Bluejayek

I don't tend to use SRB's. Not because of any philosophical objections to them, just that they never fit in with my designs. Also, being able at abort at any stage is really useful, even though I frequently get into trouble anyways when I forget to throttle down before ejecting a stage.

This was a tough challenge. Talk about precision rendezvous. As you can see in the albumn below, I first attempted to recover him by rendezvousing nearby and pushing him back with another kerbin. However, this failed terribly as whenever their helmets bumped both would get knocked senseless for a time, so Jeb ended up floating 300m away. The way that worked ended up being a 0.5m/s or less collission course with jeb, where he would grab on to one of the many ladders when the ship got close enough. Album link will be added shortly. This challenge would be a lot easier if they let kerbonauts grab onto things like other kerbonauts! I claim head ARC Rocket Scientist. As long as it doesn't come with administrative duties. PS: +1 rep for this amusing challenge http://imgur.com/a/Fn7BH#0

If you are trying this, watch out for some of the high mountains near the poles. Around the equator you are OK down to around 4KM but near the poles, youll have to go higher.

In celebration of the accomplishments of Neil Armostrong, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, and the rest of the Apollo Astronauts. You are, and forever will be, giants, and it honours us to have the privilege of standing on your shoulders. Neil, we shall not forget you. http://imgur.com/a/bVQE1 Felix, this mission profile is as close as I could get to the apollo mission profile using the stock game. I launched two craft, one as a command capsule with, and one as a lander. I then rendezvous'd with the command capsule in a 100km orbit and transferred the kerbonauts to the lander. Then, I landed, EVA'd, and took off. The ascent stage of the lander rendezvoused with the command capsule, kerbonauts rentered the command capsule, and they flew home to a safe splashdown under a parachute. This mission did not entirely go off without problems. First, a staging issue with the command capsule launch left 1/4 of its intended TMI fuel on the launchpad, but luckily I had spare fuel. Then, I had to redo the landing a couple of times... First attempt I mucked up the landing profile and lithobraked, loosing 3 of my descent engines and had to abort up. Reloading the quicksave, the second landing went fine, but I *poofed* Jeb flying him too fast with EVA pack. Third landing was successful, but landed on a slow and 1 of my descent engines broke off, but it is still stable on three. May Neil be the first of many men to walk on the moon, and not one of a dwindling few.

573 days, 14 hours, and 50 minutes. I ran into a bit of a problem at about 995000Mm. I cut down out of top time warp, and it froze me in x1 time warp. If I reloaded the save there would be a sound like thunder going odd, Jeb's portrait would go black for half a second, and then all would be as normal, except I couldn't time warp. Hence, I had to do the last 5000Mm of the journey in EVA time warp. This took a couple of tries to avoid floating too far away from the capsule to get back in, as even a tiny relative velocity makes a huge difference over that kind of distance. As per my method, I time warped on the launch pad until I was facing in the direction of kerbins rotations and then just burned. It was a constant full thrust burn with the exception of one point in my third last stage when I had to cut power to wrestle the kraken (Going about 8,000m/s in Kerbins frame at this point), and I also cut power for a few seconds once in my final stage. Aspargusing is awesome PS: Don't use this craft unless you are on a debrisless persistence file with a good computer. I still get 0.5FPS or lower on a clean persistence file running an i7 960 quadcore with 16GB of RAM. PPS: I could probably have gotten there quicker with some modifications to the design. Firstly and most obvious, it clearly doesnt need the two sets of landing legs and parachute I have on here; I just used a design I had handy that was a prototype for planetary exploration. Secondly, I can almost certainly scrap the decoupler between the second last and last stages, and save weight that way, as well as having the higher efficiency engine running on all 4.5 tanks.

A curved runway? Sometimes I find this is a bug with how it is set on the launchpad, and just restarting the launch will fix it.

I don't think any of those strategies is going to work for me

You could also just use the attachement option in advanced. Its fine for small files like craft files; don't use it for pictures though as there is a 25MB account limit.

I'm most excited for the easter egg moon that is going to appear that they haven't told us about. Because come one, you know there will be one. Even if its a 10 meter diameter asteroid.

You realize of course that in reality blowing up an orbiting peice of space junk would just turn it into lots of orbiting peices of space junk that would be more dangerous? Having a laser on a ship to 'blow up' passing space debris would just make it shatter into little bits that are more likely to hit you anyways. I imagine this doesn't exist in KSP currently, as it would be computationally prohibitive to try to model the thousands or hundreds of thousands of peices that would result. There is also no gaurentee that micrometeorites will be in the game in the future. It is possible they would introduce too much physics calculation to be viable, as well as introducing an extra complexity and the 'random failure' element that many people dislike. However, ablative shielding in the context of re-entry heat will be implemented sometime in the future, and perhaps something similar could be done to protect against small space debris.

Orbital speed is somewhat less then what dt described, it is closer to 2300m/s for a 70/70km orbit, and less for anything beyond that (although you still need more delta V to get out there). The most efficient way I have found to do the turn is to start turning, slowly, once you leave the thickest part of the atmosphere bar, around 8000-10000m. Then, turn over slowly so you are at about 45 degrees at 30km, and fully turned over by 50km or so. Once here, check your apoapsis. If you have done it perfectly (unlikely, hard to do), you should be just below apoapsis at this point with it rising with you. If it is far above you as is normal, cut your engine and wait for apoapsis. When you are about 10s below apoapsis as seen on map view, do a horizontal burn as dt described in order to bring your velocity to around 2300-2500m/s, and you are in orbit Happy flying Note: What dt described works fine, it just wastes more fuel then the earlier turn. Note2: You should turn towards the 90 degree marker, as this is the direction of kerbins rotation and it gives you a couple hundred m/s boost.

Just use the magic torque from the command module! I think you atmospheric folks get spoiled with your quick maneurverability in atmosphere For me, if the ship does a turnover in space within two minutes, its good enough. Otherwise, I'll have to start thinking about adding RCS. However, if I'm at that point, to turn over quickly I'd need to burn about an RCS tank every second. (Not to mention make my graphics card very, very angry with the large number of RCS thrust exhausts)

As I do every time this comes up.... We need this ingame. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOOSE Can you think of anything more kerbal than getting inside a foam bag with a parachute, and strapping a rocket engine to your back to get out of orbit?

Minimus has a mass of 4.234E19kg. That is 42,340,000,000,000,000,000kg. In order to change its orbital velocity by 1m/s, you would need to give it a momentum change of 4.234E19kg m/s. Assuming a rocket exhaust velocity of even 5000m/s, you'd need around 1E16kg of fuel exhausted out your rocket engine to get that velocity change. That mass is something aproximately equivilent to the mass of all of the water in the north american great lakes. It is a LOT of mass. And this is only to get 1m/s of velocity change. If we wanted to stop its orbit say, 270m/s of velocity change, then youd need 270 times more reaction mass... Think of this as something closer to the mass of all of greenlands glaciers, looking at 3E18kg of fuel now. If we then consider that we have to get this fuel from the surface of kerbin to minimus, call it a delta V of 8000m/s, assuming KSP engines with ISP = 300, hence Ve = 3000m/s, we require about 14x the payload mass of fuel to get our fuel to minimus. We're now looking at about 4E19kg of fuel on the launchpad. To visualize this mass, think of the mass of all of antarcticas icesheets, and you get a pretty good idea. Since kerbin is much smaller then earth, and has a mass of 5.29E22kg, we are looking at burning about 1/1000th kerbins mass in order to stop minimus in its orbit. The mass of earths water is about 1/1000th of earths mass, so we can assume the same about kerbin. Therefore, in order to stop minimus in irs orbit you would need to use a reaction mass equivilent to completely draining kerbins oceans. If you intend to do this, I reccomend you find some way to distract greenpeace when you drop the hose in the ocean to start draining it.

How on earth did you get it to fly in a straight line... My best entry so far is 9.1km But the craft basically does a spiral in the air.

oasiac: While I am sure this is part of the problem, I frequently find the issue is just sheer part number. In this, the biggest contribution is number of struts, which would not be cut down by merging fuselages together. Instead, a heftier strut to use instead of 100 weak ones would be nice.

I think he means go from an LKO, then do a flyby gravity assist by the Mun, and without any power applied gravity assist off minimus, and then back to kerbin, and finally out to kerbol. That would have to be one precise original orbit...

Yeah, colonel, the mission profile was to do the entire thing, takeoff to landing, without the UI. This would entail around an 8 hour session however, as without the UI there is no time warp

As hubbazoot mentioned, the only way to do this would be a munosychronous orbit. Since the Mun is tidally locked, this would stay in the same spot relative to both the Mun and kerbin at all times. Unfortunately, the SOI is 2400km, and munar synchronous orbit is at 2900km, so this is not possible.

Perhaps harvestor was on a vomit comet one day, and saw fellow passengers turning green. Hence, Green astronauts!

There was a challenge a while back to do a moon landing with no mapview and the UI turned off. Now thats tough.

Photons / light?

Fun note. KSP does not currently appear to be multi-threaded. In practise this means that an equally powerful single core processor will perform no worse then a quad core processor when running KSP and KSP alone on a cpu. However, as soon as you add background programs such as browsers or video recording software, extra cores become useful. A further note. I believe it has been said by the devs that the physics engine, Unity, will be incorporating Nvidia GPU PhysX at some point in a future release. Hence, if you are considering a computers specs primarily from the vantage of running KSP on it a Nvidia graphics card would be a better choice then an ATI.