suicidejunkie

SSTMinmus spaceplane Luna completed a 4x Contract Combo by landing on Mun to act as a 5+ Kerbal base. Unfortunately, I tried to take off horizontally instead of following procedure and using the nose puffs to set up a vertical launch. Two quick explosions later due to lack of atmospheric lift, the Munar "base" will be sticking around a lot longer than planned. With 200 days of lifesupport remaining, Lannand and crew have been told to sit tight and allow 60-80 days for replacement engines to be delivered.

I have a policy that all Kerbals rescued from LKO are to push their own wreckage to 65km PE before boarding the rescue ship. Keep space clean!

I put puffs on the nose of my Spaceplane to allow it to flip to a vertical launch orientation on Minmus. Also used to land; it comes down vertical, pumps the nukes to a dead stop and flips the nose down with gyro, and uses the nose puffs to arrest the rotation just as the wheels touch down. The nose puffs also serve as pitch boost for the cobra maneuver while descending back to Kerbin. And as an extra bonus, they're also involved in docking to push up and mate that dorsal docking port to stations.

My sized SSTMinmus has 2x Whiplash + 2x Nukes. Mk2 size with Fat-455 wings, 6 crew and ~2 tons of cargo. AP of 72km opposite KSC after ~12 minutes on the MET, with 1500+ m/s in the tank for landing on Minmus next to the fuel refinery. Profile is a rapid climb to 15km, level off and accelerate to 1500m/s during a slow climb up to ~22km, finally nukes on and maintain ~5m/s climb and ~4deg AoA while accelerating to 2km/s. Faster climb and less AoA as the speed approaches orbital velocity.

I have a perl script to edit my SFS and add these to all vehicles to protect against symmetry breaking and forgetfulness. 1 = Toggle Terriers (emergency/landing thrust on rockets with poodle/nuke cores) 7 = Radiators 8 = Retract drills 9 = Deploy drills and Start Harvesting (press twice) 0 = Toggle solar panels Also, for SSTO+Minmus spaceplanes, which are a staple craft: 1 = Toggle Air-breathing Engines 2 = Toggle nukes 3 = Toggle intakes 4 = Nose-up puffs (for holding 90 AoA on descent for rapid deceleration, and for flipping between vertical and horizontal during vacuum landing/launch) 5 = Retro Puffs

This does vary by region, but loyalty used to be a thing (in both directions). Projects and positions come and go, but people and companies would stick together. Around here, there are lots of people who have been in the office for 30-40 years, although the majority are 10-20. These people have seen the pitfalls already, they've practically memorized the docs, they know the customers, and they are shortcuts to advanced knowledge for everybody else. When we see the turnover overseas, we just shake our heads. If you can't get people to stick around for more than a year and a half, how do you expect to learn enough to do well? Oh, quality started dropping? Projects taking forever? Go figure.

With KAS, you could also re-cap the regular docking ports until they are needed.

The small ISRU can be used in some situations. On the surface, the small ISRU with a good engineer is about equal to a large ISRU with no engineer. (Terrible, in other words, but functional even with a low mass budget) In orbit, the small ISRU throws 80% of your ore mass out the airlock and you can't turn a net fuel profit unless you're shuttling ore up from Gilly or possibly Minmus.

Yep. The problem you had was unknowingly carrying many tons of payload in the form of useless oxidizer. If you drop the oxidizer from the design, you can replace that tonnage with a full science lab, an ISRU rig, and then perform the same mission profile and accomplish a lot more. If you have a mix of LF&O and both an LV-N and a LV909, you get more dV by burning off the oxidizer first with the chemical engine to lower your mass, and then burning whatever LF is left with the LV-N. If you've got rocket fuel tanks with default filling, then that means having the LV-N burn only the 0.00 units of LF left over at the end.

Here's an idea that avoids being KSP++: You are the manager of the VAB. Kerbals are driving around madly delivering random parts and doing doughnuts in their trucks, and you must take the parts and quickly plan and assemble rockets from them before they pile up. As you cap off each rocket, a Kerbal pilot will roll it out and launch it automatically. You get points based on how far they can go and what science packages were installed. The better you do, the faster the parts flow, and the more advanced the parts you get. KSP: Rocket Tetris

I have a 1km^2 debris field on the surface of Minmus I can upload tonight. It is a Mining rig that lithobroke at 30m/s, so if you've got a hearty crew it would open up a lot of possibilities. I'll just have to strip out the TACLS and Remotetech bits.

I had 1.1.x installed at one point, but it was unplayable in the sense that half the textures and buttons were not visible. I got a video card, and then after trying to run 1.1.x, things went rapidly downhill and I ended up formatting the HDD and reinstalling. So 1.1.x is currently not installed on my system.

No and No (unless this post counts) for me. That said, I do believe the releases would be better off being delayed until they are done. Patience is a virtue; exponentially so in rocketry. Ideally, there should not be deadlines or hard release dates to meet; such things are artificial constructions of marketing which compromise the actual engineering of the product IMO. If 1.1 hadn't come out until today, we'd all still be happy with 1.0.5 If 1.0 hadn't come out until today, we'd probably be going with 0.90, having fun but wondering about the delay, looking for a v0.95 and still being surprised by the 1.0-ness of the release. I don't know if the Hype Train thing actually helps sell more copies, but to me a stable release makes me far more willing to buy and/or recommend for others.

Don't neglect having a video card. I bought and installed a cheap $100 one just yesterday, and that has made a huge difference! Now I've got the settings cranked up and EVE+Scatterer and it still runs

Multiply Speed squared and pressure. The exact units don't matter, its just a question of higher or lower An excel chart won't be of much use: - At any particular speed, max Q will be where the air pressure is maximum (0 altitude). - At any particular altitude/pressure, max Q will be at the highest speed. The trick is that both speed and pressure are varying at the same time, in a different way for every launch and rocket. If you were to pause frequently and jot down your altitude (to calculate pressure) and velocity during your launch, you could then make a plot of your Q, and later on figure out where your max Q was. Perhaps adjust your launch profile and thrust for next time. Or if you've got FAR installed, open the details window and watch for when the live readout starts decreasing.

You might try looking up some of the rocket designs for the "island express" vehicles. That should get you the appropriate speeds, and then it would be a matter of surviving the heat (ablative parts?) long enough to trigger the test. Something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKfHGIMsPco

In my current save, I've got 6 dead Kerbals, with 30-odd crew still active and a fair number of missions each. Most of the casualties were random suborbital tourism and rescue contract pilots, who got distracted while reading the forums and forgot to open the chutes in time for landing. One major pilot was lost when their minmus bus broke up over the south pole. The control capsule was lost, but the hitchhiker module full of engineers and scientists survived thanks to one parachute being pre-triggered, combined with some daring EVAs at 2km up to trigger the other chutes.

Also, there needs to be a horse hidden somewhere on it.

In practice, a lot of my Minmus shots are slower than Hohmann; due to inaccuracies in the nodes and burn they end up loitering at AP waiting for Minmus to arrive, making it a 9 day trip instead of 7-8. At that point, I figure anything that can wait 7 days for delivery can also wait 9 days; so set a KAC timer, and let it ride while doing other launches and stuff.

When you have two kerbals, have one board, and one stand nearby. Roll the lander towards the outside kerbal and ramp it off their helmet to get it back vertical. The pilot can then hold with SAS while the second kerbal boards

I've sent a probe to Duna. It never actually arrived because I kept busy building sand castles in Kerbin's SOI, and then 1.0.5 dropped. Currently, I'm starting to feel the desire to send out a long range probe, while busy building things like TACLS-based portapotties on Minmus, but 1.1 is available... I do think that an L4/L5 body would be a great psychological stepping stone to tease players into the deep black, even if it doesn't save any actual dV.

I once swapped from a Hohmann transfer to a direct flight, when my bus with TACLS picked a few too many crew for the first time and then noticed it was down to 10% oxygen roughly halfway through the trip. I burned an extra 800m/s to reach minmus in the 4h30m I had left, and then burned the rest to slow down to a parabolic trajectory so Bill could rendezvous with a fresh can of air and 6 tons of landing fuel using a rescue vehicle he put together from debris parts and his KAS drill.

Designed a portapotty to be constructed and deployed by my EL rover as it circumnavigates. Any stranded Kerbonauts will be able to sit and relieve themselves while awaiting rescue. Self-cleaning and replenishing with the greenhouse and drill, and doubles as a communications relay.

I've finally gotten around to doing some science on this, but I've installed scansat since, so it isn't stock resource mapping. But in this situation, I found three biomes where calibrating caused the surface scanner % value to change.

After a staging incident previously, Valentina was left with only a munar ascent stage in LKO. Today, she traveled to mun, and began her descent towards the mining rig with the radiator panels it needed to operate. Pushing the limits, she brought the craft down only 20m/s short on dV and after a series of hard bounces leaving just 5 parts intact, the capsule rolled to a stop 350m downrange. With the help of Engineer Doburry, and the intact docking ports, the capsule has been moved to the top of the miner so she can get a lift back to orbit. She'll have to make an extended stay at the munar station while waiting for a shuttle bus, but the mission to deliver the radiators was successful despite the setbacks!