Vanamonde

That was how the Launchpad looked for most of the game's development. It was removed in (I think) v.21 because players' ships had grown so large that they kept bumping into it. However, without revealing too much, let me just say that it's not entirely gone.

TheAwer, as a moderator, my rep power is determined by the software just like everybody else's. I give it when I feel somebody has done something notable, amusing, and/or helpful to the community. I don't know about admins, but I haven't seem them do anything with reputation one way or the other.

I can't help you with that particular question, but just so you know, .23 is planned to include a significant performance improvement.

It seems like it should be, but if you look at the math again, you'll find that thrust is not a term in the equation.

This is how I place goo pods, but I think the issue with seats is that the COM changes when a Kerbal is put into the seat.

Wehrzon: Skipping ahead 80 days-- A reporter (who cares which one?): Wait, what? Wasn't the ship ready for launch already? Wehrzon: Yes, but we had to wait for a Dres transit window. Reporter: So the crew sat in orbit with nothing to do for 80 days, consuming mission supplies? Why didn't you time the preparation launches to coincide with the transit window? Wehrzon: Well, we weren't entirely sure we were going to Dres yet. If another interesting destination presented itself first, we'd have painted a new name on the side of Dres Revelation and gone there instead. Reporters: [Look at each other in disbelief] Wehrzon: But finally the heavens aligned, and the mighty 315.1 ton, 403 part mission fired its main drive engines, leaping in an instant to an acceleration of 0.1Gs! A reporter: There's a discrepancy in the mission itinerary you handed out. The duration for the transit burn is listed as 15 minutes, but the start and end times of the burn are almost an hour apart. Wehrzon: No offense, but this is only mysterious to someone unfamiliar with the technicalities of space flight. You see, an affect called "time dilation" can cause observers in different frames of reference to experience the passage of time at different rates. This affect becomes evident at speeds near that of light, or very deep in intense gravity fields, and on spaceships with many parts. And with Dres Revelation running at 403 parts, time was passing on the ship at roughly 1/4th the rate measured by clocks in the outside world. Hence the seeming discrepancy on the mission itinerary. We spaceflight experts call this affect "lag." At any rate, the interplanetary transit required one significant and one minor mid-course corrections, and after 163 days en route, Dres Revelation arrived at that mysterious, distant world! The orbital insertion burn was fairly lengthy, because of course Dres has no atmosphere in which we could aerobrake. But the ship soon settled into a stable orbit. Which is when things got freaky. A reporter: Excuse me. Did you say, "freaky"? Wehrzon: Yes, and you can quote me on that. First, the ship began to rotate to the left, even though no forces were acting upon it. We began launching the mission satellites to test this phenomenon, but it afflicted the probes as well, though we were able to wrestle those onto their trajectories. Turning back to the ship itself, we tried various means of finding the source of this rotation and stopping it, including temporarily transfering all control back to KSC, which measure has fixed similar problems in the past. But when we transfered control back to the ship, we found that it was at rest with respect to the planet. Reporter: wut Wehrzon: wut indeed. Between one instant and the next, the massive Dres Revelation had come to an absolute stop, shedding untold millions of whatever units momentum is measured in. Gentlekerbs, it seems we will have to reconsider the work of Sir Isaac Kerton, James Clerk Maxman, and other giants, because in that moment high above exotic Dres, energy and momentum were destroyed! Reporters: [Riotous consternation!] Wehrzon: Anyhoo, it was a simple matter to run the ship up to 10m/s again, thus re-establishing orbit. A reporter: Didn't you stop to puzzle out the cause of this anomalous loss of velocity? Wehrzon: No, we had a mission to complete. For the moment, we're going with the working theory that this particular spot near Dres is inhabited by gremlins. A reporter: And what about the sourceless rotation? Did you resolve that peril? Wehrzon: Ah, turned out we'd bumped a joystick, and you know how hard it is to set the deadzones on the twist axis of those pesky things. So somebody gave it a smack and the rotations stopped. There were some reddish-green faces at mission control when we figured that one out! Now that the mission was back on track, we fired up the orbital science module and began taking readings in Dres space, and resumed launching the payload of sub-missions. First went the two robo-rover deployers. The second rover landed near and sought out the exact north rotational pole of Dres. But that place turned out to be boring as spit, so we drove right away again. The rover operation here was pains-taking work, because of the difficulty of motoring over a monochromatic landscape in permanent twilight. Can you tell that this rover is approaching a sudden change in slope? Neither could our operator. So down to one rover. Moving on, the Mk100b Planetology Platform was launched and assumed a low, 30km orbit from which to begin long-term study of Dres. More about it later. And then the busy and fun part of the mission: the surface excursion! Highlander, the mission's surface module, cast off with two science adventurers aboard (snapshot of the mothership taken by the lander pilot, seconds after undocking), and began beaming back priceless telemetry as it set course for the world below! Tune in some time soon for the next enthralling chapter of... some guy's mission report!

I'd advise against angling the wheels. That tends to cause all kinds of problems.

I never get tired of putting something in a low orbit and watching the terrain roll by beneath me.

Newbie rockets for sandbox and career mode. I hope they are helpful.

Pssst! It's 2.25kms.

Since all engines pivot in unison, thrust-vectoring has no effect at all on roll. But yes, winglets are largely redundant for steering on the other two axes.

The passive ones will also reduce roll, but yes, I was thinking primarily of the active ones.

Sometimes they slide around on the ladders. I don't know why. Just some kind of minor software glitch. I don't know why it might be happening to you regularly, Aramis1781, because generally it's just an occasional problem. How long are you leaving them out there? Should take but a moment to right-click on the guy and then duck back inside.

Winglets are the most effective way to control unwanted roll during launches, which is otherwise hard to deal with because neither RCS nor reaction wheels cope with it well. Other than that, winglets have no utility for rockets that I can think of.

The Kerbal traits will become important later, as the plan is that they will actually operate the ships for you. (Which is why the stock game includes no autopilot; that will be a job for the Kerbals themselves.) Right now, the traits are just numbers.

Fly-bys will gain science points for either "space high above world X" or "space near world X," which can be worth quite a bit. Multiple instruments works just like multiple transmissions; each one earns a diminishing-returns portion of the total points possible in that region/biome.

While wearing my player hat: 700NitroXpress, I think the mistake you are making is that you are assuming that eliminating orbital velocity will automatically mean that one is moving at zero speed with respect to the surface. But a world's rotational speed is indepedent of the velocity required to orbit at a certain height. Let's take a simple example and start with an orbital speed of zero, in which the ship immediately begins to fall straight down. As it does so, the world will be seen to rotate beneath it, and when the ship reaches the surface, it will find the ground moving past it in the direction of the planet's rotation, and the ship will need to expend delta-V to match that speed in order to come to rest with a speed of zero with respect to the planet's surface. Matching surface speed and eliminating orbital velocity are two separate issues, though in some conditions the difference in magnitude is minimal. I believe that when you think this through, you are unconsciously using a rotational frame of reference when you consider the orbit, and then switching to a stationary frame of reference (with respect to the world) when you consider the landing, without carrying over the velocity from one frame of reference to the other. And under my moderator hat: Thank you folks for keeping this discussion civil despite the heat of disagreement, and please continue to do so.

Hmm. How would one categorize that? Recoilless muzzle-loading smoothbore? Or perhaps a no-bore, since the projectile never actually enters the gun?

The Mk1 command pod has 160 times the mass of the first battery type, but only stores 1/2 the electrical power. I think you're better advised spending the research points on batteries.

I'm surprised you got the little wheels up to 25m/s without breaking in the first place.

Squad has talked about making the previous paid-for versions available, but if they ever do it at all, it's WAY down the priorities list. They're a tiny company, and would have to divert scant staff time from working on the current version of the game, which tends to make players cranky. In other words, don't expect it any time soon, petition or not. Mod-ninja'd! I've GOT to learn to type faster!

Apart from those? Not much, though RCS can sometimes prevent tipping. "Cute"? CUTE?! There is no cute when lives are at stake! (And thanks. )

Yeah, but some configurations are easier than others, and flat spots are hard to come by on Mun's new terrain. And that's assuming that what looks like level terrain when you're coming down from above actually turns out to be flat when you get there. You're better off building a lander that can handle the terrain you find than trying to find terrain that can handle the lander you've built.

What happens if your altitude reaches that 64 bit floating integer limit number thingy?

I like this album format. Driven the rover much?