EndOfTheEarth

The landing lights can act as a short range altitude indicator. I always put at least one red Illuminator MK1 on my landers, as you can begin to see light from it reflected off the land at a distance of 100m.

Haven't had any issues with it so far. I had a pretty heavy descent stage on the thing, and what you see there is still loaded with fuel, so it manages to hug the ground pretty well, considering the low gravity. The complicated bit was that all the tires popped when I first landed it. After I got one of the kerbals out to reinflate one, the whole ship flew up 7m from the phantom kick that happens every time you do that. RCS, SAS, and very fast switching helped mitigate it.

Wanted to test the new Mk2 parts, then remembered that it's been nearly a year since I've sent a rover to Minmus. Easy fix:

I guess they're adding destructible cities too?

Really though, an objective-based campaign a-la 2001 A Space Odyssey would be cool, and fit in well with the current assets.

This is actually covered in the Orbiting 101 tutorial available through the game's start menu. Would highly recommend playing through the stock tutorials at least once!

1) Interplanetary? LV-N 2) Always put more than one docking port on your transport stage. 3) Landing? 5m/s 4) You can begin seeing light from the Illuminator MK1 when you're 100m off the ground. If you're descending, time to start thinking about Item #3. 5) Before traveling to your destination, you should know the following about it: --a) Surface Gravity -- Atmosphere, and minimum orbit height if one is present. --c) Average land altitude (even the ice lakes on Minmus tend to be 66m above sea level) --d) Time Acceleration altitudes 6) Kerbin is the second-hardest planet to get off of in KSP. This means that if your lander works there, it works almost everywhere.

Before I answer these questions, I would like to point out that you can easily get to the Mun or Minmus without Apollo-style docking. 1) The closest pod to the apollo LEM is the MK2 Lander Can http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Mk2_Lander-can 2) You seem to be early-on, so you don't need to worry about this sort of thing. I've been to most of the planets without giving it a second thought. If in doubt, try it out on Kerbin, then compare the gravity/highest altitude of your flight on Kerbin to the place you're headed. Since this is Kerbin SOI stuff you don't need to worry much about making an amazing transfer stage. 3) No mods needed either. Any of the large dark craters is reasonably flat on the bottom. If you want to make life easier on yourself, there are two tricks you can do to improve your landing knowledge: a) Land or crash a probe at your destination first. As long as one part survives, you have a good estimate for landing altitude. put colored Illuminator Mk1 lights on your lander, pointing DOWN. If they're on, they'll give you a 100m warning about your distance from the ground. There are also a number of maps published online. 4) If you've been practicing rendezvous, you know about maneuver nodes. Use maneuver nodes to get you into a close approach to the Mun, then, once your periapsis changes to one around the moon, plot another maneuver at periapsis that burns retrograde--away from your direction of travel, so that it captures you in orbit around the moon. Interestingly, this is still the figure-8 maneuver from Apollo, just chopped up into pieces. The reason for the 8 was something called a "free return trajectory", which was designed to allow Apollo astronauts an easier time getting home if they messed up somewhere.

It's a lander, but it it uses a pair of TurboJets for the initial ascent. The Jets are each attached to Mk1 Jet fuel fuselages (set to 50% full, since I never use more than that), and each gets air from a Ram Intake. These detach radially from an x200-16 fuel tank, which is fueling a Poodle. No crossfeed between the x200-16 and the Mk1s, but I am aware that fuel can be transferred across the radial decouplers if necessary. The ascent profile that I used while practicing on kerbin was jets up to around 13km and a speed of 350m/s, then detached and went ahead with the Poodle. The descent profile that I used was to let the atmosphere handle most of the slowing down until around 5km, then activate my four Mk2 radial chutes. This gets me down to a speed of 12-14m/s buy the time the chutes are fully open. From there, I have a single landing light to give me a visual altitude check--once I see the light reflecting off the ground, I turn on the poodle just enough to give me a 5m/s landing.

By this point I'm so used to missions where either you don't need to think about how much the atmosphere is affecting your landing zone, because almost anywhere will suffice (Kerbin, Duna) or where there is no atmosphere whatsoever, meaning that throttle control and direction is in the only variable in choosing where you land (Minmus, Pol) This is my first time going to Laythe, and I plan to operate from an equatorial orbit for the sake of making Docking easier once I get back up into orbit. My reason for this is that my lander barely made orbit during tests on Kerbin, so I doubt that it would have the fuel for inclination changes once it gets into one around Laythe. 1) Is there a particular landmass that's easier to go for a landing on? 2) If not one accessible from an equatorial orbit, is there one more easily accessible from a non-equatorial orbit? 3) Also, any tips for estimating where the atmospheric drag will set you down?

I still want to see comprehensive results from OCO. Percentages in meteorology mean more when backed up by a model. http://oco.jpl.nasa.gov/

There will still be jobs, but the nature of the jobs will change. We may not use typewriters any more, but keyboard and word processor companies still have plenty of positions. Same with robots. The robot performs the task, but who repairs the robots--and before you answer "other robots", think for a moment of how specialized the initial robots must be to replace humans, and how complicated a repair-bot you would have to build to repair 1000+ designs of worker-bots.

I think that Dream Chaser will get booted out, and here's why: WEIGHT As wonderful as the spaceplane feel is, it is the heaviest of the three spacecraft (11,300kg) and this means that: 1) Once you load all the passengers, you can't load as much cargo as you would for a capsule. 2) Even with low cargo capacity, you are limited in altitude. Theoretically, you could refit CST or Dragon for high-apogee flights by removing some occupants and cargo, but most of the weight of the DC is in the airframe. 3) Even if it lands at a large commercial airport, it's big and bulky and still needs to be transported back to KSC (Kennedy this time, not Kerbal). Unless that airport is the KSC runway, DC will cost more per pound to recover, even from an optimal landing. Aside from the weight issue, Sierra Nevada has been given progressively less and less of the Dev money from NASA as production has gone on, while Boeing and SpaceX have gotten the most. I think this suggests that NASA favors them more than SNC.

Not sure about RosCosmos, but NASA spacecraft don't just produce alarms, they also produce an alarm code that informs mission controllers about the nature of the problem. Mission Control is trained to deal with each alarm type through simulations, and they know which alarms are ignorable vs which ones are life-threatening. A famous example of this was Apollo 11 and the LEM computer throwing a "1201 Alarm". Mission control had trained for this alarm (and had failed over this particular alarm during the dress rehearsal!), so they knew that the computer was wrong, not the spacecraft, and continued to the first manned moon landing! You can hear it in the mission audio, at about 27 seconds in this video: A more recent example was a SpaceX Falcon 9 where the computer screamed for an abort half a second before launch due to a pressure problem in one of the fuel tanks. NASA and SpaceX promptly aborted the launch and discovered a problem that might have blown up the rocket, had it actually flown. Not sure if this was it, but it's a good video of an abort anyway: On the ground, the situation is a bit different. There is no rush, and as long as you haven't launched the rocket, you can truck an engineer out to fix it. This is why there are so many delays during launch; the Mission controllers take every pre-launch computer alarm very seriously, and will often halt or abort the countdown if the computer is acting up. Best case scenario, the computer was right and you just saved a 200 million dollar rocket. Worst case scenario, the computer had a faulty program and you may have just saved a 200 million dollar rocket anyway. Long story short: if it's still on the pad, and something looks off, abort.

For those of you who don't know, NASA will soon be announcing which of the Manned space contractors will continue to receive funding, and will ultimately become the group that puts Americans back into orbit. The current three major contestants are: SpaceX (with DragonV2) Sierra Nevada (with Dream Chaser) Boeing (with CST-100) The downselect will reduce the funding from all three of these organizations to two, or possibly just one "winner". Who do you think will make it to the next round? Pictures, for those of you who don't know the spaceships by heart:

Treat the Kerbal like you would any other object you were trying to dock with, then switch when you are close enough. If you do not know how to dock, I would strongly recommend practicing in sandbox mode. Naturally, you should always bring a little RCS fuel and RCS thrusters.

The reality is that no real-life rocket has ever been flown 100% manually. There is always a computer helping with navigation, and often executing the actual burns. This is the common justification I've seen for MechJeb. That said, every rocket that has flown with people aboard has flown with people who are trained in what to do when the computer fails or bugs up. This is where KSP players tend to differ. I do not know why. I used MechJeb some time ago, and while I haven't tried more recent versions, MechJeb left these impressions on me (and me alone; others can and will disagree): Pros: 1) Mechjeb will always arrive in orbit with more fuel than you. 2) Mechjeb will land you precisely where you want it to land. 3) Mechjeb will always conduct its burns in a timely manner. Cons: 1) Arriving at a destination with MechJeb does not provide an equal feeling of satisfaction to getting there manually. 2) MechJeb knows nothing about the shape of your ship, the shape of your target, or the grade of the slope you are landing on, resulting in things crashing into other things. 2a) MechJeb does not recognize obstructions, such as moon arches, and will try to land 'through' them. 3) MechJeb does not understand that staging while pitching yawing is a bad idea. Therefore, my feelings on MechJeb are as follows: You should be able to fly and land at a destination once manually before handing it over to MechJeb, so that you know what to do if something goes wrong. After that, feel free to use MechJeb all you want, but keep an eye out for flight anomalies.

Kerbals, for a period of their life, get death metal music blasted at them 24/7, increasing in volume each day. On the seventh day, a recruiter shows up and calmly reminds them, "There is no sound in space".

Interestingly, that would probably be a spaceplane mission that I sent to Minmus, even though I already had two ships there and waiting. The reason why it was so lonely is that Aldrid Kerman overshot the landing site by something like 1/8th of the planet. I managed to land him safely enough, and was using RCS to push the ship along on its landing gear (this was before rover wheels). I made it something like a quarter of the way to the other ships when I lost control, took a tumble, and the cockpit disconnected. At first I debated sending a ship to him, but decided that the terrain was too rugged for a safe landing. Aldrid would have to go to the ships on his own. So now we have a poor little kerbal trekking across the icy wastes of Minmus towards a purple circle in the far distance. No friends, no vehicle, no hope of resupply, and a dwindling supply of backpack fuel--it was the loneliest I had ever felt in the game, so I'm sure that Aldrid was nervous as well. I still consider seeing the other ships begin to render in the distance as my favorite moment in KSP, and my sense of relief upon loading him into the return ship was a serious weight off of my shoulders.

First successful Pol landing today! I've come a long way since that mess of a Bop Mission half a year ago. After this I'll do Eeloo, and I'll have made it to and from everything in the solar system with less than Mun gravity (plus Duna). The fuel situation has been good this mission so far, partially due to the volume of the stuff that the SLS parts let me shove into one piece for the tug. Either way, this is the most confident I've ever felt in Jool's SOI, and I can't wait to try my luck with Vall--I've wanted to go there since the release of .17.

I have a few pieces from Geodesium. They're the music group that's responsible for something like 80% of all real-life planetarium music, so it's usually very fitting. Some samples: http://www.lochnessproductions.com/geo/grs/grs_player.html

None listed. I consider the land and return from everywhere to be expert level, and landing and returning from everywhere with one mission to be master level. I rank myself as Upper-intermediate. I've gotten to half the planets/moons, but there's still a lot of work to do.

My thoughts on the matter are mixed. I mean, yes, the SLS parts are immensely overpowered. The first time I booted this update, I'd made an SSTO in three minutes with no math, no tests, and seven parts, and I'd almost never managed anything like that in .23 That said, I imagine that the costs behind these parts in career mode MUST balance out the power. SLS engines seem to be end-game tech, and while they should stay in the game, they should also be hard to obtain. Sandbox is sandbox. People overbuilt sandbox rockets before .23.5, and they will do the same now that they have bigger parts. There shouldn't be any surprise here.

Ingredients: 1 Jumbo parachute 1 3-man capsule 1 Rockomax decoupler 1 Large ASAS 1 Kerbodyne ADTP-2-3 1 Kerbodyne S3-14400 tank 1 KR-2L Engine I just got into an 80km/73km orbit, without decoupling anything, with fuel to spare, on my first attempt, with seven parts. In the last version, trying to build a SSTO with stock parts involved a lot of trial and error for me. I am not a SSTO expert by any means; usually I avoid them because I prefer seat-of-my-pants-ing it to doing the math work. Once I saw the update, I was curious about the power of the KR-2L vs the 14400 tank, so I slapped this thing together and this happened. Does the strength of the new parts negate the challenge of building a vanilla SSTO rocket? I'm inclined to think so, but I'm curious to hear other opinions.

Actually, it was a Progress resupply ship, and a manual docking. Even though it isn't relevant to the discussion on autopilots, everyone here should watch it, as it really hits home with the point of not rushing while docking.