Vanamonde

Hey! It's a space elevator! Rim-shot. (Get it? it's an elevator, in space.) (Or it could be a space aileron, or a space flap, or a space rudder, but those don't make puns.) (Well, I thought it was funny.)

What does the lander look like when it's intact?

"KSP engineers concede that the new exoplanet lander design 'needs some work'." Yes, those are all pre-liftoff detonations.

I spent much of today trying to make a ship that could fly enough kilometers to reach and land on another planet. My results were more in the range of kilotons than kilometers. My best attempt shuts down my CPU, breaks the altimeter, and explodes before getting out of atmo, so I can't even test how far short of another planet's orbit it's going to fall. I'm starting to suspect that all of those nifty .17 worlds are just going to be lights in the sky for a lot of us until .18, or whenever docking is implemented.

1) They get recycled. Dead guys will come back after a while. 2) They are randomly generated with name syllables, and there's about 5000 possible names. But even that's not a hard limit, because there are occasional duplications. In short, you don't have to worry about running out.

When we went to the new forum software, everybody got a teeny tiny little allotment of useable attachments space. Just a few images will eat it all up, which is one of the reasons the site moderators advise using imgur.com. It's true you don't need a membership there, but it doesn't cost anything and gives you a few additional handling options.

Yes. On the advice of some helpful other players, removing the SAS was one of several measures that made the problem go away.

The middle engine stage should have enough fuel to put your orbit over just about any point on Mun, except maybe the poles, and go most of the way toward killing your horizontal speed, and then the third stage should be able to stop the rest of the way and slow your descent enough for a soft landing. Try getting about 1/8th of an orbit ahead of your objective, then brake while watching the map view. Keep your projected impact point a little beyond the place you actually want to land until you're down to the last few hundred meters (because it's easier and more fuel-efficient to slow down than to speed up again while controlling a descent), then steer directly toward the prograde marker to bring yourself to a horizontally stationary landing. If you're trying to land near something else you've already landed, move the camera until you're looking past the current ship at the target at a 45 degree angle. Then it's quite easy to see any drift to the sides or vertically. Steer toward the objective laterally, throttle up if you're coming too low, throttle down if too high. (Be careful not to bomb the previous ship with the ejected engine stage, though. ) I just tried it again, and the middle stage is a bit less efficient than I thought. It's hard not to unintentionally exploit the fuel bug. But the third stage should still have enough extra capacity to land where you want.

Because it's also versatile and cheap. Make HUGE batches of cheap little spores, throw them out there not caring if only one out of a trillion survive (many terrestial animals and plants carelessly throw eggs and seeds around like this), then allow the critters to solve whatever unique local problems they encounter through evolution. As long as you don't mind waiting millions or billions of years, it would be dirt-cheap, especially if they were von neumann machines that made copies of themselves after your original batch. And if you haven't got FTL, then you're not in so much of a hurry to see a result: you can let the project cook while you're en route. Of course, you'd have no control over the final outcome. You might arrive to find you'd created a planet with a useless (to you) chlorine atmosphere, or given rise to Alien (from the movie of that name).

But then, SAS and ASAS together on the upper stages tends to conflict and cause uncontrollable ships. Since I had a lot of trouble with that, I've stopped using SAS altogether and haven't missed it.

I don't know about mechjeb, but I use this configuration on all my landers, without a problem. Large or small decouplers, ASAS, and RCS tanks all stand up to the load, with the help of a few struts.

There are several things you can do. Add a little more weight or drag to the outside surface of the discarded boosters, toward the bottom, so that they rotate away from the ship when discarded. Or place additional decouplers to throw them away with more force. Some players have advised rolling the ship to throw the boosters away with centrifugal force. You can put spacer pieces so that the outer boosters start a little further from the inner rocket to begin with. Or my most effective response, which would be to move the outer boosters down further so that they just don't overlap as much. Or some combination of these. Incidentally, are you piping fuel from the inner rockets to the outer ones? That would keep them running longer, but diminishes the benefit of discarding the booster when its own tanks are empty.

pikmin2faner, I'm off today and had nothing more exciting to do, so here you go. http://www./?8fkuc60dbo6orb4 I set it up the way I land my own rovers. Instructions: The bottom stage gets you most of the way to orbit, then the next stage completes orbit and gets you to Mun orbit. It's got more fuel than it needs, in case you want to land at higher lattitudes. When you've got the orbital plane you want, eject it and descend on the third engine stage. Just before touching down, use the engine to bring your vertical speed to zero, then descend on the final stage, which is on top of the rover, and acts like an RCS parachute to bring you down on your tail. You can also use that ring of RCS thrusters to turn it over if you don't land upright. Anyway, once on the wheels, eject the final stage, and you're back to your original rover. Well, almost your original model. I added a nosewheel to keep it from tipping over, 2 more RCS thrusters in the back for additional speed, and removed a couple of struts that were kind of in the way of the lower stages. Anyway, I tested it and landed it on Mun 3 times, so you should be good to go. Cautions: 1) The rocket rolls strongly on launch. They do that sometimes, but it's okay as long as your nose is still pointed in the right direction. 2) If you move any components, the staging goes batpoop crazy and parts may end up in the wrong stage. That also just happens sometimes. 3) You may find that the landing RCS draws on the rover tanks because of this, and I'm afraid there's not a lot I can do about that. If you're feeling brave, remove that stage, click to set it aside in the VAB, then pick it up again and put it back in the right place. That may fix the order of the RCS tanks, but might also screw up the rest of the staging (see #2). 4) It tends to skid around like it's on ice, which I think is just because of the wheels (I use the cart mod for my rovers). Anyway, be sure to quick save a lot, because it's hard to turn over again if it flips. Anyway, try it out and let me know how it goes.

Atmosphere is the main cause of orbit decay, but not the only one. Solar wind also has a small but cumulative effect. And at least in the case of Mars, the density of the planet varies so much that gravity is actually a little stronger at some points in an orbit, so spacecraft there must continually adjust their trajectories to maintain a steady orbit. I imagine tidal effects also come into play.

It asked me if I wanted to update the patcher again, and I still can't tell if it did anything.

I've tried a lot of layouts, but I keep coming back to this one. By putting the fuel tanks to the side of the core, you keep the height down while also providing wide mounting points for the legs, and as others have noted, that leaves you more stable on uneven ground. Then the problem is that anything you put on one side needs to be balanced, so which symmetry to use? Both bilateral and trilateral symmetries will tend to wobble around one or both of the vertical axes while you're manuvering, so quadrilateral is the most stable. And putting the ASAS and RCS tank below the final stage means they aren't competing for space with the parachutes.

Sounds like it's not quite the same then, but might be related. Anyway, if you're interested, here's my thread on the subject: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/showthread.php/16038-WTF-Engines-falling-off?highlight=engines+falling

I see your point Captain, but I'm not clear about the specifics. It seems to me that even if you are writing all the code yourself, but the product still wouldn't run without being part of someone else's software, then you owe something to the originators of the parent software. For example, you couldn't take a KSP mod and run it as a self-contained game, nor insert it into World of Warcraft and have robotic spaceships fighting orcs. The resulting product may have been indepedently produced, but still requires and profits from the work the guys at Squad put into the original software, so wouldn't they have a right to compensation? Or, it's quite possible that I'm misunderstanding how this works.

From main KSC, it's right around 290. Remember that when you get close, the purple marker will actually be pointing down at the ground and not just at a compass heading. I flew over and past it before I noticed that.

Send one guy out, use the bracket keys [ or ] to switch back to the ship, then send another guy out. Or is that not working?

I'm puzzled that no one in this discussion has pointed out that a mod is a modification; a modification of someone else's code. You're taking someone else's intellectual property and modifying it. A nice company can see that this might make the game richer and allow or even encourage it, as long as it's done for free. But that doesn't mean they should like the idea of someone else accepting money for a product that is mostly the company's own work.

It sounds like the same problem a couple of us had with the little 20 thrust engines. Do they just float away without any explosion sound and no entry on the F3 report?

Slavers seeded the planet with algae-type organisms so the planet could serve as a huge farm, then they had a war and went extinct, and life on earth evolved from there.

Oh please, the Mun is so 15 minutes ago. All the cool clubs are on Minmus now.

Okay, that comes up with a little box asking me if I want to upgrade or fix the game, which is all well enough, except that the response boxes run off the edge and I can neither resize nor scroll around the box. Anyway, won't the game just find any updates from the title screen when I start it up?