FullMetalMachinist

I think this might be your problem. Any game file that ends in ".cfg" needs to stay that way. If you saved the edited file as ".txt" then it won't work.

I would say that the situations where canards are helpful on a rocket are few and far between. Here's the thing about Burt Rutan's canard designs. They're almost all lightweight, subsonic, and low flying. That doesn't mean you should take his design philosophy and apply it to supersonic space craft. (also notice how the one space ship he did design is noticeably lacking canards) That would be like saying big heavy wheels work great for dump trucks, so they must be great for a sports bike.

If you hit X too soon after hitting Z you'll shut the engines down before they get a chance to get to full thrust. If you look closely at the throttle gauge, when you hit Z it takes a little bit of time to get all the way up. So if you hit X too soon then you'll get an estimate that's too long, because it didn't register full thrust.

I haven't run into this problem myself, so I can't say for certain. But reading the thread I linked, it seems like that's all you need. The other numbers that are N/A (or undefined) for you are the numbers that say which way the eccentricity of the orbit "points". So my guess is that because those are undefined, any orbit that satisfies the numbers that are given will work. The only really tricky part is the orbit direction. It could be a retrograde orbit, and with the numerical definition messed up and no orbit lines, it'll be hard, if not impossible, to know which way the target orbit is going ahead of time.

Sounds like you're having the same issue as the person in this thread. Basically, one of the orbital parameters is "N/A" for some reason, and because of that the game can't draw the orbit. It's certainly a bug, and you can either use the debug menu and force the contract to complete, or just use the numbers given to know where to put your satellite. I think as long as you get the inclination, PE and AP correct, it'll work.

Are you using mods? I remember seeing a thread or two in the support forum about rescue contract kerbals being stuck inside of probe cores and other such parts. It was a bug from a mod that added crew seats to all command parts. Sadly, don't remember the mod that was the problem.

Well, the way I understand it, if you set the engine limiter to 50%, that turns the precision of the throttle (shift & ctrl) up. So a 50% limited engine with a 50% throttle will give you 25% of the max thrust. And a 10% limited engine with 50% throttle will be 5% of max thrust. That's pretty precise.

Yes, because instead of going straight down, you flight path is longer. When you're going horizontal, you travel a longer distance versus dropping straight down, therefore you interact with more molecules of air that resist your travel (drag). The reason why is because this: Isn't really what you're looking at for atmospheric reentry. It's more along the lines of a bullet fired horizontal versus a bullet fired straight down. The reason is that the higher air is so thin that it might as well not be there (except for heat), so you fall and gain speed almost without restriction. So when you finally hit thicker air that will slow you down, it doesn't have enough time to slow you down because you're already going faster than terminal velocity. Think of this experiment. Imagine a hot air balloon is at 8km (about the altitude the bottom thickest layer of air starts). Fire (not drop) one bullet straight down, and fire one horizontal at the same time. The one going straight down will hit first, because it's going faster than terminal velocity when it starts, and the 8km of air acts fairly slowly to slow it down. The bullet fired horizontal is also going faster than terminal velocity, but it's vertical speed is very slow at the start. This makes the path for that bullet a long arc, meaning it travels a lot further than 8km through the air. Thus, the air has a longer amount of time to slow it down.

I'm glad you got it working better, but I have a solution for the part I put in bold. A new feature in 1.1.x is that you can set the RCS thrusters to respond only to certain control inputs, like aircraft control surfaces can. So just set your RCS thrusters to use translation only, and they won't do anything for rotation. You shouldn't need them to help rotate, that's what the reaction wheels are for.

@davidpsummers, I've been following this thread, but haven't said anything yet because you've gotten several good answers from @Streetwind and @Plusck. But something just isn't getting through, because you still don't seem to get it. That's ok, it's pretty complicated, and I don't completely understand it either. But I'll try and explain it a different way, maybe it'll help. I think where you're mostly getting confused is you're putting too much emphasis on acceleration due to gravity. And you're right, it's the same no matter if you come down straight or at an angle. The thing is, because it's the same in either situation, it doesn't make as much difference in reentry as "time spent in the atmosphere" does. Think about this. If you're in orbit and do a retrograde burn to stop all motion, you'll start falling straight down. The speed you fall at will increase due to gravity. If you were on an airless body, you'd have to burn your engines to stop, but with an atmosphere, that will slow you down for free (yay!). But here's the problem: when the air is thin, terminal velocity is really, really fast. Like 1800 m/s fast. So that means that, even if you're in the air, you can still get going really fast when you fall. Then you finally hit denser air where the terminal velocity is slower, slow enough to open your chutes. But the tricky thing is that the dense air is just a thin layer right above the ground, and doesn't have enough time to slow you down. Just because you hit dense air doesn't mean you slow down immediately. Now look at the other scenario. You're in orbit and make just a small retrograde burn to lower your PE. This way your path is an arc through the air, and you spend more time in the denser air, partly because your horizontal speed means that the ground is still curving down and away from you a little. Really at the end of the day it's not about how much gravity pulls you down, it's about how much you can manipulate your flight path to spend as much time as possible in the air to shed your speed.

AFAIK not any more. They fixed all the things that you used to be able to do with probes that don't have power. This includes turning on a spare battery. So now, the "safety feature" that many people used where you would disable a small battery as a backup no longer works, because a dead probe core can't do anything, not even turn on a (full) battery.

To those saying take the reaction wheel out, remember that this is supposed to be a tug. Which means that it likely needs that wheel for when it's docked to other craft and doing its job. So instead, leave it there, but make an action group to toggle power to the reaction wheels.

According to the stickied bug reporting guide in the support sub-forum, it's just those two.

This was a deliberate change in 1.1.x. There was a small handful of things that you used to be able to do with probes with no power that you shouldn't have (extending landing gear was one, I think). Part of the fix for those included not being able to turn on a battery that was disabled. It makes sense if you think about it. If there's absolutely no power for the probe, how does it know, or be able to, turn them back on? I know that previously this was a nice "safety feature" to leave one battery turned off, and if you forgot to extend solar panels you could turn the reserve battery on and get your panels extended. But, alas, no more. Now, I see that your ship has a crew pod on it. So if you EVA a kerbal over, they can board and turn the power on, but just the probe core cannot.

The problem is that reddit and this thread are both full of people saying "Squad was naughty, they should be punished" when there is no proof to that. All we have is one former employee's angry rant, and some vague affirmations by unnamed current employees saying that things are better. Except that there has already been some articles published on gaming websites talking about this whole thing. So whether Squad actually did anything bad or not, they have already had their reputation damaged. That's about the same as enacting the punishment before having a "guilty" verdict, which is not ok.

I'm sorry, but I couldn't let this lie. "didn't do anything"!? 1.1 did a lot. It updated the engine that the game runs in. It put in tons of bug fixes and performance improvements. It overhauled the entire UI. It completely re-did how wheels work. It added a few new features. It added a 64-bit version for Windows and Mac. And some other things I'm probably forgetting. Yes, it's got some bugs, but give it a few more weeks and I'm confident that we'll get a version that is rock steady.

AFAIK not right now, but it seems plenty of people don't like the new way so I'm sure either someone will make a mod to change it or Squad will add an option in the settings.

That's the thing, though. It has been mentioned over and over by the devs that a game with LEGO parts is what the game is supposed to be. So you want the game to be something it isn't, then call it out on it's "shortcomings" because it's not the game you want.

Whatever pedantic games you want to play with "heat" "friction" "compression" and how those are all related, I think we can (hopefully) all agree that reentry heat is mostly from "a shockwave in front of the craft compresses the air and gets hot" and not "the air is rubbing against the craft and that friction makes it hot", which is the point I was trying to make.

It's because your ballistic coefficient is higher because you're putting more mass behind the same cross section (the heat shield). Also, more mass at the same reentry angle (meaning the same speed) = more momentum. More momentum = more kinetic energy, which has to be bled off by turning that energy into heat, so there's going to be more heat generated. Sorry, but no. The vast majority of reentry heat comes from compressing the air in front of the craft. The ship is moving so fast that the air can't move out of the way, so it gets squished so much that it heats up to the point of being plasma (the "flames").

Are you closing the science bay doors before reentry? There was some new heat flow problems in 1.1 with the open doors gaining huge amounts of heat during reentry. So for 1.1.2 they made it so you can close the doors without resetting the experiment (an thus losing the data).

@DChurchill are you trying to do it using copy/paste? That doesn't work. You have to type "@" and then start actually typing the person's name. Soon as you do a small window should open up giving you a short list of suggestions bases on what you've typed so far. When the one you want pops up, click on it. If that's what you've been doing, then I don't know, something is broken for you.

Not so much. I mean, yeah it contributes a small amount of body lift, but that's about it. I would put a couple of the BigS control surfaces down on the bottom edge. Set them to pitch only, and maybe put them in an action group to toggle extend/retract down to be like flaps.

What works for me is to deviate slightly from the real life NASA orbiter and move the wings, and especially the control surfaces, waaaaaay back. The problem you're likely running into is that (like I mentioned before) the drag forces that are acting on the forward part have a huge leverage advantage because the CoM is so far back. At the same time, the elevons on the back of the wings are close to the CoM, so they have very little leverage, and aren't strong enough to keep things pointed the right way 'round. So, to help out you can move the wings back as far as you can without destroying the "replica" feel, and make sure that you have some body flaps, lots of people forget about those. Also, this: Is not really true. It may look like they're not having much trouble, but IMO designing and flying a successful shuttle replica is one of the hardest things to do in vanilla KSP.

This is the correct approach, IMO. With that being the case, like RIC said, empty the fuel tanks because it will be reentering empty on an actual mission.