 2nd.

Win V7 64bit, running 32bit steam version of KSP v1.0.5.1028 I did this once and saw a problem with my Wheesley engine, so I duplicated the flight and got the same result. OK, I'm flying toward the north ice cap, heading 30 degrees from KSC, at 5000 meters altitude, 240m/s. I'm 32:29 into the flight, and my Prop. Requirment Met is reading 97% and everything is good. One second later, my Prop Requirement Met drops in half to about 45%, my thrust falls in half, and my plane starts to fall out of the sky. The Prop Requirement Met value keeps falling and falling even as I scrub altitude, because I cannot maintain any airspeed. Eventually the plane ends up on the ground in some adjustable number of pieces. If I fly it down, then a couple minutes later, at 0 altitude and about 130m/s, the Prop Requirement Met value is down to about 18% as I recall. WTF? I have a screenshot at 32:33, but the system won't let me upload it. Edit: After a little more testing, the bug is in the fuel flow system from this particular aircraft design. The program is effectively giving me an infinite amount of fuel -- it "knows" that there are still 800 units of fuel left in the two front tanks, and it is somehow still drawing fuel at a max rate of .04/s (which is not enough to keep my plane airborne), but it is not subtracting any of that fuel flow from those tanks. So they are sitting there stuck at 400 units each. My plane partially runs out of power when the back 4 tanks get depleted of liquid fuel. I admit the design is funky. It's built to take a pilot and scientist halfway around the planet, taking lots of science samples along the way, then climb to 19000 meters 3 times with enough control that I can still land it one last time afterward. The fuselage of my plane (from front to back) is: small circular intake, MK1 command pod, MK1 liquid fuel fuselage, MK1 inline cockpit, MK1 liquid fuel fuselage, Science Jr., then 4 FL-T200 tanks, then a Wheesley, with a Thud strapped below the Wheesley. I suspect something about that order is blocking the fuel.