Vanamonde

That's how the ships from the show are: 3 engines/4 intakes.

I still think Kerbin is awfully pretty.

katateochi, I love the way that in this game, something can be pointless, ridiculous, and awesome, all at the same time. Didn't you have to take all the original Kerbals out of that ship, so you could film yourself putting a bunch of Kerbals into the ship, so that you could eject a bunch of Kerbals from the ship?

I never have problems with keyboard, mouse, or joystick inputs in any other way, but I find that these lights are reluctant to change settings unless I tap the keys several times until one of my keystrokes randomly seems to register. But I'm pretty sure that it isn't this mod that's at fault, because the exact same thing happens with the headlights on the HSTW cart. Anybody know what's going on with that?

You've got your own little documentary series going.

Most of my big spaceplanes don't go as far as your little one did. Apparently, I am doing something seriously wrong.

I like how the guys are out frolicking while the wreckage is still cartwheeling across the landscape. And that your movie starts the same way Serenity does: what fell off the ship just as the recording began?

Math and I weren't on speaking terms for a few days. I asked it how many tanks of fuel it would take to put my station in Mun orbit, and 2 hours later it had said 84 one time and -11 another time. But we patched things up last night, and I flew my first methodically designed 3-man mission to Minmus and back. It was still quite inefficient: I think because a round-up in the calculations at the upper stages is magnified in each subsequent stage. However, it usually takes me several unsuccessful iterations to get as close as this one did on its first test, and it was kind of cool to watch a stage be exhausted and discarded just at the point in the flight where I intended it to happen. There are additional benefits to the methodical approach; it's surprising how much easier it is to steer your rockets when they're no bigger than they need to be for the job. Which is kind of a roundabout way to say thanks for the work that went into this thread, and math is a good thing.

I'd like to see what those weird, vertically mounted flaps do.

If your plane is pitching in flight, that's a balance issue. If it's consistently rolling ever-so-slightly even though you built it using symmetry, that appears to be a weirdness-possible-bug that a couple of us have noticed in .16, and I'm afraid I have no advice about it but to wait for it to be fixed. VTOL engines might help attitude problems, but only as long as the engines are running, and proportionally to your thrust setting. If you don't want the plane to go in and out of control as you power up and down, you're better off balancing the plane without VTOL engines, and add the engines later, if you're inclined to try that. I haven't experimented much with VTOL myself. At least with stock parts, the inability to throttle horizontal and vertical thrust separately is a pretty big obstacle, and the ability to VTOL isn't called for on a planet where there are few obstacles to hop.

The plane of an orbit is fixed only with respect to the "fixed stars," which is an old term for the part of the skyscape so far away that it appears to be permanently changeless without the use of astronomical instruments. One-quarter of a Kerbin year (whatever that works out to be) later, this orbit will be perpendicular to the sun, so I don't think it has a special name.

Congratulations on figuring out how to make and post a movie. I want to learn how to do that, but so far I've been intimidated. Or many lazy. I liked the voices, too.

Avionics *IS* ASAS, but a version altered for aircraft. ASAS will try to return you to the heading you had when you turned it on, but avionics will try to hold you to the heading you have currently. Say you've got SAS mode on while flying and apply, whatever, yaw-right. As soon as you take your hands off the controls, ASAS and SAS will try to turn you back to your original heading. But avionics will just keep you going on the new heading that resulted from your manual course change. Avionics is very handy for planes because it serves as an autopilot-assist to keep you on course, to prevent overly radical manuevers (it resists change a little), but still allows you to make manual course changes without having to disengage SAS mode. You can fly rockets using avionics instead of ASAS and it works pretty well, but is not as steady-on-course as SAS, which was, after all, designed to be used on rockets.

The links provided above no longer seem to be working. Could some nice person provide current ones for light mods?

By the way, everybody's planes dive to the side while trying to take off. It's a bug they're aware of and are going to fix at some point. I myself spent 2.5 hours yesterday trying to get a spaceplane off the ground. The dive-to-the-side glitch meant I couldn't keep them on the runway, and the sticky-terrain glitch meant I couldn't keep the wheels on the plane. It was a massacre.

The new parts do take some getting used to (check out my whiney thread http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/showthread.php/16351-Wallows-like-a-drunken-cow for good advice from people better at rockets than me), but I think the only one that's actually not working right is large the decoupler, which has an oopsie in its code and is only a fraction of the strength it should have. You can reinforce it with struts, or use the small ones with struts.

I tell myself I built these things to make re-entry tests on heat shields and parachutes. http://www./?9b8ybchreawapp7 http://www./?6wjxgxl6cz8hhz6 I did not build these things to test parachutes and heat shields. (Start the engines (throttle 2 notches over 2/3rds for the second one) and wait for the decouplers to cook off. First one: "light fuse and get away." Second one: See how many times you can get the capsule to bounce in the exhaust flow without touching anything.)

The avionics version of the ASAS, the one shaped like a little nose cone, already does something like what you're talking about. When you stop exerting control, it just tries to keep the plane going where you've already got it pointed. There's a little but of a lag, though, so it's not exactly what you're describing. Avionics also resists turning a little, which, as you way, helps prevent overly radical manuevering that might tumble the ship out of control. It's quite good and handy, I think.

From, So You Want to be a Mun Pilot! A KSP Training Manual . Chapter 5: Landing!

A great and gripping story, and well-told. I can't help you with the grapple because I don't use mods. But as for making room in a capsule, you can EVA the guy and "end flight" him. The effect is the same, but you don't have a simulated death on your conscience. As I understand it, th devs realize the SAS tends to result in oscillations, but it's not a priority to fix right now. More of the modules won't help, unfortunately. When I was having similar trouble, smart people advised me to use ASAS instead of the basic model, and it still happens but isn't as severe. The ejectable fuel tanks you have are not a bad idea in themselves, but their mass is all at one end of the ship. That means that when you turn, that mass has momentum that tries to keep the ship turning, which makes steering sloppy, which the SAS than fails to entirely control. Try moving them up so that they're closer to the middle of the ship. They will still have momentum there, of course, but it will be a bit more controllable. The ship will still try to keep rotating, but it won't wallow off on odd angles as much. Anyway, just some suggestions. Try them or not as you see fit.

In Nova's latest bit of unprovoked cruelty (wantnow!wantnow!wantnow!), has the galactic background scenery been enhanced?

Flying aircraft, you need to rotate the whole vessel in frequent large and sometimes fast turns, which is immensely easier with the joystick. Flying spacecraft, you need to make occasional precise turns, which is much easier with the keyboard. It has occurred to me that flying backwards to a moon landing would be easier with the joystick, because you can simultaneously alter 2 axes (pitch and yaw) with one controller, but when I actually try it, it's so hard to reverse all my joystick-use habits that I have to switch to the keyboard to get myself out of some awful mess of confusion.

What were the squeaky little voices?

We've got a thread for this in the Support forum: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/showthread.php/16816-constant-game-freeze-( Help them find the problem by posting dxdiags and logfiles there.