Vanamonde

I'm sure Odysseus felt the same way.

Probably, seeing as the last post in this thread was about 9 months ago. Just to be on the safe side, why don't you credit the creators of the pics when you include them, though.

Pictures of your ship, with the HUD visible, are usually enough for others to diagnose the trouble you're having. Can you post a few screenshots? Also, moved to gameplay questions, on the assumption that it will turn out to be a design problem.

This polls is a travesty and a sham! The correct answer, Vall, is not even an option!

There's a hint to the nature of the movie in the title. It's an odyssey: a voyage, a journey. It's not so much leading to a big payoff as looking at some interesting things that happen along the way from point A to point B. Point A is when the monolith intervenes in human evolution and stimulates the apes to become people, and point B is when we reach the monolith and it stimulates Dave to become the Starchild, which is the next stage in human evolution.

Updated with a better ship design which benefits from recent changes in parts and game mechanics, and with a more efficient ascent method.

Moved to gameplay, with a request for screenshots that include the HUD overlay.

Although I'm quite experienced at playing this game, I don't have the background for the math. My understanding from the people who can do the math is that a suicide burn *is* the most efficient method. But as I said, I'm relying on the word of others.

This is an ambitious and impressive first post. However, since it's more mission report-ish than craft share-y, the thread has been moved to Mission Reports.

The glowing thing? Is a graphics glitch. There's one at the core of every planet, which you can only see when the camera is accidentally looking under the surface of the planet.

The mods are free to deal with the other things you mention because Squad has already made the planets, the rocket engines, the pilot figures, the struts, the fuel tanks, the engines, etc. All the stuff that actually makes the software work. It's also the second-draft of a system which is still under development. Modifying a sub-component of a game, whoever excellent, can hardly be said to be "a better job" than creating the game in the first place. "Everyone" being a handful of people chosen for their ability to help publicize the game. And keep in mind that what you're lobbying to get in this case would be a buggy, incomplete draft of an update which Squad doesn't feel is yet ready to give out to players. Why would you want that? When you buy a Honda, it does not come with an invitation to their shareholders meetings. Also, look once again at the purchase terms you agreed to before buying the game: "Squad is under no obligation to maintain any level of communication with the player community, choosing to do so at their own discretion." You are getting more than what you agreed to accept.

This is how everybody learns the game. A KSP player's expertise is proportional to the number of disasters you have figured out how to avoid, after stumbling into them the first time.

How do you do? Allow me to introduce myself; I work for Goldman-Sachs.

Since you are talking about real stations rather than KSP ones, the thread has been moved to Science Labs.

This discussion of the game's development has been moved to the development discussion sub-forum. Squad is a small group making their first game. I don't think development is particularly slow, in proportion to the number of people working on it. But I must, once again, take issue with thecomparison to the work of mod-makers, which comes up again and again. This complaint fails to take into consideration that mod-makers are making creating alterations or additions to already working code. And who created, maintains, and updates the code that runs the game? Squad does. Of course it's going to be faster and easier to modify or add to a functioning system than it was to create the functioning system in the first place, so there's realy no basis for comparing the two. To know more about where the game's development is going, follow the Devnotes section of the forum, and read over the planned features list.

He means this, but I'm not sure if it's the same thing you're talking about.

This thread is obsolete, because I have updated the walkthrough here and re-built the example rocket here.

This explanation will assume that you already have a moon-capable ship to use, and that you know how to reach orbit. If you do not, you can download OBSOLETE, and I have created a similar illustrated OBSOLETE. First, I will show how to reach Mun, and then I will show that a small adjustment to that technique will allow you to reach Minmus. To keep things simple, I will not use maneuver nodes in this explanation So, launch your ship and place it in Kerbin orbit. Now you are ready to depart for Mun. But how to reach it? Many new players make the mistake of aiming straight for Mun and burning the engine, but this neglects to take into account that Kerbin's gravity will draw the ship away from a straight line, so the following picture shows what happens if you try that. (Mun is at the top in this picture.) In fact, *every* movement in this game will be a curve, because you are always being affected by the gravity of one body or another, so you need to learn how to make the curves work for you. If you look at that last picture, you will find that the greatest distance that burn was achieving was exactly on the opposite side of the planet from the burn point, so if the ship wants to do that anyway, let it do so instead of fighting it. Begin this burn when you are 180 degrees around Kerbin from the direction you really want to travel. However, if you aim for where Mun is right now while using this 180 correction, you will miss again, as illustrated in the picture below. That's because it takes about 6 hours to reach Mun's height, and Mun will have been moving along its orbit in the meantime. I won't take the time to go into the math, but it turns out that in order guide your ship to where Mun *will* be, you need to aim about 60 degrees ahead of its current position, like this. (In this picture, you can see that I've adjusted the view so that Mun is about 60 degrees to the right, over by the 2 o'clock position.) I like to line this up as the opposite side from Mun plus 60 degrees, but it happens to work out that if you look ahead and begin the burn as soon as Mun rises above Kerbin's horizon, the angles will be just about the same, so many players like to do it that way. At any rate, when the time is right, make sure your nose is pointed at the prograde marker and fire the engine at full throttle. On map view, watch your apoapsis marker rise until you see this set of symbols appear. The blue circle that says "Mun encounter" when you float the mouse over it indicates the place where you will leave Kerbin's influence and enter Mun's influence, so when you see that maker, turn the engines off, because you are going to Mun today! (Don't worry about the other lines and markers for now. The gold curve indicates the path you will take through Mun's SOI and the purple path shows what your orbit would look like on the other side of the Mun encounter, if you did nothing during the encounter.) You should now coast with the engines off and enjoy the scenery for a while, and/or fast forward to the good part. Once you enter Mun's sphere of influence, the map view will change to this display. Notice that on this path, you will fly past Mun and be thrown out into Kerbin orbit again. Even though you are now under the affect of Mun's gravity, the speed it took to raise your ship to this altitude is too fast to orbit the Mun, and now that you've arrived, you will need to slow down again to establish Mun orbit. For complex reasons we need not go into right now, the most fuel-efficient time to make this slowing manuever is when you reach Mun-periapsis, so wait until that moment, turn your nose toward the retrograde marker, and fire the engine once more. Watch on map view as your projected path line curves down toward Mun, then wraps around it in a closed curve orbit, but keep the engine running until your new periapsis is at the altitude you want to orbit Mun. The lower this orbit is, the less fuel you will use on landing, but also, the lower this orbit is, the faster things will happen and the harder it will be to fly a landing. Since you are new to this, let's take things easy and set the orbit to 20,000m, like this. While you will be in a stable elliptical orbit at this point, your altitude will be constantly changing as you move around the ellipse. You can go straight to a landing from an eccentric orbit like this, but it will be easier to do if you circularize the orbit first, so wait until you reach that periapsis, point retrograde once more, and burn until the orbit is circular. It does not need to be an exact circle, though, and if you get the periapsis and apoapsis within a few kilometers of each other, that will be close enough. You are now in a stable orbit at an altitude from which you can see the Munar terrain. You can stay in this orbit as long as you like, enjoying the scenery, because Mun really is one of the more interesting worlds in the game. But as you circle Mun, keep an eye out for a piece of ground that looks pretty flat, and is pretty low (not hills), because those are the easier places to land. In this example you will be circling pretty close to Mun's equator, and while it is possible to land much farther north or south of that, for right now, let's keep things simple and try a landing near that equator. It is also possible to land in darkness, but that's difficult even for experienced pilots, so don't try that just yet. When you have picked out a likely landing spot on the day side and are ready to try a landing, save the game with F5, and if the landing attempt doesn't go well, load the game with F9. Some players may feel this is cheating, but landing is one of the harder aspects of this game, and while you are learning and practicing it, quickloads will avoid having to fly a whole new ship from Kerbin every time something goes wrong. Anyway, about 1/3rd of an orbit ahead of your chosen landing spot, quicksave, then extend the landing gear. (Note: there is an occasional glitch that causes extended landing legs to fall off of a ship when you load a save, so be sure to save the game first, THEN extend the landing legs.) Then point your nose retrograde and fire the engine, watching on map view as the line of your projected path curves down to intersect the surface, like this: The most efficient thing to do from this point would be to wait until the last second, burn the engines as hard as possible, and shed all speed just before touching the surface. However, that's just about impossible to do without crashing, so let's not try that. Instead, let's shed half our speed at half our altitude. So at first you will be going around 500m/s at 20,000, so let's slow to 250m/s at 10,000m, then to 125m/s at 5,000m. There is nothing special or precise about these numbers; I intend them to only be a rough guide. However, you will notice that as you slow, the line of your projected path will curve down, and you won't be aimed at your intended landing spot anymore. To correct for that, when performing your deceleration burns, aim the nose of your ship a bit above the retrograde marker, like this: This will be applying part of the engine's thrust to upward motion, slowing your descent rate, and keeping your intended landing point from wandering very far. This is hard to do precisely, but hopefully it will prevent you from accidentally landing in a bad spot. Now comes the tricky part. Although you have an altitude meter on the game's main screen, it reads your height above some abstract "sea level," and the ground below your current location may be much higher than that. This is part of the reason you picked a landing spot on the daylit side of Mun; so you can see how close you are to the ground. This will be easier if you have gone to the game's graphics settings screen and turned on "terrain scatter," because that option places random rocks on the surface of Mun which you can watch as you descend. Another useful thing is to switch momentarily to IVA view, because there is a "radar altimeter" dial on the control console which reads your height above the current ground level, but unfortunately, it only works within the last 3,000m. What I like to do is check that meter, go back to main view, and subtract that radar reading from the main altimeter to get an estimate of my real height above the ground. (Example: if the radar reads 1,500m but the main meter says 2,100m, you will touch Mun's local surface when the main meter reads 600m.) It's time to both shed the last of your lateral speed so that you do not go rolling across the landscape, and to reduce your vertical speed to a rate that will not damage the lander. To do both of those things at once, point your nose directly at the retrograde marker and fire the engine, full thrust at first, and then adjusting throttle up and down as needed. It turns out that if you *keep* pointing at the retrograde marker, it will seem to slide underneath you so that you are coming down almost straight onto it. Many players like to turn on the ship's RCS thrusters to help achieve this alignment, while I and many other players prefer to keep continually steering with the main engine. Also to simplify this part of the flight, I always turn my ship and camera so that the navball is lined up with my main camera view. This way, right and left on the navball are also right and left on the screen, up on the navball is forward, and down on the navball is backward. This is an arbitrary choice that works for me, and I will use it in this tutorial, but you may find another method that works for you. But however you do it, when you see the ground getting close, you should be coming straight down at a descent rate of 10m/s or less, as indicated by this meter. By the way, another reason to land in daylight is that your shadow can provide a visual indication of your height above the ground. During this landing you will be continually steering toward the retrograde marker, watching how close the terrain is, making steering adjustments, watching the descent rate meter, and throttling up and down to keep this descent speed in the safe zone. This can be *extremely* tricky to do, so don't feel bad if you crash. And even if you do it right, bad luck can still bring you down on a slope or bump and you'll watch with horror as your ship flips over and explodes. (Design tip: the lower and wider a lander is, the less likely it is to tip over while landing.) I myself crashed continuously for 4 straight days when I was learning how to land on Mun, but if you're patient, keep loading saves, and keep trying, you will figure it out, and there is nothing to compare with the feeling of landing your ship intact on an alien world for the first time. Trust me, it will be worth the frustration. Once landed, there are lots fun things you can do. Extend the ladders and have the guys get out and walk around, jump around, fly around on their RCS packs, and so on. When your highly trained astronauts have concluded their scientific inquiries (they're done jumping), it's time to bring the ship and crew home. (As before, it is advisable to quicksave while you are learning this phase of the mission.) It is always more efficient to take off to the east (as you learned in my orbital tutorial), but that is trickier to do on this launch, because you are not on a level launch pad, and may have landed at any old angle on Mun's terrain. When you are ready to take off, find east on the navball, throttle up the engine, and turn toward that eastern heading. The ship may heave around a bit as it leaves uneven ground and that can be disorienting, so steer by the navball, not by eye, and you should be okay. Now, back when you launched from Kerbin, you had to go straight up to get out of the atmosphere, so that it would not slow you down and waste your fuel. However, Mun does not have an atmosphere, so you can skip that step and start accelerating to the east for orbit right away. All you have to do is aim your nose up a bit to achieve a mimimum altitude of around 5000m so that you don't hit any hills, and you can go straight into orbit right then and there. Going higher doesn't hurt, though, so you might as well give yourself a bit of a safety margin in case of mistakes and misfortunes. In this example, let's aim for an altitude of 10,000m. There's a bit of a trick to leaving Mun. If you chose the wrong direction, Mun might just scoop you up again, or you might find yourself zipping past Kerbin too far or too fast to get home. What you want to do is leave Mun going the opposite direction from the moon so that it can't grab you again, and shedding as much of its orbital speed as you can so that you fall more directly to Kerbin, but not heading so directly at Kerbin that you can't slow down in time. It turns out that the most advantageous angle for this departure is about 30 degrees inward from Mun's orbit, but how do you find that angle? Since Mun rotates on its axis at the same rate that it moves around Kerbin, the map view line of its orbital path always enters and exits the surface of the moon at the exact same spots, and this makes for a handy marker you can use. Zoom out until you see the white line of Mun's orbit, and when your ship is 30 degrees back from that point, once more aim your nose prograde and burn. Watch the line of your projected path rise and lengthen until it shows an exit of Mun's SOI. Then once more fast forward and/or enjoy the view as your ship coasts for a while. Once you exit Mun's influence, you will see that your ship is moving on an ellipse that gets somewhat closer to the planet, but doesn't get very close and still rises back up to Mun's height. You are going too fast to get close to the planet, so point your nose retrograde and fire the engine, as always, watching map view as your path gets close to Kerbin. You have a choice at this point. A) You may go straight for a splashdown. If you burn until your periapsis is within 69,000m, you will pass through Kerbin's atmosphere, and this "aerobraking" will slow your ship through friction with the air. The effect is tiny at high altitudes and it would require many passes to slow to a landing, but if you set your periapsis to 32,000 or less, the aerobraking effect will be so strong that the ship will not emerge from the atmosphere at all. But passing through the atmosphere even a little bit will *eventually* slow your ship until it falls to a landing. (Note: currently, the map display does not take aerobraking into effect, so this ship on the path in the picture above WILL go straight to a splashdown, even though the map view shows a path continuing back into space.) But if your ship has enough delta-V remaining, you may be able to insert yourself into a Kerbin orbit before proceeding to a splashdown. (Note: Landing at higher lattitudes on Mun requires more fuel, and may not allow for a Kerbin orbit upon return. If so, just use the direct-to-aerobrake return path from Mun, since the ship should have enough fuel for that.) The advantage to pausing at Kerbin orbit on the way home is that you can practice trying to bring the ship down at a specific location. This is another thing that is difficult even for experienced pilots, though, because, as I noted, the map view does not show the effects of aerobraking. So if you want to practice this, it would be a good idea to once more quicksave before attempting the landing. The capsule will most likely be safe coming down on its parachutes even over mountains, but it is safer to aim for low plains or the sea. But when you are ready to try, point retrograde and fire the engine once more, being sure to aim some distance past your target landing spot to allow for aerobraking. (This is me, missing KSC by a big margin. ) Of course, when you are ready to land, you should eject any remaining stages and ride the rest of the way on the capsule alone, since the capsule will fall more slowly and safely without this mass that it no longer needs. The parachute knows the proper altitudes at which to open, so that it is never too early in the descent to activate it. You may try to fine-tune your landing location by opening the chute earlier or later. However, it can be *too late* to open the chute, so I advise opening it at 3500m or higher, which should be good even over Kerbin's highest mountains. (Thrill seekers: over water you can activate the chute as low as 300m and it will still open in time. Probably.) At any rate, once the ship has landed on water or ground, you have completed your first full and successful Mun mission. You can "revover" the capsule to celebrate and go on to greater exploits. Or just go to Mun again. It's a pretty cool place. Minmus as an alternative destination Just about any ship that can reach Mun can also reach Minmus. Use the same method outlined above to burn for a Minmus transit. However, there's a complication. Minmus is in an inclined orbit, meaning that it bobs first above and then below Kerbin's equator, as you can see from this zoomed out map view. Sometimes Minmus will be close enough to the equator that you get an intercept anyway, but if your Minmus transit burn goes all the way to the orbital altitude of Minmus, but the intercept symbols have not appeared, stop the burn at that point and pan the camera around to see if your path is going to pass north or south of Minmus' orbit. If you are going to pass north of the moon (as I am in the following example pictures), wait until you are halfway there, point the nose of your ship due south and burn the engine (if you are going to pass north, burn south), watching to see if this brings your path up to a Minmus intercept. (It might not. Minmus is tricky.) In this example, my ship would pass to the north of Minmus if I did not make a correction burn. But after a correction burn, you can see that an intercept has been achieved. The actual landing on Minmus is essentially the same as landing on Mun, though be careful! Minmus is so much smaller and its gravity is so much weaker that you can easily over-power manuevers and send the rocket zipping around like a meteor. Be patient and take things slowly, with burns at low throttle. One big advantage of landing on Minmus, though, is that its frozen seas are perfectly flat and exactly at sea level, so that the main altimeter will give you a proper height above ground reading. Return from Minmus also requires the same method as returning from Mun, though you may end up approaching Kerbin at an incline. This is harmless. In closing, I hope my example ship and this walkthrough have been helpful.

Modern tank combat takes place at ranges of a mile or so, which the projectiles cross in less than 1 second. Since tanks can not move at their top road speed when moving across uneven ground, this means that the target is, for practical purposes, nearly sitting still. So as I said, canons are still practical weapons if the time-to-target is quite short. I also find highly questionable your stipulations that space combat would be between battleships at ranges of a few kilometers. There's a reason no one has built battleships in over 60 years; aircract and missiles can hit battleships long before battleship guns can hit back. That principle would hold true in space combat as well. Also, with modern guided weapons and innovations such as shaped charges, speed and maneuverability are better defenses than bulk and armor. If you do wish to limit the discussion to capital ship exchanges at fairly short range, then canons might indeed be the best choice, but that is a very arbitrary limitation and not likely to reflect future combat in space.

How the heck many parts does that Eve mission have?

This thread has been moved to the off-topic sub-forum, so that no one mistakes it for information about the game. (You *know* somebody would come along and say, ".38 IS OUT?! HOW DID I MISS IT?!?!" )

I'm surprised that the discussion has gone on this long without anyone raising the biggest obstacle, which is simply hitting the target. As far back as World War I, military engineers and scientists began to realize that you could pound an area with hundreds or even thousands of artillery shells, and when it stopped, most of the enemy would still be alive to pop back out of their bunkers and shoot at your attacking troops. In WW2, only a fraction of all the bombs dropped from aircraft actually got close to their intended targets, and even fewer actually hit the target. They were already working on smart weapons during WW2 itself, such as tv-guided drone planes. The reason militaries have switched to guided weapons is that, even though they are far more expensive per-unit, they are less expensive in the long run because you might only need to fire one of them to do the same job as dozens or hundreds of dumb projectiles. And that's just the situation when firing at a large target that is sitting still, like a bridge or a factory. If the target is maneuvering at all, the only situations in which it makes sense to use dumb projectiles is if the time-to-target is short enough that the target will not have moved much by the time the projectile arrives (naval canon), or if you're firing a large number of projectiles and trusting to probability that at least some will hit (which is what fighter planes do). But notice that even in those instances, the limited range of the guns means that they are usually used as a last resort after missile supplies have been exhausted or range is under the missile's minimum. And given the scale of the distances involved in spaceflight, it's hard to imagine a situation in which the target is still going to be at the aim point when a canon shell arrives. If the enemy is aware of your presence, it would be suicidal of him not to be jinking, in which case you'd be wasting a great deal of your finite supply of large canon projectiles as you try to hit him. In short, it seems to me that the only way to effectively use dumb projectiles is to blanket the cone-volume of possible target positions with something like either machinegun bullets or shotgun pellets. By comparison, a missle, while more complex and larger, is likely to cross the distance faster and can make course corrections along the way, both of which make a hit more likely. If you can only carry a few large weapons, you'd be much better off choosing a few dozen guided missiles over a few score canon shells. This is, after all, the conclusion modern navies have reached.

Kubrick never does anything in a hurry, and the movie is pretty much incomprehensible if you haven't read the book. But that being said, I think 2001 is a masterpiece. The weightless sequences are good not just for their time, but even compared to most modern movies. There's no sound in space and Discovery cruises with the engines off, as all KSP players understand that they must be. And what about the scene where Dave (or is it Frank) jogs 360 degrees around the centrifugal habitation cylinder? That special effect is absolutely indetectible, even when you know how they did it. It's not perfect, but it is an amazing and fascinating accomplishment.

This is the Mk59i Moon Visitor from Yeahletstrythatdyne On the pad This ship is designed for new pilots who want to learn how to reach Kerbin's moons. It is not meant to be efficient, and is larger and has more delta-V than is strictly necessary for such a flight. Instead, the Moon Visitor is meant to be reliable, easy to fly, and to have enough of an error margin built-in that a new pilot can make some mistakes and still get there and back. If you do not yet know how to fly to the moons, I have made an illustrated walkthrough guide, which can be flown with this ship design. Launch the ship and leave the throttle at 100%, as the ship is balanced to stay near optimal ascent speed as it rises through the atmosphere. The solid boosters will soon exhaust themselves, and you should eject them. The launch stage will continue to burn until you have nearly reached orbit, at which time you should eject it and ignite the transit stage to finalize Kerbin orbit. The transit stage will bring the ship to orbit around either moon, and do most of the pre-landing braking for you before it runs out of fuel. Then eject the transit stage and bring the lander stage down to the surface. If you have trouble adjusting your descent speed, the Mk59i lander is equipped with RCS thrusters which fire straight up with the H key. Once landed, extend the ladder, EVA the kerbals, run around and have fun exploring in the low gravity. On the return leg of the journey, the lander can transit directly to a Kerbin aerobrake-to-splashdown, but if your piloting goes well, it should also have enough delta-V to park itself in Kerbin orbit before choosing a landing site. You may or may not need to discard the moon landing stage along the way, but either way, the Mk59 does give you the option. If you should happen to run entirely out of fuel before achieving a re-entry trajectory, the final flight core stage can use any remaining RCS fuel as emergency propulsion. But once you have chosen (or desperately managed) a landing trajectory, eject the flight core and allow the capsule to splashdown with its parachutes. Additional features: The Mk59i illuminates itself on the launchpad, and once it has landed on the moon of your choice. Although intended as a sandbox trainer, the ship does carry scientific instruments, and can transmit their results from the surface of the moons if flown in the later stages of a career campaign. The Mk59i also comes with an emergency abort system. If the launch should go wrong for some reason, hit the 'abort' action button to detach the crew capsule from the ship and move it to a safe distance with its escape rocket. (Sorry for the poor screenshot framing, but this happens extremely quickly and the camera sluggishly moves to the new center of mass.) Action group 1 subsequently opens the capsule's parachutes and detaches the escape rocket, allowing the capsule to descend calmly while you enjoy the spectacle of the rest of your ship exploding. However, if the launch goes well (which it really always should), you can hit action group 2 at any time to fire and eject the unneeded escape rocket. (You have no idea how hard it was to snap a pic of that thing as it zips away almost instantaneously.) And that is the Mk59i Moon Visitor, from Yeahletstrythatdyne. Craft file: OBSOLETE Versions of my newbie moon rockets have been downloaded more than 8000 times. I hope they continue to fly well and be helpful to new players.

Listen to Softweir. He knows stuff.