zarakon

Note to self, stack two heat shields for any Jool return mission

Struts actually have significant weight, at 0.05 each. All of the weight seems to go on the spot where you place the first part of it. If a strut gets broken by stage separation, the weight remains with the root of the strut, so if you're strutting across stages make sure the root is always in the lower stage so you can dump it sooner. Same things are true of FUEL LINES too now. Actually all of the old massless parts seem to have mass now, but struts and fuel lines are much more meaningful because they now weigh 10x as much as most of the others. Even the cubic octagonal struts have mass now, even though it's only 0.001

Switching to another object, like a kerbal on EVA, seems to do the trick, but that's not always an easy option...

I think it's always had problems if you put a decoupler separation and engine activation together in your staging sequence I had an odd case yesterday though, where the "Stage Only" view showed more fuel than what my current stage had left, but by an amount that didn't match any of my other stages.

I'd rather get MORE science from contracts. Maybe diminishing returns for repeating the same type at the same place. I think there should be contracts that give mostly funds, others that give mostly rep, and others that give mostly science. I'd also like to see diminishing returns for doing multiple biomes so that you can't get tons of science just by taking the time to EVA report and grav scan every biome in a polar orbit, and to bring a bit more balance between the amount of science you can get at worlds with many biomes vs few

I've managed to get 48k with minor improvements to Kelderek's design Doing better than that is proving tricky due to explosions

250km This page has the boundary information for all the planets and moons: http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Science

You can also move the fuel tank above the storage bay to move that mass higher If you add fins to the bottom of your second stage, you'll need to add more to the bottom of your first stage as well, so that you don't flip over during first-stage flight Another idea is to cram the probe core into the storage bay so that you can put an aerodynamic nosecone at the top to reduce drag there

While running science missions, I sometimes collect many different experiments, so it becomes a pain to click "Keep Data" over and over and over after I just wanted to transmit one thing. Is there a way to simply close this window?

I've also been using them to add probe cores to command pods. It's great not just for the rescue contracts, but for allowing me to send a scientist on a mission while also having SAS

Still early in career mode, none of them are attractive to me. I suppose I'll probably use funds->science if I end up overflowing with cash at some point, and science->something after completing the tech tree

She's the only one that's died so far. Her capsule flipped backwards during re-entry and exploded. There should have been another one, after having a parachute destroyed, but she somehow managed to survive a water landing after jumping out of the capsule

I'm curious what other people think about the solid boosters. I feel like their Isp is way too low now to get any reasonable amount of delta-V out of a solid-fuel first stage, which used to be my go-to design in career mode

For probes out to Jool or beyond, before unlocking RTGs

Back before 1.0, I could design and run a Mun mission in 30 minutes with my eyes closed. But now I'm doing a new career mode, and I'm having trouble getting my Mun rocket into orbit, much less to the Mun and back. So, how are you guys building your Mun rockets in the time before fuel lines and 2.5m parts?

I had a kerbal survive a terminal velocity head-first fall into the ocean the other day after a failed launch and failed parachute deployment

I'm betting that the typical 18-20km altitude requirements on the Kerbin survey missions are leftover from pre-1.0 when it was relatively easy to fly that high on basic jets. I've still managed to do a couple of those, but I had to put a rocket booster on my plane to give it the push from 10km to 20km, and was only good for one survey before needing a refuel.

Yeah, this seems to be spot-on I doubled the fins and slid them farther down, and also moved the upper stage fuel tank to be above the service bay. Now it flies like an arrow!

That works for the early ones, like setting speed and altitude records But flyby/orbit/land at the Mun are generated as actual contracts that you have to take from Mission Control. I don't understand why they're separated into different contracts instead of being a single multi-part one like they used to be. You should still be able to do them all in one mission though - after completing one, switch back to the space center and sign up for the next

The root part is the service bay, and inside that is an OKTO probe and four small battmans. The upper stage engine is a 48-7S and the first stage engine is an LV-T45 Around 10-15km it suddenly decides to flip backwards, and I can't do anything about it. I have SAS on stabilize, and I haven't locked the LV-T45 gimbal Replacing the 48-7S with an LV-909 seems to help a tiny bit, but not much. If I replace the service bay, probe, and nosecone all with an Mk1 Command Pod, it works flawlessly. Is there some kind of issue with the service bay or the nosecone that's causing me grief?

I think real rockets actually burn the engines for a second or two prior to releasing the clamps, in order to make sure they're working.

All of the early Kerbin survey missions have altitude requirements around 18km or higher. The problem? A basic jet engine plane can't get that high, as far as I can tell. I have to use rockets to get above 12-13km. I think these missions were balanced based on the old aerodynamics and engines where reaching 20km was easy, and they should be rebalanced around the new systems. Change the ~18kk thresholds to ~10km.

If your launch clamps are in a stage before you've turned on your engines, you're gonna have a bad time. The report should warn about that.

I like the idea of this, but it does look like it moved a bit too far forward

Turn on dynamicwarp to x16 then wait a few seconds