Vanamonde

I got the Attack 3 for $18 on sale at Fry\'s last week. After spending more for fancy joysticks that didn\'t last any longer than the cheapies, I\'ve come to see them as disposable items you just use until they wear out, and there isn\'t much benefit in spending a lot on them. All the extra buttons are nice, until you can\'t keep it calibrated anymore as the resting center point gets sloppy with wear. (At least that\'s been my experience.) It hasn\'t been as useful as I hoped. As others have noted, it really doesn\'t do fine control, except for the RCS during rendezvous, which is WAY easier with the buttons on the joystick than mashing the wrong keys half the time on the keyboard. But it is much easier to make big sweeping turns and such, and my throttle seems to be working perfectly. I use it mostly for planes in atmo. There\'s a bit of a conflict, though, in that the lateral axis is more standard and useful for roll on a plane, whereas I prefer to use that for yaw in space. It\'s kind of a pain to switch back and forth, so since I fly more rockets, I leave it on yaw and just kind of wrestle with the planes. That\'s one reason I considered buying a twist-stick instead, but like I said, I didn\'t want to spend the extra money. This concludes More Than You Wanted to Know About Vanamonde\'s Joystick Practices.

Thank you. That\'s good to know. I\'ve been deliberately avoiding other people\'s hints and designs because I want to do it myself, so I only come back to this kindly thread when I\'m desperate. But it seems I\'ve thereby failed to learn something that\'s, oh, kind of FLIPPING CRITICAL! :But it\'s not the whole story because most of my designs are tail-draggers that sit on a bit of an angle and some of them sit on the tarmac like Gibraltar, and yet a couple of planes that I built with level postures can takeoff. I keep putting canards up front to force the stupid nose up, and that works, but then most planes with those go into an uncontrollable pitch-up, and I take the canards right back off again. I tweak and un-tweak and tweak again, and that\'s how a kind of pretty design (if I do say so myself) like #24 here evolves into the monstrosity of #39. #39 seems to be like a black hole: it has reached a size where no known force can prevent its collapse.

And it\'s not a price INCREASE anyway. Everybody who buys KSP before it\'s finalized is getting a discount; it\'s just that the discount decreases over time.

Purple! It\'s the purple markers. And it\'s not really near KSC. It\'s where my car 'Ancillary' is parked in the screenshot below. If you want more directions: Fly on a heading of 290 from the first KSC, and it will be about in the middle of that big continent.

No, really. This IS my best spaceplane. You\'re looking at about 12 hours\' work right there, my friends.

I suddenly feel so inadequate. :-[

Ouch. That sucks, but you\'re closer to Cate Blanchett than I am, so we\'ll call it even. Topic: buy KSP!

Did you mean for it to look like a Buddhist temple? What with Lotus being part of the name and all?

I tried to make a 262. That didn\'t end well. I didn\'t think to try a 163, though. That looks like fun. The real Komets were very Kerbal. Quoth Wikipedia:

I see you also named your moon program after Apollo\'s sister. Mine\'s Diana, the Roman version of Artemis. Did that bottom stage get you all the way to Mun orbit? Is sticking fuel tanks side-by-side like that stronger or weaker than using hardpoints?

KSP in a $20 alpha version is more fun, has more replay value, and has fewer serious glitches than the final versions of most games the big companies will charge you $50 for. On top of that, the established companies mostly just put out sequels that are really the same old game with spiffier graphics, but no new ideas or gameplay innovations. It\'s like they want another $50 for the same game they\'ve already sold to you. KSP only wants $20 for something genuinely novel.

On many radically different designs I find that I have the same problem: I struggle to get the nose up while taking off, then struggle to keep the nose down if I can get into the air. Every change I make to ease one problem makes the other worse. And yet often a plane that can\'t translate while on the runway will spring up as soon as I run off the end of the runway. Does anybody understand this?

Oh yes, having found that cliff, I put it to good use. Check out post #240 in the awesome pictures thread. 8)

It occurs to me that if you could get the little kerbonaut to shoot up off the surface for a minute or two, it would be insanely awesome to switch to the orbiter, swoop down, and try to scoop him up like a falcon stooping on a pigeon. Nearly impossible. Deeply stupid. Almost certainly fatal. Utterly awesome. Kind of like skeet shooting, with you flying the shotgun projectile.

Yes, the geography (minmugraphy?) of that moon is fascinating. This lander (figure 1) is parked at 1132 meters. The cliff behind it (figure 2) rises to a peak of 4849m (figure 3, the highest point I\'ve found on Minmus so far, though I think there are a few higher ones). That cliff is 3717m high, not even from sea level, but just from the valley where the lander is parked.

No spaceplane uses lift throughout its flight. That\'s what the 'space' part refers to. I wish I did, but yours is already way better than any spaceplane I\'ve yet built. My feedback is, be proud of it.

I\'ve never been clear whether multiple SAS modules actually do anything more than one does by itself, but it is my understanding that they need to work through fins, canards, RCS, and/or gimballed engines to really have much affect. So if you use some of those steering devices, you might not need all the weight of those additional SAS units.

Very good tutorial, Khrissetti. To Mun step 5.5: Shut off engines as soon as the conic section display shows you\'re going to get an orbit, so you don\'t overshoot. (Just in case that wasn\'t clear.) Landing step 9.5: Last-second vertical RCS puffs (H key) can fine-tune descent speed, meaning the difference between a gentle landing and kablooey. This has saved my landers more than once. Landing step 10.5: As soon as you\'re down, turn off SAS and RCS. In their attempts to maintain your attitude, they can bounce and twist you into trouble. About return step 3? I\'m still working out the best method. If you aim straight for Kerbin, later path adjustments risk slowing you to the point that Mun grabs you again. Also, going straight down leaves you with more speed to burn off when you get there, and you don\'t want to slam into the atmo or overshoot because you ran out of gas. For those reasons, I aim 45 degrees behind Kerbin, so that Mun is 'throwing me back over its shoulder,' as I think of it. (See attached illustration.) This gets me clear of Mun sooner (as it moves on ahead and is therefore less likely to recapture me), and means Mun\'s gravity is releasing me to fall more than throwing me straight down. How does that sound?

All you need to get a tidy orbit is to keep your nose pointed at 90 (east) on the navball, so maybe steering is the problem rather than navigation? What kinds of fins, gimballed engines, and SAS are you using?

Mind? I\'m flattered!

Attached is Newton\'s nifty explanation of how orbit works. A canon is on hill V firing canonballs to the right. Fire the ball slowly and it does move sideways, but gravity also pulls it down and it lands at D. Fire it a little faster and gravity still pulls it down just as hard, but it\'s also moving sideways faster, so the ball goes father before landing at E. Fire the ball somewhat faster, and as the ball travels, the earth curves away underneath it, so the ball goes even farther before hitting the ground at F, and faster/further still at B down there. But at a certain speed, the orbital speed, the earth (or whatever) curves away at the same rate that the canonball falls/flies. The ball really is falling (freefall), but will just keep falling and never hit the earth. Of course, this illustration pretends earth has no atmosphere to slow the ball down, but the idea still works if you just imagine the mountain sticks up out of the atmosphere. Newton. Figured this out. In 1687. 270 years before Sputnik actually did it for the first time. (So nobody gets into any kind of legal troube, I copied the picture from here.)

Let\'s see the General Lee try this: 34.8km non-fatal rover jump. Screenshot #7: Liftoff, with one of my parked landers as a reference point below (just above the navball). #9: Cleared lander by 4 vertical kms. #12: Neilbles and Dudney reconsider the merits of the endeavor. Geofnard remains sanguine. #15: Touchdown, 34.8km from liftoff point on the cliff (minus the trig to correct for the reference point being 4km below the ellipse-section flightpath, whatever that would come to). #18: Woops, went over another hill before we could brake to a halt. I guess we\'re not done. I can see my house from here! And Kerbin and Mun! Yes, we flew so far that we watched the planet rise and had to adjust our attitude to correct for the curvature of the moon so we\'d land on our wheels. #20: Second touchdown 9.8km from first. #21: Lived to tell the tale.

Leading cause of death among humans: heart disease. Leading cause of death among Kerbals: the M key is next to the spacebar.

By passing in front of the first body, it starts off slowing you down. But perhaps by lingering low in its gravity well, you end up with a net gain?

When you\'re rolling you can use the B key to apply brakes. I didn\'t know about that until somebody told me, too.