Ty Tan Tu

It is my toy and I will do with it what I want. Sometimes I turn on unlimited fuel and electricity to do something that isn't really possible with 21st century technology. Maybe some might think it is cheating in career mode, but I can see if you have already played several career games before, you would want to skip ahead to get to some really cool idea you have. If you can imagine it - do it!

From an Orbiter forum - and KSP was not discussed in complementary terms, I never have understood the animosity between select members in the communities. But, that is probably ancient history...

I have stranded Valentina so many times now I am considering doing a "Valentina's Revenge" mission. I have a game that is getting too cluttered anyway, so I am thinking about ending it by transferring ALL of my Kerbanauts to the space station, and then precisely deorbit it so that it crashed into the Kerbal Space Center - as Valentina, with her big grin, escapes in a MK-1 command pod. Would that be evil?

I still use it. I am not particular good at docking and it takes up a lot of my time when I am working on a larger mission where docking is just a very small part. Plus I have done it enough by now that it is not quite as thrilling as it was the first time I pulled it off by myself before I even install mechjeb. Sometimes I want to land at a very precise longitude and latitude where I don't already have a flag or other ship. Mechjeb is very good at that. I once landed on top of a Mun arch.

That is why I land an unmanned rover first. Make sure too put something like a small docking port on the front of it so you can control it from there, Then just tool around Mun until the NAV ball is level.

Until now, I have just built rockets. Now I WANT to try a plane. I am wondering if you could use the Vernor engines to give you two separately controlled vectors of thrust...

So. I just replace the dll in the old MechJeb with the new one from 10/15. The game complains that the paths are not right, but MechJeb is now there for my ships. The overriding idea is to put a big empty fuel tank in orbit around Mun to send to Duna. I build an ore mining base on Mun and shuttle fuel up to the empty tank That is the idea. I launched an M700 Survey Scanner in a polar orbit, and find a suitable carter on Mun for mining. I build an unimaginative Surface Scanning Module lander based on the stock lander, and put it in orbit around Mun. But Mechjeb crashes it when I try to land, This was not a surprise - the designed of the lander really did suck. I launch it again and land it myself, and I STILL crash the lander, but other than the fact that the nose cone and one of the radial engines were destroyed, the lander was intact - just upside down. i thought about just starting over again, but then realized that I could use the three remaining engines to right the lander. The lander was top heavy, and it took me like four attempts, but I did right it.I found a nice flat spot with about 13,87% ore. Good enough I figure. It was flat... I launched my ore extractor ship. It is a much more conventional craft and I give MechJeb another chance at the landing. It did land the craft successfully - but it was about 10 meters under the surface of Mun, The only thing above ground was the mono propellant tank, command module and docking port. I decided to see what would happen if I fired the rocket, but the craft blow up - except for the upper tank, command module and docking port. That is what I did today

Sounds a lot like my experience. In fact my avatar shows Valentia next to her still intact command module. I landed the rescue vehicle safely, but it was a good 100 km away. So, i lifted off again and was doing great, even without RCS thrusters. Then, for some inexplicable reason, I hit the space bar - and watched in horror as the fuel tank, engine and landing gear separated from Jeb's command module. Good times, good times indeed.

That is because the whole thing is a hoax. Kerbals can't actually go to the Mun. The cosmic rays would kill them. The whole thing was shot on a sound stage by the director Stanley Kerbalbeck

Was the answer 42?

In baseball you would be batting 400 and headed to the hall of fame. I have tried all sorts of inventive ways to get rid of Jeb - but he keeps showing back up.

I don't know what platform you are on, but with PCs, if you right click on the engine you can limit the thrust. One of the more useful things I learned. Drop it down to 20% or even lower.

Lobster Thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce, garnished with truffle pâté, brandy and a fried egg on top, and Mystery Goo™.

I noticed on Github that CraigCottingham and sarbian were making code changes to MechJeb as recently as 5 days ago. Even if sarbian takes a break, it looks like there are other programmers willing to continue the project.

I wonder if the focus isn't moving toward consoles, and KSP needs programmers with more experience with console programming...

After having read through all the comments. I am not sure what to say. I came here just recently from the Orbiter community. I got tired of waiting sometimes years for updates. I have no regrets. I like building space crafts, which is not so easy to do in Orbiter. It seems like programmers have left before. When Felipe Falanghe left in June Rock Paper Shotgun quoted him as saying: There is need for games like this that inspire kids, both boys and girls, to get excited about science and engineering, My hope is that there are "enough ideas to keep us all going for years"

I have always wonder if they are not related to to H. P. Lovecraft's "Elder Things" form his novel At the Mountain of Madness. They obviously don't look nearly the same, but the "Elder Things" appear to be have plant, half animal. Shamelessly stolen from Wikipedia:

Something to think about when you are looking at all the derelict objects in your Kerbal universe - Vanguard 1 and the upper stage rocket used to launch the satellite, are still in orbit. And will be until somewhere around 2200 A.D. Vanguard 1 was launched on March 17, 1958. About a year and a half from now, it will have been in orbit for 60 years. Vanguard 2 and Vanguard 3 are still in orbit too for that matter. In fact two pieces of the upper stage of Vanguard 3 are still in orbit along with the satellite. NEO (Near Earth Object) J002E3 was at first believed to be an asteroid, but has since been tentatively identified as the S-IVB third stage of the Apollo 12 Saturn V rocket launched in November 1969.

Despite that www.kerbalmaps.com is down I landed on Mun with a lander. I picked a site on the left side of the bigger crater and placed a survey rover. At first I started down hill, but it kept going down and down and down. So I headed back up hill with the rover thinking I would go into the cater to the west, but before I got there, I ran into a flat plane. I let let my rover roll up and down hill until if stopped, assuming that would be a zero slope. I had to dampen it a bit, but it did stop. I marked the longitude and latitude, and landed a small Mun base there using MechJeb.

I know!!! Today I was planing to start my big Mun project. On the west side of the big central crater there is some nice flat terrain. I tried to go to Kerbalmaps to pinpoint where I wanted to land my survey rover, but instead got the dreaded 404.

Thanks. I was hoping that 1.2 might fix that. I was still able to dock, but it was a bit of a surprise to see my Periapsis suddenly lower than it had been on the last pass - when I was trying to slow down. The encounter nodes were jumping around. At about 2.8 km I just stopped looking at them and did my maneuver to close on the Mun station. I actually did know I was using the wrong word and thought about saying 'apocynthion' and 'pericynthion', but those words have always seemed so awkward to me. :-) I think from now on I will just use APO and PER...

I have a space station orbiting Mun and it orbit is rock solid, But I launched a simple MK2-Lander from Mun and the apogee and perigee jump all over the place. It will go up and down by as much as 5 km. It makes a transfer a bit more complicated. I had a MechJeb, but it was not activated. It seems like whatever ship has focus is unstable. I turned off SAS to see if that was causing it, but it still happens. What is going on with that? Is Kerbin affecting the orbit? The orbit was only at about 70 km. I thought that would be low enough.

I am still relatively new at this, so getting a usable rover to my Mun station was a big accomplishment for me. I tried an earlier one but it kept flipping over, and was just a rolly-polly toy for Jeb until he broke it. It has to be the ugliest lander I have ever made, but oddly handle very well. Adding the control module to the space crane made getting rid of it very easy, but I am starting to have a bunch of debris scattered over the surface of Mun. I am afraid to go above about 10 m/s with it, but did take it for a 2 km tour up to the brink of a crater - then I chicken out and returned to the Mun station.

OK. It did not turn out exactly as I hope, I am on a slope and have to enter and exit through the science lab. But I made it! How I will ever attach anything to the docking port on the front is a mystery. But, it is my first attempt at a Mun station - and Jebediah survived to plant a flag.I'll take it...

I now this is ugly, but I am playing in sandbox mode. It has been my experience that I could put the Statue of Liberty in orbit with a big enough engine. (Crap! Now I want to put the Statue of Liberty in orbit.). The other side is a mirror image with the Vernors pointing the opposite direction. With SAS enabled, it actually tries to auto correct and lays the ship down smoothly with little help from me. If I knew the reaction wheel would work, I am tempted to leave it as it is.