maltesh

My naming scheme is fairly simple. Pick an object that comes with a large number of varieties to name the class after. Name the individual vessels after the varieties, advancing through the alphabet with each successive vessel. Spacecraft come in a few types: CARVs, or Crew Ascent and Recovery Vehicles. These transport Kerbals (and Science, when I remember) from the surface to orbit, and back. I have two classes of these vehicles: The Broadsword-Class CARVs, which carry 6. These are named after legendary and fictional swords. In my current save, the ones that have existed are the CARVs Glamdring, Hautclere, Icingdeath, Joyeuse, Kalevanmiekka, Lightbringer, Master Sword, Narsil, Omens, Power, and Qualta Blade. The Polearm-Class CARVs, which carry 18. These are named after polearm types. So far, I've only had the CARV Bec de Corbin, and the CARV COrseque. DSOVs, or Deep-Space Operations Vehciles. These run on LV-Ns and are craft used to run kerbals from LKO to other space-based destinations. They never land, and are refueled primarily by ISRU installations. The Cookie-Class DSOVs carry 6. The ones currently in my save include the DSOVs Hamantash, Icebox, Joedenkoek, and Ladyfinger. The Cake-Class DSOVs carry 18. The ones currently in my save include are the DSOVs Blackforest and Croquembouche STV, or Surface Transfer Vehicles, are landers. These are also refueled and stay in service over their destination until I decide to scuttle them. The Cheddar-class landers carry 6, and are my longest-running spacecraft design; They are LV-N based landers, and variants of the Cheddar class have served me since 0.18, and rated for landings on up to Mun-sized airless worlds, such as Ike, Dres, and Eeloo. They're named after cheeses, and the ones currently in my save are the STVs Kabritt, Juustoleipa, and Liptauer. The Sauce-class landers are a new design, and carry 18., also LVN-Based. They're still going through iterations, and the two currently in service are the STVs Alfredo and Bernaise. The Spice-Class landers are lander's I've used in the past for Duna, but still don't have a design I like for them. There are none in my current save, previous saves have seen the STVs Cardamon and Dukkah, among others. ASVs, or Aerospace Vehicles: Currently, I have none in service. The Zephyr-class ASVs, I named after winds. When they were in service, I hadn't enforced the alphabetical names, so I had the ASVs including the Haboob, Nor'easter, and Sirocco, among others. My surface bases are currently leaning towards being named after fictional countries, with the one on Minmus being called Avalon Base. Haven't decided on a final rename for the Munar base, so it's still Dunzor Base. My space stations are currently being named after fictional castles and fortresses, so the ones I've named under the scheme are Anvard Station and Blandings Station. Other former classes of spacecraft that I no longer use included the Kielbasa-class DSOVs (Carried 11, named after sausages) , The Baguette-class DSOVs (Carried 19, named after breads), the Hexa- and Hepta-class DSOVs (named after the numbers 6 and 7 in fictional languages, respectively), the Borscht-class Crew Recovery Vehicles (Carried 7, named after soups), and the Salad-class Crew Recovery vehicles (carried 19, named after salads) A Google Sheets breakdown of what's currently in my Career save can be found at http://tinyurl.com/ksp-save-doc , it checks for updates about once per hour.

1.1 has removed the separate "Extend Legs" and "Retract Legs" options from the actions that can be assigned to Action Groups on landing gear, which was present in 1.0 and prior versions. Before 1.1, "Extend Legs" and "Retract Legs" were separate Action Group Actions, included alongside the "Extend/Retract" option. I'd made extensive use of that with my spacecraft setup, as with limited numbers of action groups available, my action groups were set up to do things based on what the ship was doing, rather than grouping similar types of parts. Having "Extend Legs" as an Action Group option meant that, for instance, on my "Landing" action group, I could be sure that the legs would be extended, at the same time as the Solar Panels were retracted and the engines were activated, regardless of whatever the spacecraft had been doing immediately prior to hitting the "6" key, and as long as I was still committed to landing accidentally (or deliberately) hitting the "6" key again would not take any of those parts out of the "Ready to Land" mode. More generally, I'd really prefer it if all the available action groups had "Activate", "Deactivate", and "Toggle" options for their actions, instead of the current setup where some parts only have "Activate" and "Deactivate", and others only have the "Toggle" option.

As a KSP Store user, the last few releases, in my experience, haven't caused a the painful download bottleneck on the release date that was frequent in the 0.20-0.90 days. I've been able to go to the store link and download the newest .zip version in a single attempt.

If the orbits are circular (and in the same plane), the change in angular separation is constant, so if you know the angular separation at any particular time, you can use that to find the angular separation at any future time, and then, with two sides (the radius of both orbits) and the angle between them, you can use the Law of Cosines to work out the distance between the two satellites at any arbitrary time in the future. If either, or both of the orbits are elliptical (but still coplanar), things get a lot more complicated, and you have to work out the separation angle between their periapses, work through Kepler's equations for True Anomaly as a Function of time to get the positions of each of the two satellites at the arbitrary time that you're checking, and then you can use the law of cosines. If the two orbits are not coplanar...then you're probably locked into solving Kepler's equations, converting to Cartesian coordinates, and using the distance formula.

If I'm not mistaken, for most experiments 1 Transmit + 1 Return > 1 Return Alone > 1 Transmit Alone , as for most science locations, there's more science that can be retrieved from a single return mission.

Looks like they're in Gamedata\Squad\Partlist\SubassemblyCategories.cfg

Good point. The fact that you're already talking to the aliens means that either they're /here/, and you can show them things, or you're communicating with them through radio, at which point, you've already decided on a communications protocol, and can specify things (if you don't want to use any of the other obvious examples) based on the features of your carrier wave.

[quote name='Gaarst']One second is 9 192 631 770 vibrations of a [SUP]133[/SUP]Cs atom transitioning between the two hyperfine levels of its ground state (from the BIPM website). One minute is 60 seconds. One hour is 60 minutes.[/QUOTE] If you haven't quite gotten to the point where you need to specify standards that well, I'd go with 4.568 * 10 ^14 cycles of the Hydrogen-alpha frequency. If constraints are even looser, 1.602 * 10^11 cycles of the peak frequency of the cosmic microwave background. Timing hyperfine level transitions of Cesium -133 requires the building of an atomic clock; Hydrogen-alpha is all over the place, and the Cosmic Microwave Background is everywhere.

[quote name='boxley'] like imagine if they made a movie about the titanic where a the last moment a seamonster came up and saved everyone, that would just be a weird revised twist to a existing historical event,[/QUOTE] I assume you're referring here to "The Legend of the Titanic: An Animated Classic," where a giant octopus holds the sinking ship up long enough for dolphins and whales to rescue everyone aboard.

I took the Stearwing D45 out for a flight, ran out of jet fuel, kicked off the rockets, rolled it over, opened the bay, and EVAed all the crew to see if they'd survive falling from several Kilometers up. Most of them survived the first bounce, but none of them survived the second. Uncontrolled, the plane landed in the water a dozen kilometers away or so. I don't think any pieces broke off.

"Revert Flight" rolls back the save to the time of launch of the active vehicle. To allow Reversion of any flight, The game would have to store a separate virtual quicksave for every single active flight in the save, and there would need to be some kind of decision made as to what would happen when two spacecraft launched at different times dock, or when one spacecraft splits into multiple pieces.

Orbiter does things differently. Orbiter (and Celestia) use interpolations from the VSOP87 dataset, based off extremely high-accuracy simulations of the Solar System done for astronomical purposes. For objects that are spacecraft, itdoes a Ruinge-Kutta numerical interpolation for their movements, but for prediction, and for celestial bodies whose data aren't available in VSOP87, it does a two-body simulation.

It's not that simple. The two-body problem (World-and-satellite, or Star-and-Planet) is solved. You can use simple (well, relatively simple) math to calculate the future position of the two bodies an arbitrary amount of time into the future. THat's why the sphere of influence simplification is used; it converts the Kerbal solar system into a set of nested two-body problems. The three-body problem has no general analytic solution, and you have to use significantly more complicated calculation methods to estimate the position of objects as a function of time.

It's Alt-Right-Click.

Relativistic length contraction shrinks distances parallel to the direction of motion. As you approach the speed of light, the distance you experience between your source and destination approaches zero, and the time you experience to get from source to destination /also/ approaches zero. From the nonexistent "photon viewpoint", source and destination are in the same place, so it takes zero time to go from one to the other.

For what it's worth, though, based on the edit dates of the Wikipedia "Gate Orbit" article, I strongly suspect that the guy who wrote the sole document linked in the references for the article also wrote the Wikipedia article. Not saying that the math is wrong, mind you.

That may be, but right now, they're a mess with with drivers who have at least some interest of getting to where they want to be, and not damaging their vehicles. There are large numbers of organizations involved in cleaning, repairing, and otherwise maintaining the roads and the flow of traffic on them. Vanish everyone, and you have a bunch of moving cars which are going to stop moving when they hit something. That will damage most of them, depending on how fast they were moving. Some of them may ever catch fire, and there's no fire department to come put them out. There are no tow services to move them off the road. There's no street cleaning services to get debris and trash that flows onto the road off the road. It's just you.

Better get there quickly. The power grid will likely go down within the week. Also, the roads are a mess.

In my experience, it also takes quite some time to start getting a decent rate of science from the lab. In the time it takes to get level-3 scientists trained up and into your science base (assuming low-energy transfers), a very focused player, playing on the Normal skill level, can clear the stock tech tree entirely. I don't typically play quite that focused, but my minmus surface base pulls down about 9 science per Kerbin Day with two level-3 scientists on board. Including travel time, a single-manned science lander with an untrained pilot can easily beat that on science return, even if it only lands in one biome, and it's not that difficult to build a lander that can hit multple biomes over Minmus.

If you've got a Kerbal on the ground, my recommendation is that you have that Kerbal plant a flag to use as your Mechjeb Landing Target. If you don't, a pretty-accurate rule of thumb is that 1 second of arc latitude = (radius of body in km / 200 km) in meters. As a result, on the Mun, for every second of arc north or south in the MJ Landing Autopilot UI, the intended landing point is pretty darn close to 1m north or south of the object you're planning to land near.

An EVAed kerbal can take a surface sample, and you get different science rewards depending on where the asteroid is when the surface sample is taken. That's about it, really.

A 45° slope is exactly as high as it is wide. So in the case of the 45° slope, the height is /exactly/ (b-a)/2. If the angle between the Base and the slope is θ, then the height (h) is h = 0.5*(b-a) tan θ Keep in mind that most online calculators will assume you're using radians for your angle, so if you're using something like Google or Wolfram Alpha to do the calculation, and your angle is in degrees, you'll have to explicitly declare that, or do the conversion. Your posed problem works out to 0.927 m, if rounded to three significant figures.

In the Editor, once the landing gear is where you want it, Use the Rotate Gizmo. Press F to switch from relative rotation to absolute rotation. Turn on the angle snap. This will allow you to position gear that are guaranteed to point straight and true, regardless of the curvature of whatever part they're attached to.

It's happened about three times in the Career Game I've been playing since 1.0 released. The most recent time, I had a recent enough quicksave that I used that instead of editing the persistence file. I've generally gotten into the habit of quicksaving before having Kerbals exit a craft now.

I've had this happen as well. It's really bloody annoying. I wound up having to investigate my persistence file to figure out which Kerbal was the real one, and delete the fake. It's been awhile since i've done it, and I'm relating it from memory, so definitely back up the save before doing so: What I did was: 0. Back up the original persistent.sfs file,just to be sure. 1. Switch to an object that is not the duplicated Kerbal, or the vessel he's in. 2. F5 to create normal Quicksave. 3. Alt-F5 to create a named quicksave. Call it quicksave-edited.sfs or something. 4. Open the quiicksave-edited.sfs file in a text editor, such as notepad++. 5. Search for the Kerbal's name in the Roster section. Check its idx= value. If the idx= value is 0 or greater, the real Kerbal is in the spacecraft. Find the KerbalEVA vessel in the VESSELS section, and delete that. If the idx= value is -1, the real Kerbal is the EVAed kerbal. Look for the part of the spacecraft that contains "crew=[Kerbal's name]". Blank out [Kerbal's name], so it's just "crew=". 6. Save quicksave-edited.sfs 7. Use ALT-F9 to load the named quicksave. See if this fixes the problem. If the problem is not fixed, or things are otherwise broken, you can use regular F9 to go back to the quicksave, or quit the game and copy back the original persistence.sfs