adinfinitum

Use it to take tourists on suborbital trips to the sun, or put a seat right on top and make Kerbals go really really fast.

Huh, well that's interesting to know, thanks for the info. I would've thought that Unity would've had at least a little more complex wheel simulation since its a general purpose game engine, but I guess not.

So I take it that in Unity, based on how I've seen wheels behave in KSP, traction is only determined by the normal force on each wheel?

Since we're talking about changes to the mission control UI, one thing I'd like to see in addition to OP's suggestion, which I love, is the ability to sort accepted contracts by things such as expiration date, reward amount, and type.

As far as I know, the actual look of the terrain doesn't have any correlation to a value in game, its just the texture that is overlaid on the planet mesh, so it wouldn't be able to be done like"wheel is on grass, increased traction". I like the idea very much, and I think the way to do it would be different values for each biome. For example, shores are sandy, so the shore biome would have high friction and low traction, grasslands would be a good middle ground, and the runway would be good traction and an average amount of friction.

Version: 1.0.2, downloaded from the KSP store OS: 32 bit Windows 7 Processor: AMD Phenom II x6 1035T 2.60 GHz Memory: 4.00 Gb Graphics Card: NVidia GeForce GT520 Ever since 1.0.0 came out, my game has been crashing fairly often. It's persisted through 1.0.1 and 1.0.2, I've just never bothered starting a thread about it. It seems to happen faster if I switch between screens more, so if I'm going VAB, tracking station, administration, then launchpad, it'll crash faster than just starting up a flight on the launchpad and flying around for a while. I've got about 40 different crash dump folders right now, and that's after I cleaned it out a week ago. They all seem to say pretty much the same thing, so I'll just put up the latest error.log and output_log.txt

I'm pretty sure if you attach docking ports to the bottom of your engines, and attach them in the same location on the next stage, you can make something like that work. On launch all the ports should connect, it's not going to be easy to build though.

Sounds like a bug for sure, I've never had that happen before. Might wanna start a thread under support if you haven't already.

The way I think it works, is that for parts of different sizes connected by nodes, the lower part contributes drag proportional to the uncovered area. So if you start with a 1.25m part, a 2.5m fuel tank directly underneath will have more drag than if an adapter was there, because the adapter has less drag than a fuel tank.

I would say that in some cases it could be an exploit, but not in others. Clipping multiple fuel tanks into each other, yeah, I'd call that an exploit. Nudging a few parts around to make things more streamlined and adjusting the height of landing gear isn't what I'd call an exploit though.

Ah, yeah I've seen that before, I just figured it was more of a reference point for suicide burns, or something to... I don't know, it seemed like a really odd piece of data for them to show, out of everything they could've chosen. Like inclination relative to the ecliptic would've been nice instead.

Slightly off topic, or maybe a lot off topic, but what is the rendezvous burn length, and why is it there? I've never known that was a thing, and never stumbled across it.

That's another design decision I don't understand, why does the price for hiring a kerbal increase each time? Maybe the reasoning was in a devblog and I missed it, and I could see that its supposed to simulate the higher cost of having to pay more wages, but it really makes me not want to start another mission when I've got to pay 5 times the cost of a rocket to get the pilot I need.

I'm mostly just here to agree with the material bay being the wrong size for just about everything. Maybe I'm just too concerned with aesthetics, but when I make a manned lander and want to have a materials bay on it, I feel it always ends up with the lander being tall and skinny, or wide enough that it looks absurd when you stick a fairing around it. Other than that, I never really got into career mode before, but I'm really enjoying it in this version. My only complaint with the gameplay itself is that it seems to favor one-run missions over a space infrastructure. For example, heatshields aren't reusable for more than a few times. Idk if squad is planning on increasing the reentry heat or not, but if they do there's a good chance interplanetary tugs will actually need heatshields that last more than a few trips. Another example is the experience system. I've got tug drivers, miners, tour guides, and other assorted kerbals that have more important things to do than return to Kerbin just so they can get their experience points.

The ln stands for natural logorithm, it's just a certain type of function that comes up a lot in physics. That should be plenty of dV to land on the Mun and come back, but if your thrust to weight ratio is low make sure you start your landing burn early, there's not much worse than getting down to a hundred meters and finding out you've still got 50m/s to kill

For deltaV, the equation is g*Isp*ln(m1/m2). g is 9.81m/s, aka gravity at Kerbin sea level, Isp is the given value for the engine, you want to use vacuum Isp if you're in space, m1 is the mass with fuel, m2 is mass with fuel drained. For thrust to weight ratio, you take the total thrust, divide it by the gravity of the body you are landing/taking off from, and divide that new number by the mass of your craft. Both calculations are easy to do by hand on a scientific calculator, and I think most phones now even have ln buttons.

Yep, what ElWanderer said. link This thread talks about it a little more in depth.

It doesn't seem to be that we need a drive for more science points, its that we need something to to drive players to go to other planets. The goal of space programs, at least in their heyday, was exploration to pave the way for colonization of other worlds. Perhaps a set of parts based on future technologies, where you can only unlock them once you've gotten a certain amount of science from each planet, would give players that incentive. For example, you could have the unlock from Moho be advanced radiators/heat shielding, from Eve be a new, lightweight, more powerful fuel, from Eeloo the tech to make an engine that can handle that fuel, etc. It would add a nice little bit of story, and the end game could be you've gotten all those techs, you now have the ability to travel to a new star system and explore there

I'm not sure how he'd like it, but I would definitely like it more discovery based. I think they've taken a step in the right direction with the resource mechanics, where you get general and then more precise information after running the scanners. Something I'd really like to see would be aerobraking/aerocapture predictions, where using the barometer on a planet lets you get a rough prediction, using the thermometer refines it, and then finally using the atmosphere analyzer makes it exact.

Honestly I'd rather have the game be more realistic than not, my ideal game would be orbiter/flight sim where I can make whatever ship I want, extending off into future tech and colonization in late, late game. I love orbiter and flight sims, but only having the packaged ships and no station construction gets boring after a while I've definitely noticed the divide between the two groups of people, and I'd been meaning to make a thread like this with a poll attached. It'd be like before you played KSP did you play a) orbiter, flight sims, c) a&b, and d) none of the above.

Huh, I've only done one ore retrieval contract so far, but I don't recall having that problem. I would say 8 m/s is still landing a little hard, thats about 18 mph. If I've got anything coming down at more than 6m/s I expect something to break. Getting the landing speed down to 4m/s is worth a shot.

Are your parachutes exploding before or after they've deployed? If it's the latter, try setting the deploy pressure to 0.5 instead of 0.04.

If the semi-major axes of your orbits are close to the same then you'll only get a tiny bit closer or farther each time. The key is the lower your orbit, the faster you'll catch up to a target in front of you, and the higher your orbit the faster you'll catch up to a target behind you. If you make your orbits coplanar beforehand then you can move any location on your orbit so that it's an intersection, its just that a lot of times I don't feel like making a plane change if its only a couple degrees difference.

Okay, so first thing, you definitely want each engine working as hard as possible. Sometimes its unavoidable that you can't run them at full throttle because you want to keep your speed down, but any engine that isn't full throttle is weight you can do without. If you find you're running out of fuel, add more fuel, and add engines only as you need them. Like others said, you want the first, and sometimes second, stages to have the highest atmosphere Isp. This means LV-T30s, '45s and solid boosters. To fix the problem of losing control, stick some find on the bottom of the rocket. Controllable ones work best, but if you don't have those any fin will move your center of drag down and keep your rocket pointing up.

The one location that will always work for an intercept is either the ascending or descending node. Raise up one of those two so that it crosses your target's orbit, and then place a maneuver at that node. If you're not to far from the target you should be able to fiddle with prograde and retrograde until you get a rendezvous next pass, otherwise you'll have to set it up so that the target gets a little closer each time.