Vanamonde

I got a little gray box when I started the game, I agreed to the update, it asked me to wait for a moment, and then it went away. Uh, did it do anything? It didn't come up the next time I started the game.

I tried a night landing with the floodlights mod, but the ship crashed. So I sent a rescue mission, but unwisely tinkered with the design and it ran out of gas. Since our motto at (my) KSP is, "Never leave a man behind, unless it would be a real big pain to get him back," the guys were on their own and tried to bail out. Leaving a ghost ship. After an extensive testing program, I can announce with some confidence that Kermanbraking is not a viable re-entry technique. By the way, this brings my rescue record to: stranded 8 (11 if you count this mission's dual-stranding) recovered alive 5 Rescue crew lost 3

Quicksave F5, quickload F9.

I was entertained.

A dozen crashes? You're still ahead of the curve. About six hours ago I was attempting to land a station on Mun. It came down exactly where I wanted it, bounced, and landed on it side. Anyone involved in the making of this game at that moment would have lost limbs, if he was anywhere near me. I fought with the RCS for 10 minutes, made up new cusswords, and finally managed to bounce it upright again. Then anyone from the game who got near me was at risk of a big, sloppy kiss. Don't even try to make sense out of the altimeter while landing. Turn on "terrain scatter" in the graphics settings and watch the rocks get closer.

If you're not watching the ground, how do you avoid landing on a bump or a slope? Also, it's wasteful of fuel to make the whole descent at a safe landing speed, so I come down faster and brake when I see by watching the terrain that I'm close to touchdown. At which time, yes, because you can hit the H key for fine-tuning bursts of vertical RCS thrust. It responds much faster and with finer control than the main engine throttle.

Currently, all unpiloted (and some piloted) ships do this. It's not so much a bug as an aspect of the game that isn't finished. You can reduce it by setting your orbits higher, but you can't stop it. (Unless there's a mod for it, but I don't mess around with mods.)

Stars don't have solid surfaces, and different lattitudes rotate at different rates. There's no single rotational period for anyone to match. And since there are no (permanent) surface features to synchronize with either, I'm curious as to why you want to do this?

This just might be the single most wonderful thing I have yet seen in this game. It does seem to be a dance-till-you-drop marathon, though. "Help! I've danced and I can't get up!"

Okay, I put a small chute on one fuel tank and a large chute on the other, then dropped them from a plane. Suspending the same weight, the small chute brought the load down at while the large chute brought it down at Clearly, the big chutes have more effect despite the same 500 drag unit rating, whatever it means. I'll run the test a few more times to be sure.

That globe is called the navball. It comes from airplane instruments, and so is easiest to explain in terms of airplanes. The blue side represents the sky, and so is "up" relative to the world that is currently the center of your frame of reference, or in game terms, the Sphere of Influence (SOI). The brown side is dirt, and so represents "down." The symbol that is always in the middle and looks like this -v- is a little picture of an airplane-from-behind, and represents your ship. It tells you which way your ship is pointed. If that symbol is over blue your nose is up (away from the planet), if the right wing is down you are tilted to the right, and so on. However, unlike an airplane, a spaceship is not always travelling in the direction the nose is pointing, so the navball has two other symbols. This one: | -o- is called the prograde marker, and that is the direction your ship is currently moving. If it is over brown, for example, you are heading down, even if your nose is pointed in another direction. The other marker that looks like this: | X / \ Is called the retrograde marker, and it tells you which way you've come from. (It's most useful when you want to point your engine ahead of you to slow down.) One of them is supposed to be green and the other yellow, but the prograde and retrograde both look yellow to me. The purple marks are supposed to always point to KSC and away from KSC (they are opposites like prograde/retrograde), but there's a little mistake in the game and they actually point to something else right now. It's also useful to know where planet-north and planet-south are, but they don't have their own symbols on the navball. Instead, there's that one gold meridian line that goes from the north pole to the south pole. Where it touches the horizon (brown/blue transition) at compass heading 0 is north, and where it touches the other horizon at heading 180 is south. The little numbers around the navball indicate degrees up, degrees to the south, etc.

The Joker, when you do send the rescue ship, you'll likely want to install some ladders so that the little guys don't have to RCS up and down to the door. By the way, it's hard to be sure from this angle, but there might be something in that crater for Jeb to investigate while he's waiting for rescue.

(Oops. I meant to put this in how-to. Sorry.) This is my experimental lander for other planets with atmospheres. It's a proof of concept kind of thing, so it's far from finished. Anyway, here's what I'm trying. As others have suggested, since we can't dock yet, I'm thinking of flying it to the destination world as a one-way ship in itself. There it will descend on parachutes. Then it will deploy one explorer. Then the whole thing lifts off again, gets most of the way to orbit, and then the outer ring of boosters are discarded. This leaves just the little rendezvous module to return the explorer to a 3-man, non-landing return vessel. This module would then be discarded, of course, so the final version wouldn't need the decoupler and chute that are currently used to return my test pilot. Questions and concerns: Do the larger parachutes currently confer any additional benefit, or would I save weight by using the smaller ones (they're both listed as 500 drag units)? Does anyone know why the lander stage sometimes seems to be glued to the ground after landing with the chutes, even though it obviously has enough thrust to lift off? Can anyone guess why, upon booster ejection, the booster stages roll to the left at the same time that the rendezvous module rolls to the right?

First tip: line up the map screen view so that Minmus is in the middle of the screen, then look the background sky and find some easy-to-recognize constellation or part of the galactic cloud. Then return to the main view and pan the camera around until the view matches the background sky you saw on the map screen. You should then be looking right at Minmus. Second tip: it is the only object in the KSP sky that twinkles. If you're looking at some stars and one of them isn't constant, it can only be Minmus.

Unlike (it often seems) most players, I don't just try to cram together the biggest thing my computer will run, so I guess I'm not a builder. Then again, even if a ship gets where I wanted it, I will keep tinkering with it until it's optimized for its job, so maybe I am a builder. Then again, I don't see the point of building something unless I'm going to fly it somewhere, so I guess I am a pilot. And I never use Mechjeb because it feels like cheating (NOT TRYING TO START THAT ARGUMENT AGAIN, I'm just sayin'... ), which is pilotish. So I guess I'm more pilot than builder. (Note that I never said I was a GOOD pilot. That's a separate question. )

Mine does, and I suspect Kosmo-not's and mine are pretty much the same thing in different words. Anyway, getting back from the moons is much easier than getting to them because Kerbin is a HUGE target. In fact, you never leave its SOI radius, even when you transition to the sub-SOIs of the moons, so all you have to do is de-orbit from wherever you find yourself upon exiting the moon-SOI, and there's no plane-matching to worry about. The one additional complication of returning from Minmus is that you might get caught by Mun on the way back, but that's mostly a matter of timing your flight home.

Here's a suggestion: I see a lot people decide to make a video, then start recording, and then ask what they should make videos about. Strikes me that this is backwards. I suspect that your videos will get more attention if you decide what you want to present to people, plan out how to present it, then concentrate on the point you want to make and edit out the slow parts. Anyway, those are the kind of videos I like to watch.

Looky at this here thread in the general add-on section: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/showthread.php/14100-Landing-Lights

Take off flying east, achieve orbit. Wait until you come around to about 30 degrees from where your orbit would cross the line indicating Mun's future path (the west pole, so to speak), then start burning prograde until you see the escape marker. When your path looks like this, just wait until you're out of the moon's SOI, then burn retrograde until your orbit is as close to Kerbin as you want to come before de-orbiting. I like to set my orbit to actually pass throught atmo at about 40,000m, because you will pick up A LOT of speed during the fall, and the aerobraking will make sure you eventually de-orbit, even if you run out of fuel before fully shedding your velocity. Brake, chute, spashdown.

I'm experimenting with an exoplanet lander, and I can get it to touchdown on Kerbin intact, but it seems to stick to the ground and struggles to takeoff again. I tested the stage on the pad and it's got a TWR good enough to reach orbit, so it's not the ship. Is this the "sticky pad" issue I've read about? I thought that had been fixed in a previous version? Or is it an issue we'll have to worry about on those new planets? Is there a fix other than sticking a dummy decoupler on the bottom of the stage (as those old threads suggested)?

Tips aplenty in this thread: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/showthread.php/13851-The-woes-of-building-a-space-plane?highlight=woes+spaceplane It taught me everything I know, except for the stuff I learned elsewhere.

Editing and music and everything! Your skills are improving.

Can the names of ships-in-flight be changed the same way as Kerbals?

I was having that problem for a while. I don't know what your ship looks like, but for me the solution was to arrange the ejected stage so that the center of mass of each piece is slightly outboard. That way, when you eject it the pieces start rotating around that COG, opening like a banana-peel, and leaving a gap for the rest of the ship to pass through.

Allow me to call your attention to: There's no harm in asking others to foot the (ENORMOUS) bill for something frivolous from which they will not benefit, but it is kind of ballsy. And more importantly, it's pretty darn funny. Also, So we're not only expected to give him our money, we're I guess supposed to make a mental postit reminding ourselves to give him our money at some future point. Now come on, that's comedy!