Vanamonde

In addition to the suggestions above, I like to shutdown my main engine an instant before touching down. I hit slightly harder, but have no thrust adding to that %^(-ing shipkiller bounce. I've lost more ships to that than just about any other cause in KSP. If your ship is tottering, you can hit N to have the RCS thrust straight down, jamming your ship to the surface. As for lateral RCS control, have you tried mounting the "linear" RCS thrusters on the side of your ship? They're stronger than the cluster-type thrusters. I like to put several of them on the underside of my lander so that I can hit H for fine control of descent speed and last-second braking: the more gently you hit, the less you bounce.

My mom let me stay home from from kindergarten to watch men walk on the Moon. I listened to the press conference, and I do wish they hadn't been so USA #1 about it. I am American and I'm proud, but with this kind of thing, everybody benefits and a lot of countries contributed. However, I suspect that the people involved know that better than I do, but they have to play a certain angle to keep their funding coming. By the way, it was 140kg fuel left over out of 400. So did the "blue shirts," but look where they are now.

What the heck does a negative vertical landing speed mean?

Okay, I'm experimenting, both with wings and imgur, so please bear with me. I took one of my tested planes and stripped off the wings. I put the wing segment on the upper left in place with a hardpoint near the tip to indicate its orientation, then copied (alt-click) it so that the wing panels should be identical except for spatial orientation. With the left wing "forwards" and the right wing "backwards," http://i.imgur.com/GRgN9.jpg, the plane does indeed fly straight and level, indicating lift is equal on both sides. However, with the left wing "upright" and the right wing "upside down," http://i.imgur.com/ruiWU.jpg, the plane still flies straight and level. My main concern was, since they all look identical, that I might accidentally take something off and put it back on upside down in the confusion of modifying a plane and moving pieces around, but upon experimentation, I have to say that I see no difference in performance either way.

Excuse me while I experiment with the new forum stuff. Here's a pic of how the engines are mounted, though I shifted them up a little bit since this screenshot was taken to avoid collisions with the tanks below, and added three struts affixing each to the tank to which it's attached. http://i.imgur.com/y2Jhk.jpg As you can see here, they fall off and float away anyhow. http://i.imgur.com/eEtyw.png

That clarifies the terminology, but not the problem. How do I avoid inadvertently putting down-pushy (by any name) on my aircraft if there's no visual indication as to whether a piece is upside down or not? Must I, as I noted, be careful to only rotate them horizontally?

Your engines are thrusting below the center of mass, which will impart a bit of rotational force, bringing the nose up. That's actually a good thing, if it's not overly strong. You could shift some or all of those engines higher and closer to the center line, but again, you wouldn't want to lose the effect entirely. Or you could add a couple of fins with control surfaces up at the nose, where you could call upon them to help counter the torque (though HarvesteR, who should know because he makes the game, strongly advises against using canards at the front of a vehicle for stability reasons). You could shift the whole wing structure, engines still attached, further back, which would leave the nose heavier, but that might create problems while descending and landing. In short, balancing a plane is EXTREMELY finicky and tricky, so play around with it until it works. Just keep in mind that whatever configuration gets you up there also has to work on the way down, so test it both on powered ascent and unpowered descent.

Backwards produces lift but upside down does not? So if I place a part and rotate it 180, is that backwards, upside down, or both??? Do I have to rotate it in the horizontal plane to keep it upright?

Yes, that sounds like just the same set up and problem I'm having.

Thanks for the suggestions, but I've tried both since posting those (tiny) pics. The engines are definitely not hitting anything below them since I moved them up, and even 3 struts apiece don't keep them in place. I haven't noticed if the problem is associated with warp because there's no notice or warning when it happens, so I only discover it when loose engines are floating around or preceding me to Mun. I'll try moving the landing legs, just to be sure.

Moderators: It seems this is happening to at least one other player, so would you like to move this thread to bug reports or shall I delete it and put a new post there? Either way, there are a couple of forum problems in addition to the glitch. Firstly, I get "invalid file" when I try to attach the .craft. Secondly, can attached images only be thumbnail sized now? The attachments screen doesn't seem to say anything about changing the size.

I posted something similar in the general discussion board. I also had engines on my lander stage detach themselves from the ship, not under thrust, but while I was idling at zero G in Kerbin orbit or coasting toward Mun. No explosion. The engines just fell off and floated away. Olsson, where you using the little 20 thrust engine, and was there a decoupler underneath it or was it suspended by another part? (I'd add screenshots but they're wonky right now.)

I'm more curious as to how Floonveve's one post lists a post count of zero, thus denying its own existence. Are we all just hallucinating it?

Or, we could talk about .17, and the awesome new planets. Go intense red! Choose intense red!

The engines on the lander stage circled in red on the VAB pic (figure 1) fall off for no apparent reason (figure 2). You can see in the log (figure 3) that this is happening not during 2G takeoffs or any other violent manuever, but while the ship is coasting in orbit or on the way to Mun. Some time into the flight, the engines simply decide they'd rather not be part of the rocket anymore and just float away. There's no sound effect or explosion, so the first time it happened I didn't know the engines were gone until I was 500m from touchdown on Mun, ejected my booster stage, and found myself falling like a rock. This keeps happening to that ship design even after I added 3 struts between the engine and the fuel tank above it. Now is this a bug, a design flaw, or some aspect of .16 parts that I haven't encountered before? Oh, snot. Can these attachments not be made bigger from here?

So. Um. If after landing on Mun and visiting the munolith, I\'m able to make a powered touchdown at KSC, does that mean I over-built my lander? Yeah, I thought that\'s what it meant.

What kind of weather are we talking about? At the speeds that rockets and jets fly, the air might as well be standing still on earth-like worlds. Someplace where the air is fast but thin (Mars) or extremely dense and turbulent (Venus or Jupiter), well, you wouldn\'t want to linger in those atmospheres anyway. I\'d like animated clouds for the visual impact, but other than that I\'d be fine if other planets had still air like Kerbin, with varying densities.

Oh. No matter what the vehicle as a whole is doing, the force from the engine is symmetrical along the axis, so the only accelerations it can impart are linear along that axis? Interesting.

In that last one, the big gyrostabilized rocket, I\'m curious as to why the rotation accelerated to a point and then settled to a constant rate. Without another force acting on it, shouldn\'t it just have kept spinning faster until it threw itself apart? After it runs out of fuel, the rotation does seem to slow, as if there is indeed some force counter-acting the rotation. What could be doing that? As for a pendulum rocket, I get why gravity wouldn\'t stabilize it, but under acceleration shouldn\'t the trailing mass always be resisting deviations? It wouldn\'t actually be stable, but wouldn\'t it be more stable than a pusher rocket, in which getting out of balance ahead of the thrust would magnify the deviation?

Intakes don\'t do anything yet. Later they will affect the performance of the engines, but they\'re not complete yet and perform no function currently.

KSP pro: It\'s in alpha-level development. This is like comparing a finished car to one that\'s still half-put together on the assembly line.

If I could add a vote, I like the redder red for the new planet. Make it seem really alien and exotic, like Forbidden Planet-era science fiction. You know, back when TECHNICOLOR! was new and they were over-doing it a bit, but it looked awesome. I already like how Mun seems sere and monochrome, like a dead (but beautiful) world, while Minmus (to me, anyway) makes me feel cool and relaxed. If the new planet was that bright red, it would have its own personality suggestive of searing heat.

It\'s none of my business how other people prefer to play, but I tell you one thing that bugs me. In a video or screencap I\'ll see a lander parked in a precarious spot, or some bizarrely big and unwieldyg ship in space, and start to wonder what I\'m doing wrong or if I just suck at the game. And then I\'ll spot that little mechjeb thing tucked away somewhere on the ship and think, 'Oh, right. You couldn\'t do that either.' That\'s how it\'s possible to cheat in a single-player game. The law should be that there are no bragging rights if you didn\'t do it yourself. Yes, I said 'law.' Because that\'s how critical this issue is!

The problem with remapping WSADQE as flight controls is that they work fine as other keys in the air, but you lose the 5 degree increment ability in the VAB. It does NOT map to other keys along with the flight controls, and simply stops working. So I put them back and mapped other keys to flight controls as additional keys in the second column of the input settings screen.

Are you saying you can\'t leave the VAB?