Sean Mirrsen

My way of landing was sort of like... well, a reverse landing. The craft was VTOL, and used a single NERVA for slowing down the primary vector, which was purposely kept as close to parallel to the surface as possible. VTOL engines were used for quick bursts of upward motion, and eventually the whole thing just slowly touched down onto a downward slope of a hillock and stopped. That's probably inefficient as heck though, I just wanted to land horizontally. If your primary engine is good enough to land vertically, tail first, you're probably better off doing that. Then at the very ground give it a little push upwards, and use RCS to flip over wheels down and land.

There are already quicksaves, autosaves, and saved states (there was a button to bring up a selector somewhere, but I never used it so I don't remember which... I think it's used for scenarios or something). The game already autosaves as soon as you cut throttle after exiting atmosphere (because it can't save in atmosphere), and it autosaves quite regularly so you don't lose things to a random crash. Personally, I consider even the quicksave a little cop-out. It's a neat feature to have when you're about to try something absolutely ridiculous (I tried sending my refuelling station on a mission to Eeloo with just a Poodle for propulsion... almost made it, too - was 1500m/s deltaV too short of completing the final correction; next time, I'll send some NERVAs up first). But for regular flights I just prefer to try and correct whatever errors I make. Adding a whole quicksave system to regular play would be going way too far.

Nope, that's just a plain drop tank. A.k.a. an upscale of the things used by prop fighters in WW2. Asparagus staging - technically called "Propellant Crossfeed" IRL - is rather more complicated.The reason it's not done is not because of aerodynamics - several long tubes fly just as well as one - but because of the inherent complexity of the setup. Apparently it's not as easy as topping up the center tank at the same time as the side ones drain, there are some technical issues to work out. The Falcon Heavy launch vehicle is currently the only one implementing such a setup - and yes, it is indeed nicknamed "Asparagus Staging".

I guess I'm equal parts both, but I'm not too great a pilot. Thing is, I don't bother with precise maximum-efficiency launches, and just blithely go to space however I damn well please. I design the craft to be able to work in such conditions, point the nosecone at the sky, and blast off. There's a turn and a long burn sideways somewhere along the way, but it's neither important enough to time nor difficult enough to find taxing.I also frown at the concept of "launch windows" (despite not having worked on a Mac since school, and on a 'nix system since ever). I'd rather pack half again as much fuel and do a triple-launch composite booster mission than wait for an efficient Jool transfer.

I just love the feel of being in control of the thing I've built. I will not let an autopilot take away from me the joy of guiding my creation to whatever end the fates have in store for it. That doesn't mean I don't use SAS or anything. But I am far from being a conventional rocketeer. I primarily fly spaceplanes, non-airhoggy ones, that barely get to orbit by the skin of their afterburners and then have to refuel, every single time, and I've yet to grow tired of it. When I do fly a rocket I do it with all the flair and grandeur it deserves, none of that "ten launches, all alike" nonsense. Every lifter for every new payload is custom-built, and overcoming design and control challenges arising from the differences is half of what's keeping me in the game. I'm sure that if I ever tried to play the game your way, launching the same things to the same place over and over again, I'd be bored too.

Except the Aerospike nozzle, which uses exhaust constrained by some hydrodynamic principle or other (or something to that effect) to maintain efficiency across all altitudes at the cost of mass. But yes, something to that effect would be neat to see.

Ion engines are slow enough on probes. 2m xenon tanks is just overkill. (also, what stability? They're barely exerting enough force to push off off Gilly!)

Considering that an MPD needs something on the order of hundreds of kilowatts, you're looking at a solar array massing in at a hundred tons - that is still dependent on full exposure to the Sun, and is probably extremely fragile. A nuclear reactor is compact, and not dependent on positioning, not to mention rather sturdy by design - and it quite certainly can match the required power production.

The actual problem is the players' lack of patience. Until ion-powered long burns can be abstracted on the level of on-rails timewarp, this will not change. If you want a hideously efficient probe engine, you're going to have to wait while it does its thing. edit: MPD thrusters and VASIMR thrusters are great and all, but they're effectively a rehash of Ion Engines, and likely not a great big priority for Squad at the moment. Plus they're even bigger power hogs, to the point where the only plausible powersource for an IRL VASIMR is a prototype compact nuclear reactor.

Comparing.... TWR to ISP?? Pfffffffft.. XDOkay yeah, the Ion Engine's TWR sucks. It's quite a ways below 1, whereas the NERVA can lift its own mass... almost three times over, IIRC. The engine doesn't fly on its own though, and the LV-N needs fuel. It needs at least its own mass in fuel to really get anywhere when already in orbit, and that's with nothing else weighing it down. It also kinda needs to carry all of its fuel with itself. The Ion Engine also needs fuel. It also needs that pesky electricity, in rather large amounts. Here's the thing: Electricity comes from the Sun, via solar panels. In unlimited quantities. As such, the Ion Engine only needs to carry the Xenon, which is 1/120th of the thing that propels it. Yeah, there's the solar panels, but the amount of mass you save in Xenon is massive. Bottom line: A NERVA probe will need 20 tons of mass to have the same delta-V as an Ion probe of 2 tons. Sure, it'll get there faster, and likely with less hassle, but I still think it's quite indicative.

As an extension to the editor extensions et al, there is also the Subassembly Saver/Loader, that may or may not become a stock function in .22. You can make your rover in the SPH, save it as a subassembly, and then add it to your rocket in the VAB.

I been experimenting with some pretty weird stuff at some point. ...pretty weird stuff, yeah. (I share the pilots' thoughts on this wholeheartedly)

If you are doing something you feel you may screw up, hit F5. If you do screw it up, press and hold F9. There's no reason for the game to facilitate recklessness by making the easy way out of being responsible even more obvious.

Compared to "End Flight", the Revert feature is quite forgiving. And it's the natural choice for Career Mode - that way anything you've done with the flight you revert, never happened, and the world goes on in blissful ignorance of the stunts you pulled off.

The "rewind" option is a reload of your last persistence save, placing you either the moment before, or the moment after you hit the "launch" button. When you exit your craft, you save everything to your persistence save, therefore you could only "rewind", if this were possible, to the moment you re-entered the ship from the tracking station. If you want to "rewind" manually, you should use quicksaves. And the term is Revert.

Yeah, look at those trajectories... all twisted, bent, zigzagged, deformed... ...so that's what a Kerbal Warp Drive works like...

Actually, I thought the node link on the Gigantors has been missing since... well, since forever. At least two or three major versions now. About the only singular time I have ever thought of the node link could be useful was when I put them on the ends of struts - and even then the balance isn't affected due to symmetry, and aesthetically I can set them down on the center of the strut very easily due to how well its size fits. There are just too few parts that could be used to accept those things. I'm still at a loss as to why the Communotron antenna still has it - it literally makes no sense.

Except that's Ike. 90% of that 'trajectory' is outside its SOI.

Or maybe it's just sentient, and well aware of Jeb's flying habits.

It's using the default draw mode. Sure, it likely won't appear in the legacy mode (i.e. the previous default) where the patches are always shown relative to the SOI they happen in, but in this mode, this is what can happen.

It's usually happening only on very specific approach angles, and it's not random - i.e. it's possible to entirely recreate the effect, and savestates preserve it, you just need a very specific approach. The bug is only with the calculations, though, not the path itself - once the SOI changes, the path is recalculated and goes along as it should.

Not sure what you're updating in that case - the renewed Subassembly Saver&Loader plugin doesn't have the jigsaw button.

I'll try to transcribe what he actually said. So he sounds fairly certain based on what he knows.

Well, that's what Scott said that he heard another person say, so while there's definitely a base for a rumor here, I wouldn't count on it being a certainty until further proof.

But like we already said, the thing is quite limited. You can't pull off a docking maneuver or any mission long enough to warrant splitting it into two sections. You're going to be getting use out of the reverted flights for maybe the first few years when you don't have missions more complicated than "go to orbit" or at most "go to the Mun", but you're not going to be reverting a compound flight to Duna. In other words, it's perfect for testing and letting new players learn the ropes of things without hard consequences.Also, a mission simulator is quite easy to do. It's plainly a mission that doesn't count, and disappears without a trace as soon as it's ended one way or another. Essentially the game makes an autosave before you begin the mission, and a separate quicksave for the mission itself. The mission will always load from the quicksave, and any regular play will load from the autosave instead.