Vanamonde

Nice galaxy Jaydee. Andromeda? But I prefer the Sombrero Galaxy in Infra-red. (It is my wallpaper. I just thought the site it came from might be of interest.)

Looks like a spider. Cool.

Hit R to activate the pack, move the camera until you\'re looking past your guy at the ship, and tap the W key. That will cause him to move toward the ship, but also to flail around in other directions, so just keep practicing with the keys to steer him in fits and starts toward the ship. (I don\'t remember which key does what because I re-mapped them, but they\'re listed as inputs you can alter on the settings screens.) Once close enough to the cabin door (or any ladders you have extended) a notice will pop up telling you you can tap the F key to grab onto the rungs. Then W up the ladder to the door, and F again to return to the cabin. Be prepared to panic a lot and think you\'re guy is lost forever. Actually, you\'d have to screw up pretty badly to run out of backpack fuel before he gets home again.

I\'m sad. That litle animated creature ping111 used to have was adorable. :\'(

The thing that\'s driving me nuts right now is that either planes are more fragile or the ground is rougher in .16. Spaceplanes still dive off the side of the runway on takeoff, and my experimental planes rarely make it to the runway on landing, so I don\'t really have a choice about sending them rolling across the terrain. And when that happens, they can just plain rattle themselves apart. Pieces just fall off. Sometimes pieces affixed with multiple struts will still come loose! Aargh! >

Either right-click on the capsule door and choose a guy off the little screen that pops up, or hover the mouse over one of the crew portraits and a little EVA button will appear upper-left.

They\'re not all that close. You certainly can\'t see one from the other. In fact, there\'s something else of interest closer to the eastern one.

Why can\'t he get out? If the door is facing down, you know capsules can roll themselves, right? Hit yaw, ptich, and roll, and it will hop around until it eventually settles upright, freeing up the door. That\'s how Bildred turned a depressing crash site into a homey camping spot in which to await rescue:

Ladies and Gentlemen, Yeahletstrythatdine proudly presents our most idiotic audacious idea yet: The rocket-launched jet boat! This miracle of technology was born when our engineers noticed that fuselage pieces often float after sea crashes. They naturally then set out to see if a jet engine could propel such a floating fuselage, because, who hasn\'t wondered that? The first obstacle we encountered is that when the protoype got to the end of the runway, parts would simply frikkin\' rattle off of the damned thing as we tried to roll it across open ground. What to do? What would be the most sensible way to get our vehicle the 3 or so kilometers to the shore? In a flash of insight, the solution was obvious; we\'d strap it to a rocket and blast it there! And so the SP-4 Siren was born. Flight profile: Upon ignition, apply down-pitch to direct the vehicle toward the ocean. Once safely over water, throttle-off and eject the rocket engines. Then be sure the craft is upright and level before triggering the descent parachutes, or else the shock may cause the stupid engine to fall off despite being bolted down with, like, a million struts. As the moment of splashdown approaches, try to bring the nose up so that the impact doesn\'t cause the stupid engine to fall off, again. The avionics SAS will most likely break off anyway, which we couldn\'t stop even with all the struts that would fit on it as a clever weight-saving measure since you don\'t need it anymore. Once settled on the water, the Siren is amazingly stable and will not roll over. Spin-up the powerplanet, and the Siren\'s powerful jet engine will send it screaming across the water at speeds in excess of 5.5 meters per second! Leaves a majestic rooster tail of wake and jet exhaust and everything. Should your pilot wish to stretch his legs mid-journey, he can emerge from the Siren and swim around, as the built-in ladder is accessible from the water. Passengers may swim up and board the extendable side ladders and cling for dear life. As a bonus, while cruising the Siren sometimes makes a musical tinkling noise, not unlike someone shaking BBs around in a metal can. No, really, it does. (If you figure out why, please tell our engineers.) That\'s the SP-4b Siren, folks: the most awesome way to travel about 10 kilometers yet invented by Kerbalkind.

I\'ve seen a 'flying wing' before, but not a 'falling fuselage.' Could you at least stick some parachutes to it so the poor little guy doesn\'t go smoosh?

No, you can\'t change the marker settings, but it changes itself as you get closer in order to be more helpful. Let\'s see if I remember correctly: appears for the first time at 100km, at 20km the distance numbers appear and stay on, at 5km the name of the other vessels is added, at 1km it switches over to distance in meters, at ?? the little box vanishes because you can see the ship itself, and at 10m? all the labels disappear again so you can see the other ship better, but you can still get a distance reading by hovering the mouse over the center of the other ship\'s capsule. If this display gets in the way you can turn it on/off with the F4 key. So you can\'t change the settings, but it does get more helpful as you get closer.

So it might be done, but to what purpose? Does it yield a harder shove at a critical moment or something like that? Because otherwise it just seems like a clunky way to reproduce what an LFE already does.

That is just damned cool. I have to try it now. Or, I will as soon as I have some .16 rockets that fly consistently. And sincere thanks for taking the time to make a diagram. I hope it wasn\'t rude of me to ask for that. Ooh! I just occurs to me that I can set this up in Universe Sandbox. I\'ll be back. Ack. That layout seems to be making US crash for some reason. But I had it running long enough to play with it a little, and something occurred to me. With your ship where the yellow triangle is for a starting position (on the attached), a pair of lower-orbit commo sats in either the red-star or blue-star positions would give you relayed line-of-sight/communications to any point on the planet, permanently. Except perhaps the poles. But maybe one could incline the orbits of the sats?

Not trying to be argumentatie: just trying to understand. In that case, wouldn\'t the objects either collide (if they were precisely aligned) or gradually drift out of that arrangment (if they were not precisely aligned)? I realize a slight mis-match would still keep that arrangment working for up to zillions of years, but I want to make sure I\'m understanding the concept, and whether it\'s theoretically possible that they\'d never lose sight of each other. I think I see how there could be a harmonic arrangment so that this happened every other orbit, or something like that, but I don\'t see how the timing could be maintained if they have different orbital heights and therefore different orbital periods. Is it possible you could post an illustration?

I believe a solid rocket booster is a hollow cylinder which is ignited from the inside surface. As the surface burns away and exposes the propellant underneath, that fuel ignites and keeps going. It\'s already got its own fuel and oxidizer, so there\'s no way to extinguish the combusion once started. (And since more area is exposed and combusting the longer it burns, they actually get stronger as they go.) And really, since the only advantage of SRBs is that they burn quick and hard, if you\'re going to use it for any other purpose, you\'d be better off replacing it with a LFE that\'s more controllable and will give you a better cumulative change in momentum.

My third landing first non-fatal landing on Mun in .16! Bildrid\'s just gonna camp out in his cozy little capsule until help arrives.

'Cheating' because of loading the save? I get that. But it\'s just a method of measuring the transit time accurately for an individual ship design and player skill. In the game, one can\'t put the ship design on a test rig and measure it directly, and that sort of thing. To me, it\'s less realistc to imagine that a ship crew would risk their multi-million dollar vessel and their lives on, 'Do you see the moon yet Frank, or is that a smudge on the window?' If it makes you feel better, you could pretend that the test-and-load-save is the Kerbals doing a computer simulation before the real burn.

I can\'t visualize that. Wouldn\'t any two orbiting objects (that aren\'t in the same orbit) periodically find themselves on opposite sides of the primary? The orbits must necessarily cross each other at 2 points, and it may be a long time between alignments, but from time to time one would end up at each crossover point and be occulted from the other. Um, right?

My reservation with that common technique, and I agree that it\'s minor in these circumstances, is that your transit time can vary according to the thrust ratio of your ship and the altitude from which you begin your burn, which of course would alter the degree by which one must lead the target. Are those factors enough to cause a newbie to miss? Not most of the time, it\'s true. I just don\'t like the idea of using the one-size-sort-of-fits all fire-at-moonrise and trusting to slop and luck. That can be wasteful of fuel, which will matter when economics are eventually added to the game. By my suggested method of doing a test run first, the player would get an accurate transit time figure for THAT rocket, altitude, and any steering clumsiness an inexperienced player might bring to the mix. As long as your real burn is as good or as sloppy as the benchmark run, my method should get you where you want to go. You don\'t have to be good, just consistent.

Orbiting isn\'t actually required for launch or landing. But since I was trying to make a guide for newbies, I needed a clear place from which to start describing the process. Ha! There are people on these boards who can REALLY do the math. I just did a little simple geometry.

It\'s pretty.

I want assists, such as information displays, and the SAS that I can turn on when I want and off when I want, but no more than that. But then again, I do leave avionics on to take some of the slop out of aircraft handling. Then again again, when I\'m building a plane, I make sure it handles well and is stable without SAS before I consider it finished. But I don\'t see the point of turning control of piloting and course-setting over to automation, because then I\'m just sitting here watching the game play itself, and the accomplishments wouldn\'t be mine. (You know, this thread is probably going to get ugly pretty quickly. This kind of discussion usually does.)

The cool thing is, it will look about the same after it crashes. As for a name, how about Albatross? They\'re big birds that fly well, but have trouble taking off and landing.

Screenshots please. Shoppers like to see what they\'re buying.

Needs fuel. The decoupler won\'t relay fuel, so put a tank between the decoupler and the engine. And I just tried it to double-check, and I\'m pretty sure there\'s no way to make a fuel conduit stick to a bare engine.