suicidejunkie

This sounds like you've welded the tanks to the hull, instead the decouplers. Aero will not prevent the tanks from scraping down the side of your rocket if they're not welded on, particularly when you're still under thrust. If the decouplers leave, and the tanks are still part of your ship, then clearly the parts are attached incorrectly. Do the same thing you have been doing in the VAB, but leave symmetry turned off and just add one booster. Next, look to the side and grab the separator out from between the hull and tank. If you've attached the tank correctly, you should have both tank and separator in your hand. If it doesn't, then you attached the tank to something else. NOW turn on symmetry and attach the verified subassembly.

This is where ore storage and a converter will work its magic. Regular fuel tanks cost 1/8th ton per ton of fuel carried, but ore tanks cost 1/15th. If my math is right, that means if you plan to carry 70 or more tons of fuel, the tank mass difference will pay for the 4 ton converter. And with the converter, you can decide on the fly if you need more pure LF for the nukes or LF+O for the combat drives.

Oh, here's another possibility, with double cheese for a dollar more: What happens if you make your ship doughnut shaped, or with a long moment arm, such that your geometric center and/or CoM are outside your actual hull? If the enemy puts their shots all dead center and you don't dodge, they would miss!

I usually just hook up with KAS hoses. They're great for short term use in transferring resources, although long term with save/load cycles, the physics of ground interaction tends to get a bit wibbly-wobbly and occasionally launch things into the sky. One thing I'd like to try is running a girder out to the side, and then putting a docking port on the top of it. Rovers could then drive over top, and lower their landing gear to hard dock to the base without needing precision engineering.

Skipping all the Sci-Fi discussion, try trading the heavy armor in for Whipple shields. Using the lightest parts you can find, form a wall around your ship with some standoff distance; whatever is appropriate to the weapon physics you're facing. The idea being to let the part be destroyed, but in doing so it will detonate the incoming projectile/missile at a safe distance from your actual hull where it will do no real damage. Having a low thrust high efficiency drive for patrolling, and saving your combat thrust engines for actual combat maneuvers will stretch things out as well. A fleet tanker, local bases, or an ISRU shuttle could be useful. Actually, on that note, for a sufficiently large vehicle, you can store most of your fuel in ORE tanks. After a certain size point the mass savings on the tanks will pay for the converter's mass and become profitable even without a harvesting shuttle.

Yes; it is good to note that '1km above terrain' often means 4km PE above 'sea level'. Preferably the orbit line should not intersect any terrain while putting the PE as low as possible. And definitely don't use mountains as backstops.

The Apollo picture sort of shows it, but the scaling isn't really the best. It is easiest if you come in horizontally. As noted above, set your PE to about a kilometer above the surface. Then burn retrograde at PE. I suggest setting a maneuver node at PE, and drag retrograde until it shows a full stop and drop. Start your actual burn at T-{half the burn time}. Tip the nose slightly above retrograde to keep your vertical speed near zero, and you will have all the time in the world to slow down because you are not descending (avoid targeting your landing just short of a mountain of course). After you kill your ~500m/s orbital velocity that way, you'll be hovering just above the surface (at the old PE altitude) and can gently set 'er down. Use the IVA view to keep an eye on the radar altimeter to see how close the surface is. You need to descend quickly to save fuel, but you also need to be able to stop at the end, so pick some safety limits, and adjust based on fuel levels and the Jeb-itude of your pilot: Try allowing a descent rate of 75-100 when the radar alt is pegged, drop to 50m/s when above 1000m, bring it down to 25 above 500m, then drop to 10m/s for the last 100m and puff it down to near zero at touchdown. Note how the time to impact remains somewhat constant at all altitudes under that scheme When you get more experience, you can blend that last step into the retrograde burn, and pull off a nice time-reversed gravity turn.

It might also be worth noting that the "Loading o)" animation on scene changes has the "reverse" leaders, rather than trails.

Those are the antipodes, but they're swapped. Your Debris arrow is the start and end point of the trip, and the pile of icons includes the factory base, a pile of crew shuttles, spare parts, and a little junk. The place you've got as the "landing site?" is the crash site where Bill broke his hopper's Poodle engine to prompt the run. Lannand drove the spare engine across the north to reach Bill, and they then swapped vehicles so Lannand could fly the broken rocket home with his piloting skills and Bill could deploy the satellites with his engineering skills on his trip across the south. The south pole was an actual destination on that leg because it is the optimal spot for a constant beam to Kerbin without the landscape getting in the way ever. The rover crash site is the debris about 10 degrees south of your arrow on the right side; Bill was about 30km from the finish line when he wrecked the rover and had to wheelie it north from there to the factory.

For me, KSP is the second best value for money spent on a game. (Including the cost of buying gift copies for others) It is only second, because it hasn't had a full decade to amortize the cost over like Space Empires IV did, and I don't have quite as much free time.

I drove within 10 degrees of the north pole, but the pole wasn't my goal; I just wanted to go over the top to get the spare parts to Bill at the antipode. I didn't even think about a circumnavigation by returning along the south until I was partway there. The equatorial routes seem to be fairly lenient on this thing, probably because there is no clear East Pole or West Pole making an obvious marker 90 degrees from the start As for sourcing, I suppose that depends how you count it; I didn't edit anything into place or anything, and the rover is a grandchild of KSC using Minmus ore for fuel and parts with EL. The rover was built on Minmus as I mentioned in the original post. It was built by the WildWest Seed Factory (it has expanded quite a bit since it landed, as you can see in the background of the ending screenshots of the trip): And *that* was built in orbit of Minmus from an orbital factory (which was entirely sourced from KSC including the rocketparts at the time, but is shown here getting a top-up of metal from the surface) (The parts container had a graphical glitch making it appear 10% smaller than it really is)

Trails are great when you're observing and the future is not your problem. Projections are critical when you're controlling, and the immediate future will be all your fault. Thus, I would have to say I have a slight preference to see trails in (for example) youtube videos (as long as it doesn't cause the player to do badly - incompetence is irritating), but I will only use the reverse/projection or solid lines when playing personally.

I had a rocket pause on the pad just last night, but that was because I forgot to fill the mainsail tanks with LF, so it just made a lot of SRB smoke as the clamps released and I was able to recover it before the TWR rose. I also once had a station launch that was squishy enough that I waited for the boosters to stop their vertical oscillations before releasing the upper launch clamps. That took off like a half-inflated balloon, but is definitely a special case worth manually changing the staging after installing the clamps. I often have engines and parachutes in the same stage, but that is a booster chute arm/deployment combined with an upper stage engine ignition. I think the current system gets the parachutes good enough most of the time. Maybe a special case of parachutes not being allowed in the initial stage, to account for the Flea+Capsule+Chute starter design before separators are a thing.

This would apply to the flight scene, with a very straightforward (hopefully simple as well) operation: When pressing the key, the game will save the active vessel as a .craft file. This would allow you to save a snapshot of a damaged ship for sharing on the net or for inspecting in the VAB, or doing the same for a vehicle assembled in orbit via docking ports, claws, or with KIS/KAS. Having the blueprint of the actual vessel will make it much easier to design add-on pieces that can snap tightly to the structure, or build multiple copies for challenges.

I think it would be nice to have distance from KSC to be a key factor in recovery time. Moving a ship back to the hangar over the local roads, vs dragging the same ship over the hills and through the desert for example. Being able to get a 100% refund at the cost of time perhaps. On an unrelated note, I also seem to have gotten myself stuck funds wise... I have a $250k ship that is missing fuel, and $10k in the bank. I cannot save an edit in which I add $5k worth of fuel, because I don't have $255k available in my account. It is like a Nigerian Prince scam; send me a quarter million first, and then get the big refund promised I guess I have to build a cheap tanker and fill up with the $5k of LF manually using KAS hoses, or hack a temporary SFS loan.

Vessel recovery... I've reset my points and dumped it all into the SPH, leaving the VAB with almost nothing. However, this seems to have completely wiped out my ability to recover vessels to the SPH. I just accidentally deployed a craft without any LF on board, and it is now going to take 26 days to roll it back into the hangar! There doesn't seem to be a formula for recovery times in the settings screen. It looks to me like recovery time is controlled by the first VAB queue rate, but should probably also include points spent at the SPH

All the cheap relays have DP-10s, so they use less power than the probe core. The dishes should be at the poles anyways, there it is never night and a 6x1 solar panel can stick straight up and get full input continuously. With a DTS-M1 on mun or minmus' poles to reflect back, you can flood local space with excellent coverage.

Finished the first semi-flyable draft of a Remotetech comms bomber. I was able to get it off the ground and into a turn manually, but it really needs fly-by-wire with the remotetech custom orientation setting. Top speed of 80m/s at sea level while fully laden, but that should improve greatly as the terrible aero commbombs are dropped. The darts stick the landings quite well on up to 45 degree slopes while the separators make a splash. With these air-droppable buoys, I'll be able to complete the Kerbin network with much less hassle:

Not at all. (large ships and explosions slow me down, but that's unrelated to comms) I'm pretty sure the comm links don't recalculate every frame anyways; its not like the links change very often. just finished a pretty spiffy air-droppable Comms Dart design for just $1740 (vertical fins stick better for un-guided descent), or the UFO version (fins flipped 90 degrees) which can be flown to a target with just the probe SAS. With the parachute set to fully deploy at 100m, it gets down in a hurry to avoid physics range issues, and with SAS to help they seem to stick the landings on 45 degree slopes quite well.

If you really want no drift, a landline network is optimal: Get an arctic expedition to bring a max transmitter to the pole, and the Kerbol system is yours until plate tectonics are implemented. All of the transmitters pictured were assembled by hand with KAS at the absolute peaks of mountains, but next time I think I'll just carpet bomb them out of a plane with either parachutes or lithobraking struts.

This may be a silly question, but... Did you account for the *mass* of the fuel pipes?

This may not apply to you, but it makes a huge difference if you're used to using WASD for running around in an FPS game vs if you're a hunt&peck typer. My Dad is the latter, and although he gets there eventually, it takes a long long time travelling at 0.1m/s in order to get time to press the correct burn direction. With FPS habits, I often use side thrust to start going where I want to go while the Kerbal is still spinning and/or tumbling, and roll around the keyboard to match the spin.

Another thing to try is turning off the EVA auto-rotate in your settings. Having the Kerbal spin around to face away from the camera every time you touch the controls is annoying and disorienting. Once you know about pressing spacebar to spin the Kerbal only when you want, the auto-rotate is pretty useless too.

After Bill wrecked the first truck doing a Minmus Elcano, my rover design is finally doing what it was originally intended for; hauling oversized loads across the flats. Pictured here: Jeb decides to liven up the trip a little bit with a sudden 10 degree turn while taking some refinery equipment and engineers from the factory to the equator to build a fuel station. 10 tons on the back of a 4 ton truck helps a lot with downforce to maintain grip.

Switch view modes to ANYTHING other than auto. The last thing you need when flying EVA is for your camera to spin around wildly because you just technically went suborbital! You may need chase or orbital mode to get allow the kerbal to orient in a direction they can grab the ladder from, but you can press 'v' only when appropriate. Set the nav ball to target mode, and watch the prograde marker; stay on target Also keep the speed down. 10m/s is plenty fast for a long range cruise, up close you will want to keep it below 2m/s, and under 0.5 when hoping to grab a ladder. Whenever you're not looking at the navball alone, the key thing is to put your mind in the Kerbal's head. 'A' means accelerating to THEIR left, not yours, and shift is towards their helmet.