Railsmith

affects* bearing* balancing* But yeah, the large decoupler is awful. I almost always throw anywhere from four to eight struts between any stages with the new decoupler, and it holds together just fine. Seems to cut down on wobble, too!

Too cool. Looking forward to it!

This might be going in completely the wrong direction, but have you considered an B-58-style crew capsule ejection? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_crew_capsule) That way, you could make the ejection seat behave like a normal command pod, allowing you to do a rocket ejection, then easily exit and re-enter the pod without worrying about the programming fiasco that could possibly arise from an open seat. *shrug* No matter what you do, I'll still enjoy this mod. It's fun!

Sometimes, early in the morning when it's too ridiculous an hour to actually get up, I try and change the time compression to 50x so I don't have to lie awake for too long. Even weirder, I wonder if I have enough structural integrity to fall out of bed and have enough engines intact to get back up. ...Sometimes I worry about my brain.

I secretly cross my fingers every time I land on the Mun in hopes of a non-fatal catastrophic accident so I can send a rescue mission... Or make the crew walk halfway across the Mun to a permanent research base to catch a flight there.

Nah, boats usually don't do a whole lot of moving, per se. Just about the only thing I've learned is to have the smallest number of parts touching the water, and an incredible amount of engine power.

If you hold the left mouse button and move the mouse around, you can do flips and rolls if your pack RCS is on. However, once you press any movement key, you automatically get realigned head-up.

Oh yeah, I've done that with 4x symmetry on Kerbin. Once the rover started rolling at high speeds, as it usually does, it still stayed rock- steady.

Thanks for the advice! Once the night side rolls around, I'm probably going to watch my cart pretty intently, and stop often for saving. And luckily I have a few pieces of junk scattered roughly equatorial, but I might need some landers to come down as beacons... Man, this is going to be one heck of an undertaking!

Consider radially mounting structural fuselages rotated horizontally to mount your wheels on. Might be similar in weight, but it could take just about any impact and keep on ticking. And three wheels? If you have one in the back and two in the front, it should stay quite stable.

Makes sense. My general rule of thumb is to orbit at least 2500 meters up, since there are some wicked mountains out there. But yeah, the Munar terrain was overhauled in .14, so some experiments might be needed.

Sweet, thanks Tosh! I didn't know if the forward/ back controls were straight-up mapped to the I/K, or if it was joined to the RCS controls. Also, very funny, Vostok.

I'm still waiting for a disaster fun enough to post here. But here's something that happened a while back that made me stop and stare at the screen for a while... Back in 0.14 or so, I was testing an incredibly stripped-down Mun lander that was barely able to make it into Kerbin orbit, let alone touch down on the Mun. Nonetheless, I squeezed out enough delta-v to come in on a near-vertical descent trajectory. A few thousand meters above the ground, I noticed that my lander was tilted a little too far off retrograde. "No matter," I thought. "Just gotta tilt a little..." Unfortunately, the pod's SAS couldn't resist my inputs very well, and I was somehow on 2x warp without my knowing. Therefore, I was flying towards the Mun sideways, with every keypress turning me exactly 180 degrees. The old gang didn't make it out of that one. ...And from that day forward, I have always built my landers absolutely gigantic, with enough SAS to keep a Saturn V steady.

Okay, this might be the strangest question I've ever asked. Earlier today, I landed Tosh's gigantic eight-wheeled truck on the Mun with a three-kerbal pod in the back. Since I'm full of terrible ideas, I thought it would be fun to try and circumnavigate the Mun in that beast. However, I'm worried about the life expectancy of my "I" key, especially if I recruit the help of a rock to hold it down for a few hours. So I'm wondering if anyone knows of a bug in which a key gets stuck down in-game without it actually being pressed. Alternatively, is there a way to map that key to the throttle axis on my joystick or something, so that I could leave it on without any crazy stuff happening to my keyboard? Thanks. Also, sorry if this in the wrong forum, it took me a while to decide which one to put it in.

Seven hundred meters? I have a Munbase at the bottom of a canyon that still reads 1100 or so on the altimeter when you're touched down... However, this is a bit south of the equator, so maybe the land's a bit more flat over there.

Here's the Arctis 4, a real monster of a lander. It gets all the way from suborbit (courtesy of the overbuilt first stage) to the Mun and back with tons of fuel to spare. Judging by my latest flight, it can land on the Mun, do a 70-km suborbital hop for a precision landing, then a return with a few hundred liters of fuel to spare. Once I get to my gaming computer, I'll post a .craft and a little more detailed of a description.

Very well done! Although I must say I've never seen RCS thrusters placed with six-way symmetry on a vehicle. Smooth landing, though!

I've built a spaceplane whose only method of landing was vertically, tail-first... But horizontally and tail-first? Challenge considered. XD

Woo hoo, finally got back into the forums! Here's what I built while I was away. A space fighter! And yes, it can get to the moon, with the help of its SSTO-and-more booster stage. 100% stock, except for the missiles I threw on there for kicks. Very tight fuel budget, but it can get you anywhere you need to go. And before you say "what the heck, it's got a fin on the bottom, how do you land that back on Kerbin?", I managed to figure something out on my way home. [edit: is this picture working? Just stopped for me.] Eeyup, this thing has enough gas to come back in to the atmosphere and land tail-first safely on the ground. The twin outboard tanks could probably get you a quarter of the way around Kerbin, at about Mach 1 on average.

Good lord. Markus, can I just say that\'s the coolest aircraft I\'ve ever seen?! There\'s no way I can top that!

When I read this I immediately thought 'Spaceship! Now with kung-fu grip!' XD But yeah, once I get rendezvouses figured out I\'m going to try this out with kerbals hanging onto the sides like remora on a shark. Good challenge!

Yeah, I think Vostok might have won this one. Awesome!

Pah, Mechjeb. Who needs it? This is basically an overbuilding and goofy-trajectory landing challenge. If you use Mechjeb to come down at .2 m/s or something, c\'mon. I know you can do it manually!

I had a dream, once, where you could open the hatch on an IVA and walk straight out into EVA, whilst maintaining a first-person view. Sadly, this will probably never happen, but I\'m happy with sitting in the command pod and pushing all of the brightly colored buttons until I hit the Mun.

So, I\'ve done a few Mun landings and returns. Eventually, I figured out the easiest way to pull off a landing on a low-framerate computer, which unfortunately goes against all of the advice I\'ve ever seen in videos or the forums. I\'d just like to see if anyone else can build and land a rocket in the goofy way that I do. It goes a little like this: 1. Your lander gets you all the way from (hopefully low) suborbit to the munar surface, and back. Return stages are possible, but a single-stage lander will net you bonus points. Usually, this involves a single stage to kick the lander out of the atmosphere, then a massive, overbuilt monster to handle the rest. 2. No orbiting the Mun. In your TMI burn, you\'re going to try to fall as close to vertical onto the munar surface, and then all you do on descent is retroburn. Landing in some mountains? Good luck. Hope you packed enough legs. Nighttime where you\'re coming down? Nut up or shut up, if an idiot like me could bring a lander down on the night side you can too. 3. RCS. C\'mon guys, there\'s a lot to be said for RCS. When you\'re doing a vertical descent and you want to stay vertical, RCS can keep you steady. This one\'s more of a...suggestion, though. Kudos to you if you come down on RCS only or have over 16 thruster blocks. 4. Incredibly slow landings. By the time my altimeter hits 3000 meters, I\'m doing 12 m/s. By touchdown, I\'ll be maxing out at one meter per second. If you can survive the thrilling boredom of coming down into a crater at that sort of speed, congratulations! You\'re my kind of crazy. Ultra bonus points if you can touch down at 0.4 m/s or slower. 5. Headwonky returns. Ehh, who cares about equatorial return orbits or fuel efficiency? Just turn whichever way you can and don\'t throttle down until your Kerbin periapsis is in the atmosphere. So what do you say? Can you build a rocket insane enough? Probably! Screenshots would be appreciated if you claim a successful mission, and .crafts if your lander takes up over half of the vehicle\'s total height.