Rocket In My Pocket

Steps to obtain a proper orbit that won't take 2 hours to read: Take off from pad, heading out over the sea, start dipping your nose down ever so slightly. Let the rocket slowly tilt down until it's at a 45 degree angle, this should be completed before you've reached 10,000m Continue burning at 45 degrees until you Ap is at 75km. Cut throttle and wait until your time to Ap is 30 seconds. (You can see this by mousing over the Ap marker in map mode, but I recommend using the KER mod instead.) Nose down until your navball marker is on the line separating the blue/brown halves of the navball. Burn prograde being careful to keep your time to Ap between 5-25 seconds. (I usually shoot for around 10 seconds.) If time to Ap gets too low, nose up. If it gets to high, nose down. Once your Pe is at 75km cut throttle. Congrats! You're in a nice circular orbit of 75km/75km. If you have KER installed you'll be able to see your crafts Delta V as you are building it. You will need roughly 3,400Dv to reach orbit. (It never hurts to bring extra. You want a margin for error.) As far as general rocket construction goes, you can break it down into 4 basic stages. Your first stage should be Solid Rocket Boosters like the "Thumper" http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/BACC_"Thumper"_Solid_Fuel_Booster as they have high Thrust to Weight ratio which you will need down low in the atmo. Your second stage should be a medium engine like the "Reliant" http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/LV-T30_"Reliant"_Liquid_Fuel_Engine, and the third stage should be a low TWR/High efficiency engine like the "Terrier" http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/LV-909_"Terrier"_Liquid_Fuel_Engine Then atop all that you have the "payload" stage, which are the actual bits you want to get into space such as the command pod and science gathering parts. (Some parachutes and a heatshield wouldn't hurt either if you are planning on coming home!) If you have any other questions please don't hesitate to ask, best of luck!

Congrats, you deserve it. If someone had traveled back in time and found 4 year old me playing "Duckhunt" on his NES and told him someday he'd be landing virtual rockets of his own design on virtual planets he'd have laughed them out of the room and gone back to watching Power Rangers. You guys make the impossible; possible. <3

I can confirm this. Just switched my career save over to 1.1.3 and it takes multiple key presses to activate the lights on EVA. In one particularly bad incident I was completely unable to get the lights to work no matter how long I sat there and pressed the button. Never had this problem before in any version of KSP.

I'm from the U.S. but I just wanted to say that Canadians rock! I visited there once when I was younger and even though it was the French speaking portion and I didn't speak French everyone was super polite and helpful. They made me feel really welcome and did everything but literally bend over backwards to help me. Not to mention how beautiful the country is! Alright...I'll get out of here and let you "canucks" talk about hockey or whatever.

Agreed! I've actually built up somewhat of a respect for the humble, old school taildragger from playing KSP. I've just heard so many horror stories from veteran pilots about how hard they are to get used to after flying a tricycle plane IRL that they make me a little nervous lol. That said... the "Piper Cub" is a much beloved plane for it's ruggedness, reliability, and prowess in taking off/landing anywhere. I'd really like to fly one some day!

Very cool. Nice find! Always great to see KSP getting covered on websites/in the news.

For clarification are you talking about this: The "Scorpion" tank from the Halo series? Or this:

I don't want to insult your piloting skills but... The classic "tricycle" pattern is one of the easiest gear setups to land on. It's those nasty "tail-draggers" you have to worry about. Take my word for it, I fly a Cessna 172 with a friend in real life.

To each his own, I have no problem with you playing the game in whatever way gives you the most fun. I just wanted to make a friendly suggestion about how to get better take off performance from planes in KSP, this is a common problem and one I'm not any less guilty of than any one else. I designed many a plane that careened down the runway like an out of control drag car before I finally read something on the forums that someone else had posted about the fulcrum effect of placing the gear just behind the COM. Perhaps I came off a bit "preachy" and "know it all-ish' but it's more like the converted trying to spread the good word! Anyways...It wouldn't hurt my feelings any if they changed the lights to 2-D models/sunk them into the ground/made them purely visual with no physics impact on a planes landing gear. It's fairly well agreed by the community as a whole that the rear landing gear go just behind the COM. I can provide plenty of pictures of planes from KSP that function beautifully and are designed as such if it's needed?

You keep the tail short or make it raised at an angle. Being very gentle as you take off helps as well. A well designed plane should only need a few degrees of nose lift to take off. Here are some real planes, google search some images and you'll find they all have one thing in common: The rear gear are near the COM. I find in KSP that if you make it "look right" it will "fly right."

Very likely, but on the off chance he's still about... You have to use the button on the bottom right of the screen that says "Insert other media" then "Insert image from URL" then you need to copy paste the URL of the image you have uploaded to an image hosting site like http://imgur.com/ If you need further help/instructions please ask and I or someone else will be happy to help you. Best of luck!

^ These two nailed it. A plane would have to be of truly epic proportions to require the entire runway. Make sure your rear landing gear is always just behind the COM. This makes a fulcrum that the plane can pivot on to raise it's nose.

Fix the image please. The suspense is killing me.

I played for quite awhile before I got into modding the game and made it as far as the Mun without KER. Once I started using it, I gained a better understanding of the things I had begun to have a hunch about on my own, it also keeps me from over designing my rockets which is a bad habit of mine. That said, I'm sure I could play without it now that I understand the mechanics of the game better, however without KER to "open the hood and show me the engine" so-to-speak I doubt I would have that clear grasp of what does and doesn't work. It's a fantastic learning tool and I don't think it gets enough credit in that respect. I don't have any plans to stop using it and it's always the first mod I update. Should be stock in my opinion.

This. Kerbals obviously live underground. The only structures visible on the entire surface of the planet are at the KSC. Also, you get "World First" awards for exploring Kerbin's surface. Even the concept of tire's being halfway up the tech tree points to their unfamiliarity with dwelling on a flat surface. The large eyes and short overall height helps them navigate their subterranean homes. Highly visible green skin helps them find each other in the low light conditions as well.

Am I the only one who immediately heard this in my head?

The part with the highest crash tolerance is oddly enough the Launch Stability Enhancer at 100 m/s. However since you can't exactly take those with you that doesn't really help. Some of the girder/beam parts are as high as 80 m/s which is fairly impressive. However it's a far cry from the 2000 m/s you are looking for. Maybe with enough of them you could absorb some of your impact speed but...I wouldn't want to be the Kerbal who tests it!

According to it's part.cfg file as well as the wiki it weighs 0.5 which is half a ton?

Agreed, it would be way more useful to me on my phone than it is in game. Then I could keep playing while I browsed for whatever I was looking for. I could also see this being part of an entire "KSP App" with all sorts of tools and calculators for KSP.

Alright, I figured it was worth mentioning, It's certainly happened to me before! A picture of an example aircraft that you made that suffers from this problem would be really helpful. As someone else stated above, make sure all the gear is attached to the body of the aircraft and not the wings, the wings tend to flex at the joint and cause problems. Best of luck!

On the off chance that it's something simple and silly... Have you tried resetting the trim? (Alt+ X) Perhaps you accidentally trimmed the yaw? Do you have any controllers plugged in? They could be sending unwanted signals to the game.

Yeah, those missions are really not worth the time or effort. Not that they can't be done, once you get some practice you can pretty much eyeball where you'll have to be as you re-enter to hit your target. But there are way easier ways to get funds/rep. That said if I do have to or feel like doing one of these for some reason, I typically build a very small plane, wrap it in a fairing, and send it up on a rocket, then de-orbit and glide back to a landing... not really the best way to do it, but it's the only way I've found that's any fun for me.

I used to play KSP on a 10 year old laptop, with decent frames per second. Have you turned down "Physics Delta Time" in the options menu? That should help quite a bit. As stated above more info about your computer would really help!

Right click the zip file and extract it to it's own folder. Go to that folder and find the "Precise Node" folder that is in the "GameData" folder. The file address at the top of the screen should look like this: Users>Deran(That's my name, yours will be different I imagine.)>Downloads>PreciseNode-1.2.3>PreciseNode-1.2.3>GameData>PreciseNode That is the folder you need to place in your GameData folder that is in the KSP install directory. PreciseNode.sin? Oh...wait a second you must be using the wrong link, you went to github where the mods source code can be downloaded, that's developer type stuff you don't need. This is the link you want: https://www.blizzy.de/precise-node/download.html

I haven't had any issues flying/landing planes both large and small. I don't tweak any of the wheel settings or build my planes any differently than I did in prior versions. Something tells me this is a bug that only affects certain computers/setups. Seems like half the people who play KSP can't use wheels at all and the other half are perfectly fine.