rakutenshi

Yis .. Might even have it as a post-render overlay for the rocket, colour coded with stress levels (think like thermal imaging but showing structural load instead of heat). As a side note, please make it colour blind friendly, red-yellow-green gradients are really really difficult to differentiate if you can't tell the difference between red and green and yellow. I'd suggest a yellow-blue gradient with yellow being the high stress points. And also.. wind tunnel. I don't seen being in career mode and being able to afford to see the plane explode 50 times before you finally get it "just right" .. wind tunnels and Visual Stress Indicators would be awesome.

I support the idea of having "functional part description" and "flavour text" in separated blocks. I very much like the tongue-in-cheek aspect of the descriptions, but, even in mods for example, the B9 Aerospace to be specific, I didn't even realise that the Stabilators will full moving wing surfaces until I put on one and lo and behold it moved. The base parts I can't really say that for any more since I've been using them since like .12 or something.. Its kinda just rote memorisation what the things do..sorry rambling.. shutting up now.

Remember landers are better with a wider footprint, to reduce the risk of tipping over. To make the lander as stable as possible, imagine an equilateral triangle, with the lander's legs at the bottom two corners. The center of mass should be at or below the geometric centre of the triangle. the higher it is the greater the risk of tipping. Also it may not be a bad idea if you don't plan on refuelling the lander to leave to either make a two stage lander like the Apollo LEM, or have some radial fuel tanks that you can dump on the way in.

In my experience, when you strut something that's attached via a radial decoupler, the struts, even though they break when the decoupler is fired, still completely negate all of the ejection force of the decoupler regardless of which end of the link is the source and which is the terminus. I have found that using an engine with less thrust than the central engine on the radial LFTs signifigantly reduces the shear force on the decouplers, reducing the need for struts as well. You want your biggest engine on the central stack, usually providing about 30-50% of the total thrust of the lifter's initial launch stage, with the radially mounted tanks having just enough thrust under them to bring up the total TWR to about 1.7ish. You can launch with as little as 1.3 safely, and it is kinda cool watching the rocket slowly pull away but it does cost a little more dV. I've launched 25 ton payloads with only 3 struts on the whole rocket using this technique- those three struts were because of the inherent wobble when using stack decouplers on the upper stages of taller rockets.

the best part about getting it as DLC is that noone can say "it's a mod so it doesn't count"... well they can and probably will but whatever. yeah, I'd buy official partpack DLCs too.

I'm trying to work out a general formula for figuring out the optimal payload:liquid fuel ratio, so far I've got that for ideal TWR (~1.7 at launch), that's somewhere around 800-850. Not counting discarding stages or SRBs, I've got some other numbers floating around but the spreadsheet is an absolute wreck while I futz around with it, does anyone else have information that would pin down the ideal Payload:LF ratio for an SSTO rocket? (I realise it's less for a staged rocket, due to the shed weight of the previous stages.) Crap, sorry .. half asleep been staring at numbers didn't realise what forum it was in...

I dunno. I'm lazy.. so probably "Default"...

it had to be recovered before raiding warlords could get a hold of it, and it's nuclear materiel. not overflying major population centers because if something went wrong.. bits of flaming spacecraft raining down on a big city is bad- radioactive or not.

Specialist may claw his way to space, but my preferred method is to piss the surface off and get thrown into orbit. Much less work on my part.

Not 100% sure but I think if you flip it around, with the truss on the source stage instead of the destination it might work.. alternately I've used the white hardpoints in similar circumstances, but sadly I'll tell you right now that design won't work, pendulum/tractor rockets in KSP will flip over and crash every time without a gimballing engine at the bottom

The Goldish-something is Multi-Layer Insulation, made of Mylar, Kapton, Silver and/or Aluminum sandwiched together. The orange of the space shuttle's external tank is just the colour of the insulation they use on it, though the first two space shuttle missions, the external tank *was* painted white. There is a reason for spacecraft primarily being painted in black or white patterns. It has to do with the thermal reflection properties of the two colours. Having a ship painted half black and half white, if you point the white side at the sun, it helps keep it cooler, rotating the ship slowly helps keep the surface temperature balanced much more passively. There's some details that I don't fully understand, but they pay the people who do fully understand it a bit more money than I make playing KSP.. heh.. And, also as was mentioned earlier while I was typing out this mess, the ease of tracking visual telemetry on a rotating white and black striped craft, does make that useful to.

I could deal with FTL in KSP if it was the result of maxing out your research trees or whatever they do in career mode... I'd look forward to going to the Alpha Jebei system.

...When you realise your rockets have moods and start talking to them on those tricking parallel separations during gravity turns, begging them to not blow up.

Launch Stability Enhancers TT-18A, the red mini-towers that keep your rocket straight till you're ready to launch... or hold on to it and prevent you from launching if you just like to burn fuel and wobble violently.

You were close enough to start the final docking maneouvres and realised you forgot to put an RCS Tank (or thrusters) on your ship.. You made a minor change in the VAB, went back to the launchpad and tried to take off, only to see your ship shaken about like an angry maraca because you forgot to make sure the LSE was in the right staging group... You line up with the node, time warp, and realise you forgot to deploy the solar panels, leaving you with a fully fueled piece of space debris.

if you right click on a docking port on the craft you currently control, you get 'control from here' if you right click on a docking port on the craft that you are attempting to dock with (once you get close enough to do so), you are given the option to "set as target" instead.

Point at Target Ship Throttle Up Put On Sunglasses Open Beer Enjoy Fireworks Putting on "Won't Get Fooled Again" by the Who is entirely optional. On a serious note though. it really is just alot of trial and error, using the orbital velocities to catch up or slow down to rendezvouz and then getting it all pointed in teh right direction. Take it slow, don't do 'big' burns unless you have alot of distance to cover, always make sure that you have more than twice as much time after the end of the 'approach' burn as the burn itself took, so you have time to turn around and retroburn to kill that dreaded relative velocity.

my mobile utility gantry.. very handy for moving hab modules into proper locations, instead of having to rely on landing or VTOLing over. Yeah.. it's got more nuclear material on board with those RTGs than could really be considered safe. but hey.. it works, right?

I use mechjeb because Squad hasn't implemented the part where I can actually let the kerbals themselves use their skills and training to fly the rockets that I design for them to die in.. errm.. I mean fly .. drive.. steer.. whatever. If you want to go kohlrabis to the wall and fly it by hand with a whetted thumb stuck out the window to help judge your speed, that's all well and good. I build rockets. I plan missions. My kerbals fly them. I stay safe back at mission control and put on an appropriately bereaved face when another mission explodes horribly. Then move on to the next.

I've not seen all that many successful designs that didn't use a lifter stage of some sort. I've had some designs that were overbuilt enough that the last bit that was designed to get it into a stable orbit still had enough fuel to get it most of the way out of the Kerbin SOI. At this point though I think one of two things is happening. You (endlesswaves) and I are not having the same situation in mind, or (far less likely) .. I'm not allowed to be right.

I'm thinking in situations where the payload is in the less than 5T region, and there's a small boost stage on it, maybe one of the smallest stock 1m tanks and the the LV-909, the thought being that keeping the mass down is what increases the ÃŽâ€V over the tremendous relative mass of the LV-N engines - which I do love to death, mind you. - addendum - in this situation - even if the ÃŽâ€V of the payload stage is not significantly improved over the LV-N variant, the overall mass of the payload being reduced makes the lifting stages more efficient as well, allowing you to get more "oomph" from the lifter, or for those of you running pseudo career games using the rules detailed elsewhere on the forums -smaller, sleeker, less expensive rocket designs to get what you want where you want it.

Also, although the LV-N is the 'most efficient' deep space drive engine, there is the possibility -for very light payloads such as probes and satellites - that the LV-909 may actually yield higher ÃŽâ€V than the LV-N, due to the increased mass of the LV-N over the 909. Just something to keep in mind.

this makes me happy. Larger stock LV-Ns would be nice too (or perhaps a cluster of smaller ones?).. just saying. Between clickables in the VAB and 'fixed' ISP/throttle handling.. is definitely going int he right direction

Was just a good angle that I couldnt' resist.

The flight of the Hopeless Eagle. It's fairly fuel efficient - gets to LKO with about 300deltaV, depending on how well you baby it to orbit of course. But- it's a very pretty picture I do believe.