Mister Dilsby

Well, I wasn't going to post these right away, but since you asked... ...anyone who's been paying close attention to the underside shots will have seen this coming. But I hope I surprised a few of you

But that guy in your sig is wearing the glasses--where I work, the glasses means safe! Even if the hazard involves several thousand volts or a few tons suspended by a thin cable, glasses=safe!

Well done! I really like that picture of your lander approaching the polar region. Looks like you made it to Duna and back ahead of me

Two more.

Whoo! And I am IN! This group reminds me a bit of a similar club. "Thanks, Mr. Aerospace!" "No, please, call me 'Mr. Upsilon Aerospace'!'" I bow to the power of Kron.

For sale: Mission flag, never used.

Quite true--I sent an armada to Duna in 0.90 and enjoyed it a lot. It felt sort of like this:

WalEye

Confirmed.

After yesterday's comic installment I had 4! OK, one was a PM pointing out a spelling error, but the other three were all +rep, and it was enough to put me in light green! And now, I can stop refreshing the page every 15 minutes to see if I made it yet

Nice! So I'm sure at some point you experimented with laying track--I-beams for rails, maybe some custom structural plates that look like wood ties, etc. Maybe you even drove the train with broken wheels...they sort of look like steel train wheels with the tires off, right? Not suggesting you lay track all the way around Kerbin, certainly, but curious how that worked out for you if you ever did it over a shorter distance.

Here's some more--and thanks for all your kind comments and rep, you wonderful, generous people have put me in the famous light green group! I'm very grateful, and will try to pay it back with some fanservice. This one's for ol' Shellhead Technical note which did not quite fit with the flow of dialogue: I came in without airbrakes, wanting to make sure I would get captured but not land immediately. You can see from the navball pictures that I had a maneuver node set at periapsis as though I was going to burn there to get a 50km orbit. I watched the predicted dV for the maneuver drop as I decelerated. By the time I reached periapsis the ship was captured and less than half the dV was used up, so I knew that I would NOT use up the rest of the maneuver budget and fall suborbital before I got out of atmosphere. So I let the ship rise to about 30km, and at that point felt safe enough to deploy the brakes and bring the top of the orbit down some more. There. I just saved you about six panels of talking heads :) :)

You're right. See, that sort of thing is what gets engineers in trouble in real life: making assumptions by association. Horizontal launch is often the most efficient profile--not always. Turbojets are often the best way to ascend and descend in Kerbin atmosphere--not always. There is something to be said for aesthetics, of course--even if cheap expendable rockets are the best way to get a certain payload to LKO, flying an SSTO may be cool and awesome enough that you want to do it that way. But there is such a thing as liking one solution so much that you try to make it fit every application. Have seen it many, many times in my RL career (research engineer, power&energy stuff).

Actually, we have an outstanding safety record:

Well done! For you, the sky is no longer the limit w.r.t. planes

It should not be that hard, even with big parts. Are you in an equatorial orbit with your docking ports aimed north and south? If your ports are not aimed that way relative to your orbital path, then they're going to rotate around the N-S axis as your ships orbit. Could that be part of the problem? For reference, here's my Minmus setup. There are two sets of four ports each. You're seeing an 'ore piggie' arriving to the south port on the nearer set. The far set has longer booms and is reserved for large visiting ships. If I need to use one of the ports that are presently oriented E-W, I rotate the station 90 degrees so that those ports are pointed N-S ETA: You'll note the absence of any alignment indicators or other helpers Procedure is to get close visually, aim the docking port N if you are docking on a S-facing port, then kill relative velocity to a few .1 m/s and patiently adjust until everything is lined up.

Oh, I think it definitely can be done. My Hummlebee Mk2 (shameless plug, see comic in sig ) is about 55 tons and meets almost all of these specs. Differences are, --needs the "Orange Knight" rocket booster plane to lift off from Kerbin --does not include a rover; simpler for me to taxi around on landing gear or do suborbital hops --no jets, uses aerospike rockets for gliding assist and a vernor-based VTOL system And in addition to the listed specs it does have full ISRU gear for self-fueling. OP could certainly add a couple of turbojets if desired (IMO unnecessary) and a 3t rover should not be too much trouble.

You can use the 'bomb bay' approach, just put a docking clamp on a girder in the middle of the rover and dock it to the ceiling of the bay. Kind of similar to this concept: Drop the rover by undocking, of course. Re-dock it by driving the rover under the clamp, then raising it by any of the following means: 1. VTOL system -- vernor engines work great and auto-balance using RCS controls 2. Deploy landing legs on the rover 3. Lower the mother ship to the rover by pulling up its landing gear.

Love the simulator--red lights were a very nice touch.

Quirks, yes. Bugs, no. The difference is whether or not it the 'feature' keeps the fictional universe self-consistent. A hypothetical example. As far as I know neither situation actually occurs in any version of KSP. Bug: Any time a structural intake touches an FL-T100, the ship it's on accelerates prograde at the speed of light. Also, your computer chooses a new default printer at random. Quirk: If you leave a structural intake open in any non-oxygen atmposphere, the next time you try to use your jet engine it explodes. ETA: Apologies in advance if anyone from SQUAD notices the above and does it... OK not really

Congrats, well done Squiggsy!

I have my major mining operation on the Minmus flats and shuttle ore to conversion stations in both Minmus orbit and LKO. That way if it's the right day of the 'minth' for an interplanetary transfer from Minmus orbit the ship can refuel and depart from the "Minmus Outbound" station, and if not it can leave from LKO. As to inclination issues, remember that there are two days in each minth when you can make your trans-minmus injection burn at an ascending or descending node, making the intercept trivial. If you are doing long term station filling operations then timing is not so critical and you can wait a few days for those windows.

Lots of good stuff on this 'how not to flip' thread, general techniques I and others have used to solve various launch stability problems.

It's established 'fanon' (ok, this fan posting here, last week, in a comic page ) that Kerbals can hibernate indefinitely and at will. It's one of many evolutionary adaptations, along with small size and complete disregard for personal safety, that make them an ideal species for space exploration. - - - Updated - - - Yeah, I never get tired of that. I always try to stop and look the instant the planet is visible, and look in often afterwards.- - - Updated - - - Oh, you can SSTO quite easily with a turboramjet. I have a couple of designs that work well, one of which is a liquid fuel only craft that finishes orbit on LV-Ns. You can find that and lots of other good ships on this thread. I also recently posted a brutally simple SSTO crew 'recruiter' that orbits on one TRJ and three radial 'carrot' engines. Tl;dr: TRJ + low mass = mid-career SSTO.

Not bad at all, for a n00b! Clearly you learned a lot in a week and a half. Am curious if it came from the Forums (and if so, what threads/tutorials were most helpful?), trial and error, or are you just some kind of kerbal savant?