Max Grant

I've done it a couple of times. It is just more painstaking.

Second that. It is fundamental to the success of your rocket to be able to throw away weight.

I'm 44 years old. This is the only game in all of gamedom that is interesting enough for me to tolerate. I've done all that, I've plugged quarters into an Asteroids machine, I had a Commodore 64, I played Pong in the 1970's, I had an Atari 2600 when that was a geeky thing to have, I was there for Doom and Duke Nukem and KSP is hands down the most interesting thing happening in gaming today. I'd say "mature" player with "advanced" tastes and "extra" requirements for a more interesting, involved game.

I'm pretty sure the OP is just a troll trying to gig us all into replying. Honestly, I don't care how popular the game is. I get it for me.

I tried using docking mode ONCE. I hated it. I just use the same mode throughout. I usually dock the first time right away unless my ship is wobbly, or I've made some stupid design mistake (left a docking port mated to a docking port because I was checking how the ships would look put together). Other than that, I point to target, burn off relative velocity, burn to target, lather, rinse, repeat.

LOL. This is the problem. You have some built into each capsule but you will use that up almost immediately.

Well, you probably could but it would be a travesty. You can do all kinds of crazy things. I one time installed a virtual ESX server, on an ESX server, just to see what would happen. It was the slowest virtual server I'd ever seen (took 2 hours to boot up). Just the first part of his statement (several instances of Unity) makes me think that you could do that -- in 20 years, when we can run Windows 7 on a wristwatch. The long answer for me is why the hell do the Unity developers keep avoiding the elephant in the room? We've been using multi-core processors for a decade now. It's not a new thing. In fact, if people are paying attention the rapid growth in mHz/gHz of processors which had been happening since the dawn of forver, has really stopped. I remember getting to 1gHz. Then 2 gHz. Then . . . we never really got to 3 as a standard. I certainly haven't ever seen a 4 gHz chip come through my world. So, really, I don't know how much more under pressure you can make a bunch of programmers feel, but Unity -- the WHOLE WORLD is passing you by. Get ON the bus!

My advice from 3 years of this is, not quite. Each chute will exert its own force, and if they are not precisely in alignment it will still rip your ship apart. Even if you put the chutes on the heavy lower sections of the ship, you still run the risk of them ripping it in half. Has happened many times. What I usually do is struts, across all parts of the ship. I also do a drop test if I'm not sure it will work, on Kerbin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VPc3eqRwLc I didn't think the first part of this would work (the Curiosity-style landing). I was really surprised that I was able to pull it off. The rest of the mission was a disaster, hilariously! The ship could hardly be steered (this was my first foray into multi-part ships, and there was no Clamp-O-Tron, Sr so it wobbled mightily). None of my other landers worked properly, as I recall. I spent all my R&D budget (meaning, my time) researching how to make the skycrane work. Forgot to try out any of the rest of it.

Yes, because you have to account for the whole system. It is not miles per gallon in any sense of the word. it is miles per gallon per weight per engine power, more like. All must be figured in.

I started using Anvil rockets because the assembly is more realistic than the kinds of things I have to do to make stock parts work, with big payloads. I do use an asparagus-like staging scheme, but I never exceed four side rockets, and my preferred configuration actually looks just like a Falcon Heavy, usually with smaller rockets to either side which drain into the big rocket, so that I can have all that fuel. When I design, I do several test flights and I look for various criteria. One thing is, if it's a heavy payload (say a science orbiter with 3-man capsule and nukes) I simply abort the launch if I can't make 200 m/s by 10,000 meters. That is kind of an indicator to me I'm shy on lifting power. So I will add two side rockets (in the Anvil series I use the 2m boosters, otherwise if I'm going Rockomax I just make another 2m stack). If I'm still dragging at 10,000 meters, I add two more boosters. What I usually do if I'm up to four liquid side-mounted boosters, there is a pair that drains to the center, and if I need two more, those two drain to the "last" two. I make the first pair of boosters bigger, as big as they need to be to get to where I'm going (in this scheme I usually toss them by 5,000 meters). The idea is simply throw away as much weight as I can until I get over the atmosphere. So that second pair (the last to drop off) I sometimes make smaller. I don't do math for this, but I observe which thing gets me further. Once I have a scheme that works for me in the current game I stick with it. I have been using Anvils because struts do not get preserved in the sub-assemblies, and I hate re-strutting a booster. I'd rather build it again from scratch, so the fewer struts I need the better. Finally, if my booster isn't going around 1000 m/s by 30,000 meters, it's not going to space today. I usually do my gravity turn starting very slowly around 25,000-27,000 meters. If my rocket isn't doing 600 m/s by the time we clear atmosphere, and around 1400 by the time I ditch my final ground-level booster, I start over. So by the time my "top" stage, the last-but-payload rocket fires, I expect to be around 50,000 meters, with my apoapsis above atmosphere. If that isn't happening, I go back and fiddle with more fuel, and more things to throw away sooner.

IRL ion engines are amazing. The Dawn probe is using one right now and will be the first vessel to visit and orbit two different worlds. The burn times go for WEEKS, however. If you look up the trajectory, there are colored indicators showing when it is burning vs coasting, and it burns almost the whole way there. For ion engines to be real in the game, we would need to be able to program time warp, and a much higher time-rate for physics warp. As they are now they are usable. I would like to see the ability for physics warp to be a little higher when burning ion engines, without sacrificing stability. Don't know how that could be done without making some kind of exceptions to the normal game physics.

I am of the opinion you could almost sneeze yourself out of Minmus' gravity well. The things I learn here. NO WONDER everyone is so upset with my driving!!!!

On the lower left in the VAB are center of lift, mass, and thrust. Activate center of mass, and then use the tweakable feature to empty and fill your fuel tanks. That band where the yellow and black ball goes, is where your RCS goes. IMHO, if it is a really wide band, what I do is sometimes supplant the usual RCS with single-direction RCS thrusters at both ends, if the vehicle is long and the fuel will drastically shift the center of mass. So, instead of twisting from the middle, you're grabbing at both ends, so to speak. It's magic. I actually think we are allowed to use the "weight" of the Kerbals to turn the ship. IRL that isn't an option. If you use more than a few units of RCS to dock, your ship is too wobbly. Take for a small lander about 80 (two of the little spherical balls), for a larger vessel I stick four of the bigger RCS cans on it. Also, if you're not using the Steam version of the game, F1 for screenshot. F2 turns off the HUD, I usually do that for pretty shots.

Actually, I usually dock with about 99% navball. Engineer works for some things, but I've seen it has its limitations. Being a program, it can't think for you. More importantly, the idea is to only carry stuff with you that you have to have on you. I was at one point toying with doing fly-off tanks that would leave an engine below them, but separate from above the stack using sepatrons or whatever, and cutting the fuel into as many small compartments as I could. Sometimes, the results were very exciting. I think my ideal rocket design would be more like an artichoke with the rocket in the middle and several layers of fuel tank that are shed progressively as the rocket ascends.

Well, you can see what this would look like right now with the Anvil rocket parts. Fairings and all. I've been launching some very large ships with nice, sleek-looking cones over them. The fairings go up to 5 meters. The pats (erm, parts) are 4m or 4.5? Not sure. Anyway, very large and sturdy, and blessedly strut-free. I only strut my payload to the decoupler now.

OK I was reading this so wrong. Low Kerbol orbit was anything under 100,000 km. I believe. I was getting science from the Sun by doing dives that took me down to like the 60's and I was getting down there and burning like a whole tank of fuel trying to get some Oberth effect off it.

Here's an interesting perspective on this, that I will leave here and never speak of again. I am a professional IT systems programmer. I recognize the kind of work Squad are about. Many of the complaints about the game seem to assume that the resources of all computers are infinite, and that their capabilities are too. In reality, many of the problems squad faces are due to the limits of the technology, or even the limits of our science. The end process of this simulator is not a real-world product. Therefore, it's not a real-world simulator. Expecting it to be one is silly. It's a fictional game world. I enjoy it on its own merits. I also rarely visit the intentions of another artist, which is what this also is. It is a work of gaming art. At some point, people need to understand that things like this aren't actually a democracy. The guy making the work has to please himself first or he can't continue making it, because if it isn't the work he wants to make, not even tremendous amounts of money can force him to keep working on it if he hates it. If you're that out of shape about how the game works, it costs you virtually nothing you don't already have to write your own game.

I usually use the edge of a book when working these things out. If my book's edge crosses into the orbit of my origination, it needs to be a bit further along.

I saw this post and reminisced upon many of my own questionable design decisions.

I learned to test my assumptions every time. Things like do my ladders reach to the hatch.

No, I practiced docking and got really good at it. I have only had trouble here, recently, when I one time forgot to remove a docking ring I had attached facing the one I was using, for a reason i can't remember now. I had to remember to "undock" that single part so I sailed into docking at 0.4 m/s and bounced off, and was scratching my lil' head until I remembered the wayward part. Other than that I almost never fail to dock the first time. I've got rendezvous and docking down . . . they do get difficult when working with extra-small gravities since the slightest impulse has a gigantic impact but I've internalized how to properly build a stable ship with good control, which is IMHO 90% of successful docking, having a ship that doesn't wobble like crazy. Something I got relatively good at too before the 0.23 update was estimating my rocket sizes on the fly, after building so many. That's 2 1/2 years of rocket-building experience, not some quirky talent, though. I finally got Kerbal Engineer because 0.23 didn't introduce quite so much in the way of new functioning, so I kind of got bored and decided to see if I could do better with some numbers. I also was doing this over a year ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VPc3eqRwLc I searched for Kerbal-style Curiosity landing and either mine is the highest-rated, or it put mine on top because I'm searching for it Either way, the picture-perfect landing of my rover is still something I'm really proud to have accomplished. You can also see me kvetching about wobbly docking and I realized it's because this was the first introduction of docking and as is my way, I took the idea completely out of control and made the biggest monster I could manage before attempting to see if it was spaceworthy. Wow was that thing exciting to drive! The thing is, this is not an ordinary game, and the headroom for developing skill is really really large. So, I have not gotten tired of what I'm learning here. I cannot think of any game I've ever owned that I could spend this much time with and not get bored. I spent scores of hours playing one or the other half-life or portal or duke nukem or jedi knight years ago but no one of them ever occupied my attention for two and a half years so relentlessly. I did get better at it and that's why it is such an awesome game. Most games with this kind of difficulty level make me work like the dickens to hop over the correct pixel, which I find insulting. This game makes me work for my every achievement entirely on my own merits, which I greeted with a kind of "FINALLY SOMEONE GETS IT" and have never looked back. When I achieve something really spectacular, like that Curiosity landing, it is a goal I set for me, as high as I want, as out-of-the-ordinary as I wanted, and I was able to hit it. There were no boundaries outside of the credible, believable, not-insultingly-limiting physics. So yes people are getting very good at this because it in the best way actively encourages us to creatively solve very difficult problems, on our own initiative. I think it self-selects people who thrive on this.

The RSS mod has it, or so I thought.

LOL. That game has been done already. See arcades circa 1978.

They are still testing it to get the mechanics down. I don't expect it to balance against the content of the game until they really do reach 1.0. Until then, I enjoy having "science' to do and would like to see that aspect expanded on. The first .22 iteration of the tech tree was really easy, I agree. .23 is mechanically more complex, not allowing you to do the same science over and over again, encouraging further flights and experimentation, and problem-solving which is what the game's about really. I think some of the aspects of the tech tree need to be re-arranged, because for example I think the ability to decouple is something that should be part of very basic rocketry, and it currently isn't. However, if you don't need the carrot of science vs. the stick of limited technology you can just stick to the sandbox, I do not believe they intend to remove it.