Jason Patterson

This was my thought as well. Take millions of asteroids and billions of years. Shake well.

Caps work, backslashes on the close spoiler tag do not. It's the "\spoiler" bit that's messed up. I think the idea is to drive to KSC2, fly to 100km orbit, then land at KSC1, but yeah, basically.

Depending on what you mean by "on a collision course," 1 and 2 are fairly straightforward, and I've done them both, though of course I didn't take pictures. They can be done by putting a ship into a very high orbit around Kerbol (or Jool) and killing the horizontal velocity. The ship is now on a collision course with either body, as if left alone it would fall into the star or planet. Getting back up to speed is a bit of a challenge, but it's not so bad now that we have nuke engines. Around Jool it's very easy, since you only need to come to rest relative to Jool, not Kerbol. In a high enough orbit (relatively easy to achieve for Jool) the maneuver barely requires any delta v.

It occurs to me that for a polar orbit, as long as you don't care about the other directions of the orbit, the job is much simpler. 1. Get into a relatively large, circular orbit. 2. Find the direction you're heading (not the pitch, just the compass direction), and add or subtract 90 degrees from that, doesn't matter which. 3. Turn in that direction (called normal.) and burn until your new heading is either 0 or 180. You'll need to adjust the direction of your burn as you make it so that it stays perpendicular to your heading. A constant speed means you're doing it right. You should finish up burning at 90 or 270 degrees, depending on the path you decided to take. 4. Once you're in orbit, adjust your periapsis and apoapsis as desired.

For a tidally locked object, it's poles are going to be perpendicular to the orientation of its orbit. What I do to adjust the inclination of my orbit to match another is the following (it would work just as well to get perpendicular to it): 1. Get into orbit around the object - a large, relatively circular orbit (more a not highly elliptical orbit, really.) The reason for this is that the smaller your velocity is, the less delta-v you need to change the orientation. A larger orbit also gives better visual cues. 2. Go to map view and focus on the object I'm orbiting. Bring up my navball in map view (number pad . key) 3. Rotate the map until the orbit of the object (the Mun in your example) and my ship's orbit both appear to be lines. Here's a picture of what I mean. I didn't have any ships up at the time, so this is the orbits of the Mun and Minmus aligned correctly. When you reach this point you're on something called an orbital node, a point on the line where the two orbit's planes intersect. 4. Time warp until your ship lines up with the object you're orbiting. In my picture, that would be Kerbin, in your scenario, the Mun. There are two points on your orbit where this will happen, the one closer to apoapsis is preferable, because you'll be going more slowly, but either one works in the same way. 5. Determine what compass direction you're heading. Align your ship prograde (pointing in the direction you're going) and read the direction from the navball. This is another reason that a relatively circular orbit is better, since reading the direction from the navball is quite difficult when the vertical velocity is a large component of your total velocity. 6. Adjust your ship to face normal to it. Add or subtract 90 degrees from the navball direction and turn in that direction. Adding or subtracting will depend on which way you want to tilt your orbit relative to the orbit you're trying to achieve. If your orbit starts tipping the wrong way, just turn around and burn the other way instead. In your case, you don't care whether you're starting out headed south or north on your polar orbit, so it doesn't make any difference. 7. Burn until you achieve the orbit you want. Adjust the direction of your burn as you perform it so that it stays perpendicular (+/- 90 degrees) to the direction of your travel. For example, if you started out headed at 90 degrees, and you burnt north (0 degrees) to change your orbit, the direction you're going would slowly begin to nudge northward. Your burn at 0 degrees would no longer actually be normal to the direction of travel and your orbit's properties other than inclination would start to change. Slowly changing your direction of travel further in the negative direction would fix this. Ideally, an inclination change won't change your speed at all, so that's a good indicator of how close to perpendicular you are. This will be important with a major directional change, as you're intending to do. Again supposing you started out at 90 degrees and burnt at 0 degrees to get into a polar orbit. By the time you finished you would be pointed due west (270 degrees) in order to remain perpendicular to your direction of travel. 8. Once you've got your orbital inclination the way you want it, adjust the periapsis and apoapsis as usual. Hope this helps. The downside is that your window for being captured is fairly small and your velocity is going to be wonky (the Mun is moving laterally while you're moving vertically, you still won't wind up in a polar orbit, but it will be closer than an equatorial orbit.

Do you mean a completely unpowered assist? I gravity assist all the time but that's going to be a neat trick. I'm going to give it a shot.

I've been playing for a month or so now, and I really enjoy the game. I do have a few questions though. Is there any particular place to report bugs? To offer suggestions? I also was curious about how other people play the game. When you go from Kerbin to Eve, for example, do you actually calculate when and where to burn, or do you just eyeball it and adjust as you go? I've seen lots of people complaining about the difficulty of matching orbital inclinations, and that confused me. It seems fairly easy to do, so much so that I'm wondering if I'm doing it wrong. The orbits match in the end though, so I guess I can't be too far off the mark. Perhaps the difference is that I'm not particularly constrained by time in the way I play it - I don't mind letting a few orbits go by before something happens.

Release 0.17 just came out, and with it came all the zillions of downloads of the program. Basically the servers got hammered by all of the users. Now that it's tapered off somewhat the site's getting back to normal.

The atmosphere of Moho starts at just 27.8k, though as you mention it's very very thin. I had trouble with landing in the crater, as the air temperature was so high near the ground that my entire ship, except for the crew capsule, exploded due to the heat. Even the landing gear went. For anyone who is interested, the ring of mountains surrounding the eye on Moho is roughly 10,000m above its sea level.

He's not scared, he's yawning...

Did it fall to pieces or actually explode? I've had three ships simply fall apart on me in a definitely buggy way. Space Kraken Jr?

Is there a good way to get out of IVA? I wind up hitting escape to get my mouse back and then putting it over the Kerbals' images so that it's in place when I go back into the game.

Woohoo, doing this allows Hypercam to record fullscreen video of DirectX games. Previously I was getting a black screen for fullscreen videos. Thanks so much. ETA: I do know that other games, WoW for instance, offer a fullscreen-windowed mode. I'm not sure whether that option is available for all platforms, but it is possible to integrate it into the game. I don't pretend to have any idea how that's supposed to be done, but still.

The fuel bug that existed in 0.16 has been removed, so it's possible that if you weren't using full throttle before you were getting free gas.

Curse you fidgety server. Double post.

I haven't been playing long, but I love this game. It's just fantastic. For an update, a few small (I think) things that would make a substantial difference in gameplay would be (there may be mods for some of this; if so, please let me know): - the ability to click on an item in the build list and delete it, including all of the disconnected bits that are floating around the hangar - with interplanetary travel, warp 1,000,000 would be lovely - 10 minute orbits trying to line up with Jool, even at max warp, are pretty painful and if you have to wait for several orbits to get an for an encounter, ouch - a graphical indicator of the sphere of influence of a celestial body <--- this more than any of the others My biggest problem is that I like piloting my own ship rather than having to rely on MechJeb (which is pretty incredible, don't get me wrong.) Without a calculated course, I wind up doing my best to get to where I think I need to be, but a lot of the time I've got the right idea but wind up waiting for several orbits for things to line up, or the visuals from the game indicate that I'm going to make a close pass by something and it's not close enough. I'd just like to know how close close is, you know? (Try hitting Moho for a good example. It's incredibly tiny, and course adjustments are very expensive due to the high velocity of the orbit.)

I'm loving the new patch. The only real downside is that now that there are so many interplanetary destinations, warp 100,000 isn't really fast enough. 1 second = 1.25 days is great for moons, but when you're waiting for an orbital encounter and the orbits take a year or two each, it's pretty tedious. Anyone know of an addon that offers an increased warp? Here are some pictures I took of Jool and two of its satellites. Unfortunately I wound up in a retrograde orbit around the planet (need to pay better attention next time) so getting into orbit around the moons was challenging, so say the least. I wound up running out of fuel while trying to gravity brake repeatedly to slow the ship. I did have a few close passes with two of the moons though, and I definitely hope that a warp factor 1 million is in the works. The ship I took - The Kerbol Explorer. It's ugly. Really really ugly. And poorly designed. But it got me there. Tylo appears to be a simple, rocky world. I didn't get close enough to find out whether it has an atmosphere or not. Happening upon Laythe was a lucky break. I had run out of fuel and the gravity brake I was doing off of Tylo wound up sending me to Laythe. That said, Bill Kermin's final resting place is on Laythe's surface. Or perhaps a few yards under it. Laythe does have an atmosphere, it starts at around 50,000m give or take 5,000.

I finished a lander for this, which I named, creatively enough, Hard Lander. With stock parts it was able to survive a 499m fall and a 78.5 m/s impact fully intact and ready to launch. Here is a video I made of the fall. Does anyone have a suggestion for a decent, free video recorder for PC that will record DirectX and OpenGL games? FRAPS works well but the 30s limit (or the $37 price tag) is no good.

Out of curiosity, what is the exact challenge? Are we flying over the pole in the fastest time, or is it to land at the pole in the fastest time? I just did a flyover at a just under mach 2.8, getting there in 21:12. I hit F2 instead of F1, apparently, so I'm not trying to put this up for the challenge. Suppose it took me another 3 minutes to land, would my time be 21:12 or 24:12?

Darn it. Just made a jet that flew over the pole at just after 22:00 and would have been on the ground at 25:00 at the pole, but I messed up, descended a bit too steeply, spun out of control, and went nose first into the ice at 300 m/s. Another attempt with a slightly modified plane tomorrow!

So yes, we can use a rocket engine, but the primary power should be from jets, and there is a 20km ceiling.

I don't have a good name for my plane, but I was able to get to the north pole in This is a shot from just before the crossing. Three turbofans with 12 jet fuel fuselages. Mechjeb was the only non-stock item. The maximum speed was just over 700 m/s. Another version was on target for 21 minutes and but ran out of fuel and went down in the ocean. Two more fuel tanks brought it to the ice sheet but I wound up about 5 degrees short. I did find out that it lands beautifully though, and I rolled across the ice for 2 degrees before I got sick of watching it. I think I might try this with another set of engines just for laughs.

I'm finding the hardest part of this challenge to be getting my computer to not fall to pieces after it passes through a swarm of 50 or so bits of debris at less than 1 km. It runs smoothly up to the last second, then ZAP, the whole thing dies. It gets so laggy that the game completely quits responding and I have to control-alt-delete out of it to get anything to work. I think I'm going to try putting a single large object in orbit and see whether that helps the situation. ETA: A large target caused fewer problems, but the close approaches seem to devour system resources, and they don't release them after the close approach is finished. Basically, it gets worse and worse as the number of close passes gets greater and greater. I just had a close approach that was insane, roughly 100m between two full sized ships.

So if I had built a rocket, i.e. a spaceship, that had not left the atmosphere in the last 15 seconds of the flight, I'd have it? Again, not particularly specific. Are you looking for a space plane? If so, as was mentioned, there are a couple identical challenges already.

You weren't particularly specific about the rules, so here is my entry. I built a rocket (all stock parts,) launched it into a 60km orbit, and got the speed up to 3600-3800 m/s. I maintained the altitude by burning radially inward for the entire flight. I ran out of fuel about 30s before finishing the 25:00 trip and quickly shot upward out of the atmosphere. I only took one picture of the flight, sorry. It would be a neat trick to get to that altitude and velocity without circumnavigating the planet though. This picture is actually a few seconds after after I flew over the KSC, but I wanted to be sure I had cleared it before I took the shot. If you look closely you can see the runway on the peninsula in the red circle. The ship's momentum carried it out of Kerbin's sphere of influence in short order.