MrMoog

Allow me an analogy here. Remember in elementary school, when you used to do all the long divisions by hand. The feeling of accomplishment was pretty high after an especially hard one. Now, once in college, did you have that same feeling when doing a long division, or did you not even bother with it and did it on a calculator? Some could say it was "cheating" or not "pure", or you could say that since you know the mechanics of division, you can do it on the calculator and using your time to do more advanced and intellectually challenging things with your time. Sure, getting to the moon and planets stock is a nice challenge, but when you've done it a couple time, I think you're limiting yourself (voluntarily or not) if you don't use mods/plugins, you're missing a lot of what the game has to offer simply because of ideology. I lifted off manually dozens of time, but now I'm at the point of trying to optimize the fuel and the staging, and the ascent autopilot is a nice tool to do it by isolating variables and having flight data to analyze. It's not "cheating", is pushing the limits of the game and extending the gameplay. It seems to me that the mod haters are trying to justify their lack of openness to a game that even the devs said many times was designed to used with mods. I'm not talking about infinite fuel mods, but legitimate and balanced mods or mods that add features (I count MechJeb in this category). For example, NovaPunch part are as balanced as the stock part, yet offer much more options to design original and unique crafts. Also, one could argue that the stock aerospike engine is less balanced than many mod engines (NP, KW)... so I tend to take the purists and their higher moral ground with a grain of salt. You paid for the game, so you have the right to play it the way you want.

The difference is that the Saturn V wouldn't have left the pad full of radioactive debris after an explosion.

This logic works in most cases, but not always. Sometimes when creating complex ships with escape pods, and modifying them a lot in the VAB, you can get to a point where nothing you do will fix the problem. I have a craft design that is broken for good, whatever I do, I can never get the RCS to drain in the order I want, even when removing them all and reattaching them in every possible order and/or stage. A simple, unbreakable rule would be very useful, and would remove the need to do a full up RCS test on the launchpad every time I test a new design.

Very useful mode, but I noticed a problem when more than one vehicle with this mod are close to one another. The window gets stuck in the middle of the screen (wherever it was before), and is impossible to move for any of the vehicles or debris in the area.

In the VAB, you can rotate parts using Q & E, and fine rotate with Shift+Q & E. To align the crewtank with the pod, you need two normal rotations and 6 fine rotations.

Sweet! Is it very different than the 1.9.3 beta you released a couple of days ago? Also, did you found the problem with the "inverted control/spinning ship" when decoupling a stage with a MechJeb?

Yeah, I just found a serious source of lag when using this mod. It keeps spamming CART OA.Downfloods: Creating wheels first time in the console. It becomes disastrous when using multiple ones. I would be great if this could get fixed, because this is a very useful mod for landing at night.

You seem to be right about that, thanks! I'll avoid the Restart Flight from now on.

A very irritating problem that appeared in 1.9.1 is still present in 1.9.2, that the windows positions are not remembered and are reset quite regularly.

Some of my wish list items / predictions. Mostly long awaited stuff: - Docking. - Multi-capsule ships (Apollo-style). - VAB/SPH assemblies (saving/loading assembled parts). - Complete IVA (kerbals walking around in the ships). - Stock crew modules / empty capsules (for space stations). - More information readouts (think MechJeb's info panels). - Consumables (electricity, oxygen & food/water).

I'm not sure if your question makes sense. The TWR is not dependent on the ISP. We already know the thrust and the ISP of the NTR, and the TWR will be directly dependent on the weight of your ship. The lighter the ship, the higher the TWR. But you're right, the low atmospheric ISP makes it unsuitable for atmospheric use. However, if you're landing a small ship on a moon without air, it might still be a viable option, given you have enough thrust.

You mean this on: http://ksp.olex.biz/ I don't think the values are the real ones yet, but it will be a very useful tool when updated.

Very nice work, I was waiting for someone to mod this sweet spacecraft, and you did it wonderfully! I may have noticed a visual bug though. When the fuel is exhausted while thrusting, 3 of the thrusters flames are still visible, like if at full thrust. The engines aren't thrusting anymore, but the animations are still present. I'm using MechJeb 1.9.0 (for decoupler reasons!) if that could be of any help, or even the cause.

I tried it and it works nicely indeed. I modified some parameters, like deployAltitude and minAirPressureToOpen, and it's a perfect drogue chute. Scott attached many of his chutes around the center of mass of his lander, plus the stock chutes have way to much drag so it tears the ship apart.

I'd love to see the equivalent of Valles Marineris on Duna. It would be even more spectacular since we can now see the terrain's imperfections and form from orbit.

It's 100km above the surface, like mentioned on the tool. Even if you enter 0km, it's still only on the surface.

I did the other way around. I started all manual to get a hold of the game mechanics, and then installed MechJeb to simplify some repetitive and basic functions, allowing me to build more complex ships with more complex flight plans. Also, the auto-ascent is a must for rockets that get my CPU down to <1 fps on lift off. And I could not live without the information panels anymore. Some people see MechJeb as an easy button for beginners, I see it as an advanced tool for more complex missions.

Wow, my bad. I was looking at Jool -> Kerbin, and not Kerbin -> Jool, which is makes more sense at ~3700m/s. The travel back from Jool will be quite a challenge though! By the way, it's a very nifty tool you've made there. It will be very useful to optimize our travels, and to get from Gilly to Laythe in one burn! EDIT: It's a good idea to have some fuel left, because you still need to circularize the orbit when you reach the planet, except if you plan a direct landing, which might be very risk... I mean very kerbal!

I still think there may be something off with the delta-v calculation in your calculator. It says that you need > 50 000m/s delta-v to get to Jool. I don't know what distance you used but I did some inter-planetary testing of my own and from a 100km Kerbin orbit, I was able to reach a "planet" that is 3 times further than Kerbin, 40.5Gm away, with something like 3-4000 m/s delta-v. 50 000 seems too much, considering that your speed stays between 2000 around Kerbin, to 9 500 m/s around Kerbol.

Here's the crewtank mod thread. A must have for any long trip or permanent base. One of Nova's pic hinted that a similar module might be one of the new parts, but it's only speculation at this point.

The closest to this right now is using the infinite fuel tool with MechJeb's auto-ascent function. Once in orbit, deactivate the infinite fuel, and you're ready to go. That's how I test upper stages and powered landers before building the launch vehicle.

I don't care too much about landing, as long as I have some fuel to spare! But the auto-ascent feature is a godsend for huge rockets that want to eat my CPU and let me with 1fps or less on lift off.

I know docking requires a lot of new code and testing, but the devs still took the decision to prioritize planets before it, I was only guessing one possible reason for their reasoning. As for the 2 ships, the plan is to get everyone back. But the lander is designed to allow some to stay behind and start a permanent colony, if wanted. The ascent vehicle detaches from the lander before lift off to save weight. Something akin to the Apollo mission profile, except that the LM and the CM are sent on two separate ships, and the lower part of the LM can be be used as habitat. Crewtanks are omnipresent in my designs, it really is a useful part.

I think they left docking exactly for that reason. It would be too easy to reach other planets: assemble an insane generic ship in orbit and reach any planet without problem. Without docking, we'll have a real challenge to get there, and even more to get back to Kerbin. We may have to design ship tailored to each planet, because getting to Eve will be a different challenge than reaching the third moon of Jool. My two ships approach is really coming along nicely. I've reach the point where the same launcher vehicle is used for the two ships, that are practically the same weight and size. The plan is to leave part of the lander as a permanent base that can hold 10 kerbals in 2 crewtanks. I'm planning a third ship based on the same design, only replacing the lander/base with a rover/MoLab and a skycrane.

Pretty cool names Nova. I especially like Jool and Duna. I would have preferred Charr to Moho though, sounds more badass. I can't wait to put a kerbal or three on each one!