Corona688

If you ride the edge of communication range or must endure unexpected radio blackouts, the more advanced cores will do a lot for you. All their various features, as well as Z and X, remain available even under limited control. This is assumed to be "the computer taking over". This means, even when your relays can't reach it, the Octo can stabilize a burn, the HECS can land if flown carefully, and the HECS2 can rendezvous! The biggest ones with their huge reaction wheels are more meant for controlling large stages I think. Also, I will point note that the HECS2, the only fully-functional "small" core, is by far the most expensive.

It's usually done the other way around: "We know how to reach orbit: 600 m/s at 1.5 gees(40 seconds), then 600 m/s at 0.9 gees(68 seconds), then 1500 m/s at 0.5 g(305 seconds). Engines weigh such-and-such per kilonewton and all have an ISP of 340." Then Werner von Braum breaks out the slide rule and tells you the facts of life. Then you curl up and cry and cut down the payload by a factor of three. Finally the requirements for your imaginary engines get given to RocketDyne, and they curl up and cry. You could make template rockets that way - this many mainsails plus this many thuds with this much fuel for the bottom stage, then this many skippers plus this many thuds for the middle stage, then this many thuds for the top stage. It probably won't be able to put them all together for you, unless you stick to a template there too. Relying on thuds helps prevent impossible design suggestions.

Step 1: Admit you don't need color. Step 2: Stop that. You don't need color. Your color inkjets die because you don't use them often enough. Step 3: Get a laser. The cartridges last 10x longer, never dry out, cost way less in the long run, and the printer will outlive your computer both in lifetime and usefulness.

One of our standard questions ought to be "have you used other flight simulators", I think. It never occurred to me to wonder if you were fighting old habits. Or else we might explain how that works, rather than just "how to move the correct direction".

The only time I ever got a wheel-jump was after parking on a 30-degree incline, so I think you're onto something.

Do you have (E), a screenshot?

He's making wild-guesses since he can't see the craft. My crystal ball is malfunctioning, so I can't really see your craft either. We can only go through a list at this point. Hint: A screenshot is sometimes worth a thousand words. Especially a good screenshot. Zoom in enough that we can actually tell the parts apart. If you have fuel and engines connected, but they won't fire, there's only a few things in an unmodded game which would stop it from working; Engine is disabled: Right-click on engine, activate engine. Fuel tank is disabled: Right-click on fuel tank, click on red "excluded" symbol to allow fuel to flow. A green arrow is the "on" state. There's one for fuel and one for ox. Lack of control: No pilot, or probe core is out of electricity. I think 1.0.2 is actually be before "loud and clear" update, so antennas wouldn't matter. Fuel tank is empty: If you're looking at the resource monitor rather than the tank itself, beware that it sometimes includes fuel tanks from the next stage. Right-click on the fuel tank itself to see what's left in it. If you have mods, all bets are off. Some realism mods will prevent you from restarting most liquid-fuel engines, like what would happen in real life except for very special engines. Compared to the real thing it's rather smaller. By and large they've been improving, but they've gotten more complicated too. Most of us play the current version though, as once you upgrade you can't easily go back, so it's what we understand best.

Just like any rocket, significant changes in DV mean expending a large fraction of the payload's own weight in fuel. At a very rough cut, you can get 2km/s delta-V on a 10-ton asteroid from 10 tons of fuel. If you intercept while very far away, you can fine-tune where it passes through Kerbin system for almost nothing, and maybe take advantage of a lucky moon mun intercept -- people have occasionally found asteroids captured for free.

That is quite literally rocket science There's loads of rough guesses and approximations I could throw at you - estimate from gravitational energy, estimate from newtonian mechanics - but at the end of the day it's probably easier to cheat with liquid-fueled engines and the occasional spaceplane. You can make a "spaceplane" out of junos and a swivel. It won't make it to orbit, but it can beat 62,000m.

I have the exact same sort of contract. There's no way I could sent that much fuel to Minmus for the price, so I'll set up a mining operation instead. The low gravity makes it cost-efficient. A pair of sparks can get an entire orange tank to orbit with most fuel unused.

The rover was literally scraping itself around in a circle with brakes on and reaction wheels off (all of them). No matter how funky your PoV that's not supposed to happen. I do the exact same

It almost never matters for me. I don't aim at all whatsoever, and hit an ocean, plain, or desert. The odds of hitting anything else are really slim.

Pretty sure that's the in-game defaults, where they remain for me, as I can't think of anything better.

I have different standards for different kinds of craft. Probes and satellites: "Gear" deploys antennas and solar panels. Make orbit, hit 'gear', and it's good to go. Science missions: "Gear" stores data and resamples all instruments. "Brakes" resets instruments when data can't be stored. Manned craft: "Abort" shuts down all engines, deploys all parachutes, and ejects. While very incompletely and badly implemented right now, this is the standard I want for anything which might be docked to anything else: "Control From Here" (Primary Spacecraft, Flight Mode) "Control From Here" (Primary Spacecraft, Docking Mode) "Control From Here" (Secondary Spacecraft, Flight Mode - i.e. Tug) "Control From Here" (Teritary Spacecraft - i.e. Space Station) "Control From Here" (Primary Spacecraft, Auxillary Docking or Flight) Mission Specific Mission Specific Mission Specific Mission Specific (i.e. zero) Spaceplane mode switch Groups 1-4 must activate all related and deactivate all unrelated engines. So even if you end up with a booster stage in orbit somehow, you can safe it at a touch. I could undock a lander, hit 1, and land it. Then regain orbit, hit 2, and dock it to its tug. Then hit 3 and burn the tug home. Then hit 5 and dock it to the space station. Then hit 4 to safe it. All of it except orbital planning could be done in the cockpit.

Hammered out the first joystick arrangement I actually liked: And used it to do my first proper trimmed, non-SAS, aerodynamic landing: At least ten aircraft were destroyed in trying.

This thread has inspired me to get my gamepad working properly and write it down so I can use it more than one day in a row. Gahhh, I need more hands, buttons, and axes to continually forget.

I just heard about a $20 steam sale, if you check quick it might still be on.

alt-wasd, adds a tiny offset to pitch/roll/yaw. Notably, it does not do anything when SAS is on, so it's useless for some flying methods and indispensable for others. Also, alt-x kills all trim if you input any by accident.

It doesn't look that old. Thanks.

Seriously, where is it?

You can prevent it from attaching radially by holding down the alt key.

I just managed my first proper bank turn in KSP with this. But man, the controls are still so twitchy, even with trim. I trim it up to rise, and trim it down to fall.

Nothing to it. You EVA, right-click on a command pod, and 'take experiments'. Now your kerbal has them and can carry them wherever you want. The experiment container also has a 'take all science' option. I use it on some early automated missions. Stick four parachutes on it (two drogues, two full) and it can survive re-entry all by itself. Make sure to deploy the parachutes before you decouple it!

Those are old placeholders. They looked nice but were actually terrible. They were so fragile that people would attach them in eightfold symmetry, just in case.

I remember that too. I also remember discovering, after a particularly harrowing landing, I'd been following a flag that had moved itself 10m to the right