KevinTMC

Well, depending on your personal tastes, what you\'re going to hook the cans up to, and what you listen to most often, there are any number of options that might turn out to be the best for you. So it\'s hard to give advice without knowing anything about those things. That said, the people whom I find to be savviest and best-informed on the subject are almost unanimous in their opinion that most of what both Skullcandy and Beats put out is overpriced crap, plain and simple If you might be considering in-ear monitors, I can tell you I\'ve been very pleased with the offerings from MEElectronics (http://www.meelec.com/). Their M9/M9P model offers excellent bang for the buck; towards the other end of their price scale, I adore my new A161Ps, though my guess is their sound would be much too neutral for you. For over-ear/closed headphones, the Sennheiser HD201 punches way above its weight when it comes to price-performance ratio. A bit pricier--but still nowhere near the insane heights that some high-end equipment can reach--is the classic Sony MDR-V6, widely used and respected as a sensibly-priced reference headphone for over 20 years now. (The Sony is my most recent purchase, bought for use with my new digital piano.) Many, many more thoughts and opinions and suggestions and reviews can be found at the headphone enthusiast site Head-Fi (http://www.head-fi.org/).

Aha. That would explain it. Thanks for the info. Once this is fixed, perhaps a new round of this challenge would be in order? Just reading the thread has opened my eyes to a number of things...and there\'s still ever so much more to learn. (Also, any activity like this that prompts super-smart people like closette to reverse-engineer the physics seems to lead to improvement in the game engine in the end.)

What is this 'overpowered' of which you speak? Eh...no mind. Whatever it is, the kerbal solution is the same as it always is: MOAR BOOSTERS!!!

I hadn\'t run across this challenge until just now, and thought I\'d give it a try in 0.16. I replicated the craft based on the screenshot, added a radial-mount MechJeb (for the ascent statistics) and a parachute and coupler (because I\'m soft-hearted), gave it a go...and was amazed at how much more dramatic the results were. Gunning it at 100% the whole way, straight up, resulted in an apokerb of around 8850m. Thrusting at 100% for 5 seconds (to approximately 600m altitude), then at 1/3rd throttle the rest of the way--and again, straight up the whole way--yielded an apokerb of over 345,000m. The physics model has been tinkered with a bit between 0.15 and 0.16, perhaps? EDIT: I took the extra pieces off and took a shot at manually piloting the craft into orbit. I succeeded in establishing an equatorial orbit, and pushed it out to 738km apokerb/602km perikerb before running out of fuel. I\'ve installed a handful of plugins...I don\'t *think* any of the parts used on this craft were affected by that, but I\'m double-checking that now. .craft file (the one without any stuff added) has been attached.

Erm...I don\'t know what parts you\'re referring to here exactly. This spaceplane calls for version 0.16+mechjeb. Available alternate parts relevant to this problem are limited to: a) vastly bigger tri-couplers, skinnier linear decouplers. Each of which only makes the problem worse. This design looks promising, and so I\'ll probably try to build something similar from scratch now. I do wish the posted craft had worked as advertised though.

I\'m prone to get really confused regarding sizes. (Are the new stock parts 1.75m? 2m? 3m?) Ideally, the dimensions of all parts, stock and add-on, should be given in their item descriptions in the 'store', along with mass and drag and other stats. Good naming conventions and/or properly-scaled preview images (I\'m looking at you, tri-coupler!) would make it even easier to keep track.

Obviously, Skunky is a young whipper-snapper. Growing up without any warp? Ha! Spoiled brats! In my day, we grew up with negative warp. And turning it on was compulsory, as you walked to and from school, uphill both ways...

r4m0n: Was just being goofy...as it\'s my strong impression that removing a part just because it doesn\'t work is not very kerbal.

I tried to set up a launch camera 500 meters away from the pad last night, and for some reason it wasn\'t working. Not sure if it was Fixed Camera, Carts, Damned Robotics, my brain, or something else that was at fault. I put a camera on some Damned Robotics parts in a truck. 'Launched' the truck, drove it 500m from the pad, oriented the robot arm to frame the picture, then exited to the tracking center and rolled a rocket out to the pad. Hitting F7 to switch camera views took me to the truck cam...which was now somehow pointed in the wrong direction. So I hit the bracket key to switch to controlling the truck, re-oriented the arm, switched back to controlling the rocket, hit F7 again...and the camera was again pointing in the (same) wrong direction. Any ideas?

Kerbals everywhere have been trying, and failing, to make sense of that statement. (I\'ve resorted to assuring them that '\'cause' is just a strange idiomatic contraction of the phrase 'despite the fact that'. It\'s working okay so far.)

However tedious being stuck on x1 speed may be, it\'s not half as tedious as most Internet arguments. It\'s alpha software; inconveniences are to be expected. We can survive the loss of x2 for now, since keeping it would cause worse problems. And I personally rather enjoy keeping a book close at hand, catching up on my reading when tedious things need to be waited out. But on the other hand, we don\'t have to pretend that unaccelerable tedium is a virtue either. It simply is what it is: a minor, for-now-unavoidable inconvenience.

This is an interesting craft and I enjoyed zooming off the pad with it...but with the tri-couplers hard against the central fuselage, and some of the first-stage jet engines embedded within it, I haven\'t been able to detach the first stage without taking off the toroidal spike engine at the center too. Tried adding struts...didn\'t fix it. Am I flying it wrong, or is there some odd glitch that\'s breaking the craft on my system?

I don\'t miss 2x speed that much--since based on how wonky it was in 0.15, it would surely tear lots of 0.16 ships apart. If it were feasible to implement a max-warp override, however, that would be a lifesaver. Not just for re-entry, and not just at lower levels either. On one of my last flights in 0.15.2, I was returning a Munar flight to Kerbal, and ran out of fuel just as the periapsis dipped to about 65,000 meters (with the apoapsis remaining over 3 million meters). I\'m stubborn and weird, and was also curious to see just how slowly this orbit would decay, so stuck it out even though the warp dropped back to 2x on every single orbit. But boy, was that painful, compared to if it could have been hacked to stay at no less than 100x until the periapsis dropped at least as far as 30,000.

I\'m still pretty new around here--0.15.2 was my first version of the game after instantly loving the demo--so this is my first Kerbal Patchmas. And a cracking Patchmas it has been. Such a tremendous amount of fun! Even if all trace of the project disappeared tomorrow (Heaven forfend!), I\'d still have gotten much more than my $15 worth of enjoyment. Thanks to the devs for a great game and for opening up to modders (and even bringing them onto the team) at such an early phase. Thanks to the community for being helpful and having such a wonderful sense of humor. Grateful for and really loving 0.16; already can\'t wait for 0.17!

In Soviet Russia, aircraft jumps out of you!

With the coming implementation of EVAs, there\'s been debate over just how ridiculous it would be for kerbonauts to try to save themselves by jumping out of their craft just before crashing. Apparently, it\'s not nearly so ridiculous as I\'d presumed... 'A plane towing an advertising banner has crashed just off shore at North Myrtle Beach, and witnesses say the pilot jumped to safety just before the aircraft hit the water.' http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/07/18/2206246/banner-plane-crashes-off-north.html So, if version 0.16 breaks the escape-tower mod, we\'ve still got a back-up plan! (So long as EVAs can be performed on an emergency, impromptu basis, that is...and really, would Jeb have it any other way?)

Well, on the Munar front there\'s progress of a sort. One thing I\'ve determined is that the term 'Munar/Lunar landing' is far too broad and imprecise. I\'ve instead made an itemized to-do list: 1. Reach the surface of Mun 2. Leave non-exploded parts on the surface of Mun 3. Leave a non-exploded capsule containing live kerbonauts on the surface of Mun 4. Leave a complete lander, still with all its parts, on the surface of Mun 5. Leave a complete lander, still with all its parts and upright, on the surface of Mun 6. Leave a complete lander, still with all its parts and upright and with some remaining fuel, on the surface of Mun 7. Land on Mun completely intact, and then take off again 8. Land on Mun completely intact, take off again, and escape Munar SoI 9. Land on Mun completely intact, take off again, escape Munar orbit, and enter Kerbin orbit 10. Land on Mun completely intact, take off again, escape Munar orbit, enter Kerbin orbit, and return safely to Kerbin surface #1 is a snap for me now. I\'ve had good luck with #2 and #3... ...and even pulled off #4 once. Getting all the way to #7 and beyond seems like a dream still, but my program is getting there. There\'s an even loftier dream of mounting a rescue mission someday (presuming the kerbonauts on Mun are still patiently enjoying their infinite life support then). But...baby steps for now. Oh, and here\'s the monster I\'ve developed to launch these Mun shots. Good-natured laughter at the woeful inefficiency of it all is expected; helpful hints would be an extra bonus. (.craft file attached)

Wow...helpful replies already. Thanks! (The sense of humor and bonhomie I saw on arrival at this forum did help make plunking down my $15 even more of a no-brainer.) dogon11, how many control surfaces would be too many? My last design had one large one on each wing and one small one on each horizontal tailfin, for a total of four.

Howdy all! I\'d been playing some Race Into Space (RIS a.k.a. BARIS) and, in searching for strategies online (that game is hard!) stumbled across KSP. So glad I did! After playing around a bit with the demo I just had to contribute to the project. (By the way--though it\'s a very different game of course, there are plenty of campaign-mode ideas to be gleaned from RIS. The developers are familiar with it, I trust?) I was just starting to figure out how the standard parts in 0.13 worked...now I haven\'t a clue what to do with the cool-looking additions in 0.15. Most of them are for spaceplanes, I gather? I tried making a spaceplane out of them, but most of my inventions exploded on the runway...and the one I got off the ground wasn\'t much good at anything except spinning uncontrollably. Any pointers on spaceplanes, and/or links to good guides on what parts are meant to do what and how to use them, would be welcome. Also, a question for successful Mün-landers out there: do you establish a Münar orbit before trying to land? I left out this step and still managed to land...if you call hitting the surface at 325 m/s 'landing'...