Frederf

Certain profiles are horribly sensitive to initial parameters so avoid those as much as the equipment and mission will allow. A gentle capture over several orbits can turn 100mm/s (note: millimeter) velocity anomaly into a wide splashdown error.

I've started to give a prefix to the name according to its phase and numbered order. It's very very helpful to have your ships listed in chronological order in the ship list with any complicated space program. I've worked out that A18 A19 and A20 craft needs to head to Duna in that order so I can work on them in any order and find them in a sensibly sorted list. I'm trying adding a letter "phase" prefix but I don't know how valuable that is.

I do miss an end flight button simply because exiting to space center, tracking station, mission recovery/terminate takes time. Being able to recover/terminate from the mission itself would be faster.

See post below

The thing about always burning retro/pro is you don't have to. Go ahead and burn plain horizontal or whatever is needed. Prograde is efficient but efficient doesn't help if you're efficiently getting into the wrong orbit. Personally I like to end up in something like a 60x22.5km orbit ditching the main stage to be recovered in atmo and then continuing to 80x80. If you are prograde pretty far from horizontal then prograde is going to balloon your orbit with high Ap quite badly. It's a challenge to end your gravity turn with a low Ap low eccentricity orbit from which to make the final burn.

Instability trend is likely due to a large dynamic air pressure (Q) due to high speeds in atmo. Also, shifting CoM due to fuel burn can upset the apple cart. My advice is to ascend slower and with less AOA while moving the CoL further aft with some fins.

Several attempts were made to scan that spot. All craft that passed over that part released a burst of static and dropped from tracking radar. Pundits are calling it the Kermuda Hexagon.

Not so. 0.2 drag x 1.0 mass = 0.2 dragforce. 0.2 drag x 0.1 mass = 0.02 dragonforce.

I heartily recommend KAS.

I'm waiting for RT2. You can build useless sats just for practice. Getting a tetrahedral constellation without gaps at near minimum altitude is no easy feat.

Is it possible for robotic motion to take electric charge?

Ejection seats would mean some kind of parachute system. You can eject right now, but not so useful. KSP doesn't actually have stalling as the lift smoothy tapers by angle. The whole aero system needs an overhaul as for example the Cd is based on part mass and not geometry. Steerable and castering wheels would be quite nice in general as would landing gear bays that mount recessed.

Agree. Even in the "menu" KSC scene.

Sounds like a CoL/CoM arrangement issue in both cases. One has negative stability and the other has too much positive.

Parachutes can only be armed (blue). They have a set atmospheric density threshold to actually deploy (yellow) and a height value to fill (green).

It would be interesting if braking or differential power was included in the SAS loop as a method of control.

Impacts are often expressed as a momentum change, i.e. an impulse. The severity of the impulse is its duration. The common expression of force is F=ma but Newton actually expressed force as F=dp/dt or in words the time rate of change of momentum. Impulses (changes of momentum) with short durations result in high forces and impulses that take a while are low forces. For short duration interactions the local gravity is insignificant compared to the existing momentum due to motion. Basically a 60mph crash is the same sideways or downward.

Your empiricism as well as the cut of your jib are commendable.

I believe angular drag is the drag of rotation as in how the air resistance slows a spinning object.

Mk1 pod already has a built in shield in DRE, don't add another one. I've found incidences of 6-20 degrees are acceptable.

I've found that the burn isn't perfectly symmetrical around the ideal "instant impulse" point if one is approaching a periapsis since acceleration before the point tacks on m/s in addition to the "falling" acceleration which has a multiplicative effect on total velocity change. I've found roughly 33% before and 66% after results in an exit that is closer to that of an instant burn.

Mainly acceleration is force divided by mass. More massive ships of the same drag will be slowed less. Draggier objects slow more than slicker ones at the same mass. Drag is orientation specific with several parts. Lift is also possible with parts that participate in that.

Yeah, it's obviously unintended behavior but extremely useful. It allows craft to sleep for long voyages and to save from mistakes. Of course I've just shifted my problem from running out of power to remembering to arrange the setup in the first place. I wish resource locking could be bound to action groups.

I'm quite proud of this discovery. Often I will flub a mission due to losing electricity and thus control by careless actions such as picking a wrong orientation for solar panels or similar. What I wanted was an "oops battery," a source of electricity that would buy me a few seconds or minutes of control in order to correct my mistake and continue the mission. And accidentally I've found it. The requirement is two locations where electric change can be stored, let's say a battery and a pod. Set the battery to the reserve by deselecting its resource from use (green triangle to red circle-slash). Now any electrical draw will reduce the charge stored in the pod and not the battery. When the accessible charge depleted the craft is unresponsive. It is not possible to resume use on the battery part (red circle to green triangle). This is where I thought this technique reached a dead end. However I discovered that while I couldn't unlock the part resources for use, I was able to transfer resources despite having no control over the craft. It's then a simple matter to shuffle electric charge from the inaccessible battery to the accessible pod and control is resumed. Thus it is possible to run out of power (intentionally or not) and recover provided one has some charge stored on the craft.

I'm considering using ion engines for a docking tug as it provides a very good level of control over velocities.