Mister Kerman

owo 6 tourists, a flag planting, science transmitted and an engine has been tested in orbit. I finally went to a significant scientific anomaly to boot. Good day. With everyone safe and sound at the terminal, preparations are being made for customers and personnel to journey to Minmus. Another lander redesign is necessary to improve fuel margins however. (and I never liked the way that lander looked anyways...)

Launched a rocket with a payload of orbital station bound tourists in a brand new lander. I don't like the design of it, but it should work for now to help make some quick easy cash and cross out my to do list. Lifter return needs work... Lander docked to booster and refueled. Time to sort personnel

Put my KSP shoes back on. I brute forced a very heavy fuel payload into orbit. Ignition Second stage Third Fourth Fifth Sixth stage had separation issues requiring a zero G separation solution to keep them from pivoting at their center of mass into my main engine. Easy fix They worked beautifully. After that I docked. It was a little tight but I never traded paint, which is always nice. :3 My Space Tourism business isn't as lucrative as I hoped but this fuel will allow me to make good on a few contracts still unfulfilled and maybe help pay for a complete overhaul. This was a very important fuel delivery in any case. Brute forcing is a bad business model however, and I'll need to figure out a way to make lightweight efficient craft for future endeavors.

Another good trick. Disable or reduce the gimbal of radial engines. Too much gimbal can cause over-correcting. Usually if your craft isn't a strand of spaghetti, just the gimbal from your main lifting engine ought to be enough to keep you pointed straight.

No one was disqualified; in fact the creator of the thread said rockets that aren't 100 percent reusable are totally fine. I was being presumptuous given the nature of the usual strict guidelines for challenge threads in KSP. If you wanted to seperate the station through staging and want to keep the reusable stage in one piece, I would suggest a normal decoupler. (I've always hated space debris and actually never really grasped the purpose of a seperator, unless going for a seperation of a rover or something where you would like to shear the detached part off a larger craft and not leave any indication anything was ever attached in the first place.)

Yes. Very much lol. I thought the habs were escape pods as well.

Aw dude nice SSTO. Having trouble wrapping my head around the eacape pods though.

I'd appreciate it if you weren't so defensive. I liked his rocket. I just feel in a challenge to build a 100 percent reusable rocket, he could have maybe used a decoupler instead.

It's got a seperator on it. I think that alone is grounds for disqualification unfortunately. Nice simple rocket though.

Actually I play stock and something similar happened to me. I just got into orbit, EVA'd for a minute to get a quick EVA report, then got back in my craft. I could control the craft with no probe core attached, but Jeb was still floating outside. He wasn't reported KIA and I couldn't switch to him using [ or ]. When I moved my cursor over him I couldn't select him, and If I zoomed out or used map view, he was a trackable entity. I reverted in case this bug would somehow result in his demise. Hasn't happened since.

Lol that's so dumb, but I like it anyways.

I like the bumpy runway... I honestly don't think I would have gotten a plane off the ground due to the crappy landing gear "bugs" if I didn't have those bumps to launch off of in my early career's first planes. I'm following all the old rules for building a plane, and as far as I can tell the only thing that's changed is the landing gear. Makes me think there's something actually wrong with them; regardless of other people's opinion. I hope SQUAD isn't done with their fiddling.

I wondered what exactly the red button did. I don't leave space trash. I generally ditch my ascent stage while suborbital, and my transfer stage into the body I transfer to. If it simply deletes the trash then I'll probably start doing that. It seems like KSP doesn't let you deorbit something that isn't directly observed. I should be able to leave something dipping into the atmosphere a tiny bit and eventually have it deorbit it's self, but unless this has changed from previous versions this doesn't happen. I was always scared to push it on account of it possibly just stop tracking the debris and the debris would be still up there orbiting Kerbin.

You've got to stage it when all of those parameters are checked green. They only check green when you're currently meeting that condition. You'll need to be doing all of it simultaneously.

Honestly I'd say if you focus on rockets and ask any questions you have, you'll be fine and not run into too many annoying bugs. The editor in the SPH and VAB is a lot more user friendly now too. KSP rules. Bear with the bugs; It's what we do.

That's too bad. I have a "bring everything home" policy, which comes with it's own drawback of possibly losing the entire mission worth of data. I'm still inside of Kerbin's SOI though. Honestly I've never seen the point of the labs. They're too heavy for me to want to lug them around, and maximum science value for each condition has never been a priority for me. I think there might possibly be even enough science from doing lunar landings on Kerbin's moons to completely unlock the tech tree. Past that you'll basically be trading 100 percent of your science for money or reputation. They definitely make stations look cooler though... Someone enlighten me.

Aw man. I'm doing that too after I milk the moons for enough science to get all the parts I want. ISS is so cool.

I went to observe Minmus from a polar orbit. I got all nine biomes and every experiment I could bring. I used a probe core with some solar panels and less batteries instead of a pilot so that I could bring Bob to reset experiments. Since I needed only one of each experiment, I saved some weight and added another fuel tank. http://imgur.com/a/iOHA2 Hopefully I can unlock the rest of the lander parts I want with this. I head home after work tonight.

I do the same thing. Disposable SRBs with an LFO core for gimbal steering. Either that or reduce/disable gimbal on LFO radial boosters because they provide too much overcorrection with SAS on.

(Probably should stop quoting large posts... oh well.) I get wobbles and shimmies and donuts. Oddly enough I think I just turned the sliders up to max to for my best results for lack of understanding. Those were the only times I ever got off the runway. Planes are usually a big part of my early career but I generally just get lucky when I make it off the runway. Turning of SAS helped too, since a computer isn't trying to (over)compensate while you try to take off. I may be talking out of my bum right now too, since I'm so early in my career and not building any planes that require larger gear. These sorts of things have never been a problem before so it sort of aggrivates me. It doesn't feel like a design issue or engineering challenge. It seems like a broken game mechanic.

I'm with Snark about being able to work around landing gear for landing, but the "Runway shimmy" is irritating. You can't account for that when designing a plane. I should be able to place my gear the traditional way based off of clearance, CoM, and lift/speed required. The thing should drive straight down the runway. I shouldn't be at the mercy of a bug to get airborne. Landings I can do gently so I don't mind the overstress issue, but the wobble at the very least needs to eventually get fixed.

I've had to adjust my thrust output on some SRBs to make up for lack of stability from pushing through atmosphere too quickly. They last longer that way so it's not so bad.

I think I'm going to send another observation rocket to Minmus next and unlock as much lander stuff as I can before landing on either. It's almost like free science. It really helps doing thorough low risk missions like this when you're early in your career.

I'm going to try 8 degrees tonight. I'm building very simple rockets right now as I'm early my career and it's been a few updates since I've last played. (Pre-Unity) I've been pitching further than that so this sounds good. Gravity turn should handle the rest and it'll be nice to have a semi reliable starting point to start my gravity turn. Eyeballing is a terrible way to do things. Getting reliable information from people who have already been there and done that to save on legwork is more my style. I think it's more or less why this community is so tight; common goals and cooperation for unified success. Comradery in a single player game is something you don't really see these days.

That's pretty useful if it works on all sizes and shapes of craft.