Corona688

This. When I think about it, KAC was an enabler for this, not a fix. I just had this feeling that I was going to lose all my good contracts and ... well, maybe in older versions that was a problem but no, the game doesn't punish you for that now. Another thing to keep in mind: A space station with 750 data and a pair of level-1 scientists is set for a solid year. If you spend all your time flying, that may be a literal year. So the first part of my game will remain grinding, to earn the money and science to send up stations, after which I will be able to afford to relax and timewarp big missions out. Probably several big missions, as I can't break old habits entirely.

Random thingies, no question. I love the lump-strutted NASA space probe look.

People will always complain about spaghetti rockets, even when joints have been strengthened to the point of improbability. Even when autostrutting is available in stock game. Always.

If you mean airplane, the main consideration for those is total fuel, as at cruise they will fly at a fairly steady speed consuming a predictable amount of fuel.

My suggestion: Give engines a configurable, minimum fuel priority. When available tanks above that priority run out, an engine will stop drawing fuel. You could call fuel priority "Pressure" , with the intuitive principle that a high-pressure tank is needed to drive a high-pressure engine. This is simple to understand, backwards-compatible, and fixes everything. Ugly fuel pipe hacks will no longer be useful for anything but piping fuel. Engines can be told exactly what tanks to use by priority and and crossfeed alone. An example rocket where this feature would be helpful, my twisted-candle heavy lifter: Fuel crossfeed is enabled in all decouplers, and all engines fire simultaneously, burning the bottom tanks first. Stages are discarded from the bottom up in order until orbit is reached. Tank levels must be watched, because stages won't expire once they run dry. Yes, I could fix that with an ugly fuel pipe hack, but that would be an ugly fuel pipe hack.

KSP is not suited to a 1-button controller. KSP 0.1 maybe, the 2d version perhaps.

You right-click on a fuel tank and hit the plus or minus buttons. The highest-numbered tanks drain first, except when blocked by decouplers (which you can re-enable with crossfeed).

Not at all. $19.99/min, cash or cheque. You'll hear from my lawyer once he's left rehab. You already paid for a product but expect more and more and more free work. KSP is no longer financed by your expectations.

Very difficult to do built vertically. You need girders and it ruins your aerodynamics.

I think the lowest cost I've achieved is about 1000 per ton. My reusable ones so far have ended up even worse, due to fuel weight.

Nothing in this world is free, my friend.

Either lash on your solids with a strut at the top, or enable autostrutting in the right click menu. And make sure the decoupler grabs them in the middle, so they're shoved straight away | not pushed on-end / . You can also use seprotrons to get them away from the main rocket more quickly. And always point prograde when discarding empty-solids! I like to fire as many stages simultaneously as I can. Crossfeed is enabled in decouplers and fuel priority is set so all fuel comes from bottom-most stages until depleted. This reduces the amount of dead weight you carry in the form of noncontributing engines and empty fuel tanks. They call this kind of asparagus twisted-candle, because it actually looks like asparagus. Tricky part is, engines won't die when they should, you have to watch tank levels. I wish they'd let you set a minimum fuel priority for engines.

No it doesn't. Not even when it would be a really, really good idea to shrink it.

It gives you a map of mining areas, which is useful if you decide to go that route. Mining means a fair bit more work but also means you can launch smaller things as you can gather fuel while you're there. 1km is far too early for your gravity turn, even with the new atmospheric model. I heel over at 20km, which I'm told is a bit old-fashioned, but works quite well for me. More like 30-50km. It really doesn't matter. Some of us shove decouplers and the next engines into the same stage, for simplicity, and also for festive and mostly-harmless explosions. Most of your fuel tanks and engines will become dead weight inside the first minute of launch. They'll also be the wrong engines and far too big - high-thrust low-efficiency. Get rid of them as soon as you can. My strategy: Liftoff. You need about 2 gees for about 1:10, during which you'll do your gravity turn. So use big vector engines like mainsails, maybe some kickbacks, and enough fuel for just that. Then discard the whole thing. Sustain. This should use efficient engines like LV909's, poodles, and/or thuds. It should generate somewhere in the neighborhood of a gee of thrust for three minutes. This will be enough to reach orbit or a hair less. Eject. Space Stuff. Your capsule, your electronics, little manuevering engines, and everything else. No clue. Without a picture its pretty hard to tell. Guessing you have some rough stuff near the top causing drag, but that's only a wild guess.

Once managed to get Bill to do a perfect back-flip on Minmus, landing on his feet, by jumping up and hitting a capsule with his face.

I believe "safe" means "unlikely to rip off'" - so the velocity where a partially-deployed parachute will not rip off, even if it can't slow down. "Unsafe" would be the point when it would rip right off a heavy ship and give a light one a heck of a whack as it rapidly slows down. When I attach multiple chutes I like to have some 'deploy when safe' and 'deploy when unsafe', in the hope that the unsafe ones might sacrifice themselves to turn an unsafe descent into a safer one.

A command seat should be able to deploy a craft's parachutes without a mod under any circumstances. They along with RCS are purely mechanical things which don't need power to function. If you mean the EVA parachute, that's a mod and should be in modded questions.

Cooling systems are a joke during re-entry. Where exactly are they going to dump the heat? Nowhere, they can't!

You maniac, you've flooded the world!

Knew a guy who'd launch rocket after rocket without reverting to the point he'd catch debris of the last one on the way up. For this he earned the nickname Captain Kessler. Someone also once managed to forget their space station was in a retrograde orbit, with messy results. This caused a massive amount of prograde and retrograde mess in the same orbit, to the degree rescue became impossible. Beyond that space junk collisions are very rare.

I like to build cylinders which point north-south, with docking ports at the ends. This removes a lot of aggravation from docking. Just point dead-north or dead-south as appropriate, and the navball will guide you in.

My most facepalm-worthy moment was packing a satellite in the middle of a craft. Had to undock everything to get rid of it - after which I realized The lander was bone-dry due to a crossfeed error. I'd undocked every drop of fuel. That satellite had been the only qualified pilot aboard. Doing rendezvous on pure RCS with an unbalanced, fuel-less lander without even stability assist was Fun. Oh, another: Watching Jeb roll six hundred meters downhill from the remains of his rocket unicycle. That's several straight minutes of low-gravity ragdolling. I also had that happen to a low-budget tourist craft, almost nothing but an airplane tube and a parachute. It landed on a veeeeeeeeery slight slant and rolled for ten freaking minutes, with timewarp.

The ISRU instructions mention hydrogen and oxygen. That's the one and only in game word on the constituents of fuel, I think, so I'll take it. It covers everything anyway. Hydrogen fuel, oxygen oxidizer. Monopropellant? Hydrogen peroxide. How well do jet engines run on hydrogen? Probably a bit hot and explodey. Do not smoke around the planes. DO NOT.

A trick I discovered: The spaceplane hangar doubles as a wind tunnel. Want to know if your aircraft is one of those that "flips out"? Rotate the whole craft nose-up in the SPH and see if your COL moves ahead of the COM, i.e. it will start wanting to nose up. Possible this is one of those things everyone knew but me, though I doubt it. I don't feel too bad about bumping this thread as it's full of useful stuff still.

I agree this should be in game in at least basic form, but Squad boxed themselves into a corner and won't. At core the idea's simple enough you can do it yourself though: http://www.strout.net/info/science/delta-v/ This will quickly tell you how far any particular stage will push just from weights and efficiency.