maltesh

Protractor isn't telling you what the angle between your spacecraft's world and your target world is. Protractor is telling you how far away from the ideal (circular, equatorial) hohmann transfer position you currently are. You should be aiming to leave at about the time protractor shows you 0°.

More complete album can be seen here: https://plus.google.com/117586430260877805957/posts/CsTjhzftYFn

Real astronauts have teams of hundreds of highly-experienced people supporting them, decades of institutional experience to draw on, years of training, and access to simulators and models that attempt to plan out almost everything that could happen before the mission launches. We have Quicksave and Quickrestore.

Whenever I feel like it. I also have my /saves subfolder symlinked to Dropbox, so every change in any persistence file in the past 30 days is synced and retrievable whenever I wish.

You can build antennas and dishes so that they can pop open with a simple mechanical spring, or other similar arrangement. A lot less complex, and lighter, than using a motor arrangement. With the vast majorty of spacecraft humanity has built, there's little to no reason to need to close the antenna once it's been opened; If the spacecraft is going to enter a planetary atmosphere, where a deployed space antenna could be damaged, it's usually a one-way trip.

If you bought the game through the Kerbal Space program store, nothing prevents you from backing up your download.

You can target the object on the ground that you're trying to land nearby. An indicator of its position will then pop up on the navball, allowing you to plan your thrusting to bring things closer. Back in 0.19, I threw together a Targeted Landing Practice scenario to help me develop my skills at bringing things down near other things, though with resources being pushed back, I haven't done much else with it. Should still be compatible, though.

In your settings.cfg file, change the line CONIC_PATCH_DRAW_MODE = 3 to CONIC_PATCH_DRAW_MODE = 0. Mode 0 draws your trajectory through the SOI you're headed to in the frame of reference of the object you're headed to (So it looks like a normal hyperbolic trajectory instead of the mostly-useless curves of the default mode 3), and at the current position of the object (So you can easily center on it on the map screen for closer inspection.) Mode 0 makes it very easy to see which direction your trajectory will be when you reach the object you're headed towards, as well as helping immensely with fine-tuning the periapsis of your arrival from weeks or months out with precisely-planned burns. Changing the default CONIC_PATCH_DRAW_MODE is the first thing I do on any new installation of KSP.

No, it's just to make them less good at turning things than manned pods. KSP probes react locally. If your space probe can't make its own decisiosn to do things based on the information it's receiving locally, you'd be crazy to send it interplanetary, much less attempt to land it somewhere.

Aye, the tetrahedral configuration manages it with four, rather than five. Can't say I've really made much use of RemoteTech; I like the line-of-sight indicators, at least.. That said, figured I'd throw some remotetech parts on satellites in the configuration to see what would happen. Some screwing around seems to indicate that, in the provided configuration (Where the satellites have an apoapsis just shy of 5000km altitude over Kerbin), satellites outfitted with the 8000-km-range omnidirectional RemoteTech Deployable Antenna appears to be able to keep constant contact with any object anywhere on the surface of Kerbin, although the range limit does require a bit of awkward routing at times. And of course, assuming that you've got similar range on your commset at KSC.

As Haltux implies, Escape velocity is dependent on your current distance from the center of the object you're escaping; it's not a single value that applies everywhere within the gravity well. Assuming a free, unpowered trajectory, if you're at a velocity higher than escape velocity for your distance at any point on your trajectory, you'll be at above escape velocity for the distance at every other point on your trajectory.

I just call it "The Sun." In the setting of Kerbal Space Program, the Kerbals haven't spread sufficiently far that they'd need the disambiguation. THey're "The Mountains" until your civilization finds out about other mountain ranges. It's "The Sea" until you start journeying to the other large bodies of water. It's "The Sun" until you've got interstellar colonies large and important enough that you need to be more specific.

Fuel produced by the Kethane Converter follows the Fuel Crossfeed rules, but in reverse. If you replaced the converter with a rocket engine, and said engine couldn't /pull/ fuel from the tanks in that location, the Kethane Converter can't /push/ the fuel backwards into the tank. The converter's an engine that runs in reverse.

In 1985, J.E. Draim wrote the article "Three- and four-satellite continuous-coverage constellations" (paywalled, sorry) for the Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics. The article described using four satellites in a tetrahedral configuration of inclined, elliptical orbits to provide complete surface coverage of Earth at all times, as the minimal number of satellites necessary to do so. Draim was subsequently awarded patentson the idea. A couple months ago, a discussion in the IRC channel came up on the minimum number of satellites necessary to get constant, full coverage on a planetary surface, and Draim's concept was mentioned. Using Draim's parameters, I worked out a set of parameters for a Kerbin Tetrahedral Satellite Configuration, and that's the genesis of this scenario. Objective: Launch and place four satellites in the Tetrahedral Satellite Configuration. Load the scenario. Build a satellite lifter to place the four satellites at the required positions The satellite must meet the following criteria: 1) A Probe Pod for control. 2) A Satellite dish for routing communications. 3) Some kind of onboard propulsion system for stationkeeping and deorbiting. 4) A power source (either solar panels+batteries, or an RTG) to keep the 5) Some sort of on-sat maintenance provision; Either a docking port to allow the satellite to be moved, or ladder sections to allow you to pretend that the satellite is set up for service by Kerbals. The Scenario file contains four marker objects, marked as debris, in the following orbital positions. [TABLE=width: 500] [TR] [TD]Target Orbital Elements[/TD] [TD]Marker 1[/TD] [TD]Marker 2[/TD] [TD]Marker 3[/TD] [TD]Marker 4[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Semimajor Axis (m)[/TD] [TD]4350000[/TD] [TD]4350000[/TD] [TD]4350000[/TD] [TD]4350000[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Eccentricity[/TD] [TD]0.28[/TD] [TD]0.28[/TD] [TD]0.28[/TD] [TD]0.28[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Inclination[/TD] [TD]33°[/TD] [TD]33°[/TD] [TD]33°[/TD] [TD]33°[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Argument of Periapsis[/TD] [TD]270°[/TD] [TD]90°[/TD] [TD]270°[/TD] [TD]90°[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Longitude of the Ascending Node[/TD] [TD]0[/TD] [TD]90[/TD] [TD]180[/TD] [TD]270[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Mean Anomaly at Epoch[/TD] [TD]0[/TD] [TD]-1.57078[/TD] [TD]3.14159[/TD] [TD]1.57078[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Epoch[/TD] [TD]0[/TD] [TD]0[/TD] [TD]0[/TD] [TD]0[/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE] Requirements for completion: The player must launch, get into orbit, and rendezvous with each of the four the Marker Objects. The player must deploy one satellite within 10m of each Marker object. Upon placement of the last satellite, the player must take a screenshot of the completed constellation from the Tracking Station, showing the Universal Time in the upper left corner. Ranking will be based on the Universal Time displayed in the image. Universal TIme: Year 1, Day 3, 04:32:58 (larger image here: http://i.imgur.com/w0tOnEt.jpg ) Optional Achievements: Chemset: Using solely chemical rockets to place the satellites. No LV-N, no Ion drives. Sliderule: Using solely the in-game rendezvous system; No mechjeb/KER/ORDA, etc to provide rendezvous assistance Stopwatch: Not using Kerbal Alarm Clock or other timekeeping/launch timing mods to set up rendezvous. Tidy: No debris from launches left on orbit. Major Clean: Deorbit the rendezvous targets; Each one masses about 0.38t and has 1m shrouded docking ports. R3: Use a completely reusable spacecraft to place the satellites. Oneshot: Use one launch to deploy all four satellites. Download the Scenario: Tetrasat_v0.20.zip An example Satellite: XMPLsat.craft (screenshot ) [TABLE=width: 500] [TR] [TD]Ranking[/TD] [TD]User[/TD] [TD]Timestamp[/TD] [TD]Achievements[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]1[/TD] [TD]Mesklin[/TD] [TD]Day 1, 08:56:32[/TD] [TD]Chemset, Sliderule,Stopwatch,Tidy, Major Clean, Oneshot[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]2[/TD] [TD][/TD] [TD][/TD] [TD][/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]3[/TD] [TD][/TD] [TD][/TD] [TD][/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]4[/TD] [TD][/TD] [TD][/TD] [TD][/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]5[/TD] [TD][/TD] [TD][/TD] [TD][/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE]

Stored fuel does not directly translate to energy imparted on your spacecraft. It translates to energy imparted on your spacecraft _and_its_propellant_. If you decide to take a truly terrible path to orbit (such as gently meandering off the pad and climbing to orbit over a period of two to three hours) your remaining spacecraft will have the same balance of specific orbital energy when it gets there, but you will have to spend a hell of a lot more fuel to do so. Almost every single spacecraft that has ever launched from Earth to head anywhere does a gravity turn.

When you fly straight up, you are spending delta-v fighting gravity head on the whole way. When you do a proper gravity turn, you are allowing gravity to bend your path in the direction you want to go, so a larger fraction of the delta-V you spend thrusting goes into making your spacecraft go faster. If your primary aim is efficiency, then yes, it always makes sense to do the gravity turn.

This image shows the docking surface of the Clamp-O-Tron Sr Docking ports. The side shown facing upward on the port on the ground is the docking surface, and they mate face-to-face in that fashion.

You can always put several detachable connectors on your winch ship, so if you forget to remove one, you have spares. You can also deliver more to your winch ship if you wind up running out.

The planet would come apart. Gravity is the only thing holding the Earth together,and as it bulged at the equator from this tremendous spinning, large chunks of the planet would be sloughed off into elliptical orbits. The atmosphere would escape completely. You'd eventually reach an equilibrium point where enough of the angular momentum has been transferred that what remains of the Earth is spinning slowly enough that things at the surface aren't drifting off into space, but at that point, there is probably nobody left to throw baseballs.

SAS modules do not help you start rotating, they can only help you stop rotating.

Yes, I'd say it's possible to deplete an area of Kethane. If you have a scanner over the area, it will show the amount of Kethane in the ground at the site depleting as you mine. I've never completely drained a location, but I've heard of players who have completely mined out worlds.

Kosmo-Not actually did experimentally calculate the mass of a Kerbal about a year ago, and came up with a 32 kg value, which was very close to the persistence file's value of 31.25 kg (under the standard assumptions that a Kerbal Mass Unit is a metric ton, of course.)

Hacking into a hostile target in the throes of combat is going to be both very difficult and very unreliable. Compressed-gas bullets are going to be both slow and expensive compared to electrically propelled bullets, both because of the vacuum-sealing problem, and the fact that you have to store this compressed gas somewhere. And bullets themselves are going to be of limited usefulness at range in space. Their primary utility is going to be against things that either don't know you're planning to shoot at them, or things that are unable to dodge. Several of the nice things about using a guided missile: 1. It's presumably a lot more maenuverable than both you and its target, so can respond to the evasive attempts your target is going to make. 2. It can get a lot closer to your target than you necessarily want to bring your spacecraft. 3. You don't have to hit the target with the missile, the missile can use its own weapons. Possibly things that you don't want mounted on your spacecraft's hull, such as single-shot railguns, or bomb-pumped x-ray lasers.

My Moho Runner 4 spacecraft, built as part of the intended rescue mission for Moho BUSTAAAH! had about 22.7 km/s of Vacuum Delta-V on the pad. At some point, I may go back to 0.19 and finish that mission.

When they were KSPX parts, I wound up editing them so that the 1m one had the turning torque of the Mk 1 Pod, and the larger one had the turning torque of the Landercan. I may wind up doing that again.