Carter

If you're performing manned landings, I don't think it is unrealistic at all to do daytime landings exclusively. That's what I do. I time-warp until my LZ is about one eighth through a day cycle before I begin my descent. This has the benefit of giving you plenty of daylight for activities on the surface, but not being so early that the extreme angle of the incoming light makes finding your shadow difficult while also not adequately illuminating the terrain beneath you.

I like the new stock navball more than the enhanced navball. I think the arrow is nicer than the ghosting.

I for one fully support the X37 project and hope to see an entire squadron of them in orbit someday. Each with lasers and cannons and missiles and laser-missile cannons, whatever that would be. Obviously we will need an Orbital Operating Base because there's not much use for a Space Force if there's no Space Troops to call in spacestrikes on space bad guys. We're also going to need space bad guys.

If there were a big old pot of gold on Mars for the taking I'd go and get it, but not just because of the pot of gold. That's why I believe there is more behind the great accomplishments of famous people throughout history than just greed. Sure, the financial reward is a significant motivator, but I am not so cynical as to be believe it is blinding. Edit: I am afraid we are venturing outside of the Forum Rules now, specifically 2.2b. I will stop.

Believing that someone cannot have more than one motivation (monetary) for doing incredible things is, in my opinion, a tragic state of mind to have.

And that's all? Do you think that when he set out to do what no one had done before the only thing that was on his mind was money?

I believe it is a perfectly good example. Magellan's death was not in vain. Just because an endeavor is dangerous does not mean it should not be undertaken. This is exactly what I am talking about.

You sound like the kind of guy who would have told Magellan not to go.

Probably. I'd really like to visit the landing sites some day and see for myself. We went to the Moon so much that it just wasn't a big deal to us anymore. Nowadays we know we could do it again, but why bother? It saddens me to think that humanity seems content with the pinnacle of human achievement having come and gone, and that we are past the climax. There are no more frontiers, everywhere that we've ever gone is only where we'll ever go. Here I go, rambling about my feelings again. I do not know why I do this.

That's why I try to keep strut-work minimal, and identify areas that actually need it. For aesthetics, you can try using small hardpoints instead of girders. I typically only need to strut like that on ascent stages though so girders don't bother me because they'll be in the ocean and I'll be in space.

The butt monster from Stephen King's Dreamcatcher.

The flag may have been bleached white, but the stars and stripes are still there. There is only one country on planet Earth whose flag has 50 stars and 13 stripes, none of the 6 banners on the Moon will ever be mistaken for anything but the flag of the United States of America.

I typically put a pair of modular girder segments just underneath stack decouplers and strut them to the stage just above them, it works pretty well. With ferram's Kerbal Joint Reinforcement, I only ever have to do this if I'm attaching a larger diameter stage underneath a smaller diameter stage, like shown in your video.

If I tried to build something like that I'd might as well have my frames mailed to me by Squad. Every day I'd get a new one and say, "Ooh, that still looks pretty. I wonder what it would look like if I made it spin faster?" And I'd send a letter to Squad informing them that I'd like to press and hold the E key for 1.36 seconds.

Any craft that is just testing out an idea or a part and isn't really going anywhere is X-1, X-1A, X-2, etc. Satellites, Stations, or Bases get relevant names. My box-formation of LKO communication satellites are KSAT M1, KSAT M2, KSAT MM1, KSAT MM2. M1 & M2 have dishes targeting Mun, MM1 & MM2 have dishes targeting Minmus. Mission craft get named after US Navy Destroyers. It's a pretty long list so it will take me a long time to use it up, and even if I do I'll probably go through the list again with Fletcher II, Radford II, etc. I'm not very creative.

All a stock refueling station does is allow a higher quantity of smaller and less complicated ships to go further by spending more time and using more maneuvers moving and getting to the fuel. Use an 18-wheeler to haul its own diesel or use a pickup and park a bunch of other pickups with jerry-cans along your route. I'd prefer doing the latter if I didn't have to ship all the fuel from the surface to top off stations myself. That's where mods save the day.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/93685-0-24-2-%28Atmospheric%29-Trajectories The only stock alternative I know is save-scumming.

I switched to FAR from NEAR specifically to use this mod, I have not noticed a measurable difference in my gameplay.

With FAR you can also use your pod's torque to pitch up a little bit and actually generate lift. By doing this you can set a Pe like 20km, for instance, but prolong your time in the upper atmosphere. I've actually started climbing by a few m/s on a few reentries. You ycan also set a Pe of 45-50km and do successive aero-braking passes. I'd only ever do that if I was coming in from inter-planetary, any orbit with the Ap inside Kerbin SOI isn't that big of a deal.

I put radial mounted parachutes at the bottom of my boosters once, just one per booster, facing outwards. Not at the top, and not in the middle, all the way down by the nozzle. This had the effect of hauling the nose away from the craft and it would gradually accelerate away from the main body before completely turning end-over. It was actually very pretty. Since I've installed Real Chutes I've been having trouble replicating this, I may need to crank the pre-deployment altitude way up, but Real Chutes just doesn't seem to do that instantaneous tug upon deployment that stock does. Something to try, but I don't do it anymore now that I'm learning how to tweak Sepatrons.

When I made that comment I assumed command parts are sorted between probe cores, pods, and cockpits, but now that I think about it that is probably not the case. A Nose to Pro/Nose to Retro toggle sounds like a good idea. If my original assumption is correct, however, I still think BFGfreak's proposal is superior to what I had in mind, as it wouldn't interfere with creative uses of pods and cockpits you may find among our more imaginative builders. I was thinking of having pods' reentry calculated with their noses to retrograde by default, if that is possible.

I'm using FAR. I did a quick fly-by of the Mun and burned to escape to a 20km Pe at Kerbin for reentry. After leaving Mun SOI I decided to EVA because I wanted to pull some Science data from a pair of Materials Study and Mystery Goo containers into the Command Pod (the stock Mk1 1.25m). After exiting the (very small) spacecraft the clock numbers went from green to yellow and my FPS plummeted. I assumed this was because AT was calculating my decent profile so I reentered the spacecraft, went into Map mode, and unchecked the two boxes (Display Trajectory and Auto-update iirc?) in the upper left corner. This did not help when I EVA'd again. I boarded the craft again and burned a little radial out to raise my Pe out of Kerbin's atmosphere and that did the trick. I was able to EVA with good FPS and retrieve the Science data. I have not been having good luck with even landing in the right ocean with a Command Pod, I think I may know why now that I think about it. I'll do another flight and come back with an update. EDIT: After looking at the Page 1 screenshots again, I realized Youen's example flight is done with a space-plane, which obviously does not reenter backwards like a pod does. I attempted setting all the AoA sliders to 180 degrees, because my nose is going to be pointing at the retrograde vector throughout the descent. Discovery: they only go up to 30 degrees. The next thing I tried was putting a probe core upside-down on top of my pod and controlling the vessel from there when planning reentry. Long story short: the predicted LZ was extremely accurate. I'd like to suggest some sort of functionality for including pods for Atmospheric Trajectory so this workaround isn't necessary. Thanks for the awesome plugin, btw.

The White Whale. I'm not sure what I'll name my next one. I'll probably go down the list of fat celebrities.

I'm not very good at KSP and I get hung up in the design phase for 90% of the hours I put in. The Career Mode Update helped with that a lot, and it forced me set up landing missions on Mun and Minmus that I never would have before, and just before my last hiatus I actually did a flyby of Duna because I was starving for science. I had never done interplanetary before that. Now these asteroids are flying around and I've got new parts with which to go get them. After getting a little inspiration from the forums I slapped together a bunch of fuel, RCS, and four nukes on top of the launch engines and with just two or three trial-runs to work out kinks and deficiencies, I went chasing after a Class E coming in on a 285 degree trajectory. All I did was force it to get captured, by orienting my nose retrograde and then translating to get the COM under my claw, it was no fuss. I had to detach and reattach several times because I'd lose control while burning, but seeing that for every second I burned I added several hours to its escape time, it was stress free. My Kerbin system now has a fourth body named The White Whale. http://imgur.com/a/SOvlk

It seems intuitive to me that the Oberth effect would apply at both periapsis and apoapsis, but simply reversed. The most efficient way to add energy to your orbit is to burn directly prograde at point of highest velocity (periapsis). Therefore the most efficient way to subtract energy from your orbit would be to burn directly retrograde at point of lowest velocity (apoapsis). You'll also get more bang for your buck by performing radial and normal maneuvers at apoapsis, but maybe I'm stretching to say Oberth applies to those, I'm really not familiar with the specific definition. After playing this game for a while without really reading anything about spaceflight you start to just "get" stuff that when you attempt to explain to someone else, they just don't understand unless you showed it to them in-game. Like teaching an old person how to use an iPhone without actually putting one in their hands.