zarakon

When waiting for planetary alignments or going to Jool/Eeloo, even 100000x warp feels too slow, and can require waiting 10+ minutes doing nothing. Can we get a higher speed of 500000x or 1000000x?

* Fix for vessel on the Launch pad at Baikerbanur (KSC 2) blocking ability to launch vessels from the KSC. Wait, what? 1. KSC2 has an official name now? 2. You can launch from there somehow?

I think it would be worth experimenting with thrusting in different directions. I suspect that in Sharpy's experiment, he was thrusting forward and losing some efficiency from wobble at 4x physics warp, since EVA kerbals will waste some fuel trying to stay aligned with the camera while going forward. Thrusting UP instead would probably give a cleaner result

you should still be able to fix that by right clicking the docking port and doing an undock or decouple also when building, you can attach things directly by docking ports without the need for decouplers or separators at all

Screenshot? If it's on a docking port, you can right click the docking port and decouple

Speaking of which, what's the best/simplest mod for that? Assume that I know nothing at all about mods, other than I think they go into the GameData folder

Setting something as a target so that it shows up on the navball is helpful for the final approach

High TWR results in less gravity loss, but the amount of delta-v you can gain by adding more fuel is greater (as long as TWR doesn't get too low)

If I had to rebalance just one area of the game, it would probably be the mass of the large crew capsules. I feel like they should be MORE mass efficient, not less.

Found it in a thread on a totally unrelated message board I used to browse. It was probably something like "See if you can reach orbit in this neat rocket sim", which was pretty much the only objective there was at the time in 0.8.x

Looks like some more testing is needed to find out the differences then

The actual mission probe that I lost was a HECS mounted directly behind the heat shield. I also experimented with a Stayputnik which had a round battery and small reaction wheel in between. It seemed to last a little longer but still died Hm, cool idea. Do you know if that would satisfy the contracts that ask you to return a vessel to Kerbin from a destination?

If you're planning on returning some science to the surface using a probe in career mode, be aware that the 0.625 heat shield won't do you much good with the early probe cores. The OKTO, HECS, and Stayputnik are all too wide for it, so they'll stick out into the airstream and go poof. I think it's fine for the QBE and OKTO2, but those are from a later tech node.

Well, that's easy enough to solve with a rocket. Either make an ICBM to rach halfway around the world (preferable because of the long travel time), or use airbreathers to get close, then fire the rocket for a zoom climb. Panthers can get you to 18km anyway at least in a zoom climb, so you must be talking before panthers, and I wouldn't want to go halfway around the world using a juno or turbofans... so this contract screams suborbital rocket to me... Put a LF rocket on top of a SRB, and use the LFO rocket to fine tune your trajectory. Two problems with that: 1. If the best way to complete contracts that are nominally designed for planes is to use rockets instead, that's.. basically what I'm complaining about. 2. It's "easy" in theory, but kind of a pain to actually do and not at all practical, especially since taking measurements from 3 zones would then usually require 2 or 3 different trajectories. If you could use an actual airplane and do it for just the cost of fuel, it's worth it, but if you have to use rockets anyway you're better off doing more lucrative satellite or rescue contracts instead.

My biggest issue with planes in career mode is that the contract requirements are all out of whack compared to what your available airplane tech is actually capable of. Oh, I see you just unlocked the first aviation node! Now you can go take some samples from above 18km halfway around the planet, right?