Zeiss Ikon

I think the hardest I've had that I've managed to finish successfully was when Lufrid was landed on the Mun with tourists aboard; the lander tipped over (too much slope in the landing site, and too much horizontal velocity on contact). No RCS (craft wasn't built to dock), and the reaction wheel wasn't strong enough to even raise the nose. Retracting the landing legs had no effect. The command pod hatch was down, so Lufrid couldn't even get out of the pod to plant a flag and take a surface sample. I had the landing legs mounted on fuel tanks that, in turn, were attached with radial decouplers, but blowing the (empty) tanks didn't solve the problem either -- but it did allow Lufrid to roll the craft so the hatch wasn't blocked; she was able to plant her flag and take her sample and EVA report. With that done, I made a quicksave and made a few attempts at the old "slide up the crater wall" Munar launch method. No good; the fuel tank or decoupler kept exploding before I'd slide 100 m. I finally tried maximum pitch/yaw upward (using both the reaction wheel and the gimbal of the Poodle engine), and that would in fact raise the nose rapidly enough to get off the surface before anything exploded. Three or four more tries, and I managed to get SAS turned on to keep the craft pointed upward (Lufrid was still 1 star, so didn't have "radial out" as a hold option), then shut down the engine, oriented horizontally to the east as the craft coasted upward, and burned for orbit. Lufrid and her tourists were off the Munar surface, still with plenty of fuel to get back to Kerbin.

Just remember, FOOF isn't just the formula -- it's the sound you make if any of it gets loose.

Of course not. The technology I mentioned doesn't exist yet. It would require a computer/software system to pass the hard Turing test. That hasn't yet been demonstrated. That we know of.

Well, a couple days ago, in my career game, there was a problem while Val was landing (with three tourists and a rescue) on the Mun. I got into a situation where I had to reload a save, but (due to my failure to develop a habit of quicksaving) the only save available was a persistent save just a few seconds above the Munar surface, already in free fall after burning to a stop and letting the lander build up some vertical fall again. Reloading from this autosave required opening the Tracking Station, selecting Val's lander (the very bottom of the list), and switching to it, hopefully in time to try to save the landing. Nope. With Val and all four passengers dead (apparently the game made an autosave just after I crashed for the fourth time), I tried loading an older quicksave to see how far back it was (the date display doesn't mean much, with Minmus trips taking 20+ days in total). Okay, that was pretty far back, before all the Minmus trips except the first flyby. Better just load the persistent and accept that Val and the four tourists are gone (at least until Val respawns). Wait. What do you mean, I can't load the persistent from Year 1, Day 223, after loading a quicksave from Year 1, day 173? So, the last couple player days, I've been more or less recreating the fifty game days (most of which time was a Minmus orbit mission, and in the next batch of contracts, a Minmus landing). A few things are different, since there's a random factor in contracts -- I had a rescue from Minmus orbit, instead of one from Mun orbit; a scientist had gotten stuck in a crew cabin in a steeply inclined two day orbit of Minmus (okay, that's only twelve hours, but still). Took three days to rendezvous, but it got me three World's Firsts -- First Rendezvous in Minmus Orbit, First Crew Transfer in Minmus Orbit, and First Suborbital Flight over Minmus (had a big plane change to do before the return burn, and it apparently took my periapsis below the surface for about three or four seconds). This time, Val's trip to the Mun carried only two tourists, so she didn't have to try to land the monstrosity I cobbled together to carry four passengers and have a seat in a module with a hatch for the rescuee to board (Mk. 1-3, with a Mk. 1 airplane cockpit on the nose, then a Mk. 1 Command Pod for Val); she could use my standard lander instead (nothing on top of the Mk. 1-3 except a Science Jr. and some parachutes). Much easier to keep upright and turned enough faster to handle the switches between surface retrograde and surface radial out more successfully. Plant Flag contract fulfilled, 400 science returned, happy tourists, and now it's time for the Minmus landing, which (if I remember to take the science data this time) should once more bring enough science to unlock the rest of the 160 tier and get me the Klaw that I can use to start cleaning up LKO (and Mun and Minmus orbit).

Hmm. I'll have to check this. I'd have sworn Minmus (for an example I've visited a good number of times) had a rotation axis matched to its orbital inclination (though with a 36-hour rotation, you have to specifically look for it to notice either way). Other bodies one could check (whether spin axis is oriented to the Sun or to the orbital plane) are Gilly, Dres, and Eloo, all of which have significantly inclined orbits. I've landed on Gilly once, and flown by Duna/Ike, but didn't pay attention to axial tilt when I was there -- for the Duna/Ike flyby, it was "can this craft actually make it to Duna and back?" and for the Gilly landing it was a similar "because it's there" sort of goal (both in a science game).

I'll admit, I'm kind of on the border between regular rockets (presumably two or three stages to LKO) and SSTO. My current standard launcher is a Twin Boar with a 6400 tank on top -- it'll SSTO with 15 tonnes or so of payload, but I usually add another 200 tank and a pair of boosters, each consisting of three 1.25 m 800 tanks, nose cone, and a Swivel, with crossfeed enabled on the decouplers and higher flow priority than the core (modern asparagus). Some angled fins or, once I got the tech, Separatrons on the boosters to prevent collision with the core after staging, and I get a 1 1/2 stage to orbit that will easily launch a 2.5 m direct return lander to the Mun or Minmus. Virtually every mission I've flown in my career since getting the Twin Boar, 2.5 m tanks, and Mk. 1-2 (now replaced by Mk. 1-3) has gone up on some minor variation of this lifter (early Mun landings were on 1.25 m hardware). HOTOL SSTOs are hard to design, and for my career I'm designing my own rockets from ground up (turned off the "stock vessels" on start); I've flown a few spaceplanes, mainly early Mun flyby and orbit missions, and tourist flights, that launched on a rocket (more like Dynasoar than STS), but with Mk. 1 parts they're hard to reenter without burning up the cockpit, and Mk. 2 is heavy, and I lack even Panthers so far, never mind R.A.P.I.E.R.s -- so just getting a HOTOL to orbit is nearly impossible. Shuttles (and, I've concluded, other vertical launch spaceplanes) are unnecessarily heavy and don't convert readily to landers for the Mun (though I'm sure my old Taxicab could land on Minmus, if I added a couple drop tanks to get there with enough fuel). As for "unrecognizable stuff", I tend to avoid it. If it doesn't look like a rocket or spaceplane, to me, it means I'm trying to launch something that ought to go up in sections. I've got a nearly full array of docking hardware now (160 tier nearly completed). The most "non-rockety" rocket I've launched to date was an integrated drill/converter rig for an asteroid I'd captured in my old science save -- rather a bust, after trying to run the converter and drill on fuel cells rather than solar panels for a while, I wound up sucking a 980+ T asteroid with 83% ore dry and just filling five 6400 tanks. Okay, that's a good portion of fuel when it's already in a high orbit, but having to dock with the mining station to get the fuel made it barely better than just carrying fuel up from Kerbin -- and at that point, the asteroid was a dry husk, requiring either going and catching another, moving the mining rig (which was pretty cranky to fly) to Minmus (where getting the fuel off it without mods would be a PITA), or abandoning the idea of mining fuel until higher tech was available.

My own assumption has been that Lf is kerosene (or equivalent) or just possibly gasoline -- hence same fuel used in air-breathing jets as in rockets -- and oxidizer is HTP (high test peroxide). These give good density, allowing small/cheap tanks that hold large fuel mass (that operate at low pressure, so can be thin walled). Either admixture of a small percentage of a peroxide catalyst (colloidal nickel, for example) in the fuel, or presence of catalyst packs in the engines to decompose the peroxide allows for hypergolic starts. Monoprop is a stoichiometric mix of 50% peroxide and 90% ethanol, fed through a catalyst pack (yes, this is a real world monopropellant that will not detonate, used in Armadillo Aerospace's early lander designs). Peroxide catalysts, where used, are ceramic beads with embedded platinum/rhodium particles (yes, same stuff that's in a car's catalytic converter). "Activating" an engine (i.e. staging with throttle down, or using the right-click menu and "activate engine") triggers a negligible trickle of peroxide to keep the catalyst, if present, hot for immediate starts. The additional advantage here is that all three propellants are long-term storable, within temperature limits. Kerosene will freeze, and so will peroxide and peroxide-alcohol, at an assortment of "cold to very-cold" temperatures; a little tweaking of emissivity of the tank coatings will keep temperature within range from well inside Eve's orbit to that of Dres (perhaps beyond). Gasoline freezes at close to liquid nitrogen temperature; your oxidizer will be a solid block before that happens. Contrary to what was said above, a nuclear-thermal engine will run on anything you can pump through the core. It's most efficient on hydrogen -- but hydrogen isn't long-term storable without heavy/expensive refrigeration systems (your reactant will have boiled off before your nuke-powered vessel can get to Duna or Eve, never mind Jool or Eloo). Kerosene gives lower Isp, but if you can run the core hot enough to dissociate ("crack") the stuff, not that much lower. Waste heat from even a fully scrammed reactor core will be sufficient to keep the kerosene warm on a long voyage. Now, with these propellants, the game Isp figures for several engines are fantasy numbers -- but this is a game and it needs to be playable more than it needs to be so accurate it's a pain to do anything. If you like being frustrated by real world fuels, install whatever the current version of Real Fuels mod is called, and deal with ullage as well as needing to put the right fuel in the right tanks.

As I understand it, Kerbin was set at zero inclination, and the Mun's orbit the same, to simplify the learning curve of getting to orbit. Just launch due east, and you get a no- or low-inclination orbit, from which it's easy to get to the Mun (if you have the delta-V). Replicate Earth's situation (for instance, with a scaled down Real Solar System mod), and you have to compensate for launching from Florida instead of an equatorial site, and then deal with the fact that the Moon's orbit is not only slightly inclined relative to the celestial equator, but also not quite circular. We have other simplifying conditions, too -- the patched conics system with "Sphere of Influence" for each body, within which gravity of all other bodies is ignored, far simpler than a real multi-body system, but also eliminated potentially useful things like Lagrange libration points. The simplified orbit calculation also removes orbital instability due to the Earth's oblateness (fatter at the equator, squashed at the poles) which makes some orbits unstable) and the effect of mass concentrations ("masscons") on Earth and the Moon that make other orbits unstable (for instance, no Lunar equatorial orbit is long-term stable due to the combination of masscons and Earth's perturbation, and there are a limited number of stable regions in geostationary; put your comsat in the wrong place and you'll use up all the station keeping propellant in a year or two instead of the ten-plus design life). To make the game a playable game, and one that's fun for folks who aren't actual rocket scientists, and to make it possible to program and within the capability of ordinary home computers, the simplifications were added in. There are mods to put back (most of) the complications if you're expert enough to consider it fun to need 3-4 times the dV just to get to orbit and then have your orbit decay in a couple years, in exchange for being able to, for instance, park an object behind the Moon and have it pretty much stay there.

It's only paranoia if it's delusional.

Nice. It'd be a nice addition to be able to do that in career.

Generally speaking, a vacuum engine (like the Wolfhound) suffers significant loss of Isp at sea level. I haven't used either the Skiff or Wolfhound yet (still playing with launchers that were designed in 1.3.0), but I'd generally expect the Wolfhound to be the better choice for transfer orbits, where the whole burn is in vacuum, while the Skiff would be a better choice for a launch, where you start the burn in dense atmosphere. I'll have to look at the Skiff, though, to see if it might replace my current favorite first stage motor, the Twin Boar. Maybe in pairs on an engine plate, to get the necessary thrust...

Well, I did say I didn't expect to see both impact and rendezvous indicators -- but I completely agree with your priority list, too. Not considering a landed object a target makes perfect sense, too. I'm just brainstorming ways to 'abuse" BBT to do something it's not designed to do. I probably get that at work; I repair power tools for a living, and I'm well known in my shop for fixing things with a hammer -- things you wouldn't expect to be fixed by whacking them with a lump of metal on a handle. When you don't have the "special tool" the machine manufacturer recommends, and your boss won't buy it because it's hundreds of dollars and you might never need it again (or only need it once a year or so), you improvise. It gets to be a habit.

The true mastery in programming a bot is the occasional typo. Grand masters make sure the typos are the sort humans will make (next key over, transpositions, right/left hand switches, letter omissions like the one I just corrected, "fat finger" double keys) rather than just random errors.

Well, don't get ahead of yourself. We don't have any actual proof that @NewtSoup is a person... This is the internet, after all. She could be a dog or cat. Or a bot.

MechJeb isn't necessarily perfect for any given maneuver, especially if you're trying to optimize for dV. In general, the method to launch to LKO with minimum dV (as I understand it) is to set up your gravity turn as early as possible, have the correct thrust-to-weight, and burn continuously until your Pe climbs to your Ap height (which means you've circularized). Normally, however, we approximate this -- for instance, my TWR with my (curently) standard "almost SSTO" rocket is always too high for my gravity turn, requiring a shutdown of nearly two minutes before my circularization burn. The approximation that reportedly works best is to start your gravity turn below 1 km or 100 m/s, such that you reach 45 degrees from vertical close to 10 km, have stages with the correct TWR to keep your Ap marker approximately one minute out from the time you pass 15 km altitude until you shutdown to coast to orbital height, then burn again centered on Ap to circularize -- or steer your climb angle to maintain that time to Ap. I don't attempt to do this, because I normally fly without fins (unnecessary weight and drag if you have gimballed engines), and turning more than a few degrees from prograde above 100 m/s will result in the rocket tumbling. Throttling to keep from pushing Ap too far out increases gravity losses. If, OTOH, you do fly with fins, you may find this difficult in that the rocket will self-right to prograde, and it takes a LOT of pitch or yaw authority to overcome this enough to raise or lower your prograde vector enough to matter. The subway maps are generally based on vacuum Isp, as you surmised; the problem is, different engines have different levels of Isp increase from sea level to vacuum -- unless you're using the same engine that was used to generate the data for the subway map you're using, "your mileage may vary" (to use an old American phrase from car advertising in the early days of EPA fuel economy ratings). The best I can offer is to tell you that my favorite mid-game lifter, a Twin Boar with a 6400 tank on top, will SSTO with up to about 15 T of payload; adding drop tanks or boosters will increase that figure some (but then it's not a single stage, is it?), and my launches aren't particularly well optimized either. i don't use MechJeb or KER, so i don't know the exact dV I consume, but I know that this booster and its variants with tanks or boosters will put the same load into LKO, every single time, and as long as my spacecraft doesn't mass more than that figure, it'll get to orbit (with just a little upper stage fuel consumed to finish circularizing, so the booster will reliably fall back to burn up on reentry).

I haven't tested it, but I suspect BBT can already do approximately this, if your orbit already passes over your target and it's set as "target" in the game (which you can do with debris, or even flags). Use a node for your deorbit burn (including a final plane change if needed to put the orbit directly over the target), just as when setting up a rendezvous. What I'm not sure of is whether BBT will correct prioritize between "impact in xx seconds" and "target within 0.1 km in xx seconds" -- either way, you should get a usable countdown, and in either case you 'll get a burn time to zero velocity. The difficulty is mainly that you won't get the intersect markers if your target isn't in orbit; I suspect this will cause BBT to do the "suicide burn" display rather than the "rendezvous burn".

I've got my graphics at default since my hardware upgrade, and I get shadows when I'm close enough to the ground to see them. For command pods under parachute (which is the only thing I fly where I can spare the concentration to look), I start seeing the shadow when I'm 200-500 m above ground (depending on local time of day).

I'll admit, I don't have much of a history of precision landing. In my science game (started in 1.2.2), I once brought a Mk. 1 Command Pod back to splash down within sight (even from sea level) of the Space Center. Once. Normally, even from an equatorial orbit, I can't reliably get within 100 km, never mind a few tens of meters. In the same save, I have, once, landed on Minmus within 40 m of the flag left by the previous landing -- in the dark, with no lights on the lander (didn't expect to land in the dark), the faint glow of a throttled-down Terrier my only illumination. Haven't even attempted it again, and it involved a long hover and using RCS to push the lander around. That said, the only reason I've had to want a precision landing, to date, has been recovery funds in career -- and my career game is going well enough I'm not that worried about a few percent one way or another on the tiny fraction of each launch that I recover. Recovery from LKO into the atmosphere is hard to control anyway -- a few hundred meters difference in apoapsis after the deorbit burn can make hundreds of km difference in how far you traverse after interface -- and coming back from the Mun or Minmus, there's invariably some uncontrolled inclination and I'd be doing well to predict which hemisphere I'm likely to land in. If I had reason to want/need precision landings on airless bodies, I'd consider a mod for it -- but it would need to be lightweight (i.e. not bog down my processor -- even at 4 GHz, a single core can only do so much) and not require opening a bunch of boxes that cover half the screen. BBT has this just right -- replacing an existing element of the GUI with a much more functional and versatile tool. The Trajectory mod may already do much/most of what you're after; I'd certainly examine it before committing to trying to write one. I can't say if it comes close to my preferences, since I've never installed it.

Yes, changing inclination (especially in a very low, hence very fast orbit) is very expensive. If you're orbiting the Mun, it's actually slightly cheaper (in the universal currency of space travel, delta-V) to boost your Ap out near the edge of the SOI at the correct orientation, make your plane change at your new, very high apoapsis, then lower your apoapsis on your next periapsis pass. I haven't checked, but I suspect the same is true of Kerbin orbit, or even Jool orbit -- except that in those cases, there is the Mun to help you, and around Jool there are five moons. I've actually reversed my orbit (i.e. prograde to retrograde) around Kerbin for only a hundred or so m/s, by doing it well out, a little beyond the orbit of Minmus. An ellipse with low Pe is going so slow out there, you could just about manage it by getting out and pushing. Any polar orbit will pass over KSC twice a day, as Kerbin rotates under it, though most commonly the spacecraft won't be directly above the space center when it passes under the orbit. To launch into that orbit, you just have to wait until the correct time of day (i.e. when the orbit is about to pass overhead), then launch the correct direction (north or south with the correct westward component, to kill your eastward velocity due to Kerbin's rotation) to get the correction orbital direction. In fact, with a bit of calculation of your window, you can launch from KSC into an orbit of any inclination you like, oriented whatever way relative to the Sun or the stars -- just a matter of launching at the correct time, in the correct direction, so your corrections once in orbit won't exceed your dV budget.

In the USA, we have an "ultralight" class, no license needed -- one seat, under 254 lb empty weight, max level speed (IIRC) 55 or 65 mph (probably legally defined in kg and km/hr). Then we have "Light Sport", two-seaters under some gross weight limit -- those are the ones that are getting lots of attention in the industry now. Ultralights aren't vanishing, they're just being eclipsed by the Light Sport class -- but $60,000 for a light sport is about $55,000 out of my class. I can, with some patience, get an ultralight (or a "kit", as in "fix this one up" or "finish building this, I give up") within my range. Still need some flying lessons for safety, then there's the hour drive to anywhere I can fly it, and the inability to actually go anywhere with an airplane I can't fly to a real airport. Light Sport is developing a terrible safety record, as a lot of people who shouldn't even be flying solo, never mind have a license, are killing themselves while showing off for their friends. The real obstacle at present is the cost and time to get even a Light Sport license. Without that, I can't rent an airplane of any kind (except to add to the cost of a lesson).

What you're doing, burning to ridiculous velocity, coasting for a while, then braking for capture, is what's commonly called a "cometary orbit" -- because your orbit will resemble the path of a comet, which might (due to gravity assist when it left the Oort Cloud) escape the solar system. If you had the "nuclear awesome" to burn continuously (a vessel referred to in the science fiction of the 1950s as "torch ship"), you could travel on a "brachistochrone" -- that is, shortest time -- trajectory. For destinations within the solar system (the real one) these are virtually straight lines. It's only a week from Earth to Mars at a constant 1 g burn, and even Neptune is only about 6-7 weeks. Burn harder, and if you don't wind up with compressed disks and fallen arches, you get there faster. Remember Heinlein's book, Have Space Suit, Will Travel? One week, Luna to Pluto, at 8 g constant (with a flip turnover in the middle).

Me, too. I was 45 when I was diagnosed, after decades of expectations to "be normal," and "fit in." By my early 20s, had learned to "fit in" well enough to hold a job and live in society. I have no doubt that if I could afford the lessons and aircraft rental costs, I could become a private pilot (I'm good with trigonometry, have an excellent memory, and I'm a very good driver, with long experience on motorcycles -- which requires strong situational awareness; I'm also a better communicator than many who don't have ASD). I've wanted to fly for fifty years -- but it's expensive, and I don't have thousands of dollars to spend on the learning process (not to mention the hours of study, instruction, and practice, while working full time with an hour commute each way). Thirty-some years ago, I flew radio control for a while -- it's often considered more difficult than flying a full size aircraft, because of the orientation issue (you have to control appropriately when the model is flying toward you, might be inverted, etc.), and it's lots cheaper. Not to mention, if you crash, you just collect the pieces, go home, and glue the airplane back together.

If you launched in to an equatorial orbit and then had to make a 60-something degree inclination change, then try to match orbits, I can see why you were at it a while. None of the individual bits is all that difficult, but combining them makes it a bit of a chore -- and a big dV sink as well.

When did Bob become a pilot? Jeb and Val are pilots, Bob is (IIRC) a scientist (never can keep track of which orange suit is a scientist, which an engineer).

Spread angle is exactly what you think it is: with the limitation that it only affects parachutes installed in symmetry sets. So, if I use the 3-symmetry setting to put three Mk. 2 radial parachutes on a Mk. 1-3 Command Pod, I can adjust the Spread Angle for the parachutes to determine how much separation the canopies have when deployed. So far, I don't see any indication in Google that anyone knows what the Canopy Max Rotation Rate does. From the name, it seems it would be related to the tendency of some parachutes to spin when deployed at high speed, which could affect your game performance (causing a temporary slowdown as the CPU deals with rotating the canopy skin). Edit to add: I see the Max Canopy Rotation Rate in the parachute settings in VAB, but I don't see it on parachutes on vessels already in flight. Since I'm still running 1.4.1/MH, I presume this was new for 1.4 or 1.4.1, but I don't recall seeing the canopies rotate on recoveries since upgrading to 1.4.1.