Vanamonde

Waiting for tutorials, you say? Well, how about this one: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/25008-How-to-reach-orbit-and-a-rocket-that-can-do-it-a-walkthrough-for-newbies

I don't doubt the pendulum problem itself, but the Wikipedia explanation of it doesn't sound right to me. The idea that imperfectly balanced thrust is the root of the problem wouldn't seem to explain why it's any worse at the front than the back, and if you have active steering with the thrust, it seems to me that you could average out any imbalance in the static thrust anyway. Am I missing something?

I think they do it so that the magnetism doesn't just grab again. I know that a certain distance is also required before the magnetism resets, but I feel that the little push helps avoid colliding with the ship you just left, and that sort of thing. Anyway, in the real world, most (all?) satellites have at least a minor maneuver capability, so why not put RCS on your sats and simply correct for the impetus?

You can post suggestions in the "Development" section of the forum, here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/forumdisplay.php/34-KSP-Development That's for official, stock parts. To request/suggest mods, there's another section: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/forumdisplay.php/13-Addon-Requests-and-Support

"Breaking the game," as you put it, is not an anomaly, a disaster, or a flaw in anyone's plan. It is an inevitable aspect of developing the game, and this won't be the last time it happens. And we all knew this before we clicked on the button to buy the game. (Or at least you did if you actually read the agreement.) And there's no way they could guarantee that every aspect of the game would advance in lockstep, so that nothing was needed before it arrived, or arrived before it was needed. We had rockets before there were any destinations to fly them to, and we had Kerbals in the ships for many updates before they could get out and do anything. Those pieces were filled in later, as will uses for the crew system. Nothing about this should be surprising. Look, I've got more to lose than most. I've got over 100 missions in progress that will be lost, a station that I started building back in December, a ship that has flown to other worlds 5 times and could just keep going, several tutorials I may need to rewrite, and the several rockets, rovers, and planes I have posted to help newbies may have to be updated or scrapped. And I am angry about this to the degree of zero. Nobody made me do those things, I knew all along that they'd become obsolete at some point, I had fun doing them, and I'll have fun doing them again. Those of you who are frustrated about having to do the same things over again, well, why not simply do something else this time? Your mods may be broken, but the mods are optional and Squad never agreed to or was obligated to support them anyway, and some of us manage to keep ourselves entertained quite nicely without them.

Are you sure you've matched a rocket fuel tank to a rocket fuel engine?

That's just some plain bad luck. It's a rare glitch, but it does happen sometimes when a Kerbal jumps from a ladder onto a world's surface. Can you load a quicksave from before the mishap?

Ah, Frostiken. We can always count on you for sober, well-reasoned discussion. Though I must admit I'm a bit confused this time. Are you angry because your habitual demands for faster development and new features are not being met, or because we are getting development and new features? I'm not trying to be mean, by the way. This is just the criticism that you deserve.

Well Whackjob, it looks like you've become an expert at carpet bombing the eastern hemisphere!

Where did that go, Torque?

I made example ships for newbies to download, though I've made the crewed rocket http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/25029-A-moon-rocket-for-newbies and rovers http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/35916-Small-Medium-and-Large-moon-rovers-from-Yeahletstrythatdyne as separate ships.

Remember that reaching orbit required accelerating your ship to around 2000m/s. Any delta-V the sepratrons impart to the ejected piece is only going to be a small fraction of that, meaning that its velocity will remain quite similar to your own, and therefore its orbit will remain quite similar to your own.

Streiger, multiple ASAS units do not fight each other, but they do not help each other, either. The reason your ship is unstable with ASAS turned on is that we are able to build much larger ships as new versions of the game give us bigger parts, but the ASAS parts themselves have not been updated to properly control the larger ships that are now possible. But that is going to be fixed in the very next update, as the SAS system is getting entirely rebuilt. Oddbin, what did your ship look like with cargo embarked, and how much is it able to haul?

Hmm? The gimballing of the engines is the single most powerful stabilization force KSP ships have, and it actively maintains the heading of your ships in vacuum or atmosphere. Also, the LV-Ns do indeed gimbal. Watch them the next time you fly one of your ships that use them.

Ai unit 101100, posts in the junkyard forum are not counted as part of your post total (for some reason).

Here's how I mount rover wheels. In 2x symmetry, place side struts and then put fore/aft arms on the struts. (You'll need to turn snap-to-angles off to get the fore/aft struts aligned properly.) Still in 2x symmetry, place the first two wheels (still with snap turned off). They will try to align themselves sideways like this, so use D/A to rotate them so that they are pointing down before attaching them. Then attach the other two wheels. Do NOT attempt to make the side arms with symmetry and then move them to the sides before attempting to place the wheels. This 2x symmetry on 2x confuses the hell out of the interface, and it gets stuck in this weird 3x symmetry and won't leave it. You can build a delivery rocket around a core in this orientation and it will fly straight, though the rover itself will display navball and react to steering as if it is lying on its back once on the surface. I either just live with that, since it's a minor annoyance, or I add another control piece oriented for driving and "control from here" to that piece once it's landed. Note the orientation in which you will need to place the driving control piece in order for steering controls and the navball to work properly on the surface.

I read it and believed it, but he didn't say HOW he's tried rotating the ship, and the method I described worked when I had similar problems.

Oddbin, I don't have permission to see your pic. Could you upload it to a free service like Imgur.com, and then use their BBCode link in your post? Pershonkey, each segment that I launch must (of course) be a functioning ship with all the necessary parts, but I eject all the additional SAS-tyoe parts with the delivery stages and only have one ASAS module on the assembled ship. That's really all a large interplanetary ship needs anyway. The sheer mass of the thing helps it resist rotations, engine gimballing holds it on course during acceleration, and there are no forces to induce rotations while you're in free fall. In fact, I leave SAS mode off at all times to avoid shivering, and only turn it on to hold attitude during burns. The position of the ASAS part within the ship doesn't matter, so I put it as far as I can toward the front of the ship so that less force is put upon it during accelerations, because they can be kind of fragile. (It is, after all, a guidance computer rather than a load-bearing part.) 　 　 Oh, as you can see in the pics of my earlier ships, I was trying a different concept then. Each segment of the ship remained capable of independent maneuvering on RCS, with the idea that I could rearrange the ship's cofiguration during a mission. However, 1) I never found any need to do that, and 2) the duplicate components quickly drove the part count to unmanageable levels as my ships got larger. So I stopped building them that way.

Congratulations on finding the arch. There are several more little things like that stashed around the solar system, so keep looking. And sorry about the grumps who scold newbies for posting in old threads. For some reason that's treated like a crime on this forum, but please ignore the grouches. Most of us are pretty nice.

As others have pointed out, the parts are confused by trying to exert symmetry 90 degrees from the orientation of the root part. Flip the cockpit upright, assemble the structure you want starting from beneath it and along its axis, and then flip the cockpit back and move the completed assembly to where you actually want it to be. Note that this is not a perfect solution. You can't alter any parts without moving the orientation back again, and the rocket will try to fly itself from the orientation of the cockpit unless you "control from here" some other part before the ship leaves the Launchpad. (Why does my stupid auto-correct always capitalize "Launchpad"?)

Pulling has some drawbacks. The experts who know about real rocket science insist that it's much less stable and much harder to steer, and my own experience has born that out. Also, the way KSP rocket engines are programmed to gimbal works backwards on engines that are placed ahead of the center of mass. Pulling can be done, but seems inadvisable.

10mph is actually pretty fast for running into a solid object like a planet or moon. I mean, what happens to your car if you hit a brick wall at 10mph, right? Anything over 10m/s is likely to cause damage even to a fairly robust design, and remember that the more massive a ship is the more kinetic energy is involved in an impact, even at the same speed that a small ship might survive. Take it from someone who crashed continually for 4 straight days as he was trying to figure out the landing process; it just takes practice.

I also suck at spaceplanes. But that adversity has induced me to dig in, really work on them, and get better at... well, continuing to suck a spaceplanes. Yeah. There's no upside to that.

Since asked, I will remind that the point of posting my large ship was specifically to refute this bit of hyperbole: The ship in my pic ran a bit slowly at first but was entirely manageable, reached the Jool system and dispatched 6 orbital probes, 8 lander probes, and a manned lander to the worlds there, and after each probe was detached, the part count shrank and performance improved. I'm sorry if I'm harping on this same point across multiple threads, but I'm just getting really fed up with all the whining about how horribly this broken game is because it struggles to animate ships that are needlessly and big and overly complex for any useful purpose: ships made simply for the sake of appearances. Yes gentleman, if you senselessly overbuild your ships, both the performance of the game and the ship are going to suffer for it.

Yep, it sure does suck, the way you can only build small, simple ships in this game.