AHHans

You mean the backpack with the parachutes? Well, your Kerbals never know if this is the time that they'll decide to just walk home, so they never leave the capsule without it. (In other words: in stock you cannot remove them. I'm also not much into modding, so I don't know of a mod that removes them.)

LOL. Yes, the loading officer at the launchpad calling: "Next!" (Well, or a firm press of <F9>.)

Why not? Negligible gains vs. negligible costs. It's not like I put 19 RA-100 antennas on a single craft or so. P.S. Turns out that in my latest career game I used only four HG-5 for my early-game relays. Well, by now I have two VKAs in orbit.

That! Except that it doesn't take me hours to find them. Up to one hour? Sure! Especially at the start when I didn't knew what the green sandstones on Minmus looked like. (Those are IMHO the ones that are/were the hardest to find.) Some tips for finding surface features: if you can drive/walk/fly through it then it's a surface scatter, if you crash into it then it's a surface feature. Looking out for shadows can help a lot. (So searching at noon may not be the best idea.) Zooming out (not too far) and panning the camera around can widen your search area. P.S. The surface feature were made quite a bit more common in a patch some time ago after people complained about them being hard to find.

I guess the most important things have already been said, but some additional information. Electricity on the relay is (nearly?) never the issue. Relaying radio signals does not consume electricity! (Yes, yes, that's strange and not how it is in RL, but in KSP it is.) So as long as the relay had some ECs in it's batteries when you last visited it it will be able to relay signals. It is also possible that your lander doesn't have LOS to the relay, but I guess you already checked that. More importantly: you can activate a display of the commnet connectivity in the map view, or the tracking station. That can show you between which craft you do have a working commnet link. There is a rather comprehensive wiki page about how the CommNet works. You can also increase the effective antenna power of a vessel by putting more antennas on the vessel (except for the Communotron 16S which doesn't play together with any other antenna), but this quickly runs into diminishing returns (see the explanation on the wiki page). I usually put up to eight HG-5 antennas on my early game relays, not because they have much more range than relays with four of them but because the HG-5 are cheap and weight next to nothing so it just doesn't matter.

In related news, I recently figured out that if you have a cargo inside a cargo bay and trigger the decoupler to this cargo when starting the engines, then this loose cargo will generate as much drag as if it was outside the cargo bay in the airstream. P.S. Check Yo' Stagin'!

I have nothing more to add to what @bewing wrote, except maybe: welcome to the Forums @RagnarD.

Yes, there is a significant difference which is that - for maneuvers in vacuum - the poodle gets significantly better fuel economy. But that has nothing to do with the amount of thrust that the engines generate, but with the specific impulse - the Isp values - of the two engines. Higher Isp means that the engine uses the fuel more efficiently. But the Isp value of an engine depends on the pressure of surrounding atmosphere. The Poodle as a high vacuum Isp (350s, one of the highest in the game) but its Isp at sea-level on Kerbin is a lousy 90s. So the Poodle is good for maneuvers in vacuum but really bad for lifting anything from Kerbin. The Reliant has a decent Isp of 265s at sea-level on Kerbin but only a mediocre vacuum Isp, making it a good booster engine to lift stuff from Kerbin, but not the first choice for vacuum maneuvers. Yes, with a Terrier you have less thrust and thus a longer burn time. But once you are in orbit it doesn't matter much how long a burn takes (and if it takes too long then you can usually split the maneuver into two burns(*)). What does matter is how high your Delta-V (the rocket-man's equivalent of how far your fuel will take you) is, and this depends on Isp. You are probably confusing this with the situation of launching something from Kerbin - or any other planetoid - into orbit. There the TWR does matter! (Which becomes obvious when you think about what happens if the TWR is smaller than 1.) P.S. (*) Yes, there is a limit when a low TWR leads to efficiency losses also of orbital maneuvers. But in KSP the practical limit is usually the patience of the player when burns become just way too long.

No. You can think of it like that: when you grab an asteroid for the first time then it is checked if there are any contracts open that require you to grab an asteroid of this class. If there are then that asteroid gets a "flag" that kind of says "this asteroid is O.K. for fulfilling this contract". (Actually the contract has a list saying "these asteroids are O.K. for me".) Either approach works. Which one is easier depends on your playstyle. My solution was to design an asteroid tug that also fulfilled the other requirements of the contract.

Sic transit gloria mundi. Somewhat OT: These articles show me how far Google Translate still has to go. The German translation of the article you linked to starts with something that translates to: "The scientist [...] dedicated his whole life to the development of the household space program." . o O (A Soyuz in every backyard. ) The word Google used there also translates to "domestic" but only in the sense like "domestic violence" not in the sense of "domestic policy".

Yes. Right now you don't want to land but to avoid a crash, so thrust straight up to reduce your vertical velocity. If your current velocity is mostly horizontal then you should be able to avoid a crash even without using the ascent engines. (But if you are currently going straight down at 500m/s then all you can do is watch the fireworks.) Once you arrested your vertical velocity then you can decide whether you proceed to land or abort back to orbit.

No, and yes! As @bewing wrote for a typical maneuver in space you want to have 50% of your burn before the node and 50% after the node. The timer that @bewing wrote about is the "Extended Burn Indicator" that can be activated in the settings menu.

KerbNet will show you the coordinates - and in terrain mode also the altitude - of the position where you put the marker. You will have to have a vessel with KerbNet-view of the place for which you want the information.

Set the thrust limiter of the engines to zero. Just don't forget to set them back.

Jajaja. I still think that "Saved by your kids!" is a much better slogan than "Sorry folks, you'll have to stay indoors with your stir-crazy kids for longer." P.S. Yes, I know that it is extremely unlikely that having been exposed to relatively harmless coronaviruses helps you against SARS-CoV-2, and that it is as likely to actually be harmful (as in making it more likely that your immune system overreacts). I just think the idea is funny enough to mention it here. And I thought my wording made it clear enough that I wasn't stating an actual fact or what I thought was a fact. P.P.S. Did I mention that I miss the sound of kids playing in the backyard? The sound of crying kids from the apartment above or below (hard to tell) doesn't have the same vibe.

Well, I did. I still like my thought that parents get protected by their kids by having been sick all the time when their kids got into kindergarten better than the alternative! ( or take your pick.)

O.K. I had a look at the first one, the "Rapier Sketch.craft". The first and most important issue I noticed was that you seem to use FAR! FAR changes the aerodynamics quite a lot compared to the stock aerodynamics so that makes a big difference. And I don't use FAR, so there is little that I can help you with that. (And if you use other mods that might be relevant, then please mention them.) Having said that, I did give it a try with stock aerodynamics. The design is aerodynamically quite stable, with a rather large distance between CoM and CoL. This means that it needs quite a bit of pitch-up trim to fly straight, but in stock that is not a problem, you have enough control authority for that. It does mean that with SAS in "stability assist" the nose drops quite a bit before SAS applies enough trim to keep it stable. (Again, not a problem, but something one needs to take into account.) You also use quite a few struts, but no autostruts. The relevant difference here is that regular struts generate drag, while autostruts don't. To enable autostruts you need to activate "advanced tweakables" in the settings menu. Once you did that you'll have more options in the PAWs (the "right click windows") of the parts, one of them being the autostruts. Autostruts have their own set of problems - in particular when they flip from one part to another e.g. because fuel consumption changes which part is the heaviest - but autostruts to grandparent are usually safe. For a test I removed all the obvious external struts without activating any autostruts, and the craft still flew fine without falling apart or anything. But that may be different with FAR. You are using the RAPIERs in air-breathing mode but you bring enough oxidizer to burn all liquid fuel in rocket mode. That means that you bring way too much oxidizer and too little Lf. Accordingly I ran out of fuel when trying to get into orbit like that. I then replace one FL-T800 tank per side with two Mk1 LF fuselages and with that I managed to get it into orbit with some dV and a few hundred units of excess oxidizer to spare. Once in orbit I noticed that the direction of thrust of the RAPIERs does not go through the CoM. In the atmosphere that is not much of an issue because the aerodynamic forces of the control surfaces give you enough authority to counteract the resulting torque. In space you only have the torque from the reaction wheels to keep you straight which in this case means that you can run the engines only at very low thrust levels without the craft flipping out of control. Some more tips: I find it very useful for my spaceplane to put toggling the engines on or off and switching them between air-breathing and closed cycle (plus toggling the air intakes) onto action groups. That way I can easily switch them all at once. Using dedicated airplane parts like the FAT-455 wings or tail-fin on spaceplanes is risky: the have have low thermal resistance and a prone to overheating and exploding, especially during reentry. To get the most out of the RAPIERs you want to gain as much speed as reasonably possible with them being in air-breathing mode. That means not getting too high too soon, you'll want to get to at least 1000 m/s in air-breathing mode. My flight profile for your craft (with stock aerodynamics!) looks like that: after take-off pitch about 20 deg up until I got to ca. 6000m altitude (at sub-sonic speeds); then slowly lower the nose to the horizon to gain speed (this will loose altitude but I kept above 5000m); once I got to 440 m/s I raised the nose to about 10 deg pitch up, making sure that I don't drop below 400 m/s(!); the increasing speed and the curvature of Kerbin means that the pitch (relative to the surface) will slowly increase, that's fine and what I want; once the thrust of the RAPIERs drops below 170 kN I switch to closed-cycle mode (because that craft has excess oxidizer, on my craft I usually wait till near flame-out before switching); when the time to apoapsis gets above 1 min I switch SAS to prograde hold; when the apoapsis gets to 80 km I throttle down, coast, and circularize.

Hi @Jakewhistler, welcome to the Forums. Yes, the Gameplay Questions subforum is a good place to ask for help with spaceplane design. An posting a craft file is indeed a good way to get said help. Please upload the "*.craft" file to a file hosting service (like Dropbox, Google drive, or whatever) and post the link to the file here. There is also the FAQ, and tutorials (e.g. this one) that may help you.

You can go to the tracking station in the KSC and activate the display of debris there, then you'll see where you have how many pieces of debris. Yes, that can happen! My standard recoverable booster is fine when it lands on ground, where it either stays upright or topples over with the parachutes still deployed. But when it lands on water it bobs around in the water, the parachutes get automatically cut, and sooner or later it topples over without the parachutes to slow the fall. The resulting "crash" onto the water usually leads to several parts being destroyed and leaves me with several pieces of debris.

If all parts with a command point - i.e. command capsules, probe cores etc. - get destroyed then the remaining parts are "just" debris. Did you check if there is debris at the crash site?

That mark is there like similar marks on testing contracts, not like the "reached destination" marks on normal tourist contracts. The tourists need to pass out while the craft is "sub-orbital" i.e. while that tick mark is set. This means that getting tourists to pass out by aero-braking is impossible: aero-braking requires you to be in atmosphere but then you are no longer "sub-orbital". I believe the intended way to fulfill this contract is to have enough engine power to reach an acceleration that let's the tourists pass out. But if you have the GB DLC, then you can also use a centrifuge like my GeeMaster 2000 to get that contract done. You don't even need to put the full craft onto a sub-orbital trajectory: if you rotate the centrifuge axis perpendicular to your orbital velocity - e.g. by pointing the craft to (anti-)normal - then the centrifuge capsules will move against the orbital speed during half the circle. So for nearly half the time the capsules will not be "in orbit" but "sub-orbital" and if the tourists to pass out during that time then the contract is fulfilled. (Yes, you'll need multiple tries. Yes, it's still annoying. The "pass out while flying" contracts are much easier. But the GeeMaster makes the "pass out in orbit" contracts quite O.K. and the "sub-orbital" at least annoying but profitable.)

Nice idea! I do believe that this might help the small ones take the sting out of not getting close to each other.

OT rant: Well, PNG works as well, for papers or posters vector image formats (SVG, PS, PDF if it is vector data) are even better, jpg - and everything that uses a similar compression algorithm - just plain sucks! Especially for posters! Double especially if you send me a powerpoint file that I'm to print for you! So switch off that "automatically compress images on save" option! *arrrggghhhh!* Sorry for the off-topic, but that needed to get out.

Ah. Saved by your kids. Or: "The unexpected advantages of being sick every other week in the first year that your kid went to Kindergarden." Well, not really. But IMHO that's a funny thought.

Yes I do, because that's what the suggestions from some politicians who shall not be named boil down to. Did you actually read those papers? If so how do they relate to treatment of COVD-19 patients? Well, the first one could in some fashion. It essentially says that we don't understand what UV irradiation of blood does, but there are reports about successful treatments from over 60 years ago, so we should look into it again. So such a treatment may have a positive effect on COVID-19 patients, but that's mostly because we don't understand what the treatment does so we cannot rule out a positive effect. P.S. For those who didn't read the paper: it doesn't have anything to do with killing bacteria of viruses in the blood, but with how the blood cells or chemistry reacts to UV light.