el_coyoto

Not sure about Vanguard, but Google seems to think that "gunpod13mm" belongs to AKS Technologies Weapons Pack. The ejection pod could be edited out of the .craft file with a text editor though...

Well, so far : activating the accelerometer to get a numerical value for acceleration during ascent when flying stock (yeah, not so useful), deactivate torque on rover probes and ... that's all I remember doing. I'm pretty sure I've used it in "clever" (ahem) ways somehow, but can't remember exactly...

Yup, not fissionable, but still : all the fun of an asteroid killer AND a dirty bomb, all in one fun sized package! Apart from watching Scott Manley's Interstellar Quest, I never really tried Interstellar yet, but the fact the mod would require you to cool Pu238 when storing it (and other realistic features I've seen) has certainly piqued my interest...

Not sure I will use it, but the idea of a dinosaur killer size asteroid filled to the brim with Pu 238 has just made my day, thank you AetherGoddess! Adding ART to the long list of awesome RoverDude mods I must absolutely check, thank you guys for all the work already poured into this mod...

Concerning the "enough wings?" bit, I took note of results I found in some thread (that I can't find any more) on my old trusty notebook dealing with the lift rating/mass ratio and its relation with rotate speed at take-off. The main objective of the thread was to help people with building planes that take off before the end of the runway, and I think it's a nice trick to use to guess wether your plane flies badly because it has not enough wings or if it's another problem. The thread defined "lift rating" as the sum of lift number of aero parts divided by the mass of the plane. The author provided numerical results which I reproduced fairly accurately on a few tests, so it seems like a nice approximation of how much wing you'd need on a plane : [table=width: 500, class: outer_border] [tr] [td]Lift rating[/td] [td]Test result[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]0.36[/td] [td]failed to take off, end of runway, 110 m/s[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]0.68[/td] [td]Rotate @65 m/s[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]1.06[/td] [td]Rotate @45 m/s[/td] [/tr] [/table] So, if at some point in the SPH I want to check if my plane has enough wings without leaving the SPH, I quickly sum the lift of the biggest aero parts (laziness) my design uses and check if it has a lift rating that I like. For a SSTO, I usually go with ~0.5 : it will need quite a bit of runway to take-off, will require more speed while landing to avoid stalling, but more lift would mean more drag, which is a real problem with spaceplanes...

I don't have a precise idea of what's going on, but : are you using KSP 32bits? how many mods do you have installed? Are there any "beast mod" (B9 for example)? do you have any texture compression mod installed? what is the RAM usage reported by Windows Task Manager for your KSP around the moment it starts bugging and crashing? are there any errors in the logs and/or debug console? Because this apparently random string of bugs looks awfully like your KSP has hit the memory limit, but I may be wrong... Anyway, I think providing some more data might help us diagnosising the problem more easily.

Yup, attached edge to edge is what I meant. As English is not my mother tongue, I might word things in a strange way sometimes... Thanks for clarifying and posting an example picture : I answered the post during a short break at work and didn't take the time to do it properly. LOL I remember having more or less the same reaction the first time I assembled a wing in KSP. But I ended up getting used to this "piece by piece" wing construction method, and Alshain is right, by taking some care while placing the wing parts, you can make it look reasonably nice. You may want to check on the Procedural Wings mod though : rather than building your wing by assembling parts, you define it by describing its length, thickness, etc to give it the shape you want.

You can add wings onto wings in the editor, they are a part just like another one : this is how you build big wings. The wing connector is useful, because it is rectangular, thus making it easier to build bigger wings with a core of well aligned wing connectors and the outer border of the wings with nicer wing parts, like the delta (dunno if I'm really clear on this one without a pic lol). Just don't forget to add struts if you notice too much wing flexing...

Just like the guys said. The mass of everything on the rocket which is not fuel The quantity of fuel Efficiency of engines Staging So, to improve your rocket delta-v, you have several options : Make everything that is not fuel on the rocket lighter (less RCS, less batteries, unmanned, i.e. building small) : this has a huge impact on delta-v. Add more fuel : diminishing return on delta-v after each added tank because of the so called "tyranny of the rocket equation", use with caution. You've already noticed this when you quadrupled your central stack without seeing much change. More efficient engines might help BUT if they are too heavy, they can hurt rule #1. For light ships, a light chemical engine might yield a better delta-v then a more efficient but heavier NERVA for example. Staging removes "dead mass" (empty tanks, engines which thrust is not needed any more), thus improving rule #1 on your rocket the moment you stage. Probably the easiest trick to increase delta-v as you have already noticed...

If you like porkchop plots, graphs and all that, I find KSP Trajectory Optimization Tool to be an excellent companion to mission planning. I used it a few times to do gravity assists because I find the maneuver node system a bit limited in those cases, but it can do so many other things... (including multi flybys in a "Grand Tour" fashion)

I have a limited experience in asteroid retrieval, but the only ARM I did happened to take place in Kerbin SOI, so I might help a little bit. The first step is launching directly into the asteroid orbital inclination. I don't have good tips there other than doing the launch azimuth computation by hand (this resource for Orbiter I've used in the past or this video for KSP that I haven't watched yet) or using MechJeb to do it for you. Once you have launched into the asteroid plane of inclination, things get much easier : it is a matter of setting up a node with some prograde dV then messing with the time of departure until I get close to it by turning the maneuver node around Kerbin (the time is important because it determines into which direction you will burn) . And then tweak the ejection burn, tweak the departure time until I get a good rendez vous (<2 km), like the usual docking procedure. From my limited experience with Kerbin SOI interceptions, apart from the launch azimuth computation, the hardest part was kind of forgetting the asteroid had a hyperbolic trajectory, or trying to visualize it. For me, it ended like setting up a "direct" docking encounter (in one orbit) and making sure I intercepted it before PE.

Career, modded (MJ, KER and B9 mostly) I got back to KSP after a 0.23.5 hiatus (I was on Minecraft playing spree lol) and 0.24 really sucked be me back into the game. I really enjoy the contract mechanics, they renewed my interest for the game. I've never really had cashflow challenges in my career, but I think that the balance that needs to be struck between "science" and "cash" kinda changes my way of playing and my mindset (it's not just "GATHER ALL THE SCIENCE!" anymore). Plus, I really like the part testing bit in early game : I tended to treat it as some kind of mini puzzle game, looking for ways to test the part cheaply with a still mostly locked tech tree. Fun times...

Hadn't played in a while (since 0.23) and I'm really having a blast with "First Contracts", so here are a few screens of my 0.24.2 research station core launch.

lol atmosphere on Duna = thin and traitorous... Without MJ assistance, I guess the best plan would be ignoring the atmosphere and do it the usual "Apollo" way... The chart is fun too, I've had some good results in early career with it. And yeah, the "dead stop" solution has all sorts of problems.

I quite like the idea of unmanned drones tugging back sweet, precious science to Kerbin while the Kerbals are having fun exploring. For precision landing, you have several options. Luck : using quicksave/quickload, rinse, repeat. Not very rewarding. "Drop like a stone" : very inefficient, but you could reduce you orbital speed to 0 right over your target, then drop like a stone onto your landing site, using your projected orbit to aim for it. Again, highly inefficient. "Atmosphere shmatmoshpere" : you could do a more reasonable de-orbit burn (periapsis above your target), keeping some forward velocity and killing it precisely over your landing site, just like a Munar landing, basically treating Duna atmosphere as nothing more than a nuisance. Slightly less inefficient than the previous one. If you like sliderules and charts, there is an awesome resource that tells you "if you come at that speed, by putting you PE at this height over your target, you will be aerobraked more or less onto your target" (version for Duna is here). If you don't mind using mods, MechJeb has a very good landing prediction that takes the atmospheric drag and the planet rotation into account. Hope this helps!

As it has been said, you need a free return trajectory if you want the 8 shaped trajectory. These are a bit less efficient than pure hohmann interceptions, but are safer in case of an engine malfunction. They are a bit tedious to setup in KSP, but I usually start by planning a burn that brings me to a ~14500 km Kerbin apoapsis, then mess around with the node until I get an encounter with the Mun and the trajectory I want. This helped me a bit with my first free return trajectory.

Just dropping a word to thank you for all your hard work on MJ! And I hope your wrist will be fine. Bon rétablissement! (et gaffe aux cartons lol)

Congratulations! Kerbal ingenuity and courage at their finest!

700 m/s is going to be a little tight I think... You'd need 640 m/s to get back in orbit (14x14 km) and ~200 m/s to escape the Mun with a Kerbin periapsis inside Kerbin atmosphere.

LOL how painful wound "corona braking at Kerbol" sound then?

Yup, you can use "hardware assisted braking" ( © Scott Manley) for landings, but I've never tested these with impacts of more than 20 m/s (a bit of parachute assist). Terminal velocity just above the ground is around 100 m/s, so, without parachutes we'd be trying to cushion a ~100 m/s impact with delicate and explosive hardware. Might be worth it to try though, I think it could be doable depending on how your station looks like... Do you have pictures of it ?

Funny thing is that it's this feeling of loneliness that slowly got me to drop Orbiter Flight Simulator. Sending a Delta Glider to Mars and spending months (although accelerated) in deep space really made me feel kind of lonely. Basically, once I had reached my objectives (learning orbital mechanics, re-entries and flying to all the planets) and had plenty of fun with Altea Aerospace ships, I spent most of my time in LEO building space stations. When I tried the KSP demo, I was surprised to see the profound impact of the Kerbal pictures on the bottom right section of the screen on my psychology : I was not alone any more, I had Jeb (and Bob and Bill) to keep me company! I still feel bad for the first Kerbals I sent to Eve though, so now, I make sure that my Kerbonauts on long trips have company, enough room AND a way to return home : this helps alleviate my feelings of guilt and loneliness. But even then, some places can feel a bit lonely in KSP, like those early career Mun landings where Jeb has to travel on his own in a very cramped Mk1 Capsule and land on a dead, grey, rocky world, with his home ironically hanging over him in the sky... But hey, it's Jeb and apparently, launching from the Mun into a 7x7 km rodeo VERY low Munar orbit is well worth the trip alone.

kerbalmaps.com will help a lot. But getting the exact coordinates is only half the fun if you don't use MJ or any landing predictions to land spot on it. The method for target landing I use in my career before getting access to MJ (or while playing stock with a fresh new KSP version) is inspired by what the real guys did to land on the Moon : I usually check kerbalmaps.com to locate the exact coordinates and its surroundings, and I use it to draw a paper map (better for my memory) of the surrounding landscape, with the craters and other features annotated and their approximate positions in relation to my target. Then, I rotate the map so that I can study it from the same point of view as I will have when approaching it (usually way too fast and from the west ). I try to name and learn all the features relevant to my approach by heart and picture mentally what the ground will look like during my approach, so that I don't have to get back to my map in the heat of all this landing action. For example, my Neil Armstrong Memorial map shows the edge of the big crater, some cliffs to the south of and a bunch of craters (some overlapping, some not) with a cross-hair labelled "Land here damnit!" between two of them. The landing usually goes "Ok, here's the big crater. Now, I've found 'Bullseye' (two concentric craters) with another crater overlapping it. I have to land just behind the overlapping crater." A few more notes : Drawing on paper and naming features helps my memory a lot, I've noticed. You can also make a VERY low pass over your target before landing to try to familiarize yourself with the actual landscape and compare it to your map before the landing. Of course, this method works better on heavily cratered bodies. I've tried this on Duna and the lack of features of the planet ("damn you erosion!") left me with no other option than roving to the target coordinates. Yup, way less immersive this way...

lol I hadn't thought of it, but yeah, there's something. Might be fun to try and replicate accurately the articulated truck from the Lost World with LLL though. (and hang it from a cliff for the lulz)

Being an avid fan of the Lack Luster Labs pack, it's been a long time that I wanted to include his cargo landing legs in one my designs. So, tonight was rover night! They are shown folding back flush against the hull after successfully absorbing the parachute controlled 8 m/s impact of this 12 tons prototype. Getting some airtime at 28 m/s. No wheels were harmed in the making of this scene. The Mun high over the horizon and Minmus peeking through the greenhouse windows. This rover is designed to land on Duna and return to orbit on its own at the end of its extended stay on the surface. A few more test flights pictures :