el_coyoto

Thanks @Joco223! The fuel tank is a procedural fuel tank and I slapped some scansat equipment onto it along with the stock sciencey bits. The probe core is from the Asteroid day official mod IIRC...

Well, we already have martian rovers that take selfies, so why not having scan sats that transmit perspective tricks back home?

I built a 15t to LKO SSTO and since it felt a bit lonely, I made him a nice, useful payload, so they could both run around have fun up there. They sent this postcard...

I had a few troubles with spaceplanes in 1.0.* because I was basically taking too little fuel with me (bad old aero habits), and thus kept using a lot of rockets in my careers before I lost interest (and a bit of frustration with SSTOs in 1.0.* too...) Then I found an awesome post by @GoSlash27 with a few rules to quickly size a SSTO in 1.0.* depending on the payload, and oh boy, it did re-motivate me to play KSP a lot : since a few weeks, I've been launching spaceplanes like it's going out of style. I still enjoy launching rockets though, they're so pointy and fast... PS : thanks @GoSlash27 for reconciling me with KSP!

Ah, the good ol' days when you didn't have those fancy shmancy maneuver nodes, none of this "other planets" non-sense and going to the Mun procedure was "wait in LKO for Munrise then burn for it"... *mumble mumble* Holy carp, that takes me to, what, 0.14 ? I also remember drawing maps on paper of the area around a certain memorial on the Mun, then rotating it and squinting at it from the side trying to visualize what the landing area should look like from the ship when coming down for a crash landing... (inspired by what I remembered reading from one of the Apollo pilots, saying that familiar terrain and forward speed are the keys to precision landing)

Parallel parked stuff at orbital speeds in a tight spot today. Stuff with big unwieldy wings... I misjudged the retroburn and the re-entry of the tanker though, and ended landing it with not much fuel left in the "Notsoflat" plains area between the ocean and Mt. "Whoopstooshort", roughly 150 km west of KSC. Note to self : add a light for emergency night landings in the middle of nowhere.

Today, I derped around on a mk3 SSTO able to haul a certain cylindrical object to LKO. Still requires a lot of work (wing is temporary, dry vs wet CoM is meh and requires a big reaction wheel to compensate, etc.) but it successfully took that orange tank to a 75kmx75km orbit with 160 m/s left...

Wow, that would be a really cool idea for a real simulation mode : some kind of Tron-like visuals, with solid colors and wireframe... But yeah, Hypereditng to places you've never been kinda ruins the joy of discovery, so I usually set myself a rule where I must do a unmanned flyby of a given body in career before running "simulations" around it.

I agree, it would be a nice stock feature... In the meantime, if you don't mind using mods, you can check Hyperedit, it lets you (among other things) change the orbit of your ship in one click. Also, welcome to the forums @Ricotta! (mmmh this nickname is making me hungry... ) Cheers!

Some good inspiration today. I built a rover for an incoming Duna transfer window and tested a stupid idea for its deployment. The nice thing is that the whole contraption is reasonably well balanced on the vertical axis (with the help a reaction wheel), but on the longitudinal axis as well : all I have left to do before departing to Duna is slapping a transfer stage on one side of the cargo bay, a heat shield on the other for the initial aerocapture and I'll be set. Duna 1.0.5, here I come!

Took my first 1.0.5 LF only SSTO to orbit on my second attempt, yay! 1250 m/s to LKO before refueling. Still need to work the solar panels and radiators placement to get something better than the current "let's just slap panels as they come, it won't make orbit anyway" setup...

I really love building, testing and tweaking lifters, so (strangely) most of my sub assemblies are very specific payloads (scanning probes typically). I rarely "sub assemble" science probes for example, because I also love building them and are often mission/tech tree specific. But once I have iterated enough to have a nice (very important criteria lol) and efficient modular probe platform, I usually save it as a sub assembly. For naming, I usually go with a "class" name usually inspired by IRL space programs (like "Moho" for Mercury, "Twin" for Gemini, "Orient" for "Vostok", greek stuff or silly puns) plus a "mark" numbering scheme for each iteration. I like it, it reminds me of Spitfires and stuff on the Battle of England I read when I was young... And once it's in orbit, the craft gets a "real" name (in Soviet fashion). So my ships names usually look like this : Orient mk3 "Muninator" or Moho mk2 "For Science!". I've just finished the Iain Banks "Culture" cycle, and might be tempted to give even sillier names to my ships in the future though...

Yup, Hyperedit for a quick simulation and Kerbal Engineer Redux during the design phase : it has a window that lets you check the performance of your rocket (TWR mostly) on any planet or moon.

It's a real life problem that even NASA is facing, and the way they are trying to solve it might indicate that it's not that easy to optimize solar panels placement and/or orientation (although they have other problems, like sun/shadow cycles creating stress on the structure). So, while it might not be a satisfactory answer, I usually stick as many panels as I can without creating a risk of collision during approach and docking. I would go for solution B because : it has more panels (weak argument I know ) you can dock stuff at one end without blocking both panels like in solution A : B will leave at least two other panels in sunlight. Again, I'm not sure there's a definitive answer as it all depends on where and what you dock, your station orientation, etc. it looks better, which is a totally objective and formal argument... Again, sorry for the poor answer, but it really is a tough problem that seems to be mostly approached via numeric simulations, which is basically glorified trial and error...

Gaarst's and Red Iron Crown's formulas are equivalent. "Sigma over i" means "Sum each item", just like you would iterate over an array and sum its contents. A C like conversion with n engines would look like this : numerator = 0 denominator = 0 for(unsigned int i = 0; i < n; i++) { numerator += F denominator += F/Isp } Isp = numerator / denominator

For a stage which is dropped in the atmosphere, I guess it would be ok, but black paint and space don't mix very well. If I remember correctly, german engineers liked having some highly visible black/white patterns on their rockets to be able to visually check if the rocket was spinning. They had to use less and less black on the upper stages because it absorbed the heat from sunlight with no real mean to dissipate it in vacuum, which is double bad when you use cryogenic fuels. Can't find the link that compared how the colour scheme evolved from prototype to prototype, but this nice thread also explains why the interstages were darker, again for thermal control and how it changed over time.

Always nice to see I guess... But yeah, this why regularly making saves is kinda mandatory even if you want play "realistic", it's so easy to mess up the quicksave inadvertently.

They are stock, you need to enable "Terrain Scatters" in your graphics settings. It's just for show though, as they have no collision box.

Aaah, "the most Kerbal vehicle ever built"... Be careful with aerobraking over Jool as Snark mentioned (maybe wait for 1.0.5), but personally I would use it to try and land a base on Laythe. But since I haven't really tested the new reentry system anywhere else than Kerbin (waiting for 1.0.5 ), I don't know if your heat shield would still contain enough ablator after the Jool aerobraking to also land on Laythe... Or maybe, trying to aerobrake directly at Laythe to get a capture, get your Pe out of the atmosphere, do orbital stuff around Laythe, then land a base on the surface. Using Laythe to brake into the Jool system can be a tricky but very rewarding feat. I did it a few times in previous versions, but I relied a lot on Mechjeb aerobraking predictions because I don't like using F5/F9 to find a good approach and Pe...

Long time no play, so I restarted a career in 1.0.4 and took my B crew and a noob pilot to the poles for science. I'm quite happy with this R&D plane design, it handles really well and can cross (almost) half the planet at Mach 3. When I realised that I would have an electricity problem at the poles because 6 wimpy solar panels are not enough with the grazing sunlight, I came up with a brilliantly stupid plan* and cut the engines as soon as I saw the ice cap, after a little detour to get an atmo analysis over the tundra. I decided to keep some fuel to generate electricity while on the ground to transmit data. The it hit me that I would have to land in the mountainous area of the poles, which lead to an incredibly stupid "dive landing" once a flat area had spotted. As I've said, this is is a kind and gentle plane and tweaking the tail winglets to try to have them act as airbrakes certainly helped... * Said plan forgot to take into account the fact that the plane would have to be recovered on the ice cap anyway (out of fuel) and that the MPL could store quite a few experiments, negating the need to transmit stuff...

Today, I found a few minutes to try building a plane in 1.0, and I can't wait to have more time to play with it! It took me 2 or 3 tries to find an ascent profile that wouldn't melt the cockpit, but re-entry seemed kinda easy, probably because of the (relatively) low speeds involved... I still wonder how I didn't mess up that landing though... Small unedited video being uploaded here. Cheers!

Hi Barklight! Do you use a Kerbol deltaV map? They usually are approximations (keep a margin of error), but helped a lot planning tighter fuel budgets for my missions. I did a lot of Orbiter before playing KSP, so I hit the usual walls (orbital mechanics, docking) in the former rather than the latter. The KSP wall that did hit me though was piloting and aircraft : as you can build your own stuff in KSP, I mostly struggled with good aircraft design and adjusting my piloting to different plane flight envelopes. This thread helped me soooooo much...

I'd also like to raise a glass, thank you SQUAD! Santé !

Not sure about the way the optimum departure altitude is computed, but this thread (among others) deals with the subject. I especially like the graphic made by Starstrider42 : Cheers!

It means installing KSP on Solid State Drive disk, which are WAY faster than mechanical hard disks (the ones that produce a scratching noise when they work ). It greatly speeds up KSP loading, especially with lots of mods. On topic : I tend to play career to unlock the tech tree (more or less consciously, it's more "once I have all the science, I can do whatever I want") and notice a lapse in my gameplay time once it's unlocked. To rekindle the interest, I try set myself new goals, things I haven't done before or I add mods to my install. Watching Scott Manley or what happens in this forum also helps find new things to do and places to go.