Corona688

My rules for intercepts and docking -- all homegrown hayseed nonsense -- are as follows: Fine-Tuning Intercepts: When you're headed directly for a target, the prograde reticle will be inside the target reticle, and the retrograde reticle will be anti-target. When you're headed directly away from a target, the prograde reticle will be in the anti-target reticle and the retrograde will be in the target. So, to alter course directly towards a target means moving the retrograde reticle towards the anti-target reticle. The prograde reticle gets "sucked towards" forward thrust. The retrograde reticle gets "pushed away" from forward thrust. So, to make your intercept closer while slowing down at the same time, aim a little off from retrograde, in a manner that pushes the retograde reticle towards the anti-target. This is best done within a minute or two of intercept for highest accuracy. Done right, it's possible to zero in on your target and reach orbit at the same time. The navball will show you the way. Being in the same place as your target at nearly the same speed means nearly the same orbit, after all. Docking: Once you're close enough to worry about hitting your target, the target reticles themselves will move around! The prograde reticle "pushes" the target reticle away from it. The retrograde reticle "pulls" the target reticle towards it. So to dock you must do three things: Match the angle of your target (have to eyeball this, don't know a good way to do this on navball) Push the target reticle into the center of the navball with the prograde reticle Keep the prograde reticle near the target What this means in "real-world" terms is 1) Point the same direction as their docking port, 2) Line up with the target, 3) Move directly towards the target The target will want to "shimmy away" when you get real close, you just have to keep on it by moving the prograde reticle around to push the taret back into the center.

GIMP is unforgivably tedious in the way it makes you move laye - ... Today I discover a new option toggle, "move active layer". Gimp is no longer unforgivably tedious. O_o

...which reminds me of one of my great regrets in life: That the Space Shuttle not even once used its backup landing site, which happened to be my hometown.

The questions were generally relevant. But given preplanned flights, and the NASA way of thinking, also inevitably stupid. The primary landing site is experiencing horrible storm conditions! What do you do? Die Touchdown in Smedly Hogfarmer's hayfield like a boss Divert to backup, stupid The food rehydrator has failed! What do you do? Die Crunch down your spacecream like a man Use the backup, stupid etc.

Literal "down force" in the form of RCS or other engines can keep you stable at key moments: ...but should that fail, (lack of) gravity will quickly reassert itself.

Reuse space junk for fun and profit. Whenever I get a rescue contract, I habitually check for anything loitering nearby, sometimes they're in easy access of a station. This time I noticed a doozie. Well hello there, abandoned refueling station. I'd set it Debris because it had nowhere near enough left to refuel a mun lander. It was in easy intercept distance. So, two intercepts, one EVA, and one docking later, Rescue Bro III (docking clamp, command pod, airplane can, heatshield, fuel tank, LV909) is detouring to orbit the mun, where another rescue awaits.

You want a cheap spaceflight game? Here's a cheap spaceflight game: http://www.mobygames.com/game/destination-mars (Ages 11-17? Yeesh, I forgot that! It insults your intelligence even for that.) At liftoff you got a three-frame GIF of the space shuttle and a scratchy sound played through your PC speaker. Then you had to keep a square in the center of another square or else you'd arbitrarily game-over. Do that for two minutes and you're in orbit. Then some quiz questions. Then a docking sequence, i.e. the square game again. Then more questions. Then mars, i.e. boilerplate desktop backgrounds from NASA. This game could have been written in Powerpoint. I hold it responsible for single-handedly killing North American interest in spaceflight for twenty years. This is what a cheap spaceflight simulator looks like.

First thing I tried to do? Get to orbit. Yes, 43km. That's how it worked back in 2011. (Modded tricouplers, because the in-game tricouplers had a decided list back in 2011.)

This is a pretty pessimistic looking chart, when I remember I've never seen better than 11%, ever.

Sorry. It's hard to blame KSP for this one, at least. Every axis can be mapped to a joystick axis. Every joystick axis can be adjusted, inverted, and dead-zoned. Every key can be mapped to a joystick button or (I think) hat. Throttle can be handled as an axis or incrementally.

Yes, I did. I also tried turning off all reaction wheels. Whatever it was, wasn't trim. Good idea though.

Always tricky. Well done.

For one thing, aircraft are generally flown by analog stick, not keyboard pushbutton. For another, things which are difficult to measure in KSP - like drag and angle of attack - get designed into real aircraft from the bottom up, so they can give you flight data to tell you precisely how you should - and shouldn't - fly it under varying conditions of speed and payload. Ignoring this data can have dire consequences. (See 'stab trim') Third, real aircraft come with optimized controls with all trimming set up for you and special warning features which yell at you whenever you're about to do anything especially dangerous. That's what the "rumble" feature of modern joysticks originally was - an imitation of this aircraft control feature. Which itself is in imitation of the natural rumble a small aircraft's wings make when its near aerodynamic stall. Drag solves a lot of aerodynamic problems at small scales. Stall? Oh well, just fall until your tail fins naturally point you in the right direction. Others have been solved by modern electronics. Try flying a quadcopter in cumulative-pitch mode, see how easy it is. Well, you leave me no choice. Here's the dirty secret of KSP aircraft - most of them are really, really bad. Even the ones people call good. They're far too heavy for their wings and rely on angle-of-attack, engine power, vectored thrust and reaction wheels (i.e, magic) to keep them on course and upwards. They are closer to rocket-powered bricks than traditional aircraft. This is because we really have no clue what we're doing. Someone like you, with real flight experience, rightly sees it as absurd. Old analog joysticks were kludges because of the way they had to work around the 15-pin port's limitations. In 1985, you got four buttons and two axes and that never really changed. Anything fancier had to be bit-banged through an ad-hoc digital interface made from unused button lines and various digital clutter attached to the port. This is, to understate, an impolite way to write a device driver and very unlikely to work on anything but a real port. Your analog sticks will probably never work again, not unless you gut them and put modern electronics in them. I'm sorry. I lost a few good ones too. A proper USB joystick ought to work the same way anywhere since the driver is pretty direct and universal, if you keep away from weird features like rumble.

If you can catch it while it's still quite far away, you can easily make long-term changes to its course, intercept the mun, and ultimately get captured into orbit around Kerbin for almost free. It won't be a stable orbit, as the moon will intercept it again someday and throw it out, but the mun can do a lot of the work for you. I could see that on an asteroid which will run out someday, but on Minmus, which is effectively infinite, why not? 5500km is somewhat outside kerbostationary orbit. It won't hit anything.

They did get an overhaul. You can find the old textures and models in the island airport. The 2.5m parts. IIRC, were a mod which Squad liked enough to buy and incorporate.

Given the ludicrous system requirements people mod in for "non-placeholder" graphics I'm quite happy with graphics that actually work on sane system specs. Given the caterwauling which occurs whenever they change... anything, I'm not shocked at this either.

Hell, it was a low-budget indie game when I got the preorder for $12 or so. It's come a long way since then, with things like, oh, planets.

It is a kind of lemon. It's usually eaten candied.

One rover, six biomes, 141km, three contract points, five game days: Flyover Area K-9GJ to measure temp for contract Land in Midlands Drive downhill for 2 hrs straight PLUMMET OFF CLIFF, misfire rockets, hit the flats at 50m/s, four times. Tumble to stop without a scratch somehow. Power down for the night PLUMMET OFF CLIFF, climb up from flats again Grueling 4km climb, power down for the night, then PLUMMET OFF CLIFF (with rocket boost) Ballistic landing on Greater Flats Power down for the night, then 17m/s speedway along Greater Flats to Lesser Flats Departure Plane Change to overfly L1X80 for contract. First ever Minmus spacewalk (to get data). Return to station 2150 science. Plus maybe 500 more for all the mission reports transmitted enroute.

It's just the great big ocean crater on the other side of Kerbin. It looks like a giant target with an island in the middle.

Made the 0X Moblin, a well-behaved, low-tech micro aircraft: ...with the ultimate goal of building it into the Kinder Plane, to deploy it anywhere Kerbin-wide in under 20 minutes. Ever wanted to explore the poles or the Blue Hole of Kerbin by airplane without 6 tedious hours of physwarp? This can do it.

I meant the craft built around it. You've made it look like the primary element of some sort of death ray.

I love that thing. Not much can make the ISRU look anything but ugly, you manage to make it the centerpiece.

First, the problem is solved, manhandling the rover stationary, quitting to the tracking station, and going back in removed whatever problem there was. This is Minmus, so the landing was real soft, but whatever clipping launched it 50m into the air probably wasn't! See that flag by the wheel? It got clotheslined on load - thought it was a flying part at first. As for the picture in picture, that's just editing. I was going to post it in "what did you do today", then changed my mind, then things got weird.

So, I'd driven 75km in this rover with no problems, then parked it on this cliff, had lunch, and loaded. When it loaded, it leaped 50m into the air - which on Minmus generally isn't a problem for anything with rockets, but when it landed, was subject to mysterious forces that drive it in swerving, crabwise circles even with the brakes on. This force persists even in flight, the pilot cannot perfectly center the prograde or retrograde navball. There's 0.-0.2 force on three of the wheels, very weird on Minmus. Am I doomed? I've got an escape vehicle if I have to, but this had been working so well... Answered my own question. I manhandled and RCSed the rover into stopping long enough it'd let me go to the tracking station, and when I returned to it, it was fine again. Whew.