IncongruousGoat

Unmanned Craft Without an Antenna, since pre-1.2 design habits are hard to shake. Along the same lines, Forgot About Munar Signal Occlusion.

...that lists a location in the Andromeda galaxy, with a note specifying 7 parsecs from the center. This two-by-four store...

It's not returning the science that's the concern here. It's that contracts that require you to return a vessel from the surface of the Mun or Minmus require that that vessel be controllable. But yes, if you're just trying to return the science you can tweak the parachute deploy altitude and let it re-enter. Both the parachute and canister are resilient enough to survive.

Yes, I have. It's great for returning science canisters from the Mun and Minmus. Although, technically speaking, the canister can stand up to re-entry. It's the probe core you've got tacked on to it so you can get credit for surface return that's the thing at risk.

Schenectady

Into LKO? Probably closer to a hundred, given KSP's lowered orbital velocities. In all seriousness, though, it depends on how SpaceX goes about reusing the second stage, and what kind of mass penalty that incurs. Although I suspect it would probably be closer to 15 tons.

Kind of surprised neither of these has shown up yet: "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." -Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy "The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space - each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision." -Randall Munroe

From the surface? Well... orbital velocity is around 500 m/s, and escape velocity around 700 m/s, so call it 850 m/s delta-V for gravity losses and in case my estimate is off.

Actually, the cheat does do something: It allows you to attach multiple parts to the same inline node.

Wait, which moon of Jupiter are you getting that assist from? It's not one of the Galilean moons, and I didn't think even those were large enough for a meaningful assist, much less any of the smaller moons.

...is Turing complete, taking input on the un-toasted slices and strategically charring the bread for output. This bank...

1. Delta-V is a measurement of any given vessel's ability to change its velocity. We use it as a measurement of how "far" a vessel can travel since all that matters in orbital mechanics is your ability to preform burns, i.e. change your velocity. 2. The reason Delta-V can be the same for a large vessel and a small one is due to the way it's computed. Delta-V is given by the Rocket Equation :dV = Isp*g*ln(mw/md) The figure we care about here is the mw/md term. This (called the mass fraction) represents the ratio between your vessel's mass when it's full of fuel and its mass when empty. Given a certain engine efficiency, Delta-V scales with mass fraction, not with mass. Or, in other terms, the amount of Delta-V in your vessel depends on A: the efficiency of your engines and B: the fuel mass to not-fuel mass ratio, and not on the vessel mass itself. 3. The Oberth effect works because of the way work and energy are defined in physics. First, in terms of work: Work is computed as F*d, or the product of force exerted time the distance it's exerted over. If you're moving faster, then you're going to travel further in a set amount of time. In the context of burn efficiency, it means that a given burn (force applied for a set time) is going to do more work if you're traveling faster, since the force will be applied over a longer distance. Second, in terms of kinetic energy: Kinetic energy is computed as KE = 1/2 * m * v^2. This means that a linear increase in velocity will result in a quadratic increase in kinetic energy, with increases in velocity when already moving at high speeds producing large changes in kinetic energy compared to low speeds.

May I present the Hudson expedition, my stock craft submission for the circumnavigation of Minmus: Circumnavigating Minmus proved much more exciting than expected. A combination of the bouncy-castle nature of Minmus roving and the fragility of my rover (I had wrecked it to the point of uselessness by the end) made for a surprisingly difficult mission. If and when I do another one of these, I think I'm going to test my rover to death before starting the circumnavigation. Mod list: Better Time Warp Distant Object Enhancement Engine Lighting KER Kopernicus PlanetShine Real Plume stock configs Stock Visual Enhancements Stock Visual Terrain TextureReplacer w/ Rareden's skybox Transfer Window Planner

On the subject of avionics... you might be confusing avionics with the magic torque machines the stock game calls "reaction wheels". All avionics does is allows you to control the vehicle. It doesn't provide any control authority on its own. To actually control things, you need actuating fins, engine gimballing, RCS, or dedicated reaction wheels (which are too slow, heavy, and power hungry for use on most vessels). For RCS, you want it as far from the center of mass as possible. You get more torque per unit thrust that way. It's also important to make sure your RCS is balanced; the last thing you want is for rotating your ship to induce unwanted translation. Beyond that, make sure the RCS fuel you're using is appropriate to the task at hand. Cold gas thrusters won't get you very far. For later things, Cavea B is nice; a good combination of density and specific impulse. For early things, HTP or Hydrazine are okay. And, of course, don't forget to set the thruster fuel in the engine config menu. It's an awful feeling to fly a mission all the way into orbit, just to realize that you forgot to set your thrusters to the right fuel.

That's not the problem. I'm talking about the sort of desynchronization that happens over even very short periods of time warp. It's not the lengths of time you're speeding past that's the problem-it's that you're speeding time up at all. And, of course, you can't just remove time warp. It would make all sorts of missions (mostly anything interplanetary) prohibitively lengthy.

Perihelion Parallax Photovoltaic (not space, strictly, but applicable to space tech) Praxidike (no, really. It's a moon of Jupiter) Psamathe (moon of Neptune)

First, welcome to the forums! Second... Oh dear. This again. Co-op has been suggested many, MANY times. Most of us wish it made an inkling of sense. But it doesn't, because the game gives you the ability to mess with the rate at which time flows. See, the problem is, KSP requires a lot of time warping to be playable, and there's no reasonable way to have two people playing in the same game, while allowing time warp. I mean, you could synchronize time warp across the game, but then you've got the problem where everyone's got to fly the same mission as everyone else all the time or not warp at all. Or you could go with the solution that the DarkMultiplayer mod uses, where you allow everyone to warp at the rate of their choosing, and just.. not render ships that aren't in the same time as yours. However, this has its own problems. For example... say you and your friend each launches a rocket carrying a module for a space station. You're more efficient with your launch, so you get there before (in-game) he does. However, he's more on the ball with time warp and docking, so he (irl) docks his module first. And you both pick the same docking port to dock to. Which means that you have two things docked to the same port. Which makes no sense. Co-op would be fantastic. It's just not possible within the framework of KSP.

Rule 38 of cartoons: Lower age ratings are an indicator of an inherently better cartoon. Chain link fences

It is, and so are all the planet packs it supports-never mind the fact that some of them don't list that compatibility. Although, it is worth noting that it's incompatible with Strategia, since that mod uses the center around which everything orbits as a reference for some strategies.

Galactic Neighborhood has everything revolve around a distant point mass, and it has support for a lot of the planet packs out there.

Chrome is a memory monster. The other things should be relatively harmless. Although with 8 GB of RAM you shouldn't be having too much in the way of memory issues on a stock install, which makes me think you're running into processing power or rendering issues. Forcing opengl makes KSP use the opengl graphics library for its rendering, which can sometimes increase performance by decreasing memory usage. I don't know the specifics, graphics not being my area of expertise. Searching the forums for force opengl should lead you to instructions on how to do it, if you feel it's necessary.

Hm. Honestly, at a certain part count the game will inevitably slow down. Heck, in the bad old days I had some launches running at 1/15 speed. Of course, things aren't quite that bad what with the update to Unity 5 and all the optimization, but still, it's unrealistic to expect perfect performance unless you have one heck of a machine. In general advice, some people claim that forcing opengl can help improve performance, but how much that helps varies from person to person. Another thing that might help is figuring out what, exactly, is bottle-necking your performance(processing power, memory, etc.), and then closing anything you have in the background that may be consuming a lot of that particular resource.

Turning graphics settings down all the way and uninstalling any visual mods you may have will probably help. The problem here is, that craft has 405 parts, which means it's inevitably going to cause framerate drops on a less powerful computer. To tell you anything else, we'd need to know the specifics of your computer. Sorry.

Wow. Just... wow. That's Korolev staging. Aesthetically pleasing Korolev staging. Aesthetically pleasing, reusable Korolev staging. Aesthetically pleasing, reusable Korolev staging presented in a video with really high production value. Consider me impressed.

Oh, good. I was worried I had prepped an ICBM for nothing.