UmbralRaptor

Start turning early (~10 km altitude, possibly lower!), but slowly. Perhaps in steps. Somewhere around 35-60 km altitude, you want to be at a shallow (0-20°) angle above the horizon, with an Ap of 60-75 km. Keep burning until your Ap is out of the atmosphere (~69.1-75 km, towards the higher end if you\'re going to be lower in the atmosphere for longer time), then wait.You\'ll want to start burning again somewhere between ~10 s and 2 minutes before Ap, depending on your TWR. This time, purely horizontally, until both Ap and Pe are above the atmosphere. Don\'t worry if this results in alternating between short burns and coasting for a while. Also, don\'t worry about spending up to half an orbit in the upper (60-69 km) atmosphere during ascent. Drag losses at this altitude are less than you\'d expect.

SAS will also try to damp out pitch and yaw. @kknight13 I\'m going to have to second the need for winglets or vectored thrust on the first stage to give the ASAS something to work with. Also, replacing the last stage engine with an LV-T45 (the thrust vectoring one) will provide more control later on. Probably enough to cut down on the number of SAS units. And since one one else answered it, fuel usage with the current stock rocket engines is directly proportional to thrust. There are designs where throttling down may make sense in the atmosphere (to reduce drag), but otherwise, lower throttle is only useful for greater control. (Full throttle minimizes gravity drag)

It\'s Steel Battalion. I would guess E-Bay or Amazon would be good places to look?

I\'m confused -- I\'ve been making various big clustered rockets with no overheat issues since 0.13.

If you\'re doing a straight up flight for Kerbol escape, the best time to launch is dawn. Though going into a 70 km parking orbit and burning prograde at midnight to >5km/s might be more fuel efficient.

KSP doesn\'t do relativity, so in principle arbitrarily high speeds are possible. In practice, the Kraken will likely get you long before then (baring things like falling through Kerbol, modded decouplers, etc).

The classic turboencabulator/retroencabulator?

Er, why? A synchronous orbit just has the same period as the planet/moon/star\'s rotation. And if you\'re aiming for a stationary orbit, you\'ll want to go with Kerbin\'s rotation (east) ECC = 3.89404859376129E-05 INC = 0.0765992922166288 LPE = 300.169433791591 LAN = 171.935520713902 MNA = 2.88925711703668 EPH = 95397.5556606547 SMA = 3468159.48965438

I would like to request a minimalist award -- MechJeb nominal takeoff weight of the 'new' Ultramin4D is 7.4 tonnes. I\'m fairly sure that landing 17.4 km from the KSC runway isn\'t anything noteworthy as a pilot, though. Ascents must be performed carefully due to limited ?V, but are very possible. An example flight: I landed near KSC, but it\'s not anything special. Closer would probably be doable with practice. Weight and distance from runway: It suffered from a prolonged development phase, and I\'m still unhappy with it in some ways. Initial versions had substantial phantom force issues, which have not been 100% resolved. The final version has no vertical stabilizer due to off-center thrust and pitch-up issues during the final parts of ascent/circularizing orbit. This results in increased sideslip and roll issues during the later parts of descent, though. While safe landings are possible, precision gliding is more difficult. With or without a vertical stabilizer, it seems to have good maneuverability and stability. Spins appear to be easily recoverable, and landing on any large flat patch of land is easy and safe. However, the poor glide ratio (~4.5-5, comparable to the actual Space Shuttle!) and lack of air-breathing engines limits cross-range. Time your deorbit burns carefully. I would like to thank this thread for the idea of running 2 sets of LV-909 engines instead of a single Aerospike or LV-T30/45.

Yeah, anything much over 8 km/s risks running into the Kraken. The 68 years, 35 days thing is a (minor) bug, actually. It just corresponds with 2^31 seconds. (try coasting for a while at 10,000x, and note how it doesn\'t decrease)

It depends on the rocket\'s design. If most-all parts have a drag of 0.2, this is the optimal speed vs altitude chart: Rockets with relatively poor liftoff TWRs tend to be most efficient if left on full throttle the whole time. (They fall behind and stay behind these speeds)

How fast are you going? This sounds like the 'Deep Space Kraken,' a bug with the physics engine producing phantom forces at high speeds. Getting on an escape trajectory from Kerbol is relatively easy, but with how the game is currently setup, you never leave it\'s Sphere of Influence.

Cheapest is actually somewhat ambiguous -- you\'ll want to look at both phones and plans before buying. My suggestions are based at least partly on my use-cases. (Talk is unimportant, text sees moderate use, data regularly breaks 1 GB and consistently staying below 2 requires some effort. And yes, this means I\'ve toyed with the idea of Sprint as a choice for the next phone.)

It depends on some assumptions that I\'ve made. Specifically, that you\'re in the US, and paying for both the phone and the plan. If you\'re already on a family plan (especially if you aren\'t paying for it), the situation might be different. Also, that T-Mobile has good coverage in your area.The process for an unlocked phone with a monthly plan but no contract would be: 1) Buy phone. 2) Buy Sim card. 3) Insert sim, pay monthly fees like a contract phone (albeit with easier upgrade options, and a lower per monthly fee) If you want to go with AT&T, their website makes it a hassle -- you\'ll likely have to hit one of their stores. If you want a pay-as-you-go card (unlikely), you\'ll likely have to get it at a physical store.

Are you looking for just a phone, or a palmtop computer (smartphone)? If the latter, how much storage do you expect to need/want? (eg: on board storage, and what can be gained from an SDHC or SDXC card slot if available) Do you want a hardware keyboard? Do you expect to seriously tweak the phone? (if so, look for something officially supported by CyanogenMod or the like) Note that the upfront costs of a phone are dwarfed by contract costs. If you\'re wanting to do the unlocked thing (say, on T-Mobile), You can get a Galaxy Nexus through Google. No matter what, get a carrying case for your phone. The ones that you attach directly greatly increase their survivability. I have a Motorola Droid 3 and Verizon for bandwidth. The phone itself is decent, despite the software it came with. I\'m not especially thrilled about them cutting off support on the phone ~6 months after it came out, especially given the 2 year contract I\'m in. Also, that it will *never* see an upgrade from Ginger Bread to Ice Cream Sandwich, as Motorola claims that this 'will not enhance the user experience.' Given my experience with an unofficial CM9 port, with the increased features and greatly enhanced speed, I\'m unclear how they can make this claim.

At the moment, the closest thing is editing your persistence file. Having it in-game would be a nice feature for sandbox mode.

Landing at lower speeds (<5m/s), and/or using landing legs instead of engines to take the impact.

eg: There\'s a working assumption that Kerbin has substantial amounts of sulfur hexafluoride in its atmosphere to explain the low scale height. As sulfur hexafluoride is a very powerful greenhouse gas, this could help explain things. Especially as Kerbol\'s mass is more consistant with a brown dwarf than a red one... Alternatively, what\'s to keep Minmus from being moved once we have additional planets?

It\'s not doable -- the body you\'re orbiting around has to be at one of the ellipse\'s foci.

Welcome to the forums. Can you better describe your issues? Not getting to the right orbits, running out of fuel, something else?

They may not be actual mountains, but you can crash into Kerbol several thousand km above the nominal surface.

Those of you who are on Windows boxes and want to minimize KSP (fullscreen or windowed) probably want to hit win+d.

Terameters (1e12 m).

Alternatively, were ultra-high ejection force decouplers involved?

For traditional(ish) texbooks, Fundamentals of Astrodynamics is pretty well recommended. There are also some resources on orbital parameters here and here.