Vanamonde

Mods have cooties.

I want to recover my capules, too. For right now, all I can do is pretend that landing strut is a crane.

All tidily sorted now. Achievements (rover parked by a monolith, etc.) : 103 Catastrophes: 52 Illustrations (of orbital mechanics and stuff): 16 Scenery: 240 Ship designs: 32 Knowing you don\'t care but feeling the need to post this anyway: part of the sickness.

Tang and space food sticks. (Does anybody else remember those?)

Considering that my best spaceplane can takeoff and fly but can\'t reach space or land without exploding, yours is aces. Seriously, though, yours is both cute and functional. I\'m jealous.

A lot of players use it for that: fine-steering on the final descent. That\'s not my method, but it works for other people. However, I think kknight is talking about using RCS to propel his lander-rover? That will work, I think, but you\'ll run out of RCS fuel pretty quickly. A little fuel tank with the 50 unit engine will last a lot longer.

Yep, those aren\'t the monoliths. You have more stuff still to find. (You don\'t need to go that far to find some of it!)

I don\'t go as crazy with it as you do, but it\'s reached the point where I think I need to make some sub-folders and sort my collection so that I can find the one I want when I need it. For categories I\'m thinking: scenery, achievements, comical mishaps, the staggering awesomeness that is my ship designs (that one would have a lot of crossover with comical mishaps), and stuff that illustrates ideas.

You liked it? I didn\'t find this helpful:

It looks like much of the mass of your ship is below the RCS thrusters. If the force is off-center, it will push the ship to the side AND cause it to pivot around the center of gravity. Add another set of thrusters lower down, or move the ones you have so that they\'re around the COG.

Thanks!

Oops. I wanna switch back. What are the original patched conics settings again, please?

On the real one, the orbiter\'s engines are angled slightly to help counter the asymmetrical weight, as you can see here. I don\'t know how well that would work in the game, but if you\'re trying to make something similar, that\'s how the real guys did it. Otherwise, more (asymetrically arranged) boosters!

If the lowermost parts on your ship are not too explodey (engines and fuel tanks I think are the most volatile), you can retract the struts after you land and just let it sit on the ground. Then it doesn\'t wiggle around or stroll downhill.

All it takes is fuel. Getting it to be geostationary above a certain place is a little trickier, though.

Could have been plagued with bugs, but isn\'t. KSP\'s alpha has fewer glitches than Game of the Year Bethesda products and Gold Box Total War editions. (I still have nightmares about Rome: Total War 1.0. The horror! The horror!)

Perhaps so while the technology still isn\'t mature, but there\'s a reason you don\'t throw your car away every night and buy a new one every morning. The space shuttle was the first of its kind, so of course its not optimized for the role, but the concept of a reusable spacecraft has not been abandoned.

Time to ask the hard questions: Who was responsible? How did the wreckage end up in a subterranean ocean? What the hell is that glowing blue thing at the center of the world?

Are you talking about bringing your orbit into collision with the surface, so to speak, and then braking to a halt? I tried the opposite: driving to orbit, but it didn\'t work. Try switching your landing gear to the cart mod. I drove it across the lake surface at up to 430.9m/s under its own up power, and it was still handling pretty well and sticking to the surface. In fact, I couldn\'t get it to lift off despite clearly exceeding orbital speed. Somebody was telling me that it\'s got a bit of built-in down force, which defeated me, but might help you stay in contact with the surface while slowing. But use the reverse K key rather than the brake N key, because the brake tends to pitch it over on its nose. By the way, it was still picking up speed when I ran out of lake bed and plowed into a hill, which did NOT serve as a launch ramp, as I had hoped. Kerbal science marches on.

What if you use the trick of building the plane part in the SPH and copying the file to the VAB to put a rocket under it? Does it bring the glitch with it?

I was having a lot of trouble with crashing too, so I built this lander. It\'s bigger than most players\' landers because I made it low and wide to prevent tipping over. I put the legs on hardpoints so they\'d stick down far enough to prevent the engines from hitting the ground, and it can break off up to 3 legs and still come to rest in flyable condition. It\'s got more engines and fuel than it needs, but I figured it would be good practice for the time when we need bigger ships to deliver actual cargoes and stuff. And it can easily fly home from either moon. Hope this helps. Here it is, with scenic arch:

On another thread, HarvesteR said that a thanks post gave him warm fuzzies. I just wanted to tell everybody involved in making the game that the only reason I have not posted in this thread yet is that I am still adding items to my list of stuff to enthuse about.

When I was still figuring out the process, I made some PROFOUNDLY botched Minmus approaches, but I was never unable to wrestle it back to an intercept. Given enough fuel, you can take any path you want between 2 points in space, as long as you don\'t run into something on the way. And since vexx32\'s retrograde method is going to require burning a whole mess o\' fuel to kill the head-on approach velocity anyway, I\'m not sure it\'s preferable to a messy overtake-from-below approach. Whatever is easiest for the player in question is fine for now, but fuel consumption will eventually be an issue when economcs are added to the game, so I\'m trying not to get into bad habits.

kknight13, what is going wrong and what does your ship look like? Personally, I really don\'t like the stop-high-and-descend-straight method. There are too many ways to screw it up as you descend and descend and descend. Some of us like to bring periapsis down to about 3000m (on Mun), brake hard, and then bring remaining lateral speed to zero just by backwards-steering toward the retrograde marker. I don\'t want to muck with lateral RCS while I\'m already trying to steer, throttle, and watch terrain; it\'s just too many buttons to be mashing all at once. But I do use RCS at the last second, to brake from around 10m/s to 5 or less. I cut throttle about 1 ship-length from actual touchdown to prevent that *$^%! ship-killing bounce that the springy landing legs are prone to, and float down like a feather on RCS pulses, which are much more fine-controllable and responsive than the lagging throttle.

I\'ve done that kind of orbit by accident, but I think that the way gravity works in the game makes it harder to achieve. That path gradually transitions from a stronger influence by earth to a stronger influence by the moon, whereas in KSP you reach a hard boundary and just 'fall' from there. Wouldn\'t NASA\'s trajectory serve to help you shed the velocity of transit? As you approach the body from ahead, its gravity would slow you down, whereas Mun speeds you up as you overtake it from behind in a typical KSP intercept path. I think.