Nicias

Hello, I was wondering if there was a mod that could take some of the grind out of resetting parachutes. I have an engineer aboard, but I don't want to have to EVA her out to the nose of the craft to reset all the chutes one by one.

I do the same thing with a "science bay." One of the benefits of this is that since the root is the storage bay, which has free nodes top & bottom, you can attach it on either end.

This is already an option in 1.2.2. In the F12 menu, go to "physics" I think and you can select "show autostruts"

I think this is a communication problem. In some places they use "." to separate thousands.

I think it feels like it should be twice your escape velocity since the best you could do it turn around with the same speed. However, it then is not twice your escape velocity, it is twice you excess velocity at escape. The higher this is the straighter your orbit is. So you want to maximize this number times the sine of half the angle your orbit turns you. This results in the optimization procedure @Abastro described.

I've noticed that the "time to Pe" readout says infinity when on the inboard portion of a hyperbolic orbit. Could that be fixed?

I have given up on this problem. I just check my staging anytime I dock or undock anything staged.

I tend to use similar first stages. I typically set the "sensitivity" to 0.03 and leave my cursor to the left of the 3, and then when the boosters separate I hit delete and change the sensitivity to .3 (the default)

A craft without fins will resist the *start* of the pitchover maneuver. When you pitchover you are turning from prograde which the fins resist. So it takes longer to actually do the pitchover. So for the same control inputs a fin-less rocket might pitch more. Of course, the depends on the details of the two craft. If the fins have control authority, they can help with the pitchover too.

I find that that is a good approach. I'll often do a twin boar with two orange drop tanks and two orange + skippers. The skippers, twin boar & fuel work to get time to Ap up to 50s, and then skippers & their tanks are dropped (if I get the tankage just right.) Then the rocket continues on mostly full throttle twin boar until the navball switches from surface/orbit . This requires a throttle up to keep time to Ap at 50 and at this time the orange tanks are dropped. Then the twin boar mostly takes me to orbit.

GT for the win.

Also, design rockets.

I don't buy these concerns. Whatever explodium is the substance in the ocean, is not the same as the substance in the atmosphere. If the oceans are filled with a reducer (like a hydrocarbon) then the atmosphere must not have any oxidizer in it. Otherwise the oceans would be on fire. So the most volatile elements of whatever is in the ocean will evaporate and rain down, like on Titan. So if the oceans are all kinds of hydrocarbon crud, the reactive portion of atmosphere is probably mostly things like methane, ethane, ethene, propane, etc. Which all burn fine. Don't think of using crude oil, think of using natural gas. Again, like Titan. In terms of getting just the right amount to use, that is easy too. You don't. IRL, turbine engines aren't rune stoicometerically (sp?). They would melt if they did. So you throttle by controlling how much oxidizer you pump in. You also don't have to use LOX. (Assuming that is what oxidizer is). Hydrogen peroxide might be a better choice if you were actually making one of these. Aside from the fact that LOX is cryogenic, I don't see any difference between a lox or peroxide jet in a mostly inert atmosphere with some light hydrocarbon and using a CNG turbine in a oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere.

How do I change the kind of tank in flight? Even when it is empty I don't see an option to change what it contains. Here are pictures showing what I see.

I can't figure out how to change the type of tank in flight. How do I do that?

I wish I was good with graphics. I'll try out IFS, but then the tanks will look the same. I think a mod with just 5 parts (the 2.5m fuel tanks I mentioned plus the 2.5-1 adapter) with basically the same graphics with a stripe down them or somesuch and LF only would be great.

I'm looking for a mod that just adds 2.5m LF tanks (for NERV powered craft) I don't need anything fancy, just oil-drum (full, half, and quarter size) and maybe a big orange. I also want to be able to add this to my current install save without breaking anything. Any suggestions?

First of all thanks for collecting/creating all of these! Would it be possible to modify the "allow deflating inflatable heatshield" patch to allow deflation by action group?

Thanks! That's what I figured.

Can I add OPM to a current savefile or will that break things?

Getting an intercept with minmus is harder, because of the smaller SOI and inclination. Once you have an intercept, getting in orbit, landing, getting back to orbit and getting home are easier. All of those things require less dV, lower TWR, and are more tolerant of human error.

I don't know if KER has it, but MechJeb has synodic period with target. That will tell you how long until the active object and the target are in the same relative positions in their orbits again. So if it is 10000 years, then one object will lap the other every 10000 years. I use that to sync up my relays. For solar relays using a thrust limited ion drive, I can get that number up in the trillions of years. That means that they will be off by less than a degree ever billion years, which seems sufficient.

Yeah, even then its pretty easy to do if you have MJ or KER installed. I just put on the decouplers, the SRB's and a tank (as a guess) I set the staging to go SRB, LF, Decoupler, and it will tell you the burn time for the SRB and for the main engine using the fuel from the boosters. Add tanks until the LF time is close, but not more than the SRB time. Merge the bottom two stages and you are done. I also have a premade bottom stack of TwinBoar + 4 Thumpers + Tankage. I end up putting that on most of my medium sized launches anyway. It works out nice. I use GravityTurn and the Thumpers burn out just as the time to Ap hits 50s, and GT wants to throttle down.

Would it be possible to have lights on probe cores?