Vanamonde

*If* you've researched them. If you have, then you can start flinging probes at other planets, the way the Soviets used to bomb Venus.

Okay, though the thread started off as a discussion of efficiency/delta-V rather than the patience of the player, and I was arguing from that perspective.

Flinging something out into solar orbit can also be worth fair points, long as you don't care that it won't come back.

So it does. Moved.

A transit to another planet takes tens or hundreds of days, so what difference does it make if the burn takes 1 minute or (with this ship pictured) 17 minutes? Also, that ship orbited Tylo, then returned to Kerbin, so it's certainly capable of just about maneuver a ship might need to perform. Takeoff and landing are about the only times where thrust/weight is other than a matter of convenience and patience.

Are you doing the crew reports, soil samples, etc. on those flights? Meanwhile, even if you can't land yet, low fly-bys of the moons can be worth a fair number of points.

This is ~450 tons heading out for Tylo at 0.1g. Is there any reason to be in a bigger hurry than that?

Since you received no answers in the welcome thread, I've moved this to gameplay, where it might be more likely to elicit a helpful response.

Ding!Ding!Ding! Have a year's supply of Turtle Wax!

There are only 2 models in the stock game, and neither can vector thrust. Are you saying some modded SRBs do?

If you put the station around a moon, keep in mind that every visiting ship would have to decelerate down to (whatever its orbital height is) and then burn more fuel to speed up again for departure. It may not be much for a body as small as Minmus, but it would be a recurring cost and so add up trip by trip.

That is a design problem that will be very hard to get around. The only suggestion I can make is to open the chutes one at a time with their right-click menus so that they don't all jerk at once, though being able to do that between 500m and the surface in time may be tricky.

As I like to point out, go look at the delta-V equation again. You'll find that engine thrust is not a term in the equation.

As others have said, SRBs have no steering and burn out relatively quickly, so the only way I use them is for a quick kick to help a ship get off the pad and up to an efficient ascent speed for the liquid engines to sustain.

Hello. There's nerdy talk all over the forum, but especially here. Enjoy!

Where the missile is not: Add-ons. Where the missile is: off-topic lounge.

This is one of the key concepts of spaceflight.

Are you looking for a ship to use? Career or sandbox?

Buy the game, unfawkable. I don't get a cut if you do. But even in its unfinished state, it's given me 1.5 years of almost daily entertainment, and I'm not tired of it yet.

This is one of the harder things to do in this game. Congratulations.

Parts talk moved to the part of the forum where the parts played by the game's parts are discussed.

Gentlefolks, not every forum member reads in the same order or with the same frequency, so there will be times when somebody is excited about something *you* have already seen. That's no reason to poke fun or poop on someone else's excitement. Just move along, before somebody else beats *you* to the newer stuff. Thread closed before some more grouches chime in.

Thank you for the kind words, folks. I do enjoy writing these, and the really fun part is that I don't have to make anything up; I just record the weird, cool, and amusing stuff that really does happen in this game, though I do like to come up with silly explanations for them.

Indo, if you don't see this, you probably have an old version of the game. It's easy enough to check, though; see the version number in the lower right?

Wehrzon: So the mission was ready for the homeward leg of the journey. Now, there are more efficient ways to do it, but it can be difficult to plot an interplanetary transfer from inclined and elliptical orbits, so the first order of business was to circularize the orbit of Dres Revelation and match planes with the ecliptic. After a brief wait of a few days for a launch window, the ship fired up its mighty drive engines once more, and nailed the return trajectory, though the ship did make two minor burns to fine-tune the approach to Kerbin. Four months later, with the snacks all long since consumed and the guys thoroughly sick of the season 5 set of How I Met Your Progenitor by Unspecified Means, it was a welcome sight to find the homeworld growing in the windows. And yes, even old spacehands like Jebediah and Barfan still must pause to marvel at the beauty of spaceflight, from time to time. The aerobraking manuever, while routine in its performance and successful in its outcome, was nevertheless accompanied by the usual exciting fireworks. Jebediah was especially proud of having plotted an aerobrake which dropped the major axis of the orbit spot on the ecliptic, leaving an equatorial plane matching and circularizing burns to be simple matters. Then it was time for the real payoff of the mission: bringing the science home! The Mk103 Vacuum Instrument Package undocked and de-orbited itself on RCS. There were some tense moments indeed when bad luck brought the module down in a mountain range, but then compensating good luck settled the module safely between peaks. Reporter: Do I recall correctly that Dres has no atmosphere? Wehrzon: That is correct. The same reporter: Then may I ask why the "vacuum instrument package" carries a barometer? Wehrzon: We were hoping you wouldn't notice that. [sighs.] See, we meant to put a Gravmax gravity meter on there, but they're both little blue boxes of the same size and shape... Moving on, the crew then left Dres Revelation on autonomous control. The ship rests in a 200km orbit, waiting to be refuelled and sent out again. But the flight crew for this mission relocated to Highlander and bid their travelling home of the preceding 421 days a fond farewell as they departed for Kerbin. Jebediah was once more pleased to use the last of the lander's fuel to bring the ship down just under 30kms from KSC, so that it took mere moments for the SAR plane to pinpoint their landing spot, and it was a relatively short jaunt for the Crew Recovery Vehicle to pick the boys up. Second reporter: I've heard an odd tale that on the way out to the landing site you only passed tufts of grass, but moments later while coming back along the same path, you found yourself driving among fully-grown trees. Is this true, and if so, can you explain it? Wehrzon: Yes and no, respectively. Second reporter: And a follow up, if I may. Why does the CRV have that goofy-looking spar with the two additional wheels sticking out front? Wehrzon: We found that without those, the stupid thing absolutely frikking insists on flipping over on its face when the brakes are applied. And now, I am pleased to present to you the heroic flight team of the Dres Revelation mission; Jebediah and Barfan Kerman! [Applause, applause. Then:] Another reporter: The We Have No Cities Times is claiming it has evidence that this final photo op has been staged, but the reports are conflicted. Firstly, is it true that even though one Kerbal looks exactly like another so nobody would have known the difference, you really did take that CRV rover on a one-hour roundtrip to pick up the crew from the lander, just so that the individuals our readers will be seeing in this picture really would be Jebediah, Barfan, and Wehrzon? Wehrzon: That is an inaccurate report. I first built and tested the CRV, which took about half an hour, and then it crashed three times on the way there and back (hence the front wheel spar), so that I actually spent not 1 hour but about 4 hours making sure that the individuals in that picture really would be who we claim they are. That third reporter: What is wrong with you? Wehrzon: Well, that's a subject for another time. But I must admit that there has been a bit of harmless trickery invovled in this photo op after all. That reporter: How so? Wehrzon: For one thing, we made you all stand here overnight so that the sunlight would be coming from a favorable direction for the picture. Some reporter: Is that why we've been here for 10 hours? Wehrzon: Affirmative. And of course the official photo neglects to record how we had to keep standing Jebediah and Barfan up again, because every time we came out of time warp, standing on those stairs would cause them to be flung up in the air and fall in a comical sprawl. Reporters: Yeah, that's not very dignified. We'll leave that out of our accounts. Wehrzon: Well, thank you all for coming-- Smart-looking reporter with the pipe: Pardon me, but you said the science was the most important part of the mission, and yet you are trying to call this press conference to a close without discussing the specifics. You have explained how the mission went to lengths not just to transmit data back, but to physically return the orbital science module and Dres lander. Why are you now trying to skip over that? Wehrzon: Well, see, that was all somewhat anticlimactic. The mission did net 2354 points! That's pretty impressive, isn't it? A reporter: Yes! And what will those points be spent upon? Wehrzon: Well, nothing, actually. We've already discovered everything there is to know, and invented everything that can be invented. In fact, we did that before Dres Revelation set out. The tech tree has been picked clean of fruit. Pipe reporter: But as for the mission at hand... What was anticlimactic about it? Wehrzon: When all was said and done, almost all of this mission's points came from transmissions. Bringing the orbital module back was only worth an additional 69.6 points (though that would have been more if it had had a gravity meter instead of a barometer), and retrieving the lander with its surface sample only added 149.4 points. Pipe reporter: And the desire for that surface sample was your primary reason for replacing the lander? In the manuever which cost the life of Dudmond Kerman? And you're trying to skip over the fact that the soil sample was only worth 15.7 points? To avoid having to admit that you killed Dudmond for less than 16 additional science? On a mission which was entirely moot in scientific terms to begin with? Wehrzon: That's about the size of it, yeah. But to distract you from that, here's some surplus spaceflight porn pics from the mission! [He flings handfuls of photos at the reporters as he runs away, yelling:] This concludes today's press conference! See you all next time! The flung pics follow: