Frederf

Extras like one parachute? It's wrong. Deal with it.

I've personally set the ablative resource to 1/3rd mass per unit. The default Mark1-2 pod is 4t with 1t on shield constituting 20% of its mass. The Apollo CM for contrast had only 7% of its mass as shield.

What happens on a command pod without O2 resources? Does the crew die or is the whole mechanism suspended for non-participating parts?

I stand by it. Transfer time to the Mun on the considerably lazy Hohmann scheme is slightly less than 8 hours. One can go to the Mun, land, play a game of tennis, and come back strictly on the internal Mk1-2 oxygen supply.

What really needed in addon parachute technology is a "tweakables" type implementation where you pick the chute container you want and then specify the performance details of the 'chute like Modular Fuel System. Anything short of this will just be too many parts doing too few functions. Every parachute mod that doesn't do this will be remembered as the one that people used to use before the good one came out.

The O2 levels in default pods is still way too high. Mark1-2 pod has 60 hours crew time which is enough to go back and forth to the Mun like 5 times.

Technically physics doesn't require you to be flying it, just near it. If you formation fly along side some debris it will have physics applied to it. For orbital debris to be auto deleted as "definitely in the atmosphere" it needs to dip below 23km.

Is it possible to add a "cryogenic" tick box for fuel tanks that would increase the dry mass ratio as a trade off? I'd like to use more cryo fuels the the selection of tanks is rather limited.

Perfecto Abosolutement Splenderino Enough Wordissimo

And so it turns out for medium thrust bringing extra TWR isn't justified mathematically. I recently did a ion engine transit to Duna and my burn times (if I was to try to do it all at once centered on one maneuver node) would be 30 minutes or more. I think only on that scale do you approach the tipping point between TWR saving dV and mass reduction from low thrust improving dV. I actually wanted to calculated the mathematical optimum setup to find where low thrust started to hurt more than help but I gave up.

Using a triangle approximation you can estimate the lost deltaV due to finite thrust. By spreading out an impulse burn at 70km LKO over 2 minutes you may end up say slower than an impulse at the beginning and end of the resulting orbit. This might be 100m/s with a peak speed of 2300m/s. On the average you are traveling at 2250 instead of 2300. This translates into a 23/22.5th increase in deltaV requirement which is about 2%. Those are made up but plausible numbers. Usually packing significant thrust incurs much more than a 4% penalty.

As others have stated for main engine only technique you'll want to devote a fraction of your hovering (or slow descent) thrust counter to your lateral motion. Once you have your lateral motion under control (~20m/s or less) turn your craft for landing and tilt 5-10 degrees from vertical toward the retrograde marker. This will proportion 5-10% of your thrust to lateral motion which allows easier fine tuning. Assuming you are slowly descending through the process the retrograde marker will drift toward the center position indicating no lateral motion. At that time return your attitude to vertical to not induce any lateral motion now that it is zero. The less your descent the more sensitive the the retrograde marker will be to lateral motion.

Yes but what nodes are they? I have much of the tree unlocked already and it isn't in my visible portion.

Please make it optional. If it's forced into all command pods I will stop using it.

With FAR a smooth "bullet" type craft with heat shield on the bottom has 10x Cd facing pointy end first instead of heat shield first. It's because that aero things that the wind is hitting the top of the shield but even then it should be 1:1.

Odd. I don't see it in my career. Is it some far-flung node or do I have an installation problem?

Once you get an encounter you could focus on the destination body if you have the ability to change the conic draw mode. I also didn't know about tab/shift-tab. Thanks!

Career integration?

Winglets is a weird term because it's usually small surfaces at the end of airplane wings. Static fins are nice to enforce positive stability aerodynamically. Control surface fins are nice to provide control aerodynamically. Your most drivable craft might use one or the other or a combination. I find FAR a welcome addition because I can disable the roll control channel from the aero surfaces as they are much much too sensitive in roll (causing SAS to spaz out in oscillation).

The blue orbit lines on the map scene are also being affected by clouds/cities behind the lines.

There's a difference among the game modes: sandbox, career-as-is, and strictly-directed career. For those that want a structured environment but not a dictated narrative then career-as-is is desired. Sandbox in that case is not good enough.

1. Land at a latitude where surface v = orbital v. 2. Use KAS's grappling hooks* 3. Burn to press yourself into the surface* *Manley suggestions

I don't know this forum's policy on reaction images but I FEEL LIKE I'M TAKING CRAZY PILLS. If you're going 100 mph and landing on something going 50 mph you need to slow down 50 mph. If you're going 100 mph and land on something going -50 mph then you have to slow down 150 mph! That's it. Done. Finitio. Matching velocities with something depends exactly on the velocity of the thing you're matching. Of course it does. How could you think otherwise?

I believe it also means that the grid will be able to conform to terrain instead of being a floating spherical shell. The rest of my thoughts are a bit scattered so I'll just list them: 1. Please continue hope for inactive resource handling. "Slow churn" mining on inactive vessels and inactive probe scanning are difficult and nuanced problems but I think valuable and highly prized. 2. A part which shuffled conversion products around would be fantastic. I think a very common configuration of mining and conversion is to have a mining craft, possibly a separate refiner, and lastly some sort of destination/transport tanker-tug all hooked together using KAS pipes. The problem is that resources don't happily flow across these pipes and take manual alt-right-click transferring. I use TAC fuel balancer to automate this but if Kethane handled this internally that would be better. A little pump part that took electricity and shoved around resources would be quite dear. 3. As nifty as the Ke orbital scanning is it seems a missed opportunity to not have some sort of science-based discovery of Ke deposits. Perhaps different biomes on the Mun would have slightly different multipliers of qty and extraction rates. Scanning might be done for 1-5 trace elements which act as puzzle pieces to locate Ke. I obviously haven't given it complete thought but something to make it more of a game and introduce more fuzziness.

Editor Extensions has a key combination to change between SPH and VAB modes of construction. You don't actually switch facilities but it's quite fast and convenient. This is quite valuable and complete as a tool though.