Vanamonde

Because we test our rockets with Kerbals instead of chimpanzees.

Yay! My ship! But where are the pictures of my ship?

I'm attempting to put the core of my new interplanetary design in orbit, but I'm about to get homicidal with frustration. You see that boom on the right? It has no working parts, but I want it as a visual marker of which way is ship-up during docking. But 6 gimballed engines, 3 SAS, and an ASAS are absolutely, completely, utterly unable to keep the thing flying straight after the air gets too thin for the 6 canards at the bottom. You can see that the launch vehicle masses somewhere around 240 mass units, while that boom only masses 0.591. Yet the ship CANNOT maintain heading unless I add a counterweight of the same mass and around the same length on the other side. But if I put a similar boom on the other side, it completely loses its value as a visual marker, so after struggling with the thing for an hour, I've decided to mount an identical boom on the other side, on a docking ring, so I can kick it off once the thing is in orbit. Oddly, I've found that ASAS can handle significantly asymetrical loads once in space, if you simply apply thrust in increments instead of all at once, so I think it will be okay there. I just have to battle it up there in the first place. Aargh!

This is how I do it. Carrying them in pairs means the rocket has to be twice as big, but entirely eliminates the headaches of trying to balance an asymmetrical rover design.

The colorful one is in km/s rather than m/s, and you add all the numbers on the path from where you are to where you want to be. I liked it, and keep wishing it would get updated.

It's okay! You are a leaf on the wind! (Watch out for harpoons, though.)

Graduation is the day after you complete the requirements? How do they know that you've actually passed?

I think you're using the wrong Imgur link. The one you need is the middle one on the right column, and you don't need to use the forum's 'insert image' function. Just include the link in your post.

That is exactly what used to happen, and why they stopped announcing dates in the first place, and don't assume it has stopped. There are two threads in 'general' right now complaining about wanting release dates. What kind of furore is likely to come up if they announced one and didn't meet it? And what would knowing a projected release date gain anyone anyway? It will get where when it gets here. And we're not exactly languishing in ignorance. There are dev blogs and live events, announcements of planned features, and so on. I will say it a third time; they used to announce release dates, and nagging like this is exactly why they stopped. Can't we just let the guys work on the game instead of demanding that they waste time telling us that they're working on the game?

Take a capsule, put a fuel tank under it and a rocket motor under that, go to the launch pad and see how high it flies. Take parts off, put parts on. Ideas will come to you. Do things you know won't work just to see what will happen. It's a sandbox. Therein lies the fun.

The reason they stopped giving delivery dates was that people gave them a hard time about if a deadline was missed or an announced feature was postponed. And really, I'd rather they just put their energy into making the game than hand-feeding impatient players a piece of candy now and then. Let the features come out when they're finished and ready.

That looks like what happens when you try to EVA on Jool, but sped up.

Several of us made copies of it for our own reference. Like so:

Tosh's cart mod has a stickiness factor built into it, to help vehicles get traction and not fly off the surface too easily. A little experimentation revealed to me that it's strong enough to suspend the vehicle, so I drove a rover across the underside of an arch. Though of course if you hit a bump and lose contact with the surface, you plummet to your demise.

If you open the chute when speed hasn't reduced enough but air thickness is ramping up, the sudden shock can rip it loose. Fortunately, the capsule will shed most of orbital speed all by itself, just from air resistance, and the chute is only really necessary to cushion the final contact with the ground. Open the chute any time after slowing to 300m/s but before 350m from the ground, and it should still open in time and slow you to a survivable touchdown speed. Of course, it's kind of risky to play chicken with the ground like that, and at least 500m above the ground is advisable.

The jet engines will not run out of air at the same time. That's built into the software, so there's no way to prevent it, and it means they will apply uneven thrust and send the rocket tumbling. So the thing to do is set them to toggle on/off with an action group. Do a test flight and see when they fail, and the next time you launch, turn them off in a controlled way with the action group just before fail altitude. And currently, the attachment system isn't working, so external hosting is the *only* way to post images.

Landing on an arch? Piffle. Real men drive across it on the underside.

Just spitballing here, but how about where the resources are?

Why are people talking about Mach speeds in KSP anyway? In the game, sound's speed is infinite, as is light's speed.

How did the parachute fail? It isn't random, so if there's a flaw in my design, I want to fix it! There's nothing wrong with bouncing off the atmosphere in the process of coming back, though. If I recall correctly, Apollo did that on purpose. Landing at a specific spot on a world with an atmosphere is actually quite hard, because even a slight change in your approach angle or speed will cause you to pass through the air on a very different arc, and will change the landing spot by miles. Aim for a spot quite far beyond where you want to land because the air will slow you down quite a bit and you'll fall shorter than that. But how far to aim ahead of the target? That has to be an educated guess. After splashing down, yes, end flight to retire that ship and put the crew back in the rotation roster. Or, if it's landed someplace interesting, you could leave it there, "return to space center" instead, and start another flight while the first one continues.

That IS how you build a plane in KSP. They all crash badly at first, so you keep tinkering with the design until it gets tired of fighting you and starts working. It's a test of will and endurance.

Are you losing control because of thruster placement, or because ASAS goes berserk with the RCS and gets into a continual spasm of over-corrections? Those are two separate issues. If the latter, try putting SAS on the ship instead of ASAS, which will steady the ship but leave RCS to your manual control.

You are just incapable of doing anything simple, aren't you?

Get into a prograde orbit. Zoom out on mapview until you can see the line of Mun's orbit emerging from its surface, because that is a handy landmark. About 30 degrees of the orbit before you reach that line, point prograde and burn until your path exits Mun's SOI. It should look like this: Once out of Mun's SOI, burn retrograde to bring your periapsis within Kerbin's atmosphere, so that aerobraking will de-orbit the ship. Then eject the lander and watch the capsule come home.

Most KSP players seem to like to build fancy things, but I like to go with the simplist design that will do the job reliably. So while it may not be very pretty, I'm rather proud of this ship, because it has been once each to Mun, Minmus, Eve/Gilly, Dres, and three times to Duna/Ike, and back, delivering significant payloads to each of those destinations, while discarding nothing but fuel. This is the service ribbon not for my whole space program, but for this one ship.