maltesh

In my saves, interplanetary craft is a Deep-Space Operations Vehicle, or DSOV. The primary DSOV in use in my game is the Kielbasa-Class DSOV, so named because they are long, rod-shaped craft that I decided resembled sausages. The DSOVs Bratwurst, Kielbasa, Knockwurst, and Frankfurter have seen use, with only the latter two currently in flight. An In-System shuttle is a Cis-Kerbal Transfer Vehicle, or a CTV. Give the way things are going, I should probably split that into CKTV and CDTV. The Hexa-class shuttles are so named because they seat six. Individual Hexa-class shuttles are named after the word for six in various fictional languages. Extant models include the CTVs Cesta, Tevoy, and Jav. A lander is a Surface Transfer Vehicle, or STV. The Cheddar-class LV-N powered six-man lander has been one of my most common designs. They're so named because the way I use Rarial Attachment points to hide the LV-Ns' red-hot bells inside the cryogenic LV-T400 tanks is slightly cheesy. Ships of the class have included the STVs Cheddar, Limburger, Jarlsberg, Gouda, Edam, Muenster, Roquefort, Camembert, and Casu Marzu. I also have Autonomous Tanker Vehicles of the Citrus class (their primary structural element is the medium spherical tank), which strictly should not get individual names, but the ATV Tangerine is currently orbiting Ike, and the ATV Clementine is currently orbiting Duna.

True, but axial tilt is measured relative to the perpendicular to the planet's orbital plane for all the Solar System's planets. So if one were measuring the Kerbal planets in the same manner, all would be considered to have an axial tilt. Edit: As was already mentioned in the original post, I now see.

To make a minor point, if you've got the fuel for it, there isn't a minimum acceleration required to capture on the first pass. Nothing prevents you from starting your capture burn outside the SOI of your target, if necessary. Though crossing an SOI boundary while thrusting does kill the throttle. (Well, except boredom, the fact that the game doesn't give relative-velocity information on Celestial Body Targets, and the difficulty of plotting maneuver nodes on future Conic Patches if you haven't changed the nearly-useless default CONIC_PATCH_DRAW_MODE)

Quick googling "specific impulse 600000" produced the following paper Antiproton Triggered Fusion Propulsion for Interstellar Missions which seems to indicate that an antimatter-catalyzed fusion nuclear pulse rocket can achieve 600,000 seconds Isp if the entire fuel pellet fuses. Haven't watched any Planetes, so I have no idea what type of technology's available, though the "Tandem Mirror Engine" appears to be a reference to the Tandem Mirror Experiment in 80's fusion research.

A Geosynchronous polar orbit is possible, because the only requirement of a Geosynchronous orbit is that the orbit have the same period as the sidereal day. A stable Geosynchronous orbit can have any inclination or eccentricity that doesn't result in it interacting with other bodies or going so low at periapsis that the atmosphere or surface causes problems. A Geostationary polar orbit is not possible. A Geostationary orbit is one whose ground track stays over a single point on the surface throughout its orbit. As a result, a geostationary orbit is a geosynchronous orbit that is both equatorial and circular.

Could you link the delta-V map you're using? Every delta-V map I've seen works only for journeying from (and sometimes, returnting to) Kerbin. I haven't seen one that gives information for traveling when neither the origin nor destination is Kerbin.

Heck, for certain destinations, (Moho, Dres, Jool, and Eeloo, for instance), the time between Hohmann transfer windows is /shorter/ than the transfer travel time. Time between Hohmann Transfer windows is two and a half times shorter for travels to Jool, nearly four times shorter for the typical Eeloo trip. In those latter two cases especially, it probably behooves the impatient player to wait for the transfer window. On average, you'll have to wait only about 50-60 days for the next window to Eeloo, and you're going to spend about 400 days or so flying your spacecraft out to that distance anyway.

If a celestial object has a natural satellite, astronomers can work out both its mass and the mass of its satellite from ground-based observations, and that's really all you need to produce the trajectories that KSP shows on the map screen. Even restricted to the sphere-of-influence abstraction, you'd still be able to get the mass of the main body. Atmospheric composition and density you can get from watching the body pass in front of stars. That will also let you measure its radius.

Chilling in solar orbit doesn't save delta-V. It costs you more delta-v than going directly from a low orbit over your origin world to a low orbit over your destination during a Hohmann window, thanks to the Oberth effect.

Set a window reminder in Kerbal Alarm Clock, wait for it to occur while doing other things and preparing, and then throwing the missions. I believe that's roughly 80% of the objects I'm throwing at Duna in this window.

In the dev streams before the PRpocalypse, it was mentioned that Dres was envisioned as the largest object in in what would become an asteroid belt between Duna and Jool. However, then the PRpocalypse occurred, and I've not encountered anything official-sounding about plans for asteroids since then.

Aye. Back in the 0.18 era, I wound up flying a mission to rendezvous with an asteroid in solar orbit tp get a handle on how difficult it was going to be before posting a challenge about it.The Google+ Post I eventually made about that flight is here: https://plus.google.com/117586430260877805957/posts/Ads2aY1C9sF That flight taught me a lot about how to use my engines to push the relative velocity indicator around on the navball, but the really nice thing about maneuvering to rendezvous with an object in solar orbit is that when you have a near interception with your target, and are close to it, bot you and your target are moving in effectively moving in straight lines over time periods of days or even weeks in some cases. so when you burn to push your target-relative velocity atop the target-direction indicator, it tends to stay there for quite some time. In some ways, it's easier than hunting down planets, because with spacecraft in solar orbit, you can get target-relative velocity information when hunting that close intercept, whereas the game won't give you relative velocity on a planet from outside its SOI.

If you're in solar orbit, at 86 km planned separation, you are far more than close enough to start ignoring the map screen and begin the closing phase. In solar orbit, you can start doing that from tens to hundreds of thousands of kilometers of distance, on the timescales of a solar orbit, spacecraft move in effectively straight lines over periods of days to weeks. You need to manually switch to Targeting mode on the navball, and use your engines to maneuver your prograde relative-velocity indicator onto your target-direction marker from there.

Personally, I symlink my Saves directory to my Dropbox folder, so it automatically uploads after each upload. Initially I did this so I could play the same game across two different computers, and automatically upload screenshots but a consequence of doing so means that Dropbox has a copy of every change in the persistence files in my KSP game over the last 30 days.So if something goes terribly, horribly wrong, I just have to find the timestamp from before things went Terribly, Horribly Wrong, and revert to that version.

Double-edit, wiki fail. Was looking at the wrong .cfg. Objection withdrawn, you may continue torturing the witness.

The stock FL-R10 RCS Fuel Tank holds 10 units of RCS and is radially attachable like the spherical tanks.

In the Jool system, the orbits of Laythe, Vall, and Tylo are equatorial and circular.Beyond that, you're pretty much limited, in-game to watching the maximum headingdifference between your orbital velocity marker and the 90° heading.If the heading direction of your prograde marker varies between 84° and 96°, then your orbit's inclination is 6°.

Docking ports also allow fuel flow through them unless you disable it on the pad, which can result in upper stages draining unintentionally. In addition, if you let mechjeb auto-stage and aren't careful, it will happily light stages above a docking port until its sequence hits a decoupler, the results of which can be somewhere between annoying and catastrophic.

It looks like your winch may be connected to the rest of your rover by a Cubic Octagonal Strut, which is a physicsless part.In my experience, that results in undesirable floaty behavior when attached. In the above pictured situation, rebuilding the Kethane miner using an I-beam to allow radial attachment of the winch instead of using a cubic octagonal strut prevented the problem.

While I typically don't care about the surfce orientation when closing in on the target, I definitely would prefer to keep the Navball horizon working the way it is.That said I do use the Docking Port Alignment Indicator mod mentioned upthread. It would be nice if something like that were included, possibly in the little square that pops out from the lower left corner when you switch into Docking Mode.Would give me a reason to actually use Docking Mode.

As someone else who was there in those early days, and wrote a program to provide proto-map screen information before there was one, I disagree. All the math that goes into producing something like the map screen was developed by the 17th and 18th centuries. A civilization that can't produce something like that for its astronauts, even if represented by moving markers or pins on a paper map, and a room full of mathmeticians using mechanical calculators, would not be a civilization that knows enough about orbital mechanics to reliably go places in space.

This would be the a previous version of a surface-to-orbit tanker I was using over the Mun. In the configuration as shown, it uses about a sixth of the fuel in the central tank to get from the surface to a Munar orbit; Get rid of the fuel lines and the side-tanks provide enough fuel to pull that off easily, with enough to stick a landing again with the center-tank empty. I wound up scuttling the design, it doesn't really need anywhere near the amount of monopropellant it carries, the KAS ports are too high off the ground for easy Kerbal access, and it doesn't have its own winches.

I've brachistochroned the Mun from LKO on an LV-N equipped spacecraft, a couple versions back. Made the landing in just under an hour from launch. Brachistochroning Minmus is probably feasible without going /too/ crazy on the build, brachistochroning interplanetary targets probably does require something pretty incredible.

You could also use the old trick of making your plane face in the opposite direction in the SPH...Except there are those lights in the way now.

This is one of those situations where you can probably shave some time off your attempt by heading West. The rotation of Kerbin will carry KSC over 300km eastward in the 35-ish minutes it takes you to throw your aerospacecraft around the planet.